El Borak's Myopia

He's lying

2011-12-30T12:43:00.001-08:00

Virgin Birth redux

2011-12-29T07:33:00.000-08:00

OK, no more posts on this, but I did find one "analysis" from Free Inquiry Magazine pretty funny:

Now, let’s turn to the Christian record. What do the Gospel writers say about Jesus? When it comes to his birth, as a group, they say nothing. The Gospels of Mark and John never mention the Nativity. Only Matthew and Luke describe it.

But it’s misleading to say “Matthew and Luke.” One might better say “Matthew vs. Luke,” for the Gospels bearing their names contradict* each other on almost every detail. The popular image of shepherds and wise men side by side before the cradle? Matthew says wise men. Luke says shepherds. Neither says both.

The star in the East? Only in Matthew.

“Hark, the herald angels sing” . . . but only in Luke. Matthew never heard of them**.

"Contradict" does not mean "a detail found in one story is missing from another." But that's a post for another day. What the author ~~fails to mention~~ studiously ignores is that one can tell the entire base story of Jesus' nativity from facts found in both accounts. To wit:

(1) Jesus was born during the reign of Herod****.
(2) He was born at Bethlehem in Judea.
(3) He was named Jesus by divine command.
(4) He was declared to be a Savior.
(5) He was conceived via the Holy Ghost.
(6) His mother, named Mary, was a virgin.
(7) She was engaged to be married to a man named Joseph.
(8) Joseph was descended from King David.
(9) Joseph knew of Mary's pregnancy and its cause.
(10) He married her anyway and took responsibility for her child.
(11) The Annunciation and birth were attended by revelations and visions.
(12) After the birth of Jesus, Joseph and Mary lived in Nazareth.

What is amazing about the two birth narratives is not that they contain differences, but that as different as they are, on those details that are central to the story, they agree. That is, unless one wishes to argue that "wise men vs shepherds" is more important than that Joseph accepted Mary's unexpected pregnancy.

That doesn't mean there aren't problems. Frankly, the genealogies are an issue, though not as one might think. Genealogy problems (as I've discussed before) are par for the course in the ancient world, but as no historian argues that Ceolwulf was legendary because different sources differ in genealogical details, no historian argues the same for Jesus. If it's a problem***, that problem is theological, not historical. The theology is not really my interest.

But what it does mean is that if one looks for the underlying story of the Virgin Birth, one will find that all the points that matter are found everywhere that Jesus' birth is mentioned.

* You keep using that word, I do not think it mean what you think it means.
** No one should fail to note the argument from silence here.
*** And I'm not sure it is. The differences, of course, have been noted since the First Century, and a number of possible solutions proposed (e.g. one line is Mary's, the lines are 'physical' versus 'legal.'). But the important points are that a) everyone knows the two genealogies have differences, and b) no one in 2000 years bothered to fix them. That shows that the copyists' respect for textual integrity has been more important than their concern about 'difficulties,' modern atheist mumblings about mass changes and insertions aside. Such a respectful approach makes documents more historically valuable than if the ancients had tidied up what to us looks like a mess.
**** Let's keep this readable, shall we?
(1) Matt. ii. 1, 13; Luke i. 5.
(2) Matt. ii. 1; Luke ii. 4, 6.
(3) Matt. i. 21; Luke i. 31.
(4) Matt. i. 21; Luke ii. 11.
(5) Matt. i. 18, 20; Luke i. 35.
(6) Matt. i. 18, 20, 23; Luke i. 27, 34.
(7) Matt. i. 18; Luke i. 27; ii. 5.
(8) Matt. i. 16, 20; Luke i. 27; ii. 4.
(9) Matt. i. 18-20; Luke ii. 5.
(10) Matt. i. 20, 24, 25; Luke ii. 5ff.
(11) Matt. i. 20, etc.; Luke i. 27, 28, etc.
(12) Matt. ii. 23; Luke ii. 39.

One pic to rule them all

2011-12-28T08:38:00.000-08:00

Virgin Births and philosophical presuppositions

2011-12-27T14:10:00.000-08:00

So anyway, in addition to upgrading the database at work and working on the thesis, I've been doing a little study on the Virgin Birth. In doing so, I came across a funny article (now almost 10 years old) by Nicholas Kristoff of the NYTimes. He seems a little perturbed that everyone believes in it:

So here's a fact appropriate for the day: Americans are three times as likely to believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus (83 percent) as in evolution (28 percent).

That number, according to Kristoff, includes not only 91% of Christians, but 47% of non-Christians as well. Now, what made me laugh is not that more non-Christians believe in the Virgin Birth than believe in evolution, but that the American School system teaches one and not the other. If Kristoff and other lefties at the Times would follow the logic there, they would conclude that the best way to get Americans to believe in evolution would be to ban it. That's not really a recommendation. I'm just saying.

But I do have to laugh at what passes for argumentation against it. For example,

Jaroslav Pelikan, the great Yale historian and theologian, says in his book ''Mary Through the Centuries'' that the earliest references to Mary (like Mark's gospel, the first to be written, or Paul's letter to the Galatians) don't mention anything unusual about the conception of Jesus.

Paul never mentions Mary in a single one of his letters - that Galatians gets included as an "earliest reference to Mary" just highlights Kristoff's ignorance here. The man simply doesn't know what he's talking about.

That said, this is a textbook example of the argument from silence. For what reason should we expect Paul to include a description of the Virgin Birth in this letter about freedom from the law? The objection is even sillier once it is noted that Paul's letters which appear after Luke wrote his Gospel still do not contain any allusions to it. Why not? It was simply not a topic Paul needed to address.

Mark, for his part, does not mention anything in Jesus' life before he was thirty. Are we then to presume that Jesus sprang into being at that age and gave his first sermon? Jesus' birth, circumcision, haircuts, favorite pets, and trips to Disneyland are not subjects Mark chose to address. That he did not know of them is *one* possible explanation for that absence. To make it the *only* possible explanation is foolish.

There's a reason the argument from silence is a fallacious generalization. The argument that something does not exist because x does not mention it is incredibly dangerous in form, having as it does no positive evidence in its favor and needing only a single piece of evidence to overturn it. Plenty of biblical scholars have eaten crow because they argued, for example, that there were no such people as Hittites or that there was no writing in Moses' day. You'd think that after three centuries they would learn. But when you consider that Mark, which might or might not be "the earliest" reference to Mary, was written within a handful of years of Luke and Matthew, both of which teach the Virgin Birth in full, you'll see that it's not just a silly and lame argument, it's fatally subjective. The only reason he cuts "earliest" off at Mark is because the rest of the evidence is against him.

The next one is better:

The Gospels of Matthew and Luke do say Mary was a virgin, but internal evidence suggests that that part of Luke, in particular, may have been added later by someone else (it is written, for example, in a different kind of Greek than the rest of that gospel).

"Internal evidence suggests..." is a nice way of saying "if you look really really hard...and twist." The fact is that all non-fragmentary copies of Luke and Matthew, including the earliest ones, contain the Virgin Birth stories. All of them. So there is no documentary evidence upon which to hang such a "may have been."

When Kristoff says Luke is "a different kind of Greek," he does not really mean that - all of Luke is written in Koine Greek. What he means is that the early section contains Hebraisms, Hebrew figures of speech. Which does actually tell us something, since Luke is a Gentile. Hebraisms are evidence that his information came from a Hebrew-speaker and is recorded in her* own words as much as possible. Vague asides aside, there is no evidence that Matthew's account was added later, either. Unlike the story of the Woman Taken in Adultery, for which there is evidence of later addition, Virgin Birth stories are part and parcel of the original gospels as written.

But the saddest comment is this:

As the Catholic theologian Hans Küng puts it in ''On Being a Christian,'' the Virgin Birth is a ''collection of largely uncertain, mutually contradictory, strongly legendary'' narratives, an echo of virgin birth myths that were widespread in many parts of the ancient world.

And it's sad because it's so undeniably deceptive. "Virgin Birth myths" do not appear in Jewish literature, not even (as I mentioned before) in Isaiah, which is absolutely necessary to square with the hebraisms mentioned above. Myths that appear "in many parts of the ancient world" do you no good if they do not appear among the Hebrews. Nor do the stories from the rest of the world square with the word 'virgin' - they are usually just stories of horny gods seducing beautiful women. What Küng and others do is generalize that Romulus and Remus were the sons of a god, and Jesus was the son of God, and therefore the stories are an 'echo.' That is not the way to do science, kids.

Secondly, if one actually bothers to read Luke or Matthew, it will be obvious that the narrative is anything but "uncertain"**. They give names, dates, genealogies, kings, places. Luke in particular is as historically anchored as any writing in the ancient world. Not perfect, perhaps, but as close as anything else.

But lastly, while the accounts have differences - else they should be obviously copied one from another - the two accounts are no more contradictory than are accounts of the same football game carried in the newspapers of the teams' home cities. Matthew knows nothing of Mary's thoughts but gives us great insight into Joseph's. Luke knows nothing of Joseph's mind but catalogs all of Mary's worries and joys. The best explanation for these facts ought not be hard to figure out.

But the final argument, that it's "strongly legendary," is not hard to understand, and it is within this assertion that we find the real objection. Hans Küng, as he explains in What I Believe, sees "nature miracles" as violating natural law, which is not to be allowed. We are not to wonder if miracles "really happened," but to concentrate on their meaning*** instead. In short, Küng, like Kristoff, and like so many of the Biblical scholars to which the latter appeals, holds a philosophical objection to miracles. All miracles. He would not look twice if the Luke says Jesus was potty trained****, because that does not mess with his philosophy. But miracles are not allowed in his conception of the universe - divine intervention in nature is a "violence" (his word) that he will not allow. Show me a theologian who disbelieves in this miracle, and I'll show you one who classifies them all as legend, a priori.

Therefore the problem is not with the two millennia old "great intellectual traditions of Catholic and Protestant churches" that Kristoff bemoans the death of: most Christians have always believed in and taught the Virgin Birth. The problem lies instead with the three century old philosophical school of materialism that does not allow it.

But fear not, Nicholas, that's dying, too.

* I'm pretty sure it's the lady pictured. After all, who else would know?
** A book that begins, "A number of attempts have been made to put together in order an account of those events which took place among us as they were handed down to us by those who saw them from the first and were preachers of the word. So it seemed good to me, having made observation, with great care, of the direction of events in their order, to put the facts in writing for you..." Luke 1:1-3 (BBE) is not dealing with uncertainty in the mind of its author.
*** Why an event that didn't really happen should have meaning I don't know.
**** Which he doesn't. Enter argument from silence here.

99 problems but a Christmas ham ain't one

2011-12-22T11:00:00.000-08:00

What happens at my house when I'm not there

2011-12-21T14:21:00.000-08:00

Jaley shares how TK and Molly spend Christmas Break:

So, my sisters were playing with Barbies in the kitchen. Some epic stuff went down.

TK: "Yay! I am swimming in the pool~Swimming in the pool...OHMYGAWSH ZOMBIE!"

Molly: :o *gasps*

TK: "Look! The zombie is going after Alicia, she is swimming in the pool and has NO. IDEA. THAT ZOMBIES ARE GANNA EAT HER."

Molly: "We better go save her, then! Bad zombies."

TK: "Nope. It's naptime for Sarah.

Me: "Woah. Wait. If Alicia is about to get attacked by zombies, she will get bitten, resulting in either her dying a terrible and gorey death, or her being infected and chasing you until her poor little zombie brain gives out."

TK: "...Huh? But...the Barbies are tired from swimming all day. They need rest time." (is oblivious to basic Resident Evil logic)

Molly: (nodnod, cause she pretty much agrees to whatever TK says) "Yes! Naptime!"

Me: ... ._. "You guys would be terrible in a zombie apocalypse."

TK and Molly: (ignore my comment, about five minutes pass by, full of fake snoring sounds and major giggle fits)

TK: "Okay, wake-up time! Let's go see if Alicia is alive!"

Molly: *picks Alicia out of the pool* :O "SHE LIVES!"

TK: "Yay!" *gigglegiggle* (checks the pool) "Oh. But her babies died. Huh."

Me: xD "Remind me to never let you two babysit my future kids."

Molly: "Poor dead babies..."

This is what happens when you give my sister a couple of Barbies and a swimming pool. Babies die. Such a terrible tragedy.

Last chance to use this pic

2011-12-19T07:10:00.000-08:00

On that Christmas Day

2011-12-14T07:15:00.000-08:00

There was a young Jewish girl named Mary, and she was scared. She wasn't exceptionally beautiful or exceptionally smart or exceptionally strong, in fact, she didn't feel herself to be any of these at the moment. She simply felt alone and confused and overwhelmed. And small. For standing before her moments before was a creature she had heard about but had never seen. In fact, no one had seen one for hundreds of years, and it was whispered by bearded old men that such things did not exist, that they had never really existed, and that the old stories were spiritual truths and not real true ones. It was a messenger with an overwhelming presence, bringing a message that was as exciting as it was distressing: she was going to be a mother. While the messenger had been unexpected, in some ways the news was not. Mary had always believed she would be a mother someday, and now that she was engaged to a carpenter, she looked forward to motherhood. But part of the message was both unexpected and troubling: she was going to be a mother right now, and the child would not be the son of her husband. She did not understand all that meant, really, but she did understand that she would have to tell him, and she had a fairly good idea what his reaction would be. Which is why she was not looking forward to telling him. Not one little bit.

