Author: VD

Mailvox: answering the inevitable response

Some atheists appear to view homosexuals as comrades in the great struggle against Christianity. In light of this, MD wonders if Christians can be similarly considered to harbor disproportionate inclinations towards pedophilia on the basis of the Catholic priest abuse scandal:

Hmmm. Wonder what proportion of Christian clergy molest children cf general population? . . . Conclusion: Christians more likely to molest children?

To some extent, the answer depends upon your definition of clergy. But in the end, the inescapable conclusion by MD’s metric is not only that Christians are less likly to molest children than the general population, but that gays should not be permitted in the clergy. Now, there are three significant caveats here which I will point out afterwards, but consider:

Clerical abuse
– 4,392 priests and deacons were accused of engaging in sexual abuse of a minor between 1950 and 2002.
– The Jay Report stated there were 10,667 reported victims of clergy sexual abuse younger than 18 years during this period. The RCC victims per abuser rate was 2.43
– The 4,351 priests who were accused amount to 3.97% of the 109,694 priests in active ministry during that time.
– There were 28,700 active priests in 2005. The historical/current rate is 3.72.

Teacher abuse
– It is reported that 290,000 students experienced some sort of physical sexual abuse by a school employee from 1991-2000.
– This indicates an estimated 1,508,000 cases of school children being abused by school employees between 1950 and 2002.
– There were 3.8 million school teachers in 2010. Multiplied by the 3.72 historical/current rate, we estimate 14.1 million teachers active from 1950.

Dividing the 14.1 million historical teachers by the 1.51 million victims, then dividing by the 2.43 victim/abuser rate, this means school children have a 4.4% abuse per teacher rate compared to 4.0% per Catholic priest.

Now, the three problems. The first is that this includes the abuse by school employees who are not teachers without including the non-teachers. Currently, teachers only make up half of the PUBLIC school employees in the country, but that number was historically much lower. Nevertheless, we can safely assume that teachers historically made up about three-quarters of the school employee total, which would lower the teacher abuse rate to 3.3 percent. However, we don’t know if teachers have a higher rate or a lower rate of abuse than janitors, counselors, and administrators. I suspect it is higher, due to low average teacher IQ and the larger amount of contact with children intrinsic to the job, but I simply have no information on this.

Second, the RCC abuse numbers include the victims of priests and deacons, but don’t include the number of permanent deacons. This is because there were only 41 deacons accused of the 12,500 ordained during the period concerned. This gives a total of 122,194 clergy and reduces the RCC abuse rate to 3.6 percent.

And the third problem. 81 percent of the RCC victims were male. All of the abusers were male. This is an astonishing statistical outlier, since in the general population, girls are sexually abused three times more often than boys. The heterosexual abuse rate was therefore 0.7 percent for the clergy compared to 2.5 percent for the teachers.

The conclusion, therefore, is that Christian clergy are 3.6 times less likely to abuse children than the general population unless they are homosexual. The larger part of the clerical problem is not the Church, but Teh Gay. In fact, four-fifths of the sexual abuse committed by Catholic priests could have been avoided simply by barring homosexuals from the clergy, just as Christian doctrine has always deemed necessary. And the increasing restrictions on homosexual seminarians is the obvious reason why the rate of clergy abuse has been significantly dropping since the 1980s.

However, due to the increased embrace of homosexual clergy by the Episcopalian and Lutheran churches, we can safely conclude that the chickenhawks will be gravitating to these organizations as well as to other gay-friendly institutions that are actively involved with children. It should therefore be no surprise that the Sandusky scandal took place on a college campus and concerned a children’s organization; twenty years before, Sandusky might well have decided he was “called” to the priesthood instead of setting up a “children’s charity”.

Logan’s Run looks better all the time

I told you it wasn’t just Gen X’s imagination that the preceding generation is, when viewed in the collective, a selfish, worthless, generation of grasshoppers:

“Paws off, Junior, this cash is mine.”

