Author: VD

Mailvox: the tide turns

Slowly, admittedly, one woman at a time. But it turns:

We hosted a wedding at our home this past weekend that brought in family we haven’t seen for a while, to be sure one couple we haven’t talked with since my new understanding of the nature of women and the destructiveness of feminism. I’m committed to do my part to address it whenever I see it so I thought I’d share with you one of the discussions we had. I’m embarrassed to admit that a year ago, I would have agreed with this woman. I am so thankful that I have come to understand men, more importantly, my husband. I cringe now when listening to feminist women and their rants.

We talked with this couple that I’m related to until the early morning hours two nights in a row. The more comfortable they got with us, the more truth came out about their seemingly perfect relationship. The situation is typical; she has a “career,” divides everything equally, their marriage is 50/50, he brings her coffee in the morning and takes the kids to daycare, she is overwhelmed with her career, household tasks, children etc… oh, and she is on anti-anxiety medication and repeatedly denies sex with him due to her “not being in the mood.”

She told us about one night, while relaxing in the hot tub, he confessed to her, “I have never cheated on you.” The response that followed is far from what he expected. She became enraged…. The intimate and honest moment completely backfired on the guy. She went on to explain to us that she is not impressed with his ability to remain faithful, after all, it is what is expected. She piously expressed what is required to remain married to her. The first of which is faithfulness. As he started slumping in his seat, I decided to deliver a beat down, it went something like this: “You should feel honored and respectful of him for the commitment he’s made to you.

While he’s been working with hot young women, traveling with hot young women, propositioned by hot young women, and selling clothes to more hot young women, he has remained faithful to you. He’s watched as other men, friends of his, have not done the same. (Across the table he is nodding in agreement.) He has overcome demons and lustful thoughts and has kept his fidelity. You should have told him how blessed you are to have a man of strength, but you don’t understand the nature of men. You don’t understand just what he was telling you.

So in your overreacting, irrational nature, you verbally destroyed him. His confession was met with disapproval and rejection. Had you taken a moment to think rationally about the situation, you would have seen this as an intimate moment of truth and honesty. You do not belong on a pedestal, you are just as fallible. And with all of your glaring weaknesses, he is faithful to your marriage.”

My husband was able to discuss a bit about Game with him and will do so more when we see them again in a few weeks. The focus I will maintain with her is overcoming this dominating princess mentality that she has had.

It’s quite impressive that a woman, particularly one recently converted out of feminism, should be bold enough to take another woman publicly to task in this regard. And while I don’t disagree with anything she has written, she does appear to have missed what most men will assume to be the logical explanation for the burst of inappropriate anger: the woman has already been unfaithful herself and his confession of faithfulness was heaping coals on her head. This isn’t necessarily the case, but it was my read on the situation.

After all, the cynical voice of male experience muses, the marital expectations can’t possibly be the real reason for the rage or the woman would not have said they were.

The brave struggle of the post-scientist

Yes, climate “scientists” are certainly struggling to explain a lot of things. This reminds me, whatever happened to all those recent claims of “the hottest year ever”?

Exponents of global warming have struggled to explain why temperatures have declined in recent years instead of rising in line with the significant increase in greenhouse gas emissions. Researchers now claim that sulphur emissions from power plants in China are blocking sunlight and having a cooling effect on the atmosphere, cancelling out the effect of global warming.

The impact of the sulphur emissions has combined with a cooler stage of the sun’s cycle and a change from the El Nino to the La Nina weather system in the South Atlantic has kept temperatures artificially low, the experts argued.

If true, this could mean a change in the Sun’s 11-year cycle along with measures to refine Chinese coal boilers will cause temperatures to rise significantly.

First, I think it’s worth pointing out that until rather recently, the global warming scammers were claiming that the temperatures were rising in line with their predictions. They were cherry-picking the temperature data, but apparently the cooling trend is too large and they can’t “hide the non-incline” any longer. Second, I note that if not true, this means that these intrepid “scientists” will manufacture with yet another excuse to explain why they are still correct despite the increasing mass of empirical evidence that disproves their predictions.

