Garbage In, Garbage Out: Truth, Freedom, and Falsehood in Economic Analysis and Policy Making

 Big Government and Truth

by Robert Higgs

For thousands of years, philosophers have told us that if we are to live our lives at their best, we should seek truth, beauty, and goodness. Of course, each of these qualities has raised thorny issues and provoked ongoing arguments. That people have carried on such arguments, rather than surrendering themselves to their raw appetites and animal instincts, may be counted a valuable thing in itself. A final resolution of such deep questions may lie beyond human capacities.

In regard to goodness and beauty, I have nothing worthwhile to add to the discussion. For guidance in seeking goodness, we may look to saints, theologians, moral philosophers, and moral exemplars of our own acquaintance. For demonstrations of beauty, we may turn to nature and to artists, great and small, who have adorned our lives with the grace of music, poetry, and the visual arts. My own professional qualifications, as an economist and an economic historian, do not equip me to contribute anything of value in these areas.

I do feel qualified, however, to speak with regard to truth, because the search for truth has always served as the foundation of my intellectual endeavors. Moreover, my study, research, and reflection within my own professional domains have brought home to me a relationship that others might do well to ponder and respect—a relationship, indeed, an array of relationships, between truth and freedom, such that anyone who seeks the triumph of truth must also seek to establish freedom in human affairs.

When I began my academic career in 1968, my research specialty was the economic history of the United States. I was expected to publish the findings of my research in reputable professional journals. For a young man just beginning to master his field, carrying out publishable research was a daunting task. Thousands of other writers had already contributed to building up the literature in my field, so adding something of enough importance to merit its publication in a good journal was hardly an easy task.

I discovered, however, that one way to proceed was by identifying significant mistakes in the existing literature and correcting them. Moreover, I soon found that many such mistakes had been made. To put this statement in another way, I found that the existing sources often failed to tell the truth about one thing or another, and in some cases the falsehoods propounded by one writer led later writers, who relied on those false statements, to make errors of their own.

Liberation by the numbers

Some Metrics Regarding the Volume of Online Activity

by ADAM THIERER 

One of my favorite topics lately has been the challenges faced by information control regimes. Jerry Brito and I are writing a big paper on this issue right now. Part of the story we tell is that the sheer scale / volume of modern information flows is becoming so overwhelming that it raises practical questions about just how effective any info control regime can be. [See our recent essays on the topic: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.]  As we continue our research, we’ve been attempting to unearth some good metrics / factoids to help tell this story.  It’s challenging because there aren’t many consistent data sets depicting online data growth over time and some of the best anecdotes from key digital companies are only released sporadically. Anyway, I’d love to hear from others about good metrics and data sets that we should be examining.  In the meantime, here are a few fun facts I’ve unearthed in my research so far. Please let me know if more recent data is available:

§  Facebook: users submit around 650,000 comments on the 100 million pieces of content served up every minute on its site.^[1]

§  YouTube: every minute, over 35 hours of video are uploaded to the site.^[2]

§  eBay is now the world’s largest online marketplace with more than 90 million active users globally and $60 billion in transactions annually, or $2,000 every second.^[3]

§  Google: 34,000 searches per second (2 million per minute; 121 million per hour; 3 billion per day; 88 billion per month)^[4]

§  Twitter already has 300 million users producing 140 million Tweets a day, which adds up to a billion Tweets every 8 days^[5] (@ 1,600 Tweets per second)

§  Apple: more than 3 billion apps have been downloaded from its App Store by customers in over 77 countries.^[6]

§  Yelp: as of March 2011 the site hosted over 17 million user reviews.

