The West's Problem: Ongoing Misdirection of Capital

So says Nicole Gelinas, here:

In the years leading up to 2007, the rules necessary to govern a flourishing market economy broke down, producing a financial and economic crisis. Rather than responding to the crisis by fixing those rules, the West aggressively repudiated market economics, and the repudiation continues to this day.

Or, to put it the way George Bush did, we've abandoned free-market principles to save the market.

Never works. Never will.

Guttmacher Institute Report Claims 2% of US Catholic Women Use Natural Family Planning

The Guttmacher report also claims 98 percent of sexually-active American Catholic women use contraceptives:

Among all women who have had sex, 99% have ever used a contraceptive method other than natural family planning. This figure is virtually the same, 98%, among sexually experienced Catholic women. ...

Only 2% of Catholic women rely on natural family planning; even among Catholic women who attend church once a month or more, only 2% rely on this method (not shown). Sixty-eight percent of Catholic women use highly effective methods: sterilization (32%, including 24% using female sterilization,) the pill or another hormonal method (31%) and the IUD (5%). ...

Data were gathered using in-person interviews with 7,356 women aged 15–44 between June 2006 and December 2008. All data used for this analysis were weighted, and the findings are nationally representative. ...

Current contraceptive use was measured only among women who had had sex in the three months prior to the survey and refers to the method used in the most recent month she had sex. Among women who reported using multiple methods in the survey month, priority was given to the most effective method. The category of “other” methods mainly consists of withdrawal but also includes less common methods, such as suppositories, sponges and foams. Natural family planning includes periodic abstinence, temperature rhythm and cervical mucus tests.


The Guttmacher Institute was originally in 1968 a creature of Planned Parenthood, and became independent from it in 1977. Alan Frank Guttmacher was once the president of PP.

The 4-6 year old study on which the data are based is described as "weighted," which means some data points count more than others. Which ones no one knows. I'll leave it to statisticians to decide if 7,356 women comprise enough of a data set to draw sweeping religious conclusions about any religious group, Catholic or otherwise.

From what I know of Catholics, however, the religion is "orthopractic" more than it is orthodox, emphasizing religious obligation more than religious belief, which would help explain why US Catholic women apparently routinely ignore official teaching.

Protestants have tended rather to emphasize correct belief, but in truth are not really less likely to practice otherwise.

Catholicism is a much bigger tent than Protestantism, which is a sea of tents. The strength, and the weakness, of Catholicism is its ability to co-opt pre-existing belief and absorb it.

The present struggle over reproductive issues in America highlights a struggle against an ideology not unlike that which the church faced in the Soviet era in the Eastern Bloc.

This may be a long war which doesn't end until America does.

Catholicism, however, will still be here when America is gone.   

German Lefty Fritz Vahrenholt Questions CO2 Climate Change Hypothesis

Interviewed here in Der Spiegel:

"Today, I want new scientific findings to be included in the climate debate. It would then become clear that the simple equation that CO2 and other man-made greenhouse gases are almost exclusively responsible for climate change is unsustainable. It hasn't gotten any warmer on this planet in almost 14 years, despite continued increases in CO2 emissions. Established climate science has to come up with an answer to that. ...

"The long version of the IPCC report does mention natural causes of climate change, like the sun and oscillating ocean currents. But they no longer appear in the summary for politicians. They were simply edited out. To this day, many decision-makers don't know that new studies have seriously questioned the dominance of CO2. CO2 alone will never cause a warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. Only with the help of supposed amplification effects, especially water vapor, do the computers arrive at a drastic temperature increase. I say that global warming will remain below two degrees by the end of the century. This is an eminently political message, but it's also good news. ...

"In terms of the climate, we have seen a cyclical up and down for the last 7,000 years, long before man began emitting CO2 into the atmosphere. There has been a warming phase every 1,000 years, including the Roman, the Medieval and the current warm periods. All of these warm periods consistently coincided with strong solar activity. In addition to this large fluctuation in activity, there is also a 210-year and an 87-year natural cycle of the sun. Ignoring these would be a serious mistake …

"In the second half of the 20th century, the sun was more active than it had been in more than 2,000 years. This "large solar maximum," as astronomers call it, has contributed at least as much to global warming as the greenhouse gas CO2. But the sun has been getting weaker since 2005, and it will continue to do so in the next few decades. Consequently, we can only expect cooling from the sun for now. ...

