How dumb is Obama?

November 18th, 2010

Obama is an affirmative action president.  Affirmative action people are always stupid, incompetent, and corrupt.  Is Obama stupid, incompetent and corrupt?

For corruption, observe that the infamous regulatory revolving door between Goldman and the Treasury continues to spin, even after the wall street financial system imploded, and similarly between Soros and the DoE. Perhaps Bush II was as corrupt as Obama, but Obama’s corruption is more conspicuous.

As for stupidity – well clearly, he is a lot smarter than the most affirmative action blacks, such as his ivy league wife, and a lot smarter than the average white.  But how does he compare with the elite?

Recently an anonymous person who we are told is a Washington insider told us

if you want to see President Obama get excited about a conversation, turn it to sports.  That gets him interested.  You start talking about Congress, or some policy, and he just kinda turns off.  It’s really very strange.  I mean, we were all led to believe that this guy was some kind of intellectual giant, right?  Ivy League and all that.  Well, that is not what I saw.  Barack Obama doesn’t have a whole lot of intellectual curiosity.  When he is off script, he is what I call a real “slow talker”.  Lots of ummms, and lots of time in between answers where you can almost see the little wheel in his head turning very slowly.  I am not going to say the president is a dumb man, because he is not, but yeah, there was a definite letdown when you actually hear him talking without the script.

No – I am not going to call him stupid.  He just doesn’t strike me as particularly smart.

Well, so says an anonymous informant that we are told is a Washington insider.

So let us look at evidence whose veracity is easier to check:

We all know of his stumbles such as telling us that America has 57 states, and pronouncing corpsman “corpse man”, but I am a very smart guy, and have done worse, and if I chide him on such things, will probably do something equally dimwitted in the same article as I chide him.

But I can fluently give a speech on complex topics from brief notes.  Sarah Palin can fluently give a speech on complex topics from brief notes.  Obama falls apart without a teleprompter.  Without a teleprompter, he keeps it simple, and if lured onto complexity, starts to sound – black.

So, not stupid, but stupid by elite standards.

Intelligence is not the only requirement for a president.  Blacks generally have more charisma than whites, more style, and are better able to think on their feet.  Obama has more charisma and style than any major white politician, but now that the hype has faded away, it is apparent that he has not got much charisma and style by black standards.  By black standards he is a bit of a nerd.  Compare and contrast with most of the black republican candidates in recent mid terms.  Most of them have lots of charisma.  Blacks are also good at thinking on their feet, street smarts.  Obama’s ability to think on his feet is impressive.  When the presidential seal fell off the podium, he ad libbed “It does not matter, you all know who I am” – but on more complex topics, considerably less impressive.  Again, the Black Tea partiers gave a dazzling demonstration of ad libbing and thinking on their feet, considerably more impressive than that given by Obama.  By black standards, Obama’s ability to think on his feet is not all that impressive.

It looks to me that Obama was selected as the whitest possible black, rather than the black best qualified as a political candidate, that he was selected to prove there is no difference between whites and blacks, to prove that affirmative action does not give the results it so obviously does give.  If you were selecting the black best qualified to win, you would come up with someone with a lot more charisma and street smarts than Obama, even at the cost of being a little bit dumber, you would come up with some one like the Tea Party candidates.  Instead, they came up with someone as much as possible like a member of our very white elite, our very very white elite, the whitest possible dark skinned black.

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Britain goes totalitarian

November 13th, 2010

Sean Gabb, speaking very carefully to avoid saying things he could be arrested for, tell us:

Without thinking very hard, I can remember how Nick Griffin of the British National Party stood trial for having called Islam “a wicked vicious faith”. I can remember how a drunken student was arrested and fined for telling a policeman that his horse looked “gay”. I can remember how a man was arrested and charged and fined for standing beside the Cenotaph and reading out the names of the British war dead in Iraq. I remember a case from this year where a pacifist unfurled a banner outside an army cadet training base. “Stop training murderers”, it said. His home was promptly raided by police with dogs, while a helicopter hovered overhead.He was arrested and cautioned. If I started mentioning the cases where Christian street preachers have been arrested for quoting the Bible, or where Moslems have set the police on people for alleged words or displays, or if I even alluded to the Public Order Act or the various racial and sexual hate speech laws, this article would swell immensely. It is enough to say that anything said in public is now illegal if someone complains to the police, or if the police themselves take against it. And, when something is not illegal, we are all getting used to the idea – second nature in most other countries – that we should “watch ourselves”. Even I find that, if I discuss politics in a coffee bar, I sometimes drop my voice. A few weeks ago, I found myself looking round to see who might be within earshot.