Recall what I have said on numerous occasions before. Once a “science” starts manufacturing epicycles on a regular basis, it’s all over but for the burial of the previous generation (or three) of failed scientists. If the die-hard Darwinists are any example, it may take another 150 years before they begin to openly admit that their core hypothesis is simply wrong. But skeptics can be relatively certain that the die is already cast.

The West hasn’t merely entered a post-Christian phase, it appears to be on the verge of entering a post-scientific one.

Calvin Coolidge on the 4th

Chad the Elder highlights an important historical speech by one of the greatest American presidents:

“Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man…are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the religious convictions…Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish.”

He also observes that the Declaration’s principles are final, not to be discarded in the name of progress. To deny the truth of human equality, or inalienable rights, or government by consent is not to go forward but backward—away from self-government, from individual rights, from the belief in the equal dignity of every human being….

We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first…If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things which are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed. We must keep replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame, the altar fires before which they worshipped.”

This illuminates the great blunder of the self-styled “rational materialists”. Because they know nothing of history, they assume that the fruits of Christendom are its foundations. Christianity alone did not create the freedom and subsequent wealth of the West, but it was one of the most important elements. And without that element, without a population steeped in that element, it is logically apparent that the fruits of it will gradually wither, one by one.

Coolidge was merely recognizing a truth that was equally obvious to the Founding Fathers and astute visitors such as de Tocqueville alike. The concept of “Progress”, which itself is an evil fruit of a 19th century Christian heresy, is nothing more than a descending return to the historical norms of impoverished slaves forcibly ruled by an immoral and unaccountable elite.

WND Column

9/11 is now a joke

Although a few cynical observers anticipated that Barack Obama, the erstwhile peace candidate, would not end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – remember, he beat out Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination largely on the grounds of her pro-war positions – no one was cynical enough to foresee that his occupation of the presidency would lead to the U.S. military fighting no less than six wars in its third year under his command.

Republicans who have resolutely supported the ongoing wars of democratic imperialism over the last 10 years are long overdue to answer some very serious questions about the strategic sanity of America’s continuous military aggression, particularly now that American troops have returned to the site of their last military defeat in Somalia.

A cogent argument for isolationism

It would appear that some members of one of the world’s more more vibrant cultures fail to fully appreciate the willingness of the U.S. government to encourage the mass migration of their fellow citizens or its position on the evils of certain pharmaceuticals:

A spray-painted sign threatening death for U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents was found Friday next to a school in a northern Mexico state capital, officials said. Addressed with profanity to “Gringos (D.E.A.),” the unsigned graffiti warned: “We know where you are and we know who you are and where you go. We are going to chop off your (expletive) heads.”

One wonders how long police enthusiasm for the drug war will persist once they find themselves actually fighting the sort of war where they are no longer considered off limits. Why would anyone in Mexico even have an opinion on U.S. agencies if said agencies were not interfering in Mexican internal affairs? One tends to doubt many Mexicans harbor similar ill will towards the Dutch equivalent of Housing and Urban Development.

The Crüel World of R. Scött Bâkkër

After some back-and-forth discussions pursuant to my opining on the New Nihilism of George R.R. Martin, Joe Abercrombie and others in a post entitled The Decline and Fall of the Fantasy Novel, I found myself interested in the works of my interlocutor, who happened to be the author of The Prince of Nothing series as well as a second series entitled The Aspect Emperor. It’s too soon to write a review, as I have only finished the first book in the series, The Darkness That Comes Before. However, there are already five things that are readily apparent about Mr. Bakker’s fiction:

Read the rest at The Blâck Gátë

The original MPAI

“[B]efore some audiences not even the possession of the exactest knowledge will make it easy for what we say to produce conviction. For argument based on knowledge implies instruction, and there are people one cannot instruct.”
– Rhetoric, Aristotle

With the benefit of an additional 2,333 years of human history, the only way this statement could be improved upon would be to replace the word “some” with “most”.

