You’ve probably heard about the fundamentalist Mormon cult that was raided by Texas Rangers. The whole story stank from the beginning, and the authorities wildly overreacted. The raid was apparently based on little more than an anonymous phone call, and it resulted in over 400 children being forcibly taken from their parents and put in state custody. If you’ve ever wondered why conservatives aren’t impressed with impassioned rhetoric from the left about human rights and constitutional protections, this story might help. All those rights invented out of thin air granted us by liberal philosopher-king judges always mysteriously evaporate when the iron fist of the state comes down on people that the Left doesn’t like. If police had even thought about raiding a far-left cult, then the mainstream press would have screamed about it for days. But not when the victims of capricious state brutality are on the extreme Right.

It could have gone worse, though. At least Janet Reno didn’t take charge and burn the children alive while trying to save them. These FLDS children were merely kidnapped at gunpoint on the flimsiest of evidence while their parents were apparently granted no opportunity to be heard—and certainly no presumption of innocence. Where conservative kooks are involved, the rule seems to be kidnap the children first, then let the parents try to establish their innocence.

I’m quite aware of how bizarre and controlling life probably was inside the FLDS compound. Probably more so than most. But that icky feeling is completely irrelevant to the deep legal point. Even creepy fundamentalist Mormons are entitled to a presumption of innocence and a right to be heard—before their children are stolen from them.

It’s also quite bizarre that so much of this government overreach is premised on alleged polygamy and teenagers getting pregnant. Since when did anyone get upset about teenaged girls becoming pregnant? If a justification for a baby-snatching raid by the Texas Rangers, then they’ve got quite a lot of work ahead of them. I’m sure that they can find entire inner-city zip codes packed full of pregnant teenagers—and most of them won’t know or care who the fathers of their children are. Isn’t that worse than whatever happened in the FLDS compound? I mean, at least the FLDS girls were married to the fathers of their children! Let’s get a little perspective here.

And how did polygamy suddenly become a crime so serious that its mere allegation dispels all due process rights that the accused would normally enjoy? If the judges in the more liberal states continue to trample democracy on the subject of marriage, then in a few decades they’ll be finding a constitutional right to marry barnyard animals. Yes, polygamy is still illegal, and yes, I would prefer that it stay that way. But where are our priorities here?

Recently the story got even better. The pretext for the raid was an anonymous plea for help from a girl trapped inside the compound. But it was a hoax by Rozita Swinton, a black Colorado woman with a history of doing this sort of thing. And the buzz around the conservative blogosphere—still not fully confirmed—is that she is a pledged delegate for Barack Obama.

This summer in Denver, the Democrat Party is going to burn, baby, burn.

UPDATE: After cooling off for a few minutes, let me state the obvious: I’m not an expert on this case, and the authorities probably know some stuff that they aren’t disclosing that could change our understanding of the situation.

But still, I see no justification for abducting the children at gunpoint, except as a strongarm tactic force the adults to incriminate themselves and each other.  Let’s assume for argument that everything said against the FLDS compound is true:  Teenage girls were regularly forced to marry creepy older men and were then effectively raped.  By what twisted logic would that justify taking the little children from their mothers?  If we are to believe that the mothers are the victims, then why harm them further by stealing their children?  Abduct the mothers!  That might at least make a little sense.  But it seems like wild abuse of power to steal the children when no one has alleged that the children are being mistreated in any way.

An Italian woman artist who was hitch-hiking to the Middle East dressed as a bride to promote world peace has been found murdered in Turkey.

The naked body of Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo, 33, known as Pippa Bacca, was found in bushes near the northern city of Gebze on Friday.

She had said she wanted to show that she could put her trust in the kindness of local people.

I guess that secular utopian religions have their martyrs, too.  This story reminds me of the Children’s Crusades.  This new victim even followed a similar route.

[A] gender gap has reopened: if girls were once excluded because they somehow weren’t good enough, they now are rejected because they’re too good. Or at least they are so good, compared with boys, that admissions committees at some private colleges have problems managing a balanced freshman class. Roughly 58% of undergraduates nationally are female, and the girl-boy ratio will probably tip past 60-40 in a few years. The divide is even worse for black males, who are outnumbered on campus by black females 2 to 1.

While educators debate whether there is a “boy crisis” that warrants a wholesale change in how to teach, colleges are quietly stripping the pastels from brochures and launching Xbox tournaments to try to close the gap in the quality and quantity of boys applying. “It’s a gross generalization that slacker boys get in over high-performing girls,” says Jennifer Delahunty, dean of admissions at Kenyon College, “but developmentally, girls bring more to the table than boys, and the disparity has gotten greater in recent years.”

Ms. Delahunty has special experience with this issue. After working on admissions committees that favored boys over girls for the sake of class balance, she experienced a moment of moral clarity after her own daughter was wait-listed. So she wrote an article about it for the New York Times in which she apologized for this unfair treatment of girls. The article generated many responses from a wide range of viewpoints. She heard from misogynists and, uh, what’s the opposite of a misogynist?

“It pissed off the feminists and the misogynists–I got both sides of the spectrum,” she told me. “The misogynists said women already have too many advantages. And the feminists said, How dare you not treat women like men.” But what most amazed her was the reaction of young women: by and large, they assumed this is just how things work. “Why aren’t they marching in the streets? That’s the part that slays me,” Delahunty says. “It isn’t fair, and young women should be saying something about it not being fair.”

And this is apparently the attitude of many college administrators: Sex discrimination against girls is a profound tragedy. Everybody knows that sex discrimination should only disadvantage boys.

Maybe they can find some solace in the thought that they aren’t really trying to help out boys. God, no! They’re really just trying to indirectly help the girls. As an admissions director for the College of William and Mary told US News & World Report: “even women who enroll … expect to see men on campus. It’s not the College of Mary and Mary; it’s the College of William and Mary.”

Memo to higher education: The boys know that you hate them. You haven’t exactly kept it a secret, even before the Duke rape case. And since you hate them so much, they have done both you and themselves a favor by not attending your schools.

(For readers who are not familiar with the problems that I’m describing with an admittedly broad brush, Glenn Sacks has a recent article that describes them more specifically.)

Today, the Japanese government institutes its compulsory “flab checks” for all workers over the age of 40.

To stem Japan’s “soaring obesity,” the health ministry has mandated that all waistlines among its 56 million workers over age 40 be below “regulation size” of 33.5 inches (for men). Any company failing to bring its employees’ weight under control — as well as the weights of their family members — will be fined up to 10% of its earnings by the government.

