Hors de combat

An important project calls me away from the blog for awhile. With no other excuse than that, I'll leave you with the great Argentine pianist Martha Argerich playing Scarlatti's Sonata in D Minor. Western Civ at it's finest, and all. Just how anyone getting on in years can have a nervous system capable of pulling this off is quite beyond me. Maybe it's her supplements.

In my absence, please keep reaction alive.

More on Ideological Coherence

Andrew Gelman has responded to my post on the coherence of conservatism. An excerpt:

So, to say it again: I am not making any statements about how conservatives (or liberals) are supposed to react to shoe-warehouse minarets, and I was not criticizing Mangan for lack of consistency. Rather, I was using Mangan to illustrate how a set of positions that can seem perfectly consistent to one group (Mangan and his blog readers), while a different set of views-- agreeing with him on most issues but not on the minaret situation--can seem perfectly consistent from another perspective.

Stated that way, my position might appear true but obvious. The reason why it's relevant, in my opinion, is that I think that politically-active people often feel their clusters of positions to be coherent, and sometimes it's hard for a supporter of A and B and C and D to understand the logic of someone else who supports A and B and C and not-D.

It's true that an outsider might be surprised at a certain viewpoint that he takes to be incoherent, while the holder of that view feels no inconsistency. In my post, I emphasized the notion that conservatives have no ideology - and at least one conservative commenter disagreed with me.

Paleoconservatives at this point are pretty much defined by their stance on the national question, in juxtaposition to the neoconservatives, whom paleos characterize as beholden to a policy of Invasion, Immigration, and Insolvency. Before the advent and success of neoconservatism, no such distinction was necessary. If paleos are defined by this issue, then do they perhaps have an ideology? In the sense that most paleos will agree with each other, maybe they do. Some commenters both here and at Professor Gelman's blog pointed out that my answer to the Swiss businessman and his minaret was a lot more predictable than Gelman thought it was. In a sense, were Gelman to be a bit more aware of distinctions within conservative ranks, he wouldn't have been surprised. And with no surprise, no perceived ideological incoherence.

But in a larger sense, I would still say that conservatives have no ideology. Were the paleoconservatives to be wholly successful in implementing their political views, paleoconservatism would disappear, becoming once again plain-vanilla conservatism. Going back a few decades, say before 1960, paleoconservatism probably represented the views of a majority of Americans. (One doesn't even need to specify white Americans, because other than the 12% black minority, Americans largely just were white.) Americans were Christian, desired and had strictly limited immigration, hated socialism and Communism, and had no delusions about America being a proposition nation. At the time, there was no such word as paleoconservatism.

In his conclusion, Gelman strikes a modest note:

P.S. Some other commenters point out that my remarks seem hardly enough to justify my appointment as a professor of political science. I'd agree with that one. My academic position comes from my academic work; this blog is something different (usually), it's a place where, among other things, I can work out ideas and get comments on fragmentary thoughts. I often learn important things from blog commenters here and elsewhere.

It would be great if all bloggers and pundits were as civil and as willing to learn as Professor Gelman, and I thank him for his willingness to engage with courtesy those on our side of the political spectrum.

Ignorance and Gnosticism

Guy White complains that the most common retort he gets from liberals is that he is ignorant:

Ignorant is anyone who has ever disagreed with a liberal. What truly shows that liberalism is a cult where everyone is taught to say the same thing is that the same word is always used: ignorant.

People aren’t stupid, dumb, dull, idiotic, ludicrous, moronic, imbecilic, unintelligent, deficient, retarded, laughable, mindless, out to lunch, nonsensical, dim, dopey, slow, witless, senseless, unknowing, birdbrained, foolish or misinformed.

No, if you disagree, you are always ignorant.

So, that got me to thinking about Lawrence Auster's recent remarks about liberalism and gnosticism. He believes that gnosticism is of the essence of liberalism. Since gnosticism claims to have a kind of inside knowledge, it makes sense that the a common insult that liberals hurl would be to accuse someone of ignorance. The gnostics understand, and everyone else needs their teachings.

On the other hand, some might say that conservatism claims insider knowledge and is thus gnostic. In a long-ago post, I claimed that conservatism is allied or related to curmudgeonry, and that the single defining element of curmudgeonry is the notion that one sees through the shallowness and vanity and stupidity of the masses and their pursuits.

