Author: VD

Quelle surprise

The Magic Mustache decides he won’t run; NRO and VP are the only two sites to even notice:

NR favorite John Bolton, a former United Nations ambassador, has decided against a presidential run. “It was a very difficult decision,” he said in an interview with Greta Van Susteren of Fox News. “My view has not changed one iota that we need a much more robust discussion of national-security issues as part of this presidential campaign.”

The assertion that John Bolton was electable as U.S. president while simultaneously claiming Ron Paul is not is arguably the single dumbest argument to ever appear in National Review. It seriously raised the question about whether the magazine had not only devolved into mindless neoconservatism, but outright retardation. John Bolton not only has a smaller following than Ron Paul does, he has a smaller following than I do. He has a smaller following than the average high school cheerleader.

As for foreign policy, it doesn’t mean jack squat when you’re bankrupt. Foreign policy is entirely irrelevant now, except in the sense of European sovereign debt bailouts.

Questions for evolutionists

It should be interesting to see the answers to these questions presented by the Question Evolution campaign, assuming of course that an evolutionist who is capable of responding to substantive questions with answers that do not boil down to “you are stupid and ignorant of science to even ask me such a thing” can be found.

How did the DNA code originate?

How did sex originate?

Why are the (expected) countless millions of transitional fossils missing?

How do ‘living fossils’ remain unchanged over supposed hundreds of millions of years, if evolution has changed worms into humans in the same time frame?

How did blind chemistry create mind/intelligence?

Where are the scientific breakthroughs due to evolution?

The last question is of particular interest to me. It is my contention that evolution is, from a scientific perspective, an almost totally irrelevant sideshow. The number of scientists who have actually used evolution for anything over the last 150 years is dwarfed by the number of scientists who are still desperately trying to provide a scientific foundation for TENS. The only reason evolution is assumed to be of such presumed importance is due to its philosophical usefulness to materialist philosophers and pedopropagandists like Richard Dawkins.

Germany chickens out

Faced with a clear and open violation of the German Constitution, the German Supreme Court unsurprisingly caved rather than risk undermining the supports that are propping up the banks of the European Union:

In a widely followed ruling on Wednesday, Germany’s Constitutional Court upheld the legality of Berlin’s rescue packages for debt-stricken euro zone countries, but said any future bailouts must be approved by a parliamentary panel…. The court rejected three appeals against the legality of earlier bailouts, which have stirred a furious political debate among Germans. The suits had been brought by a coalition of German lawmakers, economists and business executives who argued that Germany’s participation in loans and support funds for Greece undermined Parliament and infringed constitutional provisions underpinning the country’s democracy.

In other words, there is no longer any more law in Germany than there is in the United States. That should work out well. All this worldwide government kowtowing to the banks in a futile and desperate attempt to keep them from going under has done is to make it perfectly clear to all and sundry that there is no law. The law is now a transparent fiction. All of the words written down on paper are entirely meaningless. Read the English translation, it is a masterpiece of legal weaselry.

The world is rapidly entering into a literally Satanic state where do what thou wilt truly is the whole of the law.

And clearly, going to mark-to-fantasy should fix the whole thing. After all, it has worked so well in the USA. “My gnome, high above the Alps is hearing that the EU is considering suspension of bank mark to market acctg.”

The PZ Myers Memorial Debate update I

While I can’t say many of the atheists who have been demanding that I make a positive case for the existence of gods for literally years have exactly covered themselves with glory in their willingness to step into the intellectual Octagon and take their chances, I have to give due credit to Gay Germ, Mark DiStefano, Roffle, and Thrasymachus, who, unlike the rest of their fellow non-believers, were willing to publicly defend the atheist position.

However, since Dominic Saltarelli did not hesitate to step up to the plate, and because he is known and respected as an intelligent commenter who originally hails from richarddawkins.net, I have decided to accept his challenge as the atheist champion. Just to make it interesting, Dominic and I have decided that the first round will be in English, the second round in Italian, and the third round in Latin.

