Author: VD

The source of evangelism

Christians are driven to evangelize out of duty or out of a sympathetic desire to prevent others from destruction. Other religions proselytize for similar reasons. But why do militant atheists evangelize so fervently? I suspect one reason may be from an instinctive demographic fear:

The World Values Survey, which covered 82 nations from 1981 to 2004, found that adults who attended religious services more than once a week had 2.5 children on average; while those who went once a month had two; and those who never attended had 1.67. Prof Rowthorn wrote: “The more devout people are, the more children they are likely to have.”

As Rowthorn notes, people do fall away from their childhood religions, although as I have shown in the past, this is also true of those with no childhood religion. But the demographic disadvantage means that the atheist community has to keep all of their children within the godless fold and deconvert one out of every three religious children just to keep pace with the growth of the religious community.

No wonder their evangelical efforts are so feverish. And no wonder their writings are so frequently tinged with despair, because their own children are converting to religion faster than religious children are converting out of it.

Shakespeare had it wrong

The first thing we do is bankrupt all the prospective lawyers.

YOU WENT TO LAW SCHOOL, YOU RAN UP A LOT OF DEBT, and now you can’t get admitted to the bar because having huge debts and no plan to pay them back fails the “character and fitness” test. What the hell kind of legal education system are we running where we charge people more than they can afford to get a legal education, and then prevent them from being lawyers because they can’t pay off their debts?

I don’t know, it strikes me as a rather good way of preemptively punishing those who thought to make a living by leeching off the blood of productive society. Since lawyers are literally officers of the court, which is to say the state, they’re just another unnecessary and unproductive layer of government. We’ve clearly reached that societal stage where, having plundered nearly as much of the private sector as possible, the various aspects of the public sector is now devouring itself.

Phantom income, real bonuses

You almost have to admire the insane insouciance of the bankers, who boldly invent fake profits in order to pay themselves gargantuan profit-shares as bonuses:

The giant US banks have been bailed out again from huge potential writeoffs by loosey-goosey accounting accepted by the accounting profession and the regulators. They are allowed to accrue interest on non-performing mortgages until the actual foreclosure takes place, which on average takes about 16 months.

All the phantom interest that is not actually collected is booked as income until the actual act of foreclosure. As a resullt, many bank financial statements actually look much better than they actually are. At foreclosure all the phantom income comes off the books of the banks.

This means that Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan and Wells Fargo, among hundreds of other smaller institutions, can report interest due them, but not paid, on an estimated $1.4 trillion of face value mortgages on the 7 million homes that are in the process of being foreclosed.

That does explain the slowdown in foreclosures rather nicely, doesn’t it. This is amazing news and makes the Enron accounting look downright angelic in comparison. It’s the equivalent of Intel booking income from the sales of millions of chips, then admitting 16 months later that it never actually sold anything. And it would certainly be an incredible way to launch a startup and take it public, assuming you could get it done in 16 months.

I’ve been reading the most excellent An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, specifically the chapter on the pre-Salamancan scholastics, and I have to admit that the medieval anti-usury arguments Rothbard criticizes are looking more and more reasonable in the light of the way modern banks have taken the core concepts of credit and interest that were originally derived from natural law and private property rights and turned them into a fraudulent and usurious monstrosity that completely defies reality, reason, and logic.

By the way, there will definitely be a future Voxiversity on Rothbard’s History. It is approximately 61.8 times more interesting and informative than AGD was.

Precision in biology

Only a 67% error rate. Why is that so completely unsurprising? I continue to find it remarkable that biologists insist on inserting their uneducated noses into other fields of study when they quite clearly have no idea what they’re doing in their own scientific discipline:

The world’s plant life is far less diverse than previously thought, with a review of about one million named plants finding that only one third of them are unique. The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, in southwestern London, has published “The Plant List” online Wednesday, updating a project conceived 130 years ago by the British naturalist Charles Darwin.

The list attempts to identify every plant known to science, and was begun in the 1880s with the help of a bequest from Darwin. The review found 300,000 unique species, and 480,000 synonyms for those species, meaning that many had been “discovered” and named several times by botanists. Another 260,000 names were listed as “unresolved,” meaning that botanists have so far been unable to determine whether they are a separate species of a duplication of one of the 300,000.

In the immortal words of Bill Belichick: “Do your job.” And yes, in answer to a question from one previous commenter, the fact that biologists can’t even be relied upon to correctly define a “species” or reliably identify them does very much call into serious question their various theories regarding the origin of those species. Or, you know, whatever they are.

