'The Resurrection' (detail) by El Greco 1596-1600, Museo del Prado, Madrid
Written for ATB by my dear friend Kenny Pierce
On Easter, Christians celebrate what C. S. Lewis called, The Grand Miracle, the one single event in human history that changes the meaning of the entire human story in general and our own personal story as well. A lifetime isn't enough to exhaust the contemplation of Easter. All you can do each year is contemplate what Easter will have to teach you this time around.
I think it a particularly great challenge to attempt to explain to people who aren't Christians, what it is that Christians see in Easter particularly since the Christian response to Easter is so highly individual, given the richness of the Myth That Really Happened. So I thought that I would take a shot at explaining to an imaginary audience composed of interested and intelligent, but unbelieving, imaginary friends one of the odd ways in which I think Easter looks different when you're seeing it from the other side, as it were. This is very far from the most important thing to understand about Easter. But it's interesting, I think, in its own quirky way, and it's almost certainly something that hasn't occurred to you if you are not yourself a Christian.
God is, of course, the Author of the human story, the Dramatist who created this world that famously is all a stage. Most monotheists would agree with that, at least in some sense. Now, Easter tells us what kind of story God is writing it is a mystery novel and a thriller and a romance all rolled into one, but most especially it's the kind of novel where you can't tell what's going to happen next. It turns out that the infinite God is not unlike M. Night Shyamalan the moment when the Resurrection happened is exactly like the moment the audience realizes that Malcolm is himself dead, only more so. The second time through The Sixth Sense the entire story is different from the first time you watched it, because you know the great central secret: Malcolm is dead. And for Christians, the second time through the story, as it were whether it is the story of one's own life and apparently pointless sufferings, or the New Testament story of the disciples cluelessly tagging along behind Jesus without ever figuring out what he was talking about, or even the second time through the Old Testament the second time through, the entire story is transformed, because you know the great central secret: Jesus is alive.
I have a wonderful Jewish friend, a person, by the way, considerably more intelligent and nicer than myself, and one who understands Christianity incomparably more deeply and sympathetically than I understand Judaism. One of my friend's objections to Christianity is precisely that the Resurrection, if it means what Christians and indeed Jesus himself claim it means, radically transforms the apparent meaning of the Tanach and upends all sorts of rabbinic apple-carts, even though the rabbis strove diligently and sincerely to understand the story God was telling. My friend cannot accept that God would be so deceitful and so unfair as to set the Jewish people up to believe one thing and then spring such an astonishing and
unforeseeable surprise upon them. But to a Christian, the Resurrection is the mother of all great plot twists, sprung with a dramatic skill that, as one would expect, utterly transcends the abilities of M. Night Shyamalan or Neil Jordan. Of the millions of people who saw The Sixth Sense or The Crying Game, there are bound to have been a few who figured out the secret before the director's great moment of triumph. But the Resurrection is the one unsurpassingly masterful plot twist that nobody figured out in advance. And Christians rejoice in that moment of unforeseen, unimagined, astonished enlightenment in very much the way moviegoers delighted in the shock of revelation in The Sixth Sense and The Crying Game. Indeed, we suspect that God shaped us to delight in plot twists precisely because He Himself delights in them. The pleasure Shyamalan and Jordan take in knowing that their skill made it possible for viewers to see one movie the first time through and a radically different movie the second time ˆ at the same time recognizing that in fact it has been the same movie, honest to its principles and playing fair with the viewer, all along ˆ is an echo of the pleasure God takes in His greatest of all surprise endings.
But of course, there is the difference that in both The Sixth Sense and The Crying Game, the surprise, while artistically deeply satisfying, is also tragic and poignant. The Resurrection, by contrast, is not only the greatest of all surprise endings ˆ it is also the happiest of all unexpectedly happy endings. What looked on Friday like the most unspeakable of tragedies turns out on Sunday to have been the setup for the most delightful of all romantic comedies. It rather strains the bounds of credulity to think, for example, that Mark Darcy would really choose Bridget Jones, but that patent mismatch fades to nothing beside God the Son‚s choice of us as His Bride ˆ and yet while the former is fiction, the latter is triumphant fact.
Once Easter settles into your heart for good, hope can never be lost. No matter how bleak things may seem, the God who sprung the Resurrection on an unsuspecting world (and, to be candid, a not terribly grateful one, all in all) well, who knows what surprises He has in store for us? Easter assures the Christian of two quite remarkable things about the Eternal, Omnipotent, Omniscient God of the universe: (1) He loves surprises, and (2) He loves us.
Or, as the Christian songwriter/performer Carman Licciardello put it:
On Friday night, they crucified the Lord on Calvary,
But He said, „Don't dread; in three days
I'm gonna live again, you'll see.
When troubles try to bury you and make it hard to pray
It may seem like Friday night
But Sunday's on its way.
 More government interference in the market place.... when will it end!
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Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Friday, May 11, 2007 at 05:00 AM
Economic Theories Fact and Fiction
Conservatism historically has seen government as a problem to overcome, an albatross. President Reagan stated it succinctly when he said, “we need to get government off our backs.” Conservatives usually justify this negative view of government in the name of freedom. They conflate freedom with unregulated markets, anti-unionism, low taxes and a rabid individualism. Without so-called government interference, people would be free to make their own choices. But what has this restricted view of government and the notion of freedom it embraces meant for America’s families today? In one word—disaster.The “you are on your own” notion of government and freedom has meant that American families must live with stagnant wages at a time of high profits and productivity without a way to get ahead no matter how hard they try. It has meant health insecurity for workers and their families as fewer and fewer jobs provide health care coverage. It has meant that workers face their older years without the means they counted on to retire, as corporations have slashed traditional pension plans. And it has meant that half of Americans don’t have the fundamental right to take a day off from work when they are sick without losing a job or a paycheck.....
....We can make different choices that would ensure that Americans who work hard can support themselves and their families. We are free to choose ways that will give families time to share with each other and acquire the means that they and their children need to succeed in our new global economy. But this involves a very different definition of freedom, one that presents a very different agenda that will move us closer to ensuring that America’s families can thrive.
This definition of freedom eliminates the false choices we are saddled with today. This freedom involves more than being left alone. Instead, it offers the opportunity to build healthy families and healthy communities. It involves an investment in people. It is a freedom that recognizes that no one can be free without the basic necessities of life, that we can’t be free unless we are all treated with the dignity and respect we deserve....
....Government can and must play the kind of role that it so successfully performed after World War II, in creating the largest middle class in America’s history. Only government can set minimum standards for wages, health coverage, health and safety, paid sick days, retirement security, and the right to organize a union that ensure that hard working Americans have the basics of a decent life. Only government can ensure that families can be both responsible workers and caring family members by updating the outdated workplace practices and supports.
Only government can play the pivotal role in leveraging our resources to provide what workers need to succeed in our new global economy, and create the supports for workers and their families as they move across jobs and/or in and out of the labor force as their life and jobs circumstances change over time. And it is government which has an irreplaceable role in ensuring that all children have the tools they need to fulfill their potential and that opportunity is not limited to the wealthiest among us.
The role of government is to ensure that the prosperity of our economy is broadly shared amongst all hard working Americans and their families and that we create a society in which all families can thrive. The conservatives have it wrong. It’s not about getting government off our backs. It’s about getting it back on our sides, the sides of working families.
Beth Shulman is a lawyer and consultant focusing on work-related issues. She is the author of The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans.Â
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Thursday, May 10, 2007 at 08:29 PM
I was thinking.... the cost of labour is so inconvenient, I wonder why we allow it to interfere with laissez faire at all. Laissez faire can operate just fine with some older modalities of labour arrangements.... even slavery.
But, we don't have to go that far.... in our laissez faire system, we can still maintain high employment even in cyclic downturns. The formula is simple.... instead of allowing people to go bankrupt, they could be auctioned off into indentured servitude for a period. It's a win-win. The bankrupt are employed, and the owner, or master or whatever gets a labour bargain that helps maximize profits and spread laissez faire goodness throughout the land!
Link
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Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Wednesday, May 09, 2007 at 07:48 PM
Americans are bombarded daily with mixed messages, half-truths, misleading statements, and out-and-out fabrications masquerading as facts. The news media–once the vaunted watchdogs of our republic–are often too timid or distracted to identify these deceptions.
unSpun is the secret decoder ring for the twenty-first-century world of disinformation. Written by Brooks Jackson and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the founders of the acclaimed website FactCheck.org, unSpun reveals the secrets of separating facts from disinformation, such as:
Tthe warning signs of spin, hype, and bogus news;Â common tricks used to deceive us;Â how to find trustworthy and objective sources of information....
Link
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Wednesday, May 09, 2007 at 05:42 PM
But you see, von Mises was arguing against an extreme "Socialist" (not really.... Communist/Totalitarian and Fascist yes....) position of extreme central management. Interestingly, it is classic Liberal laissez faire Economics he was tacitly embracing. The answer is not "either/or" but the best hybrid.... that should be understood as the modern Liberal position.... non-extremist/absolutist in polarity.
The real question then: "What is the function/role of government in the economy?" And, can government redirect economic energies for the common good that would otherwise not be achieved through the process of extreme laissez faire?
Also, implicit.... shall we be governed by a government accountable to ALL the people, or should we default to the Corporate Plutocracy that evolves from the natural, free flowing play of laissez faire capitalism?
Also, implicit.... from where does enlightenment for the common good emerge in a system that is at root based on monetary gain and gravitation toward monopoly?Â
By the way, democracy does not have a monopoly on capitalism. The Chinese are demonstrating that capitalist practice can be grafted to Communist government.... the West has routinely tolerated rightest totalitarian governments of capitalist ilk, and certainly have tolerated pseudo-democratic kleptocracies that are capitalist, all with varying degrees of laissez faire.Friedman was incorrect in his deduction that capitalist practice would necessarily spawn democracy.... and government does matter. So.... how does it matter? What is the function.
Modern Republicanism says government essentially has no function.... it is an extremist position.
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Wednesday, May 09, 2007 at 05:22 AM
I always use these opportunities to learn something new, or revisit something I think I knew so as to learn anew, Kenny. That is to say, in learning an elk to be a gnu, one has to contemplate one might knot no it all! The quote you refer to may or may not be mine.... as you know I sometimes steal from others if I like the material..... even if I don't always agree with it.... like a raven
in that way....
nice shiney ideas dangling in cyberspace :)
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Tuesday, May 08, 2007 at 08:57 PM
!#@$!#$! I did it AGAIN! -- lost a comment due to that !#@$!#$@!# "instant page back" key.