The Guardian elaborates:

Health authorities hope the measures will arrest the rise in obesity among middle-aged men and slow soaring medical costs. All employees over 40 - about 56 million people - will be required to take the test to determine whether they are at risk of metabolic syndrome - symptoms associated with being overweight that, if left unchecked, increase the risk of strokes, heart disease and diabetes. Men with girths of more than 85cm (33.5in) will be given exercise and diet plans and, in urgent cases, told to see a doctor.

A 33 inch waist for men over 40? I think I might have had a 33 inch waist back when I was 13 or so. The stories don’t mention if sumo wrestlers get an exemption. Maybe this will fizzle when the Japanese realize that this law will effectively shut them out of the heavyweight classes of Judo and other wrestling-type sports in the Olympics and elsewhere.

Barking Moonbat Early Warning System comments:

Expect this attitude to spread worldwide within a short time. Fat people and smokers are the two groups people are actually encouraged to be prejudiced against. And white guys, but that doesn’t count.

UK Bus Driver Kicks Passengers Off Bus…So He Can Pray!

The white Islamic convert rolled out his prayer mat in the aisle and knelt on the floor facing Mecca.

Passengers watched in amazement as he held out his palms towards the sky, bowed his head and began to chant.

“Eventually everyone started complaining. One woman said, ‘What the hell are you doing? I’m going to be late for work’.”

After a few minutes the driver calmly got up, opened the doors and asked everyone back on board.

But when the already unnerved passengers saw the driver’s rucksack on the floor, they refused to get back on.

“One chap said, ‘I’m not getting on there now’”.

“An elderly couple also looked really confused and worried.

“After seeing that no-one wanted to get on he drove off and we all waited until the next bus came about 20 minutes later. I was left totally stunned. It made me not want to get on a bus again.”

Perhaps they were being paranoid. But as one person said in the comment section:

“you cant fault anyone for not wanting to get back on after the rucksack came out - the London bombings are still very much with the general public and it is a legitimate concern that we all have to live with. The world IS a much different place post 9-11/7-7…”

Foreclosure on Las Vegas Casino to Begin

The developer of the Cosmopolitan Resort Casino, a $3.9 billion condo-hotel complex on the Las Vegas Strip, has been notified by its primary lender that it will begin foreclosure proceedings.

The move by Deutsche Bank AG, the lender on a $760 million senior loan, comes after the developer, Ian Bruce Eichner, wasn’t able to finalize a deal for new financing amid the credit crunch. Mr. Eichner in late February cut a tentative deal with two of his other lenders, Global Hyatt Corp. and New York hedge fund Marathon Asset Management, for a possible rescue of the twin-tower project.

I’m not one for doomsday scenarios.  The coming crash will not be the end of the world as we know it.  But it will be very unpleasant in the short term, and the aftereffects will linger if the Fed continues to inflate away the dollar to try to prop up Wall Street.

As I explained earlier, the subprime mess basically means that our economy has been growing for the past several years based on lending that was based on bank assets, which included a great many mortgages, and those mortgages were based on home valuations that were too high because the system fell into moral hazard.  Nobody can wave a wand and restore the value of those lost assets.  Not Bernanke, not Bush, not George Soros or Warren Buffet.  Not even Congress giving us back tiny scraps of our own money and expecting gratitude for it.  Nobody.

The banks must cut their lending to levels that are proportionate to the real value of their assets.  And that means that a whole lot of businesses will be denied loans, and other businesses will pay much more for credit than they did before.  Basically they’ll be unwinding the loans that they never would have made had they known what their assets were really worth.  Without those loans, businesses will go under, and the liberal press will give us the usual “Women and Minorities Hit Hardest” stories.

But then it will recover.  Unless the government gets too deeply involved and really makes a mess of things, the economy will shrink to the point at which it would have grown had the assets not been overvalued, and then it’ll start growing again.  Until then, I wouldn’t invest much in stock.  Heck, I’m even worried about investing in dollars, since they’re declining in value, too.  But you gotta own something, so pick your assets wisely.

Scientists and environmentalists have attacked a global campaign to ban plastic bags which they say is based on flawed science and exaggerated claims.

The widely stated accusation that the bags kill 100,000 animals and a million seabirds every year are false, experts have told The Times. They pose only a minimal threat to most marine species, including seals, whales, dolphins and seabirds.

Gordon Brown announced last month that he would force supermarkets to charge for the bags, saying that they were “one of the most visible symbols of environmental waste”. Retailers and some pressure groups, including the Campaign to Protect Rural England, threw their support behind him.

But scientists, politicians and marine experts attacked the Government for joining a “bandwagon” based on poor science.

But how could this be? Only a few years ago “everyone” “knew” that plastic bags were a scourge on the planet. Now the fearmongers say, “Never mind.”

Could this have some connection to global warming? Is it conceivable that the current eco-scares will be debunked in ten years, just as the eco-scares of 10 years ago are being debunked today (and those of 20 years ago were debunked 10 years ago, and so forth)?

No, don’t believe it. Sure, the eco-scaremongers have a long track record of drumming up fake scientific consensus that is later demonstrated to be false. Sure, they’ve done it with nuclear power, alar on apples, radon in basements, the spotted owl, the vanishing rain forests, plastic bags, and many others that I could find with just a few minutes of Googling.  But surely this time the eco-fanatics are right, and we should immediately make ourselves miserable with the knowledge that doing so will somehow make the future better for someone else.  Maybe.  Or maybe not.

(And isn’t it strange how selectively those people become concerned about future generations?  I mean, these are the same people who love abortion and hate procreation.  In fact, they hate humanity generally.  And yet they always claim to be deeply concerned about future generations.)

I understand how youngsters can be fooled by these hoaxes. They just haven’t lived long enough to see the pattern. But I don’t understand the grown-ups. Even someone who pays minimal attention to the news ought to notice that yesterday’s panics quietly go away, while the new panics are reported with breathless excitement.

The internet may slow these hoaxes down, though. When I was a kid, the only information most people had was whatever the mainstream media fed them. Now the truth is out there, just a few clicks away. Continuing ignorance becomes steadily more difficult to justify.

• Madison, Wisconsin just finished its second snowiest December on record.
• Temperatures in Siberia are expected to reach -67 degrees Fahrenheit, which is too cold even for that region’s hardy residents.
• And Baghdad saw snow for the first time in decades.

