Chyden Finance: profit from hypocrisy

BBC News reports, “Many in the armed forces feel that too few civilians fully appreciate the drive to serve in combat.”
So, that’s why US taxpayers are paying a billion dollars per day on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
It’s a safari to keep soldiers entertained… or a turkey shoot, considering that more than 100,000 Iraqis [...]

Cornell University Psychology professors Justin Kruger and David Dunning wrote in the abstract to their “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments” (1999, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77 (6), pp. 1121-1134):
People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and [...]

As I have been saying for nearly a year, charisma is a very dangerous thing. It incites sanctimonious narcissism in the individual and sycophantic double-think among the charismatic’s disciples.
When a charismatic leader engages in behavior that normally would be seen as negative, his or her disciples often defend it with laughable results, as when [...]

Following up on yesterday’s post, CNN pipes in with a related topic. Apparently, liberalism, atheism, and male monogamy are statistically correlated with higher IQs.
George Washington University leadership professor James Bailey speculates that abnormal preferences might originate with a desire to convey superiority or elitism, which correlates with high IQ. He claims that embracing [...]

“Keep the company of those who seek the truth, and run from those who have found it.” —Vaclav Havel
When we compress complex issues into one-dimensional spectra — left vs right, religious vs atheist, conservative vs liberal, etc. — we end up talking at cross-purposes, often with ourselves.
Part of the problem is the habit of thought [...]

Carl Gustav Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist and contemporary of Sigmund Freud, coined the term synchronicity to refer to an acausal connecting principle linking two events in a meaningful manner, even though they are not causally connected.
In layman’s terms, these are ‘it’s a sign’ moments, as when one takes a breath to make a dramatic [...]

Geert Wilders is Dutch Member of Parliament, who is currently on trial for insulting Muslims and non-Western foreigners. Apparently, the Netherlands does not have an equivalent for the First Amendment of the Constitution of the USA, and being a loudmouth jerk over there is illegal.
Before you champion the silencing of loudmouth jerks with whom [...]

David Gosset, director of the Euro-China Center for International and Business Relations at the China-Europe International Business School in Shanghai, has reminded me of a story that one of my professors told me about his days as a POW in Germany.
My professor, a Bavarian, served in the Wehrmacht as a conscripted teenager in WWII. [...]

Recently, I addressed the critical economic fallacy that underlies Marxism. In particular, when Dickens, Engels, and Marx wrote their critiques of the Industrial Revolution, “economists had not yet abandoned the Labor Theory of value in favor of the Marginal Theory of value that was introduced in the 1870s by Jevons in England, Menger in [...]

Engels and Marx wrote in the mid-19th Century in opposition to what they believed to be the abuses of industrialization. To understand why their ideas failed, it helps to bear two critical facts in mind: a) the institution of large-scale, centralized manufacturing and its concomitant widespread wage-income were relatively new, and b) economists had [...]