“Well, we can’t tell you what it is, or even what “it” means, when we are examining what is right in front of us. But we can tell you with complete and utter confidence exactly how, and from what, these things that we can’t define or identify were developed thousands of years ago. And if you don’t believe us, then you just don’t understand science.”

Mmm-kay. I have come to the conclusion that many, if not most, biologists not only don’t grasp basic logic, they are not terribly clear on the concept of history either. Most people understand that if they said X yesterday and Y today, others will tend to find them less than perfectly credible and rather expect them to say Z tomorrow. The biologist, on the other hand, insists that X is really Y if you just squint hard enough and denies that there could ever possibly be Not-Y, not infrequently prior to Nature publishing an article declaring that Y, formerly believed to be X, has now been replaced by Z… or amusingly, in some cases, a new variant of X. And, as this botanical news yet again confirms, you don’t have to know what the variables are in order to recognize the dynamic pattern.

This was my favorite part: “Despite the surprising lack of diversity among plant life, the botanists and scientists associated with the project all hailed it as a milestone achievement for many different reasons.”

Congratulations, you finally figured out just how wildly inept your colleagues have been for the last 130 years. No doubt this very brief interregnum of inaccuracy will be rapidly and scientifically swept beneath the historical carpet. In fact, the error rate is worse than reported two-thirds; they were only able to specifically identify 29 percent since 25 percent are still “unresolved”. Now, no doubt this incident will tempt some intrepid devotee of Science Reason to resort to one of his favorite mantras: “science is self-correcting”. But as JQP has pointed out, this touching religious claim notwithstanding, science is not “self-correcting” in any way, shape, or form. Accountants also audit each other’s work and actually do so much more often than scientists attempt to replicate other scientists’ experiments… to the extent that scientists even do any experiments in the first place. And yet we don’t consider accounting to be “self-correcting” simply because the books may be audited at some point in the future. As for peer review, that is more commonly known as “editing” by the rest of the publishing world. There is a word that best describes any field in which news reports regularly involve the words “than previously thought”. That word is “unreliable”.

Even economists, whose imprecision borders on legendary at this point, usually manage to do better than this. Can you imagine if the quarterly GDP revisions reported $14.4 trillion for Q4 2010, subsequently revised to $4.2 trillion? (The scary thing is that’s not actually unthinkable if one considers the amount of credit supporting those numbers.) Or if Bloomberg reported that the Dow dropped from 11,755 to 3,391. The only reason biologists can get away with this astounding level of imprecision is that their butterfly collecting and theoretical fairy tales don’t have much material significance in the real world.

More biologist brilliance

I have no doubt that many young schoolchildren with an interest in the life sciences dream of studying biology, traveling to exotic foreign lands, studying wonderful animals… and killing them:

Some scientists studying penguins may be inadvertently harming them with the metal bands they use to keep track of the tuxedo-clad seabirds, a new study says. The survival rate of King penguins with metal bands on their flippers was 44 percent lower than those without bands and banded birds produced far fewer chicks, according to new research published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The theory is that the metal bands — either aluminum or stainless steel — increase drag on the penguins when they swim, making them work harder, the study’s authors said.

Science: it’s all about the self-correction. And here you thought I was exaggerating when I said that biologists are rather stupid. They can’t even figure out that strapping metal onto swimming birds just might be a problem, and yet they expect us to swallow their latest Evolutionary Fairy TaleStable Strategy they just concocted to replace the one that previously proved absurd. I probably shouldn’t keep cracking jokes about empirically testing natural selection by painting polar bears pink… no doubt there is a biologist out there who would think it’s a great idea.

R.I.P. Dick Winters

The Band of Brothers has lost its leader:

Dick Winters, the former World War II commander whose war story was told in the book and miniseries “Band of Brothers,” has died. Dick Winters led a quiet life on his Fredericksburg farm and in his Hershey home until the book and miniseries “Band of Brothers” threw him into the international spotlight.

Strangely, this marks the second time Maj. Winters has died in the last month. Ender managed to get him killed as he led Easy Company to victory at the very end of Purple Heart Lane, the ASLSK scenario which recreates the machine gun ambush at Carentan on June 12, 1944.

A squad of men followed Lt. Harry Walsh into town, but facing machine gun fire from the edge of town, the rest of his men froze into ditches alongside the road. With Battalion HQ yelling encouragement from the rear, acting Company Commander Lt. Dick Winters jumped into the road and screamed for his men to follow. Having never heard Winters scream before, Easy Company quickly attacked down the road, distracting the enemy machine gun nest enough for Lt. Walsh and his men to neutralize it.