Joseph set down his tools and walked out into the night air. His shoulder ached, as he had worked longer this day - seeking distraction, perhaps - than any other day he could remember. His hands, though calloused, were rubbed raw, and he picked at a blister absentmindedly. It would have to be tomorrow, he finally decided. Tomorrow would be the day his dreams came crashing down, for he would be a divorcee even before his own wedding. He balled his fists, then as he had too many times lately, let out an anguished roar that echoed over the quiet street. How could she have done this to him, to them? A sweet young girl, pretty in her own way, he could certainly understand how another man could be attracted to her, for he was very much. Yet she had broken her solemn promise and the promise of her parents that she would be his and his alone. Gathering himself, he shook his head, and tried to decide once again whether he would seek vengeance or suffer the ill will of God patiently. No, there would be no vengeance, that was settled. Just more tears, most likely. He would call off the wedding quietly, just the four of them in that little hovel, for there was nothing to be gained by exposing the girl to any more trouble than she had brought on herself with her rubbish about angels. But why did she insist on making it so much harder on him than it already was? He sat down on the wet ground and pulled a small flap of skin from his palm, wondering if there was another town where he could start again, another place that had not reveled in the rumors that Joseph's little Mary was pregnant with a child that was not his. Another place where coldhearted men did not laugh into their beards when he walked by. He counted two, maybe three. And they were all far enough away for his purposes. He let out a tired sigh and closed his eyes, and his swollen eyelids (was he crying?) suddenly shone red, as if he were sitting before a fire, the light of which burned through his skin. When he opened them again, his first thought was that his private anguish and public humiliation had driven him mad at last. For before him stood a dazzling figure in white and it was looking down on him with cold unblinking eyes. Joseph closed his moistened eyes again and opened them. And hearing his name spoken, he began to kneel, and then at the angel's stern rebuke, to stand.

Mary clenched her tiny fists as she looked out through the door of her parents' home. "Because this is the Lord's doing, everything will be alright," she assured herself for the hundredth time, though she had not completely convinced herself yet. Joseph was approaching the small house in which joyful promises had once been made. The very house within which her tears had not ceased to flow in weeks. Of course he had not believed about the angel. He had demanded what he called "the real truth" on several occasions, each time his voice rising, his eyes blazing. When at last her tears came he always stomped away, and now that she was leaving Nazareth for a few months he was returning again, this time to say those three little words she wanted to hear least of all: "I divorce you." Instead what he said was, “We need to marry before you leave.”

Of course it had to be taxes: nothing less than the greedy swords of Ceasar could induce a man to make this trip. Mary was as big as a house, and Joseph thought he could hear the ladened donkey complaining as it climbed the last hill before his ancestral home. Home, he almost laughed as he tugged the reins of the beast that carried his wife. He had never lived here, nor had his parents, and he wondered if there would even be a home where they could stay, where they could rest before he told the soldiers that he had traveled 150 miles to get to Bethlehem but still had no money to pay them. Maybe they would settle for the donkey. Hopefully there was no room in the prison. It turned out there was no room anywhere.

Joseph had never seen a miracle before. He had seen the angel of course, though there had been times, when he was alone late at night or when his few remaining friends laughed openly at him, when he wondered if he had really even seen that. But of this there could be no doubt. The child had been born: a son as Mary had promised and a healthy one from what he could see in the dark. While frantic, distantly-related women still scurried about, Mary had laid the babe in a manger on a bed of clean straw, the gathering of which was the only useful task menfolk could apparently perform during birth. But it was no longer dark. There was a star outside that shone like the sun of day, a light directly above the barn which cast firm shadows and drew gasps in the suddenly-full sheep pen, and Joseph walked out into it. A motley group of shepherd boys was telling an assembling crowd that they, too, had seen angels. And those angels had told them where to find the newborn king. Here. And as Joseph squinted at the star, he listened to what the angels had told the shepherd boys: We bring tidings of great joy, for to you is born this day in Bethlehem a savior, which is Christ the Lord. And with joy welling in his heart, Joseph believed, fully, for the first time.

Lessons from OWS

2011-11-28T13:55:00.001-08:00

Do unto others

2011-11-21T13:36:00.000-08:00

Kane says actions have consequences

CNN notes "Paul's surprising 9/11 claim*":

(CNN) - Presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul reiterated his controversial stance Sunday that some policies of the United States contributed to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Speaking on the CBS program “Face the Nation,” Paul said his views were consistent with analysis from various groups...

Why is this claim somehow surprising? To deny that our policies might have something to do with how the rest of the world treats us leaves only two alternatives.

The first is to deny that we have any effect whatsoever in the world. Our actions never bring about reactions. America is proof that Newton's Third Law of Motion does not apply to cool people.

The second possibility is that our actions do bring about reactions, but only predictable reactions that work in our favor. No matter what we do to or for people, they will always react with gratitude, and the people who are harmed by our actions** see the wisdom of our policy and change their wicked ways.

If neither of those possibilities makes sense, then we ought to be open to the possibility that our actions in the world do bring about consequences, and some of them we don't like very much. That is not necessarily an argument against doing any specific action, but it is an argument that we ought to take our actions seriously and count the cost of them, including the not wholly unpredictable costs that someone might visit on us if we pursue them.

There never was a stupider, more self-serving explanation for 9/11 than "They hate our freedoms." But what is amazing to me is not that Americans will grab onto any slogan that absolves them of responsibility for their own almost-rape, but that they are taken wholly by surprise when a politician tells them the startling truth that what they do actually makes a difference.

* The headline is not actually from the article, but is the text of the link on the front page.
** We don't even have to direct harm at them - we just need to help their enemies. For example, helping to create a stable and prosperous Iraq hurts those who gain by an unstable, unprosperous Iraq. These people are called 'Iranians.'

Flip Wilson redux

2011-11-21T08:25:00.001-08:00

Hahahaha

2011-11-16T15:42:00.000-08:00

Hahahaha haha ha ha:

Many on Capitol Hill doubt the committee* will be able to complete its task before its Thanksgiving deadline, and some lawmakers have questioned whether the trigger should be modified, or even discarded.

"The Congress is not bound by this*," Sen. John McCain said last month. "It's something we passed. We can reverse it."

Haha ha hahaha haha haha hahaha ha hahahaha haha hahaha ha haha hahaha haha ha hahaha hahaha hahaha hahaha hahahahahaha hahahahahahahahaha.

Seriously, you thought Congress was actually going to cut spending?

* That's the Super Duper Committee that was going recommend $1.2 trillion in budget cuts, under threat of 'automatic' cuts otherwise.
** "This" being "our promise from July."

I'd eat your dog

2011-11-16T13:56:00.000-08:00

It's not the message

2011-11-16T10:42:00.000-08:00

It's the messenger:

The Occupy Wall Street movement is not wearing well with voters across the country. Only 33% now say that they are supportive of its goals, compared to 45% who say they oppose them. That represents an 11 point shift in the wrong direction for the movement's support compared to a month ago when 35% of voters said they supported it and 36% were opposed. Most notably independents have gone from supporting Occupy Wall Street's goals 39/34, to opposing them 34/42...

The "goals" of OWS, to the extent they existed, are not what the public's perception has changed about. People still don't like corporate greed or bailouts or Goldman Sachs. The problem with OWS is the same problem the Republicans have with every poll that shows a 'generic' Republican thumping Obama: The Great Generic Republican doesn't exist, but Mitt Romney does. The Great Generic OWS Protest doesn't exist, either. What exists are a bunch of smelly hippies crapping in parks and passing scabies and ringworm around a drum circle.

But the interesting thing to me is the difference between the public's perception of the Tea Party and OWS*, given the difference in the press' approach to the two. The Tea Parties were allegedly full of violent armed racists, but nobody managed to get shot or raped at any of their hundreds of rallies. OWS protests are almost uniformly described as peaceful, but daily there seems to be a new shooting or rape at an OWS somewhere.

I suspect the longer OWS goes on, the longer these surprising poll trends are will continue.

* "...the movement with independents is notable- from preferring Occupy Wall Street 43-34, to siding with the Tea Party 44-40."

You can't help it

2011-11-15T14:11:00.000-08:00

The best thing that ever happened to a bum like me

2011-11-15T01:23:00.000-08:00

Originally written in 2006, I see no reason to change it 5 years on:

It's officially midnight, which means it's officially November 15th, 2006, which means that Rogue and I have been married 20 years. It's amazing. She's amazing.

She's beautiful. She's strong. She's intelligent. She's everything a feminist dreams of being, yet she's no feminist. While she works (and on most days, she works longer and harder than me) she does not work for herself but for others. She's the first one awake in the morning, readying herself among a swarm of children, all 5 born to other women, who see her as the most important and loving person in their lives. She is that, and more. She's more than they can ever comprehend.

She's organized. She's foresighted. She's wise. In addition to her regular job, she manages commercial property and she just bought a second house which she's having renovated. She calms unmanageable callers, laughs with happy ones, and cries with grieving ones. Sometimes she sends along the notes of praise she receives from customers and her boss; I'm never surprised when others discover what I've known for so long. She scrimps and she saves and she sometimes spoils herself. She always spoils others by giving them everything they could ever want, even if it means foregoing what she wants.

She's gracious. She's funny. She's insightful. There is no better way to spend an evening than with her, alone. Perhaps the moon is rising above the snow, a fire illuminates the dark living room. Her voice complements the crackles and pops as her words paint the future as she sees it, as she sees us. I actually got ticked at her for inviting her parents to our anniversary dinner. I'm sorry. I wanted her all for myself.

She is a simple complicated woman, a soft steel woman, a practical visionary with a heart two sizes too big. She's my wife, and has been for 20 years today. I only pray that she'll have the patience to put up with me for another 20. And then another.

And maybe, should God bless me in the future as he has in the present, even another.

Occupy the shampoo aisle

2011-11-14T10:35:00.000-08:00

(hat tip: Misty)

One way out

2011-11-14T09:24:00.000-08:00

An economist is too pessimistic:

There is no solution to the current debt crisis plaguing the euro zone, and it’s an illusion to think that one lies on the horizon, an economist told CNBC Monday.

"There is no way out, I never thought there was, not for any of the countries that are in trouble. Once one of these countries goes into this sort of problem, there is no escape," Roger Nightingale, economist at RDN Associates, said.

He dismissed the current, positive sentiment among investors regarding Italy as temporary and fleeting.

Of course the current, positive sentiment among investors regarding Italy as temporary and fleeting - it's exactly the kind of extend and pretend that has been going on in the Euro Zone since the financial crisis started. How many times has the Greek problem been "solved"? I can count at least three, and now the bankers are replacing governments to try to solve it. The math is still bad. But that does not mean there is no way out.

What economists and politicians and bankers mean by a "way out" is a way out of our current situation without pain, without cutting budgets, without suffering the natural consequences of our prior actions, and without hurting bank profits. In that case of course there's no way out, any more than there is no way out of the multiplication tables* if you wish to make 3 x 2 equal to 27. You simply have to work with reality.

But there is always a way out for Greece and any other country, including the US, that finds itself in a debt sink:
1) balance the budget.
2) default on any debt that cannot be paid for within that budget.
3) break any promise of future spending that cannot be paid for within that budget.

Simple? Yes. Easy? Of course not, or it would be done already. In fact, all of the bailouts and the programs and proposals have been designed specifically to avoid those three steps. We will have to take the one way out eventually** - the only question is how much harder the politicians will make that one way on the average person.

* Maths are stubbornly unaffected by political desires.
** "You don't have to go home, folks, but you can't stay here."

It also chaps her metaphor

2011-11-11T06:05:00.000-08:00

What's that? He says he's not dead

2011-11-10T17:45:00.000-08:00

The last foster daughters will be leaving Saturday morning to go live with relatives, leaving us with a house that's relatively empty*. That will be the last of that for a while, maybe 6 months or a year. Then I doubt we'll ever take that many at once again.

I'm really not sure what I'll do without any crying going on in my house. Oh, wait, yes I'm sure. While it's more an explanation than an excuse, the reason it's been so slow around here is that I've managed to knock out 15-20% of my thesis in the last week and a half. Now that the research is done, the rest simply consists in writing the blasted thing**. The sad thing is how little of the research I'll actually get to use. The rest can wait for the book, I guess.

* 5 kids in a house is "relatively empty" compared to 10, 7 of whom are girls under the age of 8. Especially when 2 of them do nothing but sleep here before heading off to work and/or school.
** Plus probably as much time as that again formatting footnotes. Good grief. If Kate Tarabian was not already dead I'd probably kill her.

2011-11-05T15:33:00.000-07:00

Not statistics

2011-11-04T13:56:00.000-07:00

Just a little bit of fun:

Washington — The global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped by the biggest amount on record, the U.S. Department of Energy calculated, a sign of how feeble the world’s efforts are at slowing man-made global warming...