Don’t expect a big inheritance from your boomer parents — even if they are rich. Less than half of millionaire boomers say that leaving money for their kids is a priority for them, according to a 2011 U.S. Trust study. But 64% of boomers say they plan to use their money to travel and more than one in three say they want to use it to “have fun.”…

“Make room kids, we’ll be living with you when we’re old.”

Boomers are expected to live longer than any other generation. At the same time, it’s no secret they haven’t saved nearly enough for retirement. Overall, the average retirement savings shortfall for married baby boomers is about $30,000, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute. Nearly half of early boomers, born between 1948 and 1954, and 44% of late boomers, born between 1955 and 1964, may not be able to afford even basic living expenses in retirement, according to EBRI. The result? Kids could be supporting mom and dad well into their eighties and nineties.

Yeah, I don’t see that happening on a grand scale. My generation is going to turf the Boomers into government housing faster than we saw them put our grandparents into nursing homes and we’ll do it with the same lack of remorse that they left us alone in the afternoons with a bowl of cereal and the television.

What the Boomers have forgotten is that they broke the generational contract. So they have no claim on the younger generations.

Hiding the depravity

It’s always interesting to see precisely what people are attempting to hide or avoid when they utilize false equivalences or incorrect definitions:

JT: Was this man sexually attracted to boys? Was he male also? Yeah… That’s the very definition of homo-sexual.

Evil Kirk: By that logic, a man who molests a girl is a heterosexual, presumably the sexuality you identify with. So are you agreeing that molesting girls is part of your sexuality?

First, I note that Evil Kirk doesn’t understand that JT is not relying on logic, but on a definition. Resorting to the dictionary is not resorting to logic. Second, his own attempt at logic suggests an inability to distinguish between the set and the sub-set. Molesting girls cannot be an intrinsic aspect of heterosexuality because girls are also molested by women. But molesting girls is certainly an intrinsically heterosexual act if perpetrated by a member of the opposite sex, just as molesting boys is an intrinsically homosexual act if perpetrated by a member of the same sex.

What Evil Kirk is attempting to avoid through his linguistic contortions is the fact that homosexual men are disproportionately likely to molest children. Although they make up around 1.5% of the male population, they are responsible for approximately one-third of all child molestations. This is why homosexuals try very hard to falsely impute a nonexistent aspect of age to both “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality”; they are seeking to conceal the fact that a statistically significant percentage of them are inclined to prey upon children.

My question to Evil Kirk is this: Were you intentionally attempting to hide the fact that homosexual men are around 20 times more likely to molest children than heterosexual men when you took exception to JT’s statement that a man who rapes a boy is, by definition, homosexual? If not, what was the basis for your objection to JT’s statement?

The downside of meritocracy

Ross Douthat explains the dangerous downside to America’s experiment in meritocracy:

For decades, the United States has been opening paths to privilege for its brightest and most determined young people, culling the best and the brightest from Illinois and Mississippi and Montana and placing them in positions of power in Manhattan and Washington. By elevating the children of farmers and janitors as well as lawyers and stockbrokers, we’ve created what seems like the most capable, hardworking, high-I.Q. elite in all of human history.

And for the last 10 years, we’ve watched this same elite lead us off a cliff — mostly by being too smart for its own good.

In hereditary aristocracies, debacles tend to flow from stupidity and pigheadedness: think of the Charge of the Light Brigade or the Battle of the Somme. In one-party states, they tend to flow from ideological mania: think of China’s Great Leap Forward, or Stalin’s experiment with “Lysenkoist” agriculture.

In meritocracies, though, it’s the very intelligence of our leaders that creates the worst disasters. Convinced that their own skills are equal to any task or challenge, meritocrats take risks that lower-wattage elites would never even contemplate, embark on more hubristic projects, and become infatuated with statistical models that hold out the promise of a perfectly rational and frictionless world. (Or as Calvin Trillin put it in these pages, quoting a tweedy WASP waxing nostalgic for the days when Wall Street was dominated by his fellow bluebloods: “Do you think our guys could have invented, say, credit default swaps? Give me a break! They couldn’t have done the math.”)