But I think -- hallelujah! -- the problem may be gone for good, thanks to the guy who posted this tip on disabling it. You guys should go check out that post -- including those of you who don't have an IBM ThinkPad -- just for the sake of reading the comments, in which one finds that there are LOTS of people who share my deep-seated desire to find the engineer responsible for those buttons and remove him from the human gene pool.
Hang on, let me test it...
!#$!#@$!@#$!$#@!$#!#@$#@!$#!@$!#@$!#@$#@!
Good thing I copied this comment to the clipboard before trying that button. Maybe I have to restart the computer? [sigh]
Listen, Ghost, I wanted to compliment you on your last couple of posts. You've clearly put a lot of work into getting up to speed on the Austrian thing, and it shows. I want to go back and revisit one particular paragraph of yours with which I disagree, but even though I disagree with it, (a) it's a very reasonable and thoughtful paragraph, (b) I think it's your own composition, and (c) you couldn't possibly have written it four or five days ago. Kudos, is what I say, with all sincerity.
Anyway, I'll have to come back later because -- having lost the post because of that bloody IBM engineer (may a thousand camels in succession use his face as a spittoon, and then may they each visit him a second time...walking backwards) -- I don't have time to start over and recreate it. Sorry about that. But I didn't want to put off telling you how obvious it is that you've been doing your homework. (I hope that doesn't come off as if I'm patronizingly patting your head -- it's certainly not meant that way.)
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Tuesday, May 08, 2007 at 07:21 PM
Max Weber conceded that employing "Ideal Types" was an abstraction but claimed that it was nonetheless essential if one were to understand any particular social phenomena because, unlike physical phenomena, they involve human behaviour which must be interpreted by ideal types. This, together with his antipositivistic argumentation can be viewed as the methodological justification for the assumption of the "rational economic man" (homo economicus).
Homo economicus, or Economic man, is the concept in some economic theories of man (that is, a human) as a rational and self-interested actor who desires wealth, avoids unnecessary labor, and has the ability to make judgments towards those ends.
The term Economic Man was used for the first time in the late nineteenth century by critics of John Stuart Mill’s work on political economy.
Homo economicus bases his choices on a consideration of his own personal "utility function". Economic man is also amoral, ignoring all social values unless adhering to them gives him utility. Some believe such assumptions about humans are not only empirically inaccurate but unethical.
Economists Thorstein Veblen, John Maynard Keynes, Herbert Simon, and many of the Austrian School criticise Homo economicus as an actor with too great of an understanding of macroeconomics and economic forecasting in his decision making. They stress uncertainty and bounded rationality in the making of economic decisions, rather than relying on the rational man who is fully informed of all circumstances impinging on his decisions. They argue that perfect knowledge never exists, which means that all economic activity implies risk.
Empirical studies by Amos Tversky questioned the assumption that investors are rational. In 1995, Tversky demonstrated the tendency of investors to make risk-averse choices in gains, and risk-seeking choices in losses. The investors appeared as very risk-averse for small losses but indifferent for a small chance of a very large loss. This violates economic rationality as usually understood. Further research on this subject, showing other deviations from conventionally-defined economic rationality, is being done in the growing field of experimental or behavioral economics. Some of the broader issues involved in this criticism are studied in Decision Theory of which Rational Choice Theory is only a subset.
Other critics of the Homo economicus model of humanity, such as Bruno Frey, point to the excessive emphasis on extrinsic motivation (rewards and punishments from the social environment) as opposed to intrinsic motivation. For example, it is difficult if not impossible to understand how Homo economicus would be a hero in war or would get inherent pleasure from craftsmanship. Frey and others argue that too much emphasis on rewards and punishments can "crowd out" (discourage) intrinsic motivation: paying a boy for doing household tasks may push him from doing those tasks "to help the family" to doing them simply for the reward.
Altruistic economics rejects the model as unrealistically selfish, arguing that real people have friends to whom they are to a greater or lesser degree altruistic, so it relaxes the restriction that people's utility functions must be independent.
Another weakness is highlighted by sociologists, who argue that Homo economicus ignores an extremely important question, i.e., the origins of tastes and the parameters of the utility function by social influences, training, education, and the like. The exogeneity of tastes (preferences) in this model is the major distinction from Homo sociologicus, in which tastes are taken as partially or even totally determined by the societal environment (see below).
Further critics, learning from the broadly-defined psychoanalytic tradition, criticize the Homo economicus model as ignoring the inner conflicts that real-world individuals suffer, as between short-term and long-term goals (e.g., eating chocolate cake and losing weight) or between individual goals and societal values. Such conflicts may lead to "irrational" behavior involving inconsistency, psychological paralysis, neurosis, and/or psychic pain.
One criticism contends that the Homo economicus model works as a self-fulfilling prophecy if a group of people (a company, a society) accepts its premises, particularly the idea that individuals only ever consider their personal utility function and that—as is often claimed—the "Invisible Hand" works to make these purely self-interested decisions promote the interest of society. Governance structures and social norms of such a group will effectively reward selfishness and discourage or ridicule deviant behavior like altruism, fairness, or teamwork; its idols will be those who most ruthlessly maximize their own utility function. This aspect has risen to wider attention in disciplines like organization science where extrinsic motivation has been found to be not nearly as effective with knowledge workers as it had been for traditional industries, creating a renewed interest in forms of motivation that do not fit into the Homo economicus model. This view however does not account for the fact that acting selfishly is not necessarily the same as acting in a self-interested manner, especially in social units in which altruistic and unselfish behavior is expected.
The clearest case of a self-fulfilling prophecy concerning Homo economicus has been in the teaching of economics. Several research studies have indicated that those students who take economics courses end up being more self-centered than before they took the courses. For example, they are less willing to co-operate with the other player in a "prisoner's-dilemma"-type game.Â
Comparisons between economics and sociology have resulted in a corresponding term Homo sociologicus (introduced by German Sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf in 1958), to parody the image of human nature given in some sociological models that attempt to limit the social forces that determine individual tastes and social values. (The alternative or additional source of these would be biology.) Hirsch, Michaels, and Friedman (1990, p. 44) say that Homo sociologicus is largely a tabula rasa upon which societies and cultures write values and goals; unlike economicus, sociologicus acts not to pursue selfish interests but to fulfill social roles. This "individual" may appear to be all society and no individual. This suggests the need to combine the insights of Homo economicus models with those of Homo sociologicus models in order to create a synthesis, rather than rejecting one or the other.
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Tuesday, May 08, 2007 at 05:17 PM
You see, Ghost, you and the Keynesians both begin with a fundamental assumption that comes from provincial modernist prejudice: the idea that "scientific" both (a) always means "quantitative" and (b) is always superior to "unscientific." Keynes thinks that if the propositions of a particular approach to economic analysis do not lend themselves to application of the differential calculus, then that is a sign that they must be inferior to other economic analyses that have loads of mathematical equations in them. But a non-quantifiable proposition that is valid is superior to a quantifiable proposition that unfortunately does not in fact hold true. And the General Theory is chock full of impressive equations that fall apart as soon as you start asking inconvenient questions such as, "But how exactly would you parameterize that equation?" or, "But for your equation to be 'generally' [i.e. universally] valid, don't people in general have to be so stupid that they not only don't see at first that they're being had, but even more they have to be so stupid that no matter how long it goes on they won't ever figure it out?"
But Kenny, Economics is a Social Science, or Human Science if you will.... but it depends not on the study of individuals (Psychology) or even groups of individuals (Sociology), though the Austrians rightfully highlight the human substratum.
Both Psychology and Sociology have their own issues.... Psychology separating that which is trully "individual" from the collective, and Sociology, understanding the "individual" within the group..... each perspective providing context and alternative viewpoints to the other.... and neither perfectly extractable..... both ultimately appealing to even greater human contexts like culture.
Methodologically, all human sciences run into difficulties with the notion of absolute quantification..... economics, however, is not dependent on the direct observation of individual human activity..... perhaps more so collective activity.... but always a high level artifact of human activity which is perhaps the most "quantifiable" of all the observations because it does investigate and measure artifacts of behaviors that are essentially quantitative in nature.... the movement, development and exchange of quantities, capacities.... etc.
I'm moving fast on this due to lack of time. However that's the gist of my reasoning. Economics is a human science categorically different than the other human sciences, and amongst them the most conducive to quantitative thinking. Austrians realized the underlying fact, but then back-slid into old philosophical assumptions that simply returned them to a notion that if they could only grasp all the necessary individual factors they could create the predictive engine.... and if they took the position that this was undoable, then what's the point?
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Tuesday, May 08, 2007 at 05:23 AM
Oh, and by the way, Ghost, I did notice the compliment about how I'm rather brighter than the average Republican. Thank you very much, and may I observe that I am always delighted to find something, like this, on which the two of us agree.
;-)
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Tuesday, May 08, 2007 at 02:04 AM
[chuckling] "Economics as a science is pretty much impossible..."
You sound exactly like Keynes complaining that, "To say that net output to-day is greater, but the price-level lower, than ten years ago or one year ago, is a proposition of a similar character to the statement that Queen Victoria was a better queen but not a happier woman than Queen Elizabeth — a proposition not without meaning and not without interest, but unsuitable as material for the differential calculus. Our precision will be a mock precision if we try to use such partly vague and non-quantitative concepts as the basis of a quantitative analysis..."
You see, Ghost, you and the Keynesians both begin with a fundamental assumption that comes from provincial modernist prejudice: the idea that "scientific" both (a) always means "quantitative" and (b) is always superior to "unscientific." Keynes thinks that if the propositions of a particular approach to economic analysis do not lend themselves to application of the differential calculus, then that is a sign that they must be inferior to other economic analyses that have loads of mathematical equations in them. But a non-quantifiable proposition that is valid is superior to a quantifiable proposition that unfortunately does not in fact hold true. And the General Theory is chock full of impressive equations that fall apart as soon as you start asking inconvenient questions such as, "But how exactly would you parameterize that equation?" or, "But for your equation to be 'generally' [i.e. universally] valid, don't people in general have to be so stupid that they not only don't see at first that they're being had, but even more they have to be so stupid that no matter how long it goes on they won't ever figure it out?"