So what's the difference between the two outlooks, and why would liberalism be gnostic and conservatism or curmudgeonry not be? Maybe because a conservative would claim something like "reality doesn't care what you think", i.e. the world is what it is and, while we can try to make progress at the margin, this will always be difficult and we should be aware of our own hubris. The liberal-gnostic believes that reality, i.e. the world, is inherently flawed, but that it is given to a small elite to be the light-bearers.

Or is this just conservative hubris in thinking that we are reality-based, and others are not?

Ron Paul: Prepare for Revolutionary Change

Ron Paul:

Could it all be a bad dream, or a nightmare? Is it my imagination, or have we lost our minds? It's surreal; it's just not believable. A grand absurdity; a great deception, a delusion of momentous proportions; based on preposterous notions; and on ideas whose time should never have come; simplicity grossly distorted and complicated; insanity passed off as logic; grandiose schemes built on falsehoods with the morality of Ponzi and Madoff; evil described as virtue; ignorance pawned off as wisdom; destruction and impoverishment in the name of humanitarianism; violence, the tool of change; preventive wars used as the road to peace; tolerance delivered by government guns; reactionary views in the guise of progress; an empire replacing the Republic; slavery sold as liberty; excellence and virtue traded for mediocracy; socialism to save capitalism; a government out of control, unrestrained by the Constitution, the rule of law, or morality; bickering over petty politics as we collapse into chaos; the philosophy that destroys us is not even defined.

We have broken from reality--a psychotic Nation. Ignorance with a pretense of knowledge replacing wisdom. Money does not grow on trees, nor does prosperity come from a government printing press or escalating deficits.

We're now in the midst of unlimited spending of the people's money, exorbitant taxation, deficits of trillions of dollars--spent on a failed welfare/warfare state; an epidemic of cronyism; unlimited supplies of paper money equated with wealth. [...]

We police our world empire with troops on 700 bases and in 130 countries around the world. A dangerous war now spreads throughout the Middle East and Central Asia. Thousands of innocent people being killed, as we become known as the torturers of the 21st century. [...]

Of course, it could all be a bad dream, a nightmare, and that I'm seriously mistaken, overreacting, and that my worries are unfounded. I hope so. But just in case, we ought to prepare ourselves for revolutionary changes in the not-too-distant future.

Full text here. And yet, for all the honesty of Ron Paul, he never touches on certain things that will make or break America, namely, who shall populate the country, who are "Americans"? For all the emphasis on liberty and America's traditions, he does not address (as far as I know) the nation-breaking National Suicide Pact, i.e. the immigration act of 1965.

Still, for a Congressman, he's not bad. Unfortunately for Ron Paul, as well as the rest of us, the newly reconstituted American people elected our current politicians. With half the country essentially paying no taxes, and a large plurality directly employed by federal, state, and local governments, socialism has a large constituency.

Contingency and Stock Markets

Eugene Fama and Kenneth French, they of the efficient market hypothesis (EMH), have a blog, Fama/French Forum. In Are Stocks Safer in the Long Run, they argue that, as the period of time being looked at increases, uncertainty of returns also increases. "[L]onger investment periods imply more uncertainty about final wealth."

Addressing an important point at the end, Fama writes:

Pastor and Stambaugh point out that the analysis above is incomplete in an important way. In particular, we don't know the true expected returns on portfolios. We typically use historical average returns to estimate expected returns, but the estimates are quite noisy, and they leave lots of uncertainty about true expected returns. The uncertainty about expected returns is an additional unavoidable risk of investing.

All stock market data obviously comes from historical events. Given a large enough sample, we can make certain statements or draw rules from the data. But we never really know whether our sample is large enough or whether enough time has elapsed. After all, events could have been otherwise, and we don't know whether the past will look like the future.

Consider the fate of various global stock markets, from Global Stock Markets in the Twentieth Century (pdf). Eleven stock markets suffered more or less permanent losses, including those of Germany, Japan, Argentina, Egypt, and many others. For instance, looking at the chart above, any stock market below the line had a negative annual return over its entire existence. Some of these markets were closed for years, such as in Germany and Japan, due to war; Chile's and Egypt's were taken over by their government; the Communists did their thing in Russia and Eastern Europe. Investors in most cases essentially lost everything.