§  “Humankind shared 65 exabytes of information in 2007, the equivalent of every person in the world sending out the contents of six newspapers every day.”^[7]

§  Researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, estimate that, in 2008, the world’s 27 million business servers processed 9.57 zettabytes, or 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of information.  This is “the digital equivalent of a 5.6-billion-mile-high stack of books from Earth to Neptune and back to Earth, repeated about 20 times a year.” The study also estimated that enterprise server workloads are doubling about every two years, “which means that by 2024 the world’s enterprise servers will annually process the digital equivalent of a stack of books extending more than 4.37 light-years to Alpha Centauri, our closest neighboring star system in the Milky Way Galaxy.”[8]

[1] Ken Deeter, “Live Commenting: Behind the Scenes,” Facebook.com, February 7, 2011, http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=496077348919. Also see:http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

[2] http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/11/great-scott-over-35-hours-of-video.html

[3] eBay, “Who We Are,” http://www.ebayinc.com/who

[4] Matt McGee, “By The Numbers: Twitter Vs. Facebook Vs. Google Buzz,” SearchEngineLand, February 23, 2010, http://searchengineland.com/by-the-numbers-twitter-vs-facebook-vs-google-buzz-36709

[5] http://blog.twitter.com/2011/03/happy-birthday-twitter.html Also see:http://blog.twitter.com/2010/02/measuring-tweets.html

[6] http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/01/05appstore.html

[7] Martin Hilbert and Priscila Lopez, “The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information,” Science, February 10, 2011,http://annenberg.usc.edu/News%20and%20Events/News/110210Hilbert.aspx.

[8] Rex Graham, “Business Information Consumption: 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 Bytes per Year,” UC San Diego News Center, April 6, 2011, http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/general/04-05BusinessInformation.asp.

Advantages of the separation of supermarkets and state

If Supermarkets Were Like Public Schools

A thought-provoking analogy from Donald Boudreaux:

Suppose that groceries were supplied in the same way as K-12 education. Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties. Nearly half of those tax revenues would then be spent by government officials to build and operate supermarkets. Each family would be assigned to a particular supermarket according to its home address. And each family would get its weekly allotment of groceries—"for free"—from its neighborhood public supermarket.

No family would be permitted to get groceries from a public supermarket outside of its district. Fortunately, though, thanks to a Supreme Court decision, families would be free to shop at private supermarkets that charge directly for the groceries they offer. Private-supermarket families, however, would receive no reductions in their property taxes.

Of course, the quality of public supermarkets would play a major role in families' choices about where to live. Real-estate agents and chambers of commerce in prosperous neighborhoods would brag about the high quality of public supermarkets to which families in their cities and towns are assigned.

Being largely protected from consumer choice, almost all public supermarkets would be worse than private ones. In poor counties the quality of public supermarkets would be downright abysmal. Poor people—entitled in principle to excellent supermarkets—would in fact suffer unusually poor supermarket quality.

How could it be otherwise? Public supermarkets would have captive customers and revenues supplied not by customers but by the government. Of course they wouldn't organize themselves efficiently to meet customers' demands.

Responding to these failures, thoughtful souls would call for "supermarket choice" fueled by vouchers or tax credits. Those calls would be vigorously opposed by public-supermarket administrators and workers.

Opponents of supermarket choice would accuse its proponents of demonizing supermarket workers (who, after all, have no control over their customers' poor eating habits at home). Advocates of choice would also be accused of trying to deny ordinary families the food needed for survival. Such choice, it would be alleged, would drain precious resources from public supermarkets whose poor performance testifies to their overwhelming need for more public funds.

As for the handful of radicals who call for total separation of supermarket and state—well, they would be criticized by almost everyone as antisocial devils indifferent to the starvation that would haunt the land if the provision of groceries were governed exclusively by private market forces.

Paganism in action

"Welcome to the neo-medieval world of Britain’s energy policy. It is a world in which Highland glens are buzzing with bulldozers damming streams for miniature hydro plants, in which the Dogger Bank is to be dotted with windmills at Brobdingnagian expense, in which Heathrow is to burn wood trucked in from Surrey, and Yorkshire wheat is being turned into motor fuel. We are going back to using the landscape to generate our energy. Bad news for the landscape."

Matt Ridley

Yet another quote of the month

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."

