In this relatively curse-free podcast
Bottleneck people strike again
Never buy a Google phone
The end of talk radio
How the baby boomers never helped, but hindered younger generations
Does anybody attend baby boomer funerals?
Kids faking they have mental diseases
Murdering Aaron Clarey
Indiana's Governor fails the leftist shit test
AND MORE!
in THIS EPISODE of THE CLAREY PODCAST!
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
Drunk Tuesday Afternoon Linkage
Why I Hate the 60's (The truth is NOBODY liked them!)
Leslie gives me some love.
The fun you have with a shitty world reserve currency.
Chris Betchloff accepts a fight challenge from Rich Stanton. I predict Rich will chicken out.
Leslie gives me some love.
The fun you have with a shitty world reserve currency.
Chris Betchloff accepts a fight challenge from Rich Stanton. I predict Rich will chicken out.
Monday, March 30, 2015
Book Review - The Way of Men by Jack Donovan
"The Way of Men" by Jack Donovan is one of those books that if there ever was to be a "Manosphere Bible" it would be a "must" to be included, just as the Book of Matthew or Exodus. It encapsulates some of the key tenets of being a man in today's world, and compiles and succinctly presents millennia of wisdom from our forefathers. I would consider it to be "required reading" for anybody out there traipsing upon this realm of the internet and not to procrastinate in going to buy and read this book.
Of course, it was only until now I read it, but my procrastination and hypocrisy aside, the above paragraph is 100% true. This is an ABSOLUTE MUST-READ book.
The reason is simple - it provides men of all ages an explanation of what it means to be a man.
At first this may sound a bit esoteric, even a bit effeminate. Who asks themselves "what does it mean to be a man?"
But without answering this very basic and fundamental question, most men are condemned to wander this world and waste their lives. It is a question that needs to be answered because it not only identifies you in respect to this world, but explains to you your basic function here. This book not only answers that vitally important question, but provides guidance, context, and wisdom about how to live your life given that you have the answer to that question.
From here Mr. Donovan goes into the four basic traits of what it means to be a man:
Strength
Courage
Mastery and
Honor
I did not particularly like this part of the book in that through empiricism and age I (at the risk of sounding arrogant) "already knew it." But this does not lessen the part of the book's value to younger men or men who have yet to find their way in life. Jack goes into logically-supporting detail as to what each is and how men can attain those traits.
From there the book goes into what I would consider it's general premise:
That men, and thus our psyche, have largely evolved outside of civilization. And that with the relatively recent advent of civilization the purpose of men, the way of men, is becoming obsoleted no matter how hard our frontal lobes may try to adapt.
This results in a BRILLIANT comparison of true masculinity that was required (and thus gave men their true purpose in life) in pre-civilization days to today, where technology and the state have largely replaced men, and we now go vainly looking for "substitute masculinity." Specifically, there are three forms of substitution:
Simulated Masculinity - Sparing, rolling, UFC, sports, etc.
Vicarious Masculinity - Watching sports, war documentaries, playing video games, etc.
Intellectualized Masculinity - Focusing on yourself, self improvement, within the confines that society allows
But regardless of how men cope with their obsolescence, it doesn't change the fact that they aren't wired to do so, and that the civilization that has replaced them is flawed and not feasible in the long term. This has resulted in an identity crisis for men, as well as a full blown assault on maleness and masculinity. What worked in the past and allowed civilization to form was manliness, strength, and men. However, now that civilization exists, technology serves our every need, and the state has supplanted men when it comes to women, there is nothing for men to do but play video games, read about WWII and jerk off to porn. Worse still is the criminalization on all things male and masculine by various political forces as their obsoleted skills are not only no longer needed, but a threat to those in power. And making matters even worse, the masculine skills of foresight, logic, and common sense makes the collapse of society perfectly predictable to most men, but because of democracy and civilization, they are powerless to do anything about it, rendering them "Mythical Cassandras" and causing untold amounts of frustration and insanity.
But Jack Donovan knows civilizations collapse. No empire lasts forever. And Rome did fall. And in preparation for that, his book becomes instructional.
His last few chapters focus on what can be done despite an insane, and largely, anti-male civilization. Working out, finding purpose, finding agency, etc. However, the very last chapter is titled "How to Form a Gang," in that a gang was the original unit of society that not only survived in a non-civilized world, but is the origins of the way and meaning of men. This was particularly useful and insightful in that it spoke directly to my experiences that I was happiest NOT when I was richest or had the most amount of money, but when I was absolutely my poorest, but had the most amount of male friends in the exact same horrible environment I was in. Yes, food was an issue. Yes sleep was a problem. But the mental sanity that came with having my own crew and own team is one no amount of money or financial stability can replace. And it is this last chapter that explains why that is.
So if you are confused or need guidance. If you are a young man looking to understand your place in this world, or an old man who could never find it. Or you still have a lot of questions about society, where it is going, and why certain groups of people seem hell-bent on villainizing you, I cannot recommend enough that you read The Way of Men.
You can find Jack Donovan's website here.
Of course, it was only until now I read it, but my procrastination and hypocrisy aside, the above paragraph is 100% true. This is an ABSOLUTE MUST-READ book.
The reason is simple - it provides men of all ages an explanation of what it means to be a man.
At first this may sound a bit esoteric, even a bit effeminate. Who asks themselves "what does it mean to be a man?"
But without answering this very basic and fundamental question, most men are condemned to wander this world and waste their lives. It is a question that needs to be answered because it not only identifies you in respect to this world, but explains to you your basic function here. This book not only answers that vitally important question, but provides guidance, context, and wisdom about how to live your life given that you have the answer to that question.
From here Mr. Donovan goes into the four basic traits of what it means to be a man:
Strength
Courage
Mastery and
Honor
I did not particularly like this part of the book in that through empiricism and age I (at the risk of sounding arrogant) "already knew it." But this does not lessen the part of the book's value to younger men or men who have yet to find their way in life. Jack goes into logically-supporting detail as to what each is and how men can attain those traits.
From there the book goes into what I would consider it's general premise:
That men, and thus our psyche, have largely evolved outside of civilization. And that with the relatively recent advent of civilization the purpose of men, the way of men, is becoming obsoleted no matter how hard our frontal lobes may try to adapt.
This results in a BRILLIANT comparison of true masculinity that was required (and thus gave men their true purpose in life) in pre-civilization days to today, where technology and the state have largely replaced men, and we now go vainly looking for "substitute masculinity." Specifically, there are three forms of substitution:
Simulated Masculinity - Sparing, rolling, UFC, sports, etc.
Vicarious Masculinity - Watching sports, war documentaries, playing video games, etc.
Intellectualized Masculinity - Focusing on yourself, self improvement, within the confines that society allows
But regardless of how men cope with their obsolescence, it doesn't change the fact that they aren't wired to do so, and that the civilization that has replaced them is flawed and not feasible in the long term. This has resulted in an identity crisis for men, as well as a full blown assault on maleness and masculinity. What worked in the past and allowed civilization to form was manliness, strength, and men. However, now that civilization exists, technology serves our every need, and the state has supplanted men when it comes to women, there is nothing for men to do but play video games, read about WWII and jerk off to porn. Worse still is the criminalization on all things male and masculine by various political forces as their obsoleted skills are not only no longer needed, but a threat to those in power. And making matters even worse, the masculine skills of foresight, logic, and common sense makes the collapse of society perfectly predictable to most men, but because of democracy and civilization, they are powerless to do anything about it, rendering them "Mythical Cassandras" and causing untold amounts of frustration and insanity.
But Jack Donovan knows civilizations collapse. No empire lasts forever. And Rome did fall. And in preparation for that, his book becomes instructional.
His last few chapters focus on what can be done despite an insane, and largely, anti-male civilization. Working out, finding purpose, finding agency, etc. However, the very last chapter is titled "How to Form a Gang," in that a gang was the original unit of society that not only survived in a non-civilized world, but is the origins of the way and meaning of men. This was particularly useful and insightful in that it spoke directly to my experiences that I was happiest NOT when I was richest or had the most amount of money, but when I was absolutely my poorest, but had the most amount of male friends in the exact same horrible environment I was in. Yes, food was an issue. Yes sleep was a problem. But the mental sanity that came with having my own crew and own team is one no amount of money or financial stability can replace. And it is this last chapter that explains why that is.
So if you are confused or need guidance. If you are a young man looking to understand your place in this world, or an old man who could never find it. Or you still have a lot of questions about society, where it is going, and why certain groups of people seem hell-bent on villainizing you, I cannot recommend enough that you read The Way of Men.
You can find Jack Donovan's website here.
Sunday, March 29, 2015
UC Berkeley Study Shows 2 in 1 Women Raped
From MSNBC
"When it comes to the uncomfortable topics of sexual assault and rape, there seems to be a lack of consistency when it comes to statistics. Is it 1 in 5 women on college campuses who are raped? Is it 1 in 3? Or are they under-reported and it's actually closer to 1 in 2?
The truth is even more shocking.
2 in 1 college women are raped on American campuses every year.
The discovery of this shocking statistic was due to a joint study between UC Berkeley's Women's Studies Department and the Department of Sociology. Headed by Dr. Madison Jones-Pheeters and Dr. Jane Tallakson-Smith (respectively), the study took on the difficult task of authoritatively assessing what percentage of college women were raped. However, to achieve this, the study boldly abandoned traditional researching and measuring methods and replaced them with newer, out-side-of-the-box ones. This not only allowed them to accurately measure how many women were being raped on campus, but achieve completely new and previously-thought impossible statistics.
"We really didn't like math and logic," said Dr. Jones-Pheeters. "Both were social constructs forced on us by the patriarchy. So if we were able to unshackle ourselves from these tools of oppression, we would finally be allowed to see for the first time just how much of a threat campus rape and sexual assault really are. I couldn't believe it at first, but there it is. 2 in 1 women, 200% of college-going women are raped every year."
Researchers in academia generally agree and concur with the findings, even if the statistical methods were unconventional.
"We have to appreciate what these two women did here. They are boldly defying male-created traditions such as math, logic, reality, and fact, allowing us to truly see reality for the first time in our researching lives," explained political science professor, Tanner Sylvensen-Anders. "And I'm glad they did. Now we know just what kind of danger and what kind of victims American women are!"
While they have yet to disclose their full methodologies, Drs. Jones-Pheeters and Jane Tallakson did provide some explanation as to these non-patriarchical statistics.
"Well, if we redefine rape to mean unwanted advances, and count each instance as an individual rape, even if it is still only one woman this is happening to, she has in essence been raped 2, 3, 4, even 20 times over the course of the year. Throw in a woman who suffers from multiple-personality disorder and each instance of rape is magnified thrice or four-fold. Ignoring logic then allows us to prorate these atrocities to each individual woman (or personality), giving us the figure that 2 in 1 women are raped every year."
/sarc
Sadly, I do actually see this in the future.
"When it comes to the uncomfortable topics of sexual assault and rape, there seems to be a lack of consistency when it comes to statistics. Is it 1 in 5 women on college campuses who are raped? Is it 1 in 3? Or are they under-reported and it's actually closer to 1 in 2?
The truth is even more shocking.
2 in 1 college women are raped on American campuses every year.
The discovery of this shocking statistic was due to a joint study between UC Berkeley's Women's Studies Department and the Department of Sociology. Headed by Dr. Madison Jones-Pheeters and Dr. Jane Tallakson-Smith (respectively), the study took on the difficult task of authoritatively assessing what percentage of college women were raped. However, to achieve this, the study boldly abandoned traditional researching and measuring methods and replaced them with newer, out-side-of-the-box ones. This not only allowed them to accurately measure how many women were being raped on campus, but achieve completely new and previously-thought impossible statistics.
"We really didn't like math and logic," said Dr. Jones-Pheeters. "Both were social constructs forced on us by the patriarchy. So if we were able to unshackle ourselves from these tools of oppression, we would finally be allowed to see for the first time just how much of a threat campus rape and sexual assault really are. I couldn't believe it at first, but there it is. 2 in 1 women, 200% of college-going women are raped every year."
Researchers in academia generally agree and concur with the findings, even if the statistical methods were unconventional.
"We have to appreciate what these two women did here. They are boldly defying male-created traditions such as math, logic, reality, and fact, allowing us to truly see reality for the first time in our researching lives," explained political science professor, Tanner Sylvensen-Anders. "And I'm glad they did. Now we know just what kind of danger and what kind of victims American women are!"
While they have yet to disclose their full methodologies, Drs. Jones-Pheeters and Jane Tallakson did provide some explanation as to these non-patriarchical statistics.
"Well, if we redefine rape to mean unwanted advances, and count each instance as an individual rape, even if it is still only one woman this is happening to, she has in essence been raped 2, 3, 4, even 20 times over the course of the year. Throw in a woman who suffers from multiple-personality disorder and each instance of rape is magnified thrice or four-fold. Ignoring logic then allows us to prorate these atrocities to each individual woman (or personality), giving us the figure that 2 in 1 women are raped every year."
/sarc
Sadly, I do actually see this in the future.
Saturday, March 28, 2015
Why Liberals Never Start Businesses
They're too lazy and they're not intelligent enough to.
And yes, it is that simple:
They're too lazy to work that hard, AND
they just plain don't have the brain power to do so:
And yes, it is that simple:
They're too lazy to work that hard, AND
they just plain don't have the brain power to do so:
Friday, March 27, 2015
Daddy Government and Corporate Boyfriend
What Daddy Government can’t offer you is wisdom.
Daddy Government will subsidize your babies, but he won’t tell you which men to avoid. He’ll lock up anybody you accuse of raping you, but he won’t tell you how to avoid rape in the first place. He’ll help you get that scholarship, but he won’t warn you about the trade-offs required for a full-time career. He’ll indulge his baby-girl… but he won’t help her grow into an adult woman.
Daddy Government will subsidize your babies, but he won’t tell you which men to avoid. He’ll lock up anybody you accuse of raping you, but he won’t tell you how to avoid rape in the first place. He’ll help you get that scholarship, but he won’t warn you about the trade-offs required for a full-time career. He’ll indulge his baby-girl… but he won’t help her grow into an adult woman.