Hubris on the part of the highly intelligent is particularly stupid because it reflects both ignorance and a lack of self-awareness. For example, I am in the top one percent of the top one percent when it comes to intelligence, and yet I could provide you with an encyclopedia of my mistakes, failures, and errors in judgment. I doubt that I have made any fewer of them than the average individual, but they do tend to be of a different order.

For example, was it the right thing to write The War in Heaven instead of Blizzard’s first Starcraft novel? Almost surely not. As it turns out, creating your own intellectual property from the start is less effective than riding someone else’s media tie-in wave, building a following from it, and then publishing your own material. My decision certainly made sense and was intellectually defensible at the time, but in retrospect it was a serious blunder.

Douthat doesn’t have it quite right, however. The problem with the mistakes of the meritocratic elite isn’t that they are too smart for their own good, it is that they are too smart for everyone else’s good. This is why technocratic visions so often go so badly awry, and why the Socratic dream of a government of philosopher-kings has almost invariably proven to be worse than the variously flawed alternatives. The worst aspect of a meritocracy is its lack of respect for tradition. Meritocracy represents the ultimate triumph of theory and potential over experience and reliability, so it should come as little surprise that by historical standards, the new meritocratic societies appear to be destroying themselves in a remarkably short period of time.

In the end, however, Douthat misses the point. A society will benefit most from being ruled by its best, not its brightest. As one of this society’s brightest, I can attest that the members of a society’s intellectual elite are no more likely to merit being described as its best than the average individual and they possess no more intrinsic right to rule by virtue of their intelligence than the obese elite do by virtue of their weight.

We are… Ped State

Let’s face it, it was inevitable.  For crying out loud, Sandusky’s autobiography is entitled Touched.  You can’t tell me he wasn’t flipping off the entire world with a title like that.  Last year, before the NCAA football season started, a guy in the Nebraska football program contacted me and asked me to translate a few things into Italian for their pre-season team video.  I don’t know if he still reads this blog, but I shall be VERY surprised and a little disappointed if there aren’t a number of variations on this theme in the Cornhusker section at Saturday’s game.

The clueless Pedo State students who rioted over Joe Paterno’s dismissal obviously need to have their noses rubbed in the institutional shame, the full extent of which is not yet apparent, until they realize that Paterno is not the victim here.

Exit Perry

Somehow, I don’t think Ron Paul would have had any problem naming the agencies he would eliminate. Of course, this shouldn’t disqualify Perry as a potential president, considering that our current one believes there are 57 states.

Joe Paterno is no hero

On the other hand, he’s not a criminal either. It’s a sad ending to an epic career, but in the end, Joe Paterno definitely had to go. Now. The truly problematic thing isn’t that he only fulfilled his legal obligations in 2002 when a homosexual pedophile was raping boys in the Penn State football facilities, but that he didn’t demand an investigation of Sandusky back in 1998 when the police, the local media, and the Penn State administration all knew about his criminal proclivities. If you read between the lines of the former defensive coordinator’s retirement after the 1999 Alamo Bowl, it is clear that the Penn State hierarchy, including Paterno, knew there was something seriously wrong with Sandusky’s behavior. Regardless of who should have done what after the man was seen raping the boy in 2002, Sandusky should never have been in a position to do anything of the sort in the first place, given what was clearly already known about him.

However, I think it is incorrect to seriously condemn either Paterno or McQueary for failing to run to the police. They both did exactly what they were supposed to do, exactly what the law required them to do. Saying that they should have run to the police doesn’t even make any sense; the police are not some sort of magic panacea in this situation for the obvious reason that Penn State has its own police force. In a university town like Penn State, going to the university administration is going to the police. It’s rather like complaining someone reported a crime to the DA rather than the receptionist at the police station.