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The party of the state

November 12th, 2010

The number of federal workers earning $150,000 or more a year has doubled in the two years since President Obama took office

Update: Bill however argues this is less alarming that it seems:

The big jump in % over $150K is all from the fact that the GS scale maxed out less than $150K in 2005 and over $150K in 2010. It’s totally mechanical, an incident of drawing the line at $150K.

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Hyperinflation

November 8th, 2010

Officially, America has near zero inflation and a mere ten percent official unemployment.  Odd that it has a mere ten percent unemployment when the proportion of young adult males with jobs has dropped a lot more than ten percent.

As with third world and Marxist countries, the government’s reaction to bad news is to declare a new era of prosperity.  The recession is officially over.  With an unprecedented proportion of the workforce on the government payroll, productivity has officially risen to amazing heights and somehow, despite the big increase in the proportion of people on the government payroll, public spending has officially not risen much.

Unofficial inflation, however, is starting to look quite frightening:

Market Ticker tells us:

I just got back from the grocery store.  Eggs, which were $1.60 two weeks ago, are now $1.99/dz.  Butter?  Two boxes for $6 – on sale.  The same two boxes were $4.50 a couple months ago.  Land-O-Lakes Brand?  $4.89 – each.
Cheese?  8oz bricks were commonly 3/$5 as recently as September.  Now?  $3.50 – for one.
But there’s no inflation, you see.
Oh, and on the way home I passed the gas station.  It was $2.59 for regular a couple of weeks ago.  Now?  $2.89.  30 cents in about 2 weeks, a 12% increase.

This is consistent with inflation rates of thirty to fifty percent per year, early hyperinflation rates.

Sarah Palin is, as usual, on the ball, while ruling class is floating away in La La Land, sincerely puzzled that the peasants are failing to eat cake.

This is the decisive test of Keynesianism.  Of course, we already had a decisive test of Keynesianism:  The Japanese crisis.  Keynesianism failed dismally, to which the Keynesians replied that Japan’s troubles were the result of not applying Keynesianism vigorously enough.    This time, however, it has been applied vigorously enough.  The results should be apparent by around 2012-2016.  The fat lady has not yet sung, but so far, things are not looking good for Keynesianism.

Money is a matter of functions four,
a medium, a measure, a standard, a store.

There is a conflict between the use of money as a store and the use of money as a standard, since if everyone wants to store value at the same time, the value of money is apt to rise, and if everyone wants to use their store at the same time, the value is apt to fall.  Keynesianism therefore addresses a real problem, but its proposed solution tells the ruling class what they want to hear – that they can buy votes with money they do not have, that they can eat their cake and have it to, which is of course not true, and not a solution to the problem.  Keynesianism addresses a real problem, but is not a real solution.

It seems to me that a sounder solution would be to target the long run value of money.  If people had confidence that in the long run, the value of money would be constant, that inflation would run for a few years to be followed by deflation, and deflation would run for a few years to followed by inflation, that what goes up must come down, then I doubt that natural fluctuations would be large or damaging.   Fluctuations are large and damaging because there is no telling what the future value of money is likely to be, because Keynesianism makes money dangerously ineffectual as either a standard or as a store.  This large uncertainty destabilizes the economy.  The objective of monetary policy should be to give people confidence that the value of money will be the same in twenty or thirty years, even if it fluctuates a bit from year to year.

Of course, I am prescribing what an honest issuer of fiat money should do, if he cares about the long term, and wants everyone to continue using the fiat money he issues.  Since issuers of fiat money sooner or later find themselves in a situation where the major question is whether the political leadership will survive another week, such advice is unlikely to be heeded.  Keynesianism will continue to be believed, not because it is true, but because issuers of fiat money are compelled to act as if it was true.