Ronald Reagan

History as "community organizing"

One of these young men grew up to be a great world leader, presenting the face of Western Civilization to its barbaric enemies.
The other never did grow up

History or "Herstory"

The Scourge of the Feminist Word Police

By Jacob Laksin 

If you’ve ever felt a twinge of anxiety at hearing someone use “humankind” as a substitute for mankind, or if you’ve winced at the proliferation of the politically correct suffix “person” — as in “chairperson,” or “policeperson” — when the more traditional “man” would be perfectly suitable, chances are you’ve suffered from the corrupting linguistic legacy of feminist writer Kate Swift. Swift, who died ^[1] last week at 87, was one of a squadron of feminist language police whose crusade to remake language to suit their political agendas has wreaked havoc on everyday English.
Feminists had tried to reform language long before Swift and her fellow word scolds arrived on the scene. In 1949, feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir charged that language was “inherited from a masculine society and contains many male prejudices.” She advised that “women have to steal the instrument” and “use it for their own good.”
Swift and her co-author, Casey Miller, attempted precisely such a heist in their influential 1981 book, The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing ^[2]. The book had two main premises, both of them dubious. The first was that sexism and sexual discrimination were embedded in the English language. The second was that the language needed to be radically revised in order to change society’s attitudes and make it more inclusive.
Informed more by feminist ideology than linguistic scholarship, the book’s suggested recommendations ranged from the awkward to the downright absurd. For instance, judging the word “mankind” sexist, the authors recommended that it be replaced with “genkind.” Not content simply to ruin existing language, the authors also proposed feminist-friendly neologisms. Thus, “tey,” “ter” and “tem” were to become the sex-neutral surrogates for “he/she,” “his/her” and “him/her.”
Swift and Casey’s more eccentric suggestions failed to catch on, but their book proved a giant leap for genkind, unleashing a wave of feminist assaults on the English language. Picking up where The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing left off, a “feminist dictionary” soon announced in all seriousness that the word “brotherhood” could no longer be used to describe non-fraternal kinship because “it ignores generations of sisters.” Emboldened, feminists insisted that women must now be referred to as “wimmin,” and that history had to become “herstory.”
Had such linguistic absurdities remained confined to the pages of obscure feminist tracts, they would have been a merely an illiterate footnote to the history of modern English. But they became part of the cultural mainstream when the professional arbiters of language embraced the feminist reformation. And so the American Library Association adopted a resolution pledging to avoid supposedly sexist terminology, while the Linguistic Society of America established a Committee on the Status of Women in Linguistics for the same purpose. Universities turned feminist recommendations into campus policies, and the worlds of publishing and journalism followed suit, ruining language use for new generations of speakers and writers.
Not the least of the problems with the feminist theories of language popularized by Swift is that they were based on a fallacy. Contrary to feminist claims, there was nothing sexist about generic nouns like “man,” which had been used for centuries to describe humans collectively. Nor did pronouns like “he” exclude women, a point author E.B. White made in his classic style guide for good writing, the Elements of Style ^[3]:

The use of he as a pronoun for nouns embracing both genders is a simple, practical convention rooted in the beginnings of the English language. He has lost all suggestion of maleness in these circumstances. The word was unquestionably biased to begin with (the dominant male), but after hundreds of years it has become seemingly indispensable. It has no pejorative connotations; it is never incorrect.

Now it was. History may have been on White’s side, but the culturally ascendant “herstory” was not, and it was feminist pseudo-linguists like Swift who won out in the end. The result was a steady decline in clarity and a surge in the kind of reader-proof, politically correct verbiage that today defines academic jargon — a writing style “somewhere to the left of gibberish,” ^[4] as an exasperated graduate student once put it.