I’m sure that your heart goes out to the many soon-to-be-unemployed doom-mongers.  But don’t worry.  They’re already working hard to find something new for us to be scared of.

Intrepid Seattle reporter Tom Paulson informs us that we’re running out of dirt:

The planet is getting skinned.

While many worry about the potential consequences of atmospheric warming, a few experts are trying to call attention to another global crisis quietly taking place under our feet.

Call it the thin brown line. Dirt. On average, the planet is covered with little more than 3 feet of topsoil — the shallow skin of nutrient-rich matter that sustains most of our food and appears to play a critical role in supporting life on Earth.

“We’re losing more and more of it every day,” said David Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington. “The estimate is that we are now losing about 1 percent of our topsoil every year to erosion, most of this caused by agriculture.”

. . .

Montgomery has written a popular book, “Dirt,” to call public attention to what he believes is a neglected environmental catastrophe. A geomorphologist who studies how landscapes form, Montgomery describes modern agricultural practices as “soil mining” to emphasize that we are rapidly outstripping the Earth’s natural rate of restoring topsoil.

Try not to laugh, please.  Mr. Paulson is only a journalist, and we therefore can’t expect him to know much of anything, nor can we expect him to ask any basic questions that might interfere with his clean narrative.

I don’t want to hear any snide comments about how farmers have closely studied the science of soil quality and erosion for centuries, if not millennia.  And you smarty-pants scientists who have spent your lives studying the specific chemicals that give soil its fertility, you genetic engineers who creates new varieties of plants that do an even better job with maintaining soil fertility, you civil engineers who build manmade lakes and design flood plains.  You can all just shut up with your facts and figures, because Tom Paulson is a journalist, and his almost completely uninformed opinion on the subject outweighs the views of a thousand actual scientists and engineers.

In a few months, topsoil depletion will be a full-fledged eco-disaster every bit as real and terrifying as global warming.  And I really mean that.

HT: Clayton Cramer, Ace of Spades

Yesterday the market was at a turning point.  It could have rallied, maybe, if the latest economic statistics had been better, or if Fed chairman Bernanke had said something different in his speech today.  But it didn’t work out that way.  Instead we got a crash that was almost as big on the Dow as the Shanghai Surprise of Feb 28 of last year.

I got out of some of my bearish positions yesterday, so today’s crash wasn’t nearly as much fun for me as it might have been.  And were I a less experienced trader I would have been torturing myself all day or all week over the money that I might have made.  But after doing this for a year and a half, I’m better at accepting that many of the market’s movements shouldn’t be played, because from the perspective of the day before that movement wasn’t sufficiently likely.

It’s like playing craps.  Some of the bets on the table offer low payoffs but good odds, and those are usually the best bets.  But most craps tables also have higher paying bets with lower odds.  The human brain naturally overperceives the high payoffs and underperceives the low odds, so those bets are more tempting to suckers.

But every so often a sucker wins.  He places a bet that wasn’t a good idea, but then he gets lucky and wins.  And it’s silly to wish that you could have been that sucker, placing a foolish bet and getting lucky.  A foolish bet is still a foolish bet, even though suckers sometimes win them.  In fact it’s those occasional wins on bad bets that keep the money rolling into Las Vegas.  That’s why they keep building all those hotels.  The emotional impact of seeing someone win overwhelms the logical perception of a bad bet.  Most people would rather be lucky than right, and in the long run, they always lose.

Yesterday the Dow and SPX were giving reversal candlestick patterns, and were sitting at support.  And we had major news events the next day.  That was no time to be placing big bearish bets.  Somebody else bought my puts when I closed out, and I’m sure that they had a great day today.  But even though they won, they still placed a lousy bet.
The indices still have support levels to watch out for, but it’s complicated because they’re different levels.  With the Dow, the number to watch is 12,000, which is where it bottomed out in March of last year.

The SPX doesn’t have as clear a floor.  1325 was the end of a bull market back in May 2006, so maybe that will be a floor, or maybe 1275 or 1225.

The RUT’s nearest floor is ten points down at 760, which was the bottom of the crash in May and June of 2006.

The Nasdaq 100 index (NDX) is just touching a major support level at 1850, which was the turning point for two highs and a low in the past two years.

So the larger market looks like it’s going to fragment even further, which makes me think of going more into individual companies.  In the past when the market has been more unified, individual companies have been dangerous plays because the motion of a single stock was easily overpowered by the motion of the larger market.  But if the indexes start moving in different directions, then maybe the technical characteristics of a single stock will play a larger role in its movement.

Disclaimer: Do not invest money in the stock market.  Keep it in your mattress, where it will shrink away steadily at the inflation rate, which was 4% last year, and will likely be much higher this year.  If you decide to put real money into the market, then big mean men (hopefully including myself) will take your money without any trace of regret.

We started with a lower open, rallied up for just a few minutes, then crashed down until about 10:50 EST.  Some sort of economic report came out better than expected, and this set the buyers in motion.  Dammit.  The market rallied up up up until about 2:45 EST, then crashed back down close to where it opened.  Some commentators have speculated that the last-minute selloff was connected to tomorrow morning’s announcement of new housing starts.  The buyers are eager to start putting cash back into the market, but they don’t want to risk getting blindsided by a disastrous report that triggers another round of panic selling.

The indices weren’t all the same, of course.  The rallies on the Dow and the SPX stopped at the natural resistance level of half of yesterday’s big black candles, but the RUT rallied even above yesterday’s high.  This made those of us holding puts on the RUT somewhat nervous—not just because of the adverse move, but because it breaks the bearish pattern.  Monday made the RUT look like it had a definite direction.  Today cast doubt on that.

And even though today’s Dow and SPX had lower highs and lower lows than yesterday, the close was unnerving.  The Dow showed a near-perfect doji, with the center point very close to long-term support at 12,500.  The SPX was more of a spinning top, but that candle’s body also ended up right at the long-term support.  I don’t usually pay too much attention to candlestick patterns, but those two really slapped me in the face.  They don’t indicate a high likelihood that the indices will bounce at those levels and rally higher, but they certainly call the short-term downtrend into question.

The RUT was even more troubling with its higher high and lower low for the day.  690 is starting to emerge as a support level.  But what convinced me to leave the RUT alone for now was the divergence forming between the price movement and the MACD movement.  This isn’t happening on the Dow or the SPX, but the RUT is showing a definite bullish divergence.  Maybe tomorrow will crash and break that pattern. But for now, I’m not willing to risk money in the indices when all I’m seeing is a doji at support, a spinning top at support, and a bullish divergence.  Let’s see how the housing starts look tomorrow.