In 2007, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its last large report on global warming, it used different scenarios for carbon dioxide pollution and said the rate of warming would be based on the rate of pollution. Boden said the latest figures put global emissions higher than the worst case projections from the climate panel.

Now that we're in the middle of another global climate progress panic (I guess), I decided to do my own little climate study. Now obviously, I don't have access to all the numbers that scientists do*, but I did manage to find record highs and lows for Topeka as provided by the National Weather Service going back 120 years for a little non-scientific study of my own.

I picked Topeka because, hey, what better stand in for the "northern hemisphere" in the famous hockey stick graph? And I also picked highs and lows because besides immensely reducing the number of numbers we have to deal with, since we are looking for broad trends, these numbers might be all we need. For it seems to me that if we are really getting warmer, then the number of days which are the warmest of that day ought to increase as we get closer to today. Right? You can't have the "warmest decade ever" without a good number of those days being the warmest days ever**.

So I made a spreadsheet of the warmest and coolest days and sorted them by decade. The results are interesting:
1880/90s: 21 (all-time highs)
1900s: 8
1910s: 20
1920s: 14
1930s: 105
1940s: 26
1950s: 34
1960s: 16
1970s: 16
1980s: 24
1990s: 23
2000s: 35
2010s: 11

We should expect that latter periods will be a little bit overweighted***, and the number of days in which the record high was reached in the 2000s was on the high side. However, the 1930s had three times as many high record days as the so-called 'warmest decade on record,' and that after up to 80 years for statistical outliers to wipe them out. Given that the 1930s have but 11 record record low days (compared to 21 for the 2000s), it is very hard for me to buy a the idea that the 2000s constituted the warmest decade on record.

However, there is probably little doubt that we have the highest CO2 concentrations on (recent) record. To my unscientific little mind, that does not bode well for a CO2 temperature correlation.

* Especially the numbers just above the double line on a grant application.
** Well, I suppose that theoretically you could so long as the temperature increased while the spread of temperature decreased. In other words, if the weather got both warmer more placid. Not a bad thing, all told.
*** After all, the 1890s have had a full century in which truly 'freak' days could wipe out their records. This year's days? Not so much.

Just a garage that smells funny

2011-11-02T08:18:00.000-07:00

QED

2011-11-01T13:24:00.000-07:00

That which was to be demonstrated...

Three Cornell professors, each with a B.A. in English, encouraged students at a panel discussion Wednesday to pursue their passion for studying English, even if the field’s career prospects are not necessarily lucrative.

...“I am going to touch on what to tell your parents when they say, ‘What are you doing? Are you going to live in a garage?’” Schwarz said.

Adopting a more somber tone, Schwarz told the audience — primarily filled with English majors seeking career advice — that they are studying English for the sake of intellectual, as opposed to monetary, gain.

In other words, yes, you are going to live in the garage*. You are not going to find a job as an English major that will pay the costs of your English major, especially one from Cornell**. Your parents know you're going to live in the garage. Your professors will tell you that you're going to live in the garage even while they tell you what a great person you are for doing it.

You should know perfectly well that when you study anything "as opposed to monetary gain," you're not bloody likely to get any monetary gain from it.

But never let that stop you from blaming someone else.

* Unless you're Bethany, then you're going to live on base.
** At more than $40k/year before room and board.

2011-10-31T02:06:00.000-07:00

The natural order of things

2011-10-29T19:59:00.000-07:00

On the Perpetual Virginity of Mary, Bible Tidbits makes the argument thusly:

I was recently invited to help a friend of a friend answer an objection about Mary's perpetual virginity... [Objector] says that Matthew 1:25 “And knew her not till she had brought forth her firstborn* son: and he called his name JESUS.” Saying that Mary did not have sexual relations with Joseph until Jesus was born, but then after she did. Yet scripture uses the Greek word “until” to have another meaning. It can have the first meaning but it can also mean “up to that point”. 2 Samuel 6:23 “Therefore Michal the daughter of Saul had no child unto [GK until] the day of her death.” Does this mean that after her death she started having children? No.

Bible Tidbits is correct that "not X until Y" does not necessarily mean that X will begin once Y is reached. It is an Hebraism, an idiom, and so we need to look past the individual words to see what function the phrase as a whole serves, if it has any function at all. Before I do, let me preface this by saying that as a non-Catholic I have no vested interest in whether Mary was a perpetual virgin**. But I do have an interest in what the scripture has to say about it. So that's what we're going to look at, hopefully without preconceptions.

Unfortunately Bible Tidbits takes the easy way out with its Michal parallel, strong as it looks, because in doing so, they make the phrase meaningless. By making the "until Y" a dividing line that divides nothing, they have removed the meaning from the idiom. Whatever the sentence means, it certainly means something. So what does it mean?

I think there's an idea in play here that we might call "the natural order of things." Michal did not have children until the day of her death. Since we should expect her to have them in the natural order of things, we are talking about something out of the ordinary (a "not X"). But since we would not expect her to have them afterwards, the fact that she did not is natural ("X"). "Not X" ended the day she died (denoted as Y), not because she ceased to not have kids, but because "she had no children" ceased to be unnatural. "Until Y" then serves as a meaningful distinction - it separates the unnatural order that God imposed on Michal from the resumption of the natural order, even though she had no kids on either side of the line.

That this interpretation can fit similar Hebraisms is evidence in its favor. For example, David "took the ten women his concubines, whom he had left to keep the house, and put them in ward, and fed them, but went not in unto them. So they were shut up unto the day of their death, living in widowhood." (2 Sam 20:3). The unnatural order of things was that they were "living in widowhood" even though their husband was alive. But they were certainly not "living in widowhood" after they died, they were just dead. The unnatural order ended at Y.

And "Uzziah the king was a leper unto the day of his death..." (2Chr 26:21). Royal leprosy was the unnatural order of things. After his death, Uzziah did not continue to be a leper; he was then just another dead king.

The idiom then is simply a way of saying the unnatural order "not X" is over once we reach Y. Michal continues to not have kids, while David's wives cease to live in widowhood. So whether "not X" continues through Y is a function of whether "X" is expected in the natural order of things after Y. Make sense?

If we apply this line of reasoning to Mary and Joseph, it works out something like this. The natural order of things is for married couples to have sex. In this case, we have an unnatural order of things - Joseph "knew her not" (Matt 1:25). Again, we have an "until Y," which if this ends the unnatural order of things, would mark the point at which the natural order of things resumed. In that case, there's no need to explain away the biblical mention of Jesus's brothers and sisters (Mark 6:3). The natural order of things is that Mary and Joseph would have kids.

So can we firmly conclude that Joseph and Mary had sex after Jesus was born, i.e. that Mary was *not* a perpetual virgin? I don't know that we can go that far, even though I think that is probably the case. I also don't really think it matters - everything is in relation to Jesus, so Mary's virginity, whatever its value, was most valuable before Jesus was born. I'll let those with a theological dog in the fight take it from there.

UPDATE: "I don't know that we can go that far" is not verbal weaselry, as if I'm trying to avoid offending Catholics. As a former Catholic I have plenty of practice with that. It's just that since one can come up with plenty of theoretical reasons why Joseph continued to not touch her (e.g. he was gay, he was impotent, he suffered castration in a tragic carpentry accident and the kids were adopted) and since the Bible only implies that they had sex***, I drew the difference there between "probable" and "certain." But whether they did or not is wholly unimportant after Jesus was born. Matthew chooses that point for his Y because that represents the end of the matter from a theological perspective. The Virgin had delivered the Savior into the world.

* "Firstborn" does not, as some are wont to claim, assert the existence of a secondborn. Firstborn is a unique concept, wherein certain birth rights are established by the son that "opens the womb" (Ex 13:2) regardless of whether others are born later. That the nation of Israel was God's "firstborn" (Ex. 4:22) doesn't mean that God had other, younger nations. It simply means that Israel was God's special son.

** As Pascal says, "The Bible only speaks of the Virgin's virginity up to the birth of Jesus." Why? Because "Everything [is] in relation to Jesus."

*** When scripture says that sort of thing, it does not do so merely to quench our curiosity, but for one of two reasons: there is either a moral point involved or there is offspring that will be central to the story later. Since neither is the case once Jesus is born, we should expect the Bible to say no more than it does.

Just don't give them typewriters

2011-10-27T07:42:00.000-07:00

Are you really homeless if you'd rather live outdoors?

2011-10-26T14:08:00.000-07:00

Strange things are afoot at the Flea Party:

Zuccotti Park has become a haven for the homeless.

Enticed by the allure of free food and a community of open-minded people, increasing numbers are leaving New York's shelters to join the Occupy Wall Street protesters...

I suspect that the truth is far closer to "free food" than "open-minded people." But whatever, it seems that the habitually homeless are joining the voluntarily homeless, which does not sit all that well with the latter:

"If [the homeless are] going to come here and get our food, bedding and clothing, have books and medical supplies for no charge, they need to give back," Digioia* said. "There's a lot of takers here and they feel entitled."

A lot of takers there and they feel entitled. Hmm. I'm not sure how that's any different than the rest of the protesters there.

* "Lauren Digioia, 26, a member of the sanitation committee." For some reason, that part made me laugh.

How it happened

2011-10-25T06:56:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, the dinosaurs died out because mammals ate all of their eggs. A huge asteroid is a much cooler story.

Goes both ways

2011-10-24T09:06:00.000-07:00

The slogan, that is:

President Barack Obama will unveil new measures to help struggling U.S. homeowners Monday, in the first leg of a campaign-style swing through western states that may be crucial to his re-election in 2012...

According to the White House official, he will also try out a new slogan to put pressure on Congress: "We can't wait."

I'm pretty sure many in Congress can't wait, either, but the thing they can't wait for is the election. That explains why they are so confused by it*.

In the unlikely event that the awesome power of this new slogan proves insufficient to bludgeon Congress into giving the President $400b to spend as he sees fit, I suggest that Obama ride up to each member, look him or her square in the eye, and say, "Ni." Maybe they'll bring him a shrubbery at least.

* As for me, the President's new mantra makes that old ALCOA commercial run through my head. Off key, even.

Buffalo Hangman 2012

2011-10-23T06:58:00.000-07:00

Apocalypse Not

2011-10-21T10:46:00.000-07:00

Nothing else in the world smells like that:

Thus we can be sure that the whole world, with the exception of those who are presently saved (the elect), are under the judgment of God, and will be annihilated together with the whole physical world on October 21, 2011, on the last day of the present five months period. On that day the true believers (the elect) will be raptured. We must remember that only God knows who His elect are that He saved prior to May 21.

Five months are up already? It seems like only yesterday that the false prophet known as Harold Camping was saying the world was going to end. There is hardly any reason to suspect that he'll be any more right this time, and I do note that apart from a few mocking press stories, no one is really paying attention. That is as it should be. Well, the "no one paying attention" part, not the mocking part. But as the mocking is self-inflicted, I don't think we Christians get to complain about it overly much.

We need to work on that "wise as serpents" part, it seems. As Newton noted of his own day's Harold Campings, "By this rashness they have not only exposed themselves, but brought the Prophecy also into contempt." Sometimes God's own people are his worst PR agents.

The Albert Gore Jr Gun Safety Award

2011-10-19T10:15:00.000-07:00

When white people have no electricity and no water

2011-10-18T07:06:00.000-07:00

they call it camping:

STEVE INSKEEP, host: A lack of jobs - not workers - has drawn thousands of people to the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. The protesters include recent college graduates who say they're unemployed and that they can not repay their student loans. One question is whether enough of them will mobilize to matter. NPR's Claudio Sanchez reports...

SANCHEZ: ...What did you get a degree in?
KAIT LEGERS: History, from Ohio University.
SANCHEZ: What do you do with a degree in history?
LEGERS: With a Bachelor's? Nothing. I can't do anything with this.

Question for the unhappy camper: how many students will need to mobilize in a park to make Kait Legers's history degree employment-worthy?*

The fact of the matter is that if Kate got ripped off, it wasn't by Wall Street**. If she thought that getting a bachelors degree in history was a ticket to a good job she was a fool. If Ohio University led her to believe that she was going to somehow slide right into that corner office VP job at Sprint because of her detailed understanding of Roman Britain under the governorship of Agricola, then they are the ones who ripped her off.

This is really easy, campers. You choose college for one of two things, either to get training oriented toward a job or to get an 'education,' by which is meant training oriented toward not-a-job. Those people who want to get a job will get degrees in engineering, plastics, computer science, accounting, teaching, and the like. Those who want a more liberal education will get degrees in philosophy, history***, women's studies, black studies, religious studies, or sociology, and the like. You borrow the money, you get to pick.

But if you chose the latter, what right have you to complain that you did not get the former?

* Judge Smails says...
** Wall Street will be happy to rip her off later, obviously.
*** In the final class of my history undergrad, we were assigned the task of locating an actual job for which our new degree qualified us. It was a very cruel prank, for as a wakeup call it came far too late to do the grads any good.