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
The Underrated Gift of Sanity
Permit me these examples three.
First, the closing of the all-women's college, Sweet Briar. Sweet Briar last month announced that it would be closing this year. This was greeted with screams and vitriol, claims dreams have been destroyed, and repleted with threats of lawsuits and protests from current day students, as well as alumni and professorial staff.
Never mind the mathematical reality that the liberal arts bubble is bursting.
Never mind they have 1 employee per 5 students.
And never mind this college runs horse stables, indicating insane financial mismanagement and mathematical ineptitude.
Reality doesn't matter to those affected by Sweet Briar's closing. All that matters is what they were told, believed, and wanted. And thus these two irreconcilable forces result in grief, anger, confusion, frustration, and stress.
Second, "girls hate jocks."
Or at least that's what my mother told me when I was a youngin'. Couple that with the 90's decade long propaganda that women wanted kind, caring, sensitive men, and a generation of boys-now-men expended considerable energies during their teens and 20's pursuing women using strategies that were (in part) based on these flawed premises.
The results were entirely predictable - failure. And not just failure, but failure with the same commensurate grief, anger, confusion, frustration, and stress that is currently plaguing the clueless people of Sweet Briar.
And finally, third, "age is just a number."
This is a precious quote from a British woman named Patricia who, despite being 64, thought her marriage to a 26 year old Tunisian man was going to last.
And why wouldn't she?
She was told by feminists, media, professors, and leftist politicians, that 50 is the new 20. Age and beauty are merely social constructs. And men who chase after women for looks are not just shallow, but flawed.
The only problem is reality did not care what politicians, feminists, media types, and professors told her. 2 million years of human evolution prompted the young Tunisian man to leave her, resulting in, once again, grief, anger, confusion, frustration, and stress.
We could go on, but the above three anecdotes point towards a crisis the United States and Western Civilization are slowly, but unavoidably wandering into. A crisis of a deluded population crashing into the impenetrable wall of reality.
How our civilization became so deluded is somewhat complicated, but in hindsight explainable and understandable. With unrivaled economic success due to free markets, freedom, and capitalism, Western Civilization advanced so quickly that the majority of the economic and biological problems that plagued humanity for the past 2 million years were resolved. Hunger was eradicated. Poverty was eradicated. Even certain diseases were completely eradicated that entirely new ones were discovered because humans rarely lived as long in the past. This resulted in a spoiled population that never really endured the hardships of true life, and worse, gave people with a lot of time on their hands, even more.
Idle minds are the devil's workshop, and go to work he did, for instead of being thankful for a life of ease and ample free time, people's egos got in the way and demanded more. Now people were no longer satisfied with a good home cooked meal, they sought out the "injustice" of who precisely cooked that meal. No longer were people satisfied that a rich guy invented a device that allowed them to communicate with people around the world for nearly free. They were obsessed about him having more money, even obsessed about the color of his skin and the fact he was a man. And no longer were people satisfied. And no longer were people thankful for companies that created life saving devices and drugs, but insisted they were oppressed by these engines of innovation for they dared to charge for their services and dared to move to greener pastures. In short, Western Civilization slid into becoming a spoiled brat, narcissistic, envious society where all that mattered was feeding their ego without the required work and accomplishment that would warrant it.
This insatiable desire to feed the ego without the commensurate work resulted in a group of opportunists who were only more than happy to feed society's ego at seemingly no cost. To do this they created, out of whole cloth, false narratives and religions that the naive masses would swallow whole:
Sexism
Racism
Class warfare
"Evil corporations"
"You can't put a price on education"
"You go girl!"
"You can have it all!"
"Lean in!"
"Empowerment/Raising Awareness/
White/Male Privilege
Single moms are heroic
"50 is the new 20!"
and other outright lies
Worse, these charlatans put themselves in key points and positions within society effectively allowing them to brainwash and profit off of the rest of society:
Politicians
Media
Hollywood
Journalists
Professors
Feminists
Teachers
Activists
SJW's
Non-profits, and
NGO's
And so even with the benefit of stable and sane parents, even with the benefit of grounded peers, everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY within Western Civilization succumbed, one way or another, to at least ONE bit of erroneous and false propaganda. One bit of false, erroneous propaganda that cost them precious years of their lives.
Millions of students, brainwashed by public school teachers, wasted trillions on stupid, worthless, and completely unemployable degrees.
Millions of children were raised in divorced or single parent homes because feminists convinced women that was just as good an environment as a nuclear family.
Three generations of blacks were brainwashed to believe their last place socioeconomic position was the fault of white males, delivering a tragic mentality of defeatism that led to a self-fulfilling prophecy (but at least ensured democrat politicians had life long careers).
And three generations of women were led to believe their careers and government checks were more important than the human beings in their lives, only to find out too late upon their death beds that they had wasted their one shot at life (but again, at least some democrat politicians got their vote).
We can go on, but you get the point. Everybody in Western Civilization in one capacity or another, was brainwashed to believe in a lie that just wasn't true. And even though they may have believed the lie, it didn't change the fact reality doesn't care. And this conflict between what they were told, what they believed and what reality ultimately delivered has caused nearly everyone untold grief, suffering, confusion, frustration, and anger.
But enter two coincidentally timed events:
1. The development of the internet
2. The Great Recession
The internet is amazing unto itself. However, it has a unique trait that has the potential to undermine the charlatans and con artists posing as politicians, professors, teachers, feminists, etc. It not only allows anybody to write anything they want, but it allows everybody in the world to view it. In other words, the internet side steps the establishment guardians and censors of the MSM media. This allows ordinary people to expose the corrupt people of our society and hopefully "wake up the masses"as to just how brainwashed they are, and to just what a tragedy is being perpetrated against them.
However, people in power do not give it up lightly. And to protect themselves against the internet they have made it socially, professionally, politically, and economically for anybody to speak directly and bluntly about the truth. And this "political correctness" is no joke. With Mozilla, DongleGate, and doxxing, people (primarily on the left) only need to take public statements of a person, found on the internet, tell his/her employer about it and ruin their careers and financial livelihood forever. Thus, even with a powerful tool like the internet at their disposal, most people obey like the sheep they are and dare not speak what they truly think in fear of losing their jobs.
Well...that was until The Great Recession anyway.
For while many people have a career or a family to worry about, The Great Recession made it so millions would never have a career and family to begin with. So devastating and drawn out was this recession nearly 1.5 generations never succeeded much past college, and when you combine its severity with the fact the solution to the recession was to bail out those that caused it, any faith in "authority" or hope in a meritocracy had vanished. And now an estimated 100 million people not only have nothing to lose, but a hatred for those who ruined their lives.
And they've taken to the internet.
The red pill, the Manosphere, the alt right, you name it, millions of people with millions of blogs, YouTube channels and podcasts have formed as the only, but growing beacon of sanity, empiricism and reality. Everyday they highlight and point out the insanity they see, but the rest of the world doesn't as they're too absorbed in themselves and protective of their egos to do so. And these internet rogues also point out the perpetrators who are responsible for it, profiling and shining a light on the endless list of politicians, feminists, professors, deans, activists, and others who are scrambling to save themselves.
However, in being the only bastion of truth, reality and sanity, this part of the internet faces a Herculean challenge. Decades worth and trillions of dollars in brainwashing and lies have been propagated and incorporated into the minds of millions of people. So successfully so, that even if you're trying to point out the truth to them, their egos have been so pampered and protected, their response is not only disbelief, but one of rage, anger, hatred, even assault (imagine telling a liberal arts major their degree is worthless, or telling a wimpy, but reliable chemical engineer male most women will pass him up for a drug dealing thug with muscles). But this daunting challenge aside, it still doesn't change the fact that these people have to face a choice no matter how thorough and complete their brainwashing:
Continue to live in your deluded dream world, continue to chase and pursue after dreams that will never be,
or
accept the cold harsh reality that reality is.
To a sane person the choice is obvious, because there is no choice. Reality is reality. By definition choosing not to accept it is delusional and proof of a mental problem. But if you've been brought up your entire life under lies and propaganda, and you value your ego more than the rest of society and the real world, and above all else, you're an intellectual weakling, you will likely continue to live the lie.
But as tempting as it is to stay in the warm, but false, comforts of pretty lies, there is one benefit to "taking the red pill" (as it were) and it's more valuable than all the promises of the charlatans and con-artists.
Sanity.
Understand no matter what the politicians, feminists, journalists and professors tell you, it's not true. Their promises and your dreams that were based in them are never going to come to fruition. So no matter how comforting and ego-protecting it is today, if you believe them and make life decisions based on them, you will ruin your life. And not just by failing to achieve dreams that were never achievable in the first place, but the sheer torment you'll endure that is caused by the anger, confusion, frustration, stress and grief of living a lie (again, imagine the daily torment people with "Masters in English" are suffering in the labor market or women who believe they could "have it all" are suffering in the dating/marriage market)
But if you give up your deluded dreams and accept to live in reality, you get the gift of sanity. The KNOWING why things happened the way they did in the past, the knowledge of how things are likely to work in the future, and never being confused, frustrated, or angry again. Imagine if you were told what women REALLY liked when you were 13. Imagine if you were told how corporate America really worked. Imagine if you were told about the economic realities of choosing the right major.
To have that you only need to give up your dreams.
Which is a good thing because those dreams were worthless because they were never going to happen anyway.
First, the closing of the all-women's college, Sweet Briar. Sweet Briar last month announced that it would be closing this year. This was greeted with screams and vitriol, claims dreams have been destroyed, and repleted with threats of lawsuits and protests from current day students, as well as alumni and professorial staff.
Never mind the mathematical reality that the liberal arts bubble is bursting.
Never mind they have 1 employee per 5 students.
And never mind this college runs horse stables, indicating insane financial mismanagement and mathematical ineptitude.
Reality doesn't matter to those affected by Sweet Briar's closing. All that matters is what they were told, believed, and wanted. And thus these two irreconcilable forces result in grief, anger, confusion, frustration, and stress.
Second, "girls hate jocks."
Or at least that's what my mother told me when I was a youngin'. Couple that with the 90's decade long propaganda that women wanted kind, caring, sensitive men, and a generation of boys-now-men expended considerable energies during their teens and 20's pursuing women using strategies that were (in part) based on these flawed premises.
The results were entirely predictable - failure. And not just failure, but failure with the same commensurate grief, anger, confusion, frustration, and stress that is currently plaguing the clueless people of Sweet Briar.
And finally, third, "age is just a number."
This is a precious quote from a British woman named Patricia who, despite being 64, thought her marriage to a 26 year old Tunisian man was going to last.
And why wouldn't she?
She was told by feminists, media, professors, and leftist politicians, that 50 is the new 20. Age and beauty are merely social constructs. And men who chase after women for looks are not just shallow, but flawed.
The only problem is reality did not care what politicians, feminists, media types, and professors told her. 2 million years of human evolution prompted the young Tunisian man to leave her, resulting in, once again, grief, anger, confusion, frustration, and stress.
We could go on, but the above three anecdotes point towards a crisis the United States and Western Civilization are slowly, but unavoidably wandering into. A crisis of a deluded population crashing into the impenetrable wall of reality.
How our civilization became so deluded is somewhat complicated, but in hindsight explainable and understandable. With unrivaled economic success due to free markets, freedom, and capitalism, Western Civilization advanced so quickly that the majority of the economic and biological problems that plagued humanity for the past 2 million years were resolved. Hunger was eradicated. Poverty was eradicated. Even certain diseases were completely eradicated that entirely new ones were discovered because humans rarely lived as long in the past. This resulted in a spoiled population that never really endured the hardships of true life, and worse, gave people with a lot of time on their hands, even more.
Idle minds are the devil's workshop, and go to work he did, for instead of being thankful for a life of ease and ample free time, people's egos got in the way and demanded more. Now people were no longer satisfied with a good home cooked meal, they sought out the "injustice" of who precisely cooked that meal. No longer were people satisfied that a rich guy invented a device that allowed them to communicate with people around the world for nearly free. They were obsessed about him having more money, even obsessed about the color of his skin and the fact he was a man. And no longer were people satisfied. And no longer were people thankful for companies that created life saving devices and drugs, but insisted they were oppressed by these engines of innovation for they dared to charge for their services and dared to move to greener pastures. In short, Western Civilization slid into becoming a spoiled brat, narcissistic, envious society where all that mattered was feeding their ego without the required work and accomplishment that would warrant it.
This insatiable desire to feed the ego without the commensurate work resulted in a group of opportunists who were only more than happy to feed society's ego at seemingly no cost. To do this they created, out of whole cloth, false narratives and religions that the naive masses would swallow whole:
Sexism
Racism
Class warfare
"Evil corporations"
"You can't put a price on education"
"You go girl!"
"You can have it all!"
"Lean in!"
"Empowerment/Raising Awareness/
White/Male Privilege
Single moms are heroic
"50 is the new 20!"
and other outright lies
Worse, these charlatans put themselves in key points and positions within society effectively allowing them to brainwash and profit off of the rest of society:
Politicians
Media
Hollywood
Journalists
Professors
Feminists
Teachers
Activists
SJW's
Non-profits, and
NGO's
And so even with the benefit of stable and sane parents, even with the benefit of grounded peers, everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY within Western Civilization succumbed, one way or another, to at least ONE bit of erroneous and false propaganda. One bit of false, erroneous propaganda that cost them precious years of their lives.
Millions of students, brainwashed by public school teachers, wasted trillions on stupid, worthless, and completely unemployable degrees.
Millions of children were raised in divorced or single parent homes because feminists convinced women that was just as good an environment as a nuclear family.
Three generations of blacks were brainwashed to believe their last place socioeconomic position was the fault of white males, delivering a tragic mentality of defeatism that led to a self-fulfilling prophecy (but at least ensured democrat politicians had life long careers).
And three generations of women were led to believe their careers and government checks were more important than the human beings in their lives, only to find out too late upon their death beds that they had wasted their one shot at life (but again, at least some democrat politicians got their vote).