"Many scientists assume that the temperature changes by more than 1 degree Celsius for the 1,000-year cycle and by up to 0.7 degrees Celsius for the smaller cycles. Climatologists should be putting a far greater effort into finding ways to more accurately determine the effects of the sun on climate. For the IPCC and the politicians it influences, CO2 is practically the only factor. The importance of the sun for the climate is systematically underestimated, and the importance of CO2 is systematically overestimated. As a result, all climate predictions are based on the wrong underlying facts. ...

"[T]he declining solar activity, as well as the fluctuations in ocean currents, such as the 60-year Pacific oscillation, which was in a positive warm phase from 1977 to 2000 and, since 2000, has led to cooling as a result of its decline. Their contribution to the change in temperature has also been wrongly attributed to CO2. Most of all, however, the last sunspot cycle was weaker than the one before it. This is why the sun's magnetic field has continued to weaken since 2000. As a result, this magnetic field doesn't shield us against cosmic radiation quite as well, which in turn leads to stronger cloud formation and, therefore, cooling. What else has to happen before the IPCC at least mentions these relationships in its reports? ...

"In addition to carbon dioxide, we also have black soot, for example. It creates 55 percent of the warming effect of CO2, but it could be filtered out with little effort within a few years, especially in emerging and developing countries. And, in doing so, we would achieve huge benefits for human health. ...

"All I'm saying is that CO2 is a climate gas, but that its effect is only half as strong as the IPCC claims. ..."

Total World Stock Market Capitalization Year-End 2010 at $56 Trillion

Data here.

Total Demand Deposits in January at $0.8 Trillion

Total Savings and Money Market Deposits in January at $6.057 Trillion

Irrational Exuberance in Home Ownership Rates

MJ Perry has a good post on the deflating home ownership bubble here, and this cool chart, which shows once again that starting in 1995 all manner of metrics assumed an irrationally exuberant upward trend.

An additional chart at the link less convincingly makes the case that low down payment loans were a cause, rather than a by-product, of the bubble.  Looks like a lagging indicator to me, but obviously it is an imprudent policy to require only 3 percent down.

Famous Republican Ted Olson Responsible For Challenging CA Proposition 8

Conservatives needing another reason not to support the Republican Party need only look to this case:

Ted Olson, one of the lawyers representing couples who challenged Proposition 8, said: "This case is about equality and freedom and dignity and fairness and decency. It is about whether we are going to eliminate government-sponsored discrimination written into the constitution of the biggest state in the U.S."

Mr. Olson, a Republican stalwart, teamed up with David Boies, a Democrat and his adversary in the 2000 presidential-election case of Bush v. Gore, to bring the challenge to Proposition 8. ...

Six states, plus the District of Columbia, permit same-sex marriages, and proponents of gay marriage are gearing up to press their cause during this election year, including in Maine and Washington state.

From the Log Cabin Republicans to Ted Olson, Republicans have been in the vanguard of the insane waging war on nature and nature's God.

To hell with them all.

Radioactivity 150 Miles From Vermont's Troubled, Aging Yankee Nuclear Plant Blamed on Atmospheric Testing in 1940s and 1950s, and on Chernobyl

Strontium-90 has been found in bass far from Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, according to this story:

Now, new tests of bass caught 150 miles away in northwestern Vermont and outside the area affected by the plant's groundwater show similar levels of Strontium-90, said William Irwin, chief of the Vermont Health Department's radiological division.

The likely source, rather than Vermont Yankee, is residue from above-ground nuclear testing in the 1940s and 1950s and the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown in the Soviet Union in 1986, he said.


This report puts it as follows:

Irwin said Lake Carmine, in Enosburg Falls, is about as far away from Yankee as you can get and still be in the Green Mountain State.

"The results are that cesium-137 and strontium-90 in Lake Carmi fish is in the same range as Connecticut River fish," said Irwin. "We take this as some evidence that all fish in Vermont are likely to have radioactive cesium and strontium at these levels and that, as we've hypothesized, it is from nuclear weapons fallout and the releases of Chernobyl. All of us are glad to have proof and not just conjecture."