Thus von Mises's proof that socialism cannot possibly work is not a proof within which differential calculus can be wielded. Indeed, its central point is precisely that any attempt to plan production and consumption numbers centrally requires quantification of all sorts of variables that -- being ultimately driven by the preferences of individuals, which preferences, due to fundamental characteristics of the human condition, are inevitably subjective, wildly variant throughout an intractably non-homogenous population, and ever-changing -- cannot possibly be quantified except insofar as they are embodied in the price levels established on a free market. Therefore the only possible way for the planners to have data that would allow them to make even vaguely reasonable Five-Year Plans, would be to refrain from "planning" the economy (in the socialist sense). Thus the socialist attempt to improve the economy by overriding the follies of the wild and undisciplined chaos of the free market with the enlightened priestly guidance of the wise Snowballs and Squealers and Napoleans...um, sorry, I mean to say of the Wise Economists, Politicians, and Bureaucrats...at any rate, the socialist attempt to improve the economy by subjecting it to socialist planning is pretty much equivalent to a man's attempting to improve his sperm count by castrating himself.
The proof was not a proof that used calculus; it was instead a proof that you could take every mathematical genius in the world and put them to work solving equations to help plan a socialist economy, and the planning still would not work. The fact that von Mises's arguments eschewed the use of numbers made lots of silly persons sneer at those arguments as "unscientific" because they weren't numerical.
But the fact that they were "unscientific" (i.e., non-numerical) did not keep them from being right. And the fact that von Mises's perfectly valid demonstration of socialism's destiny of failure was not a "scientific" (i.e., numerical) demonstration, didn't keep socialism from going right on ahead and failing anyway.
Note also the prejudicial language, "Economics as a science is impossible as described by the Austrian School.... might be why nobody actually practices it." Note the assumption that economics is something you practice, something that economists do. The fact is that the Austrian school does continue to have a sizable stable of people who think that the bulk of its principles and conclusions are valid, and who attempt to influence public policy based on those principles and conclusions -- which, by the way, is not rendered out-of-court by being "unscientific" (in the sense in which Ghost is here wielding perjorative implication) any more than it is ineligible to attempt to influence public policy based on such highly "unscientific" principles and conclusions as all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness...
When Austrians practice economics, they do not "do" economics the way Keynesians and other qualitative schools do; that is certainly true. But to leap from that obvious fact to the absurd conclusion that nobody does Austrian economics is hilariously childish. Let's say somebody with a deep-seated prejudice toward the idea that the only valid analysis is quantitative analysis, says, "Nobody practices Austrian economics," implying by that (as Ghost at least wants us to think the person she's quoting is implying) that Austrian economics is obsolete and invalid. (Notice, by the way, how this is in fact an attempt to avoid facing up to the challenge of actually refuting the Austrian arguments, by a blatant argumentum ad populum.) In such a case, what they really mean is, "You can't find anybody who practices Austrian economics, who does Austrian economics the way we do Keynesian economics, and therefore nobody practices Austrian economics." This has precisely as much logical validity as saying, "You can't find any baseball players who play baseball in a way that makes it look like they're playing rugby, and therefore nobody plays baseball." If you go on to try to imply that this proves that Austrian economics are inferior to Keynesian arguments, then you wind up with something like the following:
"Baseball is a stupid and pointless sport. When you play it, it doesn't look at all like rugby, and therefore it isn't really a sport at all...which explains why nobody plays it. And this proves that baseball is stupid, pointless, and inferior to rugby."
Let me give you an example from the General Theory. Here is a paragraph that Keynes uses to work up to his grand idea of getting labor to accept lower real wages by sneaking a pay cut on them through the back door of inflation rather than through the front door of saying, "You're getting a pay cut starting next Friday."
Now, Keynes goes on from here to do all sorts of fancy things with pseudo-mathematical formulas and such. But the Austrians looked at this and said simply, "There may be many reasons that people accept small erosions of purchasing power through inflation that they wouldn't accept as a nominal wage cut -- they may prefer not to have to be in a constant state of negotiation and may therefore allow a certain amount of variance as the cost of being able to renegotiate at intervals rather than constantly; or the non-monetary incentive [Austrians, you remember, are very well aware that people are motivated by many things other than money] of not being a scab may create a step function of utility at the current minimum union wage; or, considering the educational level of most manual laborers here in the 1930's, they may just be too ignorant to realize that they are getting swindled. But insofar as the money matters to people, it's the purchasing power of the money that dominates their motivation."
From this the Austrians went on to observe that manual laborers, while they might be uneducated, were not stupid, and that if you kept on inflating the currency, they would start factoring expected inflation into their pay demands. And once they did that, then the Keynesian inflation would stop having the Keynesian employment effect; and if you wanted to get that effect you'd have to speed up the inflation. You would, in fact, start getting a race between the laborers and the Keynesian money-degraders. If the Keynesians kept trying to stay ahead, the rate of inflation would get faster and faster until they blew up all public confidence in their currency and people abandoned it for other "currencies" (by, for example, demanding that their wages be specified in terms of a foreign hard currency or in terms of a synthetic currency that automatically adjusted the nominal rate to match changes in some proxy for inflation such as the CPI). But if they decided to reign in inflation at some point, then they could either try to stabilize it at a constant rate of inflation, or else actually to lower the rate of inflation. Keeping the rate high but constant would have exactly the same economic effect as keeping a stable currency would have had if you hadn't gotten people to the point of expecting your currency to become ever more worthless with the passage of time. But actually cutting the rate below the level people expected -- why, that would have the same effect as deflation would have had on a previously stable currency, at least until people had finished the painful and disruptive process of adjusting their inflation expectations back down.
These arguments are not numerical, nor are they derived from complicated mathematical models or from data-mining out of statistical databases. That doesn't change the fact that they do in fact accurately describe the way real live human beings really do behave. And the fact that the Keynesians waved around lots of impressive-looking "scientific" mathematical equations with Greek letters while the Austrians scorned them...well, that doesn't change the fact that millions upon millions of poor and middle-class Third Worlders know from all too bitter personal experience just how devastating it is to go through a Keynesian hyper-inflation. And it doesn't change the fact that when Keynesian America, having benefitted from observation of Third World Keynesian hyperinflation, tried to reign in U.S.-dollar inflation, they got (to the astonishment of Keynesians but quite in accord with the expectation of Austrians) "stagflation" -- that is, they got high-teens inflation combined with all the symptoms of a serious recession.
The Austrian school, in other words, gained influence in public affairs, and prestige among the sensible people who live in the real world (as opposed to the people who live in the ivory-tower, protected-from-the-reality-of-the-free-market world of academia), precisely because what the Austrians had warned would happen if people took the Keynesians' advice, turned out to be exactly what happened. The fact that the Austrians' predictions were based on fundamental and unchanging elements of human nature and human action rather than on "scientific" numerical analysis didn't change the fact that the Austrians had turned out to be right and the Keynesians had turned out to be wrong.
By the way, Ghost, to change the subject just a bit: I'm having trouble reconciling your position on global warming with your position on economic theory. Unless I'm much mistaken, the big deal about global warming is that in the long run -- say, fifty years from now -- bad things are going to happen. But aren't you a Keynesian? And doesn't that mean -- after all, you yourself approvingly cited this very bit of Keynesian repartee -- that "in the long run, we're all dead"? How does it come about that in the area of global warming we're supposed to look at the long run, for the sake of our children; but in the area of economics we're supposed to say, "Après moi, le déluge"? The young Frenchmen and Dutchmen who are fleeing their homelands in search of economic opportunity and civic order, neither of which may now be found in said homelands because of the accumlated piper's bills from a half-century of their parents' taking a short-term view...you think maybe they might have a preference to offer about whether people should, à la Keynes, ignore the long-term consequences of their short-term attempts to repeal the laws of economics?
Whoops, wait a second, my dear Ghost, it suddenly occurs to me that you later on in your comment also (a) equate "Austrian" with "Republican" (no doubt to the fury of Libertarian Party members from sea to shining sea) and (b) complain that Republican economic ideas have dominated the American political landscape since the Eighties and have come damn near to ruining the country. So I think it's reasonably safe to say that you, at least, disagree, on this point, with whoever it is you're quoting -- you seem to believe that the problem isn't that nobody's practicing Austrian economics, but instead is that the entire Republican Party has been practicing Austrian economics for the last twenty years. One presumes, therefore, that you simply didn't notice that part of the block that you quoted, and therefore I probably shouldn't treat you as having endorsed that part.
One other point about this sine wave thing you keep talking about...actually, two points about that. First, the Austrian contention is not that it doesn't matter how big the oscillations are as long as the average works out fine. On the contrary, the Austrians are very eloquent on the damage and pain inflicted by wild swings in the business cycle, especially to the people who can least afford it. The Austrian contention is that the various schemes politicians come up with to "flatten" the sine wave cannot reliably flatten the sine wave, and most of the time will make it worse. You can attempt to refute the Austrian view of the business cycle (though if you try, and if you are careful to make sure you understand what the Austrians actually argue rather than what their opponents would like you to think the Austrians argue, you will find it not at all easy to refute). What you absolutely cannot do is say that the Austrians don't think the oscillations of the business cycle do any harm.
Secondly, I suspect that you, like the overwhelming majority of moderately mathematically educated Americans...well, here, let's do a thought experiment. Picture a sine wave for me, okay?
Got it? Are you picturing it?
Okay. Now answer this question honestly: isn't the sine wave you're picturing oscillating around the x-axis? That is to say, a sine wave oscillates around a central line, and when somebody says "sine wave" non-mathematicians automatically and unthinkingly visualize that line as horizontal. But the central line around which the business cycle fluctuates, is almost never horizontal -- the overall standard of living in any given society is usually either trending upward (the case over most of history for the human race as a whole) or downward (frequently the case for declining and falling Roman and British and similar empires). And while the amplitude of the oscillations is no doubt significant, surely the slope of the central trend line is significant as well?
The Austrian contention is that when the government attempts to manipulate the economy "for the common good" will -- except sometimes in the short term by good luck and by putting off piper-paying until a later administration's watch -- these attempts both decrease the slope of the central line and inflame the volatility of the oscillations. To pretend that the Austrian attitude toward the business cycle is, "Who cares about the oscillations as long as the average works out all right?" is to misrepresent their position in the short run and further to ignore the very sensible reasons they have for demanding that the long run be taken into account as well.
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Tuesday, May 08, 2007 at 01:58 AM
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Monday, May 07, 2007 at 08:54 PM
Milton Friedman
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Monday, May 07, 2007 at 08:17 PM
Actually Kenny, the concept of homeostasis applies to both the earths environment and economics. You're link on how hard it is to destroy the earth underscores my earlier statement that homeostasis can be achieved without the continued existence of the human race. Gaia will crush us like roaches..... we are of course like roaches in our drive to survive, however, as nofate pointed out, the span of our existence on earth compared to the apparent age of the earth is.... did he say something about farting?
Anyway, too.... to give a back-handed slap at Austrian School, economic homeostasis can be achieved under conditions that do not include widespread human satisfaction.