I’m not sure how much good it will do him. Last I checked, liability for willful and malicious torts is not dischargeable in bankruptcy 11 USC 532(a)(6). And Nifong’s conduct in the Duke Rape Case was about as malicious as I can imagine.

But even assuming that Nifong could put together some argument that his actions were merely negligent, he doesn’t have the money to mount a defense and make that argument. His bankruptcy schedules show a house worth $235,000 but secured debt over $302,000, from which I infer that his mortgage is more than the value of his house, so he doesn’t have any equity to borrow against to pay his lawyers. Probably his bankruptcy lawyer has some angle that I’m not seeing, but Nifong declaring bankruptcy mystifies me.

Microsoft is developing Big Brother-style software capable of remotely monitoring a worker’s productivity, physical wellbeing and competence.

The Times has seen a patent application filed by the company for a computer system that links workers to their computers via wireless sensors that measure their metabolism. The system would allow managers to monitor employees’ performance by measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial expression and blood pressure.

Thus begins the predictable drama that surrounds every new technology.  Alternating groups tell us that it will either solve all our problems or destroy life as we know it.  Right now we’re on the pessimistic side with this particular technology:

The Information Commissioner, civil liberties groups and privacy lawyers strongly criticised the potential of the system for “taking the idea of monitoring people at work to a new level”. Hugh Tomlinson, QC, an expert on data protection law at Matrix Chambers, told The Times: “This system involves intrusion into every single aspect of the lives of the employees. It raises very serious privacy issues.”

I seriously doubt that this technology would accomplish much in most workplaces.  Managers can already snoop on their workers in various ways, such as internet usage or video cameras.  The problem with worker supervision isn’t in the technology, but in the labor required to interpret the results.

This technology is more mature than many people realize.  It has already been used extensively in the armed forces, and this article suggests that some pilots, firefighters, and astronauts are already using them.

And as those uses suggest, the real power of these implanted body-monitoring systems is to instantly communicate when your body is in trouble, whether that trouble involves sleepiness, low oxygen, irregular heartbeat, or just about anything else.  If the technology becomes cheap enough, then the elderly could start signing up in droves.  An abstract fear of Big Brother will quickly lose out to the opportunity to get immediate help with much more real and reasonable fears of stroke, heart attack, etc.

It is said that for centuries the Japanese used this system of recording prices, especially in their rice markets.  Supposedly they noticed various configurations of candlesticks as correlating with subsequent price movements.  As you might expect with the Japanese, they gave these patterns very fanciful names, some of which the Americans have translated from Japanese, and some of which they simply adopted the Japanese word directly.

Much like any other technical indicator, candlestick patterns have limited predictive power.  They are not nearly as powerful as trend, support, and resistance.  But they do have their uses as part of an overall trading plan.
A doji is a candle where the open and close are right on top of each other, especially where the wicks above and below are roughly equal in size.  It looks like a plus sign.  Investopedia describes it as a neutral signal, but Investools describing it more as a harbinger of change, especially when it occurs at support or resistance.  It means that the bulls and bear fought to a standstill, which suggests that power is shifting away from whichever side has been winning recently.  Today’s Dow (INDU) made a near-perfect doji.
A spinning top is similar to a doji, in that the open and close are close to each other with wicks above and below.  But the spinning top has more distance between the open and close, so that it has a very short body rather than a line.  It looks like a top.  The body’s color is unimportant.

The message from a spinning top is similar to the doji, but less urgent.  The strength difference between buyers and sellers is decreasing, so its direction could be changing soon.  Today’s S&P 500 (SPX) made a spinning top.

A divergence isn’t a candlestick pattern at all.  It’s a much larger pattern that forms between price movement and the movement of a technical indicator such as the MACD.  Normally the price and the technical indicator move in roughly the same direction.  But in a divergence they start moving in opposite directions.  Investopedia has a nice explanation and sample chart.

A divergence indicates that the market’s real momentum is moving in the direction of the technical indicator, even though the price is still moving in the opposite direction.  So if the price is moving down but the technical indicator is moving up, we call it a bullish divergence and expect the market to start moving upwards.  Today we had a bullish divergence between the RUT and its MACD (8,17,9).

When I started this blog two years ago, I was passionate about improving the quality of my writing. As part of that project, I had the idea of doing a series of “How To Write” posts, working from the ground up. In short order I discovered two unalterable truths: 1) comprehensively explaining an entire subject is an awful lot of work, and 2) other people have already done that work, and done it better than I could. So I ended up writing only about the particular language topics that interested me on any given day.

Now I suspect that it’ll be the same with technical trading. Investopedia.com has a wealth of well-organized information on the stock market, including technical trading. The trouble with writing a comprehensive curriculum is knowing where to start, and what sorts of questions students are likely to ask. Some people aren’t clear on what stocks are exactly, and why they would fluctuate in value. Others need the basics of interpreting a chart, such as the difference between a bar chart and a candlestick chart.

The first step to learning technical trading is to start doing it—but not with real money. If you have a few thousand dollars you can open an online trading account with a variety of brokers. They will vary somewhat on fees, but particularly on their customer service and the details of how their trading platforms work.  All of them should offer a virtual trading option that allows you to practice trading with pretend money.  Use that option.

I’ve been through three different brokers in the past year and a half. Cybertrader impressed me not at all. Optionsxpress has a very beginner-friendly web interface, but it’s like riding a bicycle with training wheels: They’re great at first, but you quickly get sick of them and want something less restrictive and more powerful.

That more powerful trading platform is ThinkOrSwim. It’s very scary the first time, even if you mostly know what you’re doing. But it’s also very powerful once you learn it. Think of it as being like a sports car: hard to control at first, but ultimately very satisfying if you climb the steep learning curve. And they have great customer service. They’re very patient with silly newbie questions, especially if you call them after the market is closed.

ThinkOrSwim is so powerful because it doesn’t require a web interface. With the other two brokerages I’ve tried, you work through a web browser, using the same communication protocols that all other web sites use. Eventually you’ll want something faster. With ThinkOrSwim you run their program on your computer, and it communicates directly with their servers using whatever protocols they’ve chosen specifically for that purpose. No browsers are involved.