We can go on, but you get the point. Everybody in Western Civilization in one capacity or another, was brainwashed to believe in a lie that just wasn't true. And even though they may have believed the lie, it didn't change the fact reality doesn't care. And this conflict between what they were told, what they believed and what reality ultimately delivered has caused nearly everyone untold grief, suffering, confusion, frustration, and anger.
But enter two coincidentally timed events:
1. The development of the internet
2. The Great Recession
The internet is amazing unto itself. However, it has a unique trait that has the potential to undermine the charlatans and con artists posing as politicians, professors, teachers, feminists, etc. It not only allows anybody to write anything they want, but it allows everybody in the world to view it. In other words, the internet side steps the establishment guardians and censors of the MSM media. This allows ordinary people to expose the corrupt people of our society and hopefully "wake up the masses"as to just how brainwashed they are, and to just what a tragedy is being perpetrated against them.
However, people in power do not give it up lightly. And to protect themselves against the internet they have made it socially, professionally, politically, and economically for anybody to speak directly and bluntly about the truth. And this "political correctness" is no joke. With Mozilla, DongleGate, and doxxing, people (primarily on the left) only need to take public statements of a person, found on the internet, tell his/her employer about it and ruin their careers and financial livelihood forever. Thus, even with a powerful tool like the internet at their disposal, most people obey like the sheep they are and dare not speak what they truly think in fear of losing their jobs.
Well...that was until The Great Recession anyway.
For while many people have a career or a family to worry about, The Great Recession made it so millions would never have a career and family to begin with. So devastating and drawn out was this recession nearly 1.5 generations never succeeded much past college, and when you combine its severity with the fact the solution to the recession was to bail out those that caused it, any faith in "authority" or hope in a meritocracy had vanished. And now an estimated 100 million people not only have nothing to lose, but a hatred for those who ruined their lives.
And they've taken to the internet.
The red pill, the Manosphere, the alt right, you name it, millions of people with millions of blogs, YouTube channels and podcasts have formed as the only, but growing beacon of sanity, empiricism and reality. Everyday they highlight and point out the insanity they see, but the rest of the world doesn't as they're too absorbed in themselves and protective of their egos to do so. And these internet rogues also point out the perpetrators who are responsible for it, profiling and shining a light on the endless list of politicians, feminists, professors, deans, activists, and others who are scrambling to save themselves.
However, in being the only bastion of truth, reality and sanity, this part of the internet faces a Herculean challenge. Decades worth and trillions of dollars in brainwashing and lies have been propagated and incorporated into the minds of millions of people. So successfully so, that even if you're trying to point out the truth to them, their egos have been so pampered and protected, their response is not only disbelief, but one of rage, anger, hatred, even assault (imagine telling a liberal arts major their degree is worthless, or telling a wimpy, but reliable chemical engineer male most women will pass him up for a drug dealing thug with muscles). But this daunting challenge aside, it still doesn't change the fact that these people have to face a choice no matter how thorough and complete their brainwashing:
Continue to live in your deluded dream world, continue to chase and pursue after dreams that will never be,
or
accept the cold harsh reality that reality is.
To a sane person the choice is obvious, because there is no choice. Reality is reality. By definition choosing not to accept it is delusional and proof of a mental problem. But if you've been brought up your entire life under lies and propaganda, and you value your ego more than the rest of society and the real world, and above all else, you're an intellectual weakling, you will likely continue to live the lie.
But as tempting as it is to stay in the warm, but false, comforts of pretty lies, there is one benefit to "taking the red pill" (as it were) and it's more valuable than all the promises of the charlatans and con-artists.
Sanity.
Understand no matter what the politicians, feminists, journalists and professors tell you, it's not true. Their promises and your dreams that were based in them are never going to come to fruition. So no matter how comforting and ego-protecting it is today, if you believe them and make life decisions based on them, you will ruin your life. And not just by failing to achieve dreams that were never achievable in the first place, but the sheer torment you'll endure that is caused by the anger, confusion, frustration, stress and grief of living a lie (again, imagine the daily torment people with "Masters in English" are suffering in the labor market or women who believe they could "have it all" are suffering in the dating/marriage market)
But if you give up your deluded dreams and accept to live in reality, you get the gift of sanity. The KNOWING why things happened the way they did in the past, the knowledge of how things are likely to work in the future, and never being confused, frustrated, or angry again. Imagine if you were told what women REALLY liked when you were 13. Imagine if you were told how corporate America really worked. Imagine if you were told about the economic realities of choosing the right major.
To have that you only need to give up your dreams.
Which is a good thing because those dreams were worthless because they were never going to happen anyway.
"I Thought Age Was Just a Number"
Uncie Bern reviews three articles about western women who married their third country lovers. The hilarity that ensues is the entertainment you are entitled to for enduring 40 years of feminist drivel.
Monday, March 23, 2015
Katherine Byron Meet The Patron Saint Name of Frick
The safe space, Ms. Byron explained, was intended to give people who
might find comments “troubling” or “triggering,” a place to recuperate.
The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh,
calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as
well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma.
I'll say it again.
I will NEVER hire a liberal arts major from any college unless they admit they were idiots and are repentant for being so.
I'll say it again.
I will NEVER hire a liberal arts major from any college unless they admit they were idiots and are repentant for being so.
All Those Smart College Students and Professors
and yet none of them can do The Maths!
(Also note, they have horsies!!!! Yeaaaaaa! Pretty horsies!!!!)
(Also note, they have horsies!!!! Yeaaaaaa! Pretty horsies!!!!)
Uncie Bern Bern Reviews The Black Man's Guide Out of Poverty
Bern was kind enough to review my book and highlighted some excerpts that were particularly powerful. It's written review, but included are two videos.
Saturday, March 21, 2015
Friday, March 20, 2015
Narrative Uber Alles, Leftism Uber the Children
I had read an article somewhere where a lesbian mother was confessing she desperately wanted her daughter to become a lesbian. I had tried to find the original article (and if you know of it, please link below), but instead found this more disturbing one from 2011 where the lesbian parents are treating their son with hormone blocking drugs to "give him more time to determine if he wants to be straight or not."
Then there's this article that cites a study that claims to have debunked the "Single Mom Myth." It shows that a mother's education overcomes whatever her marital status she may have when it comes to the efficacy of raising her children. Never mind the sample size they chose was highly dubious. And never mind it was done by an all-woman's college. And never mind the sociologists have a blatant conflict of interest in promoting education to women at the expense of their families. The ends justified the shoddy methodological means.
Now the point I'm going to make is not that this study is proof that academic studies can no longer be trusted, or that lesbians somehow make bad parents. The point is the common variable that connects these two articles together:
Narrative Uber Children.
No matter what the left claims about wanting to help the children (or whatever pet cause they cite), it's instances like the two mentioned above that they belie their true colors. And when you get a glimpse into the true hearts of these leftists you can understand just how evil and vile they are. For they are so wedded to their political ideology that they are not only willing to:
Parasite off of society's producers
Lie to society
Legally steal from others
and
Bankrupt the nation, but
they will do so at the expense of children, even their own.
This isn't to say that all lesbian mothers put their politics and sexuality above their children. This isn't to say that all sociology doctorates seek to fabricate a "study" that will undermine the upbringing of millions of children. But if you look at the actions of the left, particularly when it comes to forcing them to choose between their ideology, their politics and the leftist narrative or their children, a scary percentage of them will throw their children under the bus.
The reason is simple - ego. They simply value themselves and their ideology more than their children. They are no different than their "right leaning" counterpart families where they have children, only to outsource them to daycare, and are twin siblings of the occasional vegan parents stories where their child dies because the parents valued their faux-vegan-religion more than their children. They are simply vile and evil.
The question is what to do about it?
There's not much that can be done (bar legally in the case of child abuse and neglect), however their arrogance does expose one of their flanks. Society has moved so far to the left and political correctness instilled so many lies, they don't realize their abhorrent behavior is on display for all to see. Worse, they're not even aware their behavior is abhorrent. They think it's noble. It's just. It's admirable. Because it's advocating the leftist narrative, and the narrative is uber alles. So when they proudly display their leftist credentials, while at the same time throwing a generation of children, even their own, under the bus, all one needs to do is highlight it, point it out, and make it very clear just how sick and wrong these people are.
And yes, they will scramble, cowardly hiding behind their victim trait of being "lesbian" or "female" or whatever. And you will be accused of being a racist or a bigot or a homophobe for daring to criticize their priorities and religion. But in the end you are merely and genuinely standing up for the children. Something leftists seem to have a hard time doing.
Then there's this article that cites a study that claims to have debunked the "Single Mom Myth." It shows that a mother's education overcomes whatever her marital status she may have when it comes to the efficacy of raising her children. Never mind the sample size they chose was highly dubious. And never mind it was done by an all-woman's college. And never mind the sociologists have a blatant conflict of interest in promoting education to women at the expense of their families. The ends justified the shoddy methodological means.
Now the point I'm going to make is not that this study is proof that academic studies can no longer be trusted, or that lesbians somehow make bad parents. The point is the common variable that connects these two articles together:
Narrative Uber Children.
No matter what the left claims about wanting to help the children (or whatever pet cause they cite), it's instances like the two mentioned above that they belie their true colors. And when you get a glimpse into the true hearts of these leftists you can understand just how evil and vile they are. For they are so wedded to their political ideology that they are not only willing to:
Parasite off of society's producers
Lie to society
Legally steal from others
and
Bankrupt the nation, but
they will do so at the expense of children, even their own.
This isn't to say that all lesbian mothers put their politics and sexuality above their children. This isn't to say that all sociology doctorates seek to fabricate a "study" that will undermine the upbringing of millions of children. But if you look at the actions of the left, particularly when it comes to forcing them to choose between their ideology, their politics and the leftist narrative or their children, a scary percentage of them will throw their children under the bus.
The reason is simple - ego. They simply value themselves and their ideology more than their children. They are no different than their "right leaning" counterpart families where they have children, only to outsource them to daycare, and are twin siblings of the occasional vegan parents stories where their child dies because the parents valued their faux-vegan-religion more than their children. They are simply vile and evil.
The question is what to do about it?
There's not much that can be done (bar legally in the case of child abuse and neglect), however their arrogance does expose one of their flanks. Society has moved so far to the left and political correctness instilled so many lies, they don't realize their abhorrent behavior is on display for all to see. Worse, they're not even aware their behavior is abhorrent. They think it's noble. It's just. It's admirable. Because it's advocating the leftist narrative, and the narrative is uber alles. So when they proudly display their leftist credentials, while at the same time throwing a generation of children, even their own, under the bus, all one needs to do is highlight it, point it out, and make it very clear just how sick and wrong these people are.
And yes, they will scramble, cowardly hiding behind their victim trait of being "lesbian" or "female" or whatever. And you will be accused of being a racist or a bigot or a homophobe for daring to criticize their priorities and religion. But in the end you are merely and genuinely standing up for the children. Something leftists seem to have a hard time doing.
Wednesday, March 18, 2015
Deb Hollingstad - Woman With Horse, Will Spend Money
I'm not going to editorialize, but instead we're going to play a game. A game called
"HOW MANY CAPPY CAP THEMES CAN YOU COUNT IN THE STORY!?"
There's at least 7 in there.
Here's the original story.
Here is Ms. Hollingstad's background.
Discuss!
"HOW MANY CAPPY CAP THEMES CAN YOU COUNT IN THE STORY!?"
There's at least 7 in there.
Here's the original story.
Here is Ms. Hollingstad's background.
Discuss!
The Liberal Arts Have Lost All Validity
I'll say it again for the cheap seats:
The liberal arts are no longer a valid or legitimate study in college. They are nothing more than hobbies in activism and socialism, serving only as functional tools of brainwashing and employment of worthless, talentless leftists in this and other western countries.
I will NEVER hire a liberal arts major (unless they have seen the light)
And I will NEVER trust a liberal arts professor with anything.
The liberal arts are no longer a valid or legitimate study in college. They are nothing more than hobbies in activism and socialism, serving only as functional tools of brainwashing and employment of worthless, talentless leftists in this and other western countries.
I will NEVER hire a liberal arts major (unless they have seen the light)
And I will NEVER trust a liberal arts professor with anything.
Asshole Consulting One Year Annivesary!
Happy day all!
Today is Asshole Consulting's one year anniversary!!!
And unlike most American businesses, it was profitable in the very first year!!!
To celebrate I'm having a VERY SPECIAL and VERY ASSHOLELY 0% OFF SALE for all Asshole Consulting requests today! So spread the joyous mirth and happiness of the world's only company that specializes in truth at all costs (and charges for it)! Tell family, friends, and morons who desperately need the services of Asshole Consulting!
Today is Asshole Consulting's one year anniversary!!!
And unlike most American businesses, it was profitable in the very first year!!!
To celebrate I'm having a VERY SPECIAL and VERY ASSHOLELY 0% OFF SALE for all Asshole Consulting requests today! So spread the joyous mirth and happiness of the world's only company that specializes in truth at all costs (and charges for it)! Tell family, friends, and morons who desperately need the services of Asshole Consulting!
QOTD - "The Fed Helps Poor People"
From my Veteran Chicago Agent in the Field:
I was walking by the Fed the other day, and there was a Father & Mother taking a picture of their probably 6-7 yr old son by the "Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago" sign.
I was walking by the Fed the other day, and there was a Father & Mother taking a picture of their probably 6-7 yr old son by the "Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago" sign.
The mother said, "Now when you grow up you can look at this picture and work for the Fed to help poor people."
I just chuckled, shook my head, and walked past.
Tuesday, March 17, 2015
Help a Fellow Manospherian Who Has Cancer
Kid Strange Love of Manosphere.com fame has unfortunately been diagnosed with cancer at the age of 30. Hodgkin s Lymphoma, but it is one of the more curable forms of cancer.
Regardless, it just plan sucks to get cancer and I thought what would be better than if Kid Strangelove were to wake up to a ton of new traffic to his site as well as a couple thousand new followers on his twitter account.
Anyway, his site is here and his twitter handle is @kidstrangelove
Take a couple seconds to make his day and boost his immune system to fight off cancer.
Regardless, it just plan sucks to get cancer and I thought what would be better than if Kid Strangelove were to wake up to a ton of new traffic to his site as well as a couple thousand new followers on his twitter account.