Imagine an equation in which total collapse is simply a homeostatic condition within a chronically erratic business cycle..... but as long as the "big dogs" are making buck.... who cares, right? There are always "winners" even in a depression, and that which does not kill me makes me stronger..... better prepared to "win" on the next cycle.
Now, if you want to modify your notion of laissez faire to include human-value factors such as "environment", "quality-of-life", "distribution of wealth", and governmental regulations that flatten the sine wave around the some mean, median or mode.... fine..... then the economic philosophy can be laissez faire. And if the Austrian School produces that, then that is just wonderous.
Otherwise, "Austrian School" from this Republican administration is just a euphemism for "We're going to do what we darn well please."Â
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Monday, May 07, 2007 at 07:29 PM
Von Mises, the Austrian economist, maintained that economics is a permanent, a priori, and purely deductive science, which he calls praexology, and which he says is developed entirely from introspectively and intuitively self-evident propositions. But this is a minority view. Many more cultural science researchers admit to cultural change and its constituent meaning change on the part of the actors. And since this meaning change can happen in the actors, it can happen in the researchers also, since their practice of cultural science research is also human action. However, the cultural science researchers’ examination of cultural change is simply comparative in the sense that it is not a componential semantical analysis.
As with neoclassical economists, Austrians reject classical cost of production theories, most famously the labor theory of value. Instead they explain value by reference to the subjective preferences of individuals. This psychological aspect to Menger's economics has been attributed to the school's birth in turn of the century Vienna. Supply and demand are explained by aggregating over the decisions of individuals, following the precepts of methodological individualism, which asserts that only individuals and not collectives make decisions, and marginalist arguments, which compare the costs and benefits for incremental changes.
I would say the Austrian Schools sets up its theoretical system in such a way that it would essentially be impossible to have a "science" of economics.... it fails to understand the nature of the "individual" from a psychological perspective, choosing instead to believe in some absolute, ahistorical substratum of behavior from which the activities of individuals in "aggregate" (just add it all up positivist) can be deduced within the framework of Austrian Economist's who are, as of course human individuals, introspectively and intuitively deducing self-evident propositions.
Good luck with that.
Modern schools of Psychology, Sociology and I dare say Economics have pretty much shed the insurmountable obstacles to faithful observation of phenomena created by antideluvian philosophical assumptions. Economics as a science is impossible as described by the Austrian School.... might be why nobody actually practices it.
No, my friends, the Austrian School is a cynical joke.... a refrain used by a political party that is in essence anti-intellectual; would be hard pressed to count among its numbers those who actually studied let alone understood or practiced arcane Austrian Praexology.
Perhaps that is why Senior Bush once referred to the Republican "supply side" as "Voodoo Economics". Austrian School is abstract, obscure and only penetrable by the likes of Kenny who thinks within the realm of academic discourse and particularities.
Kenny is quite a bit smarter than the average Republican politician. When asked for some sort of academically redeeming rationale for its apparent economics-based-on-greed, the Republican Party replys blithely with a wave of its collective hand saying.... "Why, of course, it is the Austrian School".... As if anybody even knows what that is.... or cares.
Laissez faire in praxis for modern Republicanism is simply this: Government at least does nothing to regulate the private sector.... at best it allows the private sector to write the regulations for itself to its own benefit.
It is nothing more and nothing less. Voodoo Economics.... the world never existed as thought in the theory (theories), and the study of that world would be impossible if it had.Â
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Monday, May 07, 2007 at 06:57 PM
Okay, I have mostly stayed out of the global warming thing, but since I think Ghost would rather have me giving her a hard time about global warming than to have me correcting her logic (I don't know where you copied the bit about the fallacy of composition, my dear Ghost, but whoever you copied it from understands neither the fallacy of composition, nor the fallacy of hypostasization, nor the teachings of the Austrian school), I think we'll stick to the global warming topic long enough for me to provide two links.
The first one, I'm only linking to because the Ghost appeals to "common sense," which is precisely what one has to throw out of the window in order to by the Armageddon propaganda of the global warming crowd. This would be why I entitled this post "Some common-sense musings on global warming." That post started a fairly long conversation with my friend Jim Raffensperger (see the comments to that response and to this one, and then follow the chain of links), which ball has been in my court for some time.
Since you are bringing logic into the conversation, my dear Ghost -- a decision of which I highly approve, I might add -- you should recognize that your entire argument in favor of global warming is an appeal to authority. Do you, by chance, know the criteria by which one tests the validity of an appeal to authority? (Hint: the global warming "scientific consensus" fails every such test spectacularly; if "all reputable scientists" are telling us the truth, they are going to peculiar, and one would think unnecessary, pains to do so entirely by means of dishonest tactics.)
Oh, hell, while we're on the topic, I suppose I should just go ahead and whack you soundly on the whole-sum-of-parts thing. The Austrians most definitely do not say that the whole economy is equal to the sum of the parts of the economy. Whoever told you that was either very, very stupid, or else was lying. What the Austrians do say is that an argument that depends upon the fallacy of hypostasization does not magically become a valid argument just because the place you decide to apply it is in the field of economics. In other words, if you cannot take your macroeconomic principles and show how they are logically driven by individual human actions and decisions -- which are the only actions and decisions that actually exist -- then your macroeconomic principles are not going to be valid and they are going to betray you.
If you don't think this is true, then go ask any technical stock trader or futures trader what "curve-fitting" is.
Now, back to teasing you about your settled conviction that human beings have such godlike powers that we can over the next fifty years raise the earth's temperature to a high enough level to cause massively destructive climate change -- which opinion, fascinatingly enough, coincides with the apparent conviction that the human race is so hopelessly incompetent, and its pace of technological advancement so slow, and its powers of creativity and invention so impoverished, that we can be confident that at no time in the next half-century will anybody come up with technology that is perfectly capable of mitigating the effects of a degree or two of global climate change at vastly less cost than the draconian measures of increased statism that are being advanced by liberals using global warming as their excuse. Enjoy the following link that has long been in my Favorites list:
How To Destroy The Earth
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Monday, May 07, 2007 at 05:40 PM
Nonsense... just because some tried to debunk my overall assessment doesn't mean it was debunked. Kenny's argument was that I just didn't understand the Austrian School.... well whoopty doo.
The big theoretical injection of the Austrian School was that it based itself on human behavior.... it acknowledged Economics to be a human science.... but then it tacitly drug in old positivist philosophy..... the whole is equal to the sum of its parts ( I offer Gestalt as an empirical alternative to postivism), then predicated praexology on the near impossible task of identifying only what "must" happen in the individual behavior of humans from a logical substratum.... since logic is involved in only part of human activity, if not impossible (to capture all necessary factors), only partial in its ultimate output. Austrian School influenced Keynesian Economics, and was superceded by it. Keynesian principles still explain far more economic phenomena than Austrian Praexology.... if there ever trully was such a thing.
As far as the "whole rest of the population" is concerned, it really takes Republican propaganda to conveniently convince people that conspicuous consumption of energy is merely a "life style" choice with no reprecussions.
Anybody can figure out using common sense that carbon emissions create greenhouse gas, and greenhouse gas traps heat energy in the atmosphere, and that those emissions have spiked since the industrial revolution, that it probably would be a good idea to deal with that human waste.
I believe the Scientists.... certainly not an "I'm in the pocket of big polluting industries" Republican politicians.
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Monday, May 07, 2007 at 05:02 PM
Well the alternative point of view is like laissez faire capitalism.... everything will just take care of itself.... all systems strive toward homeostasis.
The problem is that homeostasis does not always suit human existence..... the earth may homeostatically compensate for the impact of human waste by eliminating humans.
As has already been pointed out, your twisted view of laissez faire and capitalism and the way they work, has already been debunked.
The problem is that homeostasis does not always suit human existence So, based on a lot of pseudo-science that may or may not be accurate, due to the unimaginable complexity of modeling the future course of the earth's climate, we are all supposed to turn over our freedom and decision making ability as an electorate to a bunch of pointy headed intellectuals that KNOW that they are right and the whole of the rest of the earth's population is wrong??? (Except China and India and Russia of course because the U.S. enslaved and raped and pillaged their peoples and resources for so long, it is now time for a little pay back). And who is it that gets to make these decisions for us???
the earth may homeostatically compensate for the impact of human waste by eliminating humans Guess what Ghost? I agree with that statement 90%. But changing several words puts me in agreement 100%! Try this: the earth will homeostatically compensate by having an extinction event. Guess what GD? We're all going to die. And the earth and/or the sun may play a big part in it. According to one chart I have, there have been 83 extinction events in the last 600 million years! (Reference: Sepkoski, JJ, Jr. 1994. Extinction and the fossil record. Geotimes March 15 - 17) Five of those were major events, meaning large numbers of species/families died off. The last minor event was about 10-11,000 years ago. One nice chart I have puts it this way: Quaternary Period: "The Age of Man", 1.8 mya to today. For the period 1.8 m(illion)ya to 11,000 ya, The fist humans (Homo Sapiens) evolve. Mammoths, mastodons, sabertoothed cats, giant ground sloths, and other Pleistocene megafauna. A mass extinction of large mammals and many birds happened about 10,000 years ago, probably caused by the end of the last ice age. (sorry, I don't have the reference for that last, but just search on "extinction events" and you will get hundreds of hits, some scientific, some very politically "scientific") It ends with: Holocene: 11,000 ya to today: Human Civilization. There have also been several Flood Basalt events, i.e. the Siberian and Deccan traps in which fantastic magma flows occurred over decades and threw out >1000 cubic kilometers of material. Here is a wikipedia description of the Deccan Traps: The Deccan Traps is a large igneous province located on the Deccan Plateau of west-central India and is one of the largest volcanic features on Earth. It consists of multiple layers of solidified flood basalt that together are more than 2,000 m thick and cover an area of 500,000 km². The term 'traps' is derived from the Swedish word for stairs (trappa, or sometimes trapp), referring to the step-like hills forming the landscape of the region...This series of eruptions may have lasted fewer than 30,000 years in total. The gases released in the process may have played a role in the K-T extinction event, which included the extinction of the dinosaurs...Before the Deccan Traps region was reduced to its current size by erosion and continental drift, it is estimated that the original area covered by the lava flows was as large as 1.5 million km², approximately half the size of modern India. The present volume of directly observable lava flows is estimated to be around 512,000 km³
Then there was also the Siberian Traps: The massive eruptive event spans the Permian-Triassic boundary, about 251 to 250 million years ago, and was essentially coincident with the Permian-Triassic extinction event in what was one of the largest known volcanic events of the last 500 million years of Earth's geological history. The Siberian Traps are the largest known volcanic eruption ever to have occurred in the history of Earth...Vast volumes of basaltic lava paved over a large expanse of primeval Siberia in a flood basalt event. Today the area covered is about 2 million km² and estimates of the original coverage are as high as 7 million km². The original volume of lava is estimated to range from 1 to 4 million km³.