ThinkOrSwim will also give you the best charts that I know of, which are Prophet charts. ToS also has its own charts, which are occasionally useful for specific purposes. But generally Prophet is what you want, and ToS is a cheap way to get access to them. Much like ToS, Prophet charts are fantastically powerful, so much so that it’s unlikely that you’ll ever use most of what it offers.

Bottom line: Go open a ToS account. I think that the minimum is $2,500 to open one. Then start playing with the many, many options you find. They have some great video tutorials. And after you watch those, open up some Prophet charts and play around with those for a while. It’s all terrifying at first, but if you take it one step at a time and consult Investopedia frequently, it’ll slowly make sense.

Or you could do what I did and pay Investools an obscene amount of money for classes. Investools holds live seminars all over the place, and they teach a variety of trading systems so that you can pick one that matches your risk tolerance, your available time, and your budget for purchasing classes.

China turned down Citigroup’s plea for funds, though maybe China already sank all their available cash into other troubled financial companies. Other governments in the Middle East and Southeast Asia grabbed some bargains on Citigroup stock, but its earnings report this morning was still far worse than analyst expectations. Its stock dropped about 4.5%, which was good news in itself for those of us with a bearish mindset. But even better was the fact that it hovered around the high for the day for about 20 minutes after the opening bell, which gave the bears plenty of time to buy puts or sell short.

The broader markets were down overall, though not as much as I had hoped. I’ve been tracking four indexes: 1) the Russell 2000 (RUT), which consists of lots of small-cap companies, 2) the Standard and Poors 500 (SPX), a blunderbuss index that is said to include 80% of the entire market’s capitalization, 3) the Dow Jones Industrial Average (INDU), in which you can find an industry-balanced group of the thirty biggest companies, and 4) the Nasdaq 100 (NDX), containing the 100 biggest NASDAQ companies, which are heavily skewed toward technology.

I think of the RUT, the SPX, and the INDU as three points along the same axis.  The RUT has the smallest companies, the SPX captures the middle, and the INDU shows only the behemoths.  Each has some degree of independent motion, but they also generally move together as the total market.

Right now the INDU is the most bullish of the three.  It ended the day by stopping right at 12,500, which was also the low five days ago.  If you were only watching the INDU, then you would conclude that there is no market rout yet, because the INDU hasn’t formed a new low.  The past six trading sessions have all bounced around wildly, but within a fairly constant range of 12,500 to 12,750.  From just the INDU chart, we would have no idea where the market is going next.

The SPX tells a slightly more bearish story, though still far from a panic.  This middle-of-the-market index bounced around 1375, which was the low in the big crash of August 16, and also where the market bottomed out after the Shanghai surprise in late February of last year.  It’s a great big long-term support.  And we didn’t break it today—although we did close right at it.

Maybe I’m straining to see what I want to see, but the last few days of the SPX look more bearish than the INDU.  While the INDU has been pretty flat since January 7, the SPX looks like it tried hard to bounce, and failed.  It found the big support on the 9th, and then jumped up sharply on the 10th, just as you would expect at the bottom of a sideways trend.  But the 11th was a warning shot, with a lower high and even a slightly lower low.  Monday the 14th was also noncommittal with an inside day or harami (lower high and higher low).  Up through yesterday, you could have argued that the SPX chart could be showing a nice bounce.  But today broke that decisively.  The rally attempt over the last few days failed, and we slammed right back down into that support level.

So we have a flat INDU (big cap) and a possibly bearish SPX (big and middle cap).  But the warning sirens go off when we look at the RUT (small cap).  The chart there is in freefall.  The only support you’ll find is back in the summer of 2006, down at 670.  And while today’s bearish action didn’t go below the low of Jan 9, it’s still well outside the range of all the other previous days.

My interpretation is that the market expects some kind of credit crunch, and it will hit the small caps the hardest.  The lenders simply won’t have enough money to go around to keep the wheels turning.  And I don’t see how the Fed can really prevent that, as the problem is with loan-to-asset ratios rather than interest rates.  (I’m not sure about that, though.  The Fed still holds many mysteries for me.)  When these companies go back to their lenders to renew their operating loans, some will be turned away.  And if you’re the lender with a limited supply of dollars to go around, you’re naturally going to want to lend to the big companies first.

Finally, consider the intraday charts.  They say that the big money only trades right at the end of the day, so there’s some significance to the price momentum in the last half hour.  All three charts (INDU, SPX, and RUT) show a decisive downward plunge right at the end, with the INDU and SPX charts showing a sharp selloff five minutes before the closing bell.  This supports the theory that the big money is steadily pulling out of the market.

This is why I’m bearish on the RUT, and pessimistic on the rest.  The only area with any bullish promise is technology, where the index charts (QQQQ and NDX) look much healthier.  But with the overall market going down right now, I wouldn’t be buying any calls on Apple or Google.

I’m not clear on whether the plaintiffs in these cases have won every time or merely nearly every time.  The plaintiff enjoys taxpayer-funded legal help, while the defendant must pay his own legal bills.  And there is no real law to be applied.  If you’re a liberal, then you need merely complain that your feelings were hurt, and the liberals on the HRCs will bring the might of the state down on whoever offended you.

The HRCs have mostly gone after fringe individuals before, but now they’re trying to get into the mainstream.  The case against MacLean’s for publishing excerpts from Mark Steyn’s book has received lots of attention in recent months, and it still makes me too angry to write anything interesting about it.  But before Mark Steyn there was Ezra Levant, owner of the now-defunct Canadian magazine The Western Standard.  In early 2006, amid the furor over the Mohammed cartoons, The Western Standard was virtually alone among media outlets in actually publishing the “offensive” images.  Various Muslims ran crying to the Alberta HRC, and now the case has come to what seems to be its first hearing.

This hearing was videotaped, though the audio is very, very quiet.  Turn your speakers way up.  Mr. Levant is not going away quietly.  He has posted eight segments of the hearing up on YouTube for the world to enjoy.  I recommend starting with the opening statement.  He is eloquent, and he understands perfectly the larger issues at stake.  Canadians should be calling their politicians in outrage, demanding that these HRCs be disbanded.

Here was my temptation: As I mentioned earlier, Citigroup (C) reports its earnings tomorrow, along with Merrill Lynch (MER).  Merrill Lynch is probably the more familiar name to the public, but Citigroup is much, much larger.  And Citigroup is a Dow component, which means that it moves the market even more than its size would suggest.

