"No," he said curtly.

She asked him another question.

"Nope."

She inquired a final time.

"Not at all."

"Why are you being so brusque," she challenged him indignantly.

"Not brusque at all. Succinct, perhaps even compendious, I like to say," he said in riposte.

"Do you find me officious," she asked pensively.

They had gone here many times before and he was utterly blasé about the whole line of questioning. He had become inured to this pablum and cynical attempts at empathy.

"No, I'm just a misanthrope unwilling to indulge your crotchets," he retorted sardonically.

The Limits of Rationality

Standard, neo-classical economic theory taught in American universities is predicated largely on a model of the so-called homo economicus, or rational man. This vision involves an agent with rational preferences and capacity to advance ones own self-interests as defined by those preferences.

Now, is this accurate? You might say it is a mere model of reality, an attempt to simplify behavior in a way that succumbs to analysis and that in doing so, it is useful. But, questions of epistemology aside, the utility of the model is often times in the eye of the beholder.

Modelers who use statistical regression in econometrics often are pleased with models that can explain about ten percent of the variations data. Think about that. The other ninety percent of the information goes unexplained, unexploited.

This is not to say that the revolution started by luminaries such as Marshall, Jevon and Walras have built a house on sand. But, with models that can often times hardly explain a minority of the data, let alone the majority of the data, you start to see the problem.

Doggishness and God

Is God a Dog? Is it a mere coincidence that God is an anagram for Dog? I often ask myself this question in between reading the bible and advanced math texts. I've found no reason not to believe that God is, in fact, not a dog.

Put simply, God is Dog is God, is Dog.

Truth and Justice

People have become increasingly cynical about truth and justice in our world. With outsourcing, natural disasters and other social and natural epidemics on the rise, it's hard to fathom the good ole' days when truth and justice were not just spoken of-- but also practiced.

Now, I don't mean that the God delusion has faded, or that God does not exist anymore. For it would be folly to believe that the occassional disaster disproves His existence but might it make it a bit less palatable to the connosieur shopping for troof'?

I'll write a bit later on this a bit more but for now, let's just say that this is numinous-arts signing off.