The Larry Doby of presidential politics

2011-10-14T11:17:00.000-07:00

I'm not asking you who's on second

CNN wonders why no one really seems to care how black Herman Cain is:

...why isn't Cain's ethnicity as much a part of his story as it was with Obama?

For one, many conservatives decry the focus on a candidate's race as an obsession for liberals...

There's a second reason that some conservatives, particularly tea partiers, largely ignore Cain's race: it drives a stake through claims that the movement harbors racists...

There's a third reason: the novelty has worn off. Everyone knows now that a black guy can be just as poor a president as a white one, so who cares whether the next guy up to be president is black or white? America has now been there and done that. No one is going to give it a second thought when a Bobby Jindal or a Nikki Haley or a Ben Nighthorse Campbell gets close to the presidency. No one except the press, for whom the 'first x' can always make a story seem more interesting than it really is. I mean, freaking Pakistan has had a female head of government. That we haven't is not really a story, it's just a fact.

When Obama was first elected, I asked How long until he can just be the president? I didn't know the answer then, but today I know it is 'less than three years.' If someone you know still consistently refers to Obama as 'the first black president,' you know that person is either a racist or a liberal*, and you probably ask yourself on occasion why you still talk to this person. To everyone else you know Obama is just the president. And if the first black president** is no big deal, why would the second matter at all?

UPDATE: Racism is everywhere, man:

[PMSNBC Host Ed] Schultz's example? He quoted [Sen. Jim] Demint saying that "If we are able to stop Obama on this [health care law], it will be his Waterloo***. It will break him." For clarity, Schultz repeated the offending line, "It will break him."

Dr. James Peterson, director of Africana studies at Lehigh University, explained that "break" is a racist verb, "a term that was used to destroy, mentally and physically, slaves." Accordingly, the Demint line demonstrated "how dark some of these racial discourses can be in presidential politics."

Did you catch it? Everyone knows that "dark" is a euphemism for "black." Darkies. Africa as "the dark continent." Washington D.C. itself as "Dark Country." I can't believe that in this day and age, we still have to put up with such blatant racism on television.

* no exclusive disjunction intended.
** Besides, Obama is the third black president anyway.
*** freaking racist Napoleon

Slash says to buy American

2011-10-12T08:23:00.000-07:00

Of course it's a cult

2011-10-11T09:06:00.000-07:00

But saying so makes you stupid:

(CNN) – GOP presidential hopeful and Mormon Jon Huntsman had some choice words on Monday for the Dallas pastor who's repeatedly described Mormonism as a "cult" and a "false religion" this weekend.

"The fact that, you know, some moron can stand up and make a comment like that, you know, first of all, it's outrageous," Huntsman said on "The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer."

It's outrageous that any moron can speak his mind in America? Yeah, if only we could get rid of that stupid First Amendment...

That said, to discover whether the pastor is really a moron it might make sense to determine whether he is correct in his assertion that Mormonism is a cult. For that we need a definition. Now, this might be one of the few places where the dictionary cannot help us, because its definitions are too vague and lean too heavily on sociology. A cult can be any "particular system of religious worship, especially with reference to its rites and ceremonies," in which case Mormonism is a cult, but then so is Anglicanism. Such a definition is not terribly helpful.

So we're going to need a different definition, a more specialized yet an also widely-accepted one. I propose the following: "A cult is a group that deviates doctrinally from a 'parent' or 'host' religion; that is, cults grow out of and deviate from a previously established religion." Gospel Outreach has a couple of examples, and they are right in line with much historical Christian teaching on cults. In short, a Christian cult is a new group that deviates from established Christianity while claiming to be Christianity. Islam, though based on Christianity, is not a Christian cult because it does not claim to be Christian. Mormonism, in claiming to be Christian, might be such a cult, if it can be shown that they deviate from established Christianity. So that is where we will have to make our case.

But rather than arguing over specific doctrines that might even make Catholics a cult*, I would rather present a pair of bigger fish for your frying pleasure:

1. Mormonism proposes a new prophet, Joseph Smith. Smith established the church, provided its doctrine and its additional scriptures, and is considered the spiritual head of Mormonism. He might be a true prophet or a false prophet. But his truth or falsehood aside, when your church is founded by a prophet that no one else has, you cannot but deviate doctrinally from the main religion.

2. Mormonism proposes a new book, The Book of Mormon, as "holy scripture comparable to the Bible." They also claim that their Doctrine and Covenants is "a collection of divine revelations and inspired declarations." The truth or falsity of such claims aside, when your church relies on new scriptures that no one else has, you cannot but deviate doctrinally from the main religion.

Obviously, I do not believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet, nor do I pay the slightest reverence to his Doctrine and Covenants - if I did, I would be a Mormon. And if someone is not a Mormon, they really have no choice but to conclude that Mormonism is a cult, even if John Huntsman calls them a moron** for it.

If someone is a Mormon, there's little good that can arise out of pretending to be one of us regular Christians, a people who will be tossed into the Gorge of Eternal Peril for ignoring both God's words and His prophet***. Well, other than to get our votes, of course.

* too many cult hunters would make everything outside the conservative wing of the Southern Baptist Convention a cult.
** not to be confused with Moroni, the angel who showed Smith the golden tablets (pictured above) which tell how a group of Israelites traveled to upstate New York in 600bc and established a thriving civilization that lasted centuries but alas failed to leave behind a single yarmulke.
*** And for not answering the five questions. Well, three questions.

2011-10-11T00:44:00.000-07:00

Sie können dieses nicht berühren

We are the 99 weeks

2011-10-11T00:35:00.000-07:00

A different kind of Dow 10,000 party

It look like Occupy Wall Street is set for an infusion of new blood:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The New York state comptroller expects Wall Street to lose 10,000 jobs by the end of 2012.

The job losses are projected to occur in New York City's securities industry from now through December, 2012, according to Eric Sumberg, press spokesman for state comptroller Thomas DiNapoli...

"These developments will have a rippling effect through the economy and adversely impact state and city tax collections."

Fewer securities brokers plus we get reduced state and local government to boot? Who says the papers are always full of bad news?

While it's not terribly kind to wish for other people to be thrown out of work, it is difficult not to be overjoyed at the approach of anything that might shrink our financial sector as a proportion of our overall economic activity. Yes, banking is valuable, but more is not better. Once you have reached the point where the minimal financial needs of the economy can be handled efficiently, additional employees add no value. Same with Wall Street: there is very little marginal value added added to our economy by selling little pieces of companies or companies' debt to one another*. The more people we have involved in that after a certain small point, the less we are actually doing. We would all be better off in the long run if half of Wall Street was planting trees for minimum wage and another quarter was building Roman-style bridges out of rough-hewn granite.

If there was one advantage to FDR's policy of making the Great Depression last as long as possible, it was that we got fewer brokers and more bridges out of the deal. Seems to me that will be the best we can hope from the current government's efforts as well.

* especially with High-Frequency Trading, which helps actual investment just as much as the sales tax helps commerce, and in the same way.

Sean dies at the end

2011-10-10T08:42:00.000-07:00

The cool Mr. Bean

Friday Randomness

2011-10-07T10:38:00.000-07:00

Baked beans are off

A couple of you have been getting caught in the blogspot spam filter recently - seems that Prof and Fish's nuggets of wisdom have been the most affected. I've added them all back in. If your comments keep disappearing, leave me a comment letting me know*.

Speaking of Spam, the Vikings are actually favored at home this week**. Seems even the oddsmakers can't believe how bad they are. Coach Frazier really needs to PONDER that 0-4 record, I think, lest his team get caught in a self-reinforcing WEBB of despondency.

When you listen to Obama, you have to take him absolutely literally. For example, in his latest news conference, he noted that, "I had a chance to meet a young man named Robert Baroz. He’s an English teacher in Boston who came to the White House a few weeks ago..." Now a lot of people are calling Obama out because he didn't actually meet the man. Obama never said he met him, only that he had a chance to do so. Just like the Vikings had a chance to be a pretty good team this year.

In both of my history classes (at least the ones I have to be in class for) we're watching films this week and next. In one, we are watching actual Nazi propaganda films like Triumph of the Will and The Eternal Jew. In the other, we are watching an A&E*** biography of Napoleon. Like with the Vikings, it is apparently too much to ask for consistency between the first and the second.

SUNDAY UPDATE: The Vikings' change of strategy is obvious: since building a 3-touchdown lead and then retreating into a cocoon was not winning games, they have decided to up that to 4 touchdowns.

* Catch-22.
** By 2 1/2, but still.
*** History starts with an 'H', you will note.

Why are you here?

2011-10-07T06:03:00.001-07:00

This is what happens when you name parks after Cesar Chavez.

This is sure to end well

2011-10-06T14:15:00.000-07:00

Say Hello to my little trend

Due Process we can believe in:

(Reuters) - American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.

There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House's National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.

I can't imagine any problem with establishing the precedent that Americans can be killed by the government so long as they are specially chosen for the honor by a secret panel of political appointees operating outside the law.

Janis occupies Wall Street

2011-10-05T08:07:00.000-07:00

Her friends all drive Porches

O Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes-Benz?

Your gold is about to expire

2011-10-04T10:08:00.000-07:00

This one will not remain online long, I'm pretty sure. So here's the important part:

00:23 "…Some investors aren’t confident that, what, what gold is backed by or if it’s backed by anything at all, as compared to something like the US dollar. Investors are comfortable that the US dollar is backed by the American government. So no matter what is happening to the American economy, something like the US dollar is backed by the Federal Reserve - that’s going to be around a year from now. That’s a much more comfortable investment for them."

(h/t: Astrosmith)

Cleaning out the spam filter

2011-10-03T16:45:00.000-07:00

A study in pattern recognition:

Natie: Hello. I live with you in the same place. I am sweet, sassy and a little crazy. See my photos.

Jeany: Hello. I live in your city. I'm beautiful and well appointed. Can you see me here.

Lusy: Nice to meet you! I live in the same city as you. I am beautiful, intelligent girl. See my photos.

Ashley: Hi. I am far from you. I'm smart and beautiful. And here I am.

Mary: How are you?! I live some distance from you. I'm beautiful and well appointed. You can view my photos.

Jeany: How are you?. I'm in your city. I am beautiful, intelligent girl. Some of my photos you can find on...

Mary: How are you?! I live some distance from you. I have a wonderful and very funny girl. You can view my photos.

For our collective sake, I really hope the continued existence of such campaigns is due to their low overhead more than actual success because of the stupidity of their intended victims.

Geography Fail

2011-09-30T09:57:00.000-07:00

It must be all those extra states that trip 'em up.

The Kansas Stock Exchange

2011-09-29T10:38:00.000-07:00

On the grant of a quarter million tax dollars to JCB Laboratories via the Kansas Bioscience Authority, LJWorld commenter* Jimo illustrates a huge problem:

“The only serious financing alternative [to government grants] would be to force companies like this to get backing from Big Pharma -- in return for equity control. That policy would destroy the business model for any small pharmaceutical start up.”

He is correct, of course – it is the only serious current financing alternative to those companies that cannot get bank loans. That does not make it a good idea.

Giving tax dollars away to favored companies, on marginal bets, opens politicians up to temptations and accusations of corruption while opening taxpayers up to the certainty of loss. There will always be Solyndras, and putting taxpayers dollars into them provides mud for commenters left and right to throw at the ethics and intentions of politicians on the other side. Each side is convinced that the other’s corporate welfare is corrupt. Both of them are probably more correct than their opponents wish to admit. It is the nature of free money to bring out the worst in both givers and receivers.

But on the other side we have the Big Pharma Problem (call it the BPP): if the only way small companies can get financing is to rely on big companies in their industry to bankroll them, we are going to have trouble. You see it in software development all the time: a little company develops something cool, a big company buys it, and it’s never seen again. Big Pharma, like big software, like big defense, has as much incentive to quash innovation as it does to promote it. Big companies find it easier to strangle their competition in the cradle than to compete with them in the market. Government money, like anti-trust law, is perceived as some protection from this necessity. But it's a terrible alternative.

So why don’t we come up with another alternative? Before we try we have to understand that there is a third horn to our dilemma***: the reason the BPP exists is because politicians and their captive regulators have made it a necessity. If you ever wonder why the rich always seem to get the best deals, it’s because the law requires that the poor be protected from the good deals, which are also the high risks. For example, the rich – called “accredited investors” under the Securities Act of 1933 – are able to buy unregistered stock directly from a tiny company. That means that if the company goes ballistic, this rich investor is going to get richer faster than the poor man who was denied, by law, the same opportunity. Don’t get me wrong, the poor do need to be protected from the scamps and the scoundrels as does everyone else. But if they are going to become rich, they have to be given the opportunity to invest as the rich do.

So how do we a) make it possible to get money into worthy companies without using tax money, b) offer options other than “Big Pharma” to do so, and c) keep the poor and ignorant from being wiped out by financial weasels and allow them to get rich at the same time? One option would be a Kansas Stock and Bond Exchange. But don’t let the name fool you, it’s nothing like the NYSE, which exists to move money from the accounts of small investors to the accounts of large ones. This exchange would exist to allow small investors to take small risks that could have big rewards.