The area covered lies between 50 and 75 degrees north latitude and 60 to 120 degrees east longitude. The volcanism continued for a million years and spanned the Permian-Triassic boundary. There is no firm evidence that this event caused (or helped cause) the Permian extinction, but the timing of the two events is provocative.
To put it crudely, as Herzberg said: human civilization is but a couple of farts in a hurricane. Which of you power seeking friends is going to stop the next extinction event Ghost? Until it happens, what we have are a bunch of socialists trying to convince the masses that they need to turn over their power of the vote to the social planners that they will install to force the rest of us to comply with their supposedly "enlightened" regulations. I see no difference between what is going on now, and the power grab by the communists in Russia in 1917, China in 1947(?), etc. There will be forced labor camps and the forced "re-education" of millions. Read The Gulag Archepelago or The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression for further information about the extent that it can get to. I'd rather take the earth's "homeostasis" than your and your buddies repressive schemes any day, Ghost.
Posted by: nofate | Monday, May 07, 2007 at 12:12 PM
Carried away by a moonlight shadow
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Sunday, May 06, 2007 at 09:37 PM
Well the alternative point of view is like laissez faire capitalism.... everything will just take care of itself.... all systems strive toward homeostasis.
The problem is that homeostasis does not always suit human existence..... the earth may homeostatically compensate for the impact of human waste by eliminating humans.
Nobody trusts Republican points of view anymore.... they are all about propaganda and being "on message". Facts don't matter to them.... the only thing that matters is corporate profit margins. Anything goes as long as the corporations are making a profit.... it really is that simplistic an ideology.
The factual debate about whether global warming is real is, or at least should be, over. The question now is what to do about it.
Hail to the Polluter-in-Chief and the Republican Party!Â
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Sunday, May 06, 2007 at 03:08 PM
So Cockburn and Herzberg are "academic gadflys"? Excommunicated from the church of global warming, more likely. When you can't come up with facts, you spout the party line in four different comments in the last 24 hrs???, i.e.:
the preponderance of science sees anthropomorphic-generated Global Warming trends... An article of faith, Ghost. You have seen the references I have posted, as well as others, but you steadfastly refuse to give up your belief that political power needs to be handed over to those who truly believe the anthropomorphic global warming is proven science. Absolutely nothing has been proven. To be proven, results have to be reproducible. As shown in the article I mentioned earlier (www.americanthinker.com/2007/02/numerical_models_integrated_ci.html), it is nearly impossible to reliably reproduce results in a small closed system in a microprocessor manufacturing facility that is taking extreme pains to control every variable. Yet, you and many "scientists" are claiming that human caused global warming based on less than a couple of hundred years of spotty data, can be modeled as a complex system that can accurately predict the weather on the earth 50 or more years out.
The fact that these artificial "climates" are closed systems far simpler than the global climate, have the advantage of the experimental method, and are subject to precise controls, and yet are frequently wrong, should lend some humility to those who make grand predictions about the future of the earth's atmosphere
To do this modeling, a long list of variables must be contrilled for: As with all fluid mechanics models, the flow field of a climate model (i.e. the entire atmosphere) is divided into three-dimensional grids of small volume elements designated by latitude, longitude and altitude. Each volume element of the grid is then characterized with parameters such as pressure, temperature, wind velocity, etc., and equations that relate these factors. Air and energy that leave one volume element enters the adjacent one. When summed across all volume elements, the model keeps track of the flows of air and energy in the entire atmosphere. Many factors must be accounted (see below). Boundary conditions must be set: in this case, the boundary of the atmosphere is land or ocean surface on the bottom, and some boundary in space on the top; these yield rules (e.g. air cannot flow into the surface of the earth). Then, Initial Conditions must be set: this means that the grid's equations are "populated" with the known values of the parameters characterizing the atmosphere such as pressure, temperature, and humidity profiles measured today.
Finally, the computer calculation can commence: A unit of time (a second, minute, day) is assumed to pass and the computer calculates the next "state" of the model based on the initial conditions, the boundary conditions and the other equations of the model. This process is repeated again and again, with the new state being the initial condition for calculating the subsequent state, until e.g. 100 years has passed.
Errors can accumulate rapidly. Let's list some of the factors that must be included (by no means an exhaustive list):
Solar flux
Gravity, Pressure
Temperature
Density
Humidity
Earth's rotation
Surface temperature
Currents in the Ocean (e.g., Gulf Stream)
Greenhouse gases
CO2 dissolved in the oceans
Polar ice caps
Infrared radiation
Cosmic rays (ionizing radiation)
Earth's magnetic field
Evaporation
Precipitation
Cloud formation
Reflection from clouds
Reflection from snow
Volcanoes
Soot formation
Trace compounds
And many, many others
Even if mathematics could be developed to accurately model each of these factors, the combined model would be infinitely complex requiring some simplifications. Simplifications in turn amount to judgment calls by the modeler. Can we ignore the effects of trace compounds? Well, we were told that trace amounts of chlorofluoro compounds had profound effects on the ozone layer, necessitating the banning of their use in refrigerators and as aerosol spray propellants. Can we ignore cosmic rays? Well, they cause ions (electrically charged molecules) which affect the ozone layer and also catalyze formation of rain-drops and soot particles.
As with all models, it is perilous to ignore factors in the absence of complete experimental data which might have otherwise have significant effect.
Perhaps most critically, the role of precipitation in climate seems to be understated in the numerical global climate models.(my emphases)
MODELS... It is ALL based on models, set up by humans with their own biases and judgements as to what to include or emphasize and what to exclude or de-emphasize.
Ghost, I know there are many millions of you out there that truly believe that political power should be handed over to these politicians based on these so called "consensus science" theories, but they are just theories, nothing more. I cannot go along with it.
Science, being a human activity of concensus based on investigation has found the proponderance of evidence demonstrates significant anthropomorphic impact on the environment.... not only does the data support it, but anybody who has ever thought about the enormous amount of human time, energy and money required to deal with human waste knows this to be intuitively true See above for my take on that. Not posessing the requisite classical academic training of a single discipline myself, I would love to see Kenny or slowtrain take a run at the holes I see in that statement. Science is an activity of consensus??? I don't have time to develop the research necessary to debunk that statement but that is not right. It's just not right.
Then, of course, back to the insidious rightests. At best, the firing of eight United States attorneys, most of them highly respected, is an example of such profound incompetence that it should cost Mr. Gonzales his job. Hello!!! The U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president. Clinton fired a whole passel of 'em when he arrived, as have other presidents. The biggest mistake in this was Bush and Gonzoles' inability to tell the Dems to go to hell, next subject, yawn. But instead they have managed to give puppets like you ammunition to keep throwing around in venues like this.
gringoman: I too am very impressed with Thompson. We'll see if things develop, it is still so ridiculously early in the process, that I think the best thing he can do is keep talking to the base, and the hell with the media exposure. All they do is distort any conservative candidates message anyway, ala that idiotic "debate" of 30 second sound bites at the Reagan Center (what a travesty) with Chris Matthews, of all people, foaming at the mouth and yelling "Time Governor!...Time Senator!...Time! Time! Time!". And, of course, raking Rudy over the coals again, and again, and again... on abortion!!! Like Matthews really gives a shoot about Rudy's point of view on abortion, except as it relates to preserving Roe v Wade. It was just a chance to attack an obviously unprepared Rudy and make him look stupid to the base. And carried on MSNBC, the great protector of conservative viewpoints and free expression. What a joke.
Posted by: nofate | Sunday, May 06, 2007 at 01:56 AM
But, as we know, Global Warming is just a side show.... the real news is what Republicans have done during their time in power..... not only do they deliberately govern incompetently (because they don't believe government has a function other than fattening corporate profit margins), they have also actively sought to undermine the American Constitution and its Amendments at every turn. Take Alberto Gonzales, the political appointee to the position of Attorney General.... What a wonderful picture he presents:
One can see why they'd prefer to be challenging scientists over Global Warming.... the wolf is at the door, and it's time to pay the piper.... how's that for mixing metaphores?
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Saturday, May 05, 2007 at 09:45 PM
This is what the Republicans are afraid of.... and they should be. The gig is up.... reality is catching up to lies once again.... simply in another venue.
Â
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Saturday, May 05, 2007 at 08:10 PM
Global Warming is both a Scientific and Political issue. Science, being a human activity of concensus based on investigation has found the proponderance of evidence demonstrates significant anthropomorphic impact on the environment.... not only does the data support it, but anybody who has ever thought about the enormous amount of human time, energy and money required to deal with human waste knows this to be intuitively true.
The Global Warming issue simply puts pressure on government to make corporate citizens accountable and responsible for their carbon footprint. It impacts at the ideological level (Republican inbred political ideology) because people look to the government to regulate, and corporations don't want to be regulated. In modern Republicanism, Corporate Plutocracy has found willing politicians who embrace and do little or no true competent governance.
That is why there is such a disproportionate attack on the idea of Global Warming.... it's not "on message", and in fact challenges the message of a political party that honor no expertise other than expertise required for propaganda and political manipulation.
The records all there, the results are becoming increasingly clear to the American People, and the Republican Party will either change, or be crushed.
Green Republicans will be ascendent in 2008.
