The Toledoth of Shem

If you're sick of Bible stuff, skip down a couple posts ... Magruder asked about Genesis, so this is mostly for him (at least the second part is).

Since I didn't go to church today*, I spent a good part of the morning going over Shem's toledoth (a result of the prior post) and while I intended to make what I found an update to that, it sort of grew out of control, and so you have to put up with 2 bible posts in a row.

The idea I explored a bit below was that if Gen 10-11:10 was indeed a stand-alone document written by Shem - as toledoth theory suggests - it would be probably just one of many written by him to various groups of his decendants, which is why the theory would be a lot stronger if we had another similar copy from somewhere else. And in my studies today I came across a pair of internal references that seem to bear that out.

The document contains a triple genealogy (Ham, Shem, Japeth), with Japeth going first and Shem's posterity being presented last. But there is one subtle difference in how the three are introduced:

Gen 10:2 - The sons of Japheth: Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech, and Tiras.

Gen 10:6 - And the sons of Ham: Cush, Mizraim, Phut, and Canaan.

Gen 10:21-22 - To Shem also, the father of all the children of Eber, and the brother of Japheth the elder, even to him were children born. The children of Shem: Elam, Asshur, Arphaxad, Lud, and Aram.

While Ham and Japheth are presented rather generically, before the same type of line for Shem we find that he is called "The father of all the children of Eber." Now Eber, from whom the Hebrews draw their name, is but one of Shem's many grandsons. Why does he get a special mention? One possible reason is that this document is being written specifically to his family.

A second confirming fact turns up in the genealogy itself: none of the many divergent lines are traced as far as is Eber's. Of Shem's 5 named sons, only Aram (from whom the Aramaic language draws its name) and Arphaxad, the father of Eber, have their sons named.

No grandsons are named for Aram (in other words, his line is ended here), but one (Eber) is named for Arphaxad, then two of Eber's sons are named, and thirteen of his grandsons, though, notably, none of the last generation named is in the direct line of the Jews, who are traced through Reu, a son of Peleg not named in Shem's document.

Therefore while it's probable that this document was created specifically for the family of one of Shem's grandsons (from which I infer the probability that similar documents were created for others), it is not traced furthest into the line that became the Jews. So if Moses is making it all up, he is in the strange position of making up family trees for others and leaving his own comparatively barren.

Odd, but it is probably better explained by toledoth theory than by either JEPD or Moses-dictation theories, if only because the Jews must have gotten this from the family that originally received it (the family of Eber, Joktan branch), which means they have a copy, which means that there are likely more copies out there.

A second thing I found - totally unrelated to the above but perhaps illustrating the construction of the passage - was in the Story of Babel itself. A while back I laid out the reason why the Babel narrative is part and parcel of the genealogies (it is the story that explains how the families came to be as Shem presents them rather than a chronological contradiction), but I did miss an interesting parallelism:

Here's the story as it is written (I've update the KJV language a bit for clarity, removed the verse notations, the intro, and the summary):

And it came to pass that, as they journeyed from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and they dwelt there. They said one to another, “Come, let us bake bricks and bake them well.” (They had brick instead of stone and slime instead of mortar). And they said, “Come, let us build a city and a tower whose top reaches the heavens. Let us make a name for ourselves so we are not scattered across the face of the whole earth.”

The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men were building. The LORD said, “Look, the people are together, sharing a language, and this is what they begin to do? Now nothing they can imagine will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down to there and confound their language so they may not understand one another’s speech.”

Now, if we set these two main parts of the story side by side we can find a very clever parallel:

Man - action and discovery: And it came to pass that, as they journeyed from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and they dwelt there.
God - action and discovery: The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men were building.

Man states his intention: They said one to another, “Come, let us bake bricks and bake them well.**”
God notices the intention: The LORD said, “Look, the people are together, sharing a language, and this is what they begin to do?

Man states a further intention: And they said, “Come, let us build a city and a tower whose top reaches the heavens."
God states the effect of this intention: "Now nothing they can imagine will be impossible for them."

Man states his intention to foil God's plan***: "Let us make a name for ourselves so we are not scattered across the face of the whole earth.”
God states his intention to foil Man's plan: "Come, let us go down to there and confound their language so they may not understand one another’s speech.”

The summary notes that "from there the LORD scattered them across the face of the whole earth," precisely the opposite of Man's intention.

It is nearly impossible to see this when the verses are lined up in neat little columns, but I thought it an interesting find nonetheless, and something I'd never seen before.

* Lynn worked till noon, babies nap at 10, Jaley had a party at 11:15, you know, all the regular excuses.

** I removed the clause about "slime for mortar," which I take to be explanatory rather than narrative.

*** God's plan being that man "fill the earth" (Gen 9:1)

Hath the LORD indeed spoken only by Moses?

Apologetics Press cuts the gordian knot of contradictory creation accounts:

In Matthew 19:4-5, the Lord Jesus combined quotations from Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. He declared: “He who made them from the beginning made them male and female [1:26], and said, For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and the two shall become one flesh [2:24].” If the liberal viewpoint is true, how very strange that Christ should have given not the slightest hint that the two accounts involved a multiple authorship and contradictory material! Obviously, the Son of God did not endorse the modern Documentary Hypothesis.

As one who believes* that there are two separate creation accounts, I would assert that there is simply no biblical necessity for Genesis to have a single author, much less that it be Moses. Jesus' quotation (and combination) of multiple sections says nothing about their authorship, only their authority. He could quote them that way because they were the word of God, not because the words of Moses carried any special authority**.

In fact, I think one can make a very good argument from the structure of Genesis itself (e.g. toledoth theory) that Genesis 2:4 ("These are the generations of the Heavens and the Earth when they were created") clearly marks the separation of the first of nearly a dozen works that eventually became Genesis from the next one, which itself ends with a similar statement in Genesis 5:1 ("This is the book of the generations of Adam"). If one wants to get technical, there is a third creation account immediately following that, but this is exactly what ought to be expected if Moses compiled Genesis from existing works rather than writing it from dictation or cultural remembrance. Each tablet, picking up the story in a new "book," would summarize what came before, if only to ensure that the stories were kept in the correct order. Modern authors of multi-volume works do the same thing.

But the toledoth theory makes one assertion that I have difficulty with, not in theory but in practice.

It was the habit of the ancient Babylonians to place a toledoth at the end of a tablet to mark both the author or owner and the time and place of its writing, and that practice is reflected in Genesis, where the person named is usually the subject of the prior passage. We see that most obviously in Genesis 37:2 ("These are the generations of Jacob. Joseph, being seventeen years old, was feeding the flock...") where Jacob is the subject of the prior passage and gets barely a mention going forward - Joseph is the main character through the rest of Genesis. Toledoth theory states (here's the theory part) that is possible, even likely, that Jacob is the author of all the material that ends with 'his' toledoth, Noah is the author of all the material that ends with his toledoth, and the same is true for Adam. The toledoth theory defenders rightly point out that there is nothing in the passages preceeding the toledoth that the alleged author could not have known***, and that, toledoth (the word itself is plural, so it's not 'toledoths') being what they are in the ancient world, Genesis itself is telling us that we are dealing with multiple authors writing over a long period of time.