The way it would work is this: If the KBA finds that JCB Laboratories has an idea worth putting $250,000 into, rather than writing a tax check, they would authorize JCB Laboratories to raise $250,000 on the Kansas Exchange. The exchange would allow only a certain number of “deals” per year – about the same amount of money as the state is giving away presently. The approved company could then issue unregistered common stock, or preferred stock, convertibles, bonds, whatever they wished, in increments of $50 and with a maximum of $1000 per investor. Those ‘deals’ would be offered over a Kansas Exchange website, where any Kansas resident could invest in any number of Kansas companies, subject to supply. The small investor, by taking a limited risk, might be able to get a 10% return on a preferred stock rather than 1% in a bank account. The lower middle class budding speculator might find a bet that could pay off 1000% over 20 years like the ones Buffet gets. But this is not a ‘trading’ exchange – this is a place for Kansas companies to partner with Kansans to build the jobs of the future. If you want to sell your stock, you would still have to go through the SEC process just like Warren Buffett. If the company calls your preferred stock, they would have to send you a check, just like companies on the NYSE. It offers limited risk, limited cost, and the possibility of unlimited rewards, but it's not a swap meet.

There is a real advantage to dealing in small numbers – Big Pharma is quite unlikely to bother about $1000. On the other hand, if there are a mere 250 people who think JCB can pull this thing off, the money will be raised without a hitch. If there are 1000 such people, even better. But perhaps its greatest advantage is that it puts real wealth – or at least the possibility of real wealth - in the hands and name of the individual Kansan.

When modern Americans “buy stocks” they are usually centralizing wealth in the hands of the wealthy. If you buy a mutual fund, the fund buys, owns, and votes the stock, and they seldom ask your opinion about it. The more you buy, the more the people who control the funds control America’s wealth. It only gets worse as the boomers collectively save for retirement. It would be better for Kansas companies if their real owners lived and worked alongside them. And it would be far better for all of us – companies, investors, and workers – if rather than the government "investing" our money in companies that have promise, they would make it easier for us to reap the rewards of doing it ourselves.

* Yes, FWIW, I'm Fossick of Fossick's Freehold. I retired the non-anonymous** El Borak on LJWorld because I might have to work in Lawrence someday and I don't trust the liberals at KU not to hold my opinions against me.
** Nonymous?
*** Think of this beast as the Triceratops of Unpleasant Choices.

Never Give up

2011-09-28T10:01:00.000-07:00

Thy mother danceth not

2011-09-27T16:28:00.000-07:00

And thy father neither rocketh nor rolleth:

Via the AP version:

"Take off your bedroom slippers. Put on your marching shoes," [Obama] said, his voice rising as applause and cheers mounted. "Shake it off. Stop complainin'. Stop grumblin'. Stop cryin'. We are going to press on. We have work to do."

[African-American author Karen] Hunter called the AP's version "inherently racist," ... [and] found it offensive. "I teach a journalism class, and I tell my students to fix people's grammar, because you don't want them to sound ignorant," she said. "For [the AP] to do that, it's code, and I don't like it."

This week's institutional racism* argument is over whether the AP is racist for reporting what the President actually said rather than what the prepared remarks distributed before his speech said he said. When Obama spoke, he purposely dropped his "g"s; of that there can be no doubt. He is perfectly able to speak proper English, and on this occasion he did not, obviously out of deference to his black audience.

I guess I side with the AP because the President purposely spoke as he did, and because they described his change in tone before transcribing his exact words. This is wholly different from fixing his "same tax rate as a Jew," which was obvious goof.

But I'm intrigued by Hunter's assertion that Obama speaking in a way he thought would appeal to his black audience sounds 'ignorant.' If Obama said complainin' because he thinks that is how black people talk, is he the racist? Or is it the black journalist who thinks the way black people talk is stupid?

* Meaning, "We're looking for Kluxers under the bed like Woody Wilson looking for commies."

Save us, Obi-Wan Bernanke, you're our only hope

2011-09-27T09:46:00.000-07:00

The CNBC article sports a strange title, "Central Bankers the Only Defense Against Apocalypse: Economist." And the reason it's strange, is that is just sounds like more of the same stuff that's bringing apocalypse in the first place:

The problem according to Carl Weinberg, the chief economist at High Frequency Economics is the lack of urgency in Europe...

“What the central bankers can do in advance of the failure of Greece is move the risk onto their own balance sheets, off the balance sheets of the banking system,” he said.

This could involve buying all Greek government bonds according to Weinberg who believes such a move would not only fix the prices Greece is being forced to pay to service its debt but also remove the entire risk of bank failures.

Such a move would cost $250 billion euros if the ECB paid at face value. Weinberg believes time is not on the policymakers’ side*.

Good God, what a scam. The bankers create money from nothing to lend to the government at interest**. And it's risk-free, the argument being that the government can always tax people to get more money. Politicians being what they are, overspend to the point that as soon as something they didn't count on comes about, suddenly they can't pay back what they borrowed. Then the banks get worried, because the assets they bought for nothing might become worth nothing.

So they hold a gun to their own heads and scream, "Markets are precipitating a banking crisis," by which they mean that they are being called upon to take the loss from their investments, and since they are overleveraged on what they wrongly thought were risk-free investments, this might destroy their companies. And then how are they supposed to get their Christmas bonuses?

Obviously, this will never do. So the idea becomes to "move the risk onto the [central banks'] balance sheets, off the balance sheets of the banking system," by which they mean, of course, to move the losing bets out of the hands of the private banks*** and into the hands of the "central banks," where they can become the new assets of the taxpayers. This move will not only "fix the rates" that slackers like Greece pay, it will thereby allow them to keep slacking, which will allow them to keep issuing debt, which can then pay interest to the banks, which can dump them back on the taxpayers as soon as their bets turn to losses again. This is called a 'defense against apocalypse.'

In reality, now that we've have 'saved' companies by centralizing their losses under governments, we are now 'saving' whole governments by centralizing their losses under national and international banks. Now the International Monetary Fund might itself need a bailout. There is a trend here that politicians are missing on purpose.

I expect it shall not be long before they make three discoveries:

banks have centralized all the losses they can.
Those losses are still losses, even stuffed into the taxpayers' Christmas stockings.
When those stocking are full, the losses will have to be taken all at once.

Then central banks won't be considered the only defense against financial apocalypse. They will rightly be recognized as the enablers if the not perpetrators of it.

* Neither are the bankers on the policymakers' side. "The dwarfs are for the dwarfs." Or is that the gnomes? They all look the same to me.
** Yes, it's more complicated than this. That doesn't change its nature.
*** And no, they will not be returning the interest.

Congratulations to the Vikings

2011-09-26T06:01:00.000-07:00

Another amazing performance. In the Brad Childress sense of the word obviously.

Talk to the hand

2011-09-21T09:17:00.000-07:00

U.S. President Barack Obama waves while standing with other leaders during the Open Government Partnership event at the United Nations September 20 in New York City. The United Nations General Assembly kicks off September 21, with leaders from around the world attending.

I really, really hope that's not the Chinese Premier that Obama cut out of the picture while needlessly drawing attention to himself.

UPDATE: You gotta love the "This looked shopped*" comments. The word you're looking for is not "shopped." The word is "narcissistic."

* "I can tell from some of the pixels and from seeing quite a few Take Back the Night rallies in my time."

Me gustan

2011-09-20T13:16:00.000-07:00

via email:

Hispanics of Today (HOT) will be celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month by selling breakfast burritos for $1 in the oval tomorrow morning. They will begin selling at 8am.

Not that we want to perpetuate stereotypes or anything.

UPDATE: The mystery meat and potato burritos are awesome. Pero dónde están los gatos?

It's not just economics, it's the law

2011-09-20T10:35:00.000-07:00

Marketing for dufuses

2011-09-16T13:47:00.000-07:00

So anyway, I have about the lowest tech phone you can buy that still will play the theme from Halloween when it rings*. But among the many features of the phone I routinely ignore are the demo games. Demo games are a really cool idea assuming your screen is big enough to actually play games: you try a game out and if you like it**, you can phone some money to the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation or whomever and they will allow you to download a full version.

But here's the marketing stupidity part. I have 4 demos on my phone, 2 of which I would never, ever play even if I was from Wichita. But they are also locked, non-deletable, and with me (or at least my phone) forever. Surely the main reason they are locked is not a concern someone will steal them. It's because the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation is certain that if I cannot delete them, I will eventually submit to the inevitability of playing and then buying them.

I suspect such marketing departments are the only places in the galaxy this makes even a little more than zero sense***. If your objective is to sell games, and if the means of selling those games is to encourage people to play them, why would you ignore the opportunity afforded by someone throwing your product in the trash?

Instead of locking Vuvuzela Hero on my phone, would it not make more sense to allow me to delete it and then replace it with a demo for Tuba Hero? If I delete that, you could then send me Dijeredoo Hero. You're not losing anything by handing out an unlimited number of demos - to hoard your demos is akin to worrying people will be entertained by watching your TV commercials. And who knows, if you keep allowing me to try new games, maybe eventually you might sell me one. Besides, I understand Hurdy Gurdy Hero is going to be worth every penny.

* The model right below it weighs 6 pounds, comes with a genuine imitation leather pistol-style holster, and has a crank on the side of it for power. The model below that is a pair of soup cans with a 7-foot piece of string between them.
** Or if you spend an inordinate amount of time in the can, which is about the only time I could imagine one playing "Family Guy" all the way through.
*** There is a reason those mindless jerks will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.

Little Sister is watching you

2011-09-16T09:27:00.000-07:00

(hat tip: Moonbattery)

UPDATE: It didn't take any more than turning myself in to end up on the Obama2012 mailing list. I received my first email today, which was studded with such insights as, "The President has a job to do, so he's asking each of us to take the lead in shaping this effort." If that means anything at all, I'll be strudeled if I can figure out what it is.

Of course I unsubscribed immediately, and when I did I was offered a chance to tell them why. I simply said, "Hillary would be a much better president." I'm not sure if that's true, but it will give them something to think about.

That's it!

2011-09-15T12:42:00.000-07:00

I'm reporting myself to AttackWatch.com. It's entirely and completely unfair* of me to post a picture asserting that Obama is a salad dressing dude.

UPDATE: It is rather funny that under the site's submission terms, you have to give the Obama campaign team the right to republish anything you send, and you have to warrant that you have the right to give that right. That means that nearly everyone who reports someone else** for saying mean things about the president is lying simply by sending it in. I submitted this, but all they did was ask me for money.

* and probably unconstitutional to boot
** in other words, Person A is submitting Person B's work and giving the Obama campaign the right to re-publish it.

Technology is racist

2011-09-14T14:00:00.000-07:00

Tuesday randomness

2011-09-13T18:56:00.000-07:00

I'm sequestered this week writing a 20-page historigraphical paper on the Weimar hyperinflation of 1923*. Keynes really knew his stuff, it seems, before he went insane** sometime around 1930.

So I'm watching ESPN7 or some related off-network sports channel and I see an announcer who looks vaguely familiar. I can't place the guy until his fellow announcer calls him "Coach." And I'm like, "Coach? Jonathan Coachman? That guy used to be a wrestling 'announcer!'" He might have been able to get away with being called "coach" on Smackdown, but in football that moniker really ought to be saved for when guys like Bill Parcells or Jimmy Johnson are behind the mic.

Unsurprisingly, Vox Day has won the first round of the PZ Myers Memorial Debate. His arguments were not unexpected, but those of his opponent... let's just say I never expected "mystery butter" to provide evidence against the existence of God or gods. Kudos to Dominic for originality, I think, but I'm not sure it would score.

While the "poverty rate" has risen under Obama, America still has the fattest***, richest poor people in the world. So we've got that going for us.

* Half of 6 or 7 books are written up, another is read and ready, and I'm sitting at 15 pages already. The paper should weigh in at a svelte 25 pages or so. Then I have 5 more on Chancellorsville and related battles to jump in to. It's a horrible life.
**Or got hungry. It seems there will always be work for an economist who gives governments intellectual cover to do what they want to do anyway: spend more than they collect. If it doesn't work, that is evidence they need to spend more.
*** If the government could find a way to incorporate a BMI adjustment to the poverty figure, I suspect our faux poverty would all but disappear.

Barack, how about some more coffee?

2011-09-10T13:12:00.000-07:00

It's not the economy, Stupid

2011-09-09T14:17:00.000-07:00

It's you:

Nearly one in three Americans who grew up middle-class has slipped down the income ladder as an adult, according to a new report by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Downward mobility is most common among middle-class people who are divorced or separated from their spouses, did not attend college, scored poorly on standardized tests, or used hard drugs, the report says.

“A middle-class upbringing does not guarantee the same status over the course of a lifetime,” the report says.