Dubya's legacy.... the fruition of a rotting tree of thought, is dying. RIP
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Saturday, May 05, 2007 at 07:14 PM
GD, the Gore Warmological Scientists (their state-funded grants all in order), now attacking even dedicated socialist Alexander Cockburn (his father was a prominent Communist in Great Britain) for heresy, need to do more than pompous screeds with "expertise" about the CO2 on Venus, as if that destroys the logic and sense of solar radiation being the key generator of global warming. For example, let them take a trip to Mars. On Mars they will not find Venusian blankets of CO2. Neither will they find Western corporate polluters, nor even the Chinese Communist-capitalist polluters who they are much more timid about confronting---just as your typical secular leftie will wet his or her pants if needing to tackle Islam instead of Christians. And guess what? They will find global warming on Mars. Now. And not a capitalist in sight. But a whole lot of sunlight (ergo radiation) in sight.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
From gringoVision......Reviewing the May 03 Republican debate, Peggy Noonan, a former aide to Ronald Reagan, laid it on nice and thick in the Wall Street Journal...."But behind the hopeful candidates, a dwarfing shadow loomed, a shadow almost palpable in its power …" She was referring, of course, to a no-show, someone who hasn't even entered the race yet, a man who, as gringommentary last week predicted, leading Pub contenders have reason to fear, despite having a huge head-start over him in the do-or-die matters of fund-raising and organization. Peggy's "dwarfing shadow" would be, yes, the Tennessean Fred Thompson. So, is it time to know more about this lawyer and celebrated TV actor, as rivals and enemies hurry into serious dirt digging mode? Yes, no question. It turns out that former Senator Thompson is also known to think and to write. Apparently, despite a certain stately, even courtly manner, he will even engage the controversial, i.e. matter that will make passionate friends and equally passionate enemies. E.g. Here is a recent article in which he confronts two figures who polarize on a level comparable to Hillary Rodham Clinton and George Walker Bush: namely Fidel Castro and Michael Moore, not to mention Hollywood and the "strange infatuation" with El Commandante, the world's longest living dictator (surpassing not only the 12-year reign of National Socialist Adolf Hitler, but even the 30-year reign of International Socialist Josip Djugashvili Stalin): THE MYTH OF CUBAN HEALTH CARE (Now at gringommentary or http://pajamasmedia.com/2007/05/the_myth_of_cuban_health_care.php#comments
PS. FYI. Fred Thompson spoke to big Republican gathering in CA last night. On the subject of Democrats' need for their perennial "Tax the Rich" mantra as a cover for their income redistribution schemes to fund their Entitlement Empire, he said that when the "Tax the rich" mantra sounds, the middle class better get away fast. It's all about picking pockets for income redistribution, a game the liberals patented.
Posted by: gringoman | Saturday, May 05, 2007 at 11:27 AM
Funny that most scientists think that the evidence for global warming is as good as scientific evidence ever gets.... the anti-Global Warming crowd has to go looking for academic gad-flys to "assert" their case. Also, the Herzburg-Cockburn argument has been around since at least 2001.... nothing new.
The issue is all about Corporate Lobbies, not common sense or scientific evidence.... the preponderance of science sees anthropomorphic-generated Global Warming trends.
Cockburn is making personal hay on his counterintuitive and singular perspective.... for whatever reason. Keep in mind, he is a professional muckraker who's buisness and purpose is controversy. Â
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Saturday, May 05, 2007 at 09:04 AM
GD: I suppose it is simply an inconvenient fact that you fail to recognize, that three of the main sources I mentioned above are not "modern republican...simple slash and burn economics."
Here is Alexander Cockburn (www.creators.com/opinion/alexander-cockburn/is-global-warming-a-sin.html):
In a couple of hundred years historians will be comparing the frenzies over our supposed human contribution to global warming to the tumults at the latter end of the Tenth Century as the Christian millennium approached. Then as now, the doomsters identified human sinfulness as the propulsive factor in the planet's rapid downward slide.
Then, as now, a buoyant market throve on fear. The Roman Catholic Church sold indulgences like checks. The sinners established a line of credit against bad behavior and could go on sinning. Today a world market in "carbon credits" is in formation. Those whose "carbon footprint" is small can sell their surplus carbon credits to others less virtuous than themselves.
The modern trade is as fantastical as the medieval one. There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of carbon dioxide is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend. The greenhouse fearmongers rely on unverified, crudely oversimplified models to finger mankind's sinful contribution — and carbon trafficking, just like the old indulgences, is powered by guilt, credulity, cynicism and greed.
He goes on to show that decreases in anthropogenic CO2 during the 20th century do NOT correlate with a near continuous slow increase in overall atmospheric CO2, then concludes: It is thus impossible to assert that the increase in atmospheric CO2 stems from people burning fossil fuels.
He goes on to talk about Martin Hertzberg, Ph.D., the man who drew that graph (of manmade vs. overall CO2 levels) and those conclusions, back in 2001. Hertzberg was a meteorologist for three years in the U.S. Navy, an occupation that gave him a lifelong mistrust of climate modeling. Trained in chemistry and physics, a combustion research scientist for most of his career. Herzberg has raised the question, as have a number of other skeptics (read: deniers, aka heretics?) such as Roy W. Spencer, principal research scientist at the Global Hydrology and Climate Center of the National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, AL (www.americanthinker.com/2007/02/numerical_models_integrated_ci.html and www.nypost.com/seven/02262007/postopinion/opedcolumnists/not_that_simple_opedcolumnists_roy_w__spencer.htm?page=0), is CO2, at 380 ppm in the atmosphere, playing a significant role in retaining the 94 percent of solar radiation that the atmosphere absorbs, as against water vapor, also a powerful heat absorber, whose content in a humid tropical atmosphere can be as high as 20,000 ppm? As Hertzberg says, water in the form of oceans, snow, ice cover, clouds and vapor "is overwhelming in the radiative and energy balance between the earth and the sun. … Carbon dioxide and the greenhouse gases are, by comparison, the equivalent of a few farts in a hurricane." And water is exactly that component of the earth's heat balance that the global warming computer models fail to account for. Now that's Cockburn, writing in The Nation. As I said, not your typical "rightest" "simple slash and burn economics" publication. For confirmation, just check out some of Cockburns other writings at the creators syndicate site cited.
The complexity of the systems being modeled is unimaginably intricate. The article mentioned above (www.americanthinker.com/2007/02/numerical_models_integrated_ci.html) that referenced Roy W. Spencer is itself very instructive regarding the unimaginable complexity of integrated circuits that are manufactured by creating artificial atmospheres or "climates" within which chemical vapor deposition (CVD) forms nanometer-scale thin solid films on silicon wafer surfaces. In CVD, metal vapor precursors entrained in carrier gases are used to deposit metal films on surfaces in a condensation process not unlike formation of dew or frost on a lawn. In such CVD processes, premature formation of metal particles is unwanted and needs to be controlled and prevented; such particle formation is akin to precipitation of rain drops in the atmosphere. The semiconductor process industry uses numerical models to predict the behavior of gases and vapors in order to deposit these substances on substrates, and thereby manufacture integrated circuits.. The writer, Jerome J. Schmitt, is himself not a climatologist or meteorologist but I have studied fluid mechanics and gasdynamics and have a general understanding of computer models used in process engineering and goes on to explain that Almost all semiconductor manufacturing processes occur in closed vessels. This permits the engineers to precisely control the input chemicals (gases) and the pressure, temperature, etc. with high degree of precision and reliability. Closed systems are also much easier to model as compared to systems open to the atmosphere (that should tell us something already). Computer models are used to inform the engineering team as the design the shape, temperature ramp, flow rates, etc, etc, (i.e. the thermodynamics) of the new reactor.
Nonetheless, despite the fact that 1) the chemical reactions are highly studied, 2) there exists extensive experience with similar reactors, much of it recorded in the open literature, 3) the input gases and materials are of high and known purity, and 4) the process is controlled with incredible precision, the predictions of the models are often wrong, requiring that the reactor be adjusted empirically to produce the desired product with quality and reliability.
The fact that these artificial "climates" are closed systems far simpler than the global climate, have the advantage of the experimental method, and are subject to precise controls, and yet are frequently wrong, should lend some humility to those who make grand predictions about the future of the earth's atmosphere.
Aside from a long list of variables that must either be included or "simplified", the author points out that there is still the problem of water, i.e. the role of precipitation in climate seems to be understated in the numerical global climate models. And, going back to the Cockburn article, and Hertzbergs contention from above re: "farts in a hurricane", Spencer more eloquently states the same thing: Unless we know how the greenhouse-limiting properties of precipitation systems change with warming, we don't know how much of our current warmth is due to mankind, and we can't estimate how much future warming there will be, either. To solve the global-warming puzzle, we first need to learn much more about the precipitation-system puzzle.
What little evidence we now have suggests that precipitation systems act as a natural thermostat to reduce warming.
And Ghost, your insinuations that conservatives somehow want to pollute the environment and keep the workers of the world living in slave-like conditions is getting really old. We just witnessed the May day slave parade past the reviewing stands of the gnarled leaders of the "Workers Paradise" in Cuba, where the slogan is "A rice cooker in every kitchen, if you have one. Rice later when the U.S. lifts the embargo". The antique media did their best to keep pumping the lie that Cuba's poor masses would have no problems at all if not for the heartless embargo of the evil U.S. No matter that nearly every other country in the world, including China, also so downtrodden by the U.S., is trading whatever goods the Cuban leaders can extort out of their populace to trade with.
What is it in your mind that allows you to believe that I want my children and future generations to grow up in a world where the environment is unlivable? Why do you throw out such accusations against the U.S., clearly one of the most environmentally safe countries in the world, when countries like China and India, coming into their own as industrial powerhouses, and, as always, Russia (an environmental nightmare) are doing next to nothing to help keep environmental pollutants from contaminating the planet? And then, while trashing the planet, flaunting it, flatly stating that they will not reform, and then blaming it on the U.S.!
I think we have fallen down the rabbit hole. You are calling the very people who want to lift up the masses to their highest potential, insidious. Yet you tell these same masses that they cannot achieve their full potential unless the state is their to hold them up. No one can do it themselves because the corporation is going to suck the life blood right out of you while feeding you the illusion that things can be better if you save and work hard. But the state is always there to help you with a safety net run by benevolent bureaucrats with your best interests at heart. Right: Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Teddy Kennedy,...
But an even more important question is this: When are we going to ban Doctors???
Statistically, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners.
Remember: "Guns don't kill people, doctors do!"
cite: (www.americandaughter.com/humor_files/banning.html)
(all emphases are mine)
Posted by: nofate | Friday, May 04, 2007 at 11:43 PM
You're absolutely right nofate. Any human motive, endeavor or enterprise that cuts into Corporate Profits is Socialism. (Sarcasm Mode On)
Or, it's prudent stewardship. I already posted evidence that record Corporate Profits are not even leading to an increase in investment, let alone doing anything good for the environment.
Modern Republicanism is simple slash-and-burn economics.
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Friday, May 04, 2007 at 03:12 PM
Alexandra: Happy Birthday! Hope all is well with you.
