Author: VD

The Italian war on science continues

As we learned in the reaction to the L’Aquila verdicts, holding scientists accountable for actions that lead directly to the deaths of innocent people is a direct attack on science:

Italian police say they have arrested nine cardiologists accused of performing unauthorized experimental treatments on patients.  Carabinieri
Col. Giovanni Capasso says the investigation began over a year ago
after consumer groups raised alarm about some suspicious deaths at the
Polyclinic hospital in the northern city of Modena.

Capasso said
nine doctors were arrested Friday on accusations of corruption, criminal
association, embezzlement, defrauding the national health system and
performing unauthorized experimental treatments. One was jailed while
the others were given house arrest.  In addition, he said, a dozen
medical equipment companies have been barred from working with the
national health system for their alleged involvement in the scheme.

What an outrage!  Obviously these heroes of science must be released at once!  How dare the Italian authorities put such fine, reputable scientists on trial for the “crime” of adding to the the body of scientific knowledge?

Soldier boy is BETA

I usually keep the Game-related content for Alpha Game, but this intersection of Game and current events simply demands comment:

At some point after Petraeus was sworn in as CIA director on Sept. 6,
2011, the woman broke up with him. However, Petraeus continued to pursue
her, sending her thousands of emails over the last several months,
raising even more questions about his judgment.

It doesn’t only raise questions about his judgment, but about his socio-sexual rank as well.  Petraeus superficially appears to be a handsome, successful warrior, an obvious Alpha in every way, but in addition to being unimpressed by his military performance since 2001, I’ve long felt that he carried himself more like a man dressed up like a soldier than a military commander.

I’ve met a number of top military commanders, including three that were members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  Such men exude dominance and a palpable sense of command even when they are wearing a t-shirt and shorts while washing the car; you get the impression that they could successfully invade a small South American country with no more than a BB gun, a wrist rocket, and the staff of the local McDonald’s restaurant.  For all his fruit salad, Petraeus always struck me as being much more akin to Hollywood’s notion of a general than an actual fighting man.

What sort of socio-sexual loser sends THOUSANDS of emails to a married woman who has indicated she is done with him?

A timely resignation

Interesting timing for this resignation, considering that CIA Director David Petraeus was scheduled to testify about Bengazi next week before Congress:

Central Intelligence Agency Director David Petraeus has resigned, citing “extremely poor judgment” for having an extramarital affair.

Petraeus, 60, told President Barack Obama of the affair on Thursday and offered to resign, a senior official told NBC News. Obama accepted his resignation in a phone call Friday afternoon. 

“Yesterday afternoon, I went to the White House and asked the President to be allowed, for personal reasons, to resign from my position,” Petraeus said in a letter to CIA colleagues. “After being married for over 37 years, I showed extremely poor judgment by engaging in an extramarital affair. Such behavior is unacceptable, both as a husband and as the leader of an organization such as ours.”

“This afternoon, the President graciously accepted my resignation,” Petraeus said in the letter.

This is why it’s always helpful to have a few skeletons in your closet if you want to move up the ladder.  The powers that be don’t like high-ranking individuals who don’t come with an easy self-destruct button.  The question is why someone felt the need to press it for Petraeus now.

Dear Matt Drudge

The Hill writes to Matt Drudge:

I
have written before that, whether I like it or not, you are the one of
the most influential forces in modern media, possibly THE
most influential single player. You tower above your peers in what you
do. Despite my failed efforts, no liberal or Democrat has even tried to
create a legitimate competitor to what you do. But with your influence
comes power, and with power comes responsibility, and the Drudge Report
in recent months has become inundated, and saturated and permeated with
baiting stories about the president’s race, and about blacks generally.
These are beneath the standards you should set for yourself and your
profession.

You should be, and I hope you will be, a
better citizen and more worthy professional than is suggested by the
sheer number of race-related and often race-baiting stories that you
regularly banner on the Drudge Report.

 Translation:

Dear Matt,

We in the media have been successfully sweeping black-on-white crime under the carpet for decades.  Now that people are reading you instead of us, they are beginning to realize that vibrancy is not, in fact, our strength.  Please stop, or we will turn up our noses at you as our readers continue to turn to you for the information we are keeping from them.

Thank you,

The Mainstream Media

An unexpected argument against suffrage

One doesn’t usually expect to see the New York Times present arguments against women’s suffrage:

On average, women make up about 20 percent of lawmakers in the United States
and abroad. We found that when women constituted 20 percent of a
decision-making body that operates by majority rule, the average woman
took up only about 60 percent of the floor time used by the average man.
Women were perceived — by themselves and their peers — as more
quiescent and less effective. They were more likely to be rudely
interrupted; they were less likely to strongly advocate their policy
preferences; and they seldom mentioned the vulnerable. These gender
dynamics held even when adjusting for political ideology (beliefs about
liberalism and egalitarianism) and income.

In contrast, the men in our experiment did not speak up less or appear to lose influence when they were in the minority.

In
our experiment, groups with few women set a minimum income of about
$21,600 per year for a family of four — which is close to the federal
poverty level for a family of four. But once women made up 60 to 80
percent or more of a group, they spoke as much as men, raised the needs
of the vulnerable and argued for redistribution (and influenced the
rhetoric of their male counterparts). They also encountered fewer
hostile interruptions.