It's a good argument in theory, but as I mentioned, I have difficulty with it in practice. Walk through this with me for a minute, if you will. As I have mentioned elsewhere, Genesis 10-11:10 for example makes up a single document and one that is complete in isolation from the rest of Genesis. It begins after the toledoth of the sons of Noah and ends with the Toledoth of Shem, making this "Shem's document."

So here's the problem: where is the rest of Shem's writing? I can see how one could make an argument that those writings from before the flood might be destroyed, but Shem is writing not only after it, but after Babel and the Dispersion as well - almost in "history" as we know it. And one could probably make the argument that the writings from after the entry into Egypt are no longer extant, as papyrus is not very durable****. But during this in-between period we should expect that at least one copy of Shem's (and Terah's, and Ishmael's, and one or two more) tablets to show up somewhere in the archaeological record.

"But why," a clever critic might ask, "would it be necessary for Shem to have written anything else?" Because in order to have writing in a culture you need several things, most notably people who can read and write, and something written. You cannot expect that Shem learned to write without having plenty to read, nor that he would maintain the ability without practice (i.e. without continuously writing), nor that he would bother to write anything at all unless he had an audience that had both of the above. In order for it to be a meaningful family history as toledoth theory proposes, you must have both a prolific author and a writing community. And that means you must have other correspondence left over.

Now, I suppose that it is possible that Shem maintained his skills by writing this same thing over and over, but if so, where are the copies? It's more probable that he wrote many things to many of his descendents (which is how he knows so much about them) but if so, where are the copies? One reason we know what we do (and are learning more every day) about the workings of places like Babylon and Elba is that not only did they write prolificly, their medium (baked clay) is a durable one. But the toledoth theorists, when they make statements like this, "the 'Tablet Theory' suggests that portions of Genesis were originally written on clay tablets by men who personally experienced the events described. The tablets were later compiled by Moses," seem to presume that there is but one copy of each tablet. Humans, I think, do not work that way.

Instead, even if Shem spent his last century on earth writing nothing but copies of this tablet - he had to be writing *something* - his descendants should have filed them away in the archives we find all over the Middle East now that we are looking, and which contain multiple copies of works like Gilgamesh. The El Borak theory of writing therefore asserts that if Shem could and did write, the Israelites should not be the only of his descendents who present us with his words.

Yes, it's an argument from silence, the weakest type. Yes, it could be (and I expect that it will be in time) shot down by someone finding a single copy of Gen 10-11:10 in an archive somewhere under Saddam's old stomping grounds. But when we do not find what a theory expects that we should find, people being people, I think that points out a weakness in the theory.

So in short*****, Apologetics Press needen't worry that there are those who propose multiple authors for Genesis, nor that such an idea undercuts Jesus' authority or the authority of scripture. There is a perfectly reasonable theory that accounts for multiple authorship while still maintaining that authority. On the other hand, that theory itself is not without problems, probably one of the reasons I think the issue will not be settled in my lifetime, though it may eventually be settled.

* but not one of those dreaded creatures, liberals.

** If Moses one cold desert night had lamented the lack of goose liver pâté among the Hebrews, that would not make his complaint scripture, just unwelcome.

*** Genesis is fairly free of this sort of anachronism with the occasional exception like Gen 14:8, "...the king of Bela (the same is Zoar;) " which probably represents editorial updating for Moses' audience as Bela likely didn't exist as such when he presented Genesis to the Israelites.

**** It also explains why there is no toledoth at the end of Genesis. The Egyptians didn't use them, so Joseph, being in Egypt for many years before he wrote, would have followed their practice.

****** Ha!

What I need is friends in quiet places

My boss and I carpool from Fort Scott to Pittsburg (about half an hour) and due to our completely divergent musical preferences*, the radio is generally off by agreement. But yesterday morning the fog was so bad that he wanted to keep the radio on** in case there was an announcement of an accident or highway closure, not an uncommon occurrence as this stretch of US69 is one of the more dangerous pieces of blacktop in Kansas.

Well, we didn't hear any of that that, but I did hear something I had never heard before: an entire Garth Brooks song. I think it was the special, recorded-live***, extended-to-an-extra-verse, with-the-bad-word-included version of "Friends in Low Places."

All I can say is, that which does not kill us makes us stronger****.

* Meaning that I expect he would enjoy a rendition of "Master of Puppets" or Maiden's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" about as much as I enjoy George Strait. "Enjoy" here meaning, "claw the sides of my face in a mad panic in an attempt to rip my eardrums out."

** which induced in me an immediate panic anyway. There is no radio in Fort Scott that I want to listen to.

*** Country audiences can sing better than rock audiences, I'll give you that.

**** And the bandages come off my face in just a few short weeks.

Too bad he never cries

Mark Gilbert notes Chuck Norris' entry into the market:

Chuck Norris doesn't target inflation. He roundhouse-kicks it until it begs for mercy.

Chuck Norris doesn't supply collateral, only collateral damage.

The tears of Chuck Norris would supply enough liquidity to solve the credit crisis. Too bad he never cries.

When the yield on a Chuck Norris bond goes up, the price also rises.

Chuck Norris charges the Bank of England a penalty rate for borrowing.

Chuck Norris can still get a 125 percent mortgage on a $2 million condo without providing proof of earnings.

Chuck Norris doesn't mark-to-market. The market marks to Chuck Norris.

Chuck Norris has a trade surplus with China.

Green Cars and Evolution

The Telegraph explains how evolution explains everything:

An all-male team of psychologists at Edinburgh University has discovered that there are twice as many males as females in the brightest two per cent of the population.

The research, however, also points out that there are twice as many males as females in the least intelligent two per cent of the country...

One theory put forward to explain the results is that men have evolved to boost their intelligence as a way of making themselves more attractive to the opposite sex. Women, however, do not need to be clever in order to reproduce.

Timothy Bates, professor of psychology at Edinburgh University, who led the research said: "The female developmental programme may be tilted more towards ensuring survival and enjoying the safety of the middle ground."

A very clever creationalist years ago explained to me the fallacy of the green car. If our scientific theory is, "All cars are green," all that is necessary to prove* that is to go out where there are a lot of cars and very scientifically count the green ones - while studiously ignoring every car that does not fit the theory, of course. I laughed at the time, but I note that he is very clever not because he ate my lunch so to speak (which he did - it was a heck of a lesson in the confusion of familiarity with expertise), but because the fallacy he pointed out is as ubiquitous as it is unnoticed. And not simply in science**.

I'm reminded of that by the above scientifically-sounding theory put forward "to explain the results" of this statistical endeavor because it doesn't remotely explain what it claims to explain: it simply explains the part of the results that happen to fit it.

