Monthly Archives: February 2014

The Swiss

Posted on by

This Tyler Cowen post captures what’s wrong with our ruling elites.

In my view immigration has gone well for Switzerland, both economically and culturally, and I am sorry to see this happen, even apart from the fact that it may cause a crisis in their relations with the European Union.  That said, you can take 27% as a kind of benchmark for the limits of immigration in most or all of today’s wealthy countries.  I believe that as you approach a number in that range, you get a backlash.

Countries have an absolute right to decide who is and who is not a citizen. They also get to decide who can and who cannot enter their country. They also control who can settle in their lands. The only people qualified to know how much immigration is good for the Swiss are the Swiss. An outsider can have no idea what will work for the Swiss, so they should not pretend they know the right answer. The best someone like Cowen can do is talk about what the Swiss think is best for them.

It is tempting to write this off as arrogant and obtuse, but that’s not it. What we seeing is an almost religious fervor by our rulers for a borderless world. They don’t state it that way, as they have gas-lit themselves on the matter of religion. They think they are pure logic machines, but that’s just self-delusion. Open borders is part of this utopia they imagine is right around the corner. If we just get rid of borders, human differences and sexual differences, humanity enters the Promised Land.

Fraud Book

Posted on by

There is no way to check the details of this, but the fact the video has not been struck down the creator has not been sued, suggests it is not a slander of Facebook. Indian is known for hosting click farms and similar scams. One of the weird products of global village is the village idiots are easy to spot. Hindus will patiently sit in click farms, creating fake traffic for web sites. Russians, on the other hand, will never do it. Instead, they are better at gypsy scams like selling fake shoes and penis pills. The Philippines is another great place to setup click farms. The new thing is to setup outbound call center there because most speak English. That’s another job Russians would never do.

Anyway, it is a good idea to be suspicious of Facebook. It is one of those services that is great as long as it is free. If they start charging for it, the whole thing collapses. That leaves advertising, but that’s a limited game as well. Plaster the site with ads and people get turned off. Plus, ads are often the source of malware and most users have ad blockers. Then you have the mobile problem. Microscopic ads on a phone are worthless. The quality of advertising is another issue. Like a most internet advertising, the stuff on Facebook is aimed at the impulsive and stupid.

Now it seems the scam is different. They are getting companies to setup pages and then pay to get traffic to their page. Since no one in their right mind goes to a corporate FB page, they are using robots to fool the companies. It is a clever scam, but an old one. Pyramid schemes often work this way. Psychics have always used plants to trap suckers. They were also caught putting stuff on people’s home pages that was supposedly liked by a friend. It was pretty ham handed and they said it was an error, but no one should believe Mark Zuckerberg. Everything about that guy screams grifter.

The Death Spiral

Posted on by

Story likes this are a good reminder that people will go to great lengths to avoid running afoul of the official morality, enforced by the ruling class. Violating the taboos of the commoners is never a problem, as long as the rulers are OK with it. In post-modern America, a way to show your worth in the ruling class is to violate the norms of decent people. To go the other way is to risk being ruined, as the ruling class is as ruthless as Muslims when it comes to enforcing their morality.

Baltimore has an interesting history. Up until the 20th century is was basically a port city without much industry. When industry arrived, it did so with a vengeance. Poles, Italians and Irish flooded in to work the docks, steel mills and factories. They had an enormous car plant near the docks that employed tens of thousands at its peak. In the 1950’s, Baltimore was one of the more important cities in the country. It was economically importation and had one of the leading newspapers in the nation.

The civil rights movement and its fallout in the 1960’s hit cities like Baltimore particularly hard. Traditional neighborhoods were broken up in something called block busting, as the usual suspects would buy a house and move in a black family. Everyone would put their house up for sale and the pirates would swoop in and buy at an increasingly discounted price. Basically the landlords figured out how to monetize racism. Baltimore went from roughly 75% white at the end of World War II to majority black in a decade.

As black on white crime increased, the politics became tribal. The remnant of the white population hung on for a while, but they were playing a losing game. Crime control became racist and fell away. The public schools fell prey to the racial spoils system and the collapse of human capital. The middle-class, black and white, fled the city. There was a respite for a while in the 2000’s, but like Detroit, Baltimore is dying and headed for bankruptcy. If you want to see the future, visit Charm City.

