Gallery: Stormi Henley , Miss Teen USA 2009
Country: | United States of America |
State: | Tennessee |
Name: | Stormi Henley |
Home Town: | Crossville |
Age: | 18 (at year 2009) |
Title(s): | Miss Teen USA 2009 |
Competition(s): | Winner Miss Teen USA 2009 (July 2009) Winner Miss Tennessee Teen USA 2009 (October 2008) Winner Miss Cumberland County (August 2008) |
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Tea-bagging and Doing it Austrian Style
I promised to make this post concise and hold it up to my usual humorous style. I failed miserably on both counts. If you were hoping for my usual funny posts, here’s a funny picture to hold you over until tomorrow.
In his post “Are American’s stupid” Jamie Jefford accused anyone of not supporting the Teabaggers of not understanding economics. The Teabagging parties actually follow two thoughts of economics. One that the corporate organizers support, and one that their followers believe. It’s like how PETA gets models to get naked (something I’m in favor of) to protest the wearing of fur, but they have a crazy belief that having pets is like having slaves (it’s not).
What most of the followers believe they are supporting:
The Austrian School of Economics: This Economic thought (It cannot be called a theory as it has no mechanism for Falsifiability) holds that basically government should take a hands off approach to the economy and let market cycles go through wild booms and busts which would be more frequent, more intense and shorter.
Ignoring that the Austrian School is not a valid Economic theory, it has two major moral problems (In Economics a theory can be valid meaning it works but immoral meaning it leads to human suffering ie: Discrimination Economics and Slavery).
The sharper (although shorter) downturns inflict massive suffering to the people affected. Under this school of thought people seeking entry-level jobs are simply ignored and asked not to make too much of a fuss as they curl up on the street corner to die. Having the Government stand by and do nothing as a quarter of their citizens die of starvation is not morally acceptable or a reality as starving masses tend to revolt.
The other moral hazard the Austrian School faces is that nature arbores a vacuum. If the Government takes a completely hands off role in business, it leads to the rule of “Might makes Right” where the larger businesses stifle competition through violence against small businesses.
The Austrian School also has two inherent weaknesses, (besides not being a theory and all). First, having to deal with frequent downturns makes consumers and entrepreneurs jumpy. It stifles economic risk taking as people are less likely to gamble with their savings if it means a bad decision could mean death.
The hands off approach leads to wealth accumulating in the hands of the very few. If you are one of the lucky ones who has wealth under this system you will be reluctant to change anything. So innovation is stifled.
While proponents of the Austrian School claim that making the economic system more dynamic makes for more innovation, history has shown the opposite happens.
What the Corporate Organizers want:
Fascism, Corruption, Cronyism, Corporatism better known as Supply-Side economics. The idea is if money is given to the rich they will invest it and it will benefit everyone.
The problem with this approach is Corporations hold to the line, “Never innovate until your competition forces you too.”
By favoring large corporations over small businesses they have no incentive to innovate so they invest quickly run out of “Real” things to invest in and make false economic bubbles like the housing market in the 80s and the past 7 years.
Even the modified Supply-Side economic policies of the Clinton administration which tried to create real bubbles by favoring the more innovative companies, first the Personal Computer boom then the Internet boom, ran into the problem of companies have no incentive to invest in the underling science to fuel these booms. Without the science behind them there cannot be technological innovations.
They also want a regressive tax system, I’ve written about the problems of that here.
Some things I support the Tea-Baggers on.
With a grab bag of complaints the Tea-Baggers have there are bound to be something I agree with them on. Here are a few.
Bringing the word Tea-Bagging onto the airwaves. I crack up every time I hear a reporter say it.
TARP- They didn’t protest when Bush started it, but now that President Obama is handling it they are all against it. But no matter who is handling it, it is a shitty idea.
The idea was to save the banks so investors don’t lose more of their money. They could then lend out more money and get the credit system working again.
The problem was our credit system was lending out millions of dollars for every “real” dollar the banks had in reserve. I wrote about that here.
The amount of “real” money that would need to be used to offset the major banks losses of imaginary money simply doesn’t exist. The federal government would have been better off raising the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation)’s guarantee to a couple of million, protecting the depositors “real” money and letting the banks fail.