Significantly, they elevated the safety net
to as much as $31,000. The most talkative participants in these
majority-female groups advocated for even more government generosity:
$36,000, enough to catapult many poor families into the ranks of the
lower middle class.

Translation: if you think the nation is in economic difficulty now, just wait until more women are elected to office!

Right
now, spending on social services was $2.10 trillion, if we limit that
definition to Social Security, Unemployment/Welfare, Medicare, Medicaid,
the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Social Security
Administration.  If we apply the researcher’s numbers, a female-majority
government would increase that by 43.5 percent, to $3.01 trillion.  And
if the most activist, “most talkative” women were in charge, the bill
would come to $3.5 trillion.

Total revenue: $2.165 trillion.  Deficit in the max-women scenario: $2.67 trillion, more than double the current $1.27 trillion.

Ironically,
to the numerate individual, this is not a logical argument for more
women in elected office.  This is an argument against female suffrage.

It’s too late, Republicans

Ron Paul, who was rejected by Republicans in favor of the supposedly more electable Mitt Romney, concludes it is Game Over for the USA as well:

Rep. Ron Paul, whose maverick presidential bids shook the GOP, said
in the wake of this week’s elections that the country has already veered
over the fiscal cliff and he sees no chance of righting ship in a
country where too many people are dependent on government.

“We’re
so far gone. We’re over the cliff,” the Texas Republican told Bloomberg
Television’s “In the Loop” program. “We cannot get enough people in
Congress in the next 5-10 years who will do wise things.”

Since the “drive toward the cliff slower” strategy has worked so well, perhaps Republicans will now consider attempting a “fall slower” approach.

Now why might that be?

I found British Prime Minister David Cameron’s concerns to be intriguing:

Shortly
after 11.30am, Mr Schofield challenged the PM over rumours about Tories
being accused of child abuse.  He handed over a card with names gleaned
from the internet, telling the Premier: ‘You know the names on that
piece of paper. Will you be speaking to those people?’

A
clearly-unhappy Mr Cameron said he did not like what the presenter was
doing, and warned he was fuelling a ‘witch hunt’. He said: ‘There is a
danger if we are not careful, that this can turn into a sort of
witch-hunt, particularly against people who are gay.

Now, why would would anyone imagine that accusations of child abuse would turn into a witch-hunt, particularly against people who are gay?  What an extremely educational reaction.

Hope vs Math

Pat Buchanan appeared inclined to bet on the latter in his pre-election column:

[W]hoever wins today, it is hard to be sanguine about the future.  The demographic and economic realities do not permit it.

Consider. Between 1946 and 1964, 79 million babies were born – the
largest, best-educated and most successful generation in our history.
Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, both born in 1946, were in that first
class of baby boomers.

The problem.  Assume that 75 million of these 79 million boomers survive to age 66.
This means that from this year through 2030, an average of nearly 4
million boomers will be retiring every year. This translates into some
11,000 boomers becoming eligible for Medicare and Social Security every
single day for the next 18 years.  Add in immigrants in that same age category and the fact that baby
boomers live longer than the Greatest Generation or Silent Generation
seniors, and you have an immense and unavoidable increase coming in
expenditures for our largest entitlement programs….

With government in the U.S. at all levels consuming 40 percent of
gross domestic product, and taxes 30 percent, taxes will have to rise
and government spending be controlled or cut. The alternative is to
destroy the debt by depreciating the dollars in which it is denominated –
i.e., by Fed-induced inflation.  But you can only rob your creditors once. After that, they never trust you again.

There is another social development rarely discussed.  The workers who are replacing retiring baby boomers in the labor force are increasingly minorities.  Black folks and Hispanics alone account now for 30 percent of the population – and rising rapidly.  Yet these two minorities have high-school dropout rates of up to 50
percent in many cities, and many who do graduate have math, reading and
science scores at seventh-, eighth- and ninth-grade levels.

Can their contributions to an advanced economy be as great as were
those of baby boomers of the ’60s and ’70s, whose SAT scores were among
the highest we ever recorded? U.S. scores in global competition have
been plummeting toward Third World levels.

Let’s just say that I expect the de facto social policy of seeking to replace white male Anglo-Saxon Protestant products of intact families with a labor force that increasingly consists of uneducated, illegitimate, irreligious female people of color to work even less effectively than the Roman attempt to replace Roman citizens with German barbarians in the legions.

The bizarre thing is that it is the numerate and historically aware portion of the population that is decried as benighted, outdated, and anti-science by the bien pensantry.  They are betting on hope and belief in the inevitability of “progress” against mere population demographics and math.  In the immortal words of Pepper Brooks: “It’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for ’em.”

Breakdown

This chart of the electorate fairly clearly illustrates the growing difference between historical America and third world America.

We already knew the “conservative Catholic Hispanic” vote upon which Karl Rove and George W. Bush were going to build their permanent Republican majority doesn’t exist.  But the theory of the conservative Asian voter appears to be even more of a myth.  Of course, why immigrants from cultures with zero tradition of limited government would ever be expected to respect the concept has never been explained to my satisfaction.  And where would they learn to appreciate it in modern America?  The public schools?  At university?