Maybe the Left can be forgiven for trying to address the issue of race and the very real results of discrimination. In retrospect, their solutions sound like the rantings of a crazy person, but at the time they probably sounded plausible. After fifty years of failure, there’s simply no excuse for race hustlers persisting in their views. Every conceivable effort has been made to make integration work. Trillions have been spent on a problem that is no better now than fifty years ago. It’s time accept reality.

The Homo War

Posted on by

Looks like everyone over at the NY Times is ready to celebrate the first openly homosexual football player. The Left has been using homosexuals as a proxy in their war in white men for a couple of decades now. Football, which is popular with white men, is hated by the Left. That’s why they are peddling the concussion stuff. Now that can make it gay. The NFL will no doubt have Pride Day and maybe make the players wear rainbow outfits.

The weird thing about the homosexual stuff is it borders on self-mockery. Much of what constitutes the gay lifestyle and the gay aesthetic is self-denigrating. Homosexuals are full of self-loathing due to their affliction, so their public expression is often a mockery of the gay lifestyle. Liberace is a good example. Elton John is another. There’s nothing about the gay stuff that is ennobling or respectable. At bets it is campy and silly. At worse it is degenerate.

There was never a time when homosexuals were discriminated against on the scale of blacks, Jews, Irish, Italians and Catholics. There are some make believe times, like the Stonewall Riots, but they are mostly imaginary. Stonewall was not a riot in any sense of the word. It was a protest, for sure, that put attention on the cop’s habit of raiding Mafia owned gay clubs. The fact that the Mafia was exploiting homosexual males and the cops were primarily targeting the mob gets lost in the phony narrative.

The point being, harassment of homosexuals has never been much of an issue in America. A black guy in 1990 probably faced more hostility than the typical gay guy in the worst of times. We’re talking about rude jokes, not anything that would alter one’s life. The gay lifestyle killed more gay men in a weekend than straights have in a century. Most people get this, so casting gays as sympathetic victims is a loser’s gambit.

As with all cults and subcultures, defining who is in and who is out of the group is the primary focus of the group. For the Left, being a member of the anointed mean embracing the homosexual stuff. It’s not about the homosexuals themselves. The Left does not care about them any more than they care about blacks. Homosexuals are just another charm of the progressive charm bracelet, to be shown off at the next cocktail party. The gay man is just another totem.

 

The Future Is A Feminist Nightmare

Posted on by

This statue is scaring the coeds at Wellesley College.

According to the WaPo:

The mostly-naked man appeared on the Wellesley College campus Monday, clad only in white underwear briefs, barefoot, standing with his eyes closed and his arms outstretched.

He looked like a problem for the campus police.

He turned out to be art.

The figure — which was set beside a road on the all-female college campus near Boston — is actually a very lifelike sculpture from artist Tony Matelli. The sculpture, called “Sleepwalker,” was intended to draw attention to a new exhibit by Matelli at the campus museum.

“There’s no way you can miss this thing,” said Lauren Walsh, 22, a senior from Danvers, Mass. She said the sculpture was placed in a busy area near both academic and residential quads. “I looked at it for a few minutes, and it didn’t move,” she said. Which meant it was art.

Some students dressed the statue up in winter clothing, apparently worried that the man would catch cold (the students returned to take their clothes back in the morning).

It is a good bet that most of the girls were amused by it. Maybe they took a selfie with it, but otherwise it was just another day on campus. It’s actually rather lame. If the “artist’ wanted to be edgy or controversial, he should have create a statue of a modern Priapus with a giant ornamental member. Maybe add some devil horns and a long tail with a spike at the end. That would have caused more of an uproar from the usual suspects than the frozen accountant. Imagine this on the girl’s campus.

Anyway, the girls did not like a naked man on campus.

Walsh worked on a petition to get rid of it. She thought that the appearance of an almost-nude male stranger — especially at night — would bring added stress for students, especially those who had suffered sexual assault in the past.