First off, anyone who thinks that a middle class upbringing "guarantees" that same class will be held automatically is either an 80-year-old European or mind-bogglingly stupid. The former can be forgiven because they grew up at the tail end of a world where class was a position you were born into. However, "middle class," vague and deceptive as the label is, here merely represents a statistical variable between the top 30% of income earners at a given time and the lowest 30%. To whom but the most benighted is it a revelation that a constantly-changing number, income, might not retain its relative position between two other changing numbers over the course of a lifetime? What we have here is a report trying to make the obvious sound deep, or at least sinister*.

What else is wholly expected is the more popular reasons for falling out of the middle class. The first is divorce, wherein a family, usually with kids, suddenly finds itself without one income or significant familial support or both. Why would not halving someone's income usually drop them vis-a-vis their neighbors? The second - the child didn't go to college - is also an obvious ticket to LowerClassVille. While it is becoming apparent to all except those who sell degrees that a college degree is not enough to keep one middle class**, the lack of a college degree is liable to throw up tough odds in more cases than not. The last two, you're a moron and a meth head, are not very good anchors to middle-class-hood, either.

But as much as I have seen this study quoted in the last 2 days blaming Obama or Bush or Pelosi or immigrants, or any other individual or party, people are generally missing the point***. The economy is what it is, but your relative place in it is based almost entirely on what you, as an individual, do. Or more importantly, what you don't do.

* I especially enjoy when people bold that line like it's saying something insightful.
** It is not even proof that one is educated.
*** or making self-defeating statements like, "The report did not examine the effects of the Great Recession, which presumably accelerated downward mobility." Since the middle class is simply the middle 40% of income earners, even if half of Americans lost half their income, the percentage of people in the middle class would be exactly the same, 40%. For every person who drops out, another rises in automatically.

Anticipation

2011-09-09T10:34:00.000-07:00

Despite

2011-09-08T12:03:00.000-07:00

You keep using that word:

Bernanke gave a nod toward the notion that the economy has not recovered as quickly as it should have, despite the unprecedented levels of stimulus from both the Fed and Congress.

I do not think it means what you think it means.

UPDATE: the latest little catch phrase that seems to be popping up in relation to Fed action is 'Operation Twist.' Operation Twist is a stragedy in which the Fed buys the long end of the bond market curve and sells the short end in order to flatten the yield curve. This is supposed to do something or other. At least it was supposed to do something or other in 1961 when it was first inmplemented. Unfortunately, according to one well-placed source inside the Fed*, "Operation Twist is widely viewed today as having been a failure."

Obviously that does not mean it won't be tried again. Like the Stimulus package, all it probably needs is a new name.

* Ben Bernanke, "Monetary Policy Alternatives at the Zero Bound: An Empirical Assessment."

Take Two

2011-09-07T13:20:00.000-07:00

The only thing less competent that re-trying a failed policy with more money is re-trying it with less money. But at least your failure is more affordable that way.

If Obama was smart, he'd sell the new $300b Not-a-Stimulus bill as a $550b spending cut compared to the last one. Since it will accomplish exactly the same as the earlier, more expensive version, it might be an easy sell under the dome.

The incredible shrinking Congresswoman

2011-09-07T08:41:00.000-07:00

Fox News makes Teh Fun:

Republicans have decided they're not going to give a rebuttal to President Obama's jobs speech later this week, a decision House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi took as a high affront to the White House.

Pelosi said the party's "silence" would "speak volumes about their lack of commitment to creating jobs."

OK, so the real news is that Obama's speech is expected by the GOP to be so incredibly weak that they need not respond to it, so incredibly strong that they cannot respond to it*, so incredibly unwatched that there's no one watching to respond to it to, or they really just want to get home in time for the game. In any event, there is no doubt that to the GOP, Obama is like Saruman after his ouster from Orthanc**. He may still have some small powers of oratory, but only if you believe him first. No one does anymore, and those who believed the illusion most fervently are now the most disillusioned.

So what has this to do with Pelosi? Absolutely nothing, which is kind of the point. Pelosi says something, but no one bothers to respond to it because it's not worth responding to. The story quickly moves past her to the actual people who are actually making news. She leads the story, but former Bush speechwriter Dana Perino gets more ink, and he talks about Republicans. It seems that though once the most powerful woman in America or something, Pelosi has been reduced to a hook to get people to read stories that are about people who completely ignore her.

* OK, I'll admit I just put that in to make it sound fair.
** You needn't go with him, Biden Wormtongue. I know of no wrong you have done us.

Look for the union libel

2011-09-06T12:12:00.001-07:00

Dufus economics

2011-09-04T14:12:00.000-07:00

One guy's got it right:

Figuring out how well the second round of quantitative easing would work* wasn’t difficult, at least for one prominent economist.

Paul Ashworth, senior US economist at Capital Economics, had the Federal Reserve’s easing program, nicknamed QE2, solved pretty much right from the start.

OK, that's not the funny part. Even I, your resident non-economist, had QE2 solved pretty much right from the start. QE2 would accomplish nothing for the same reason QE1 would do nothing and why I'm sure QE3 will have the same non-impact. Unless the foremost economic problem we are presently suffering is high rates**, lowering rates is not going to solve the problem. But even before Bernanke set about to cure problems cause by debt oversupply by creating more debt***, Ashworth nailed it:

“The Fed’s new program of asset purchases is not going to pull the US economy out of its current malaise because, given the scale of the balance sheet problems affecting household and financial institutions, ...

Ooh, let me guess:

...households cannot afford to take on more debt no matter the rate. Or maybe it's,
...downsizing of families and an aging population has perhaps permanently lowered demand for oversize houses. Or maybe it's,
...business is not looking to expand, given the realities of the first two.

Oh, do please tell us why it is that Bernanke's program of lowering rates from the lowest rate in half a century will not cure what's ailing us?

... it is simply too modest,” Ashworth wrote then.

* Or wouldn't work, whatever.
** Unlikely, given that we have the lowest rates across the board since the 1950s or early 60s.
*** Lowering rates was the (failed) goal, taking on more debt was the method through which it was pursued.

They should stop calling it an approval rating

2011-09-03T19:18:00.000-07:00

Getting one right

2011-09-01T08:57:00.000-07:00

But for how long?

The First Circuit Court of Appeals reached a crucial decision last Friday allowing the public to videotape police officers while they're on the clock.

The decision comes after a string of incidents where individuals have videotaped police officers and were arrested. Police officers across the United States believed citizens didn't have the right to videotape them as they conducted official duties, but issues like police brutality put the issue up for debate.

There is really not much argument available for the police that private citizens filming them in their official duties somehow keeps them from performing them, especially given the pure number of TV shows* where full television crews ride along on beats and even raids. The best they can do is claim that recording is "wiretapping" or "evesdropping**," the latter of which implies that citizens do not even have the right to look at police in their duties. The fact that all but a very few of these cases have not just been thrown out of court but laughed out ought to say something about the issues at had.

The police don't like people watching and recording them. I understand that. I also truly do not care. I am not the slightest bit sympathetic to the argument that it's somehow not fair to them, or that people with cameras look like people with guns. Police officers have no right to privacy when they put on the uniform of the state***. They are watchers who need to be watched, period****.

The First Circuit court was certainly correct when they concluded, "Gathering information about government officials in a form that can readily be disseminated to others serves a cardinal First Amendment interest in protecting and promoting "the free discussion of governmental affairs." The only danger I see is that there is not an explicit right to make such a recording - that means the Supremes could still find a compelling government interest in ensuring that people only see the Protection and Service the state wants them to see.

I don't expect the Supremes to find that, though I do expect a number of attorneys general to argue that, especially those from Illinois and Maryland, where state laws specifically ban recording of anyone without consent. So while celebration is in order, it's just a touchdown, not a Super Bowl ring.

* True story: one of my foster kids saw a commercial for one of those shows and then told me, proud as a peacock, "Hey, my dad was on Cops!" Swear to God.
** Honest, Mr. Gandalf, I wasn't dropping no eves.
*** Or when acting as agents of the state in plain clothes.
**** Saying, "period" and following it with a period makes any assertion true. It's double-true if "period" is a sentence all its own, but I'm not confident enough to write it that way.

We got fun and games

2011-08-30T21:14:00.000-07:00

He must be from New York

2011-08-29T08:36:00.000-07:00

No one else would consider zombie nets before ammo.

No worries, mate

2011-08-27T19:06:00.000-07:00

Obama has the situation well in hand:

Obama takes charge at hurricane command center

US President Barack Obama warned the US east coast was in for a "long 72 hours" as he led his government's response to Hurricane Irene at a disaster command center in Washington...

"Obviously a lot of families are going to be affected ... the biggest concern I'm having right now has to do with flooding and power," Obama said during the videoconference.

The dude is obviously in command, so why doesn't he just save us the drama and steer the damn thing out to sea?

Nothing to add

2011-08-26T10:14:00.000-07:00

Talk about a week with nothing to talk about*. Maybe next week will be better**.

* Other than social workers, which I have long concluded is a euphemism for idiot. This weekend will be full of them, as we have our annual foster parent training conference in OP. I intend to use the class time to outline the last half of my thesis.

** Or worse. At least if the entire East Coast is destroyed, Biden and Krugman will get their stimulus.

A day which shall live in Internets

2011-08-24T17:17:00.000-07:00

Tramp stamps remain forever

2011-08-24T14:12:00.000-07:00

But CNN worries that our children won't be able to decipher them:

"Will a simple handwritten note look like hieroglyphics to the next generation?"

So wrote second-grade teacher Anthony McGrann on his Seattle-based education blog, Seconds. The post, which argued that cursive handwriting should continue to be taught in schools, garnered more than 500 comments. It's a touchy subject: Is there a reason schools should continue to teach cursive, and is it worth the time that must be spent?

I doubt it. I can't write anything in cursive other than my name and have not used it since the seventh grade.* As a southpaw, I never used it well - or at least it never looked good - as we lefties have a bad habit of dragging our hand through the wet ink as we write, smearing even the most perfectly-formed letter across the page. If I have to write (exams, notes, etc.) I print**. If it's something work-related or something I can type, I type.

So does everyone else. And that's the point, I suppose. There is a "market" in writing whether one likes it or not, or admits it or not. And cursive is no longer a market favorite. It's dying not because it's not taught, but because it is not needed. And because it's not needed, it need not be taught. Like shorthand or court reporting, there will always be a niche market for those who understand it***. But teaching it is no guarantee that anyone will use it; because it's unnecessary, it will die off anyway. I suspect we will miss it a lot less than second grade teachers insist.

Assuming we can find a fitting replacement for the personal signature, of course.

* Three college degrees and I'm functionally illiterate.
** and thank God every night for professors who can read it.
*** While I try, I confess that I still have a pile of undeciphered (and perhaps undecipherable) cursive letters from my July trip, sitting in a folder on my dresser. They are not being ignored because they are unimportant. They are being ignored because reading them gives me a headache. Columns and columns of numbers are easier to comprehend.

To serve man

2011-08-22T06:01:00.000-07:00

Getting it backward

2011-08-19T19:57:00.000-07:00

Vox draws the wrong conclusion from an old teaching:

VD: 12/28/09 12:37 PM:
wrf3: 12/28/09 12:21 PM:
Who is my neighbor?
Jesus answered that specific question in the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Luke 10:36-37: "Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?" The expert in the law replied, "The one who had mercy on him." Jesus told him, "Go and do likewise."

Jesus obviously did not tell him that all three of the men were his neighbors. In fact, two of the three were excluded. "Neighbor" is simply not synonymous with "everyone". There is no Biblical basis for establishing that equivalence.

It's an old post, which I hadn't seen until it popped up today in a discussion over there about anklebiters. But I was rather shocked at Vox's implication: your neighbor is the man who does good to you first, and no one else. I don't think that's Jesus' point at all.

For the biblically impaired, the backstory (Luke 10:30-7) is this: Jesus told a story about a man* who was attacked by robbers along a lonely road and left for dead. While he lay there bleeding, a priest and a Levite, his fellow Jews, walked past and ignored his plight. A little bit later a Samaritan, a member of a sect of "half-breed" Jews despised and hated by real Jews, happened upon him. He got the man patched up, then hired an innkeeper to nurse him back to full health, even offering to pay that part of his expenses not covered under Medicare, Part D. Jesus then asked his inquisitor** which man was a neighbor to him? The lawyer rightly answered it was the Samaritan. Jesus then told him to go and do as that man had done.

According to traditional Jewish teaching, a neighbor was a fellow Jew (c.f. Strong's Concordance #4139), and it was only these neighbors, and not gentiles much less nasty Samaritans, that one had an obligation to love under Leviticus 19:18. Since non-Jews were considered outside God's love, they were considered unworthy of the love of godly men - pretty convenient if you find some group of people unlovely and unlovable. However, it is Jesus' choice of a Samaritan as the neighbor that blasts the traditional Jewish teaching (and I might add Vox's conclusion) to smithereens. For if Jews are not the 'neighbors' of Samaritans, then neither are Samaritans the neighbors of Jews, and yet not only was the Samaritan admittedly acting as a neighbor, Jesus told the Jew with whom he was speaking to go and do the same thing. "Cross the boundary of your comfort, your tradition, and your prejudice," Jesus was saying, "and show love to the stranger you happen across on the road." That would make neighbor synonymous with anyone, if not everyone.