GD: thanks for the totally unbiased version of your outlook on the insidious rightest conspiracy that the wascally wepublicans are waging on global warming. But, repeating, the last time I checked, The Nation and Alexander Cockburn and the NY Times were not insidious rightest republican conspiracy rags. Or did you choose to ignore that? Here's one from a "rightest" publication for you, just to keep things from being totally upside down: (www.americanthinker.com/2007/02/weapons_of_global_warming_dest.html)
The center of the battle between socialism and capitalism right now is clearly global warming, and it is fascinating to see what lengths the left will go to advance their forces on this issue. Such actions now include threats to people's jobs if they don't conform to the views expressed by liberals concerning man's "undeniable" role in causing the earth's temperatures to rise...On February 7, former Vice President Al Gore, the left's true champion on this issue, told a group he was speaking in front of in Madrid, Spain, that China is correct to blame America for global warming. Maybe more important, Gore stated to the crowd that this Asian country - which happens to possess the fastest growing economy on the planet with the largest population base - shouldn't be required to participate in climate solutions until the United States does its share.
Those familiar with the strategies employed by socialists must recognize the common tactic of blaming the world's problems on America while absolving all other nation's of any responsibility. Gore is indeed a master at this...Of course, another bugaboo of socialists is the idea of companies making money. As such, the following proclamation by the presumptive favorite to win the Democrat Presidential nomination in 2008, Sen. Hillary Clinton, was quite cautionary:
The other day the oil companies recorded the highest profits in the history of the world. I want to take those profits. And I want to put them into a strategic energy fund that will begin to fund alternative smart energy, alternatives and technologies that will actually begin to move us in the direction of independence.
gringoman: will do. Haven't commented there, just cruising so far.
Posted by: nofate | Friday, May 04, 2007 at 07:33 AM
Happy Birthday Alexandra.
Check out this article providing economic fact and theory:
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Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Friday, May 04, 2007 at 04:51 AM
Happy birthday, Alexandra, and best wishes for many more. I hope you are doing well; we miss you.
Posted by: LilMissIndie | Thursday, May 03, 2007 at 10:19 PM
Alexandra,
Wishing you, not just a Happy Sabbatical, but also a HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
From Nofate....Gringoman: great link. That's going in my favorites. I hope that is not what's going on with Alexandra??? The guy @ Protein Wisdom also comes to mind. She seemed frazzled by some of the weirdo comments she had been having to deal with a while back. Hope I'm off base here, just thinking out loud.
From gringoman: I hear you, Nofate, I hear you....By the way, if you email or comment or anything there, give gringo regards to AMERICAN DAUGHTER, or Nan. (She's the Virginia lady with a background in the American saga and nuclear physics.)
For anyone who didn't see it, this is the comment and link that Nofate was referencing:
As most visitors to Alexandra's understand, there are still brave women in America. Here is another one (with a line of gringomanic introduction, called WEAPON OF MASS INSTRUCTION: AMERICAN DAUGHTER)
If you want to know how a woman with a background in the American saga and nuclear physics is responding to vicious cyber-stalking against the Internet presence of outspoken women, including hers---whether these women dare to address sex crime, Islamofascism or just innovative software---and what she's now packing---don't even think about not reading Nancy K. Mathis' DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT.
http://www.americandaughter.com/index.html?http://frontpage.americandaughter.com/?p=1243
Posted by: gringoman | Thursday, May 03, 2007 at 08:32 PM
A birthday? Kenny, thanks for letting us know, and Alexandra, congratulations and best wishes for many more; may you be forever young. Shalom, Mac Brachman
Posted by: mac brachman | Thursday, May 03, 2007 at 08:20 PM
Kenny,
Thank you for remembering my friend....
Posted by: Alexandra | Thursday, May 03, 2007 at 06:27 PM
We all know that the anti-Global Warming crowd is simply being manipulated by the Corporate Plutocracy. It's just modern Republicanism at work.
Acknowledging that environmental standards and regulations have any validity cuts into their laissez faire arguments and profits.
Whether or not the unchecked green-house gas effects will lead to catastrophe in the near or far term is quite irrelevant to corporations that belch toxic waste into the air and water or support modes of transportation that do the same.
It is all about not having to clean-up after themselves.... to be unchecked and unfettered by any value system other than monetary profit.... catastrophe won't happen in their lifetime, nor in the lifetime of their stockholders.... or at least they hope.... and in the long run we're all dead.
Any idiot knows one has to deal with human waste products.... but it is far more profitable to move your smokestack to the other side of the Rio Grande and spill your sewer pipe into the water.... that mean American government is making us clean up our slop!
These guys are the minority marginalized position in the modern Republican Party:
Republicans for Environmental ProtectionPosted by: Ghost Dansing | Thursday, May 03, 2007 at 06:14 PM
Gobal Warming Deniers now crossing party lines. Someone call Algore and put him on the case:
Is Global Warming a Sin? by Alexander Cockburn in The Nation! (www.thenation.com/doc/20070514/cockburn)
"In a couple of hundred years historians will be comparing the frenzies over our supposed human contribution to global warming to the tumults at the latter end of the tenth century as the Christian millennium approached. Then as now, the doomsters identified human sinfulness as the propulsive factor in the planet's rapid downward slide. Then as now, a buoyant market throve on fear. The Roman Catholic Church sold indulgences like checks. The sinners established a line of credit against bad behavior and could go on sinning. Today a world market in "carbon credits" is in formation. Those whose "carbon footprint" is small can sell their surplus carbon credits to others less virtuous than themselves.
The modern trade is as fantastical as the medieval one. There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of carbon dioxide is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend. The greenhouse fearmongers rely on unverified, crudely oversimplified models to finger mankind's sinful contribution--and carbon trafficking, just like the old indulgences, is powered by guilt, credulity, cynicism and greed."
You have to subscribe to read the rest, but it is an interesting article, if you can find excerpts for free it is worth reading.
The NY Times too??? (www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/weekinreview/29revkin.html?ei=5124&en=141e334ebe4cb9fa&ex=1335585600&adxnnl=1&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink&pagewanted=1&adxnnlx=1178138460-giwiOsqWBWgdmqhq7NLaTg)
“The worst of the carbon-offset programs resemble the Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences back before the Reformation,” said Denis Hayes, the president of the Bullitt Foundation, an environmental grant-making group. “Instead of reducing their carbon footprints, people take private jets and stretch limos, and then think they can buy an indulgence to forgive their sins.”
It appears Algore is having trouble keeping the flock in line. These are not your typical insidious rightest conservative global warming denying publications. Oh my!
Posted by: nofate | Thursday, May 03, 2007 at 03:12 PM
While the concept of eugenics may seem sophisticated, modern.... scientific or whatever, eugenics is nothing more than the human practice and applications of agrarian animal husbandry to the the human population itself.
GD, for once, that is a statement I definitely agree with. The problem for eugenicists, from the beginning, has been how to make "...the unbalance between the birth rate of the 'unfit' and the 'fit'and "...the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective" (as stated by Margaret Sanger) palatable to the masses upon which it was to be practiced. Hitler was obviously not a good spokesperson- he did not know how to be subtle about it. "Hitler's determination to establish his "Master Race" was embraced by German eugenicists. *17 And eugenicists elsewhere failed to criticise the Germans. In the United States, the Birth Control Review praised the effectiveness of the Germans, and published articles by Rudin and others. *18"
But, what I find very interesting is that since WWII, "the eugenics movement continued to thrive, without reform:
The development and promotion of birth control was a major eugenic success... The discovery of the population explosion and the hysteria about the need to control it was a major eugenic success... The field of genetics grew faster than fruit flies in the 1950s, and although the accumulating knowledge was valuable, the field was dominated by eugenicists, who could use their knowledge for eugenic purposes.
UNESCO, founded in 1948, was directed by Julian Huxley, a determined eugenicist who used his global platform very effectively... The welfare state in Britain was based largely on the work of Richard Titmuss, John Maynard Keynes and William Henry Beveridge, members of the Eugenics Society" (www.eugenics-watch.com/intro.html#history)
And of course, in 1973, the eugenicists were handed the keys to the kingdom when the U.S. Supreme Court discovered the "right to privacy" in the penumbra of the constitution. But here (www.eugenics-watch.com/roots/chap10.html), in the words of one of the major movers of eugenicists, is the openly stated plan:
"Voluntary Unconscious Selection"
excerpt from Frederick Osborn's Galton Lecture
Conclusion
It is eighty-six years since Galton published his Hereditary Genius; eighty-six years since he gave us the hope that the average of human intelligence and character could be raised to the level of the upper five or ten percent today; since he envisaged the eugenic movement as something that would sweep the world and make man at last the master of his own destiny on earth. It has not happened. The eugenic movement is nothing but a few small handsful of men in various countries; here in England, in the United States, in India, in France. They are not influencing public opinion. The very word eugenics is in disrepute in some quarters. Yet I still believe in Galton's dream. Probably most of you do. We must ask ourselves, what have we done wrong?
I think we have failed to take into account a trait which is almost universal and is very deep in nature. People simply are not willing to accept the idea that the genetic base on which their character is formed is inferior and should not be repeated in the next generation. We have asked whole groups of people to accept this idea and we have asked individuals to accept it. They have constantly refused, and we have all but killed the eugenic movement.
People will accept the idea of a specific hereditary defect. They will go to a heredity clinic and ask what is the risk of our having a defective child. They balance that risk against the chance of their having a sound child, and they usually come up with a pretty sound decision. But they won't accept the idea that they are in general second rate. We must rely on other motivation.
Given the right circumstances, people will have children in proportion to their ability to care for them. If they feel financially secure, if they enjoy accepting responsibility, if they have warm affectional responses, if they are physically strong and competent, they are likely to have large families, provided they have reasonable psychological conditioning to this end. If they are unable to feed the children they have, if they are afraid of responsibility, if their affectional responses are weak, people don't want many children. If they have effective means of family planning, they won't have many. Our studies have shown this to be true all over the world. On such a base it is surely possible to build a system of voluntary unconscious selection. But the reasons advanced must be generally acceptable reasons. Let's stop telling anyone that they have a generally inferior genetic quality, for they will never agree. Let's base our proposals on the desirability of having children born in homes where they will get affectionate and responsible care, and perhaps our proposals will be accepted.
It seems to me that if it is to progress as it should, eugenics must follow new policies and state its case anew, and that from this rebirth we may, even in our own lifetime, see it moving at last toward the high goals which Galton set for it.
It appears Hitler never really died. He just put on a more effective costume. Or, perhaps a better analogy would be that he was like a spoiled child throwing a tantrum, wanting "it" right now, unwilling to be patient enough to sample each course in it's turn, demanding and attempting to grab the desert before anything else. I had thought that the eugenicists had disappeared after WWII and the Hitlerian debacle. Silly me. Chilling.
BTW, most of the eugenics references came from a Catholic oriented website containing an online wealth of information. The same information, different point of view, is proudly made available on several eugenics oriented sites, just do a search. The main difference of opinion I have with the Catholics is that it is not just the Catholics that are the only ones opposing the eugenics movement. Although they may be correct in stating that they are the only major organised religion specifically in opposition to eugenics. Not sure about that.