Drudge has been running this story for a few days now.  It describes how Citigroup has suffered some serious damage in the subprime mess, more than was expected.  Such a major loss of revenue and especially assets would require Citigroup to constrict its lending business, which would echo all across the US economy.  Perhaps the world economy.

Citibank’s solution has been to try to bring new capital into the company, and the most promising pool of new capital is in foreign governments, especially in the Middle East and China.  If the foreign governments put their cash into Citibank, then it won’t have to curtail as much of its lending, and it may stave off a panic on Wall Street.

So what do we do with this news?  The considerations flip and flop around.

You could say that this scramble for capital indicates that Citigroup is in far more trouble than they’ve let on, and their report tomorrow will trigger panic selling.  But then, you would expect that selling to have begun with these news reports.  Instead, Citigroup stock rose decisively last Thursday and Friday, and today it held steady in a doji.  This was after the price steadily declined since mid-December.  So the price movement suggests that the bad news was already anticipated a long time ago, and the recent news has given the market some hope that Citigroup has found a way out of its mess.  So if Citigroup’s report tomorrow is anywhere close to the news stories, then it may see a rally rather than a crash.

It was fun to imagine wildly profitable puts from a crash, but eventually I came back to basics and remembered why I don’t play news.  Unless you’re skirting the insider trading laws, the professional traders will beat you on news every time.  They get the news faster, they interpret it faster, and they trade on it faster.  And while insider trading is illegal, you have no assurance that some people out there aren’t breaking the law.

The Citigroup situation is a good example of how professionals with connections can annihilate individuals, even if the pros aren’t cheating.  Citigroup and its employees can’t disclose any of the gory financial data to the public, but they almost certainly can disclose it to the foreign government as a necessary part of obtaining the money they so desperately need.  And those governments aren’t subject to US securities laws.  Once the data leaves the country, there’s no way to trace how it might seep back in.  It might still be technically illegal to trade based on the recirculated information, but it would be nearly impossible for the SEC to prove it and enforce it.  And once it hits Drudge, then everybody knows it, so that trading probably isn’t even illegal any more.

So I concluded that the big money already knows what’s going on at Citigroup, and its stock price tracks those negotiations pretty well.  If the deal with China goes through, then the stock will do fine.  In fact, it could go up quite a lot, as Citigroup could increase its market share as similar companies take similar losses without the padding of a foreign sugar daddy.

And now another twist: This story from the International Herald Tribune says that the Chinese have backed out of the deal.  The story is dated today, Monday the 14th, but has no time stamp.  (Those dinosaur publishers really need to get with the times.)  Looking at the intraday chart for Citigroup, I’m not seeing anything to suggest that the news hit while the market was open.  So tomorrow’s open is likely to gap down, go straight down on the opening bell, and then go down a whole lot more after that.  And with the major indexes having already slightly broken their long-term support, a sharp down day will put us into an undeniable downtrend.

Disclaimer: Do not invest any money in the market.  You should only invest your money in Certificates of Deposit paying one or two percent.  With inflation at about the same rate, this means that you’ll effectively be earning nothing, but you’ll be providing capital to the lending system so that other people can use it to enrich themselves.

All the indexes are showing higher daily highs and lows over yesterday. Today’s highs were in the same general range as the highs from day before yesterday. In a less scary market I would be tempted to anticipate a few days’ worth of bull market with some little credit spreads on uptrending stocks.

But the news is grim. During the day I heard a news report about financial companies looking to foreign governments to shore up their balance sheets before they announce earnings, many of which apparently come next week. The subprime losses continue, and there may well be more blood in the water just before next week’s expiration. So it’s no time to be Pollyanna and play bullish. The market’s future is grim, folks. Probably not grim forever, but definitely for the next few months.

The news report I heard was vague on which companies were scrambling to hide subprime losses.  Charles Schwab (SCHW) reports earnings on January 14th.  Then Citigroup (C), US Bancorp (USB), State Street (STT) and JP Morgan Chase (JPM) all release earnings on January 15 with Wells Fargo (WFC) on the 16th.   Merrill Lynch (MER) announces on the 17th.  Financial heavy-hitters SLM financial (SLM), Suntrust Banks (STI) and Capital One Financial (COF) all release on January 23rd, with Bank of America (BAC) and Wachovia (WB) coming on the 22nd.

This is a great chance to illustrate something that confuses many investors.  When you hear about different companies by name, it’s natural to assign them roughly equal subjective weight.  But that’s wrong.  The publicly traded companies include huge companies and little companies, and it isn’t always easy to distinguish them.

For example, Drudge is running a big banner story right now about rumors of big losses at Merrill Lynch (MER).  To the typical news consumer, this sounds like a big deal, because they know what Merrill Lynch is.  It’s the sort of company that they might do business with.  But when you put pencil to paper, it isn’t that big of a fish in the financial pond.

A reliable and easy way to measure the size of a publicly traded company is its market capitalization, abbreviated as market cap.  This is simply the number of outstanding shares multiplied by the price per share.  In theory, it’s the value that the market has placed on the company.  I’ve ferreted out the market caps of all the companies listed above.

Merrill Lynch (MER) market cap: 43 billion

That’s a lot of money for you and me, but it’s dwarfed by some other big financial companies:

Dow component Citigroup (C) market cap: 136 billion
Dow component US Bancorp (BAC) market cap: 172 billion

JP Morgan (JPM) market cap: 135 billion

Wells Fargo (WFC( market cap: 91 billion

SLM market cap: 7 billion

USB market cap: 50 billion

COF market cap: 18 billion

WB market cap: 66 billion

STT market cap: 32 billion

STI market cap: 21 billion

Running the numbers on market caps also gives some idea of the scope of the subprime crisis.  On this date a year ago, Countrywide Financial (CFC) had a market cap of 23 billion.  Today the market cap is 3 billion.  The losses in this subprime mess are huge, much bigger than ordinary investors understand, and possibly bigger than most politicians understand.

Tonight I watched part of the GOP debate, and Romney said that we needed to “stop the housing crisis.”  I groaned.  What ignorance!  (Or cynicism.)  There is no fix for this problem.  Financial institutions thought that these mortgages were valuable, and on that basis they loaned money out into the rest of the economy.  And not just the US economy.  The world economy.  Now those assets aren’t worth nearly what those banks thought, so they will need to lend less until they bring the total of their outstanding loans down to an acceptable multiple of their assets.

