Author: VD

Margaret Thatcher was right

The politicians have run out of the middle class’s money after spending it all on the bankers, the immigrants, and the poor… who, it occurs to me, can be described more succinctly as “the non-working class”:

I watch countless news stories about people who are criminals (illegal aliens, felons) liars, cheats, or just stupid getting help with their mortgage loans because they “need it”. And people getting free medical services because they “need it”. And people declaring bankruptcy because it’s just too hard to pay the bills, they “need to”. All the while I see my government crushing people like me–expecting us to just keep doing, just keep paying, just keep being responsible in order to make up for all of those people who were not.

The American middle class is on the verge of collapse, at which point it will almost certainly revolt in some manner. It will likely be less spectacular than the burning buildings in Cairo, but there is no way that the confluence of collapsing bubbles in real estate and education are not going to have a significant effect on middle class behavior once it becomes sufficiently obvious to everyone how they have been played for suckers and financially raped by the banks with the full connivance of the state and federal governments. The middle class revolt is going to start with a refusal to continue paying its debts for mortgages, credit cards, and college degrees. As for where it’s going to end, who can say?

Medical students make good Nazis

The problem with the so-called ethics of science and medicine is that they don’t actually exist. They’re nothing more than an artificial and arbitrarily imposed set of guidelines created by an impotent non-authority. Even to the extent that they are supposed to exist, as in the case of the Hippocratic Oath, they are seldom honored except in the breach:

AUSTRALIAN medical students are carrying out intrusive procedures on unconscious and anaesthetised patients without gaining the patient’s consent. The unauthorised examinations include genital, rectal and breast exams, and raise serious questions about the ethics of up-and-coming doctors, Madison reports….

Of students who were put in this position during the research, 82 per cent obeyed orders. “We think that it is weakness in the ethical climate of the clinical workplace that ultimately serves to legitimise and reinforce unethical practices in the context of students learning intimate examinations,” writes Prof Rees.

The study consists of 200 students across three unnamed medical schools in Britain and Australia. Not all participants agreed to carry out the intimate examinations without permission from the patient.

One student refused to take part in an examination of a woman who was “part spread-eagled on the bed and the nurse is (sic) pulling down her jeans at the same time and it was all very complicated and you could see her, she was about seventeen”.

The problem isn’t that scientists are intrinsically unethical, because a scientist can subscribe to an objective moral code as readily as anyone else. The problem is that because so many scientists reject morality and religion, they are consequentially unethical by choice. Needless to say, this does not bode well for Sam Harris’s attempt to construct a morality on the basis of a morally neutral process.

The reason so many people were appalled by PZ Myers boasting of the scientific ability to drain the blood from dogs, behead small mammals, and view images of vivisected humans without remorse is that the obvious logical conclusion is that history teaches that most scientists are just as willing to gas Jews, freeze priests, and exsanguinate gays in the name of science and progress.

Death of a White Knight: Episode III

Another would-be White Knight manages to get himself killed unnecessarily:

Wednesday night during a fight outside his Conejo Valley apartment, authorities said. The suspect, who was injured in the fight, was arrested and booked into Ventura County Jail on suspicion of murder, Ventura County sheriff’s officials said. Authorities declined to comment on what sparked the fatal fight. The victim’s daughter said relatives were told he was stabbed while intervening in an altercation between a woman and man….

Barnes died of stab wounds to his torso, said Michael Tellez, a deputy medical examiner. It was unclear if Otal and Barnes knew each other, officials said.

So again I will advise all the deltas and gammas prone to white-knighting: if a man and woman are engaged in a verbal or physical altercation, stay out of it! It’s not your concern and if the man doesn’t attack you, the woman probably will. On a tangential note, it would be very interesting to know if those who thought a woman is justified in aborting her child in order to save herself to raise the rest of her family also believe that it is right for a man to intervene in domestic altercations.

Mailvox: no harm, no foul

The ElusiveWapiti is offended on the blog’s behalf:

Pharyngula makes the list of “Top 100 Blogs” but VP does not. Blasphemy, I’d say.

Actually, that was a pretty good list. I’m delighted to see Karl, Susan, Roissy, Athol, and Ferdinand all receiving well-deserved notice. Ritzholtz’s blog is a good choice too, although I would have liked to see Mish and Steve Keen in the Economics category. Scalzi’s blog used to be quite good when he had the time to post daily, and although I don’t read it now that it’s mostly authors writing about their own books, I can see where that would be appealing to many readers. The list is a bit dated and lefty, since as Instapundit noted, Wonkette is all but dead and Boing Boing is stultifyingly boring.

As for Pharyngula, it is the home of the moderately intelligent, college-educated, angry, and unpopular. Since there is no shortage of such creatures, I think it eminently merits its recognition as a top blog. I wouldn’t characterize it as “smart”, but then, I don’t have an IQ of 100 either. Of course the readers of this blog don’t find it to be intelligent since most of you are more intelligent than PZ, but from the average perspective, it is pretty smart. One can’t be an idiot to get things that completely wrong.

I would be very surprised if VP was ever named on such a list, since even after the publication of RGD you won’t find it on a list of top 100 Economics blogs. Nor do I mind that it isn’t. This blog is too esoteric for the mainstream and too iconoclastic for the moderately intelligent; I would tend to consider it a failure if it was not. What I said about women is also true of men. I don’t expect most people to agree with me because I don’t expect them to be able to understand me.

