Another flavor of the month has passed its sell-by date. To no one’s surprise, except perhaps those Republicans in desperate search of a get-out-of-racism-free card, the Magic Negro, Part II: Republican edition has “suspended” his campaign, thus marking the latest collapse of a nominal frontrunner. If we are to take the polls seriously, this leaves Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney as the two leading candidates for the Republican nomination, which is arguably the least attractive leadership pair on offer since the Polish people were divided between Hitler and Stalin.
Author: VD
An upset in Iowa?
Ron Paul is coming on strong:
A brand-new Iowa Poll, just published by the Des Moines Register, reports the often-dismissed 76-year-old Paul has surged past one-time front-runner Mitt Romney and moved into second place, with his sights set on the current front-runner Newt Gingrich.
According to the new poll results, Gingrich leads the pack at 25% of likely caucus-goers with less than a month until they’re held. Paul is second with 18% and Romney now trails with 16%.
It would certainly be interesting to see how far the media is willing to go in pretending Ron Paul doesn’t exist if he were to win Iowa. It would certainly be hard to maintain the unelectable theme. I imagine the big story would be the “unexpected” strength of Mitt Romney’s third-place showing.
VPFL Week 12
58 Moundsview Meerkats (8-4-0)
55 MS Swamp Spartans (6-6-0)
79 RR Redbeards (5-6-1)
76 Greenfield Grizzlies (7-5-0)
81 Bane Sidhe (6-6-0)
63 GroverBeach Quixotes (4-8-0)
84 Bailout Banksters (7-4-1)
30 Cranberry Rhyneauxs (4-8-0)
67 Macau Marauders (5-6-1)
56 Green Reverends (6-5-1)
The SF classics and the human condition
Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that I am a fervent believer in the Flying Spaghetti Monster. And let us further suppose that I am utterly convinced that the tenets of the Pastafarian Church not only represent the present pinnacle of human progress, but are guaranteed to remain valid and morally definitive for so long as our species shall fail to evolve. And finally, let us also suppose that many of the classics of the science fiction and fantasy genre are deemed to infringe in a variety of ways upon the tenets of Pastafarianism. Am I then justified in claiming that these works are not classics, indeed, cannot be considered classics because they violate the Pastafarian sensibilities that every right-thinking human being knows are true? Am I perhaps even justified in claiming that no one should be permitted to read, much less enjoy, works that offend fundamental human decency as defined by the true interpretations of the various blots and sigils left to humanity by the Flying Spaghetti Monster as he passes overhead in all his noodly goodness?
Even if we cannot justify these things, surely I, as a fine, upstanding human, Pastafarian, and scholar, cannot be expected to slog my way through any literary work that is insufficiently respectful of the societal mores that, if not necessarily dominant today, are assured to one day be accepted by all of humanity in the fullness of time!
Read the rest at The Black Gate
Mailvox: an easy choice
Jamsco asked me to consider presenting an argument for supporting Tebow and the Broncos versus an argument for supporting the Vikings. I rejected that because there is absolutely no chance I would ever support any team against the Vikings. I find The Miracle of Tebow to be even more entertaining than the Tarvaris Jackson Experiment, and I wish the young man well in general, but against the Vikings?
Never. The only circumstance in which I might consider supporting another team against the Vikings is if one of my children was playing against them. And even then, I’d probably hope for an excellent individual performance in defeat.
However, I can say that seeing the Vikings lose to Tebow and the Broncos on Sunday would be less painful than most historical Vikings defeats. I rank Vikings defeats on the following 10-point pain scale:
10- Dallas Hail-Mary game. Pearson absolutely committed offensive pass interference.
9 – Oakland. Super Bowl XI.
8 – Atlanta. 38 in 98. This was dreadful, but unlike the other two games, I didn’t actually cry. One of the guys at the bar in Florida did, however.
7 – New Orleans. NFC Championship aka The Greased Pig Game. This probably would have been an 8 if I was younger and was still capable of feeling normal human emotion. Also, New York 41-0. People tend to forget the Vikes were actually favored. Total disaster from the get-go.
6 – New England. The 28-27 game. How do you lose when you’re winning 27-0? Pittsburgh. Super Bowl IX. I didn’t expect the Vikings to win, but I still hoped. Washington. The Darren Nelson drop in the 1987 NFC championship. We would have crushed Denver too.
5 – Any loss to the Packers when the Vikings are favored. And pretty much any loss to the Lions. Not that the Lions are a rival, it’s just that it’s so unexpected.
4 – Arizona. 18-17 in 2003 to knock the Vikings out of the playoffs. Or any playoff loss in a year when the Vikes clearly aren’t good enough to compete.
3 – Any loss to the Packers when the Packers are the better team. Losing then isn’t surprising, it’s just annoying. As are the Packer fans. Or losing after leading by 10 or more in the third quarter. Or any loss in the second half of the season after starting 6-2 or better.