I can think of only one way to present a bright side: This is only a bubble—so far.  Basically, the economy has been growing on lending that was in turn based on assets that weren’t really there.  We saw economic growth that shouldn’t have taken place, because it was based on a misperception of the value of those mortgages.  So now, hopefully, theoretically, the market will fall to the low-growth point where it would have been had everyone understood what their assets were worth.

It’s normal for markets to experience periodic bubbles like this, but only government intervention can really screw things up.  As banks make fewer and fewer loans to fix their loan-to-asset ratios, political pressure will mount on the Federal Reserve, and other central banks, to throw more money into the economy.  But more money won’t fix anything on the long term, because the problem isn’t that banks don’t have enough money to lend.  The problem is that banks don’t have the assets to justify the loans, and there’s no way for the Fed to dream up valuable assets where none exist.  But the Fed can distribute too many dollars in trying to “do something” about the falling stock market, and in so doing the Fed will inflate away the dollar’s value.  Then we could see some economic problems much, much bigger than the bubble that’s popping around us right now.

DISCLAIMER: You should not invest real money in the stock market.  If you do, then big mean men (possibly including myself) will seize your life savings and spend it on luxury yachts.  You should keep your money in cash under your mattress where it will seem safe—unless you understand inflation.  You also shouldn’t listen to anything I write about economics, because I probably don’t have the slightest idea what I’m saying.

Expect a few days of buying interest driving prices up slowly, then another crash. I expect resistance on the Dow between 13,000 and 13,150, resistance on the S&P 500 (SPX) at 1440 to 1460, and resistance on the Russell 2000 (RUT) at 740.

All that is background for the latest blockbuster article from The New Republic, this one savaging presidential candidate Ron Paul for articles in newsletters with his name on them:

Finding the pre-1999 newsletters was no easy task, but I was able to track many of them down at the libraries of the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society. Of course, with few bylines, it is difficult to know whether any particular article was written by Paul himself. Some of the earlier newsletters are signed by him, though the vast majority of the editions I saw contain no bylines at all. Complicating matters, many of the unbylined newsletters were written in the first person, implying that Paul was the author.

But, whoever actually wrote them, the newsletters I saw all had one thing in common: They were published under a banner containing Paul’s name, and the articles (except for one special edition of a newsletter that contained the byline of another writer) seem designed to create the impression that they were written by him–and reflected his views. What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing–but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.

I don’t like Ron Paul.  I think he’s a nut, especially on foreign policy.  Men who say things like this just can’t be taken seriously:

You’d pull American troops out of Korea, Germany, the Middle East, everywhere?

I would. Under the Constitution, we don’t have the authority to just put troops in foreign countries willy-nilly when we’re not at war.

Conservatives already unhappy with Ron Paul will be tempted to use this TNR article to pile on his and drive him out of the race.  But that would be a serious error.  The fact that Ron Paul is a nut doesn’t mean that the hit piece against him is fair or accurate.  My reading of the article is that it’s the kind of overheated political hatchet job that got TNR in so much trouble over Beauchamp.

One of my stranger idiosyncrasies is a belief that I can spot most falsehoods based solely on the presentation and deportment of the people presenting them.  People behave—and write—in very specific ways when they’re trying to push an idea that they know isn’t fully supported.

I’m not talking about liars; they’re an entirely different group with different behaviors.  It’s much more common to find writers who completely believe in what they’re saying, but who also realize that their readers wouldn’t share that belief if they knew exactly what the writer knew.  The classic example is Dan Rather with his forged memos, who last I checked still believes that George Bush shirked duty in the National Guard in the early seventies.  It wasn’t a lie, because Rather believed it.  But he also knew that the available evidence wouldn’t be enough to convince the public, so he stretched that evidence, and went too far.

The Beauchamp story followed a similar pattern.  As good liberals, the TNR editors believe (as fervently as any religious zealots) that US troops are inhuman monsters and baby-killers.  So when offered suspicious evidence to demonstrate what they ‘knew’ to be true, they dispensed with much of the fact-checking and rushed to press.  It’s the same error that conservatives will soon make with Ron Paul: They know that the conclusion is true, and so they assume that the evidence offered to support the conclusion must be valid.  In formal logic, we call this Affirming the Consequent.

The first hint that something is awry with the TNR article on Ron Paul is in the way that it presents a web of people, organizations, and ideas, but offers only the flimsiest of connections between them.  For example, we learn that Ron Paul hired Lew Rockwell as his Congressional chief of staff for four years, and that Rockwell founded the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and that a senior faculty member at the institute founded a group that TNR labels “secessionist” and wrote a book that TNR describes as a “pro-Confederate, revisionist tract.”  In 1995, Ron Paul spoke at an institute event about which Rockwell wrote: “We’ll explore what causes [secession] and how to promote it.”

See, at TNR they ‘know’ that conservatives are somehow the political descendants of the Confederacy, and they all secretly yearn to pull the country back 150 years to an age of slavery, misogyny, and so forth.  So if Paul has had anything to do with people who write approvingly about secession, then that proves that his views are identical to those held in the Confederacy.

This is TNR logic at work: Favoring a right of secession means that you have an “alliance with neo-Confederates,” which in turn “helps explain the views his newsletters have long espoused on race.”

And what are those views on race?  You’ll have to take TNR’s word for it that they’re really, really bad, because the actual quotes in the article don’t prove much.  The quotes will only tell you that Ron Paul dislikes welfare recipients and racial preference programs.  It’s also racism, in TNR’s mind, to disapprove of post-game looting by black basketball fans.

But remember, this isn’t a lie; it’s just a stretching of the truth.  Some parts are probably accurate, such as a spasm of race-war paranoia in the early nineties, some disapproval of the political changes in South Africa, and some over-the-top criticism of Martin Luther King.  But the author’s goal is to weave these little fragments of evidence into a conclusion much larger than what they can sustain.

The pattern is similar in the sections on gays, Jews, and the far-right militias that became such liberal bogeymen in the 1990s.  There are little bits of evidence here, but they don’t add up to nearly what the author wants to conclude.  The article’s goal is to weave scant evidence into the liberal stereotype of extreme conservatism.

Ron Paul is a kook, but he isn’t the type of kook that the liberals like to imagine that all conservatives secretly are.  He’s a very different kook, one much too far from liberal stereotypes for the TNR editors to understand.  Conservatives should not rise to the bait that TNR offers.  If they seize this article to condemn Ron Paul, they’ll end up agreeing with its very liberal and wildly inaccurate premises.