The first PZ Myers Memorial Debate features Dominic Saltarelli vs Vox Day and concerns the evidence and logic for the existence or nonexistence of gods.

Now, as to the judges, we appear to be rather light on agnostics, which I suppose isn’t all that surprising because agnostics are naturally less interested in the subject and can’t be bothered with it. Here are the proposed judges, and I invite the relevant groups to discuss them. Please do not suggest any new names now, as everyone has had sufficient time to come forward.

Christian: Markku, Ms Pilgrim, cl, Stilicho, Josh, Gene, Gregory, Salt.

Agnostic: Crowhill, Alexamenos

Atheist: Mark Di Stefano, Thrasymachus, Roffle, ScottScheule

Now is the time to for discussion among the three groups in order to settle upon a judge who is deemed to be representative, impartial, and intelligent. I have no preference on either the agnostic or atheist judges, but for the Christian judge, I suggest that cl might be ideal because he is not a reader of this blog. However, I leave that for the Christians here to decide. After the three judges are selected, I will ask Dominic if he has any objection to any of them, and then we can move onto a discussion on how the scoring will be done. After that, Dominic and I will send our first round submissions, (which will consist of an initial statement and a response to the other’s statement), to the judges; the following day all four pieces will be posted here for general perusal. The judges will be expected to post their scores, along with any relevant comments supporting those scores, within two days of receiving the submissions.

E se non è gia tutto chiaro, la cosa delle lingue era solo un scherzo. Naturalmente faremmo tutto il dibattimento in latina, come i clàssici.

To protect and be serviced

No wonder walking the beat is so exhausting:

Combining data on police arrests from the Chicago Police Department and the results of the authors’ own survey, the study estimates that prostitutes are arrested only once in every 450 tricks, but only one in ten of these arrests will lead to a prison sentence. Johns are arrested even less frequently, with only one john arrested for every 1,200 tricks.

But perhaps more striking is the rate at which a police officer can extort free sex from a prostitute. Levitt and Venkatesh found that about one in 30 tricks performed by a prostitute is a freebie to the police in return for avoiding arrest. In other words, a prostitute is more likely to have sex with an on-duty police officer than to be arrested by one.

You know, it’s remarkable that all those good men on the police force never appear to notice that tiny number of bad apples in their midst boffing all the hookers.

They can’t read, they can’t write

Naturally, it’s the perfect time to teach them quasi-scientific myths:

Children as young as five should have lessons in the basic principles of evolution, a leading atheist has said. Professor Richard Dawkins claims Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is so important that every primary school in Britain should have it on their curriculum, he told The Times.

The evolutionary biologist believes youngsters are able to grasp the basic principles of the theory which underpin the study of biology.

Keep this in mind the next time you hear an evolutionist posturing as a critical thinker. This should remove any last vestiges of doubt that Dawkins is no longer even pretending to be a scientist, but is nothing more than a full-fledged pedopropagandist for atheism and scientific materialism. It’s also amusing to see his insistence that children who can’t read can grasp the basic principles of the theory while his acolytes insist that university educated adult Mensans cannot.

Even if it is 100 percent true, evolution isn’t important at all. Even if every single transition from amoeba to homo sapiens sapiens could be mapped out precisely, this will have literally zero material impact on anyone, except for a very small number of professionals working in the field. But it is somewhat amusing to think of what the graduates of schools in which 12 years of what passes for education are dedicated to recycling, gay indigenous women’s studies, and evolution in lieu of reading, writing and math would look like. Only one thing is certain. A more sanctimonious and less useful collection of little bastards would be hard to find.

Anyhow, neither evolution nor science, except a single course on general science, should be taught in high schools. Teaching science is a complete waste of time at that level, much less doing so any earlier, and it is quite obvious, from talking to any high school graduate, that practically none of the students who are presently forced to sit through science instruction retain any as much as a genuinely interested ten year old.