Spain’s Socialist Utopia Mugged by Reality

A massive wave of social unrest in cities across Spain, dubbed the Spanish Revolution, reflects the failure of the social welfare state model to provide Spanish youth with a future, much less a present

By Soeren Kern  

Throngs of Spanish youth have gathered in more than 150 cities across Spain to protest skyrocketing unemployment, cutbacks to social welfare benefits, and rampant corruption among Spain’s political elite. The massive but mostly peaceful protests (photo galleries here ^[1], here ^[2], here ^[3] and here ^[4]) by disaffected youth represent the first significant manifestations of social unrest since a decades-long housing bubble burst in late 2007 and plunged the Spanish economy into a deep and prolonged recession ^[5].
The self-styled May 15th Movement ^[6] took to the streets of Spanish cities on Sunday, May 15, to demand “real democracy now” ^[7] and a new economic policy ahead of municipal and regional elections on May 22. United by anger over a youth jobless rate that is hovering at around 45 percent — and the inability of a largely inept political class to do anything about it — the May 15th Movement is a conglomeration of several smaller protest groups, including Democracia Real Ya! ^[8] (Real Democracy Now!) and Toma La Plaza ^[9] (Take the Square).
The Spanish protesters have been inspired by the pro-democracy movements in the Arab world, and are using social media networks to coordinate the demonstrations. (One of Twitter’s most popular conversation topics in recent days has been the hashtag #15m ^[10], or May 15, which marks the start of the #SpanishRevolution ^[11].)
The largest protests have been in Madrid, where tens of thousands of demonstrators have converged on the city’s emblematic Puerta del Sol ^[12] square (which protesters have renamed “Plaza SOLución” ^[13]). Similar protests are under way in other major Spanish cities, including Barcelona, Bilbao, Granada, Palma de Mallorca, Santiago de Compostela, Seville, Valencia, Vigo, and Zaragoza. The protestors have vowed to remain mobilized at least through the May 22 elections, in defiance of a ban ^[14] that Spanish authorities have placed on the demonstrations.
After forcibly evicting some 150 protesters from the square in Madrid ^[15] on May 17, police changed their approach and have mostly stood by as the activists vowed to resist peacefully if authorities make any further attempts to dislodge them. A spokesperson for the May 15th Movement has described the protests as a “peace encampment” ^[16] while youth have been chanting famous slogans of resistance that date back to Spain’s 1936-1939 civil war, when General Francisco Franco laid siege to Madrid. Protesters have also circulated flyers citing a provision of Spain’s post-Franco constitution that gives citizens the right to protest without prior authorization.
Up until now, anti-government protests in Spain have been relatively few and far between, partly because of the strong ties that labor unions have with the ruling Socialists ^[17]. But Spain’s nascent youth democracy movement is a spontaneous grassroots groundswell that is not left versus right but rather young versus old. The youth movement is highly inclusive and its members — who represent all of Spain’s socio-economic classes — have expressed disgust with both the governing Socialists and the main opposition conservative Popular Party. A ubiquitous protest slogan has been: “PSOE y PP, la misma mierda es,” ^[18] which loosely translated means “Socialists and Conservatives, they are the same crap.”
The protesters do have a point. For example, corruption in Spain is endemic ^[19] and politicians from both major parties have been implicated in scandals in all of Spain’s 48 provinces. The Justice Ministry currently is investigating more than 700 cases of high-level corruption ^[20], including 264 cases involving Socialists, 200 involving Conservatives, and hundreds more involving smaller regional parties.
Spain’s ailing economy too is a symptom of much broader problem, including the inability of the social welfare economic model to create jobs, as well as a highly paternalistic labor market that benefits an older generation seeking to preserve the status quo. Although Spain’s economic crisis has affected workers in all age groups, youth unemployment is more than double the overall jobless rate of 21.2 percent, the highest in the industrialized world. Around half of Spain’s youth are unemployed and the other half that is working often does so under highly exploitative employment conditions.
Spain’s status quo is preserved by a dysfunctional economic, political, and judicial system as well as an unwritten social contract whereby many college graduates work in poorly paid apprenticeships (often earning the minimum wage of €641 ^[21] or $900 a month), sometimes for ten years or more, leaving them no other option than to live at home with their parents, sometimes until their mid-thirties. (By way of comparison, 63 percent of all Spanish workers earn less than €1100 per month ^[22], creating the neologism mileurista, a one thousand euro earner.)
In its Regional Economic Outlook for Europe ^[23], the International Monetary Fund on May 12 warned that youth unemployment in Spain raises the prospect of a “lost generation.” Colloquially, the current generation of Spaniards between the ages of 18 and 34 is known as the “Generación ‘ni-ni’: ni estudia ni trabaja,” ^[24] roughly translated as “The Neither-Nor Generation: Neither Studying Nor Working.” According to a recent survey, more than half of Spanish youth say they have no purpose in life and nearly all of them believe they are worse off than their parents.
Opinion polls forecast devastating losses for the Socialists ^[25] on May 22, as voters punish them for the government’s handling of the economic crisis and the painful austerity measures aimed at avoiding a debt default. Polls published in the centre-left El País and the center-right El Mundo newspapers predicted broad losses for the Socialists including in strongholds such as Barcelona, Seville, and the Castilla-La Mancha region. According to El Mundo, the Socialist Party is “on the edge of a catastrophe.” ^[7]
Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero announced on April 2 that he would not stand for a third term in general elections scheduled for March 2012. Some in the party believe a new leader could halt the fall in the Socialists’ popularity.