The first fact noted is that men are overrepresented*** on the highest end of the intelligence scale, which fact is explained by the theory. Fact 1 is a green car. The second fact is that men are overrepresented on the lowest end of the intelligence scale. Fact 2 is a white car and therefore completely ignored by our theorist.

Of course, none of this proves or disproves whether evolution explains these particular facts - the theory, explaining nothing, is worth nothing. But it is a fine example of the intellectually sloppy way in which every fact is claimed to be explained by evolution among people who are trying to make their counting appear scientific.

Except facts that don't fit the theory, that is.

* He also explained that a scientific theory is neven really proven, it can only be disproved. If after many attempts we fail to disprove the theory, we are probably on safe ground to provisionally accept it as correct. That was something never explained in my high school science classes, but illustrates very well the difference between science and propaganda.

** As I illustrated in a post on Green Car Liberalism, the tactic might work even better - it is certainly more prevalent - in politics.

*** If we assume, as I don't, that intelligence ought to be equally distributed regardless of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, disability, age, veteran status, medical condition, citizenship, ancestry, or marital status.

Color me so surprised

You are number 478,930 to use the Candidate Calculator. This page shows how well you match on the issues with each candidate. The candidate calculator uses your responses to determine a percentage of how much you agree with the candidates on issues.

Your Top Match

You planned to vote for Paul. Based on your responses, your top candidate for 2008 is below.

Texas Representative Ron Paul (R)

96.36% match

Try the Candidate Calculator

(hat tip: Vox)

I haven't decided if this is funny or in poor taste

Or both.

Blame the Crusades

April Fleming* blames the Crusades for the long hibernation of science:

Even though some science is much older than the Bible (not the theory of evolution, granted). Thanks to Persia** we still have some ancient science texts that are remarkably accurate. Most of the rest were destroyed in the crusades...

When I pointed out that the Crusades did not take place in Persia and asked how we know a) what was destroyed, and b) how we know that it was accurate if it was destroyed, she replied with this:

I was thinking mostly of the great library in Alexandria that was destroyed - a lot of what was smuggled out of there ended up in Persia, as one of the only safe places at the time for scientific thought. There are some interesting accounts*** of the raid of the library itself, by the people who salvaged what they could. They also noted some of what was lost.

It's a good answer - though by no means a correct one, for as I pointed out there (and here) that particular library was destroyed several times, the first a full millennium before the Crusades, the last at least 400 years before (by, in order, pagan Romans, pagan Romans, Christian Romans, and Muslims).

It seems that among a lot of the educated left, the Crusades are to blame for pretty much everything bad that happened between Caesar and Galileo, but in fact, they lasted for less than 2 centuries (1095-1291) and probably did very little damage to knowledge, much less science as we understand it today. The biggest effects were the permanent schism of Christianity and (ironically) at least the beginnings of the re-introduction of Greek learning in Western Europe****. In short, the Crusades had a larger and longer-lasting effect on Christianity than on anything outside it.

But let's just make a quick rundown of the Crusades (don't worry, it won't take long and will illustrate something very interesting):

First Crusade (1095-1101): Took Jerusalem from the Muslims (Seljuq) and established a number of "Crusader States," basically European-style vassal states around the Med. It was the only Crusade that was an unmitigated success.

Second Crusade (1147-8): Its only real success was in recovering Lisbon from the Moors. Lisbon, Portugul? Oh, yeah, did I forget to mention that much of Spain***** and Portugul were held by the Muslims at this time? The Muslims generally defeat the Christians outside Europe.

Third Crusade: (1189-92): The Muslim Saladin had taken Jerusalem, and the Europeans marched massive armies from Germany, France, and England to re-take it. When it was over, they left Jerusalem in Muslim hands and extracted a promise that Christian pilgrims could visit. Woohoo!

Fourth Crusade (1201-4): This is the only crusade that could have conceivably destroyed the library at Alexandria. Unfortunately, it never made it to Egypt and ended with the sacking of the (Orthodox) Christian city of Constantinople, an outrage denounced by Pope Innocent at the time and which was still being apologized for by Pope John Paul II.

The next crusade (Albigensian) was limited to the boundaries of modern France. The one after that (Children's) may or not have actually occured. If it did, it simply resulted in a lot of European Children sold into slavery. The improperly-named Fifth Crusade resulted in a defeat for the Christians. In the sixth, the German king mucked around Acre, the capital of the remnants of the Jerusalem Crusader state, but not much else happened.

I could go on, but are we getting the idea here? The Crusades other than the first one were simply border skirmishes between Christians and Muslims, centered on Jerusalem. They almost never resulted in the sack of a great city (the kind that might have a science library, like Constantinople) and for the most part were nothing more than European nobles trying to regain parts of the eastern Mediterranean taken by Muslims and Muslims trying to take it back.

They were an episode, a parenthesis in historical development, with each one trying to match the glory of the first and becoming more and more petty and venal as time went on. Eventually, even the Popes realized the futility of continued Crusades and called them off. The episode was all but finished by 1300.

But there is a strange irony in the fact that it is modern unbelievers who condemn Christianity so much for both the Crusades and (to a greater extent) the Inquisition, and that irony arises from the fact that most of what "we know" about the episodes comes from the pens of Protestant historians whose purpose was not to try to illuminate historical truth but to illustrate how bad the Catholic church was. For example, much of the "Black Legend" of the Inqusition was simply political hay made by the English Protestants in order to besmirch the Spanish Catholics and whip up public sentiment against them.

In fact, the non-Christians who believe the least-true accounts of both of these episodes are themselves victims of Christian propaganda. The lies of the Christians have come back to bite their descendants. And if the historically ignorant blame us for things that never happened, I can only say that, at least in the case of the Crusades, it's more our fault than theirs.

* Actually, this is not to pick on April, because while she's historically ignorant, at least she's woman enough to admit it and is willing to learn. Unlike too many on either side of the aisle, she's not one that argues simply for the sake of winning once it's been shown that the facts are the other way.

** Persia would have been an especially bad place to hide documents during the Crusades. Not because the Crusaders ever got there, but because the Persian Empire had fallen to the Islamic Turkish Seljuq Empire and the entire area was dividied into warring little kingdoms that refused to cooperate with one another. Besides being the major reason for Christian success in the first Crusade, that political environment makes it very difficult to preserve documents, especially those written in Greek and Latin, the tongues of those the Moslems considered both infidel and enemy. Documents written on paper are best preserved in a place where there's not a lot of burning and looting going on.

*** No, there aren't. At least not ones written at the time. We have no documentation that the fourth occurred, we can only infer the third from Christian writings that do not mention the library specifically (they are concerned with the Temple of Serapis nearby), and Seneca mentions that 40,000 scrolls were burned on account of Caesar, but he gives no details as to what they contained. Ammianus Marcellinus, writing about 400, seems to say that the library is a thing of the past - he gives no further details.

**** Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, had been fairly untouched in the 700 years following the fall of Rome in the West. But after the body blow delivered in the Fourth Crusade (and in the face of expansive Islam) a lot of the cultural accrual started turning up in Italy and France, eventually leading to the Renaisance.