Check under the math

It’s always a good idea to verify that you’re not being subjected to a snow job. Or worse, subjecting yourself to one:

One of the most common errors in applied mathematical analysis is to fail to notice when a mathematical argument proves too much. This occurs when the same argument can be deployed more generally than in the particular case being considered, and in other cases where it can be deployed it leads to conclusions that are clearly absurd.[2] Though this can occur more generally — in nonmathematical reasoning — it is a particularly acute danger in applied mathematics, due to the fact that understanding mathematical arguments generally requires a high level of training and intellectual effort. It is very easy to get lost in equations and theorems and fail to see the forest for the trees.
An Example of Applied Mathematics Going Horribly Wrong

Let me give you an example of this phenomenon in action. The Australian government recently announced that it will attempt to enact legislation to impose a tax on industrial carbon-dioxide emissions, with some of the revenue being earmarked as compensation for affected consumers. At a pro-government political rally in Sydney, a young activist proudly displayed what he clearly thought to be a devastating economic argument in favor of this “carbon-pricing” scheme.

To those readers who have not studied neoclassical microeconomics, this is probably just a big bunch of gibberish. But to those who have, it should look quite familiar. The graph is a “utility analysis,” which purports to show that imposing a tax on polluting products (which increases their price) and simultaneously giving compensation back to consumers would make them better off than they were initially — in other words, it purports to show that the Australian government’s proposed scheme, or something like it, would make people better off.

This is a classic example of a mathematical analysis that proves too much. Notice, in the graph in the sign, that the two products are labeled “C” (for clean products) and “P” (for polluting products). Although they are labeled in this way, the fact that the horizontal axis represents the consumption of polluting products plays absolutely no part in the analysis. There is nothing in the graph representing the pollution that these products cause, and so the label is merely a name. The letter “P” is nothing more than an algebraic symbol, one that could just as easily stand for pies, pastries, printers, pizzas, polka lessons, picture frames, pole dancing, ponies, popcorn, pool tables, poppy-seed muffins, pornography, postcards, potatoes, potpourri, poultry, pumpkins, puppies, pudding, or any other good or service (including goods and services that don’t start with the letter “P”).

Thus, by the exact same mathematical argument, the graph implicitly purports to show that a government can make people better off by taxing any good and then compensating the consumers of that good. Though the government taxes the polluting products in the graph, the sign maker could just as easily have switched the labels on the axes so that the government taxes the clean products, and the result, according to the same analysis, would still be a consumer who is better off.

Actually, one of the problems that I occasionally encounter is that if I spend too long analyzing something, it eventually all starts to look completely nonsensical. I thought I had finished a draft of the third inflation video last night, then found myself going back and checking on a few details… and eventually got to the point where even a simple calculation like the difference between nominal and real GDP was beginning to look like an ancient series of glyphs scratched out by the Mad Arab. At one point, I had either proved that inflation cannot, in fact, exist, or that there has not been any economic growth since approximately 1566. Color me skeptical.

I don’t think it helped that I’d been reading a few chapters from the Aristotle’s Rhetoric earlier in the day. Which, I notice, makes it clear that the sign referenced in the article is an enthymeme attempting to pass itself off as a syllogism. However, as Mr. O’Neill adroitly demonstrates, it is only an apparent syllogism and therefore the enthymeme is a false one.

Anyhow, I am prescribed a solution: close the spreadsheets, put down the Aristotle, and find a nice, mindless novel to read. As it happens, I’d been meaning to get around to R. Scott Bakker’s books anyhow. So don’t expect much in the way of insight or brilliance this weekend.

Mexicans in Minnesota?

Operation Wetback II is long past overdue:

Many middle class people are leaving the state for Texas, Colorado, Nevada and Arizona, where taxes and the cost of living are lower. In the past decade, 1.5 million more people left California for other states than came to California from another part of the United States, according to analysis from the Public Policy Institute of California.

New births and international immigration make up the difference, but even immigration has slowed from sky-high rates in the 1990s, according to demographers, as people such as Maribel Mota, a recent arrival from Mexico, find themselves unemployed and behind on rent in the Golden State.

Mota, a 38-year-old who spoke to CNN through a translator, said she wants to go to Minnesota, where she hears there are more job opportunities and rent is lower. She’ll trade sun for snow, she said, if it means she can make ends meet.

No doubt those Californians won’t take long before setting about californicating their places of refuge. The problem is that if the legal immigrants are not sent back along with the illegal ones, it won’t be more than 20 years before the Aztlan independence movement becomes an issue. It’s pretty simple. Either the idiotic “melting pot” ideal is not only abandoned but aggressively rejected or the nation collapses amid civil war.