Do as I say ...

 Deconstructing Chomsky

 by David Solway

Those who regard Noam Chomsky as one of the world’s premier thinkers might be advised to reconsider. It is, of course, mainly his political writings that have earned him his current reputation for crusading fearlessness, uncompromising candor, and lacerating intelligence. That they consist largely of cant and drivel erected on a foundation of dishonesty escapes his acolytes’ attention completely, likely because he speaks to their prejudices and because they have not done their homework. And possibly because they are influenced by the New York Times, which beatifies Chomsky as “arguably the most important intellectual alive.” But then, that’s the Times, for which the provision of evidence was never a desideratum.“What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence,” to quote Christopher Hitchens’ aphorism on the beatification of Mother Teresa, whom he regards as “a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud” — epithets which would more aptly apply to Chomsky. I will, however, provide evidence for my dismissal of Chomsky as a world-class quack, as did Hitchens with Mother Teresa in his devil’s advocate volume on the saintly imposter.
As I’ve written before, Chomsky’s dishonesty is palpable. He rages furiously and sanctimoniously against the U.S. “war machine,” but as Peter Schweizer reveals in Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy, Chomsky wrote his world-famous Syntactic Structures on grants from the American military establishment. America is, for Chomsky, “the land of Pentagon contracts, lucrative real estate holdings, stock market wealth, and a tax-sheltered trust for his children.” Yet, despite his fierce denunciations, he squats there like an orb spider, his web sagging with the weight of juicy flies. He makes disingenuous millionaire Michael Moore look like a small-time piker.
As for his political ravings, the sheer nonsense of most of his claims is outstripped only by the abyssal gullibility of his auditors and readers, who do not realize that Chomsky is a contaminated witness. “It would be easy to demonstrate,” writes David Horowitz in an article titled “The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky,” “how on every page of every book and in every statement that Chomsky has written, the facts are twisted, the political context is distorted (and often inverted) and the historical record is systematically traduced,”  expressing “a pathological hatred of his own country.” A recent book has accomplished precisely such a demonstration. Chomsky’s doctoring of sources, dubious or obscure references, misquotations, convenient abridgments, significant omissions and gross misinterpretations have been abundantly documented in The Anti-Chomsky Reader, a volume which should be consulted by those who are still impressed by Chomsky’s glowing nimbus and public prominence as a “libertarian socialist.”
Noted jurist and author Richard Posner concurs with the book’s findings. In his Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, Posner writes that Chomsky’s tone and one-sidedness is “all too typical” of his oeuvre. “Chomsky’s use of sources is uncritical, and his methodology unsatisfactory — it consists simply of changing the subject.” Nor does Chomsky feel obliged to defend his assertions no matter how outrageous or tendentious since “[h]e never acknowledges error.” Chomsky appears to regard himself as a political sage, perhaps even a prophet, whose insights cannot be questioned and whose pronouncements are infallible. One recalls his confident prediction to an MIT audience in a lecture of October 18, 2001, scarcely a month after 9/11, that the U.S. was preparing a “silent genocide” against Afghanistan, planning “to murder three or four million people.” This should tell us all we need to know about his powers of divination.
According to Thomas Sowell in Intellectuals and Society, Chomsky is one of those public intellectuals who has ranged “beyond the confines of his specialty” and made “inflammatory comments on things for which he had no qualifications.” But the shabby scholarship alone, evident both in the pulpiteering style and the abject referencing, as well as the apodictic claptrap he purveys, should have set off alarm bells for responsible readers and prompted them to do a bit of supplementary research. If they had, they would have realized that Chomsky is so far off the wall he makes Humpty Dumpty look like a paragon of stability.