***** In fact, it would not be until Ferdinand and Isabella three centuries later (in the 1490s) that Spain finally kicked out the last of those Muslims. Those wars, of course, provided a whole lot of experienced conquistadors who would follow in the wake of Cristoforo Columbo.

Halo3's Companion Volume

Suburban legends

My daughter has a children's lit instructor who spends most of his time talking about everything* except children's lit. But when he's not reliving the glories of the 60s, he's sharing other stuff he has just heard somewhere and really doesn't understand. Rebel Nun asked me recently about his explanation for the popularity of June weddings:

"[People during Medieval times] took their yearly baths in May so by June they still smelled pretty good, but because of the slight body odor they held a boquet of flowers." - Prof. Curry

Now just reading it by itself, the first thing one will notice is that it really makes no sense. If you did not bathe for a month, I doubt you would have "slight body odor." In fact, I cannot imagine you would be much better off than if you had not bathed in a year. So there are really two issues to deal with, the sideline (Medieval bathing) and the real reason June weddings are popular.

Despite popular modern opinion, people in the Middle Ages liked to bathe. There were bath houses throughout Europe for most of the Middle Ages, and especially famous and sought after were the hot springs at a little town called Bath in England. But there were two problems with bathing for most European urbanites: wood and fire. Because much of Europe had been converted to farmland and what was still forested often belonged to a king or noble as a private huntng refuge, wood was expensive. And because most buildings were made of wood, fire tended to get out of control and warm a lot more than the bath water. As a result, by the late Middle Ages, hot baths were a luxury only the wealthy could afford, and everyone else who wanted a bath had to take a cold one. Even in May**.

But why the June wedding? Medieval Catholics probably didn't know this, but a June wedding is a tradition they inherited from the Romans. The queen of the Roman gods was named Juno (from whence we name our month of June), and in addition to her royal duties she was also the goddess of weddings and fertility. To the Romans, a June wedding was believed to carry a special blessing from Juno: a happy marriage resulting in a chariot load of children. That tradition was simply carried into the new European society that fancied itself the descendants of the Romans, and from them to us.

So what does it all mean? Nothing, really, except that what everyone knows is often wrong, and children's lit professors would probably be better off sticking with Green Eggs and Ham.

* By which I mean "Vietnam."

** There is no Medieval source (that I have seen anyway) that claims that May was the month when everyone took their annual bath. But this guy's a PhD so he must know, right?

I realize this is a very complicated apparatus, but...

A terse little article reveals that the Fed is not only not helping the subprime problem, but has accidentally* built a Rube Goldberg machine** that will accomplish its opposite:

NEW YORK, Sept 20 (Reuters) - Prices on the U.S. 30-year Treasury bonds shed two points on Thursday on inflation fears tied to surging commodity prices and the Federal Reserve's hefty interest rate cut earlier this week.

The yield on the long bond was 4.96 percent, up from 4.84 percent late Wednesday. Bond yields and prices move inversely.

What a lot of people thought would happen was this:

a) The Fed lowers rates.
b) Lower rates rescue subprime loans that have reset to higher rates.
c) Voters with subprime mortgages are happy.

What actually happened was this:
a) The Fed lowers rates.
b) Lower rates cause the US dollar to fall.
c) The falling dollar causes commodity prices to rise.
d) Rising commodity prices cause people to fear inflation.
e) Inflation fears cause investors to sell bonds.
f) Selling bonds causes bond prices to fall.
g) Falling bond prices cause bond yields to rise.
h) Rising bond yields cause mortgage yields to rise.
i) Rising mortgage yields cause mortgage payments to rise.
j) Rising mortgage payments cause people to lose their homes.
k) Voters with subprime mortgages are unhappy.

In short, by lowering rates, the Fed has caused the subprime problem to get worse.

There is simply no painless solution to the problem of people living in homes they cannot afford, and the more the Fed and el Presidente and Congress muck about in the mess, the worse it will get. But as a certain would-be Republican governor of Texas once quipped, if it's inevitable, you might as well relax and enjoy it.

I wonder how much we'll enjoy it once it really starts raining?

* I suspect it's accidental (your mileage may vary) because being a political institution, their primary goal is to make voters happy. Of course, they may be attempting to do so by making Wall Street happy. As I've said before, people looking at the Dow are looking at the wrong thing, but there are a whole lot of people looking at the Dow.

** Rube Goldberg (rōōb') adj. Of, relating to, or being a contrivance that brings about by complicated means what apparently could have been accomplished simply.

Does honesty prove a rightward bias?

Apparently they don't teach metaphors in journalism school:

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Nelson Mandela is still very much alive despite an embarrassing gaffe by U.S. President George W. Bush, who alluded to the former South African leader's death in an attempt to explain sectarian violence in Iraq...

"I heard somebody say, Where's Mandela?' Well, Mandela's dead because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas," Bush, who has a reputation for verbal faux pas, said in a press conference in Washington on Thursday.

Jailed for 27 years for fighting white minority rule, Mandela became South Africa's first black president in 1994. He won a Nobel Peace Prize for preaching racial harmony and guiding the nation peacefully into the post-apartheid era.

Rather than Bush making an embarrassing gaffe, it's obvious from watching the tape that Bush was using "Mandela" as a metaphor for a home-grown opposition leader who could lead a popular government in Iraq as the real one did in South Africa. The embarrassing gaffe belongs to Reuters for concluding that George Bush said that not only did Saddam literally kill the former South African president, but everyone* with his last name. El Presidente is completely wrong in asserting that what Iraq needs is a popular politician**, but at least he understands figures of speech.

But what is even more troubling than the fact that a major news service has reporters and editors who do not not actually watch the news they are reporting*** is the number of members of the "Reality-Based Community", like these guys (1) (2) (3) (who must serve to represent the remarks of too many lefty bloggers to link separately), who apparently believe that dealing honestly with what other people say is somehow granting them a favor or giving them the benefit of the doubt****, rather than simply the lowest level of honesty required for political discourse.

Thankfully, if someone reads through the comments, one will find a few liberals who can still deal honestly with words. Unfortunately they are often immediately set upon by their co-locutors as sycophants of the President.

So what does it say for the Reality-Based Community when basic human decency is conclusive evidence that you are not really a liberal?

* And we all know that Mandelas in Iraq are like Chins in a Chinese phone book.

** If they find one, his name will likely be Ahmadinejad anyway. And this is not to say that his comments cannot be reasonably construed as a "You're no Jack Kennedy" to Iraq's current governors. If you're looking for a Bush gaffe, there's a good one.

*** The best possible spin is that, being in Johannesburg, perhaps neither actually saw the news conference. But in that case they simply have no business writing about what they did not see. None of the people who were there thought enough of it to even ask a followup.

**** "Sarcastic, serious, allegorical, joking, whatever; Bush is an idiot. Be my guest and accord him credit if you so choose; I call it as I see it." - Brave New Films

There is more than one kind of Babel

National Geographic worries that the episode with the tower will be undone:

Sydney - The world's native languages are dying out at an unprecedented rate, taking with them irreplaceable knowledge about the natural world, according to a National Geographic study...