2 – A regular season loss.
1 – A preseason loss.
I would say that a loss to the Broncos would probably be about a 1.5, not because I’m cheering for Tebow, but because the season is shot anyhow and I’d just as soon see Frazier go. I see no reason to have any confidence in him. The Vikings run defense isn’t as epic as it was a few years ago, but it is still a top-10 run defense giving up only 99.6 YPG, which should slow down the top-ranked Denver running attack. The Vikings should win, even without Adrian Peterson, since their weak and wounded pass defense, (missing both starting corners and ranked 29th), should be capable of rising to the challenge posed by Tebow’s arm, and because the Denver defense simply isn’t as good as many casual observers imagine.
By the way, I always support the NFC North team in the playoffs. Bears, then Packers. I hate the NFC West. I don’t hate the NFC East, but I hate the way the media spends half their coverage on the NFC East and the other half on the rest of the league. And the NFC South still strikes me as a nonentity, the Saints one Super Bowl notwithstanding.
Anyhow, I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s game. You can always judge a player better when you see him play against a team you know well. I do wish Winfield wasn’t on IR; it would be fascinating to see if Denver could run his way or not… I’m betting not, but we won’t be able to find out.
Exit the Harassinator
You know, it really doesn’t bother me in the slightest to say “I told you so“.
Herman Cain, the insurgent populist whose candidacy has been ensnared by allegations of sexual impropriety, said Saturday that he is leaving the race for the Republican presidential nomination, saying that the allegations have cast a “cloud of doubt over me and this campaign.”
“As of today, with a lot of prayer and soul searching, I am suspending my presidential campaign,” he said at an event in Atlanta. “I am suspending my presidential campaign because of the continued distraction, the continued hurt . . . on me, on my family, not because we are not fighters, not because I am not a fighter.”
Herman Cain’s campaign was always a joke. He was never a serious candidate in the eyes of anyone with more than half a brain who bothered paying attention to what came out of his mouth after swirling around in his head.
I shall now commence to gargle with the sweet, saline goodness of Fred Backer’s tears
Homeschool or die
I’m about as cynical about the basic concept of public schooling as it is possible to be. And yet, the American “education” system still regularly manages to surprise me to the downside:
A 7-year-old boy is being investigated by his South Boston elementary school for possible sexual harassment after kicking another boy in the crotch. The first grader’s mother, Tasha Lynch, says she was shocked by the school’s decision.
“He’s 7 years old. He doesn’t know anything about sexual harassment,” she said.
Lynch’s son, Mark Curran, said the boy that he kicked had been bullying him on the school bus ride home from Tynan Elementary last week.
“He just all of a sudden came up to him, choked him. He wanted to take his gloves, and my son said, ‘I couldn’t breathe, so I kicked him in the testicles,’” said his mother.
Lynch described a phone call she received from the school explaining that the case will be treated like sexual harassment, due to what it considers inappropriate touching.
“‘Your son kicked a little boy in the testicles. We call that sexual harassment,’” Lynch said the school told her.
Apparently the schools wish parents to teach their children to die when they are being choked. Or something. In any event, it does suggest an alternative strategy for kids who are being bullied. The moment that a bully lays so much as a finger on you, charge him with sexual harassment. That should keep him and his parents busy for the next few weeks… and if he dares to say anything about it later, it’s a simple trip down to the counselor’s office to lay a second charge.
Of course, if you’re a parent, what on Earth are you thinking to leave your children in what has clearly become a complete madhouse? I know, I know, your school is different. The teachers are excellent. Your kids are more than fine. And you know absolutely everything that goes on inside their school building for 36 hours every week, right?
Parents of kids in public school are almost uniformly idiots, at least in this one regard. They always claim to know everything about their children’s schools, and yet I’ve never met a single one who could even tell me the ratio of teachers to administrative staff or the average number of children in a classroom. Most of them can’t even tell me what classes their kid has, let alone his daily schedule. Yeah, you totally know what’s going on there.
Exposing the injectors
The rabid “vaccinate everyone for everything” crowd likes to mock the vaccine realists as “anti-vaxxers” and “anti-science”, but the dishonesty and hollowness of their position is exposed every time the facts about vaccination manage to leak out into the mainstream:
Natasha Bita, a journalist for The Australian has just won a Walkley Award (the Australian equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize) for an in-depth article series on the CSL Afluria flu vaccine, a shot that caused convulsions in one percent of Australian infants who received it.
To put this vaccine scandal in perspective, the CDC states that ‘seizures can occur after vaccination,’ 33% of infants who have a first seizure will have more seizures and 10% of infants who have one seizure can develop epilepsy. According to the Merck Manual (the largest-selling medical textbook), seizures are a symptom of encephalitis, which the Merck Manual defines as a vaccine adverse reaction. Vaccine-induced encephalitis can leave a spectrum of permanent brain damage in its wake – post-encephalitic syndrome (aka epilepsy and autism). In other words, kids that have convulsions from Afluria can have lifelong neurological disabilities.