The outrage of betrayal

Esperanza y Cambio

by Richard Fernandez

He came to power by blaming his predecessor for sending troops to Iraq. The new leader promised comprehensive health care reform and to bring his country’s welfare safety net in line with Western Europe’s. But the global financial crisis came and denied him his chance of greatness. Compelled by circumstances, he began to belatedly imitate the policies of his predecessor simply in order to survive. We are of course talking about Spain’s Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.

When Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero took power seven years ago, he and his Socialist Workers Party set out to perfect the welfare state in Spain. The goal was to equal— or even surpass — lavish social protections that have long been the rule in Spain’s Western European neighbors.

True to his Socialist principles and riding an economic boom, Zapatero raised the minimum wage and extended health insurance to cover everything from sniffles to sex-changes. He made scholarships available for all. Young adults got rent subsidies called “emancipation” money. Mothers got $3,500 for the birth of a child, toddlers attended free nurseries and the elderly won stipends to finance nursing care. …

We are a lot poorer without Michael

Environmentalism is a religion

by Michael Crichton 

I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.  

We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.

As an example of this challenge, I want to talk today about environmentalism. And in order not to be misunderstood, I want it perfectly clear that I believe it is incumbent on us to conduct our lives in a way that takes into account all the consequences of our actions, including the consequences to other people, and the consequences to the environment. I believe it is important to act in ways that are sympathetic to the environment, and I believe this will always be a need, carrying into the future. I believe the world has genuine problems and I believe it can and should be improved. But I also think that deciding what constitutes responsible action is immensely difficult, and the consequences of our actions are often difficult to know in advance. I think our past record of environmental action is discouraging, to put it mildly, because even our best intended efforts often go awry. But I think we do not recognize our past failures, and face them squarely. And I think I know why.

We need a global government. Really.

The Doomsday List

Getting pre-2012 jitters? Me too! But consider these other dates given for the End of the World...

∆ Around 30 AD:
Taking the New Testament literally, this is the time-frame Jesus gave for The Second Coming. Matthew 24:34, "...This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled." The date is based on the life-expectancy in that era, thirty years.

∆ 500 AD:
Hippolytus of Rome, a 3rd-century theologian, predicted world will end on this date, and uses evidence from the Bible (including the dimensions of the Ark of the Covenant) to prove his point. The belief that the world would end in 500 AD was popular at that time, and Hippolytus's opinion was shared by fellow theologians Sextus Julius Africanus and Irenus.

∆ 1000 AD:
The first big "End Times" craze. Mass panic. Christians giving away their possessions. Christians fighting with Pagans, trying to convert as many as they could before Christ came back. You can only imagine what would have happened if they had the Internet back then, with those little "1000 AD: Apocalypse" YouTube videos.

∆ 1033 AD:
The Christians who predicted the end of the world in 1000 AD realized that they forgot to add in Jesus's age. Oops.


∆ 1186 AD:
Around 1184 certain prophecies began to talk of an impending "New World Order," instructing the citizens to run to the caves and hide because of all the famine, earthquakes, and other natural disasters that were to follow. Stop me if you heard this one before.


∆ 1284:
Pope Innocent III came up with this date by adding 666 years since the founding of Islam.

∆ 1346 AD and afterwards:
Black plague sweeps across Europe, killing 1/3 of population, scaring the hell out of everyone else. At least this one had something to really back it up.

∆ 1496 AD:
1500 years after the birth of Jesus, this was another popular End Times date for the eschatological set.