If our neighbor was defined by who we are, then the actions of this Samaritan (and the inaction of the Jews) would never have brought about the lawyer's answer - his neighbor (fellow-citizen, companion, friend) was the Jew. But if neighbor is a concept larger than these boundaries allow, only then does the parable make sense***.

One can certainly force a hyper-literal interpretation and conclude that only the Samaritan who did the traveler good was his neighbor. In fact, one need only assume Jesus was answering the question and no more. It would follow then that the traveler had only the obligation to love the Samaritan. But if that's the case, why tell the parable? For men naturally love those who do them well (Luke 7:42). Yet Jesus did not say, "Go and do what you are naturally inclined to do;" that would hardly be worth saying, much less recording for posterity. Instead, Jesus answered "Who is my neighbor?" by insisting that his interlocutor go and do as the Samaritan did: love and care for the stranger. My take is that Jesus did not answer the question directly as was his habit with dishonest questions****. Rather he simply cut through the legalistic dust the lawyer was kicking up, exposed his hypocrisy, and told him how to truly keep the command that he already knew full well he should be keeping, but was not.

* Who from the context we will assume is a Jew.
** A lawyer. Insert joke here.
*** and only then does the OT teaching make sense. If some men are not your neighbors, does that make it ok to sleep with their wives (Lev 18:20) or defraud them (Lev 19:20)? I'm pretty sure that's not exactly what Moses is saying here.
**** since the man was only seeking to justify his present behavior (Luke 10:29) and not really looking for an answer.

A century of change

2011-08-19T08:42:00.000-07:00

...has changed nothing, it seems.

UPDATE: The Onion is awesome:

SEWARD, NE—Claiming he wasn't afraid to let everyone in attendance know about "the real mess we're in," Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke reportedly got drunk Tuesday and told everyone at Elwood's Corner Tavern about how absolutely fucked the U.S. economy actually is...

Numerous bar patrons slowly nodded in agreement as Bernanke went on to suggest the United States could pass three or four more stimulus packages and "it wouldn't even matter."

"You think that's going to create long-term economic growth, let alone promote job creation?" Bernanke said. "We're way beyond that, my friend. There are no jobs, okay? There's nothing. I think that calls for another drink, don't you?"

While using beer bottles and pretzel sticks in an attempt to explain to the bartender the importance of infusing $650 billion into the bond market, the inebriated Fed chairman nearly fell off his stool and had to be held up by the patron sitting next to him...

"God, I'm so wasted," added Bernanke, resting his head on the bar...

Sure, but at least he told the truth.

It makes my deja vu hurt

2011-08-18T13:02:00.000-07:00

A financial reporter misses the obvious joke:

When Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke takes the podium next week at the central bank's annual meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, his sense of deja vu may be overwhelming.

Stocks have been giving up gains won after last year's speech... Oil prices are higher and there's been little improvement in the job market. Bond yields are down...

It's almost as if QE2, the Fed's $600 billion bond-buying program first mentioned at last year's meeting and designed to boost the struggling economy, never happened.

Of course it happened. We have the debt* to prove it. QE2 occurred right on schedule and was carried out according to plan. It just didn't accomplish anything, least of all what was promised. It did not get the economy out of its funk and it didn't make the housing market recover. Hell, it didn't even hold interest rates down**, as the current dip in rates intensified after the program was over, probably due to actions in Europe. The truth of the matter is that QEII, like QEI, like the Bush and then Obama Stimulus packages, like the Fed buying a couple trillion in mortgages, might as well have never happened.

The title of the Reuters article, however, asks an unexpectedly rhetorical question: Fed May Have Bullets Left, but Are They Blanks? Well, they have all been so far, by the article's own reckoning. Is there any evidence that Bernanke has saved the best tools he has for last? But just to be clear let me answer this in the negative, as the very assertion that Deputy ~~Fife~~ Bernanke has a bullet or two in his uniform pocket at least implies that there is a probability, or at least a reasonable possibility, that he will be able to shoot something.

This possibility is highly unlikely, to say the least. To wit: the article notes, in all seriousness, that since QE2 was such a smashing failure, Bernanke's next "trick" (their word, his admission) will be "buying long-dated Treasuries to push down long-term rates." It sounds like a reasonable and logical policy that just might work. However, those with memories longer than 50 seconds might recall that was precisely the purpose, the method, and the very definition*** of QE2. And we all know how well that program worked.

* technically, the Fed has the bloated balance sheet to prove it.
** Though Bernanke's actions surely saved or created an unprovable number of basis points.
*** "A week ago, the nation's central bank announced that it would buy $600 billion in long-term U.S. Treasury bonds, ostensibly to push down long-term interest rates."
-- Dallas Morning News, "What is Fed's QE2, and what will it do? Experts explain in everyday English " 11/10/10

Plus we pay off our debts by borrowing more

2011-08-18T01:10:00.000-07:00

Questions and answers

2011-08-17T11:36:00.000-07:00

A religion scholar from Boston University has the first. I'll make up the second:

1. “Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands” (Colossians 3:18). Should female presidents submit to their first husbands?

Prothero is correct that Bachmann did not answer the question. This is the same question (and the same dodge) that Huckabee made three years ago when he was running. The answer is "yes, but." Wives should submit to their husbands in the marriage. You cannot have a democracy with only two voters; someone simply must make the final call in those rare instances* when husband and wife cannot come to a unanimous decision. Christianity says that the husband gets the extra vote. It's as simple as that. However, this is not a blanket "order your wife around" command. If Bachmann is elected President, then that is her job, and her husband has no more say over the decisions that go with that than I have over my wife's real estate sales. If the Bachmanns can't work out the lines between those, she should not run until they do.

2. “But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you” (Matthew 6:6). When I watched Perry’s performance at “The Response,” this Bible quote came to mind. I would like to know what he thinks of it. Should Christians make a show of praying in public?

This is a fun quote for those people who are bothered by Christians coming out of the prayer closet and one of the most tempting to turn into an absolute (kind of like "Judge not"). But Jesus , Paul, Peter and John all prayed in public - Christians are to gather and pray, and it would be very difficult to do both in separate closets. It's not public prayer that is the issue, but as Prothero notes, making a show of it. The church has wolves aplenty who love nothing more than to show how holy they are in exchange for power. "He that has ears," and all that.

3. “Thou shalt not kill” (Exodus 20:13). Part of the Ten Commandments, this passage has been used by many social conservatives to argue against Roe v. Wade and abortion rights. After all, if God said, “Thou shalt not kill” then why are we taking lives inside the womb? But if God said, “Thou shalt not kill” then why are we allowing capital punishment?

The word in Exodus is not 'kill' - that's a 17th century** translation. The word in the 10 Commandments is 'murder.' From that point forward, it is not difficult to work out the distinction between capital punishment (which is commanded a number of places in the OT) and abortion. Even a religion scholar ought to know that one.

4. “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s” (Luke 20:25)...Nonetheless, Jesus seems to be drawing a clear distinction here between religious and secular authority - a distinction that neither Perry nor Bachmann appears to see... does either see a line of demarcation of any sort - a picket fence, perhaps - between “what is Caesar’s” and “what is God’s”?

While I explained the entire passage here, the simple answer is that the government is to protect life, liberty, and property, while the Church is to be Christ's body on earth, to love God and love people, in that order. The 'separation' problem is twofold, it occurs first when conservatives seek to use the power of government to make better people by force, and the second occurs here:

5. “Blessed are the poor" (Luke 6:20). In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus famously begins, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3). ..How do Perry and Bachmann read this passage? Did Luke mess up by leaving out "in spirit"? Or did Jesus really say "Blessed are the poor"? And if he did say that, what did he mean by it? Do his words carry any meaning for us today, and to the way we craft our federal budget?

See, here's the funny part - Liberals are all worried about the separation of Church and State, but only until it comes time to craft the Federal budget. Did Jesus call on Caesar to help the poor? No, but he did mention to the priests that they could do good to the poor whenever they wished. Paul and the early church collected money not for basketball courts but for the poor. The Christian's obligation to the poor is a personal and church one, not a governmental one. Whether the poor (or the poor in spirit) are blessed is a religious question, not one for Congress or the courts. But the government that tries to eliminate their poverty has shown that it can remove all kinds of blessings in the attempt. Just ask a family that's been 'helped' for three or more generations and is still poor***.

* Let's hope that it is rare. If it's not, it's going to be a difficult marriage no matter how the issues are decided.
** And earlier. Coverdale, the Bishop's Bible, and the Geneva Bible all translated the passage 'kill' in the century before King James. OTOH, 20th and 21st Century editions are pretty unanimous in saying 'murder.' It's not the Bible that has changed, but the language.
*** For example, as the great philosopher Charles Barkley once noted, "Poor people have been voting for Democrats for the last 50 years and they are still poor." Since the poor vote for Democrats because they are poor, what incentive does that give Democrats to actually relieve their poverty?

Monday is Stupid Day

2011-08-15T13:00:00.000-07:00

It's gotta be, as there is just too much about to attribute to a full moon. But speaking of lunatics, Mr. Buffett is out this morning with his semi-annual "Tax Me More" rant. But the best rebuttal comes from Warren Buffett, who when asked a couple years ago why he doesn't just give his money to the government, responded:

I think that on balance the Gates Foundation, my daughter's foundation, my two sons' foundations, will do a better job with lower administrative costs and better selection of beneficiaries than the government.

So do I, Mr. Buffett, which is why I don't think the government should be selecting 'beneficiaries' at all. But if you think you should pay more taxes, just pay them. There are few things sadder than a man with $40 billion dollars obsessing about every one else's money.

Greg Valliere, chief cook and bottle-washer at the Potomac Research Group, doesn't like the Tea Party very much. But after calling the partiers "stupid and reckless," "zealots," and "laughably naive," he manages to drop this turd in the punch bowl while explaining* why the government's budget is not like a household budget:

If Microsoft or IBM want to build a new corporate headquarters, they issue debt. They pay back their debt, with interest, just as the U.S. government pays back debt with interest – defying the petty demagogues who proclaim that there would be nothing wrong with default.

If the US government "pays back debt with interest," then why did the debt ceiling need to be raised in the first place?

When IBM pays back debt, it does so from its budget surplus if you will, as does Microsoft. Each payment results in the company carrying *less* debt. But the government following each payment carries *more* debt. Could it be that the government is not actually paying back debt at all, but is borrowing more money to pay interest on money previously borrowed? That its current policies have created a debt sink in which it will spin, faster and faster, until it is inevitably sucked under? Why, yes, Mr. Valliere, and that is what has the Tea Party so mad in the first place. Of course, no demagogue (petty or otherwise) said there would be nothing wrong with default, but that there was no need for default** at all. The necessity of default was always a figment of the Beltway's fevered imagination.

Peter Wehner of Commentary magazine apparently doesn't know what taxes are for:

Lower taxes are a very good idea, but it is not a talisman. And if we have reached a point where Republicans running for president cannot envision (or at least admit to) any scenario in which they would raise taxes, even if as a result they could roll back the modern welfare state, then it’s time to consider loosening the philosophical straightjacket they are in.

If Republicans had the power to roll back the modern welfare state, there would simply be no reason to raise taxes. What does he think these taxes are spent on? Talismans?

* he's typing slowly, so those who learned economics "in a cornfield outhouse" can understand.
** Default at this point is still purely optional. At this point.

Shovel-Ready

2011-08-15T11:35:00.000-07:00

A Bye-ku

2011-08-14T21:03:00.000-07:00

Apologies to James Taranto:

Ten thousand lakes boil
But if we wanted a squish
Mitt has better hair

I just spent the weekend with a whole gaggle of Minnesotans* who didn't want to know how well Pawlenty did in the Iowa straw poll, but how poorly he did. That has to count for something.

* and not all Dems. My brother, who is in Bachmann's district, really likes her, though he's convinced she has 'diarrhea of the mouth' and will eventually torpedo her own campaign in a fit of epic stupidity. Maybe that just reflects the fatalism pounded into all long-time Vikings** fans.
** Color me ~~naive~~ eternally hopeful, but Ponder already seemed to have that presence on the field that T-Jack will never master, even at $4m a year. If the rookie lined up behind an actual offensive line, I suspect he could really shine. But Joe Webb (and oh, how I love the guy); if you draft someone as a 'pure athlete,' why would you let him sit on the bench as your third-string QB? He should at least be returning punts and kickoffs. A whole bench full of talented guys who don't play, as Mr. Taggart was famous for saying, "ain't gonna do you no good no how."

2011-08-10T18:38:00.000-07:00

Maybe 2000?

2011-08-08T05:58:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: Dow down to Goblin Town, you go my lad. Ho! Ho! My lad!

It's odd how everyone is blaming the trouble today in the Dow on the S&P's downgrade of US credit. But that downgrade doesn't seem to be bothering the bond market, which is where it should show up*, and where yields are at record lows today.