Now, should Paterno and McQueary have spoken out afterwards given the failure of the administration to do anything? Yes, I believe so. But a failure to do the optimal thing is not synonymous with doing the wrong thing. To compare them, as some have, to Sandusky himself, or even to the administrators responsible for taking action, is both unfair and incorrect. It would have been heroic for either man to speak out and confront both Sandusky and the Penn State administration, but the reality is that most men are not cut out for such heroism. However, Paterno’s fame, combined with his willingness to take on the university administration in his own interest – they wanted him to retire years ago – versus his unwillingness to do so on behalf of the boys being raped by his former assistant, is an indelible stain on both his reputation and his moral character.

I think it is totally irrelevant that Paterno didn’t go to the campus police because I see no reason to believe they would have investigated the manner any more seriously, or been less inclined to cover up the matter, than the Penn State administration. They report to the administration after all, and more importantly, they already knew about Sandusky. From CFT: “An extensive police report exists from as far back as 1998, documenting Sandusky inappropriately touching a young boy.” Moreover, consider the way police forces around the country cover up most of the crime, including rape, that occurs on college campuses. Still, if Paterno shouldn’t have gone to the Penn State police, he absolutely should have gone public and spoken to the media after it became clear that the university administration intended to sweep Sandusky under the carpet as they and the police had done previously. Paterno should have threatened to resign then, but failing that, he should have resigned immediately once the media storm began. In fact, I have some serious questions about this story erupting so soon after Paterno broke the all-time coaching wins record, as it appears someone with links to Penn State was waiting until that happened before going public about Sandusky. There will be more nasty revelations coming, that is almost guaranteed.

However, don’t kid yourself into thinking that the gay rape scandal at Penn State is the least bit unusual. Most, not many, but most, such offenses are swept under the table by organizations from the Roman Catholic Church to your local high school. The sub-optimal, self-interested behavior of men like McQueary and Paterno is the norm. And the police forces of the USA have swept far more wrongdoing under the carpet than most people would like to believe. There are very, very few individuals who are willing to risk their jobs and reputations when the organization decides to handle a crime of this sort “internally”.

I’m not saying this to defend Paterno or McQueary. If it is still deemed appropriate to fire men and women from their jobs for moral failings, then they should certainly be fired. However, I am not sure that this is presently the case in the modern USA, given that one cannot deny employment to a homosexual, an adulterer, or a murderer of unborn children for their proven moral failings. Regardless, it is wildly naive to pretend that most people would have behaved much differently when faced with that situation. Some would, but most demonstrably would not. If heroism and strong moral character are necessary aspects of retaining one’s job, the unemployment rate will soon be well north of 75 percent.

UPDATE – My suspicions were correct. “The VP who heard the grad assistant’s claim was in charge of the campus police. He did nothing. Paterno got the witness to the head of the campus law enforcement agency who was supposed to know that a crime was being reported to him.” In other words, Paterno did tell the police, who then did nothing.

UPDATE II – And the next phase of the scandal looks as if it will go well beyond the university’s football program:
“Madden stated that two “prominent columnists” are currently investigating a rumor that Jerry Sandusky’s Second Mile Foundation, a non-profit organization aimed to serve underprivileged youths, was “pimping out young boys to rich (Penn State) donors.” Madden went on to say that Jerry Sandusky was told by those running the show at Penn State football that Sandusky had to retire after allegations made in 1998 that the defensive coordinator was guilty of “improper conduct with an underage male.” Sandusky, thought by some to be Joe Paterno’s successor at the time, abruptly and somewhat shockingly retired from coaching in 1999. It actually gets worse. Madden went on to say “When Sandusky quit, everybody knew; not just at Penn State. It was a very poorly kept secret around college football, in general. That is why he never coached in college football again and retired at the relatively young age of 55, young for a coach.””

This scandal is going to end up being about a lot more than one record-setting football coach. And don’t imagine that Penn State is the only place where the gay mafia is doing this sort of thing; homosexual pedophiles are more than 14 times more likely to be caught abusing boys than heterosexual pedophiles are caught abusing girls. Watch for the predictable and nonsensical attempts to claim that men who like to rape boys are not homosexual.

Down to the wire

Some of my 2011 economic predictions are bang on the trend, but may not happen as described by the end of the year. Specifically 8 and 9.