What could a chart like this look like, say, 40 years into the future? Where will the U.S. markets be, above or below the line?

The Coherence of Conservatism

Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia, and the author of Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do (Steve Sailer discussed the book here), analyzes a recent post of mine as an exercise in "internal vs. external coherence in political ideology". Professor Gelman was puzzled by my reaction to the Swiss businessman who built a minaret.

Now, by the time I'd gotten to this item, I'd read a bunch of Mangan's blog and I had a sense of where he's coming from--he's conservative, is skeptical of government, has strong views on racial issues--and I was expecting his reaction to the minaret to be something like: Hey, those silly Europeans--they want Americans to be politically correct but then they go around suppressing free speech in their own country by banning minarets, something that would never fly in a free country like America. Good job by that plucky businessman to succeed with free enterprise where government failed; this shows how capitalism solves problems that governments create. This man with a shoe-store chain is a productive member of society, unlike the chattering classes who want to tell the rest of us what to do. I'm more inclined to trust a guy who's built up a chain of stores--someone who faces the judgment of the marketplace every day--than some bureaucrat who cashes government checks. Etc.

Reading on, I was surprised to see that Mangan had the exact opposite reaction, siding against the shoe store owner...

He goes on to say that I was not entirely consistent in my answer, which may be right. His more important point, however, is whether one's opinion on one political issue can be predicted from one's opinion on other issues, i.e. whether political ideologies are coherent.

My point here, though, is not to get into a debate about the motivation of some Swiss sneaker-store owner who I've never met (and never heard of until today) but just to point out how an action can be framed in such different ways (Plucky Entrepreneur Defies Government Ban, or Naive Political Activist Plays With Fire, or Selfish Big Businessman Bites the Society that Feeds Him). And each of these stories is potentially coherent. Imagine, for example, how people might feel about a store owner in the U.S. flying a huge Confederate flag in violation of some state law.

Trying to slice the Gordian knot here, it's a truism among conservatives that conservatism means precisely the absence of ideology. Whether conservatives are right to say that they have no ideology is another matter - though I believe that statement to be true. The point being that, if no ideology is involved, there can be no ideological incoherence.

John Kekes, in his essay What Is Conservatism?, answers the question by saying that conservatism is a political morality that aims for political arrangements that make society good, and that a society is good if it enables the people in it to lead good lives. Therefore, conservatives never hold one value supreme among all others, whether the value is freedom, security, wealth, or any other. An example of this can be seen in the expression "the Constitution is not a suicide pact".

Since I hold that the national question is the most important one we face today, I derided the Swiss businessman for his open contempt of his countrymen. In another time, when we faced or will face different challenges, I might not have done so. But that is not incoherent, because I, like every real conservative, have no ideology.

It's Official: Saturated Fat Does Not Cause Heart Disease

A new paper in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition evaluates the association of saturated fat intake with heart disease. One of the co-authors is Ronald Krauss, M.D., who is "Director of Atherosclerosis Research at Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute, Senior Scientist in the Life Sciences Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences, University of California at Berkeley." In other words, Dr. Krauss is as good a representative of mainstream thinking on diet and heart disease as you'll find. From the abstract:

A meta-analysis of prospective epidemiologic studies showed that there is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD or CVD. More data are needed to elucidate whether CVD risks are likely to be influenced by the specific nutrients used to replace saturated fat. [my emphasis]

There you have it: given Dr. Krauss's status, and given the findings of this paper, it's official that saturated fat does not cause heart disease or stroke.

Now, all of the evidence that saturated fat causes heart disease and that low-fat diets are a means of prevention was peer-reviewed. But somehow they all missed it.

Medical Hypotheses Controversy in Times Higher Education

Times Higher Education runs Unclear outlook for radical journal as HIV/Aids deniers evoke outrage, outlining the subject that's been discussed at some length on this blog.

It has published papers on everything from ejaculation as a treatment for nasal congestion to why modern scientists are so dull, but the future of Medical Hypotheses is hanging in the balance after a host of complaints from high-profile researchers.

The irreverent publication is the only Elsevier journal not to subject its submissions to peer review. Instead, its editor decides what to publish on the basis of how interesting or radical a paper is, and how well expressed the arguments are.

But its future is in doubt after editor-in-chief Bruce Charlton, professor of theoretical medicine at the University of Buckingham, published a paper from a well-known HIV/Aids denier.