“The statue of the nearly naked man on the Wellesley College campus is an entirely inappropriate and potentially harmful addition to our community that we, as members of the student body, would like removed immediately,” Walsh wrote, in a petition posted at the Web site Change.org under the name of another student, Zoe Magid. There are now 300 signatures in favor of getting rid of it.

The thing about feminism is it is largely a lie. Sure, a small number of angry lesbians stick with it after college, but the whole thing is just an act. Most of the women indulging in this stuff are smart enough to land a decent husband and have a family. They end up living more like June Cleaver than the feminist ideal. The ones who do live the life after college end up miserable and crazy. The dumb ones tend to fall into that trap.

American Crackpot

Posted on by

The American Conservative is a publication that seems like it should be better than it is and have a greater influence that it does. They have always struggled to keep it going, so that’s probably part of the problem, They tried to be a traditional paper journal, but that’s not something with a future. They have a website, but it is the antiquated “webzine” style that does not seem to work very well. The content has often been of the paleo variety, which is becoming a bit of an anachronism these days.

Anyway, this was posted the other day. It hits on why conservatism in general, but paleoconservatism in particular, never seem to work. There was always an effort to superimpose whatever they meant by conservatism onto the culture. That is, they often tried to take something that was obviously not Right and argue that it was actually conservative. often, the result was taking yesterday’s radicalism and making ti today’s right-wing orthodoxy. You see that in the Seeger piece.

Seeger was the authentic voice of the old American left and understood that conservatism, far from being inimical to socialism, was actually an essential component of it. In an interview with the New York Times in 1995 he declared, “I like to say I’m more conservative than [Barry] Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back to when there was no income tax. I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other.”

Seeger’s vision of the ideal society was not some high-tech futuristic metropolis but was rooted firmly in the past. America’s past. “When I was a boy, I read every single book by naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton,” he said in a 1982 interview.

Seeger was an unrepentant communist, long after it was clear Stalin was a murderous psychopath. He actively conspired with foreigners to do harm to his fellow citizens for no other reason than ideological zeal. If mass murder is a conservative principle, the Right may want to have a meeting or something to figure out what went wrong. Just because someone has fond memories of the past, it does not make them Edmund Burke. There is more to being conservative than being a reactionary.

Seeger rejected the egotism of the modern elbow society which neoliberal capitalism has created. “There was no ‘I’ in Seeger’s music, only a big, broad encompassing ‘we’” writes Jody Rosen. Seeger never liked to talk in terms of his career. “I hate the word ‘career’ because it implies one is searching after fame and fortune—two of the silliest things to want,” he said. He abhorred commercialism. When he was given a microphone he used it to forward the causes he believed in—and not push a new album or CD.

As Kathy Shaidle covered last week, Pete Seeger was a money grubbing thief who would screw his mother for a nickel.

He was a better socialist than the Trotskyite ideologues who accused him of being a Stalinist, and he was a better conservative than the McCarthyites who persecuted him. He understood, probably better than any other figure on the American Left, that in order for the human race to go forward we need to go back. Way, way, back.

That’s complete nonsense. Seeger was never “persecuted.” He was a proud Stalinist long after Khrushchev revealed the details of Stalin’s crimes.  In fact, he was dissembling about Uncle Joe right up until the end. As Mark Steyn pointed out, Seeger could never bring himself to condemn the man who murdered fifty million people just to prove a point. if being on the Right means anything it means opposing grand social experiments that slaughter tens of millions of people.

That gets back to the weirdness of American Conservative and that whole fringe right-wing world that operates around paleoconservatism. Maybe it is just the nature of fringe politics. As these people were pushed out of the main stream, many went looking for something else they can support. Inevitably, that mean embracing or accepting some crap pot stuff. Of course, everything outside the main looks like crack pottery when you’re standing inside the main. Crack pots are a matter of perspective.

J. B. S. Haldane

Posted on by

I’m reading, as time permits, The Inequality of Man. This was written around when Haldane was converting to Marxism. You can tell he was deeply fascinated by the doings in the Soviet Union at the time. Haldane was convinced humanity was in decline, as he thought that was the natural evolution of all species. The only way to arrest that would be for man to alter his evolution. The only way to do that would be to alter his social arrangements.