8. There will be a serious Euro crisis, most likely brought about by a sovereign default or a nation announcing it will be leaving the Euro. Italy is the most likely candidate.

Political and economic crisis in Italy spurred fears of a split in the euro zone with borrowing costs for Europe’s third biggest economy near unsustainable levels and the bloc unable to afford a bailout.

Yeah, that doesn’t look too bad at the moment. Greek is already in technical default with the 2-year bond up to 108% and the one-year at 222%. Double your money! The big banks simply don’t want to call it that because doing so will trigger all the credit default swaps that are hanging over their heads. And Italy will pull out of the Euro sooner or later, but not necessarily by December 31st.

9. One U.S. state and at least three major cities (100k population plus) will attempt to file for bankruptcy or federal bailout. (It’s unclear if states can file for bankruptcy and public employee unions will oppose the city filings.)

Alabama’s Jefferson County filed for bankruptcy court protection on Wednesday in the biggest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history. Commissioners for the county, which is home to Birmingham, the state’s biggest city and economic powerhouse, voted 4-1 to declare bankruptcy after meeting behind closed doors for two days in a last ditch-attempt to restructure its debt out of court.

Harrisburg also filed for bankruptcy this year and I thought it counted until I learned it’s only got a population of 50,000. You’d think I would have remembered that since I went to college about an hour away… of course, I never, ever went there, which probably should have been my first clue. I’d count Jefferson County and its 658,466 population but not Harrisburg. The big question, of course, is the state of Illinois. That’s the state I expect to declare bankruptcy first.

It does, however, look as if the blog will just barely make it to the predicted 2,750,000 for the year, up 16% from last year’s 2,370,028. On the other hand, the number of bank failures has decreased significantly in 2011, at this rate it may not even break 100.

The gang that can’t shoot straight

The Harassinator’s team raises more questions about his competence as an executive:

Based upon information available at the time of Mr. Block’s Tuesday night interview on Fox News, the campaign was led to believe that Mr. Josh Kraushaar, currently with the National Journal and a former employee of Politico, was the son of Karen Kraushaar. Mr. Josh Kraushaar is in fact, not related to Ms. Karen Kraushaar.

You’re already in a hole. You’ve already developed what is rapidly approaching a Clintonian reputation for playing fast and loose with the truth. So why not keep digging? Being a gunslinger really isn’t impressive when you keep shooting yourself in the foot.

The fearful foundations of the Fourth Reich

I wrote that a few years ago in a column about TARP. But things are arguably even worse in Europe, where the bankers have forced two non-democratic changes in government in Greece and Italy. But don’t think things can’t go from bad to worse; the normally sane Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is freaked out to the point that he is calling for diplomatic and economic war rather than simply allowing the whole debacle to collapse under its own weight.

In Italy they have already made matters worse. I doubt that much will change with “technocratic governments” in either Greece and Italy, yet immense damage has been done to democratic accountability. The EU Project has become both dangerous and insane….

You cannot allow the biggest bankruptcy in history to run its course – with calamitous domino implications – before all options have been exhausted.

One can only guess what is happening in the great global centres of power, but it would not surprise me if US President Barack Obama and China’s Hu Jintao start to intervene very soon, in unison and with massive diplomatic force. One can imagine joint telephone calls to Chancellor Angela Merkel more or less ordering her country to face up to the implications of the monetary union that Germany itself created and ran (badly).

Yes, this means mobilizing the full-firepower of the ECB – with a pledge to change EU Treaty law and the bank’s mandate – and perhaps some form of quantum leap towards a fiscal and debt union.

In other words, because the EU is an evil financial empire on the verge of collapse, the US and China should intervene, prop it up, and help it transform itself into the literal Fourth Reich. Since Evans-Pritchard has generally been an intelligent and reasonable observer of past EU antics, the hysterical nature of this column should suffice to demonstrate the extraordinarily dangerous nature of the situation.

And he’s wrong. The bankruptcy is going to happen no matter what measures are taken. The financial media has learned nothing from 2008. Desperately delaying the necessary surgery is not going to improve the chances that the patient will survive.