The paper, "HIV-Aids hypothesis out of touch with South African Aids - A new perspective", was published online last July. It was written by Peter Duesberg, professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues.

It argues that there is "as yet no proof that HIV causes Aids" and says the claim that the virus has killed millions is "unconfirmed".

Prominent Aids researchers contacted Elsevier to object to the article and wrote to the US National Library of Medicine requesting that Medical Hypotheses be removed from the Medline citation database - an act that would exclude it from the mainstream scientific-communication network.

Elsevier's response was to retract both Professor Duesberg's paper and another article - "Aids denialism at the ministry of health", by Marco Ruggiero, professor of molecular biology at the University of Florence. [...]

Professor Charlton this week accused the researchers who complained of taking "behind-the-scenes action" to exclude dissenting views and bring the journal down.

"The coercive and anti-scientific reaction shows exactly why it was right that these papers were accepted to be published," he told Times Higher Education.

He said Elsevier had to decide whether to close the journal altogether or whether to leave it alone, adding that meddling with its unique status would be "unacceptable".

Steve Fuller, professor of sociology at the University of Warwick, said that while peer review worked for "normal science", it also had the power to suppress radical ideas.

"Medical Hypotheses has never hidden what it set out to do, namely to provide a forum for bold scientific ideas that challenge the status quo," he said.

It's good to see Dr. Charlton taking an aggressive stance for his journal (and career) and against the would-be guardians of what the educated public will be allowed to read.

I posted the following comment at the site:

After what we've learned about peer review from Climategate, one has to laugh at those who suggest that peer review is the Holy Grail of science and "a quality control mechanism". We've seen that peer review can function as peer exclusion and an attempt to ruin careers, and whatever the merits or demerits of the Aids skeptic case, that is exactly what is going on here. The notion that every single journal must toe an ideological line of peer review and furthermore that the Aids skeptic case is grounds for dismissal and blackballing is both absurd and soft totalitarian. That an article and a journal be listed on MedLine and readable on the internet appears to horrify those calling for action against Medical Hypotheses, who are openly against the dissemination of information and obviously fear dissent. If the anti-denialists are so sure of themselves, why do they call for the suppression of science?

Buy Treasury Bonds - or Else

From a Bloomberg article, Retiree Annuities May Be Promoted by Obama Aides:

The Obama administration is weighing how the government can encourage workers to turn their savings into guaranteed income streams following a collapse in retiree accounts when the stock market plunged.

The U.S. Treasury and Labor Departments will ask for public comment as soon as next week on ways to promote the conversion of 401(k) savings and Individual Retirement Accounts into annuities or other steady payment streams, according to Assistant Labor Secretary Phyllis C. Borzi and Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary Mark Iwry, who are spearheading the effort.

This could the the shot over the bow for a campaign that will force retirement accounts to buy U.S. Treasury bonds. Some commentary from Adam Brochert (since he says it better than I could):

Not only will the money in your 401(k)s, IRAs and/or other tax-sheltered investment vehicles be forced into government bonds (i.e. stolen and misappropriated), but this will occur at a time when government bond yields are near historical lows and can only move higher, which means this government lifeline and "guaranteed" income will be a wicked curse on those who "do the right thing." Couple this with the almost guaranteed further devaluation of the U.S. Dollar and you have a recipe for disaster.

If you think this proposal and this "exploration" of the annuity concept to "save" retirees from the volatile stock market are going to go away, then sleep well. Just don't say you weren't warned when your IRA is converted to "something better" that will "protect you." Who do you think will stand up for your rights when the time comes? Do you think that the 50% of the people in the U.S. who pay no federal income tax will come to your aid? Do you think the large percentage of the U.S. population that works for the federal government will come to your aid when their salaries and pensions will be at risk if this money is not stolen from you? Do you think Congress cares what you think when they passed the Wall Street bailout packages despite a deluge of calls, faxes and letters 90:1 against the measure? If you have savings, you are wealthy, and we all know the rich are evil. [...]

The tipping point is getting very close and one can only hope that there are enough motivated and educated patriots available to stop the process at this point. America is no longer very close to a free capitalist society and to think otherwise is ridiculous in my opinion.