Posted by: nofate | Thursday, May 03, 2007 at 01:54 PM
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday, Alexandra
Happy birthday...[big finish]...to...you-u-u [ouch, too early in the morning to try to hit that high a note, sorry]
Much love from Texas, dearest Baroness.
Posted by: Kenny | Thursday, May 03, 2007 at 07:44 AM
While the concept of eugenics may seem sophisticated, modern.... scientific or whatever, eugenics is nothing more than the human practice and applications of agrarian animal husbandry to the the human population itself.
Second only to Man's historical obsession with "creating life" is his manipulating, controlling and modifying the life forms he encounters.
The fascination with such things can be seen in traditional obsessions with royal bloodlines, what pretty celebrity marries another pretty celebrity and has a baby.... hybrid and inbred pets, plants, crops, etc.... eugenics is simply a radicalization of these impulses into the realm of governmental policy and deliberate controls or manipulations.
It is risky business.... delimiting comparatively randomized natural selection processes by positively controlling the means of reproduction inevitably results in problems of inbreeding on a micro and macro scale frequently attended by undesirable and unintended consequences.
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Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Thursday, May 03, 2007 at 05:06 AM
I take finally back. I just revisited the American Daughter link from gringoman, and found this humor section factoid to be apropos to several recent news headlines:
http://www.americandaughter.com/humor_files/banning.html
Posted by: nofate | Thursday, May 03, 2007 at 04:48 AM
Kenny: I'm still screwing the top of my head back on. How you manage to get a handle on all that amazes me. I'll leave you and slowtrain to the long philosophical and logical debates, there's no way I'm even trying to keep up with you two. BTW, while staying on a single topic may be a hallmark of academic style debate, the freewheeling style of conversation here and in life in general, is what most of us are used to, I think, although the level that the debate can descend to, in some other settings or sites, is less than desirable. The high standards at ATB are what attracted a lot of us, I do believe.
Just on the periphery of probably a couple of the topics that have been mentioned, I ran across something interesting about Keynes in Thomas Sowell's The Vision of the Annointed, which I have been re-reading lately: p. 204:
"Utter certainty has long been the hallmark of the annointed. When John Maynard Keynes predicted dire economic problems resulting from underpopulation in Western society-on the eve of sharp increases in population growth-he said that we know "much more securely than we know almost any other social or economic factor relating to the future" that we were facing a "stationary or declining" population level."(25) (sounds eerily like a certain former vice-president, doesn't it?) Here is that footnote: J. M. Keynes, "Some Economic Consequences of a Declining Population," Eugenics Review, April 1937, p. 14.
I just thought that was interesting, as well as the following related tidbits:
www.eugenics-watch.com/intro.html#history
The welfare state in Britain was based largely on the work of Richard Titmuss, John Maynard Keynes and William Henry Beveridge, members of the Eugenics Society.
www.eugenics-watch.com/roots/chap06.html
A short article following Sanger's "Plan for Peace" in the Birth Control Review referred to the views of a prominent economist and officer of the Eugenics Society: "Professor John Maynard Keynes, eminent authority on post-war economic problems, speaks of contraceptive information as the most important aid on the political horizon and says that without it we might as well throw all treaties into the waste basket." Sanger had powerful support for her view that peace required population control.
www.eugenics-watch.com/roots/chap02.html
John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) was perhaps the most influential economist of the 20th century. His ideas had a huge impact in the United States during and after the Great Depression, and in Britain after World War II. This influential economist was an officer of the Eugenics Society (Vice President in 1937, and a Director from 1937 to 1944). Like Beveridge, he was concerned about full employment, balancing population and jobs. He argued for a national policy on population, and looked forward to a time when it would be possible to measure and improve the genetic qualities of a society, as well as controlling their size. After World War II, the industrialized nations met to consider how to assist reconstruction and to stabilize global finances. Keynes represented Britain at the meetings, and helped to lay the foundations for the new World Bank. Over time, the World Bank became a powerful force for population control, providing funds but also putting pressure on governments to adopt national policies with population targets.
www.economyprofessor.com/theorists/johnmaynardkeynes.php
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes brought out his heavy, two-volume Treatise on Money, which effectively set out his Wicksellian theory of the credit cycle. In it, the rudiments of a liquidity preference theory of interest are laid out and Keynes believed it would be his magnum opus. His bubble was soon pricked. Friedrich von Hayek reviewed the Treatise so harshly that Keynes decided to set Piero Sraffa to review (and condemn no less harshly) Hayek's own competing work. The Keynes-Hayek conflict was but one battle in the Cambridge-L.S.E. war.
And, before GD feels compelled to give me a wiki-lecture, I am well aware that some well known conservatives jumped on the eugenics bandwagon also, notably Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt.
On the Global Warming hoax, there was this(www.ft.com/cms/s/48e334ce-f355-11db-9845-000b5df10621.html) from the Financial Times of London: "Companies and individuals rushing to go green have been spending millions on “carbon credit” projects that yield few if any environmental benefits.
A Financial Times investigation has uncovered widespread failings in the new markets for greenhouse gases, suggesting some organisations are paying for emissions reductions that do not take place.
Others are meanwhile making big profits from carbon trading for very small expenditure and in some cases for clean-ups that they would have made anyway."
There is an eye opening new article in (www.americanthinker.com/2007/04/the_muslim_mainstream_and_the.html) American Thinker by Andrew Bostom that points out: "Nearly a century later, the preponderance of contemporary mainstream Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia, apparently share with their murderous, jihad terror waging co-religionists from al-Qaeda the goal (if not necessarily supporting the gruesome means) of re-establishing an Islamic Caliphate."
The article also references an (www.islam-watch.org/IbnWarraq/Fascism.htm) article by Ibn Warraq, who observes " that the most fundamental conception of a Caliphate, "...the constant injunction to obey the Caliph-who is God's Shadow on Earth", is completely incompatible with the creation of a "rights-based individualist philosophy." Well worth the time to read.
Gringoman: great link. That's going in my favorites. I hope that is not what's going on with Alexandra??? The guy @ Protein Wisdom also comes to mind. She seemed frazzled by some of the weirdo comments she had been having to deal with a while back. Hope I'm off base here, just thinking out loud.
And, finally, as a response to the youtube Joan Baez wannabee of GD, here is my own youtube contribution that was brazenly ignored by the antique media: the (www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQo_tg70Zek&mode=related&search=) Gathering Of Eagles, March 17, 2007, Washington DC.
And, finally, again, I've been trying to get this comment up. The gatekeeper not only doesn't seem to like live links (but is selective- you never know which ones it won't like), but I had to go back and remove all the ht.. prefixes, or it kept telling me I was a spam machine. Nuts!
Posted by: nofate | Thursday, May 03, 2007 at 04:38 AM
Not only has Dubya and this Republican administration poorly selected a war, then poorly prosecuted it, they've got America caught in a trap!
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Wednesday, May 02, 2007 at 05:34 PM
Tie a yellow ribbon around something.... something good has begun.... it's only 19 miles to baghdad
LinkÂ
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Tuesday, May 01, 2007 at 07:43 PM
As most visitors to Alexandra's understand, there are still brave women in America. Here is another one (with a line of gringomanic introduction, called WEAPON OF MASS INSTRUCTION: AMERICAN DAUGHTER)
If you want to know how a woman with a background in the American saga and nuclear physics is responding to vicious cyber-stalking against the Internet presence of outspoken women, including hers---whether these women dare to address sex crime, Islamofascism or just innovative software---and what she's now packing---don't even think about not reading Nancy K. Mathis' DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT.
http://www.americandaughter.com/index.html?http://frontpage.americandaughter.com/?p=1243
Posted by: gringoman | Tuesday, May 01, 2007 at 11:21 AM
Economic Reality versus Economic Theories.....
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Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Monday, April 30, 2007 at 04:58 AM
Great Republicans
Throughout his presidency, Eisenhower preached a doctrine of Dynamic Conservatism.
Although he maintained a conservative economic policy, he continued all the major New Deal programs still in operation, especially Social Security. He expanded its programs and rolled them into a new cabinet level agency, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, while extending benefits to an additional 10 million workers. His cabinet, consisting of several corporate executives and one labor leader, was dubbed by one journalist, "Eight millionaires and a plumber."
Eisenhower was extremely popular, winning his second term in 1956 with 457 of 531 votes in the Electoral College, and 57.6% of the popular vote.
Eisenhower supported the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka U.S. Supreme Court decision, in which segregated ("separate but equal") schools were ruled to be unconstitutional. The very next day he told District of Columbia officials to make Washington a model for the rest of the country in integrating black and white public school children.[18] Liberal critics complained Eisenhower was never enthusiastic about civil rights, but he did propose to Congress the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 and signed those acts into law, although both Acts were very weak and added little to the total electorate. Nonetheless, they constituted the first significant civil rights Acts since the 1870s.
The "Little Rock Nine" incident of 1957 involved state refusal to honor a federal court order to integrate the schools. Eisenhower placed the Arkansas National Guard under federal control and sent Army troops to escort nine black students into an all-white public school; this integration did not occur without violence. Eisenhower and Arkansas governor Orval Faubus engaged in tense arguments during this tumultuous period in history.
On January 17, 1961, Eisenhower gave his final televised speech from the Oval Office. In his farewell speech to the nation, Eisenhower raised the issue of the Cold War and role of the U.S. armed forces. He described the Cold War saying: "We face a hostile ideology global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose and insidious in method..." and warned about what he saw as unjustified government spending proposals and continued with a warning that "we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex... Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Sunday, April 29, 2007 at 08:40 PM
Turks Rally in Support of Secularism
And Americans should too! Secularism
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Sunday, April 29, 2007 at 01:57 PM
Here is an interesting article I found.... it is a kind of "back to the future" type piece.... an historical lesson in scapegoating, doing the wrong thing, applauding wrong actions, and lying for political purposes:
LinkPosted by: Ghost Dansing | Sunday, April 29, 2007 at 08:03 AM
Here is some additional information on Capitalism.... from 1948. I do not believe the video title using the term "propaganda" is using the term in the pejorative sense:
CapitalismÂ
And a similar video on Communism:
CommunismÂ
And a Cartoon:
CartoonÂ
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Saturday, April 28, 2007 at 07:39 PM
A quick update on the success Dubya is having in the area of foreign policy:
 A Saudi Prince Tied to Bush Is Sounding Off-Key
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Saturday, April 28, 2007 at 05:27 PM