Anyway, his site is here and his twitter handle is @kidstrangelove
Take a couple seconds to make his day and boost his immune system to fight off cancer.
Cappy's "Retirement Planning in 10 Minutes"
You don't need a Masters in Finance to plan for retirement. You just need this 10 minute video the ole Captain put together with sweat, tears, toil, care, and love.
Also, yes, I am aware the whole video is MORE than 10 minutes, but the actual lecture is under 10.
Regardless, please feel free to forward this if you find it helpful. I'll be using YouTube to create higher quality videos this year as a platform to launch the next book.
Also, yes, I am aware the whole video is MORE than 10 minutes, but the actual lecture is under 10.
Regardless, please feel free to forward this if you find it helpful. I'll be using YouTube to create higher quality videos this year as a platform to launch the next book.
According to DudeBroWallStreetFratBoys the Stock Market is Never Overvalued
A new generation is upon us and I know this not only because of common sense and basic demographic information, but because there's been a recent spat of college age/20 somethings who have critiqued my earlier work about the stock market being overvalued. Naturally, my criticisms go back to even before the financial crisis, but this was when most of these finance-majoring DudeBros were all of 10 years old. And now, equipped the little, microscopic, and misleading information that comes with a degree in finance today, these know it all FinanceMajoringDudeBros are going to set the ole Captain straight about how his predictions have not come true, and that they are going to somehow be smarter and better than their baby boomer and Gen X bailed-out bankster counterparts.
Ahhhhh youth.
So let's beat this dead horse one more time.
There are two measures we use to gauge whether a stock is worth the price. Price to Earnings (or the "PE" ratio) and the Dividend Yield.
The PE ratio is simply that - the price per share divided by the earnings per share. It shows you what you are paying in stock price per dollar in earnings. The higher it is the more overvalued a stock is and vice versa.
The dividend yield is the same concept, except we flip the numerator and denominator AND replace earnings with dividends (because you technically only receive dividends, not the total earnings per share of the company). Instead of a ratio (like the PE) you get a "yield" or "percent rate of return" on your investment.
And so when we look at both you can PLAINLY see that the market is severely overvalued.
The historical average PE for the S&P 500 has been 15. It is now trading at 27. If you are a DudeBroFratBoyGoldmanSachsFutureBailoutRecipient, ask yourself a simple question. Is it worth paying nearly $800 for the PS4? Is it worth paying $7/gallon in gas? And is it worth paying $50,000 for a new AVERAGE sedan? Because paying a PE of 27 for a share of stock is no different.
The dividend yield is even worse. The historical average for the dividend yield has been 5%. You could expect to receive a 5% annual rate of return in the form of dividends. Today it is 1.8%, a 277% overvaluation.
Now your PS4 costs $1,108.
A new average sedan $69,000.
And a Big Mac $12.50.
Of course, before we pick on future DudeBroFratBoysofAmerica we have to look at ourselves in the mirror. For while the DudeBroFinanceMajorsofEternalDudeBroness merely parrot what they're told by their charlatans posing as business professors, at least they're not investing in the stock market because they're poor college kids.
The same cannot be said, however, for the millions of obedient, conformist, non-thinking Americans who year after year throw trillions of dollars into their precious 401k and IRA retirement programs. For they are the financially-illiterate zombies that do not take their advice from the likes of Shiller or Schiff, but the 24 year old HR generalist who "strongly recommends" investing in the company's 401k plan *tee hee!* And in doing so inflate the stock market beyond all sane and reasonable measures of valuation, not to mention price out younger generations (if they are smart enough to read articles such as these).
The point is that there are three major things driving stock prices higher than their fundamental warrant.
1. Quantitative Easing
With the Fed printing off money so it can buy treasuries, mortgages, and other unwanted securities off of the banks' hands, the recipient banks of these monies invariably invest said monies in the stock market driving up prices.
2. Fed-Induced Low Interest Rates
With interest rates very low, it becomes profitable for corporations (ie-shareholders and executives) to borrow at these low rates and repurchase the company's shares. This drives the value of their shares up more than the interest expense the company would have to pay on its debts. Of course, this leveraged buyout ignores whether it's worth paying a PE of 27 for its own shares, further fueling the bubble, AND it ignores what would happen if the economy were to tank while they have so much debt on their books, but hey! We drove the stock price (and thus our stock options) up another 200%, and that's all that matters!
and
3. Retirement Plans
This is the deadest piece of the horse I've beating since 2004. Why, oh why, did the government just magically decide it was "the stock market" that would serve as the primary vehicle for 300 million Americans' retirements?
Why not property?
Why not private businesses?
Matter of fact, what business was it of the government's to provide tax incentives for people to invest for retirement anyway?
Pfa! Who cares, it was "well intended" and that's all that matters. Distortion of the stock market be damned.
In the end, the same mentality that occurred in 1998 for the DotComs, in 2006 for the housing market, an in 2009-present for the education bubble is reappearing again today in the stock market.
"The market keeps going up!"
"You can't afford NOT to be in this market!"
"You need to save for retirement!"
"What do you mean 'earnings'?"
"What do you mean 'dividends'?"
and my all time favorite
"This time it's different."
And while yes, this time it is different (as the Fed has now made the stock market a place that is a viable long term hedge against inflation, NOT a place to invest in an actual company), let us be clear. It's precisely the exact same shit that happened before. And the reason it keeps happening so frequently is because the exact same people it happened to before are too damn ignorant and uneducated about economics, not to mention stupid, to learn from their past experiences.
It drives nearly every real economist in the world to pour a glass of scotch and enjoy the decline.
Ahhhhh youth.
So let's beat this dead horse one more time.
There are two measures we use to gauge whether a stock is worth the price. Price to Earnings (or the "PE" ratio) and the Dividend Yield.
The PE ratio is simply that - the price per share divided by the earnings per share. It shows you what you are paying in stock price per dollar in earnings. The higher it is the more overvalued a stock is and vice versa.
The dividend yield is the same concept, except we flip the numerator and denominator AND replace earnings with dividends (because you technically only receive dividends, not the total earnings per share of the company). Instead of a ratio (like the PE) you get a "yield" or "percent rate of return" on your investment.
And so when we look at both you can PLAINLY see that the market is severely overvalued.
The historical average PE for the S&P 500 has been 15. It is now trading at 27. If you are a DudeBroFratBoyGoldmanSachsFutureBailoutRecipient, ask yourself a simple question. Is it worth paying nearly $800 for the PS4? Is it worth paying $7/gallon in gas? And is it worth paying $50,000 for a new AVERAGE sedan? Because paying a PE of 27 for a share of stock is no different.
The dividend yield is even worse. The historical average for the dividend yield has been 5%. You could expect to receive a 5% annual rate of return in the form of dividends. Today it is 1.8%, a 277% overvaluation.
Now your PS4 costs $1,108.
A new average sedan $69,000.
And a Big Mac $12.50.
Of course, before we pick on future DudeBroFratBoysofAmerica we have to look at ourselves in the mirror. For while the DudeBroFinanceMajorsofEternalDudeBroness merely parrot what they're told by their charlatans posing as business professors, at least they're not investing in the stock market because they're poor college kids.
The same cannot be said, however, for the millions of obedient, conformist, non-thinking Americans who year after year throw trillions of dollars into their precious 401k and IRA retirement programs. For they are the financially-illiterate zombies that do not take their advice from the likes of Shiller or Schiff, but the 24 year old HR generalist who "strongly recommends" investing in the company's 401k plan *tee hee!* And in doing so inflate the stock market beyond all sane and reasonable measures of valuation, not to mention price out younger generations (if they are smart enough to read articles such as these).
The point is that there are three major things driving stock prices higher than their fundamental warrant.
1. Quantitative Easing
With the Fed printing off money so it can buy treasuries, mortgages, and other unwanted securities off of the banks' hands, the recipient banks of these monies invariably invest said monies in the stock market driving up prices.
2. Fed-Induced Low Interest Rates
With interest rates very low, it becomes profitable for corporations (ie-shareholders and executives) to borrow at these low rates and repurchase the company's shares. This drives the value of their shares up more than the interest expense the company would have to pay on its debts. Of course, this leveraged buyout ignores whether it's worth paying a PE of 27 for its own shares, further fueling the bubble, AND it ignores what would happen if the economy were to tank while they have so much debt on their books, but hey! We drove the stock price (and thus our stock options) up another 200%, and that's all that matters!
and
3. Retirement Plans
This is the deadest piece of the horse I've beating since 2004. Why, oh why, did the government just magically decide it was "the stock market" that would serve as the primary vehicle for 300 million Americans' retirements?
Why not property?
Why not private businesses?
Matter of fact, what business was it of the government's to provide tax incentives for people to invest for retirement anyway?
Pfa! Who cares, it was "well intended" and that's all that matters. Distortion of the stock market be damned.
In the end, the same mentality that occurred in 1998 for the DotComs, in 2006 for the housing market, an in 2009-present for the education bubble is reappearing again today in the stock market.
"The market keeps going up!"
"You can't afford NOT to be in this market!"
"You need to save for retirement!"
"What do you mean 'earnings'?"
"What do you mean 'dividends'?"
and my all time favorite
"This time it's different."
And while yes, this time it is different (as the Fed has now made the stock market a place that is a viable long term hedge against inflation, NOT a place to invest in an actual company), let us be clear. It's precisely the exact same shit that happened before. And the reason it keeps happening so frequently is because the exact same people it happened to before are too damn ignorant and uneducated about economics, not to mention stupid, to learn from their past experiences.
It drives nearly every real economist in the world to pour a glass of scotch and enjoy the decline.
Monday, March 16, 2015
What Is Private Property?
Delving into precisely what is private property and why it is the key to economic success, as well as what happens to economies when you take it away:
Might Want to Hold Off On Going Galt
Economists with souls and normal people with brains would look at the twice elected Obama and the people who put him into office and say,
"This country is not going back to the greatness it came from and is permanently headed towards a more common, and uninspiring European socialist model. Ergo, the great American Experiment is over, democracy with its idiot masses are forever here to stay, and it's now time to buy up silver and go Galt."
And you'd be right.
True to form Obama and a more-or-less democrat congress voted in the highest levels of peace-time spending in the country, ran the highest levels of peace-time deficits, resulting in the highest peace-time national debt (which is about to eclipse our all time record war-time debt during WWII). Throw in Obamacare and a couple extra trillion in crony-owned Solyndras and lord knows what else in socialist pork, and you have a political and economic environment where the rational and logic thing to do would be to scale down, work less, and go Galt.
Except for one thing - deficit spending.
While our politicians obey the idiot masses and just spend spend spend, they also want to be re-elected. So the last thing they do is force the true cost of these social programs on the population. Instead they keep taxes artificially low and borrow the money to finance these vote-bribing programs, resulting in huge deficits and a huge national debt.
But what this means for you and any other American who is thinking about going Galt is that the true tax rate has merely been deferred into the future. Our tax rate TODAY (disagreeable as you may find it) is actually quite low. Unsustainably low. And at some point in time in the future, it's going to have to go up (especially given this doesn't even account for $127 trillion in unfunded liabilities).
So what's a young aspiring "Galtist" to do?
Work your ass off and build up some cash if you can.
The reasons are multi-fold.
First, as mentioned before, the current tax rate is artificially low. Take advantage of it. If you can make money today, do so, because you're unlikely to keep this high a percentage of your income for the rest of your life.
Second, you'll have time. Not just because our deficit is decreasing ("only" 5% of GDP today), but more importantly because we have the world's reserve currency - the dollar. I've explained it before, but in having the world's reserve currency we can keep borrowing for quite some time no matter how many socialists we elect and no matter how poor our nation's finances. This reserve currency status will essentially allow us to keep overall taxes lower than they need to be, effectively forcing other nations to pay for our spending.
And finally, third, assets are harder to tax than income. Your income has to go through your employer. Your employer has to report this to the IRS. And matter of fact, forget reporting, they just take out the taxes before you see it. However, if you were to work up the cash now at these lower tax rates and purchase assets to be saved into the future, it becomes a little harder for Uncle Sam to come in and take those assets.
What if you just misplaced that gun collection you had?
What if all that cash was blown on strippers and booze?
Shucks howdy, I slipped, fell and ended up living in Singapore with an asset protection trust!
Oh sure, they can confiscate your house and jack up property taxes, but there are other valuable assets you can store your money in today to avoid the sure-as-hell-guaranteed taxes that are coming tomorrow.
Regardless, the point is that tax rates today are very low not relative to history, but relative to what is likely coming in the future. And while it may put great distaste into your mouth to work hard today, it's likely your best move because the distaste tomorrow is going to be on par with tax rates averaging around 60%.
Enjoy the decline!
"This country is not going back to the greatness it came from and is permanently headed towards a more common, and uninspiring European socialist model. Ergo, the great American Experiment is over, democracy with its idiot masses are forever here to stay, and it's now time to buy up silver and go Galt."
And you'd be right.
True to form Obama and a more-or-less democrat congress voted in the highest levels of peace-time spending in the country, ran the highest levels of peace-time deficits, resulting in the highest peace-time national debt (which is about to eclipse our all time record war-time debt during WWII). Throw in Obamacare and a couple extra trillion in crony-owned Solyndras and lord knows what else in socialist pork, and you have a political and economic environment where the rational and logic thing to do would be to scale down, work less, and go Galt.
Except for one thing - deficit spending.
While our politicians obey the idiot masses and just spend spend spend, they also want to be re-elected. So the last thing they do is force the true cost of these social programs on the population. Instead they keep taxes artificially low and borrow the money to finance these vote-bribing programs, resulting in huge deficits and a huge national debt.
But what this means for you and any other American who is thinking about going Galt is that the true tax rate has merely been deferred into the future. Our tax rate TODAY (disagreeable as you may find it) is actually quite low. Unsustainably low. And at some point in time in the future, it's going to have to go up (especially given this doesn't even account for $127 trillion in unfunded liabilities).
So what's a young aspiring "Galtist" to do?
Work your ass off and build up some cash if you can.
The reasons are multi-fold.
First, as mentioned before, the current tax rate is artificially low. Take advantage of it. If you can make money today, do so, because you're unlikely to keep this high a percentage of your income for the rest of your life.