"Languages are undergoing a global extinction crisis that greatly exceeds the pace of species extinction," linguistics professor David Harrison told the National Geographic website.

Harrison said half of the world's 7 000 languages were expected to disappear before the end of the century.

He said indigenous people had an intimate knowledge of their environment that was lost when their language disappeared, along with concepts dealing with mathematics and the nature of time often unfamiliar to western thinking.

"Most of what we know about species and ecosystems is not written down anywhere, it's only in people's heads," he said.

Since people who cease to speak a language do so because there is another one that they have picked up that meets their needs better, it seems to me like the death of a language* is closer to the retirement of a model of car than the extinction of a species. In this case, we're talking about languages shared by tiny groups of isolated and often stone age peoples; it's natural and should be expected that as they lose their physical isolation they would choose to give up their linguistic isolation as well. I can hardly see anything noble in keeping them isolated so we can study them like bugs or viruses.

But what I found most interesting was Harrison's statement that stone age people know far more about species and ecosystems than does the modern, scientific West. Read his statement again, that's what it means**.

So I ask you, if the lost knowledge of people with rabbit bones in their noses is truly 'irreplaceable,' why are we spending all this money on science, especially paying this guy's salary?

Or put another way, if after spending all the money we spend on science we know less about our world than we knew when we all lived on a diet of lizards and pine cones, does that not mean modern science is truly as valuable*** as a degree in Women's Studies from Wellesley?

It must be true if a scientist say so.

* A language need not disappear even if it dies. Lots and lots of people still speak Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and French.

** Though in all probability it's just the kind of bs that academics naturally run. Their discipline is the most important in all the world, their crises (read: proposals for funding) are of such gravity that all other funding priorities pale by comparison.

*** by which I mean, of course, worthless at best.

I'm not sure they'll take dollars for long

A 5th-grader knows Nixon, a Senior knows Dick

While one could argue that Federalism requires both ultimate power at the national level* AND a sharing of power between levels of government (giving question 24 two possible correct answers), there can be no doubt I simply shanked the very first question, even though I knew better:

You answered 58 out of 60 correctly — 96.67 %
Average score for this quiz during September: 75.3%
Average score since September 18, 2007: 75.3%

You can take the quiz as often as you like, however, your score will only count once toward the monthly average.

ISI's very cool civics quiz will, among other things, allow you to compare your knowledge against that of the average college senior. But don't get too excited: the Institute notes that your competition "knows astoundingly little about America’s history, government, international relations and market economy."

Contrary to popular belief, that the average senior knows nothing of value does not represent a failing of the American educational institution as much as it does the fact that most people have neither the inclination nor the ability to understand serious subjects.

Making college available to everyone does not make everyone capable of doing college-level work, so if we are going to insist that everyone go to college, we have little alternative but to create alternative programs** so the dummies can graduate as well. After all, someone's gotta work in human resources.

In regards to the test, it is no coincidence that the most prestigious universities tended to perform the worst***; they are the universities that bend over backwards to please the kinds of students who want to avoid learning and jump right into politics. And that certainly explains the state of modern American politics as well.

* If that's not the case, what, precisely, were the Federalists and the (original) Anti-Federalists arguing over?

** Which usually end with the word "Studies."

*** See Finding 3. Nor is it a coincidence that the longer a person stays in one of these colleges the worse they tend to do.

(hat tip: Vox Day)

That ought to make merging them easier

It sure makes converting Canadian stock prices simple:

TORONTO (Reuters) - The Canadian dollar reached parity with the U.S. currency for the first time in 31 years on Thursday, according to Reuters data, supported by lofty commodity prices, a strong domestic economy and concerns about a U.S. economic slowdown.

Hard to believe you could buy a Loonie for .65 a few years ago.

Who's to blame?

I've been trying to avoid this post, but from the contents of my inbox and the 65 comments on a single story for a site that probably gets that many visitors in a normal week, it seems Fort Scott is talking about nothing else.

Scenario 1: A married youth pastor and his unmarried male bible school-attending assistant invite two 15-year-old girls from the youth group over to the latter's apartment where they provide them with beer and liquor and proceed to have (as yet unspecified) sexual acts with them. Looks pretty bad for the church, huh? What do they teach there, anyway?

How about this scenario: The Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitative Services assigns two male mentors to a pair of girls who have spent the last year in juvenile hall for sneaking liquor into a football game and getting a 6th-grader, among others, drunk. This is not their first brush with trouble, either; at 14 they were busted for posting nude pictures of themselves on the web. The state-approved mentors accompany their charges one Friday night and the same thing happens. Looks pretty bad for SRS, huh?

Or how about this one: a substitute high-school teacher and a teacher's aide invite a pair of freshman girls over after school and guess what? Looks pretty bad for the school, huh?

What if it's all three of these wrapped into one*? Who's to blame then?

The traditional tack is to blame the organization one least likes. Atheists and Christians in other denominations will blame the church, homeschoolers will blame public schools, some with different priorities will blame SRS for the foolishness of giving a legal green light to men in their 20s having unsupervised access to and authority over nubile young women.

My feelings on similar situations have changed since I became a foster parent and have been in contact with teenaged girls raised without family**. They have changed an opposite way since I have begun to take seriously Paul's admonition that wolves would enter the flock and realized that predators will always go where the prey is, whether a church or a school or a mentorship program. They are also muddled by the fact that I used to shepherd that same youth group on Friday nights, and while I don't know the girls (at least I haven't seen them in 3 years, but I know of them and am familiar with their circumstances) I do know many of their peers and one of the guys. The other is a replacement for a guy I know quite well who left under a somewhat similar (though far less criminal) cloud. It's a small world***.

They are also clouded by the fact that the pastor's wife was indicted earlier this year for lying to a grand jury my wife was on, an elder was indicted for insurance fraud by that same jury****, and another elder was convicted a few years ago of taping nude teen girls in the tanning salon he owned. It's a church with problems I believe go far beyond "what is taught."

And it doesn't help that the church is one that I was a member of for years but purposely left a while back. A couple of long-time readers here surely recall those circumstances, the rest will just have to get along with not knowing the particulars.

God help me if I end up on this jury, because I simply don't know what I'd do with myself in such a case. Was a crime committed? Doubtless. Are the men primarily to blame? Doubtless. Should they be canepoled on National Avenue during Good Old Days? Absolutely. But should they go to jail for up to 75 years for it? That's where I have real doubts, because while a crime was committed, justice demands that the price paid is equal to the damages the crime wrought. Eye for an eye, and all that, and I really wonder how much damage was wrought. And as a juror, I could not perpetuate injustice in the name of justice, regardless of the law*****.