The similar levels of radioactive contamination suggest that the reasons for shutting down an aging plant like Vermont's Yankee Nuclear are distinct in this case, not the least of which is that the design is identical to the Fukushima, Japan, nuclear power plants which melted down after the earthquakes and tsunami in March 2011.

Obama: Pesky Constitution Gets In Way of Getting Things Done

Quoted here:

"What's frustrated people is that I've not been able to implement every aspect of what I said in 2008. Well, it turns out our Founders designed a system that makes it more difficult to bring about change than I would like sometimes. But what we have been able to do is move in the right direction," Obama said.

Obama Knows His Base Is Women, And ObamaCare Was Designed For It

Romney would lose in November because he's competing for a voting block which Obama already owns. While 48 percent of Romney's voters said they were Republican, 41 percent self-identified as Independent.

Once again, from the Florida exit polling here, Romney's biggest support came from women (52 percent), Hispanic/Latino (54 percent), moderate/liberal (59 percent), oppose Tea Party (57 percent), Roman Catholic (56 percent), and the abortion should be legal crowd (54 percent).

Compare that with this from CNN (here):

Catholic teaching opposes abortion and the use of contraceptives, though a 2011 study by the Guttmacher Institute showed 98% of sexually active Catholic women had used contraception.

The Democrat strategy, as always, is to divide and conquer, but when it comes to the Catholic church, there isn't a lot of dividing work to do. Obama has known for a long time that the loyalty of Catholic women to the church is divided over reproductive issues, as is the loyalty of Christian women generally.

Women in this country want the freedom to kill their unborn children. Otherwise Roe v. Wade would not continue to stand.

Obama knows his base. ObamaCare was designed for it. Catholic women in Florida went for Romney like they'll be going for Obama in November. The better to eat you with, my dear.



"Those domestick traitors, bosom-thieves,
Whom custom hath call'd wives; the readiest helps
To betray the heady husbands, rob the easy."

-- Ben Jonson

Thomas Sowell Says Mitt Romney's Minimum Wage Views Prove He's No Conservative

Here:

When you set minimum wage levels higher than many inexperienced young people are worth, they don't get hired. It is not rocket science.

Milton Friedman explained all this, half a century ago, in his popular little book for non-economists, "Capitalism and Freedom." So have many other people. If a presidential candidate who calls himself "conservative" has still not heard of these facts, that simply shows that you can call yourself anything you want to. 

The Difference Between Us and Them, Well Stated

Here:

For conservatives, answering the essential question of what our political goals are is not difficult. We do not believe in the perfectibility of the world. Those of us who are Christian conservatives believe that the government can fight wars, as well as provide protection from discrimination and a safety net for the poor. Capitalism and the free market are not perfect systems, but they are the best systems for providing human flourishing. We believe in progress that reenforces timeless truths.

Yet if you do believe in the perfectibility of the world -- or "fundamental transformation" in the president's phrase -- then nothing, not even the human conscience, can be allowed to get in the way.

F. Fukuyama: Our World is Devoid of Monstrous Projects of Social Transformation

The Big Lie, softly told.

In The New York Times, here:

"The undergraduate students I teach . . . are fortunate not to live in a world where ideas could be translated into monstrous projects for the transformation of society, and where being an intellectual could often mean complicity in enormous crimes."

He's never heard of Barack Obama, I guess, nor the enormous crime of abortion in which all our intellectuals are complicit, nor the compulsion of ObamaCare, targeted drone killings, the TSA's war on the fourth amendment, the illegal war in Libya, TARP and the fascist bank bailouts, the zero interest rate policy war against elderly savers, the war on carbon, the war on the rich and the middle class, gays in the military . . ..

Obama's Attack on Roman Catholicism Evokes Charges of Tyranny, Fascism, Totalitarianism

From one Mark Judge, here:

The New Comstockery is a metastasizing liberal cancer not just of intolerance, but of hatred for those who disagree. ...

The New Comstockery is fascist. ...

[L]iberal tyranny ... has become evident recently in both the Obama administration[']s violation of the First Amendment in forcing Catholic institutions to sell birth control, and the reaction to the Susan Komen Foundation's attempt to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood. ...

[S]omething ... in our time has become a terrible reality: the totalitarian impulse of liberalism, particularly when it comes to sexual matters.