If they had done that “real” money would flow into the banks that were solvent and these small and mid-sized banks would take over for the larger ones. The stock market would have taken a bigger hit, but it had already been knocked down to half of its former value.
Things they are protesting that make no sense.
They seem to be protesting getting a tax-cut. 95% of people are poised to get a tax-cut under President Obama. This cut is aimed to make the tax system more progressive leading to shallower recessions as I explained here.
They seem to be complaining about Healthcare Reform, which has to be done one way or another. It can be done through an orderly transition, or we can do nothing and watch the costs spiral out of control until Healthcare goes through Demand Destruction killing millions and tanking the economy again. As I wrote here.
As far as the expanding Federal Deficit they seem to be protesting the cures for it. Investment in Education pays off with a roughly 10 to 1 increase in GDP. Investments in Science have a direct payoff 8 to 1 and continue to payoff for years in the future. Think of the Aerospace Industry that was spawned by Jet research in WWII, the Internet which was spawned by military investment in DARPAnet and the PC Industry which was spawned by NASA’s investment in Microchips for the Space Program.
President Obama has pledged $12 Billion towards education and promised to restore Investment in Science to 3% of GDP.
These are investments that will grow the GDP and the only way to cure the Deficit and start working on the national debt is to grow the GDP.
Without even getting into the crazier voices at the Tea-Bagging parties like the ones who shout out “Burn Books” I’ll stick by my claim that the Tea-baggers are stupid, for lack of a better term, for the total lack of Intellectual curiosity and the insistence to deny any and all facts that contradict their pre-conceived beliefs that they display.
In his post “Are American’s stupid” Jamie Jefford accused anyone of not supporting the Teabaggers of not understanding economics. The Teabagging parties actually follow two thoughts of economics. One that the corporate organizers support, and one that their followers believe. It’s like how PETA gets models to get naked (something I’m in favor of) to protest the wearing of fur, but they have a crazy belief that having pets is like having slaves (it’s not).
What most of the followers believe they are supporting:
The Austrian School of Economics: This Economic thought (It cannot be called a theory as it has no mechanism for Falsifiability) holds that basically government should take a hands off approach to the economy and let market cycles go through wild booms and busts which would be more frequent, more intense and shorter.
Ignoring that the Austrian School is not a valid Economic theory, it has two major moral problems (In Economics a theory can be valid meaning it works but immoral meaning it leads to human suffering ie: Discrimination Economics and Slavery).
The sharper (although shorter) downturns inflict massive suffering to the people affected. Under this school of thought people seeking entry-level jobs are simply ignored and asked not to make too much of a fuss as they curl up on the street corner to die. Having the Government stand by and do nothing as a quarter of their citizens die of starvation is not morally acceptable or a reality as starving masses tend to revolt.
The other moral hazard the Austrian School faces is that nature arbores a vacuum. If the Government takes a completely hands off role in business, it leads to the rule of “Might makes Right” where the larger businesses stifle competition through violence against small businesses.
The Austrian School also has two inherent weaknesses, (besides not being a theory and all). First, having to deal with frequent downturns makes consumers and entrepreneurs jumpy. It stifles economic risk taking as people are less likely to gamble with their savings if it means a bad decision could mean death.
The hands off approach leads to wealth accumulating in the hands of the very few. If you are one of the lucky ones who has wealth under this system you will be reluctant to change anything. So innovation is stifled.
While proponents of the Austrian School claim that making the economic system more dynamic makes for more innovation, history has shown the opposite happens.
What the Corporate Organizers want:
Fascism, Corruption, Cronyism, Corporatism better known as Supply-Side economics. The idea is if money is given to the rich they will invest it and it will benefit everyone.
The problem with this approach is Corporations hold to the line, “Never innovate until your competition forces you too.”
By favoring large corporations over small businesses they have no incentive to innovate so they invest quickly run out of “Real” things to invest in and make false economic bubbles like the housing market in the 80s and the past 7 years.
Even the modified Supply-Side economic policies of the Clinton administration which tried to create real bubbles by favoring the more innovative companies, first the Personal Computer boom then the Internet boom, ran into the problem of companies have no incentive to invest in the underling science to fuel these booms. Without the science behind them there cannot be technological innovations.
They also want a regressive tax system, I’ve written about the problems of that here.