The problem is that when you make a habit of dealing in the realm of the unthinkable, few can fathom it. So, even when I’m correct about some previously outlandish possibility, I am unlikely to receive any credit for it because such things are considered to be, by definition, black swans. Since no one can possibly have imagined it, no one could have predicted it, therefore any claims to have done so are inherently false. This is but one of the many examples of modern/medieval logic that has, ironically enough, returned to supplant the empiricism that previously usurped its primacy.

Special Needs Mountain

So I went skiing today. And while I don’t completely object to the idea of putting helmets on little kids since they sometimes get going and don’t know how to stop, it is astonishing to see how many adults and teenagers wear them now. It’s ridiculous. I started skiing when I was three and I don’t recall seeing or even hearing of anyone ever impaling their skull on a tree branch.

And another thing. Those short, fat skis that everyone uses nowadays. It’s the Alpine equivalent of people walking around wearing clown shoes with suits. They supposedly make it easier to ski, but when I tried them I found it far too irritating to have to keep my skis apart. So, often I’m the only one on the mountain with what I consider to be proper skis. I suppose I’d feel like a dinosaur if everyone else didn’t look like such retarded clowns.

Loads of time

You really have to wonder about the feminist claims to be “pro-woman” considering how readily they have fed false information to young women in what has proven to be a serious obstacle to the long-term objectives of many of them:

Doctors have issued a stark warning to couples not to leave it too late to try for a baby. With more and more women pursuing careers, they and their partners are leaving parenthood to at least their late thirties. But women aged 35 are six times more likely to have problems conceiving compared to those ten years younger, warns a major study from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.

The report says older parents are making it harder for themselves to have children – and increasing the likelihood of serious medical complications for both mother and baby. By the age of 40, a woman is more likely to have a miscarriage than give birth.

In light of how drenched in feminist propaganda and false biological horologies most young women are today, it is probably necessary for more scientifically astute and family-friendly individuals to take the literal offensive when confronted with the mindless “I’m still young, I have plenty of time” mantra of the average college-educated woman. The correct response is, “of course you do, darling, so long as you don’t mind having two miscarriages and a retardspecial needs child.”

Killing the Internet

Succession riots in Egypt:

Egyptians are telling me Egypt’s internet has been disabled and that mobile phone service may be next. Twitter, used to coordinate public protests, has already been cut off.

This tends to raise the question… why does Obama feel that he needs a kill switch for the US internet?

A very good start

It’s hard to quibble with this first action by Sen. Paul:

In his first major legislative proposal, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul has proposed cutting government spending by $500 billion in a year, including eliminating the Departments of Energy and Housing and Urban Development and most of the Department of Education. Paul, R-Ky., said the plan he rolled out Tuesday would cut almost 40 percent of the country’s projected deficit by abolishing programs that he said are outside the government’s constitutional scope.

Throw in the DEA and I’m sold.

Kristof fails to grok Christianity

I often find it amazing how the various modern perversions of Christianity don’t get it wrong so much as turn it completely on its head:

The National Catholic Reporter newspaper put it best: “Just days before Christians celebrated Christmas, Jesus got evicted.” Yet the person giving Jesus the heave-ho in this case was not a Bethlehem innkeeper. Nor was it an overzealous mayor angering conservatives by pulling down Christmas decorations. Rather, it was a prominent bishop, Thomas Olmsted, stripping St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix of its affiliation with the Roman Catholic diocese.

The hospital’s offense? It had terminated a pregnancy to save the life of the mother. The hospital says the 27-year-old woman, a mother of four children, would almost certainly have died otherwise.

Bishop Olmsted initially excommunicated a nun, Sister Margaret McBride, who had been on the hospital’s ethics committee and had approved of the decision. That seems to have been a failed attempt to bully the hospital into submission, but it refused to cave and continues to employ Sister Margaret. Now the bishop, in effect, is excommunicating the entire hospital — all because it saved a woman’s life.

Unsurprisingly, the New York Times columnist betrays that he has absolutely no understanding of one of the core teachings of Christianity, the very commandment that Jesus gives his disciples. Christianity is not about saving lives, especially not at the expense of others. It is about sacrificing one’s life for others, something that the mother, the nun, and the hospital actually committed murder in order to avoid doing.

This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

The bishop did right to excommunicate those who killed a child in order to potentially save the life of its mother. And if we lived in a moral society, the state would do right to prosecute them.

Tech update

Needless to say, I was much amused by this patent application in light of all of the Macintossers initially dismissing the multibutton approach and declaring how stylistically horrific it is. Clearly it is much better to imitate the multibutton approach, only to do so in a manner that forces one operate by sight instead of by touch and places the virtual buttons directly under one’s palm, if for no other reason than Apple has blessed the approach.

Speaking of comparing the effectiveness of different interface approaches, we’re going to be releasing the performance results of various mice soon and it looks to be a bit of a scandal. We have compiled strong empirical evidence indicating that in between the switch from mechanical rollers to optical sensors and the advent of the the multibutton interface, there has been essentially no actual performance difference between so-called high performance gaming mice and cheap office mice. Here is a comparison of four mice, two of which have multibutton support and two of which do not. The difference in performance between the two multibutton mice is the result of their different approaches to the interface; there is a reason, after all, that clumsy people are described as being “all thumbs”. That comparison marks the fastest speeds recorded at 1920×1200 resolution, whereas the sustainable speeds that one can reasonably expect to maintain in consistent use are about 15% slower on both the conventional and multibutton interfaces.

Finally, on the practical application side, there is a new video focused on Mozilla Firefox and demonstrating how the default Firefox mode operates for those who might be interested.