Pace Mark Judge, the consequences of the relaxation of morals in the West produced a horrific 20th century on both sides of the Atlantic. It makes no difference that the tens of millions killed here in America have been faceless. Their blood cries out no less than the millions of Stalin's and Hitler's victims.

Nor has the impulse to liberal tyranny been only just recently evident.

It was evident to many of us much earlier, especially in ObamaCare in 2010 and in the fascist bailouts of 2009, which gave rise to the Tea Party. George Bush's liberalism which ended with TARP at home was just the kinder, gentler Republican version of it, trampling out the vintage for the most part in foreign fields.

But Obama has brought the grapes of wrath back home.

Few have been the voices decrying the expansion of the national security state in 2011. The Department of Homeland Security and the TSA have been hard at work implementing nationwide checkpoint programs, using scanners and military surveillance technology, particularly drones (unmanned aerial vehicles) to "patrol the borders," hunt down cattle rustlers and execute without trial (admittedly noxious) American citizens in foreign lands.

In 2012 the Republican House is actually cooperating by passing legislation which routinizes the domestic integration of UAVs under the control of the FAA. And Republicans think Mitt Romney is going to make a difference?

The revolution has been measured, taking off one obstacle at a time so as not to cause widespread alarm, but its objectives are indeed totalist.  Dismissing religious freedom now in 2012 almost comes as an afterthought, a mere by-product of ObamaCare.

The spider weaves its web, and soon we will all be caught it in, if we aren't already.

It's good that Mark Judge is finally paying attention.

Is anyone else?

"There is no contradiction between economic Liberalism and Socialism."

                               -- Oswald Spengler, 1933 

Women Are The Ruin Of Many Tyrants

The Tax Man Stands In The Way Of The Deleveraging Crisis

Household net worth in Q3 2011 has fallen to $57.4 trillion, and relative to GDP this is still well above historical peaks in the post-war period in the 20th century.

If total household net worth relative to GDP fell to the post-war historical peak before the recent silliness, at present levels of GDP this implies a further pull-back in total household net worth of roughly 7 percent, or $4 trillion, to $53.4 trillion.

It is interesting to note that mortgage debt relative to current GDP also as shown here should correct down about 33 percent to match the post-war historical peak of that metric. With about $10 trillion in mortgage debt currently outstanding, a 33 percent adjustment down comes to $3.3 trillion, a figure very similarly sized to the outsized net worth noted above.

In other words, we could come a long way toward rectifying both metrics almost instantly by taking from net worth and paying down mortgage debt, if only the tax man didn't stand in the way.

It should be emphasized that roughly $5 trillion of $18 trillion in retirement funds stands ready in IRA accounts alone to address this problem, if only government gave people the freedom to do so.

Another interesting point suggests itself.

The post-war average GDP of 3.5 percent per annum has utterly failed to materialize in the first decade of the 21st century, as GDP has averaged instead in the neighborhood of 1.7 percent per annum.

Both net worth and debt measured against an economy pumping out 50 percent more GDP would mean I wouldn't be writing about this right now.

I'd be too busy relaxing and getting ready to make lots of money tomorrow.

There's more than one way to skin a cat: less meddlesome tax policy, or growth-oriented economic policy.

Preferably both.

Does The Fed Help Precipitate Recessions By Raising Rates, Or Lowering Them?

Yes!

Alan Greenspan was confirmed as Federal Reserve Chairman in August 1987, Ben Bernanke in 2006.

Two Episodes of Nearly Vertical Exuberance in Net Worth

Two recent episodes of nearly vertical exuberance are shown by dramatic spurts in total net worth of households over 5 year periods: beginning from the mid-1990s and from about early 2003, coincident with stock market and housing bubbles.

A correction to trend implies a net worth decline to around $45 trillion, or 21 percent from the present $57 trillion.

Irrational Exuberance In Credit Creation Has Stalled

Yet one more metric showing how a new trend line began in the mid-1990s coincident with dramatic new housing and banking legislation of the time. A reversion to the status quo ante implies an overall reduction in asset values of at least 33 percent to 42 percent, and perhaps more in a crash which over-corrects below the more modest trendline set by bank credit of approximately $5.5 trillion.