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Jihad watch reports Obama is Muslim

November 8th, 2010

Jihad watch reports on the anointed one’s visit to India:

Obama is visiting … a Muslim shrine. He has no plans to visit any holy places of the Sikhs (such as the Golden Temple, Amritsar), or any Hindu holy places, Buddhist holy places, or Jain holy places. Nor does he plan to visit Nariman house, the Chabad house in Mumbai that was the chief target of the jihad mass-murderers who killed 173 people in November 2008.

India is majority Hindu. All the faiths of India are in a state of war or near war with Islam, which conflict has within living memory been conducted at the level of full scale pogrom, mass murder, and full scale conventional military operations with tanks and columns of uniformed troops, as well as the more usual level of angry mobs and unconventional small scale operations deploying people out of uniform. Obama is being conspicuously rude to his Hindu hosts in visiting a Muslim shrine without visiting a Hindu Shrine.

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Yes, Obama is a Muslim.

November 5th, 2010

I  doubt Obama believes in anything, not in God, not even the evidence of the senses – but to be officially a Muslim, you have to publicly pronounce the Shahada:  “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet”.  Obama did as a child, and recently repeated in public as an adult.  To cease to be a Muslim, you have to publicly reject that proposition, which he has not done, or publicly accept a contrary proposition, such as “Jesus is Lord”, which he has not done.

To be officially Christian, you have to be baptized in the name of Jesus, and call Jesus “Lord”, which Obama has not done, nor has his “Christian” pastor, the Reverend Wright, done.

As for what I am:  I think that Mohammed was a mass murdering pedophile rapist who made up all that stuff about angels telling him the word of God.   I think Jesus was making an honest and sincere effort to reform Judaism into a more peaceable faith, both for the general good and to protect Jews from getting squished by Romans, but the evasiveness of his prophecies reveal him to be a mortal.

“Nation shall rise against Nation, and Kingdom against Kingdom”.   And verily I tell unto you bears shall shit in the woods.

Jesus’ prophecies for the fall of Jerusalem and temple were only marginally more impressive.  He did not give an approximate date, nor tell us that the Romans would be the ones to do it – thereby keeping his ass covered against the possibility that Rome would fall before Jerusalem did – which ass covering reveals him to be a mortal, though it also suggests the books of the New Testament were written up before seventy AD.  If they had been written up after the fall of Jerusalem, his prophecies probably would have been sharpened up a bit by the chroniclers.  The argument that the New Testament must have been written after seventy AD is people irrationally hostile to Christianity going overboard in their desire to piss on Christianity.  To cast doubt on Christianity, you merely have to cast doubt on the proposition that Jesus lives, not on the proposition that Jesus lived.  The argument that the books of the bible were written long after the ministry of Jesus is an effort to disprove the existence of Jesus the man, which effort is silly – there is plenty of historical evidence that Jesus lived, preached, was crucified by Pontius Pilate, and stayed dead.

What I do believe in is that our senses give us straightforward access to reality as it really is, to things in themselves, that we are not trapped in Plato’s cave because we can reach through the windows and break things apart to see what they are really made of, that with due care and competence, categories and concepts can be and should be constructed to correspond to the likeness and origins of particular things, reflecting commonalities between particular examples of real things.  I believe that all words are defined by pointing at examples, or defined by other words that were defined by pointing at examples, that children rightly learn the meaning of words from the examples pointed at by their mothers, and that the ultimate authority of what words mean is the type examples provided by mothers and fairy tales to children – thus words mean what children think they mean, and not what ideologues and philosophers say they mean, that language, reality and the connection between language and reality are what children think they are.

While Obama is a Muslim, I not only doubt that he believes in Allah, but doubt that he believes that reality exists external to himself, or that words have any definite meaning.

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Yet another vote for European style Social Democracy

November 4th, 2010

As Europe collapses, Americans vote to be like Europe.

The republicans now have control of the purse strings, and, among other things, have promised to reduce next years deficit from $1470 000 000 000 to $1370 000 000 000.  We are in a bus heading towards a precipice at seventy miles and hour, and the republicans promise to slow down to sixty five miles an hour.

Any tea party candidate that made vague noises in the general direction of doing something to preserve America and avoid total collapse, lost.  That position just is not popular.

The only solution is that after the collapse comes, we have to install a system other than democracy with broad or universal franchise.