The market was actually moving pretty normally until about 2:30 EST, when the CEO of AT&T said that some of its business lines were softening. Then it was straight down from 12,850 to a close of 12,589. This shatters support across the board, which means that technical traders will soon be trading short, increasing selling pressure. We should still get some sort of rally over the next few days, but I’m not expecting much. If we get a tiny rally that crawls up to that 12,750 line and can’t break it, then was have an excellent technical setup to go bearish.

DISCLAIMER: Do not invest any money in the stock market, ever. If you do, you will lose it all, and you’ll spend your retirement years under an overpass holding a cardboard sign.

But in this age of litigation, obviously I cannot recommend that you make any particular investment. In fact, my official advice is that you view technical trading merely as a hobby to be done with virtual money and make-believe trades. Your actual money you should keep under your mattress or in a clean, dry mayonnaise jar. If you choose to enter the stock market with real money, be aware that this is a big, mean game in which very smart people will take your entire life’s savings without a moment’s hesitation, if you’re foolish or careless enough to let them.

Many of my readers will have no interest in any of this, so I plan to hide it all behind More links, so that readers who prefer my posts on politics, philosophy, and theology can still find them without undue effort.
Today we had an excellent example of support at work. For those not familiar with the term, support is a point at which we expect a price moving down to turn and start moving up. Support can come from a variety of sources, but today we had plenty of the easiest kind: horizontal.

Let’s consider the Dow Jones Industrial Average, just because it gets the most attention. MSN Money has the best free stock charts that I have found so far, though this particular chart omits 1-2-08 for some reason. It’s just another big down day that neatly fills the gap between 12/31 and 1/3. If you have an online brokerage account, they can probably get you better charts.

Look at the chart around November 26. Then as now, the market had been going down decisively for several days in a row. But during the four trading days from 11-21 through 11-27, the price couldn’t break below 12,750. Then the price started moving back up, and gained about a thousand points before it started turning back down. This creates a support area. Because the price bounced at this point before, we expect it to bounce there again.

The price did something similar in August 15-17. We had one day of panic selling on the 16th, but it closed back at the support area. This also suggests the significance of 12,750. And if you can find a decent full-year chart (the MSN Money chart isn’t helpful because its one-year chart only shows weekly bars) you’ll also see that 12,750 was the peak of a seven-month bull run from mid-July of 2006 through mid-February of 2007. When that level acts as a ceiling it is called resistance, and one of the most basic rules of technical trading is that old resistance usually forms new support, and vice versa. Since 12,750 was a ceiling back in February, we shouldn’t be surprised that it has been acting as a floor, and we should expect it to do so again.

This isn’t to say that the Dow is going to roar back to new highs. The four most recent highs in the Dow (10/10, 10/31, 12/10, and 12/26) form a pretty tidy downward slope, so this time around I don’t expect the Dow to break 13,250. But it should be enough of a bounce to give some short-term profit.

While this support level is likely, I don’t yet consider it tradeable. I plan to wait until the close on Tuesday, and maybe even through Wednesday, to confirm the bounce before I trade it.

And for those of you who don’t have the slightest idea what I just wrote: Be patient. Soon I will break down and explain the basics of technical trading, and some day you’ll be able to look back at this post and roll your eyes at how dull and obvious it all is. And if anybody can find a better publicly available stock chart, lemme know about it.

Just for a moment, let us take it as read, as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and the other bestselling atheists insist, that what happened in Bethlehem two millennia is a lot of mumbo-jumbo. As I wrote a year ago, consider it not as an event but as a narrative: You want to launch a big new global movement from scratch. So what do you use?

The birth of a child. On the one hand, what could be more powerless than a newborn babe? On the other, without a newborn babe, man is ultimately powerless. For, without new life, there can be no civilization, no society, no nothing. Even if it’s superstitious mumbo-jumbo, the decision to root Christ’s divinity in the miracle of His birth expresses a profound — and rational — truth about “eternal life” here on earth.

From there he makes some points on Europe’s upcoming demographic collapse. It’s familiar territory for Steyn fans, though I was interested to note that British news sources expect the various spellings of ‘Mohammed’ taken together to overtake ‘Jack’ and ‘Thomas’ as the most common name given to baby boys in the United Kingdom in 2008.

Then Steyn pushes on to his main point, which is the Christmas focus on the birth of a baby contrasted with a burgeoning Western culture of self-hatred and death. Two of my points should already be familiar to my regular readers: Last May the UK-based Optimum Population Trust urged Britons to have fewer children for the planet’s sake. And just last month the Daily Mail ran a very positive story about young women choosing abortions and sterilization to help save the planet.

Now an Australian obstetrician has upped the ante by proposing that the government levy a tax on people who have more than two children, and financially reward people who choose sterilization. It won’t be long before someone in the fever swamps of environmentalism declares that mere financial incentives are not enough, and the state needs to start mandatory sterilizations and abortions. That may sound like hyperbole, but consider, the above three news stories appearing in mainstream news publications would have been inconceivable ten years ago.

The trends are similar in environmentalist theology. Steyn points to the recent book A World Without Us, in which the author loving contemplates what would happen to the Earth if all humanity were to suddenly disappear. He might also have mentioned the recent movie I Am Legend, starring Will Smith and doing very well at the box office, has a similar theme of massive human extinction that is—of course—our own fault.

But the real cutting edge of environmental theology is Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, by David Benatar of the University of Cape Town. In what seems to be a bid to become the new Peter Singer, Mr. Benatar’s thesis is that creating a child seriously harms the child by its mere existence, and that human existence itself is bad. Lest you think I exaggerate, consider this passage from page six, which you can read for yourself via Amazon:

Nor is the harm produced by the creation of a child usually restricted to the creation of that child. The child soon finds itself motivated to procreate, producing children who, in turn, develop the same desire. Thus any pair of procreators can view themselves as occupying the tip of a generational iceberg of suffering.

Most people are taken aback when I tell them my blog’s name. We should live? Who would be crazy enough to say that we shouldn’t? Lots of people, as it turns out, and not all of them Muslims.

Steyn closes his article:

It’s hard not to conclude a form of mental illness has gripped the world’s elites. If you’re one of that dwindling band of westerners who’ll be celebrating the birth of a child . . . next week, make the most of it. A year or two on, and the eco-professors will propose banning nativity scenes because they set a bad example.