I suppose it was only natural for him to be fascinated with what the Western intellectuals thought was the greatest social experiment in human relations since the French Revolution. According to his Wiki biography he became a full-throated Marxist in 1937, which was the start of the Yezhovshchina, the most intense of Stalin’s purges. A recurring theme of the time is the academic communists in the West became true believers just when the slaughter in the Soviet Union got going.

Two things keep popping into my head as I read through what is rather dry and painfully out of date genetic discussions in the book. One is that the most of the popular social theories of my grandparent’s age were mostly nonsense. Haldane talks about psychology as being the great savior of mankind because it will lead to the end of crime and mental illness. His fondness for eugenics is a bit chilling, even if what came next was wildly exaggerated.

The second thing is how belief and science are not incompatible. Haldane was an atheist, but he was a Marxist. There’s nothing rational or logical about Marxism. It starts with the assumption that heaven on earth is possible if things can be arranged just the right way. There’s no reason to believe it, but adherents do and they do so in order to be a part of the cause.

Catholics have no logical reason to have warm feelings toward the Pope, but they do because that’s what you do in that religion. Haldane was a rigorous and talented scientist, a brilliant scientist. Yet, he believed in some crazy religions like Marxism and eventually Hinduism. It is often assumed that belief and empiricism operate at polar opposites on the plane of human thought. It is simply not the case. True believers often make the best scientists.

I’m not sure if this is true today, I have no way of knowing, but science had a teleological thread to it well into the modern era. A guy like Haldane set aside God, but he still believed nature had a purpose and a design. Chance really did not figure into the science of his day. Discovering the truths about nature meant solving the purpose. “Why does a duck have a bill?” is a different starting point than “How did the bill win over the known alternatives?”

If I head off to Home Depot for a hammer and return with one, there’s agency involved throughout. If I head off to Home Depot and end up married to a Ukrainian in Florida, it is a series of choices that appear to be chance from a great enough distance.  It may not be chance in the strict sense of the word, but it is certainly not design. Teleology drove a good deal of early science and may be driving current science.

Leno Versus The Lunatics

Posted on by

I admit to being a fan of Jay Leno. By fan I mean I have been recording his program for years and watching when I feel like watching some television. I don’t watch much TV, other than sports. While eating dinner, I like to watch something for an hour that will not piss me off or make me crazy. Leno is the perfect choice. His brand of humor is broad based and well within the bounds of common decency and middle-class respectability.

Leno’s jokes are PG-13, his political humor sticks to the obvious from the headlines and it is not particularly ideological. He makes fun of whoever is in the news, regardless of party or status. His bits after his monologue are similarly tame, mostly letting regular people do silly things for the camera. The first 30 minutes make for a good dinner time show. I rarely watch his guests as I don’t follow pop culture.

All that said, I therefore took note of the fact he was being forced out by his employers in favor of a person named Jimmy Fallon. A quick search tells me Leno was dominating his counterparts, including the man-boy favorite, Jimmy Kimmel. The old Marxist David Letterman stagers on in third place. As Leno’s forced exit grew closer, his rating soared to the point where he was becoming a cultural phenomenon.

His final show scored huge numbers. According to the people who care about these things, his final show was one of the most watched in decades. As an empirically minded person, 14 million viewers in a nation of 300 million looks tiny to me, but people who make millions to know about this stuff say otherwise. It is just a reminder that culture is not rational in the linear sense of the term.

If a major company decided to retire its top selling and most profitable product, for a new product that is obviously inferior, it could be excusable. Even the best and brightest get wild ideas in their head about what lies around the corner. Front running, or attempts at it, is what gets investors in the most trouble. Sticking with the tried and true is boring, especially for young people, so change for the sake of change is common.

Television is a different thing, in that the nature is short term. The whole point is to get a hit, ride it until it dies and then jump out the window with a suitcase and the cigar box full of cash. NBC tried this a few years back and it was a costly and embarrassing disaster. To do it again when Leno is riding even higher than the last time raises the question. Why does NBC hate him?