Some things I support the Tea-Baggers on.
With a grab bag of complaints the Tea-Baggers have there are bound to be something I agree with them on. Here are a few.
Bringing the word Tea-Bagging onto the airwaves. I crack up every time I hear a reporter say it.
TARP- They didn’t protest when Bush started it, but now that President Obama is handling it they are all against it. But no matter who is handling it, it is a shitty idea.
The idea was to save the banks so investors don’t lose more of their money. They could then lend out more money and get the credit system working again.
The problem was our credit system was lending out millions of dollars for every “real” dollar the banks had in reserve. I wrote about that here.
The amount of “real” money that would need to be used to offset the major banks losses of imaginary money simply doesn’t exist. The federal government would have been better off raising the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation)’s guarantee to a couple of million, protecting the depositors “real” money and letting the banks fail.
If they had done that “real” money would flow into the banks that were solvent and these small and mid-sized banks would take over for the larger ones. The stock market would have taken a bigger hit, but it had already been knocked down to half of its former value.
Things they are protesting that make no sense.
They seem to be protesting getting a tax-cut. 95% of people are poised to get a tax-cut under President Obama. This cut is aimed to make the tax system more progressive leading to shallower recessions as I explained here.
They seem to be complaining about Healthcare Reform, which has to be done one way or another. It can be done through an orderly transition, or we can do nothing and watch the costs spiral out of control until Healthcare goes through Demand Destruction killing millions and tanking the economy again. As I wrote here.
As far as the expanding Federal Deficit they seem to be protesting the cures for it. Investment in Education pays off with a roughly 10 to 1 increase in GDP. Investments in Science have a direct payoff 8 to 1 and continue to payoff for years in the future. Think of the Aerospace Industry that was spawned by Jet research in WWII, the Internet which was spawned by military investment in DARPAnet and the PC Industry which was spawned by NASA’s investment in Microchips for the Space Program.
President Obama has pledged $12 Billion towards education and promised to restore Investment in Science to 3% of GDP.
These are investments that will grow the GDP and the only way to cure the Deficit and start working on the national debt is to grow the GDP.
Without even getting into the crazier voices at the Tea-Bagging parties like the ones who shout out “Burn Books” I’ll stick by my claim that the Tea-baggers are stupid, for lack of a better term, for the total lack of Intellectual curiosity and the insistence to deny any and all facts that contradict their pre-conceived beliefs that they display.
Clarifying Stupid
This is a clarification of a few things that Jamie Jeffords took offense to, and mentioned in his post “Are Americans Stupid?” If this is the first time reading one of his posts, please ignore the spelling and grammar mistakes, they are not typical of his normal postings. I have a feeling he responded quickly and didn’t do his normal proof checking.
In my last post “Against Stupidity, The Gods Themselves Struggle in Vain” I talked about groups that I labeled “Stupid”.
I had thought I made myself clear when wrote that, I considered these groups stupid not “in the sense of diminished mental capacity, but that they are stupid by choice.”
Reading over the responses, and my actual statement I can see I need to clarify that a bit.
I am using the term “Stupid”, for lack of a better term, for the total lack of Intellectual curiosity and the insistence to deny any and all facts that contradict their pre-conceived beliefs that these groups display.
I’d also like to clarify that even though in that post the groups I identified The Birthers, The Tea-Baggers, Intelligent Design Supporters, and Climate Change Deniers are all part of the Conservative Movement, I’ve done the same to groups that are Liberal or so Bat-Shit crazy that no one will claim them.
Anti-Vax Movement “Shut Up and Put your Mouth to Better Use”
PETA (A lot of Liberals support them without looking at what they truly stand for) “Shut Up and Put your Mouth to Better Use”
Moon Hoaxers “Celebrating 40 years of Moon Landing Conspiracies.”
Global Warming Doomsayers (People that believe Global Warming will cause the planet’s temperature to rise 18 degrees in the next century ending all life on earth.) “3 of the Greatest Imaginary Threats to our Nation”
Michael Moore “A response to Michael Moore from a former Oil Man”
Carbon Credits “Fidelity Credits” I think the satire in the piece shows what I think of the Carbon Credit Idea.
Smoke NAZIS “6 Things the Smokers and Non-Smokers can Agree on.”