Second, you'll have time. Not just because our deficit is decreasing ("only" 5% of GDP today), but more importantly because we have the world's reserve currency - the dollar. I've explained it before, but in having the world's reserve currency we can keep borrowing for quite some time no matter how many socialists we elect and no matter how poor our nation's finances. This reserve currency status will essentially allow us to keep overall taxes lower than they need to be, effectively forcing other nations to pay for our spending.
And finally, third, assets are harder to tax than income. Your income has to go through your employer. Your employer has to report this to the IRS. And matter of fact, forget reporting, they just take out the taxes before you see it. However, if you were to work up the cash now at these lower tax rates and purchase assets to be saved into the future, it becomes a little harder for Uncle Sam to come in and take those assets.
What if you just misplaced that gun collection you had?
What if all that cash was blown on strippers and booze?
Shucks howdy, I slipped, fell and ended up living in Singapore with an asset protection trust!
Oh sure, they can confiscate your house and jack up property taxes, but there are other valuable assets you can store your money in today to avoid the sure-as-hell-guaranteed taxes that are coming tomorrow.
Regardless, the point is that tax rates today are very low not relative to history, but relative to what is likely coming in the future. And while it may put great distaste into your mouth to work hard today, it's likely your best move because the distaste tomorrow is going to be on par with tax rates averaging around 60%.
Enjoy the decline!
Sunday, March 15, 2015
Gen X Moms v. 2.0
RamZPaul finds that the DoeEyes Gen X mom is not only telling boys how not to approach her daughter, but she also has a video on how to give blow jobs (obviously not intended for young boys).
I'll say it again, they are the adults now, and young people would be wise to know they are insane.
I'll say it again, they are the adults now, and young people would be wise to know they are insane.
Saturday, March 14, 2015
Gen X Moms - Doe Eyes of YouTube
In my previous podcast there was a segment where I warn younger generations (Millinneals) that my generation (Gen X) never really matured or grew up. And that if you operate from the logical, but highly flawed premise that "older people know what they're talking about" then you are in for a world of hurt, much like my generation was when we assumed the Baby Boomers knew what they were talking about when they were in their 40's and 50's.
Of course, this tangentially touches on a concern I always have running in the back of my mind. Namely, that the wisdom and life experiences I have may become obsoleted or moot as society changes. Ergo, the wisdom I got through living in the 80's and 90's, may not apply to younger people of the 00's and 10's.
Thankfully, (or sadly depending on how you look at it) it seems the advice us "elder brothers" of Gen X is needed now more than ever, because things have not changed, let alone improved as Gen X has taken over. Matter of fact they've gotten worse. And this video shows it.
I wanted to highlight "Doe Eyes" because this is a woman that is in my generation and you can tell at one time she was the hottie girl in her school through her 20's. But what should be blindingly clear, as well as outright scary, is how this full grown woman, who is a mother, is still acting like a 15 year old child.
And this is the threat and the problem that I cannot emphasize enough to younger generations.
Because she is older she not only thinks she can dispense advice to younger generations, but you younger kids out there are predisposed to believe her simply because she's an "elder." Young men are going to listen to her advice, assume it's correct because "she's an adult," and waste an estimated 2 decades pursuing a flawed chick-getting-strategy. The result will not just be failure, but frustration, mental stress, confusion, and insanity.
Thankfully, however, that's why you have the Red Pill/Manosphere/internet community.
Roosh was the original discoverer of the video and has since sent traffic there. I am retweeting it and addressing it as well. And I'm sure you will share and downvote this veritable and arrogant cunt's video (since she has taken comments down). Whatever it is, we owe it to out younger boys and girls out there to identify, highlight, expose and destroy such propaganda and lies so that they may not be misled by frauds like Doe Eyes, and may have better, saner lives that are based in reality.
Post post - somebody pointed out the kid wrote a girl a poem and that this was viewed as a "bad" thing. Ladies, if you wonder "why don't men do nice things like write poems anymore," there's your answer.
Of course, this tangentially touches on a concern I always have running in the back of my mind. Namely, that the wisdom and life experiences I have may become obsoleted or moot as society changes. Ergo, the wisdom I got through living in the 80's and 90's, may not apply to younger people of the 00's and 10's.
Thankfully, (or sadly depending on how you look at it) it seems the advice us "elder brothers" of Gen X is needed now more than ever, because things have not changed, let alone improved as Gen X has taken over. Matter of fact they've gotten worse. And this video shows it.
I wanted to highlight "Doe Eyes" because this is a woman that is in my generation and you can tell at one time she was the hottie girl in her school through her 20's. But what should be blindingly clear, as well as outright scary, is how this full grown woman, who is a mother, is still acting like a 15 year old child.
And this is the threat and the problem that I cannot emphasize enough to younger generations.
Because she is older she not only thinks she can dispense advice to younger generations, but you younger kids out there are predisposed to believe her simply because she's an "elder." Young men are going to listen to her advice, assume it's correct because "she's an adult," and waste an estimated 2 decades pursuing a flawed chick-getting-strategy. The result will not just be failure, but frustration, mental stress, confusion, and insanity.
Thankfully, however, that's why you have the Red Pill/Manosphere/internet community.
Roosh was the original discoverer of the video and has since sent traffic there. I am retweeting it and addressing it as well. And I'm sure you will share and downvote this veritable and arrogant cunt's video (since she has taken comments down). Whatever it is, we owe it to out younger boys and girls out there to identify, highlight, expose and destroy such propaganda and lies so that they may not be misled by frauds like Doe Eyes, and may have better, saner lives that are based in reality.
Post post - somebody pointed out the kid wrote a girl a poem and that this was viewed as a "bad" thing. Ladies, if you wonder "why don't men do nice things like write poems anymore," there's your answer.
Friday, March 13, 2015
Thursday, March 12, 2015
Why Women Do the Majority of Housework
There is usually a lot of anger and confusion among both sexes, especially when social engineers tinker with genetics and society, forcing social roles that were largely already hashed out over billions of years of evolution. And housework is one of those things that most men "meh" at, while women grip, whine, complain, moan and scream bloody murder over.
So let ole Cappy explain why the debate about "who does the majority of housework" is not only stupid and moot, but solve it with a health dose of reality and realism.
Whoever wants the cleaner house does the cleaning.
I'll say that again.
Whoever wants the cleaner house does the cleaning.
You'll notice that this rule (based in reality) is not sexist or biased. It is an asexual statement as it can be a man who is more cleansely, or a woman who is more cleansely. However, it is usually women who have the higher standard of cleanliness.
This then revisits that good old fashioned world of economics. Specifically, supply and demand. If somebody has a higher demand for something, then they are the ones not in the position of power and the ones that must compensate and compromise.
A guy who isn't as interested as dating a girl as she is in him.
Why men must do the majority of asking out and not vice versa.
An employer who has 100 applicants for one job versus the starving, debt laden college graduate.
The man in need of a kidney versus the man with one to spare.
And people who want a cleaner house than their spouse get to do the cleaning.
This has largely (though not always) been the case with myself. I keep my abode "biologically clean." That means toilets, dishes, laundry, and anything else that has the potential to spontaneously spawn Ebola gets cleaned. But vacuuming, dusting and cleaning out the microwave? Not a weekly event. But I'll be damned if it wasn't 9 out of the 10 girls I dated who would start doing dishes (that didn't need doing), complain about the dust, and whine about clothes on the floor, all while I was in perfect health and the world still continued to turn.
Like most women, nearly all of them would try to negotiate and get me to do more of the household chores or at least at a higher frequency. But unlike our Swedish male counterparts I used a word that has since likely been lost in the Swedish language - no.
There was also not an argument, an explanation, or a lecture that followed, but a declarative statement.
"I will clean to my standards of cleanliness when I deem it necessary. If you wish to clean to a higher standard AND more frequently you may. But that is your choice and not something you will hold over me or keep track of on some kind of 'chore scorecard.'"
And everytime, EVERY TIME it has worked because not only was I being a real man, but it's true.
The person who wants a cleaner house cleans.
Of course, the truth is this whole drama over housework is precisely that - drama. A Western Civilization-wide shit test feminists and unconscious females are programmed to administer to test the mettle of their (increasingly failing) men. And a mere dismissal of this test will allow you to pass with flying colors.
But if they insist or do not relent. Actually being serious about housework, to the point they threaten to leave or end the relationship, then all you have to do is walk them out to their car, take a look at the oil change sticker they got at Jiffy Lube 8 months and 6,000 miles ago, hand them a socket wrench set and a jack and say,
"You're overdue for an oil change. Have fun dear."
And when she invariably asks you "what kind of oil," "how much oil," "how do I get the lifty thing under the car," etc., etc., you merely break out your lawn chair, pour a nice scotch, light up a cigar and answer,
"Google it, Google it, Google it."
And that one oil change will end the debate of "who does the housework" forever.
So let ole Cappy explain why the debate about "who does the majority of housework" is not only stupid and moot, but solve it with a health dose of reality and realism.
Whoever wants the cleaner house does the cleaning.
I'll say that again.
Whoever wants the cleaner house does the cleaning.
You'll notice that this rule (based in reality) is not sexist or biased. It is an asexual statement as it can be a man who is more cleansely, or a woman who is more cleansely. However, it is usually women who have the higher standard of cleanliness.
This then revisits that good old fashioned world of economics. Specifically, supply and demand. If somebody has a higher demand for something, then they are the ones not in the position of power and the ones that must compensate and compromise.
A guy who isn't as interested as dating a girl as she is in him.
Why men must do the majority of asking out and not vice versa.
An employer who has 100 applicants for one job versus the starving, debt laden college graduate.
The man in need of a kidney versus the man with one to spare.
And people who want a cleaner house than their spouse get to do the cleaning.
This has largely (though not always) been the case with myself. I keep my abode "biologically clean." That means toilets, dishes, laundry, and anything else that has the potential to spontaneously spawn Ebola gets cleaned. But vacuuming, dusting and cleaning out the microwave? Not a weekly event. But I'll be damned if it wasn't 9 out of the 10 girls I dated who would start doing dishes (that didn't need doing), complain about the dust, and whine about clothes on the floor, all while I was in perfect health and the world still continued to turn.
Like most women, nearly all of them would try to negotiate and get me to do more of the household chores or at least at a higher frequency. But unlike our Swedish male counterparts I used a word that has since likely been lost in the Swedish language - no.
There was also not an argument, an explanation, or a lecture that followed, but a declarative statement.
"I will clean to my standards of cleanliness when I deem it necessary. If you wish to clean to a higher standard AND more frequently you may. But that is your choice and not something you will hold over me or keep track of on some kind of 'chore scorecard.'"
And everytime, EVERY TIME it has worked because not only was I being a real man, but it's true.
The person who wants a cleaner house cleans.
Of course, the truth is this whole drama over housework is precisely that - drama. A Western Civilization-wide shit test feminists and unconscious females are programmed to administer to test the mettle of their (increasingly failing) men. And a mere dismissal of this test will allow you to pass with flying colors.
But if they insist or do not relent. Actually being serious about housework, to the point they threaten to leave or end the relationship, then all you have to do is walk them out to their car, take a look at the oil change sticker they got at Jiffy Lube 8 months and 6,000 miles ago, hand them a socket wrench set and a jack and say,
"You're overdue for an oil change. Have fun dear."
And when she invariably asks you "what kind of oil," "how much oil," "how do I get the lifty thing under the car," etc., etc., you merely break out your lawn chair, pour a nice scotch, light up a cigar and answer,
"Google it, Google it, Google it."
And that one oil change will end the debate of "who does the housework" forever.
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
The Three "Shitties" of Public Schools
Minneapolis Public Schools had a cute outright lie they advertised on KBEM FM 88.5 (a radio station they run, because we all know public schools should be running radio stations).
It went something like
"Good Teachers,
Great Kids
Great Schools."
I had to laugh because I knew the opposite was quite true. Minneapolis had the
shittiest teachers
the shittiest kids and
the shittiest schools.
But it made me think. Precisely what are the ingredients that go into making a school shitty, good, or even great? And I think the Minneapolis Public Schools were very close when it came to ingredients, they just had very poor quality ingredients to throw into the pot.
So I developed a new and revised formula for the Minneapolis Public Schools with one caveat. The formula is:
Parents
+
Teachers
+
Children
=
Schools
And the caveat is that only two of the three ingredients have to be shitty in order for the whole school to be shitty.
For example you can have great kids, but horrible parents and horrible teachers. Doesn't matter how great the kid does, his parents are losers, his teachers are losers and the kid is likely condemned to failure.
Another combination, shitty teachers, shitty children, but great teachers. Much as I loathe teachers I do know there's a handful of them out there who truly do care about education and are indeed great teachers. Unfortunately, that's rendered moot when you have shitty students and equally shitty parents who believe their children can do no wrong (though that is more of a trait of elitist suburban schools, and not the inner city). Regardless, the kid is condemned to failure.
And then there's shitty teachers and shitty students. The parents could have the greatest intentions in the world, but unfortunately the state now effectively raises your children from 5 years old on. You are merely to feed, clothe, and house them until they can be returned to the state indoctrination facility for an amount of time that nearly quadruples the amount of time you get with your own flesh and blood. Again, failed school.
We can go on, but the point is as the moral decay of America has progressed and higher and higher percentage of these three pillars are being corrupted, increasingly becoming "shittier," a higher and higher percentage of our schools are becoming "shitty." And it doesn't matter how much money we throw at them, it's going to require personal resolve, character and dedication to excellence of ALL THREE GROUPS to improve public education.
Until that time you can expect increasing amounts of:
Single/incompetent/absentee/outsourcing parents
Misbehaving children, and
Poorer quality teachers
all resulting in the laughing stock that has become public education. And it will only be a joke until these poor kids are dumped out into the real world.
But hey, at least you didn't have to raise your own kids
And at least you got summers off.
And at least you got your GED.
It went something like
"Good Teachers,
Great Kids
Great Schools."
I had to laugh because I knew the opposite was quite true. Minneapolis had the
shittiest teachers
the shittiest kids and
the shittiest schools.