Sure, a marriage was destroyed (by the husband, regardless of the outcome of the trial). And sure, parents of kids in a church youth group, a school, and a juvenile justice system have been taught a painful lesson in trusting authority. But what about the legal victims in the case? In some sense they are certainly victims, because they were not in authority and those in authority had absolutely no right to do what they did. In some ways they were not, being in possession of a sexuality that they know how to use to their advantage. Yet even then, while a brand new pair of boobs bestows a certain power, it is not issued with the wisdom to use that power nor the defenses to protect one from the inevitable emotional (and legal) trauma that arises from the abuse of that power.

So does sexual predation demand that a predator be locked away forever? Sure. Does momentary moral weakness demand the same? I don't think so. I can only pray that the jury is given sufficient information, and has the wisdom, to be able to discern the difference.

* This is a small town; we all have to play multiple positions or we can't field a team.

** One of my foster daughters had a very similar older sister. I cringe every time I consider the purposeful destruction she wrought on all those around her over a decade. And while these girls now have a family, they were both foreign adoptions less than a handful of years ago and have displayed a propensity for the same.

*** So small, in fact, that you can 'meet' all four of the principals within half a dozen clicks from this page if you know what to look for.

**** the charges were dismissed against him because he did not actually post-date the check that purchased a policy at the same hour the big fire of a few years ago was burning down 2/3 of the city block in which his building stood; he left it blank so the agent, also indicted, could write it in the next day.

***** I can, and would, hang a jury to avoid that. But I can, and would, flip the switch on the electric chair if such was called for.

A PSA from Snoop

On the subject of the college kid who got tazered at the John Kerry rally, Snoop says, "Hey white people you need to watch!" So take it from Snoop.

(language warning)

James on Squirrels

Via email:

So, the squirrels have found their way up to my apartment balcony and have been raiding my bird feeders. This makes me mad. I don't like squirrels, they are just tree-going rats. Now, I need to find a way to get rid of them. Being a nice, human person I decide that the best way to get rid of these little annoyances is to squirt them with a water gun filled with a solution of half water, half vinegar. Simple, right? No. See, apparently water guns are a seasonal item, and there is not one to be found for sale in Lawrence. None. I don't know who makes these decisions, but I don't remember this from my youth. I thought I could ALWAYS buy a water gun at any point. Now what? Lets examine my options

Option one: 12 gauge shot gun. I own a 12 gauge, and well, that would definitely eliminate the tree-rats. At the range I would be using it, about six feet, I am sure the squirrel would be reduced to a fine hazy red mist. Not much clean up, as the 12 gauge would make small, biodegradable squirrel chunks. However, there are a few drawbacks. Like noise. The discharge of a shotgun in an enclosed space is not good. And then there is the small issue of a large chunk of my balcony being blasted into splinters along with Herr Tree Rat. And I am sure that some of the pellets would travel through the squirrel and continue across the parking lot, shattering the sliding glass doors of other tenants, perhaps blowing chunks out of their balconies. Now, the US military and I call this "collateral damage." Sort of the price of doing business. My landlord calls this "forfeiture of security deposit." My neighbors call this "psycho." And the Douglas County DA calls it "a felony." We can discount this option.

Option two: The Deuce-Deuce. Ahhh, yes, the .22 caliber pistol, the perennial favorite of mob hit men, the Israeli Mossad and Boy Scout troops everywhere. Small, compact, fairly quiet and able to grease squirrels. Problems? Well, bodies. Where as the shotgun would merely require a hose job, the .22 would leave me and the surrounding area littered with squirrel corpses. Yeppers, that would get me on the news. I suppose I could skin them and make a nifty coat or something. In any case, standing on my balcony cappin' rodents like some kind of deranged game hunter once again would bring me unwanted attention from Johnny Law. Option two, also a no go.

Option three: BB gun. The teenage boys best friend. Well, one of them anyhow. You can play with this one all you want and not have to worry about chaffing. Pretty quiet, cheap, generally accurate and packs a nasty sting. Problem? I don't own one anymore. Once I graduated to big boy firearms, no need. Or so I thought. I guess I could buy one, but I am cheap. This also eliminates paint ball guns, throwing knives, chakrams, and tomahawks. Thus option three eliminated.

Option four: trapping. I am a clever guy, I am sure I could build a trap. But them what? Now I got a squirrel in a box. An angry squirrel in a box. An angry, biting, clawing ball of white hot ball of rodent fury in a box. Need I say more? What am I a gonna do with that? Let it out? Relocate every squirrel in Meadowbrook to another location? Nope, sheer workload takes this option out of the running.

Option four: Broom handle. Yes, the old stand by. Four feet of wood. Suitable for poking, prodding, whacking and otherwise laying the smack down. See, I don't wanna get to close to these little geeks. The one thing that sticks with me from my biology days is that rodents like to bite. And I don't want to get bit. Rabies is not something I want. So, if I was armed with four feet of wood, I could poke, prod, whack and otherwise lay the smack down with impunity. Any draw backs? Well, no not really. It is humane and no rodents have to die. So, I guess if you are bored you can drive by my apartment complex and watch me caper like a new age caveman poking at squirrels with a stick on my balcony. Should be good for a laugh or two.

Can lowering rates save the economy?

I think Bernanke has officially broken the dollar:

TORONTO, ON (UPI) -- The Canadian dollar topped 98 U.S. cents for the first time in 30 years Tuesday as the U.S. Federal Reserve cut interest rates an aggressive half-point.

The Canadian currency rose to 1.06 U.S. cents to 98.34 U.S. cents in mid-afternoon trading after closing at 97.28 U.S. cents Monday.

The last time the Canadian dollar closed above 98 cents was in January 1977.

As they say in wine circles, that was a very bad year.

But the worst part is that the current year hasn't been so bad, compared to the late 70s*. El Presidente de los Estados Unidos has not been on TV in a sweater talking about malaise, the Russians haven't invaded Afghanistan, and we don't have 15% interest rates or 12% inflation**. In fact, as our Goldman Sachs-running, billionaire SecTreas reminds us every day, the global economy is as strong as Hercules when he faced off against the moon men. So what the heck is the problem? The problem is, of course, that the current credit crunch is not the result of money being tight; it is a result of money being too loose, of rates being too low for too long.

Why in the world did everyone in the past 5 years all of a sudden get stupid, lending money to people who could never pay it back, rolling up mortgages into tranches and then leveraging them 10 or more times? Why have money center banks and pension funds found that all of a sudden they hold billions of dollars' worth of unsaleable crap?

They were chasing yield. No more, no less. Because the Fed dropped interest rates from 7% to 1% and held them there for three years, people who needed a return on their money were forced to take on more and more risk and got less and less in return. When your bank is paying 1% in interest, it makes perfect (short-term) economic sense to buy today with no money down, no interest, or to invest in some exotic alphabet soup that at least gives the chance that the money you are saving will grow enough that you don't have to budget dog food for dinner twice a week. But when the Fed brought them to a more reasonable level - which they had to do because of the problems it caused - the whole thing imploded - as it had to do. Well, the dollar imploded. Gold exploded (it is right now at its second-highest level ever) as did oil (above $82/bbl - when it hits $90, TSHTF).