∆ 1669 AD:
Fearing the return of the Antichrist on this date, 20,000 Old Believers in Russia burned themselves to death between 1669-1690. That'll show the Antichrist.


∆ 1792 AD:
A date believed to be the end of the world by some Shakers. By now, every group seemed to have their fave date for the Apocalypse.

"Because it makes them happy"

IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

by Steven Hayward

As you've probably heard, the world is going to end about 48 hours from now. Or the beginning of the end, or something. Or so says Harold Camping, an evangelical broadcaster who has been spending big bucks on newspaper and billboard ads to let us know so we can sort out our sock drawers in time. (I assume the newspapers and outdoor advertisers asked for up-front payment for the ads, just in case.) Camping's calculations are based on complex arithmetic that sound a lot like Louis Farrakhan's obsession with the number 19 back in his famous (half) Million Man March in the 1990s. No doubt if the end indeed comes to pass, the Washington Post will report "Women and Minorities Hardest Hit: Reagan Policies Blamed." Of course, the good Mr. Camping predicted before that Judgment Day was at hand--September 6, 1994. This time he means it, and his math is better now. "It's going to be a wonderful, wonderful day," Camping told a San Francisco Chronicle reporter.

This last comment gets at the difference between religious apocalypticism and secular kinds, especially the environmental type. At least the religious versions of the end of the world come with a promise of redemption for man and nature. The secular apocalypse is usually without hope. Yet they share one larger thing in common: the deep, passionate commitment that the end is near. And when the end doesn't come, instead of relief, there is disappointment. Fundamentalist preachers and environmental prophets-of-doom react the same way every time: they d go back over their math, and offer new predictions for the end. The preachers end up with dwindling congregations and radio audiences; the green prophets get appointed science adviser to the president.

People often ask me why environmentalists tend always to incline to apocalyptic conclusions about the state of the planet. "Because it makes them happy," is my standard response. This is not tongue-in-cheek. There is something about certain kinds of personality types that derives a frisson of delight from contemplating the end of the world. And if you point out that the end of the world is not at hand, it makes environmentalists very unhappy, in part because it deprives them of the opportunity to play savior to the world.

The folks at LiveScience.com have a nice piece up this week discussing this trait, featuring comments from Lorenzo DiTommaso, a Canadian academic working on a book entitled The Architecture of Apocalypticism. From the brief description here, it sounds like DiTommaso's book will explore the way in which apocalyptic belief perversely reinforces the view some people have that "there is something dreadfully wrong with the world of human existence today." He could be describing Al Gore, who liked to cloak his global warming worries inside a larger indictment of our "dysfunctional civilization."

The deep strain of true belief is one reason why environmental arguments are seldom susceptible to factual argument or logical reasoning, and is also why people who hold such beliefs should be kept as far away from political power as possible. At least the preachers just want us to repent. The green prophets want to run our lives; they'll start with light bulbs and toilets, but it won't end there.

Another quote of the (next) month

“It isn’t necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice — there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.”


by Frank Zappa

Quote of the month

“Once a society reaches the point where common courtesy must be legislated, they’ve really just about admitted that they’ve failed.”


by anonymous

"Τhe Great Men of the Permanent Governing Class cannot be bound by the rules they impose on the rest of you schmucks."

The unzippered princeling and the serving wench

By MARK STEYN

Back when he was still the officially designated Next President of France and not an accused rapist, Dominique Strauss-Kahn was glimpsed at the annual IMF soccer tournament wearing a T-shirt emblazoned "YES, WE KAHN!" (Monsieur le directeur was not participating in the game: The field he likes to play requires more horizontal exertions, as even the deferential and protective French media have begun belatedly to acknowledge.) In consciously mimicking the slogan of another and very successful presidential candidate, the IMF boss and Socialist Party candidate improved upon it – or, at any rate, made it more accurate. "Yes, We Can"? Er, no, actually, you can't. But yes, he Kahn!