What we’re see is the work of fanatics. I first bumped into this when I was a kid working in Washington. I worked for a Congressman doing nonsense work. Back in the old days, this was common. I’m sure it is a rigid process these days, but three decades ago it was not, so you got a fun mix of personalities. The law student in charge of the young staff was a nice girl, but a hard thumping liberal feminist.

Inevitably she set her sights on me as someone who had to be run out of the office as a trouble maker. Her reason, which she told me when I confronted her, was that I was not “very liberal.” That’s all that mattered to her. So much so she did not note that I was the favorite of the congressman’s wife, driving her around town. The result was they found a new person to supervise the kids and volunteers.

It was my first experience with a fanatic. The second experience was talking with an Iranian exile. He was a student when the Shah fell, but he was not a fanatic or even religious, as far as I could tell. He thought the Islamists were nuts and was one of the first people I heard talk about the danger of Islamic fundamentalism. He told me a story about his time in the army during the Iraq war to illustrate his point.

His unit was near the front lines and they were preparing for an offensive. Between them and the Iraqi army was a minefield. Saddam’s army was trained and developed by Soviet advisers, so it relied about Soviet tactics. That mean they used a lot of mine fields. The Iranian commander asked for volunteers to clear a minefield. About two dozen Revolutionary Guards volunteered for the job.

After some prayer, they ran across the minefield, blowing up the mines with their feet. A second wave of volunteers followed showing that the mines had been cleared. That’s the definition of a fanatic. The object of their fanaticism changes, but everything else is the same. The true believer gives up his identity for that of the group, so sacrifice is the ultimate expression of faith. The act counts for more than the result.

The point of this diversion is that NBC is run by fanatics. A night watching MSNBC, for example, is a descent into madness. Within living memory, liberal members of the press would have mocked these people as the aluminum foil hat crowd. Today they run the news division of NBC. Inside the building is a daily competition between fanatics to see who is the most committed to the cause. Leno is not one of them.

In such an asylum, a non-believer like Leno would be suspect. In a weird way, his popularity is confirmation of his heresy.  Because normal people like him and he gets along with normal people, it is assumed he is an enemy of the cause, so they will do what must be done to run him off. That’s not to say his replacement is a fanatic. He’s just not the guy they see as the enemy. So, the change will be made.

The Grifter Gal

Posted on by

The food supply in the West is surprisingly safe, given the deregulated and decentralized nature of the system of producing food and getting it to your table. This reality, however, comes with frequent food scares. These cares are usually based in superstitious nonsense. Every day we see stories about how some staple of our diet is dangerous or a story debunking the previous scary story. Then there are the new snake oil salesman, pitching the latest food fads and miracle diets.

This story about Subway is a good example. The chemical in this case is Azodicarbonamide, a food stabilizer. There’s no science linking it to any negative health issues. We know this because it is in all of the food in North America and people are not falling over dead from it. Granted, there has not been a longitudinal study on the widespread use of it, but the lack of people dying from it is called a clue. That does not stop grifters from claiming otherwise. In this case, it is someone named Vani Hari.

Vani started FoodBabe.com in April 2011 to spread information about what is really in the American food supply. She teaches people how to make the right purchasing decisions at the grocery store, how to live an organic lifestyle, and how to travel healthfully around the world. The success in her writing and investigative work can be seen in the way food companies react to her uncanny ability to find and expose the truth.

Where she got the knowledge she spreads is a mystery. A search for a more detailed biography comes up empty. It appears she was a marketing or sales person out of college and then got into the fake nutrition rackets. That’s not surprising. People in sales are good at finding the pressure points of people and exploiting them. So are con-artists, which is the entire population of the health food racket. Everyone wants to be healthy and will set aside rationality in the quest for good health. It is a very old story.

A feature of the female grifter these days is the weird aspirational way they describe themselves. Maybe is the way women have always talked, but men never had a reason to notice it. In this highly feminized culture, women are turning up everywhere in female lead roles, which are exaggerated versions of women. That means they talk about themselves in weird ways and seem to care about everything a bit too much.

My name Vani, means Voice in my native language, and I have always had things to “Voice” throughout my life whether it be about politics, the environment or whatever is making headlines. After suffering some serious health issues, I became incredibly passionate about understanding what is in food – how it is grown, what chemicals are used in its production, and what eating food does or doesn’t do for the body.