As you can see from the chart above, the dollar is now below 80, where it has been for a week, and is falling hard. It may recover in the near term and rise above that particular line in the sand that I pointed out 18 months ago. But I think the damage is done. By dropping two rates today, the Fed has signaled the rest of the world that it will attempt to save those who leveraged stupidly at the expense of those of us who get paid in dollars, and at the expense of those foreigners who hold our debt. Do not expect them to hold it much longer. They learned not to invade Afghanistan, they will learn not to hold US dollars.

The problem is low rates. The problems we see today are unavoidable and eventual because they remained so low for so long. Therefore the only solution, the one no one is talking about, is to raise rates and take the lumps that we've earned by acting stupidly for the past 5 years, giving savers an incentive to save rather than to borrow and consume.

That result is politically unacceptable and the Fed, despite all protestations to the contrary, is primarily a political institution***. Therefore we will get a different result, one which will be far more painful in the medium term. Zimbabwe painful.

Lowering rates today may**** put off the day of reckoning. May. But the day will come and must come because of the short-sightedness of our spendthrift Congress and President and their friendly merchant banker financiers. When it comes it will be an albatross the Republicans will bear forever. And it will be a long time before they again bear it in a position of power.

At least I hope so, because the alternative, that the Democrats could screw up their turn at bat so badly as to make people pine once again for the GOP, is far worse.

UPDATE: Mish says the same, only better. That's because he's smarter and better-looking than I.

* Just wait.

** Not in official numbers anyway.

*** which is why it should be abolished.

**** But not for long in any case, because the problem is magnified, if in secret, by low rates.

How flying squirrels evolved

Have a beer with Ben Franklin

Come on, you know you want to.

(hat tip: TerryMum)

Can we talk about something else, please?

So I walk into my bedroom tonight and my wife is watching some diet show. You know the type. There are all kinds of erstwhile-obese people chatting like old friends about how much weight they've lost. There's men and women, black and white and yellow. Hadji from the Johnny Quest show* is there in the front row, and I think I even see the Indian from that old pollution commercial. And they're all sitting in a half-circle in front of the sales guru, telling him (and of course, the camera) about the joys of eating rabbit food and doing diaphragmatic breathing or some such.

"But what's the best part of the [stupid unmemorable name] diet?" the host asks, smiling far too broadly for what is about to follow.

The audience looks on in breathless anticipation as one guy in the center pipes up.

"My stool. It's good." He** looks around at the adoring crowd. "No, my stool is great." They cheer: their stool is apparently great as well.

Now seriously, I could stand to lose 35 pound or so. I had actually walked in after doing some stretching and a little time on the stationary bike. But I'm giving it up. If the best way to lose weight requires talking on TV, surrounded by perfect strangers, about the consistency of your crap, it just ain't worth it.

* Not the crappy, politically-correct remake with the girl hero, but the original one, where Race Bannon used to kill guys by jumping his speed boat on top of them.

** the guy forever known among his kids' friends as "Mr. Poop."

Doubledots goes into the poster business

Got wood?

Not if you want to pay in American dollars:

MONTREAL (Reuters) - Canada's Tembec Inc. said on Friday it has pulled its lumber output off the North American market because current prices do not take into account the surging value of the Canadian dollar.

"Tembec has temporarily halted its lumber sales due to the strong Canadian dollar and pricing concern," Tracy Dottori, corporate manager of organizational development for the Canadian lumber, pulp and paper maker, told Reuters.

Dottori said the measure affected 3.5 million board feet of SPF (spruce-pine-fir) lumber a day. She added that the company expected to come back to customers some time next week with a new price list adjusted for the rising Canadian dollar.

Of course, "the rising Canadian dollar" is a distinctly north-of-the-border perspective. From where we sit, it's the sinking of the American dollar that is causing foreigners to stop* sending their goods to our market.

Now a lot of short-sighted people will argue, "Great, the weak dollar is working just like a protective tariff. That means that American goods will be more competitive." And in this case, they would be absolutely correct. It will raise American lumber company profits** in the short term with no extra work on their part. But.

But for every seller, there's a buyer***. And in this case the buyer will be paying more money for exactly the same wood that he would have paid less for before, increasing his costs and lowering his own profit by an offsetting amount.

Can anyone think of an American industry that uses a whole lot of wood products and really cannot afford for their main cost to take a really big jump up right now?

Yeah, me neither.

* Albeit temporarily in this case. They'll be back once they have adjusted prices accordingly and built in some wiggle room for themselves.

** mostly because they can raise their prices and still sell for less than the Canadians. And to the extent that it's not a real tariff, meaning that those profits go to shareholders rather than politicians, I'm cool with that. Call me crazy, but I think high domestic profits are a good and desireable thing.

*** Which is why, irony of ironies, Democrats were the free-traders of a century ago, and it was the Republicans who wanted a high tariff to protect American business from offshore competition. In fact, the single thing Woodrow Wilson's administration had right was that increased competition, especially from abroad, raises the standard of living of the average person by keeping prices down. Today's progressives hate Wal-Mart for that very reason.

Be a non-conformist, like me

It seems there are a lot of indistinguishable horses in the race:

Sept. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc.'s Global Alpha hedge fund fell 22.5 percent in August, its biggest monthly decline, on losses from currency and stock trades...

Goldman blamed its losses on too many quantitative funds making the same trades, and said in mid-August it would have to develop new strategies.

Alpha is what is technically known as a "quant" or "quantitative" fund, a fund that makes trades in the market based (mostly) on mathematical models. But as the name and size (8 thousand million dollars) imply, it's also a BSD fund*, one that a lot of other funds try to imitate. Goldman is among the biggest and strongest players in the market (there's a reason our current SecTreas came straight from there), and its people are assumed to be the best and the brightest. They are certainly among the best paid. And since they know so much, you think they would have seen the self-reinforcing feedback loop they were creating. Oops. Well, at least they are still among the best paid.

In the spirit of reading the news before it's fit to print, I think we can make the assumption that every other hedge fund making the same trades as Alpha has the same problems. I think we can also assume that because the fact that they were all making the same trades causes problems, those funds who try to disengage are going to cause even more problems** for those who remain.

Finally, there's a third assumption we can make, which grows into a certainty the longer the current market volatility*** continues to chew up and spit out mortgage companies, the corporate bond market, the commercial paper market, quant funds, the dollar, and the promises of central banks: we ain't seen nothing yet.

* Big swinging dick

** For example, if we both own a lot of stock in the same company and I dump all mine on the market to meet a margin call, yours goes down in value, too. Then you get a margin call.

*** also known as "The New Reality."

In which Walter makes a boo-boo

Professor Williams misses the forest for the grocer:

I buy more from my grocer than he buys from me, and I bet it's the same with you and your grocer. That means we have a trade deficit with our grocers. Does our perpetual grocer trade deficit portend doom? If we heeded some pundits and politicians who are talking about our national trade deficit, we might think so. But do we have a trade deficit in the first place? Let's look at it.