I do believe I’ve been fairly even handed in my making fun of the stupid from all areas of the political spectrum.
To clarify I couple of things that Jamie said about my post “Frankly, you have to have zero understanding of economics…”
I have a BA in Economics from the Nations largest University; I’ll put my Universities Accreditation up against any college or University you care to name.
As far as me being anti-religious; it is true I don’t belong to an organized religion, I’m a Unitarian, but I didn’t attack the religious beliefs of anyone.
I’m against the Creationist’s trying to impose their view on the majority who doesn’t share that view, and their attempt to undermine valid scientific research but that is not an attack on their religion.
With those clarifications out of the way I will post a lengthier posts on how 3 of the groups I mentioned are ignoring reality.
I don’t think I need to show that with the Birthers, even though they make up 30% of the Republican Party.
In my last post “Against Stupidity, The Gods Themselves Struggle in Vain” I talked about groups that I labeled “Stupid”.
I had thought I made myself clear when wrote that, I considered these groups stupid not “in the sense of diminished mental capacity, but that they are stupid by choice.”
Reading over the responses, and my actual statement I can see I need to clarify that a bit.
I am using the term “Stupid”, for lack of a better term, for the total lack of Intellectual curiosity and the insistence to deny any and all facts that contradict their pre-conceived beliefs that these groups display.
I’d also like to clarify that even though in that post the groups I identified The Birthers, The Tea-Baggers, Intelligent Design Supporters, and Climate Change Deniers are all part of the Conservative Movement, I’ve done the same to groups that are Liberal or so Bat-Shit crazy that no one will claim them.
Anti-Vax Movement “Shut Up and Put your Mouth to Better Use”
PETA (A lot of Liberals support them without looking at what they truly stand for) “Shut Up and Put your Mouth to Better Use”
Moon Hoaxers “Celebrating 40 years of Moon Landing Conspiracies.”
Global Warming Doomsayers (People that believe Global Warming will cause the planet’s temperature to rise 18 degrees in the next century ending all life on earth.) “3 of the Greatest Imaginary Threats to our Nation”
Michael Moore “A response to Michael Moore from a former Oil Man”
Carbon Credits “Fidelity Credits” I think the satire in the piece shows what I think of the Carbon Credit Idea.
Smoke NAZIS “6 Things the Smokers and Non-Smokers can Agree on.”
I do believe I’ve been fairly even handed in my making fun of the stupid from all areas of the political spectrum.
To clarify I couple of things that Jamie said about my post “Frankly, you have to have zero understanding of economics…”
I have a BA in Economics from the Nations largest University; I’ll put my Universities Accreditation up against any college or University you care to name.
As far as me being anti-religious; it is true I don’t belong to an organized religion, I’m a Unitarian, but I didn’t attack the religious beliefs of anyone.
I’m against the Creationist’s trying to impose their view on the majority who doesn’t share that view, and their attempt to undermine valid scientific research but that is not an attack on their religion.
With those clarifications out of the way I will post a lengthier posts on how 3 of the groups I mentioned are ignoring reality.
I don’t think I need to show that with the Birthers, even though they make up 30% of the Republican Party.
Megan Clementi Gallery, Miss Florida USA 2010
Country: | United State of America |
State: | Florida |
Name: | Megan Clementi |
Home Town: | Orlando |
Age: | 25 (at year 2009) |
Height: | 5'7" |
Title(s): | Miss Florida USA 2010 |
Competition(s): | * Winner, Miss Florida USA 2010 * 3RU, Miss Florida USA 2009 * Top 10, Miss Florida 2007 (Miss America Pageant) * 1RU, Miss Florida 2006 (Miss America Pageant) * Top 10, Miss Florida 2005 (Miss America Pageant) * Miss USA 2010 (TBA) |
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Against Stupidity The Gods Themselves Struggle in Vain
I was reminded of the above Freidrich von Schiller quote from 18th century when I was blog walking and read an attack on Bill Maher on Eye of Polyphemus.
Eye of Polyphemus is one of the few conservative blogs I can read. The author Jamie Jeffords does know how to use the shift key instead of writing in all caps unlike most of the other conservative sites I’ve visited and he does actually try to make sense out of the Republican talking points. But there is only so far you can polish a turd.