But it made me think. Precisely what are the ingredients that go into making a school shitty, good, or even great? And I think the Minneapolis Public Schools were very close when it came to ingredients, they just had very poor quality ingredients to throw into the pot.
So I developed a new and revised formula for the Minneapolis Public Schools with one caveat. The formula is:
Parents
+
Teachers
+
Children
=
Schools
And the caveat is that only two of the three ingredients have to be shitty in order for the whole school to be shitty.
For example you can have great kids, but horrible parents and horrible teachers. Doesn't matter how great the kid does, his parents are losers, his teachers are losers and the kid is likely condemned to failure.
Another combination, shitty teachers, shitty children, but great teachers. Much as I loathe teachers I do know there's a handful of them out there who truly do care about education and are indeed great teachers. Unfortunately, that's rendered moot when you have shitty students and equally shitty parents who believe their children can do no wrong (though that is more of a trait of elitist suburban schools, and not the inner city). Regardless, the kid is condemned to failure.
And then there's shitty teachers and shitty students. The parents could have the greatest intentions in the world, but unfortunately the state now effectively raises your children from 5 years old on. You are merely to feed, clothe, and house them until they can be returned to the state indoctrination facility for an amount of time that nearly quadruples the amount of time you get with your own flesh and blood. Again, failed school.
We can go on, but the point is as the moral decay of America has progressed and higher and higher percentage of these three pillars are being corrupted, increasingly becoming "shittier," a higher and higher percentage of our schools are becoming "shitty." And it doesn't matter how much money we throw at them, it's going to require personal resolve, character and dedication to excellence of ALL THREE GROUPS to improve public education.
Until that time you can expect increasing amounts of:
Single/incompetent/absentee/outsourcing parents
Misbehaving children, and
Poorer quality teachers
all resulting in the laughing stock that has become public education. And it will only be a joke until these poor kids are dumped out into the real world.
But hey, at least you didn't have to raise your own kids
And at least you got summers off.
And at least you got your GED.
Tuesday, March 10, 2015
The Reason for America's Demise in One Video
It's graphic, not because of cursing, but because of grotesque insanity.
English Majors of the Math World
As you know I largely loathe and despise English teachers. It is nothing short of child abuse that we force millions of children every year to essentially sit in a prison, 9 months a year, and learn a language they already know.
Yes, I know grades K-4 are necessary to learn to read and write.
Yes, I know things like penmanship, reading and writing are necessary to become effective communicators in the real world.
But the mental abuse (post 4th grade) of forcing children to learn obsolete, unnecessary, and idiotic things like "dangling participles," "dipthongs," and diagramming sentences is mere make-slavery-work-child-labor to employ (largely) 20 something girls too lazy to do math and instead chose to become English teachers.
But before we get too riled up about the all-too-common liberal arts teachers, we need to focus on math teachers.
Oh yes.
For while they may (and for all practical points and purposes do) deliver a real and needed education to the children, there is one subsegment of math that is as obsolete as learning the difference between an adjective and an adverb.
Integers
Whole Numbers
Rational Numbers
Irrational Numbers
Natural Numbers
and any other vocabulary terms anal retentive math purists foisted on otherwise unsuspecting and innocent child math geniuses
Not once, in all of my math studies, was it necessary for me to know what the hell those aforementioned things are/were.
Multivariable regression was used to program models that would predict GDP growth.
Correlation coefficients and other statistical measures used to test relationships with different economic and financial phenomena.
I've even used trig to measure the side of a roof for a shed I was building.
But never, EVER have I or anybody else ever had to know what an integer was or what a "natural" number was.
The truth is the only thing these "things" serve is to lower the test scores of math geniuses and give math teachers who can't do math something to belabor their children over for a week's worth of material and lesson plans. No doubt there's going to be some idiot "professional educator" that's going to parrot the reason why we teach such unneeded poppy cock, and I'm sure some mathematician is going to explain the "importance" of differentiating between and integer and a "whole number." But in the end we all know it's an unnecessary hoop we make children, math textbook publishers, and teachers jump through, wasting calories of energy that could be used studying and teaching math that actually matters and has real world applications.
Yes, I know grades K-4 are necessary to learn to read and write.
Yes, I know things like penmanship, reading and writing are necessary to become effective communicators in the real world.
But the mental abuse (post 4th grade) of forcing children to learn obsolete, unnecessary, and idiotic things like "dangling participles," "dipthongs," and diagramming sentences is mere make-slavery-work-child-labor to employ (largely) 20 something girls too lazy to do math and instead chose to become English teachers.
But before we get too riled up about the all-too-common liberal arts teachers, we need to focus on math teachers.
Oh yes.
For while they may (and for all practical points and purposes do) deliver a real and needed education to the children, there is one subsegment of math that is as obsolete as learning the difference between an adjective and an adverb.
Integers
Whole Numbers
Rational Numbers
Irrational Numbers
Natural Numbers
and any other vocabulary terms anal retentive math purists foisted on otherwise unsuspecting and innocent child math geniuses
Not once, in all of my math studies, was it necessary for me to know what the hell those aforementioned things are/were.
Multivariable regression was used to program models that would predict GDP growth.
Correlation coefficients and other statistical measures used to test relationships with different economic and financial phenomena.
I've even used trig to measure the side of a roof for a shed I was building.
But never, EVER have I or anybody else ever had to know what an integer was or what a "natural" number was.
The truth is the only thing these "things" serve is to lower the test scores of math geniuses and give math teachers who can't do math something to belabor their children over for a week's worth of material and lesson plans. No doubt there's going to be some idiot "professional educator" that's going to parrot the reason why we teach such unneeded poppy cock, and I'm sure some mathematician is going to explain the "importance" of differentiating between and integer and a "whole number." But in the end we all know it's an unnecessary hoop we make children, math textbook publishers, and teachers jump through, wasting calories of energy that could be used studying and teaching math that actually matters and has real world applications.
The 10% State
Bernard Chapin, if you are unaware of, is a micro-celebrity of You Tube fame who generates about 2-3 short 10 minute videos each day and is also a daily stop for your beloved Captain. The majority of Uncie Bern's material covers the daily news, with a focus and specialization on chronicling the efforts of marxists, feminists, and others to bring down the United State and destroy freedom.
However, while the majority of Bernard's focus is on exposing these scum, he does occasionally wander into the realm of philosophy and economics, a common refrain of his being the "10% State."
Bernard's argument is quite simple - that the entirety of the state should cost us no more than 10% of our production. That if we got rid of income transfers, forced people to support themselves, and government merely provided true public goods and services, our final tax bill would only be 10%. Naturally, he receives guff from the parasites that rely on the taxpayer to support them, but parasitism aside, he's 100% right.
The state really only does cost 10%.
If you look at the federal budget (which I know for some leftists is going to be a virginal experience), and add up ONLY the government services that are truly part of "governance" you'll find out that the 2015 federal budget really needn't be more than $1.1 trillion.
Take out social security.
Take out Medicare and Medicaid
Take out the EPA, Department of Education, Department of Agriculture, NASA and all the other unneeded bureaucracies and (if you did it right) you'll come up with a bare bones budget of $1.1 trillion.
Divide that by the roughly $17 trillion economy we have and you get 6.5%. Well below the 10% state Bernard portends.
Of course, this does not account for state and local spending which historical and on average run about 1/3 total federal spending. Add an additional 2% (or even 4% for Californians!) and you're still well below the 10%.
Naturally, this is merely an intellectual and academic exercise about what "could have been." The 10% state will never be revisited (we were there once) as the American public is too spoiled, too dumb, and too satiated by government goodies to appreciate what a potential future we could have. But I did want to at least validate and prove that what Bernard Chapin is calling for is absolutely and 100% feasible. A 10% state would and has worked.
Sadly, this is a democracy. And sadly, the masses are the most spoiled and idiotic in American history. And thus the 10% State will remain where we last left it - in history.
(Author's note - No wandering cauldrons of politically incorrect commentary were hurt in the writing of this post)
However, while the majority of Bernard's focus is on exposing these scum, he does occasionally wander into the realm of philosophy and economics, a common refrain of his being the "10% State."
Bernard's argument is quite simple - that the entirety of the state should cost us no more than 10% of our production. That if we got rid of income transfers, forced people to support themselves, and government merely provided true public goods and services, our final tax bill would only be 10%. Naturally, he receives guff from the parasites that rely on the taxpayer to support them, but parasitism aside, he's 100% right.
The state really only does cost 10%.
If you look at the federal budget (which I know for some leftists is going to be a virginal experience), and add up ONLY the government services that are truly part of "governance" you'll find out that the 2015 federal budget really needn't be more than $1.1 trillion.
Take out social security.
Take out Medicare and Medicaid
Take out the EPA, Department of Education, Department of Agriculture, NASA and all the other unneeded bureaucracies and (if you did it right) you'll come up with a bare bones budget of $1.1 trillion.
Divide that by the roughly $17 trillion economy we have and you get 6.5%. Well below the 10% state Bernard portends.
Of course, this does not account for state and local spending which historical and on average run about 1/3 total federal spending. Add an additional 2% (or even 4% for Californians!) and you're still well below the 10%.
Naturally, this is merely an intellectual and academic exercise about what "could have been." The 10% state will never be revisited (we were there once) as the American public is too spoiled, too dumb, and too satiated by government goodies to appreciate what a potential future we could have. But I did want to at least validate and prove that what Bernard Chapin is calling for is absolutely and 100% feasible. A 10% state would and has worked.
Sadly, this is a democracy. And sadly, the masses are the most spoiled and idiotic in American history. And thus the 10% State will remain where we last left it - in history.
(Author's note - No wandering cauldrons of politically incorrect commentary were hurt in the writing of this post)
"The Black Man's Guide Out of Poverty" Now Available in Kindle!
Finally available!
And don't forget my other awesome books, the worst of which is better than the best of "Oprah's Book Club."
And don't forget my other awesome books, the worst of which is better than the best of "Oprah's Book Club."
Monday, March 09, 2015
US Money Supply as a Percent of Global GDP
If you don't know what a "world reserve currency" is, allow me to explain it in terms of non-economists (ie-normal people who have sex).
Not all countries are created equal. Many are corrupt, either through their leaders, their people, or both. And so if other countries, people or businesses would like to conduct business with one such country (say, Greece or North Korea or some other unreliable crap hole) you would like to receive payment not in Drachma/Euros or North Korean Won, but something more stable. This gives rise to demand for a third party's currency, a third party whose currency is reliable and trustworthy.
Enter in the US dollar.
After WWII it was pretty apparent that the United States was "the last man standing." Yes, many countries on the Allied side of the war "won," but their economies and infrastructures were devastated. It was only the US that had the economic productive capacity to make their green pieces of paper valuable (not to mention the Ward Cleaverly-Dwight Eisenhowery-US was infinitely more reliable and trustworthy than the murderous Stalin). And so the US dollar became the world's "reserve currency" which allowed international commerce to be conducted in a reliable and trustworthy medium of exchange.
Fast forward many decades later and you might ask, "Now that all these countries have recovered, why do we even have a global currency?" And that is a good question. Nearly all the participants of WWII have recovered, rebuilding their infrastructures and economies, producing economic value that provides their pieces of paper worth, so why not let all countries' respective pieces of paper trade against each other on the international currency markets?
Which they do, but, there are two things that keep the US dollar as the world's reserve currency.
1. There is still demand for international transactions to be made between two different countries in a currency that is largely deemed reliable. The US dollar (more or less) has and continues to more or less fit this bill. Countries trust it, view the United States with confidence and believe our green backs have intrinsic value.
2. Habit. Though I am not a huge international traveler, it is amazing how many countries accept US dollars. Cut across the border to either Canada or Mexico, they take US dollars. Take a boat to nearly any Caribbean island, they take US dollars. The Jamaicans at the (only) tropical resort I ever visited, very happy to take dollars.
But just try the reverse.
No Canadian can buy anything with their "fancy schmancy" "plastic" currency here in the US.
I don't even know what a Jamaican dollar looks like, let alone would be willing to accept one.
And Mexican Pesos I view as a novelty that I can more or less assume will lose value as what few I've collected sit and inflate away in my desk.
Now most people (both Americans and non) don't think twice about this. They merely accept it as fact that "yes, my US dollar will likely be accepted in most countries" and "hell yes, I'll take that dirty, filthy Yanqi money off of your hands Americano!"
But if you think about it, the economic ramifications of this agreement are immense (if not, outright insane). And if you figure out what these ramifications are you will not only more thoroughly understand what a "reserve currency" is, but be able to understand a lot of what is going on with the US economy.
The primary "epiphany" you should realize from this is that through mere TRUST, through mere RELIABILITY one currency can replace all others. But infinitely more impressive than that is that in replacing all other currencies you exponentially improve that currency's purchasing power (and thus the lives of the people who live in the country that is home to the world's reserve currency).
In other words, each "normal" countries' respective currency can only buy goods and services within that country.
Jamaican dollars can only purchase what is made in Jamaica.
Japanese Yen can only buy what is made in Japan.
And Australian dollars can only buy what's made in Australia.
But US dollars can buy nearly everything in the world.
In other words, if you can get your currency to become a world reserve currency, your purchasing power goes from the mere domestic production of your lowly, single country to that of the entire world. And all without lifting a finger or providing the slightest bit of additional economic production.
In the case of the US dollar, this means Americans (or anybody holding a US dollar) can not only buy the $17 trillion in US made goods and services, but (more or less) the $76 TRILLION in world GDP.
Did Americans work harder?
No.
Are Americans smarter?
No.
Did "The Lord Our Savior Jesus Christ" look favorably upon us?
No.
All that happened was 60 odd years ago millions of US soldiers came over to Europe and Japan, helped destroy what remained of the majority of the world's economic producing countries, while the US homeland remained relatively unscathed, giving us and the US dollar the much-coveted "world reserve currency status."
And now, instead of just being able to buy goods in these here United States of 'Merica, we can and have bought whatever we damned well pleased simply because "we're Americans."
However, there is an additional benefit to being the world's reserve currency. Not only do we get to buy everything in the world, but nearly all of our financial sins are bought and paid for by the work and toil of others.