It may make sense to either decrease contributions to retirement accounts, and/or bust open the account and pay the taxes and penalties, depending on how one thinks this will play out. Taxes are only going up anyway, so that alone might justify it.

Brochert is correct to note that most of the population simply won't care when your retirement savings are stolen. Either that, or they will actively favor doing so.

Suing Climate Fraud

It's always nice to come across a piece of good news in an otherwise bleak-looking world. The good news: Attention Penn State: Top fraud attorney seeks climategate whistleblowers. If those who conducted climate research committed fraud, then they may be liable under the False Claims Act, i.e. receiving government grant money fraudulently.

An “inconvenient truth” for Mann is that an ally of ours, former CIA agent Kent Clizbe, has this weekend emailed the proxy professor’s co-workers with details of the tempting offer that could turn 2010 into quite a prosperous New Year. We hope someone at this premiere world research institution will come forward and substantiate the facts from evidence already uncovered from the government emails leaked on November 19, 2009. The emails, among other things, show correspondence between Michael Mann and British Professor Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research, which discuss methods to “hide the decline” in global temperatures.

If any of the dozens of co-workers in the US or the UK are prepared to give evidence, even if it doesn’t lead to any convictions, they could benefit from a share of tens of millions of dollars in recovered public funds. The Whistleblower idea came up in Internet discussions with top US fraud lawyer, Joel Hesch, of Hesch and Associates and former CIA agent, Kent Clizbe. Clizbe’s idea was to email the offer to all 27 of Mann’s co-workers at Penn State’s Earth System Science Center (ESSC) this weekend.

Whether convictions are obtained or not, Mr. Hesch assures prospective whistleblowers they will receive a substantial share of any monies recovered. Federal investigators reward whistleblowers with an average payment of $1.5 million based on the sums of money recovered. The US Federal government has paid out almost $3 billion so far in such rewards. The largest rewards to date exceed $150 million, and one out of every five applicants gets a monetary reward. Estimates of the total sums invested in government climate research already exceed $50 billion. The offer put on the table to Mann’s colleagues could be the most lucrative whistleblower deal ever made.

James Delingpole has published the email which this group has sent to all of Michael Mann's colleagues at the Earth Sciences Center at Penn State. That any whistleblowers stand to collect millions of dollars will be a tempting incentive.

Who shall guard the guardians? Lawyers.

National Origins of Significant Biologists

Just as we did with composers (also here), let's look at the significant biologists according to Charles Murray. To repeat, in this context and defined by Murray, "significant" denotes "those who are important enough to the development of a field that a well-versed student of that field is likely to be familiar with them", and are "mentioned in at least 50% of the qualified sources". Murray lists significant figures in a number of separate fields, including astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology. My guess would be that the national origins in one of these fields would not be drastically different from another.

In science, as opposed to Western music, the U.S. comes into prominence. However, in Europe, classification of national origin or ethnicity still requires using language as a marker, due to the many defunct nations, principally in the old Habsburg lands and Germany. So this list will be organized slightly differently. I used the same method of including only those who scored at least 10; but in the sciences the dispersion is much less than in music, i.e. a greater fraction of all biologists than composers are considered significant.

1. Germany, Austria, and German-speaking Bohemia: 35
2. England: 21
3. U.S.A.: 19
4. France: 12
5. Italy: 11
6. Switzerland: 6
7. Ancient Greece: 5
   
8. The Netherlands: 4
9.  Russia and Ukraine: 4
10. Canada: 3
    
11. Denmark: 3
    
12. Sweden: 3
13. Ancient Rome: 1
14. Belgium: 1
15. Poland: 1
16. Spain: 1

The top 10 biologists, along with point scores, are:

1. Darwin: 100
2. Aristotle: 94
3. Lamarck: 88
4. Cuvier: 83
5. Morgan: 75
6. Linnaeus: 59
7. Harvey: 51
8. Schwann: 48
9. Hales: 48
10. Swammerdam: 47

What is it that Germans have going for them that others do not? They came in first in the Western music category, and their position among significant biologists will, I presume, be similar to that in all other sciences. I doubt that it could be IQ. According to IQ and the Wealth of Nations, the estimated IQ of Germans is 102. Compare to Poland or Spain, both at 99, and both with only one significant biologist on the list.