It was fitting that MMP paid Winters the compliment of identifying him as a 9-2 leader. He merited it. If you haven’t seen Band of Brothers yet, I would highly recommend it. Very highly. It was extraordinary to watch the dramatization of the infantry battles, then listen to the comments of the men who survived them. And you cannot watch the series without coming away with a deep and abiding respect for the calm warrior and leader of men that Dick Winters was.

Science Reason in action

Telic Thoughts presents an amusing chronicle of PZ Myers and his response to the Arizona shooting:

Upon hearing that a democratic congresswoman had been shot, the scientist PZ Myers immediately discards science to make this rather unscientific hypothesis about a man who’s name he didn’t even know yet.

“I’ll take a wild guess here. The scumbag who committed this crime has been caught; I’ll bet he’ll turn out to be a Teabagger who listens to a lot of AM talk radio.”

PZ’s only evidence comes in the form of a Palin campaign poster featuring a map of targeted campaign races with “targets” over the congressional districts that were targeted. Then facts start to come in. The shooter had exhibited disturbed behavior. The shooter was an atheist. The shooter read Marx, Hitler, and Rand. Rambling nonsensical web screeds?

PZ responds to the evidence with more emotional, partisan non-science:

“What I see are people who are far too quick to dismiss the right-wing hate speech as a causal factor. Yes, this shooter was a lunatic; that doesn’t mean he wasn’t hearing the drumbeats from the right.”

More evidence comes in fast. Former acquaintances and friends call him a liberal activist. Radical. An atheist. A 9/11 truther. A pothead.

PZ doubles down.

Now, there is certainly nothing wrong in making guesses about why something happened. And those guesses are bound to reflect our biases in one way or another. But it is interesting to compare the irrational reactions of left-wingers like Myers and Paul Krugman, who have clung to their immediate and biased suppositions rather than abandoning them in the face of the documentary and testimonial evidence, with a more rational albeit equally incorrect reaction.

The left-wing supposition was based, as Telic Thoughts notes, on pure personal prejudice. There simply wasn’t any reasonable justification for the conclusion. There haven’t been any shootings by members of the Tea Party and or many shootings inspired by talk radio; the example that has been cited on various sites is a fictional one from a movie called The Fisher King.

Now, my initial suppositions were also incorrect. My very first thought when I heard about it was that the shooting was probably immigration-related because Arizona has been such a national hotspot on that issue. I didn’t know if it was more likely to be someone who was pro-immigration or anti-immigration because I didn’t know the congresswoman’s position on the matter. I initially assumed the shooter was an anti-immigrationist since Giffords is a Democrat and most Democrats are supporters of unlimited third world immigration. But I looked up her record, discovered the woman was considered to be somewhat of a restrictionist on the issue, and therefore concluded incorrectly that the shooter was likely to be some sort of La Raza fanatic disappointed by the failure of the DREAM act.

“[T]his could be the result of a personal issue, for all we know right now…. I would guess that it’s a Hispanic college student who is an illegal alien and has lived in the USA all his life. I can’t imagine it was anyone even loosely associated with the Tea Party in any way since they tend to be more focused on Washington players. It’s probably not a pro-lifer either, since they would be more interested in targeting abortion doctors than politicians.“

When one takes a logical approach to observing and interpreting the world’s events, one is forced to consider all the various possibilities regardless of one’s biases. Hence my consideration of the various possibilities that the shooter might have been an anti-immigrationist, a Tea Partier, or a pro-lifer. (I never considered the gold standard or anti-federalism to be even remote possibilities since the shooter might as reasonably have targeted a Cardinals cheerleader as a congresswoman if one of those issues happened to be his motivation.) And while my conclusions could certainly have been skewed by my own biases, at least there was a coherent and logical basis unrelated to them for reaching it. This also meant I had no vested interest in clinging to my initial surmise. So, once it became obvious that the shooter was not a Hispanic, but a young white male who was not a military veteran, I correctly concluded that the shooter was an atheist with personal problems. “Schizoid atheist” was the term I used. The schizophrenia hasn’t been confirmed yet, but the atheism has. Again, I did not reach that conclusion because of my personal biases, but because it fit the model of numerous recent shootings by other young white men around the world.

Myers, on the other hand, believed as he did only because he very much wanted to believe it. His initial conclusion was based on absolutely zero evidence, and he has continued to stick with it in the face of all the available evidence. As one of his commenters correctly pointed out, there is no indication that the shooter had any knowledge of the Palin “crosshairs” map that has the hysterical Left in full point-and-shriek mode. What passes for Myers’s reasoning in this incident goes a long way towards explaining the central basis of his criticism of religious beliefs; he is quite clearly projecting his own habit of belief for belief’s sake upon those who possess them. Moreover, it is amusing to note how his inability to adjust his thinking on the basis of the evidence is consistent with the inflated importance he ascribes to scientific evidence; because he has to reject the validity of documentary and testimonial evidence in order to justify his belief in the non-existence of God, he cannot permit himself to be swayed by those forms of evidence with regards to matters he considers less important. And so, the truth of what was written nearly 2,000 years ago is made evident.