I'm more of the opinion that the end of QE2 is to blame, which is a nice way of saying, a couple more down days and Washington will be screaming for QE3. Then QE4. Then QE5. I think pitchforks and straw torches are in there somewhere, too, but I can never be sure.

Laugh of the day: Dow Finishes Down 634 Points. Obama’s speech certainly did nothing to slow the drop, though I suppose the White House will argue that it would have been 734 without the speech, meaning that Obama saved or created 100 Dow points . . . .

* but things have a funny habit of doing what they want, not what I expect.

Why we fight

2011-08-05T07:25:00.000-07:00

So American soldiers can upgrade their bulky kevlar helmets to stylish cloth hijabs.

But this was the funny part: "Lt. Col. Michael Lawhorn, a U.S. Central Command spokesman, stressed to TheDC that while commanders are encouraging American women to wear headscarves while engaging with civilians, they are not having them wear the headscarf in lieu of their kevlar helmets."

Right, which is why the male soldier in the background is wearing a fedora and why the women are carrying picnic baskets instead of automatic rifles.

No wonder they never accomplish anything

2011-08-04T06:27:00.000-07:00

You just have to laugh at Moonbat 'solutions' to problems. Here we have a problem: 600 million cats that kill a billion birds a year. We can't have that. I mean, we don't know how many birds there are, nor what the bird population might look like if cats did not cull the flock, nor how many more mice and rats would there would be, but whatever. Birds are cute, so they are more important than rats anyway. The implication is given that the biggest problem is feral cats*, and they are a real problem, not only in the wild but around airports for some reason.

For the problem of feral cats eating too many birds, Moonbat solution is TNR, a TLA** for "Trap, Neuter, Return." That's right, they trap the cat, rip out or cut off its reproductive organs, then release it back into the wild***. Obviously, the TNR 'solution' is only promoted because Moonbats would likely hide feral cats in their basements if they knew people were going to, you know, kill them. Besides, spaying cats that nobody wants provides lots of work for veterinarians, and that's good for the economy or something.

But I especially like the idea to 'stop feeding strays.' Because, you know, a hungry cat will eat far fewer birds than a sated one. One could make the argument that not feeding cats goes a long way in not 'attracting' them. Fair enough, but it's not like cats don't exist if they are not in your yard. If one is not willing to put down feral cats, then it is hardly helping birds to not feed them, and hardly helping the cats themselves when they will likely starve to death. But it does make the Moonbat feel like she's helping, which is the actual goal of liberalism anyway.

The solution to the feral cat problem is simple. Not easy, since feral cats will probably never be completely wiped out, but simple:

Trap and Shoot (TS). Rather than releasing bird-killing cats into the wild, they should be converted into egg rolls, winter gloves, or some other useful object. TS is not only cheaper and faster than TNR, it has a smaller acronym, which is prima facie evidence of its higher efficiency. It also does not demand any veterinarians.
Place feral cats on the 'unprotected species' list, so they can be hunted by anyone with a licence, without limit. Or even better, put them on the annoyance list with rats and leave them entirely unprotected.

Lots of people will scream that actually killing feral cats would endanger Aunt Bertha's favorite house kitty because suburban neighborhoods would suddenly be crawling with hordes of automatic rifle toting white supremacists shooting everything with whiskers. Needless to say, the likelihood of actual pet cats being killed is about the same as that of actual pet cats receiving accidental Moonbat hysterectomies.

Besides, if the idea is to save birds, Aunt Bertha needs to keep her cat indoors. Then we need to figure out what to do about all those pesky mice at the airport.

* they use the word 'stray,' which is not the same thing.
** Three Letter Acronym
*** This is in accordance with the Moonbat theory that a cat with no testicles is allergic to bird meat.

They probably have one for 'budget cuts' as well

2011-08-03T13:48:00.000-07:00

Is that Nero's fiddle I hear?

2011-08-03T13:16:00.000-07:00

Or will Rome burn in silence?

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- The cost of insuring against an Italian default reached a new high of 360 basis points Wednesday after yields on the country's benchmark 10-year bonds hit euro-era highs of 6.1% Tuesday.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been forced to schedule a speech to parliament later today on how his government plans to deal with Italy's debt crisis in an attempt to reassure the markets and bring down the cost of borrowing for the eurozone's third-largest economy. The speech has now been delayed by two hours to 5.30pm CEST until after the market close in Milan, suggesting growing nervousness about Italy's creditworthiness.

It's perfectly obvious that neither Italy nor Greece nor Spain nor Ireland* is going to be able to get through our debt crisis until they either pay off or default on their massive debts. Of course, Greece was up most recently; it defaulted on 20% and hung the rest on German taxpayers. Italy is up to the plate now; the ECB is trying the old "we'll buy their debt to make the auctions look like a success" trick that worked so well** for Greece. But Italy's economy is several times larger than Greece's (it's even larger than Great Britain's), and with another heavy hitter named Spain on deck now, you have to wonder how many more homers the ECB will give up before the Germans yank them off the mound.

But everyone knows that. What they might not have seen was this: Italy is falling apart because they are forced to pay a 10-year rate of 6%. That's not very high, but it is indicative of how badly governments are overly leveraged on low interest rates. What is negligible debt service in a 2% era becomes quickly unmanageable at 6%. And sclerotic government budgets simply cannot handle the rapid changed needed to deal with it.

The US's average 10-year rate for the 70s, 80s, and 90s was north of that number, and sometimes well north of it. Surely there's nothing magic about 6%, but there is something scary about it. Not only is it reachable surprisingly quickly once the market turns, but it would mean almost a tripling of our debt service costs were rates to again reach that average.

Someday they will - the idea that rates will remain low forever is as foolish as the idea that stocks remain high forever. They go up and down, like everything else, albeit in longer waves. But for the leveraged player, the trend needs to go on forever or he will be quickly wiped out. And there is no bigger leveraged player than the United States government.

* Nor the US
** If the objective was to to make the default twice as big

Malcolm the Tenth addresses the Tea Party

2011-08-02T08:29:00.000-07:00

About those cuts:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The deal reached by Congress to raise the debt ceiling and cut more than $2 trillion in public spending will probably have only a minor impact on the economy for the next two years.

Almost all the cuts would be made in 2014 or beyond...

Meaning that none of the cuts will be made at all. If this congress cannot bring itself to make cuts to a budget that is actually under its control*, what are the odds that a future Congress will make those cuts because of the promise of this Congress? About the same as me playing Mick in the sequel.

* Do we even have a budget? I forget sometimes.

Recycling

2011-08-01T18:27:00.000-07:00

At least they chose to steal from a movie no one has actually seen.

Except after C

2011-07-30T18:53:00.000-07:00

The Engine of Economic Congress

2011-07-30T16:29:00.000-07:00

As is so often the case, Congress is working on the wrong problem:

And the real kicker? This whole wrenching effort to shrink the debt may actually increase the debt*.

Any emergency deal may not be broad enough to prevent the major credit rating agencies from downgrading the United States as a rock-solid investment. That, in turn, could increase the cost of borrowing for the government (hence more interest and debt), not to mention for everyone else.

Actually, I don't think the rating agencies' opinion of US debt will have much effect on interest rates. People don't buy US debt because of the rating, nor are hundreds of mutual funds going to suddenly take note of Uncle Sam's profligacy only because Moody's points it out**. But it does lay bare the inconvenient truth that whatever Congress is doing, they are not doing it to protect America's credit rating but its spending addiction. They are not seriously considering anything that might avoid damaging the former.

The government's budget deficit is like an oil leak in your car's engine: the longer it runs, the more oil it spills. Your mechanic - call him Mr. Moody - is politely pointing out that the accumulation of oil beneath your car means that you will eventually suffer an engine lockup, and probably somewhere very inconvenient. To fix this problem, Congress is feverishly working to install a bigger oil pan, big enough to hold so much oil that it should keep the engine from dying for a few more miles, out past the point where they could conceivably be blamed for the wholly predictable breakdown. The real problem, of course, is the oil leak itself. But that's the one problem they are not terribly interested in***.

But it is kind of ironic to watch the GOP fumble and bumble their way toward a balanced budge amendment as a 'solution' to the problem. They already have a solution - unless the Prof is right and Obama keeps on spending in violation of the law, we will have a balanced budget the day after tomorrow. We also have $14 trillion dollars' worth of oil pan to work with in case of emergencies. Problem solved.

That, of course, will never do. A balanced budget amendment is a way to fool mechanics into thinking the leak has been plugged, while ensuring that the oil into (and out of) the Congressional engine flows unimpeded.

* The AP here makes the wholly-predictable mistake of confusing the national debt with the budget deficit. But you ought to expect nothing less from a news service that routinely confuses paying your bills with a debt default.
** Besides, the agencies so completely missed the 2008 debt implosion that no one listens to them anyway. They are merely trying to overcompensate for their prior embarrassment, I suspect.
*** Maybe some moonbat could here accuse them of being in the pocket of big oil.

Spoiled Little Princesses

2011-07-28T18:56:00.001-07:00

TK and Molly at Kitty Hawk

No, Virginia, Gold is not money

2011-07-28T11:01:00.000-07:00

In two subheadings, Mountain Vision's Weekly Update illustrates the internal contradiction of the gold bug:

Gold Is NOT Money?!?!

Bernanke conceded that he was monitoring developments in the gold price, but then said that gold is not money (cash), but only an asset... In my view, Bernanke´s response - and particularly his demeanor - tells us quite a bit about his staggering ignorance, and possibly the incompetence of central-bank-paper-money lovers in general.

God forbid I should defend Bernanke in any way, shape, or form, but he is exactly correct in this case. Money is, as the dictionary states*, "any circulating medium of exchange, including coins, paper money, and demand deposits." Money is, in short, whatever is used for money. There is good money and bad money, hard money and paper money, but the definition of money arises from its use. This may seem basic, but the mantra of the Gold bug that gold = money ignores the fact that gold can be art, gold can be jewelry, gold can be a very expensive boat anchor. But in any of those cases, just as in the case of 10-kilo bars sitting in a bank vault, gold is not money.

The contradiction comes in the very next subheading:

Infinite Investment Options Now Being Reduced to One - Gold!

Think about that for a second, not on the truth or falsity of it**, but on the nature of gold in this sentence. To invest is, "to put (money) to use, by purchase or expenditure, in something offering potential profitable returns, as interest, income, or appreciation in value." In short, you invest in something by spending money, lending money, or by otherwise putting it to use, to get more money. Obviously, they are not talking about putting gold to use to get more gold***, but about putting one's money in gold in order to get more money. But if gold is such an investment, then gold is something other than money.

Coins and paper money are money because they are used as money. Demand deposits are counted as money because fraudulently but theoretically they are money that is "available" as if it were simply sitting in a box with your name on it in the bank. But gold is only money when it is used as money, and if you're investing your money in it, then it is not money any more than a timeshare apartment, a share of stock, or a Honus Wagner baseball card is money. Gold is, as Bernanke said, an asset, albeit one that has attributes that make it very stable money when it is so used. It may even be money again someday, but today, it's just a shiny piece of metal that you should have bought 10 years ago. If you did, you'd be able to get a lot more money for it today.

* Definition #3 comes close to what gold bugs are looking for when it says that money is "gold, silver, or other metal in pieces of convenient form stamped by public authority and issued as a medium of exchange and measure of value." But the operative phrase is "medium of exchange."
** It's false
*** One could conceivably imagine a gold bank where one deposits gold for interest, but in that case it is not gold that is the investment, but the CD or other instrument in which gold is invested.

2011-07-28T01:02:00.000-07:00

It's too bad Obama won

2011-07-27T18:55:00.000-07:00

But at least this guy lost:

The fiery, independent version of the Republican senator from Arizona took to the floor of the Senate Wednesday morning. Demanding “straight talk,” Mr. McCain accused conservatives of abandoning reason by opposing the House Republican leader’s plan to resolve the debt crisis...

“This is the kind of crack political thinking that turned Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell into G.O.P. nominees,” he jeered, referring to two losing Tea Party candidates for the Senate in 2010.

And I guess the crack political thinking that turned McCain into the GOP presidential nominee was genius, right? It's rather funny that he would pick on the two Tea Party conservatives who lost, while ignoring the election of the many (dozens?) who won and returned control of the House to the GOP two years ago.

McCain pretended to be a conservative* all throughout that losing campaign - he even pretended to be a conservative in his own Senate primary - but it seems that with election safely behind him he's back where he belongs:

[O]n Wednesday morning, it looked like the maverick had returned.

Mr. McCain assailed the conservative Republicans...

"Maverick," of course, means "Republican who spends his career sabotaging conservatives" in non-New York Times speak. As bad as Obama is, at least the nation is stuck with only one Democrat party as a result of his victory. Had McCain won, we would have been saddled with two as the GOP, no stranger to putting party over principle**, would have given him everything he wanted in a feeble, Bush-like attempt to make him successful.

Unfortunately, what he wanted - and wants - is seldom distinguishable from the desires of the man who sits in the office McCain so incapably sought.

* And even a Republican
** [insert cynical ~~joke~~ observation here]

I miss this guy

2011-07-27T12:33:00.000-07:00