Consider two countries - Greece and the United States.
Both have unsupportable debts.
Both run chronic deficits.
Both have increasingly lazy and slothful people.
Both support their parasites over their producers.
And both are headed up by spoiled socialist children incomprehensibly ignorant of economics.
So how is it Greece is going through tumult and chaos, while the US is enjoying is getting away scot-free?
Well, perhaps a chart will help.
Below is the M2 money supply of the US dollar divided by US GDP and World GDP.
What this essentially shows is how much money there is relative to the amount of stuff that money can purchase. Normally you would compare the US dollar to US economic production (the red line), however, since the US dollar is the world reserve currency, it pays to compare it to what it can really buy - the world's economic output.
This results in an interesting divergence between the two numbers. The red line shows what most Americans are concerned about. An increasing amount of money being printed against a stagnating amount of economic production. There was roughly 51 cents for every dollar of GDP circulating, while now it's 65 cents - fears of inflation and a run on precious metals expected. However, the blue line shows something quite different. Almost an "ideal" increase of the money supply along with the economic production that said currency can buy, resulting in practically no change and no inflation. And when you consider that the US dollar is the reserve currency of the world and that it is not solely affected by domestic production (but fear of other countries' inferior currencies) then a lot of other things make sense in this seemingly economically insane world.
One, this is why the United States can behave like Greece, but not suffer the consequences. Americans are by all means just as spoiled and petulant as the Greeks. We just happen to have the world's reserve currency...so nanny nanny boo boo on them.
Two, this is why our deficits and debts seemingly don't matter to anybody. If the US was an individual applying for a loan, no bank, even the crappy ones I worked at, would touch him. But since it's the "US" and we have the magical currency, every other country out there is more than happy to lend our insolvent and irresponsible government money.
Three, this is why precious metals haven't gone up (as much as was anticipated anyway). By every sane, reasonable, and empirical logic, gold and silver should be rocketing against the US dollar. But this would, once again, assume the US dollar could only purchase US goods. It also assumes nearly every other country out there sucks even worse than the United States. Ergo, with things looking worse in other countries, combined with the US' already-established world reserve currency, it is just too convenient for people to pile into the dollar, giving it more purchasing power, and driving precious metal prices down against it.
There are other economic phenomena that having the world's reserve currency explains (and masks). But there is one thing I do want to point out about it. It moots and obsoletes nearly every form of traditional (and sane) economic analysis. One of the things I loathe about leftists and Keynesians is the intellectual dishonesty they flagrantly display proclaiming their policies (which have failed in nearly every other country) works here in the US. While marginally true, it's completely contingent on an incredibly lucky economic technicality - we have the world's reserve currency. You take that away and the US would be no different than Greece, Japan, Spain, Portugal, or any other heavily indebted, non-producing nation. The truth is modern day Keynsian economics and the leftist faux-economists it has spawned are miserable failures that owe the delay of their demise to millions of WWII soldiers and two very large oceans that blessed the US with a world reserve currency. And to stand there, hiding behind this fact, while having the audacity to claim they know what they're doing, while the rest of the world proves they don't, is the epitome of cowardice and hypocrisy.
Aaron Clarey is a normal guy who just happened to become an economist. He does not have his doctorate in economics which makes him superior to most others. He has authored several books about finance and economics that are actually interesting, insightful, and digestible by the average person. You can find his rantings and tirades on his You Tube channel as well as is "whenever he feels like it" podcast. You may also contract his services by visiting his consulting division Asshole Consulting.
Not all countries are created equal. Many are corrupt, either through their leaders, their people, or both. And so if other countries, people or businesses would like to conduct business with one such country (say, Greece or North Korea or some other unreliable crap hole) you would like to receive payment not in Drachma/Euros or North Korean Won, but something more stable. This gives rise to demand for a third party's currency, a third party whose currency is reliable and trustworthy.
Enter in the US dollar.
After WWII it was pretty apparent that the United States was "the last man standing." Yes, many countries on the Allied side of the war "won," but their economies and infrastructures were devastated. It was only the US that had the economic productive capacity to make their green pieces of paper valuable (not to mention the Ward Cleaverly-Dwight Eisenhowery-US was infinitely more reliable and trustworthy than the murderous Stalin). And so the US dollar became the world's "reserve currency" which allowed international commerce to be conducted in a reliable and trustworthy medium of exchange.
Fast forward many decades later and you might ask, "Now that all these countries have recovered, why do we even have a global currency?" And that is a good question. Nearly all the participants of WWII have recovered, rebuilding their infrastructures and economies, producing economic value that provides their pieces of paper worth, so why not let all countries' respective pieces of paper trade against each other on the international currency markets?
Which they do, but, there are two things that keep the US dollar as the world's reserve currency.
1. There is still demand for international transactions to be made between two different countries in a currency that is largely deemed reliable. The US dollar (more or less) has and continues to more or less fit this bill. Countries trust it, view the United States with confidence and believe our green backs have intrinsic value.
2. Habit. Though I am not a huge international traveler, it is amazing how many countries accept US dollars. Cut across the border to either Canada or Mexico, they take US dollars. Take a boat to nearly any Caribbean island, they take US dollars. The Jamaicans at the (only) tropical resort I ever visited, very happy to take dollars.
But just try the reverse.
No Canadian can buy anything with their "fancy schmancy" "plastic" currency here in the US.
I don't even know what a Jamaican dollar looks like, let alone would be willing to accept one.
And Mexican Pesos I view as a novelty that I can more or less assume will lose value as what few I've collected sit and inflate away in my desk.
Now most people (both Americans and non) don't think twice about this. They merely accept it as fact that "yes, my US dollar will likely be accepted in most countries" and "hell yes, I'll take that dirty, filthy Yanqi money off of your hands Americano!"
But if you think about it, the economic ramifications of this agreement are immense (if not, outright insane). And if you figure out what these ramifications are you will not only more thoroughly understand what a "reserve currency" is, but be able to understand a lot of what is going on with the US economy.
The primary "epiphany" you should realize from this is that through mere TRUST, through mere RELIABILITY one currency can replace all others. But infinitely more impressive than that is that in replacing all other currencies you exponentially improve that currency's purchasing power (and thus the lives of the people who live in the country that is home to the world's reserve currency).
In other words, each "normal" countries' respective currency can only buy goods and services within that country.
Jamaican dollars can only purchase what is made in Jamaica.
Japanese Yen can only buy what is made in Japan.
And Australian dollars can only buy what's made in Australia.
But US dollars can buy nearly everything in the world.
In other words, if you can get your currency to become a world reserve currency, your purchasing power goes from the mere domestic production of your lowly, single country to that of the entire world. And all without lifting a finger or providing the slightest bit of additional economic production.
In the case of the US dollar, this means Americans (or anybody holding a US dollar) can not only buy the $17 trillion in US made goods and services, but (more or less) the $76 TRILLION in world GDP.
Did Americans work harder?
No.
Are Americans smarter?
No.
Did "The Lord Our Savior Jesus Christ" look favorably upon us?
No.
All that happened was 60 odd years ago millions of US soldiers came over to Europe and Japan, helped destroy what remained of the majority of the world's economic producing countries, while the US homeland remained relatively unscathed, giving us and the US dollar the much-coveted "world reserve currency status."
And now, instead of just being able to buy goods in these here United States of 'Merica, we can and have bought whatever we damned well pleased simply because "we're Americans."
However, there is an additional benefit to being the world's reserve currency. Not only do we get to buy everything in the world, but nearly all of our financial sins are bought and paid for by the work and toil of others.
Consider two countries - Greece and the United States.
Both have unsupportable debts.
Both run chronic deficits.
Both have increasingly lazy and slothful people.
Both support their parasites over their producers.
And both are headed up by spoiled socialist children incomprehensibly ignorant of economics.
So how is it Greece is going through tumult and chaos, while the US is enjoying is getting away scot-free?
Well, perhaps a chart will help.
Below is the M2 money supply of the US dollar divided by US GDP and World GDP.
What this essentially shows is how much money there is relative to the amount of stuff that money can purchase. Normally you would compare the US dollar to US economic production (the red line), however, since the US dollar is the world reserve currency, it pays to compare it to what it can really buy - the world's economic output.
This results in an interesting divergence between the two numbers. The red line shows what most Americans are concerned about. An increasing amount of money being printed against a stagnating amount of economic production. There was roughly 51 cents for every dollar of GDP circulating, while now it's 65 cents - fears of inflation and a run on precious metals expected. However, the blue line shows something quite different. Almost an "ideal" increase of the money supply along with the economic production that said currency can buy, resulting in practically no change and no inflation. And when you consider that the US dollar is the reserve currency of the world and that it is not solely affected by domestic production (but fear of other countries' inferior currencies) then a lot of other things make sense in this seemingly economically insane world.
One, this is why the United States can behave like Greece, but not suffer the consequences. Americans are by all means just as spoiled and petulant as the Greeks. We just happen to have the world's reserve currency...so nanny nanny boo boo on them.
Two, this is why our deficits and debts seemingly don't matter to anybody. If the US was an individual applying for a loan, no bank, even the crappy ones I worked at, would touch him. But since it's the "US" and we have the magical currency, every other country out there is more than happy to lend our insolvent and irresponsible government money.
Three, this is why precious metals haven't gone up (as much as was anticipated anyway). By every sane, reasonable, and empirical logic, gold and silver should be rocketing against the US dollar. But this would, once again, assume the US dollar could only purchase US goods. It also assumes nearly every other country out there sucks even worse than the United States. Ergo, with things looking worse in other countries, combined with the US' already-established world reserve currency, it is just too convenient for people to pile into the dollar, giving it more purchasing power, and driving precious metal prices down against it.
There are other economic phenomena that having the world's reserve currency explains (and masks). But there is one thing I do want to point out about it. It moots and obsoletes nearly every form of traditional (and sane) economic analysis. One of the things I loathe about leftists and Keynesians is the intellectual dishonesty they flagrantly display proclaiming their policies (which have failed in nearly every other country) works here in the US. While marginally true, it's completely contingent on an incredibly lucky economic technicality - we have the world's reserve currency. You take that away and the US would be no different than Greece, Japan, Spain, Portugal, or any other heavily indebted, non-producing nation. The truth is modern day Keynsian economics and the leftist faux-economists it has spawned are miserable failures that owe the delay of their demise to millions of WWII soldiers and two very large oceans that blessed the US with a world reserve currency. And to stand there, hiding behind this fact, while having the audacity to claim they know what they're doing, while the rest of the world proves they don't, is the epitome of cowardice and hypocrisy.
Aaron Clarey is a normal guy who just happened to become an economist. He does not have his doctorate in economics which makes him superior to most others. He has authored several books about finance and economics that are actually interesting, insightful, and digestible by the average person. You can find his rantings and tirades on his You Tube channel as well as is "whenever he feels like it" podcast. You may also contract his services by visiting his consulting division Asshole Consulting.
Why Investing Is No Longer Possible
In one of my classroom discussions (in a class I teach online), I answered one of my student's questions about dividends and whether it's possible to find an "undervalued stock" in today's market. The answer ended up being a bit more profound and insightful than I anticipated and thought it might be of benefit to you yahoos:
"As for the art of picking stocks (or any other investment),
correct. The art is finding the undervalued ones, in spite of whether
the overall market is overvalued or not.
However,
in the past 30 years, ESPECIALLY the past 6-8, the markets no longer
reflect the value of investments or the securities they're supposed to.
This is largely due to:
retirement plans flooding the stock market
low interest rates prompting companies to borrow at low rates to repurchase shares
HFT
and
quantitative easing money ending up in the stock market
In
other words, to pick stocks one can no longer look at the individual
company or underlying assets of the investment. You need to predict
government policy, federal reserve moves, international monetary flows,
and people's investing habits.
Unfortunately,
all of that renders traditional analysis moot and (frankly) makes the
entire process of stock valuation even more impossible than it was
before. All that being said, it only reinforces the importance of
finding an UNDERVALUED stock relative to its dividends or earnings
ESPECIALLY given the trillions of NON-investment dollars that are
flooding the market and distorting prices."
Saturday, March 07, 2015
Cappy on the Black Brigade
Drove down to visit DT and The Man as they had me on a guest for their podcast.
Here is part 2.
We talk about defeatism within the freedom movement, is it possible to "save America," the "podcast biz," how a YouTube channel is NOT a podcast (enter stuffy elite "cough cough" here), "Charolette Johanssen," "ask Davis Aurini," misanthropy, and more!
Just so you know, I do NOT control how many sounders are put in there. Take it up with DT.
Here is part 2.
We talk about defeatism within the freedom movement, is it possible to "save America," the "podcast biz," how a YouTube channel is NOT a podcast (enter stuffy elite "cough cough" here), "Charolette Johanssen," "ask Davis Aurini," misanthropy, and more!
Just so you know, I do NOT control how many sounders are put in there. Take it up with DT.
Friday, March 06, 2015
Socialists Wonder Why People Aren't Breeding
Ug, the level of stupid in this is amazing.
Governments becoming more and more desperate to get younger people to breedso they can have future slaves to fund their social security eerrrr...."continue the culture and population."
Sorry socialists.
You let every other culture into our countries.
You CHEERED THEM ON and PREFERRED THEM TO OUR OWN
You pay parasites and punish producers
And good lord, don't even get me started about what your feminist division has done to men's desire to pro-create.
No, you created this problem and our future would be children will not be the solution to it. This is where the game ends and any (unfortunate enough children) born to socialist parents are the ones who are going to pay for your idiocy.
Enjoy the Decline.
Governments becoming more and more desperate to get younger people to breed
Sorry socialists.
You let every other culture into our countries.
You CHEERED THEM ON and PREFERRED THEM TO OUR OWN
You pay parasites and punish producers
And good lord, don't even get me started about what your feminist division has done to men's desire to pro-create.
No, you created this problem and our future would be children will not be the solution to it. This is where the game ends and any (unfortunate enough children) born to socialist parents are the ones who are going to pay for your idiocy.
Enjoy the Decline.
Thursday, March 05, 2015
They're Only Human Afterall
I would have guessed,
"Young men who put becoming heroes over finding something worthy of becoming heroic about" as to why young men become terrorists,
but sexual slaves makes just as much sense.