That Aristotle is still the second most important biologist after nearly 2,400 years is astounding; he must have been one of the greatest minds ever. Or perhaps there's another explanation, namely that he was so early in the game that it was comparatively easy for him to make discoveries. Against that, Newton said that if he saw further than others, it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants. Aristotle had no giants' shoulders on which to stand.

Swiss Businessman Erects Minaret

Wall Street Journal:

BUSSIGNY, Switzerland -- In November, Switzerland voted to ban the construction of new minarets, the towerlike structures that adorn mosques. A week or so later, in an apparent act of defiance, a new minaret unexpectedly sprang up here.

But the new minaret is not attached to a mosque; this small town near Geneva doesn't even have one. And it's not the work of a local Muslim outraged by Switzerland's controversial vote to ban the structures, which often are used to launch the call to prayer.

Instead, Bussigny's minaret is attached to the warehouse of a shoe store called Pomp It Up, which is part of a Swiss chain. It was erected by the chain's owner, Guillaume Morand, who fashioned it out of plastic and wood and attached it to a chimney. The new minaret, nearly 20 feet high and illuminated at night, is clearly visible from the main highway connecting Lausanne and Geneva.

"The referendum was a scandal," Mr. Morand said recently at his cavernous warehouse, near pallets piled high with shoe boxes as pop music played on an old stereo system. "I was ashamed to be Swiss. I don't have the power to do much, but I wanted to give a message of peace to Muslims."

This seems to me an example of capitalism at its worst. Capitalists and businessmen seek profits above all else - which is fine, that's their specialty. In this case, Morand has no loyalties beyond profits; he's willing to sell out his country just so he and his business and his liberal ideology can thrive. His disdain for his fellow Swiss is palpable.

Capitalism in the US is really no different. Big business wants nothing other than profits, and if it takes mass immigration, legal or illegal, suborning the constitution, paying bribes, kowtowing to "diversity", and lobbying for subsidies, they're all for it.

What are the odds on social breakdown?

From Zero Hedge, This Is The Government: Your Legal Right To Redeem Your Money Market Account Has Been Denied is a slightly technical article, but the gist is this:

At this point it is without doubt that even the government understands that when things turn sour, and they will, the run on the bank will be unavoidable: their solution - prevent money from being dispensed, when that moment comes. The thing about crises, be they liquidity, solvency, or plain-vanilla, is that "price discovery" occurs all at once, and at the very same time. And all too often, investors "discover" they were lied to, as the emperor, in any fiat system, always has no clothes. [...]

The next time there is a market crash, and you try to withdraw what you thought was "absolutely" safe money, a back office person will get back to you saying, "Sorry - your money is now frozen. Bank runs have become illegal." This is precisely the regulation now proposed by the administration. [emphasis added]

The administration is proposing a rule that would allow money market accounts to be frozen, only in an "emergency", of course. That "emergency" will be when everyone wants their money at the same time.

The thread currently has over 300 comments, and again I'll give you the gist: buy gold, silver, guns (as one astute commenter said, "don't forget the bullets"); get yourself a garden and/or a safe place to live.

To me, much of this commentary makes sense: the dollar is becoming worthless, the banks are insolvent, and the government essentially bankrupt, dependent on selling debt to foreigners. But how long can we go on treading water?

My understanding of the Fed's strategy is to allow the TBTF banks to earn their way out of trouble, without having to mark their worthless assets to market. The burning question: can that be done?

Will there come a point in this game of musical chairs in which the music stops? I don't know: we've become so accustomed to living a life of peace and prosperity in the USA that most of us cannot even imagine anything else.

Is it possible to estimate the chances that everything goes to hell? Or would that be more like investing or economic forecasting, when the more people that predict something, the less likely it will happen? In other words, does the fact that few people - except nuts like me - think that the odds of social breakdown are substantially greater than zero mean that the odds in favor of it happening are actually quite good?

Elegance Up, Thuggishness Down

The Trends Journal, a publication of somewhat overheated but usually right prognosticator Gerald Celente, has a list of top trends for 2010. (Forelock tug: Eman.) Besides mundane things like "The Collapse of 2010" and "Terrorism 2010", there's this:

Depression Uplift

As times get tougher and money gets scarcer, one of the hottest new money-making, mood-changing, influence-shaping trends of the century will soon be born. We forecast that this will be “Elegance” in its many manifestations.