Incredibly, the defective CSL flu vaccine Afluria is still on the market in the US: FDA-approved and CDC-recommended. The only concession US vaccine authorities have made to this Afluria scandal is to raise the recommended age for this vaccine, but even that feeble response is colored by a direction to give Afluria to young kids anyway if no other flu vaccine is available.
One thing that few American pro-vaxxers understand is the extent to which their pro-vaccine enthusiasm is viewed as lunacy by the rest of the medical world. For example, the US vaccine schedule involves 2.4 times more vaccines before the age of two than the UK schedule. In the period in which infectious diseases were all but eliminated, children received ONE-FIFTH as many vaccines as they do now. It is profoundly and shamefully dishonest to pretend that it is in any way necessary to give FIVE TIMES MORE vaccines to children in order to accomplish what was already accomplished with a much more limited vaccine schedule.
What the irrational pro-vaxxers fail to realize, in their futile and stupid attempts to launch deceptive, emotion-based attacks on those who demonstrably know more about the relevant facts of the matter than they do, is that their efforts are counterproductive. Instead of engaging in reasoned discussion, they simply point and shriek like the global warming crowd. Not only are they completely unconvincing, but they are losing, as vaccination rates continue to fall.
When intelligent and concerned parents are told they are stupid and anti-science when they are merely asking intelligent and relevant questions instead of having their questions answered in a respectful manner, they are not going to obediently fall in line and get their kid injected. Instead, they are quite correctly going to conclude that there is no chance in Hell that they are going to pay any attention to what the hysterical pro-vaxxers say in the future.
Most pro-vaxxers simply haven’t thought through the costs and benefits to the average family. Nor have they ever considered that many families that don’t adhere to the vaccine schedule are doing so with the medical approval of their pediatricians who have seen one of their children have an adverse reaction. Once you’ve seen one child collapse unconscious or have a seizure, how completely and utterly stupid do you have to be to blindly proceed with the recommended vaccine schedule with that child or any of your other children?
Some vaccines make sense. Others don’t. That is the reality that the pro-vaxxers will have to get their heads around before anyone in the vaccine reality camp will pay any attention whatsoever to their emotion-laden rantings. Consider this: the fact that children need water in order to live is not a rational basis for drowning them on behalf of their health.
And just to be clear, I think it makes sense to vaccinate for tetanus, polio, and after the age of four, measles. It may make sense to vaccinate for some influenzas if a sufficiently deadly variant were to arise and begin spreading. But it makes no sense to vaccinate against most of the other diseases which are so seldom fatal and are so easily treated without hospitalization. I am not an “anti-vaxxer”, I am simply a vaccine realist. If the rabid vaxxers were as genuinely concerned about saving lives as they claim, they would occupy themselves with banning automobiles, not injecting children with various toxic substances.
So much for “scientific consensus”
The models were wrong, the predictions were wrong, and now the basic assumptions underlying the hypotheses appear to be wrong too:
The Economist reports on some new cutting-edge climate research published in a peer-reviewed article in Science that challenges some core green doom warnings. In particular, the study suggests that the probable sensitivity of the earth’s climate to increases in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is far lower than the assumptions traditionally used by the (already discredited) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Not only that, the authors find that the existence of a so-called “fat tail” — the notion that extreme temperature changes in response to increases in atmospheric CO2 are likely — is illusory.
The failure of the global warming “science” needs to be rubbed hard and repeatedly into the noses of all the scientists and science fetishists who claim that science cannot be questioned by non-scientists, or indeed, that their statements bear any more weight than those made by the fat homeless guy living in van DOWN BY THE RIVER!
Hide the decline
Economic statisticians can utilize the climate scientists’ trick too:
The jobless rate declined to 8.6 percent, the lowest since March 2009, from 9 percent, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. Payrolls climbed 120,000, with more than half the hiring coming from retailers and temporary help agencies, after a revised 100,000 rise in October. The median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey called for a 125,000 gain…..
The decrease in the jobless rate reflected a 278,000 gain in employment at the same time 315,000 Americans left the labor force. The labor participation rate declined to 64 percent from 64.2 percent.
This appears to be nothing more than the usual statistical shenanigans. By claiming that the labor force is shrinking, those who have left it are not counted as jobless, therefore unemployment is considered to have fallen, therefore more people are employed even though a smaller percentage of the growing population has jobs than before.
However, the more important number, the EPR, did continue to tick upwards to an unadjusted 58.7 percent, the same as last month. This means that the jobs situation is marginally better than one year ago, when it was 58.4 percent.