“For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

Claiming to be wise, they became fools…”

It is particularly amusing to see the ready willingness of a self-proclaimed skeptic who disdains documentary evidence to fall for a forged document. And this comment by Lou Cypher related to the forgery nicely underlines the aforementioned Pharyngulan predilection for projection.

“It doesn’t matter what the facts are, if the teabaggers repeat a lie frequently enough it evidently magically stops being a lie in the eyes of the public, so once they decide to posthumously change his party affiliation to ‘D’ that’s basically the end of the discussion right there.”

How I love the smell of irony in the morning….

UPDATE: And there goes the remnant of PZ’s “right wing talk radio incitement” meme. “He did not watch TV. He disliked the news. He didn’t listen to political radio.”

Does anyone doubt that this won’t slow any of the brainless Lefties from continuing to argue that even if right-wing discourse didn’t have anything to do with this incident, it might next time.

A tale of two bad ideas

It occurs to me that American police would be wise to consider abandoning their police state mentality sooner rather than later. Despite their ongoing militarization, the badge gang isn’t actually capable of enforcing the law or anything else upon the population. They only look as if they are in control so long as the populace is largely law-abiding of its own free will. Consider the following anecdote from just across the border:

11/23/2010 CIUDAD JUAREZ — In the bloodstained chaos that is Mexico’s drug war raging on the doorstep of the United States, Erika Gandara, 28, is standing tall, and alone. As her town’s only police officer “I am the law,” she says…. “Yes, I am a police officer,” the fresh-faced Gandara, who might be mistaken for a high (secondary) school student in her purple hoodie if she were not packing an [A]R-15 rifle, told AFP in an interview in her sparsely furnished office.

“I am this town’s only cop. I am the law,” she said.

And she meant it.

I remember reading that a few months ago and thinking that it was a classic example of female bravado, which rests entirely upon the false notion that a woman’s sex renders her untouchable. Needless to say, I wasn’t terribly surprised to read this today.

“Érika Gándara, 28, seemed to relish the role, posing with a semiautomatic rifle and talking openly about the importance of her new job. “I am the only police in this town, the authority,” she told reporters. Then, two days before Christmas, a group of armed men took her from her home, residents say, and she has not been seen since.”

I’m not sure which was more ill-conceived, Gandara’s brief career as a police chief or Pippa Bacca’s attempt to hitchhike across Turkey in a wedding dress. Regardless, they appear to have come to the same end. And speaking of ill-conceived notions, both the government and the police should keep in mind that it is not wise to aim into the abyss.

“An ardent atheist”

As some of the usual suspects have been attempting to pull out Sam Harris’s classic “No True Atheist” argument to which they retreat every time the atheism of a mass murderer or spree killer is mentioned, I thought it would be pertinent to quote this Associated Press article about Arizona shooter:

Over time, Loughner became increasingly introspective — what one of the friends described as a “nihilistic rut.” An ardent atheist, he began to characterize people as sheep whose free will was being sapped by the government and the monotony of modern life.

Thus perishes Uber Dawks’s claim that Loughner’s atheism was “highly debatable”. I further note that the atheist killed six times more people than did the secular Catholic authorities following the trials of Giordano Bruno and Galileo combined… more than 375 years ago. Now, atheism doesn’t cause anyone to kill by itself. The vast majority of atheists, like the vast majority of theists, will never intentionally do physical harm to anyone. But there is no question that the rejection of objective divine morality that atheism necessarily entails removes considerable rational obstacles from murder and other moral offenses. The danger created by this rejection is that it leaves the atheist answerable to nothing more than his subjective and dynamic morality, which despite the partial barriers of intellectual pretensions and moral parasitism, ultimately consists of emotion, desire, and passing fancies.

Unmasking the badge gang

And here the police are always saying that if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to hide:

Dozens of anti-gang police officers across the city are quitting their assignments over a requirement to reveal personal financial information under strict anti-corruption rules, The Associated Press has learned. Gang units in some of the city’s most violent neighborhoods are being left with multiple vacancies, with officers choosing instead to work regular patrol shifts, Assistant Chief Earl Paysinger said Monday.

That might be an interesting way to end the drug war. Simply impose the same anti-corruption rules on the DEA, the ATF, and the associated divisions of the big city police departments.