The trend will begin with fashion and spread through all the creative arts, as the need for beauty trumps the thrill of the thuggish. A strong, do-it-yourself aspect will make up for reduced discretionary income, as personal effort provides the means for affordable sophistication.....

The much-noted coarseness and vulgarity of popular culture over the past several decades could only have been made possible by wealth and the expectation that it will continue to increase. Even such a lowly example as the wearing of bluejeans by almost everyone, including white-haired grandmothers, represents an escape from wealth and responsibility and maturity. More recently, tattoos, formerly the province of convicts and bikers, have become common even on women. Public profanity, slutty dress, hostile haircuts, open drunkenness: all these things have been indulged in by some and tolerated by others because of the feeling that it didn't matter all that much. So long as the American economy kept cranking and everyone appeared to be more or less upwardly mobile, many people felt entitled to their indulgences in lower class behavior and thuggish appearances.

With the economy going into the tank, intolerance for these things ought to rise. Employers who can't take a chance on hiring the wrong person will look askance at tattoos. When unemployment and poverty mean that fewer people can affect any kind of elegance, looking like a bedraggled beatnik or peasant will lose its luster.

There's precedent for this too. The movies of the Depression era featured the likes of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, as elegant as could be, giving people some escape from their condition. In the bad old days of segregation and before welfare, openly thuggish behavior and demeanor on the part of blacks was almost non-existent; they couldn't afford to indulge in it.

It appears that the bad economy may bring a little upside with it.

Paul Ehrlich: Responsible for Falling Birth Rates?

Regular reader and commentator Miles wrote:

[O]ther than feminism getting women into the workforce** (and therefore not needing to marry men to leave home), the length of time it takes to get a career going these days (putting one well into their mid-twenties before they are fiscally ready to marry), and our insane child support/custodial laws making marriage such a precarious financial risk for men, I blame this man (and his ilk) more than ANYONE for our falling birthrates:

Paul Ehrlich: Doomer extraordinaire

(Note the resemblence to the current AGW'ers prognostications even though this list was compiled on a anti-peak oil blog):
----------------------------------
"The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population control is the only answer." -- Paul Ehrlich, in The Population Bomb (1968)

"I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." -- Paul Ehrlich, 1969

"In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish." -- Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day 1970

"Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity... in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion." -- Paul Ehrlich, 1976 Source

"Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make, ... The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years." -- Paul Ehrlich in an interview with Peter Collier in the April 1970 of the magazine Mademoiselle.

"By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth's population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people". -- Paul Ehrlich, 1969

"By 1980 the United States would see its life expectancy drop to 42 because of pesticides, and by 1999 its population would drop to 22.6 million." -- Paul Ehrlich, 1969 Source

Dennis, when did our birthrate precipitously drop? The 1970's. The 70's are when Ehrlich started appearing on Johnny Carson (and other televison programs). Ehrlich was on Carson 20 times. I remember being told by a fourth grade teacher that if we all didn't just have one child that we might be starving in the future. I think the left hyped environmental disaster to suppress the Western birthrate in the 70's with full knowledge of what the Immigration (D)eform act of 65' would slowly be doing as the next two decades rolled by.

My particular favorite of Ehrlich was how he warned us that sending any food aid to India in the 1970's was a waste of time because they were going to starve anyway and they'd never be able to feed themselves. India now actually exports food. Obesity is a bigger problem in the West than hunger, yet Ehrlich is probably still gainfully employed at Stanford. I wonder how many couples stopped at one child instead of having two because of this man?

Despite such a record of complete and probably destructive nonsense, Ehrlich is indeed still employed at Stanford, where he is Bing Professor of Population Studies (sic).

The Population Bomb was published in 1968, and I can recall it being assigned reading in both high school and college classes. The book's impact was undoubtedly huge, and set the tone for the doom-and-gloom laden 70s, which went on to feature such things as The Club of Rome's Limits to Growth, the oil embargo, and Jimmy Carter's malaise speech. It was at the forefront of the nascent environmentalist movement, becoming a chapter in its bible. However, to be responsible for falling birthrates, it would have had to make an impact beyond the 70s, because birthrates have been falling ever since. On the other hand, the average SWPL would probably still tell you that overpopulation is a huge problem - and it is a problem, but only in a few places - and with the advent of the AGW crowd, we still hear calls for limiting family size - for white people only, of course.