"Young men who put becoming heroes over finding something worthy of becoming heroic about" as to why young men become terrorists,
but sexual slaves makes just as much sense.
Were the Nazi's (the National SOCIALISTS) Socialist?
I faced a problem.
I had found another one of those "universally known economic assumptions" that everybody assumes is true, but did not know for a fact whether or not it was. We all know these economic assumptions, and even we are guilty of assuming they're true every day:
Capitalism is the best economic system there is (proven true)
"The rich don't pay their fair share" (proven false)
"Sexism is causing the wage gap" (proven false), and
"Housing always goes up" (absolutely proven false)
However, this one was going to be a little bit harder to prove:
Whether the Nazis (the National SOCIALISTS) were indeed socialist.
The reason I was interested in proving this right/wrong is because it often surfaces when people are debating ideologies and many conservative/libertarian/freemarket types will point out that the "Nazis were socialist" in order to show that not all socialists are "nice" and that Hitler wasn't "right wing". However, it wasn't simply going to be a matter of going to the FRED database, pulling two data series, correlating them in Excel and then giving the proverbial statistical finger to the left. It was going to be more problematic.
First, I'll buy you a beer if you can find the actual Nazi's budget. And I'll buy you a chaser if you can find them going back to pre war Germany. AND I'll buy you a martini if you can get me their GNP/GDP figures!
They just don't seem to exist.
It's either been too long ago or the actual documents have been destroy or they're buried in some CIA warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant. So I couldn't conclusively point at numbers and had to find some other means.
This brought up the second problem. Without actual budget figures, I had to rely on academic research. Unfortunately, this academic research largely focused on military spending and not non-military spending or the overall political-economic philosophy of the Nazi party. However, it did provide some great insight into what Hitler was "thinking" in terms of economics, as well as precise and specific actions the government took during pre-war and wartime Germany. Some of these actions included:
Price controls
Establishing a national labor group
Massive deficit spending (however no obvious data was available)
Massive public works (like our CCC, the autobahn, and other Keynesian things)
Rationing
Nationalizing industries
Banning large retail stores (though due to their primarily Jewish ownership)
Government issuance of securities rising to 90% of total securities issued (ie only 10% private sector)
And a corporate tax reaching 98%
All of these are obviously and blatantly socialist, and conservatives may think they've won the debate about whether the Nazis were socialist here. But you know the left and you know merely citing actions Nazis took is NOT going to convince them.
You need data.
You need charts.
You need irrefutable proof.
That's the only way to get leftists to stare blankly at your data, be speechless, then shrug their shoulders, dismiss your data, and call you a racist (which is the only form of victory you can get over leftists because they are so delusional they think they can never be wrong).
So inevitably, I knew I would have to find data. And after a solid hour of researching, I found two datasets, pre-war Germany, that though NOT GDP and the actual Nazi federal budgets, still allowed me to do a little bit of Algebra (that's "math" for you liberal arts majors) and come up with the precise numbers I was looking for:
Nazi military expenditure as a % of GDP
and
The pre-war budget of the Third Reich
When I put them together I could infer the dataset I universally use to determine whether or not a country is "socialist" or "capitalist."
Government spending as a % of GDP
And when we look at the actual numbers we can conclusively say that the Nazis were indeed socialists.
Government spending as a percentage of GDP averaged around 40% pre-war. Additionally (at least in the beginning) 80% of the budget was spent on social programs, not the hallmark of an "evil, right wing, capitalist economy." And when combined with the blatant socialist moves of nationalization, government work projects, price controls, and other forms of government intervention it is very clear that the effective economic philosophy of the Nazis was socialism.
However, in intellectually honesty (as well as intellectual interest) there are some interesting observations that need to be pointed out.
One, there was not much time to witness or study Nazism's economic policy that wasn't obscured or masked by Hitler's war ambitions. Matter of fact nearly all of the academic research on "Nazi Economics" was about Hitler's drive for re-armament. Ergo, to see the default state of a "peace time Nazi economy" you maybe get that in 1935 before Hitler ramps up the military spending.
Two, the "Nazi miracle" (where Hitler gets Germany to full employment faster than any other western nation out of the Great Depression) is actually quite misleading. Yes GDP was growing at double digit rates. Yes, "full employment" was attained. But it was all due to an overly aggressive rearmament. So "overly aggressive" that actual standards of living decreased. The military took so much in terms of resources civilians had to suffer rationing, consume less consumer goods and in general sacrifice for the military. And this was NOT even during the war.
Three, ironically the same could be said about the US. Once we entered the war we essentially did what Nazi Germany did during pre-war. Build up our military at all costs. Food and fuel rationing. But in a Keynesian dream come true we "got that dem der GDP figure nice and high and got dat dem der employment rate to full" even though people will still sacrificing. About the only thing that could be said that was better in the US was that pre-war we were getting out of the depression by supplying the Europeans the materials they needed to kill each other. This once again shows the obfuscating effect war has on an economy making it difficult to discuss whether that economy is indeed "capitalist" or "socialist."
Finally, the father of Nazism himself, Hitler, actually didn't seem too interested in economics. He was not consistent in different economic stances, first claiming one thing, then contradicting in another. And though I did not read Mein Kampf, his overall effective actions (in my research) were to outsource the economics of Nazism to his financial leaders (Schacht, Funk, and Goering). Here (once again) the focus shifted almost immediately from rebuilding Germany to preparing it for war.
In the end, however, whatever Hitler's and the Nazi's ultimate philosophical economic aims were, the actions and numbers were effectively socialist. Certainly during "peacetime" and especially so during war (as military spending is still state spending, akin to North Korea). Thankfully, it is a theoretical debate about what a post-WWII Nazi economy would look like.
I had found another one of those "universally known economic assumptions" that everybody assumes is true, but did not know for a fact whether or not it was. We all know these economic assumptions, and even we are guilty of assuming they're true every day:
Capitalism is the best economic system there is (proven true)
"The rich don't pay their fair share" (proven false)
"Sexism is causing the wage gap" (proven false), and
"Housing always goes up" (absolutely proven false)
However, this one was going to be a little bit harder to prove:
Whether the Nazis (the National SOCIALISTS) were indeed socialist.
The reason I was interested in proving this right/wrong is because it often surfaces when people are debating ideologies and many conservative/libertarian/freemarket types will point out that the "Nazis were socialist" in order to show that not all socialists are "nice" and that Hitler wasn't "right wing". However, it wasn't simply going to be a matter of going to the FRED database, pulling two data series, correlating them in Excel and then giving the proverbial statistical finger to the left. It was going to be more problematic.
First, I'll buy you a beer if you can find the actual Nazi's budget. And I'll buy you a chaser if you can find them going back to pre war Germany. AND I'll buy you a martini if you can get me their GNP/GDP figures!
They just don't seem to exist.
It's either been too long ago or the actual documents have been destroy or they're buried in some CIA warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant. So I couldn't conclusively point at numbers and had to find some other means.
This brought up the second problem. Without actual budget figures, I had to rely on academic research. Unfortunately, this academic research largely focused on military spending and not non-military spending or the overall political-economic philosophy of the Nazi party. However, it did provide some great insight into what Hitler was "thinking" in terms of economics, as well as precise and specific actions the government took during pre-war and wartime Germany. Some of these actions included:
Price controls
Establishing a national labor group
Massive deficit spending (however no obvious data was available)
Massive public works (like our CCC, the autobahn, and other Keynesian things)
Rationing
Nationalizing industries
Banning large retail stores (though due to their primarily Jewish ownership)
Government issuance of securities rising to 90% of total securities issued (ie only 10% private sector)
And a corporate tax reaching 98%
All of these are obviously and blatantly socialist, and conservatives may think they've won the debate about whether the Nazis were socialist here. But you know the left and you know merely citing actions Nazis took is NOT going to convince them.
You need data.
You need charts.
You need irrefutable proof.
That's the only way to get leftists to stare blankly at your data, be speechless, then shrug their shoulders, dismiss your data, and call you a racist (which is the only form of victory you can get over leftists because they are so delusional they think they can never be wrong).
So inevitably, I knew I would have to find data. And after a solid hour of researching, I found two datasets, pre-war Germany, that though NOT GDP and the actual Nazi federal budgets, still allowed me to do a little bit of Algebra (that's "math" for you liberal arts majors) and come up with the precise numbers I was looking for:
Nazi military expenditure as a % of GDP
and
The pre-war budget of the Third Reich
When I put them together I could infer the dataset I universally use to determine whether or not a country is "socialist" or "capitalist."
Government spending as a % of GDP
And when we look at the actual numbers we can conclusively say that the Nazis were indeed socialists.
Government spending as a percentage of GDP averaged around 40% pre-war. Additionally (at least in the beginning) 80% of the budget was spent on social programs, not the hallmark of an "evil, right wing, capitalist economy." And when combined with the blatant socialist moves of nationalization, government work projects, price controls, and other forms of government intervention it is very clear that the effective economic philosophy of the Nazis was socialism.
However, in intellectually honesty (as well as intellectual interest) there are some interesting observations that need to be pointed out.
One, there was not much time to witness or study Nazism's economic policy that wasn't obscured or masked by Hitler's war ambitions. Matter of fact nearly all of the academic research on "Nazi Economics" was about Hitler's drive for re-armament. Ergo, to see the default state of a "peace time Nazi economy" you maybe get that in 1935 before Hitler ramps up the military spending.
Two, the "Nazi miracle" (where Hitler gets Germany to full employment faster than any other western nation out of the Great Depression) is actually quite misleading. Yes GDP was growing at double digit rates. Yes, "full employment" was attained. But it was all due to an overly aggressive rearmament. So "overly aggressive" that actual standards of living decreased. The military took so much in terms of resources civilians had to suffer rationing, consume less consumer goods and in general sacrifice for the military. And this was NOT even during the war.
Three, ironically the same could be said about the US. Once we entered the war we essentially did what Nazi Germany did during pre-war. Build up our military at all costs. Food and fuel rationing. But in a Keynesian dream come true we "got that dem der GDP figure nice and high and got dat dem der employment rate to full" even though people will still sacrificing. About the only thing that could be said that was better in the US was that pre-war we were getting out of the depression by supplying the Europeans the materials they needed to kill each other. This once again shows the obfuscating effect war has on an economy making it difficult to discuss whether that economy is indeed "capitalist" or "socialist."
Finally, the father of Nazism himself, Hitler, actually didn't seem too interested in economics. He was not consistent in different economic stances, first claiming one thing, then contradicting in another. And though I did not read Mein Kampf, his overall effective actions (in my research) were to outsource the economics of Nazism to his financial leaders (Schacht, Funk, and Goering). Here (once again) the focus shifted almost immediately from rebuilding Germany to preparing it for war.
In the end, however, whatever Hitler's and the Nazi's ultimate philosophical economic aims were, the actions and numbers were effectively socialist. Certainly during "peacetime" and especially so during war (as military spending is still state spending, akin to North Korea). Thankfully, it is a theoretical debate about what a post-WWII Nazi economy would look like.
Wednesday, March 04, 2015
Gov. Mark Dayton Found to Be Stalking His Wife
Gov. Mark Dayton is seeking a meeting "as soon as possible" with his wife about her decision to go out with her girlfriends Friday night without his knowledge.
Dayton told reporters Wednesday that he did not get advance warning about her going out as it is customary for his wife to inform him of everything she does, thinks, and says. He says he wants to hear directly from her about what she did, why she did, and who she was with.
In a statement, Mrs. Dayton said she looks forward to working with Mark and other Minnesota elected officials to inform them about her intentions and whereabouts last Friday.
Mrs. Dayton told friends Tuesday that she would "do what she wanted because she is her own person and Mark did not own her as a slave." Governor Mark Dayton called this display of self-ownership "tragic."
Original article here.
My take on it here.
Tuesday, March 03, 2015
Alex is Looking to Hire Again
For anybody out there looking for a job (that admittedly is boring, but you can do it from a beach drinking rum and cokes) Alex at Academic Composition is looking to hire. Information is below:
Want to earn a little extra money on the side working from home? All you need to do is put up ads on Craigslist, you'll make 5 bucks for each person who'll respond to your ad. You'll also make a buck for each day your ad stays live on the forum. No, this isn't one of those "get rich quick" scams, but it is a reliable way to earn anywhere from $50 to $200 per week in less than half hour of work. We're now in the middle of mid-terms and lots of students will be looking for people to write papers for them, so it's certain that you'll be able to generate plenty of leads every week. Contact Alex at academiccomposition@gmail.com to get started If you reside in the United States, you will need to post in the CL sector allocated for the metropolitan area near you. If you reside in Canada, you will need to do likewise, but post on Kijiji instead. Please feel free to apply if you reside anywhere on the Continent, however, the following regions are the most likely to bring in the highest number of leads. 1. Los Angeles 2. Denver 3. Minneapolis 4. Vancouver 5. Dallas 6. Austin 7. Atlanta 8. Boston 9. DC 10. Toronto Aleksey Bashtavenko Academic Composition Owner & Principal Writer (540) 300-1253 academiccomposition@gmail.com www.academiccomposition.com www.linkedin.com/pub/aleksey-bashtavenko/25/7b8/323/ |
Monday, March 02, 2015
Sunday, March 01, 2015
Episode #85 of The Clarey Podcast
Why driving through an ice storm in Albuquerque is like Return of the Jedi
The ideas you come up with in Kansas
The "Those were good times" Joke
Shorter to look it up on Google
Venezuela's president blames the US for his screw ups
We'd, sadly, have to kill all North Koreans
What if Whites/Males/Jews/and other boogeymen actually committed the crimes they were accused of?
AND MORE!!!
In THIS EPISODE of The Clarey Podcast!
The ideas you come up with in Kansas
The "Those were good times" Joke
Shorter to look it up on Google
Venezuela's president blames the US for his screw ups
We'd, sadly, have to kill all North Koreans
What if Whites/Males/Jews/and other boogeymen actually committed the crimes they were accused of?
AND MORE!!!
In THIS EPISODE of The Clarey Podcast!