When the franchise was extended to all males, people predicted that eventually the voters would fall for politicians promising that they could vote themselves rich, and everything would collapse.   Observe.  The voters have fallen, and now collapse is in sight.

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Vote Cthulhu

November 1st, 2010

Why vote for the lesser evil?

Bush, of course, launched numerous expensive new programs and entitlements, and failed to restrain the inherent growth of Clinton’s affirmative action easy mortgage program.  He encouraged the growth of that program, though to judge by the screaming of the Democrats at the time, probably slightly less than the Democrats would have done.

But even if Bush had launched no new entitlements, restraining the inherent growth of Clinton’s mortgage program would have been unthinkably drastic and “racist”, would have been “cuts”, “cuts” directed at particular racial groups supposedly for racist reasons, “cuts” immeasurably more extreme and controversial than anything any tea party candidate dares speak out loud about, “cuts” far more dramatic than the quite controversial cuts happening now in Britain.  To maintain the Clinton status quo against the inherent growth of Clinton’s programs would have required unthinkably drastic “right wing racist cuts”.

Every institution tends to grow.  Institutions are made of people.  They exist because they give those people what they want, so people in them always want more of that institution.  Market institutions, such as firms, are inherently limited, because if the customer says “no”, the institution fails to grow, or vanishes altogether.  Government institutions have no such inherent limits, so always grow barring frequent, extreme, and drastic “cuts”.

The growth of government in America was restrained by federalism, by market competition between the states.  When the constitution was gutted, that restraint was removed.  Almost everything the feds do except the post office, the patent office, and warfare, is unconstitutional.  If all that stuff was passed back to the states and states such as California were allowed to go bankrupt, state to state competition and state bankruptcies might slow growth to levels that could be accommodates without social collapse.

There is a natural selection process going on– government programs that can be stopped half way, generally are, or at least are slowed, so government tends to be dominated by programs that inherently have limitless growth that can end only in social collapse or total domination of every aspect of society.

If any politician stops affirmative action mortgages, he launches himself on a path where he is going to stop all affirmative action and wind up in front of the television cameras ridiculing Marie Curie’s Nobel prizes and women scientists in general.  You cannot stop affirmative action half way.  The inherent logic and needs of affirmative action, like most successfully expansionist government programs, require total domination of every aspect of society, or complete repudiation.

The dominant part of government is programs that cannot be cut half way, can only be cut off at the roots, because the ones that can be cut half way, frequently are.

In the private sector, natural selection selects well run firms, so firms are mostly well run, and where most firms are badly run, for example retailing, well run firms such as Walmart tend to dominate.

In the government sector, natural selection selects programs whose growth is impossible to restrain  For example:  If  you give “under represented groups” their fair share of Nobel prizes, you soon have to give them their fair share of degrees.  If you give them their fair share of degrees, you soon have to give them their fair share of well paid high status jobs.  If you give them their fair share of well paid high status jobs, you soon have to give them their fair share of mortgages. If you give them their fair share of mortgages, the economy collapses.  So there is no help for it but to resist and ridicule giving them their fair share of Nobel prizes.

You cannot have half affirmative action, and half not, because if you do, either the half that is not affirmative action be racism and sexism, or the half that is affirmative action must be fraud, lies, pretense, and special privilege, must itself be racism and sexism. This is the formula for a successful government program – that any attempt to restrain its growth must be politically outrageous and extraordinary.

It follows that the biggest and most uncontrollable programs will be those that to cut is unthinkable,  and that the only cuts of those programs that can succeed is total abolition.  Compare and contrast with the most “radical” of the Tea Partiers.

If you can cut a program by five percent or ten percent, then it is unlikely to be a big problem.  Most government is programs that cannot be cut by five or ten percent, cannot even have their growth much slowed, except by abolition.

If George Osborne slows the growth of Britain’s National Health scheme to levels that Britain can afford, in a few years the National Health Scheme will consist entirely of committees of expert authorities sending memos to other committees of expert authorities, while Britons die in the streets of readily treated ailments.  Indeed, we are already seeing the horror stories in the British press.  George Osborne tells some government entity that is blowing ludicrous amounts of money that it will have a few hundred million pounds less money that it asked for, a mere drop in an overflowing bucket.  The entity finds some pathetic and deserving client, whose very life has come to depend on them spending a minuscule amount money on him, and announces that they will save a few pounds by letting him die.  And then they do it.