Plus he puts lots of pictures of scantily clad starlets on his blog.
The post was about if the United States is a stupid country, so I responded with a few examples of stupid political movements that highlight the stupid.
1) Birthers.
People who don’t believe that President Obama was born. These people make up nearly a third of the Republicans and they are bat-shit crazy. In an earlier post I compared them to both the Moon Hoax people and the South Park Underwear Gnomes.
Basically they have a lot in common with the Moon Hoax people in that they will ignore any and all evidence presented to them.
2) Tea-Baggers
The Fox News sponsored Tea-Bagging Movement is a great place for nut-jobs to meet.
The premise behind the Tea-Bagging movement is they are protesting the fact that President Obama is shifting the $900 Billion that the Republicans had been giving out to corporations in no-bid contracts for non-existent services, into things like job programs and healthcare.
The idea seems to be that government should only rob the poor to help the wealthy, not help citizens for the common good.
Naturally when you get a group of people together to support such a wacky idea you are going to attract the super crazies, like the Neo-Nazis who look at these events as recruiting grounds and the people who want to burn books because they contain liberal things like facts.
3) Intelligent Design Supporters.
These are people that think schools should throw out hundreds of years of logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence in favor of a scientific theory that relies on “Because I say so.” As its major point.
Confronted with overwhelming observable evidence of evolution isn’t a problem for these people they simply make up a different enemy, “Darwinists”.
They claim only Darwinists are allowed to teach in Universities, which is odd considering no Biology Professor that I’ve ever met has called themselves a “Darwinist”. One would think if Universities only hire “Darwinists” that you could find a “Darwinist” University Professor.
Now, if you want to claim that Universities hire science Professors that teach theories based on hundreds of years of logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence like, gravity, entropy, and evolution then they have a point as that is what science is.
4) Climate Change Deniers
These are people that think just because the world burns enough oil every day that if it were put into barrels and they were laid end to end they would circle the globe 2 and half times, it can’t have any impact on the environment.
They simply ignore the observable facts about climate change.
A. The troposphere, the lowest layer of the atmosphere is getting warmer, while the Stratosphere, the atmospheric layer above it is getting colder.
This is because carbon dioxide in the troposphere traps the heat and doesn’t allow it to rise into the stratosphere and then be dissipated into space.
B. The temperature is rising at the poles.
As air warms at the equator it spreads out across the planet, as it does this the troposphere loses heat to the stratosphere making the temperature at the poles much cooler. (This is a gross simplification of the process but it illustrates the concept). Carbon Dioxide traps this heat so it transfers more efficiently to the poles.
On the planet and Moon in the solar system that have a runaway greenhouse effect, Venus and Titan there is little change in temperature from the equator to the poles. This is the tell-tale sign of the greenhouse effect.
Now as to the effects that Global Warming will bring to the planet there is a lot of room for debate. In fact I’ve written a post on it. “3 of the greatest imaginary threats to our Nation.”
At the time I wrote that the data showing that the poles are warming up faster than predicted was classified for National Security under the Bush Administration so I will raise my prediction to a 4-degree change over the next 100 years.
The fact that climate change is happening is impossible to deny.
It’s pretty clear what these groups all have in common, the ability to deny overwhelming evidence that is right in front of their face and claim any evidence is part of a liberal conspiracy, or as Stephen Colbert put it, “Part of the liberal bias of reality”.
The worst part of the stupidity of these groups is not that they are stupid in the sense of diminished mental capacity, but that they are stupid by choice. And since they are stupid by choice they feel that everyone around them should make the same choice and embrace the stupid.
The weird thing is they are against the “Intellectual elite” which should mean they would think being called the opposite “Stupid” is a compliment, but they get mad at being called that.
Sofia Rudieva Gallery, Miss Russia 2009
Name: | Sofia Andreevna Rudieva |
Birthdate: | November 15, 1990 (1990-11-15) (age 18 at year 2009) |
Birth location: | Saint Petersburg, Soviet Union |
Height: | 5 ft 10 in (1.78 m) |
Eye color: | Grey |
Hair color: | Black |
Title(s): | Miss Russia 2009 |
Competition(s): | Miss Russia 2009 (Winner) Miss Universe 2009 (Contestants) |
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