Insofar as the grocer example, there are two accounts that I hold. One is my "goods" account, which consists of groceries. The other is my "capital" account, which consists of money. Let's look at what happens when I purchase groceries. Say I purchase $100 worth of groceries. The value of my goods account rises by $100. That rise is matched by an equal $100 decline in my capital account. Adding a plus $100 to a minus $100 yields a perfect trade balance. That transaction, from my grocer's point of view, results in his goods account falling by $100, but when he accepts my cash, his capital account rises by $100, again a trade balance...

International trade operates under the identical principle.

Far be it from me to criticize my favorite economics professor, but I think that in this case, he's not following his own analogy far enough, because he's presuming we have a perpetual cash account to offset our perpetual appetite for groceries.

Let's say that rather than paying my grocer cash (because I don't have any) that he can use to buy more groceries, I offer him shares in my house. I am buying groceries from him, he is "investing" in my house, and we all realize that having others invest in us is a good thing, right? That is the argument Williams uses in a more recent article on the trade deficit here. And that's fine as far as it goes*.

But what happens when the game carries on too long? Eventually, the grocer ceases to invest in my house and is rather investing in his house. It becomes his house because eventually he will come to own it. Because I have run a perpetual deficit with him without the means of paying for the groceries through my own production, I am falling further and further into debt to him.

As he notes, international trade operates under the same principle. It is fine to run a deficit with the grocer so long as I run an offsetting surplus with my employer, which enables me to continuously buy the groceries I consume. But the moment I find myself in a perpetual deficit with all my lenders and have no income in my cash account, then them "investing" in me is simply a fancy way of saying they are buying my assets. When they buy all my assets, I am broke, but I still need to eat. In the same way, it is fine to run a trade deficit, so long as we are creating the means to pay it off some day, to redeem the IOUs coming from our negative-balance cash account.

He continues:

Some politicians gripe about all the U.S. debt held by foreigners. Only a politician can have that kind of audacity. Guess who's creating the debt instruments that foreigners hold? If you said it's our profligate Congress, go to the head of the class. If foreigners didn't purchase so much of our debt, we'd be worse off in terms of higher inflation and interest rates. What about the possibility of foreigners dumping our debt? Foreigners aren't stupid. Dumping large amounts of Treasury bonds would drive down their value. Foreigners as well as we would take a hit.

Williams here is absolutely correct about the blame for the deficit and for the resultant ability of foreigners to hold so much of our debt. And when (not if) they repudiate that debt or (God forbid) ask that we pay it through goods or real capital, those bad things he mentions will happen.

But the possibility of foreigners dumping our debt is not such a straight-forward question of them being stupid because it's not a straight-forward question of whether they wish to receive something valuable** for all those IOUs. That debt is not held by foreign little guys, but by foreign governments who can print up as much of their own money as they wish. They don't need it the way you and I need our 401(k). To them it is an asset, yes, but it is just as much a political asset as a financial one.

The day your grocer gets tired of taking little bits of your house and decides he'll get his money by selling the whole thing is the day you realize the foolishness of running perpetual, debt-funded deficits with him. That is now his choice based on his own priorities. The day one of our national grocers decides they'd rather have something real rather than the promise that maybe, some day, if we get around to it, we'll redeem our depreciating*** currency with something real, that is the day we collectively realize the foolishness of giving an authoritarian nation with ambitions and priorities of of its own, ambitions and priorities that may run deeper than simply getting paid and may be counter to our own well-being, control over trillions of dollars worth of grocery IOUs.

Of course, we can always go to war to keep them from collecting on the debt. In fact, we just may need to. I hope those plastic Pok-e-mon toys are worth it.

* Maybe a year in the my case, maybe a decade in the case of a nation. There are very few things in economics that are straight cause and effect on a macro level, and Williams is correct to point out that we had a trade surplus during the 30s. He neglects to point out that we were also the world's leading creditor nation at that point, rather than its leading debtor. As bad as the Depression was here, it was far worse elsewhere, especially in those places that had to spend a lot of their already-reduced income paying interest on debt.

** Besides, if America never intends to give them goods for that debt, is it valuable? What good is interest on nothing?

*** In fact, it's not simply a choice they will make but a choice which we will force upon them.

Imagine if you will, a man standing atop a four-story structure. He can leap onto the bare concrete, assuring himself broken bones if not worse. Stupid, right? Of course, only someone with a deathwish would jump.

Now, imagine the building is on fire. The man is fine at present, but there are no flashing lights around; the only lights he sees are from the fire getting closer. It is becoming more clear that if he remains on the building, he will be burned up with it. Now is it stupid to jump?

Holders of our currency, especially large holders, are the man on the building. They will lose a lot of money if they sell it, because when they aquired it, it was worth a lot more of everything. But it keeps going down, becoming worth less with each passing day. It is quite possible that, given our propensity to create it from nothing, that it will eventually become worth nothing. It will certainly become worth even less than it's worth today.

Now are they stupid to take the loss today rather than hold on in hopes that someday America's currency will again be good as gold?

That puts the issue in a whole different perspective, no?

Hooray for big round numbers

We crossed $9 million million today

Wow, I can't wait to vote now

Steve Forbes says the choice will be a stark one:

SINGAPORE (AFP) - US publisher Steve Forbes predicted Sunday that Democrat Hillary Clinton will be one of three candidates vying to be the next US president...

Forbes said the former first lady's likely rivals in the race for the White House were New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and his predecessor Rudolph Giuliani.

"I think you will have Mr Giuliani, Mrs Clinton and then there is a third candidate and the current mayor of New York... a man named Michael Bloomberg," Forbes said.

Bloomberg quit the Republican Party in June, sparking immediate speculation he was plotting an independent White House bid.

Well, why not? Americans are so obviously enamoured with New York that they would like nothing more than to see its carpetbagging senior* Senator face off against a current and former mayor of New York City. Actually, I don't believe it will happen, but the fact that it's even possible (and the odds, frankly, are not ones I'd bet against) just goes to show how much is at stake next fall. I mean, even though I've been told that each Presidential election for the past 2 decades has been "The Most Important Election of Our Lifetimes(TM)," there is no doubt that this one will take the cake. Vote wrong and you just might end up with a New York Liberal as President. Oh, the huge manatee!

All seriousness aside, if it shows one thing, it is that the Religious Right is currently (and maybe always was) a paper tiger**. That neither party will produce an RR candidate and the Ross Perot wannabee in the race coined the term "Creationalism"*** to describe the scary voters whom I assume he will not sully himself to court, just goes to show that those concerned that the Federal Government would soon be demanding adherence to the Baptist Distinctives upon threat of burning at the stake was a fine fundraising tool but not much more.

I can't say that's a terribly bad thing, though. Jesus saying his kingdom was "not of this world" is probably one of those things we ought to take literally.

* Though I would not have been totally opposed to the senator who was senior when she was junior.

** Back in the halcyon days of Progressivism, for example, both parties (and even third parties) tended to run nearly indistinguishable Progressives.

*** Which, at Dot's urging, I will continue to use. See? I respond to feedback, really I do.