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Fixing the financial system

October 30th, 2010

We are in trouble, the entire west is in trouble, in substantial part because the financial system has been leaking a lot of money.  So has every other part of the governing apparatus, but the financial system is the biggest hole in the bucket.

Now a lot of people are saying that this is a revolutionary election, it is about fundamental change.  Thomas Sowell, a man I enormously respect, tells us this is a crossroads election.  But is not.  The Democrats are driving the bus towards the precipice in top gear with the pedal flat to the metal, the Republicans propose to proceed with the pedal not quite flat to the metal.  Some of the unelectably extreme elements of the Tea Party are suggesting a lower gear.  In Britain, they applied supposedly radical cuts – which “cuts” some how result in a substantial increase in government spending.  Before the “cuts”, an ordinary Briton had to be crazy if he planned to work, marry, have kids, and support his own kids.  After the “cuts”, he still had to be crazy if he planned to work, marry, have kids, and support his own kids.

But let us focus on the biggest single money leak:  The financial system, for all the other problems resemble that.  If we had the will to fix the financial system, we would have the will to fix all the other problems.

The Market Ticker proposes a general audit of the banks:  Shut down the insolvent banks, and remove their management permanently from the banking industry.  This seemingly addresses the problem of crooked financiers.  If we cannot jail them, we can at least fire them.   Unfortunately, it does not ask why we are overrun with crooked bankers.

In America, the problem was the CRA and affirmative action lending.  The regulators required a banker to make loans to certain voting blocks that there was no way could legitimately be made – so only crooked bankers survived.  If a banker is still in business, he is a criminal.  But world wide, we saw a similar outbreak of crooked lending, often with very different beneficiaries.

The common factor in all this crooked lending was Basel:  Basel means that regulators are the ultimate decision makers as to what is a risky loan and what is a safe loan – which means that politically correct loans are necessarily supposedly safe, and politically incorrect loans are necessarily supposedly unsafe – which means that a banker has to be corrupt.

So to fix the banking system, have to undo Basel.  This sounds easy.  The left claims that Basel is deregulation, therefore extremely bad and the big cause of our financial troubles;  The right claims that Basel is regulation, an explosive expansion of regulation, therefore extremely bad and the big cause of our financial troubles – except however that only one minor candidate, widely viewed as ludicrously extreme, proposes to undo Basel.

Every candidate claims to hate the banksters twice as much as every other other candidate – but again only one candidate proposes to purge the banking system of zombie banks and crooked bankers.

You will notice the the fix for the financial system is the wholesale rollback of thirty years of financial regulation (or, as the left call it, deregulation), the mass firing of the good and the great, the powerful, the important and the influential, a large portion of the most eminent graduates of our most eminent universities, and the imprisonment of a significant fraction of them.  Simply apply a similar fix to every part of our society, and the problem is solved.

We have a society that believes that children should not be spanked, that thieves should not be flogged, that women should not suffer adverse consequences for bearing children by men other than their husbands – and that graduates for the most eminent universities should not lose their jobs for corruption or incompetence.

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hyperinflation of the US$

October 29th, 2010

A great storm first manifest as clouds on the horizon. The Republicans are going to wish they had not won the 2010 November elections.

Supposedly US inflation is near zero, yet food, fuel, and heating oil has risen substantially.

Gonzalo points out

Grains as a class have risen over 33% year-over-year. Refined oil products have risen just shy of 13%, with home heating oil rising 18% year-over-year. In other words: Food, gasoline and heating oil have risen by double digits since 2009. And the 2010-‘11 winter in the northern hemisphere is approaching.

Supposedly, food in the supermarket is not rising, or not rising yet, yet bulk prices of the commodities you need to live on have risen by thirty to fifty percent.

If this has not shown up in the supermarkets yet, it is going to show up mighty soon.

The storm, inflation rates that are quite obviously disruptive and unacceptable, will likely be raging vigorously some time in 2012. There may well be continued reluctance to admit what is happening. I will not be much surprised if official statistics and the New York Times announce that everything is coming up roses even in 2012

Officially, all is roses today, yet Case Research reports

commodity prices

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