Hitler became passionate about killing Jews and Slavs. Mao, after coming to power, became passionate about killing off millions of his people. Pol Pot was very passionate about his work. Serial killers are passionate about their work. When the West was run by sensible men, taming one’s passions was a virtue. Now that it is run by women, the more passion the better, even if the person is a raving lunatic and con artist. Perhaps that’s the other feature of girl power. Everyone becomes a con artist.

Skepticism Versus Atheism

Posted on by

This is an interesting post. Atheism is one of those things that is ridiculous when you seriously consider it. The atheist claims to be certain about the existence of god, but that is impossible. By definition, God is unknowable, so you either believe he exists or you don’t believe he exists. The key word there is belief. This is a human trait that is rooted in our biology. We know it is heritable and we have some sense of why this is a useful human trait. To argue against it is to argue against biological reality.

Here’s a relevant passage:

If reasoning is so easily swayed by passions, then what kind of reasoning should we expect from people who hate religion and love reason? Open-minded, scientific thinking that tries to weigh the evidence on all sides? Or standard lawyerly reasoning that strives to reach a pre-ordained conclusion? When I was doing the research for The Righteous Mind, I read the New Atheist books carefully, and I noticed that several of them sounded angry. I also noticed that they used rhetorical structures suggesting certainty far more often than I was used to in scientific writing – words such as “always” and “never,” as well as phrases such as “there is no doubt that…” and “clearly we must…”

To check my hunch, I took the full text of the three most important New Atheist books—Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell and I ran the files through a widely used text analysis program that counts words that have been shown to indicate certainty, including “always,” “never,” “certainly,” “every,” and “undeniable.” To provide a close standard of comparison, I also analyzed three recent books by other scientists who write about religion but are not considered New Atheists: Jesse Bering’s The Belief Instinct, Ara Norenzayan’s Big Gods, and my own book The Righteous Mind.

I’m a bit skeptical of this method. It assumes things that are not in evidence, as they say in court. people who are confident in their beliefs probably use language loaded with certainty, but we live in a passive age, so maybe not. Language is as much a part of the culture as ritual and ceremony. Given that we live in a feminine age, it may be that atheists have changed their language to use the passive-aggressive technique popular with women. In other words, it’s not as simple as the author assumes.

To provide an additional standard of comparison, I also analyzed books by three right wing radio and television stars whose reasoning style is not generally regarded as scientific. I analyzed Glenn Beck’s Common Sense, Sean Hannity’s Deliver Us from Evil, and Anne Coulter’s Treason. (I chose the book for each author that had received the most comments on Amazon.) As you can see in the graph, the New Atheists win the “certainty” competition. Of the 75,000 words in The End of Faith, 2.24% of them connote or are associated with certainty. (I also analyzed The Moral Landscape—it came out at 2.34%.)

One of the under discussed aspects of atheism is that the adherents are the biggest proselytizers. generally, we assume proselytizing is a sign of doubt. The person trying to bring you over to his side wants confirmation. if he were sure about what he thought on a subject, he would just add it to the stock of truths he carries with him. He would assume most people have the same truth. The proselytizer, in contrast, is never really sure, so he hopes to convince others so he  can be sure.

Reason is indeed crucial for good public policy and a good society. But isn’t the most reasonable approach one that takes seriously the known flaws of human reasoning and tries to work around them? Individuals can’t be trusted to reason well when passions come into play, yet good reasoning can sometimes emerge from groups. This is why science works so well. Scientists suffer from the confirmation bias like everybody else, but the genius of science as an institution is that it incentivizes scientists to disconfirm each others’ ideas, and it creates a community within which a reasoned consensus eventually emerges.

This is where the skeptic shows his worth. Science is just as prone to nonsensical beliefs as any other human endeavor. The endless feuding over climate science is a great example. Even the most empirically minded can become zealots, losing all perspective in their crusade. The skeptic is far less likely to fall into this trap as he is much more willing to accept that we simply don’t know the right answer. The skeptic, unlike the atheist, is only sure of his won fallibility.