You know, I always liked her

But after seeing this, I have to say that if it weren’t for SB, I’d be forced to conclude Mila Kunis is, in fact, the Platonic ideal of woman:


Lots of women pretend to like games and sports since it’s an easy and intelligent way of winning favor with men. But it’s never hard to tell who is serious and who isn’t. It is interesting how your guild gets to know you over time without having to meet you. My old guild used to refer to me as Shakespeare after the incident when I happened to offer a some appropriate commentary concerning the amusingly panicked flight of a gnome from an Ursan village.

Mailvox: the benefits of post-mortem battery

RM appreciates the number performed on the Dead Horse of 2004:

Back in ’04 you went adnausem on “Me so Michelle” about why the INJ could never have invaded the US. The other day I read a post on a blog about the “Rifle behind every blade of grass” quote attributed to Yamamoto. I confidently called BS based on your blog from ’04 based on what I learned. Took little other than a brief search of WND archives to get the pertinent facts from a column.

And here some of you thought it was a wasted month!

WND column

The Christian Nation

“While I was in America, a witness, who happened to be called at the assizes of the county of Chester (state of New York), declared that he did not believe in the existence of God or in the immortality of the soul. The judge refused to admit his evidence, on the ground that the witness had destroyed beforehand all the confidence of the court in what he was about to say. The newspapers related the fact without any farther comment. The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live.”
– Alexis de Tocqueville, “American Institutions and Their Influence,” 1851

One of the repetitive themes that developed in The Irrational Atheist over the course of its writing is the profound historical unreliability of atheists. Atheists, particularly the aggressive variety, tend to repeat the same talking points over and over with such assurance that the average historically illiterate individual, regardless of his religious faith, has a tendency to accept them at face value. But this is foolish, as historical arguments presented by atheists almost invariably rely upon taking one small piece of historical evidence and twisting it beyond all recognition while simultaneously ignoring the larger part of the historical record.

Mailvox: a skeptic’s case

EG wonders how I would go about attempting to defend evolutionary theory:

Let’s assume that you were not skeptical of evolution by (probably) natural selection, and let assume that you wanted to try to give a defense of the ‘theory’. How would you proceed to salvage the theory and make it eminently attractive to the skeptics and the deniers?

The first thing I would do is walk through the logic of the theory in reference to itself alone. By this, I mean not proposing it as a more sensible alternative to something else or getting sidetracked in discussing other matters. For example, no amount of Keynesian critique will succeed in establishing relevance of the Austrian Business Cycle. This should allow one to identify the key problems that require empirical support.

The second thing I would do is marshal the empirical facts. This is a methodical, mathematical approach that appears to be foreign to most biologists, for example, my erstwhile biology tutor was outright confused when I asked him what the average rate of evolution was, even though, if evolution did indeed take place, logic dictates that rate must exist as a matter of historical fact and be accordingly calculable according to a variety of metrics. Of course, given the poor performance of econometrics versus Austrian logic and behavioral empiricism, perhaps we should not expect too much from any theoretical evolumetrics.

The third step is comparing the logic with the metrics, to show that both are well in accord with each other despite the unavoidable gaps in the latter, and how the combination serves to provide meaningful and testable predictions even though it is presently incomplete. While this wouldn’t serve as a proof, it would amount to a reasonable working assumption.

Needless to say, this bears almost no similarity to the “assum, imagine, and apply” method which is utilized by most advocates of evolutionary theory. Because they have no respect for logic and subscribe to Bacon’s dogmatic empiricism, they begin with the second step rather than the first and prevent themselves from being able to progress to the third step. Their tactical problem is that while scientific empiricism works very well within small time limits, it is like trying to use a microscope to look at a blue whale when considering matters that stretch outside an observable time scale. Thus they are forced to use logic without ever admitting it or having any familiarity with it, usually with the consequences one would expect.

And their strategic problem is that in most cases, evolutionary theory is intended as a weapon to serve their real object, which is the advancement of materialism, Dennett’s skyhook. The reasonable working assumption that my method could theoretically provide simply isn’t enough to serve their larger purposes, which tends to support their blind adherence to the purely empirical and deceitful insistence that the unprovable has, in fact, been proved.