A man is innocent until proven guilty, and it will be for a New York court to determine what happened in M Strauss-Kahn's suite at the Sofitel. It may well be that's he the hapless victim of a black Muslim widowed penniless refugee maid – although, if that's the defense my lawyer were proposing to put before a Manhattan jury, I'd be inclined to suggest he's the one who needs to plead insanity. Whatever the head of the IMF did or didn't do, the reaction of the French elites is most instructive. "We and the Americans do not belong to the same civilization," sniffed Jean Daniel, editor of Le Nouvel Observateur, insisting that the police should have known that Strauss-Kahn was "not like other men" and wondering why "this chambermaid was regarded as worthy and beyond any suspicion." Bernard-Henri Lévy, the open-shirted, hairy-chested Gallic intellectual who talked Sarkozy into talking Obama into launching the Libyan war, is furious at the lèse-majesté of this impertinent serving girl and the jackanapes of America's "absurd" justice system, not to mention this ghastly "American judge who, by delivering him to the crowd of photo hounds, pretended to take him for a subject of justice like any other."

Well, OK. Why shouldn't DSK (as he's known in France) be treated as "a subject of justice like any other"? Because, says BHL (as he's known in France), of everything that Strauss-Kahn has done at the IMF to help the world "avoid the worst." In particular, he has made the IMF "more favorable to proletarian nations and, among the latter, to the most fragile and vulnerable." What is one fragile and vulnerable West African maid when weighed in the scales of history against entire fragile and vulnerable proletarian nations? Yes, he Kahn!

Before you scoff at Euro-lefties willing to argue for 21st century droit de seigneur, recall the grisly eulogies for the late Edward Kennedy. "At the end of the day," said Sen. Evan Bayh, "he cared most about the things that matter to ordinary people." The standard line of his obituarists was that this was Ted's penance for Chappaquiddick and Mary Jo Kopechne – or, as the Aussie columnist Tim Blair put it, "She died so that the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act might live." Great men who are prone to Big Government invariably have Big Appetites, and you comely serving wenches who catch the benign sovereign's eye or anything else he's shooting your way should keep in mind the Big Picture. Yes, Ted Ken!

Nor are such dispensations confined to Great Men's trousers. Timothy Geithner failed to pay the taxes he owed the United States Treasury but that's no reason not to make him head of the United States Treasury. His official explanation for this lapse was that, unlike losers like you, he was unable to follow the simple yes/no prompts of Turbo Tax: In that sense, unlike the Frenchman and the maid, Geithner's defense is that she wasn't asking for it – or, if she was, he couldn't understand the question. Nevertheless, just as only Dominique could save the European economy, so only Timmy could save the U.S. economy. Yes, they Kahn!

Capitalists Vs The Free Market

Capitalists Who Fear Free Markets

By FLOYD NORRIS

Capitalism is supposed to produce losses on bad investments.

But all too often it has not.

In Tokyo this week, corporate executives were outraged when a Japanese government official suggested that banks might have to take losses on loans to the company that produced a nuclear catastrophe.

Yukio Edano, the chief cabinet secretary, had the temerity to say “the public will not support” the injection of government money into Tokyo Electric Power, also known as Tepco, unless banks share in the pain. Tepco says it would like to pay compensation to victims, but needs government cash to do so.

The president of Japan’s largest bank, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial, was shocked by the very idea that a bank should lose money if it lent to a company that could not meet its obligations. Mr. Edano’s remarks “came out of the blue,” said the executive, Katsunori Nagayasu. “I felt there was something wrong about them.”

To Yasuchika Hasgawa, the chief executive of the Takeda Pharmaceutical Company and chairman of the Japanese Association of Corporate Executives, the idea violated basic tenets of society. Mr. Hasgawa said he “cannot help but question how this country’s democracy can be made to work with free-market-based capitalism.”

His definition of “free-market-based capitalism” seems to assume that lenders should escape without pain, at least if they are lending to major institutions. It is an idea that has become remarkably pervasive.

“We consider banks and Tepco systemically important institutions,” wrote Tetsuya Yamamoto, a Moody’s analyst based in Tokyo. “Debt forgiveness undermines the systemic importance of the bank and utility sectors in the national economy.” These are, he added, “developments we did not anticipate.”