Author: VD

A sign of an indication?

In which we are informed that the Lizard Queen is now making noises about resigning from Obama’s Cabinet:

Hillary Clinton raises prospect of resignation. Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, has complained of the tiring natue of her job and said she will step back from the role before the end of Barack Obama’s presidency.

R writes: “I admit it doesn’t actually surprise me that it is so far playing out as you predicted.”* So far, so good, anyhow. I have no doubt that Hillary will resign, most likely before the end of the first term. Of course, the much more interesting question is if she intends to step back from the role in order to bring about that end to Mr. Soebarkah’s presidency.

*“it is clear that he [President Soebarkah] is likely to be extraordinarily vulnerable if the Lizard Queen elects to strike against her current boss. The first indication that she intends to do so will be a growing chorus of elite Democratic opinion against Obama’s conduct of the war… the more significant indicator would be her resignation from the Cabinet next year.”

Marriage flames out

What a surprise that an orientationally-challenged judge should just happen to come down on the orientationally-challenged side:

The biggest open secret in the landmark trial over same-sex marriage being heard in San Francisco is that the federal judge who will decide the case, Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker, is himself gay.

Yes, it’s just TREMENDOUSLY astonishing that he decided the Founding Fathers seriously intended to enshrine homogamy and polygamy as Constitutional rights. It’s pure fiction. But on the plus side, the coming battle between gays and feminists is shaping up to be the most amusing battle between two left-wing constituencies since scientists thought there might be a gay gene. Given the certainty of this decision going to the Supreme Court, it’s no wonder Obama is trying to pack it with lesbians.

I’m just wondering who’s got next, the bigamists, the polygamists, or the animal lovers. But at the end of the day, it’s little more than one more check in the societal collapse column. This should, however, have serious implications in November as the Republican grass roots begin the push for a Constitutional Amendment in defense of marriage.

Against God and homeschooling

What a surprise. A man who is dependent upon government “education” handouts is a proponent of totalitarian school law:

I am not a fan of homeschooling; in fact, if I had my way, I’d make it illegal. Too often it’s an excuse to isolate kids and hammer them full of ideological nonsense, and in a troubled public school system, it doesn’t help to strip students and money from a struggling district — it should be part of the social contract that we ought to provide a good education to everyone.

Of course he would. PZ is a conventional godless fascist of the early 20th century variety. Totalitarians always oppose everything that strengthens individual freedom and poses a potential rival to the secular religion of the state. There is a very good reason why the Nazis banned homeschooling in 1938 and “Free education for all children in public schools” is the tenth pillar of the Communist Manifesto, while it is nowhere to be found in the U.S. Constitution or the English Common Law.

UPDATE – I realize some of my critics, especially those partial to Pharyngula, find it difficult to believe that PZ is really as stupid as I consider him to be. Perhaps this quote will help them understand that I am not exaggerating in the slightest. And try to remember, PZ isn’t a scientist or a professor at an elite university, he’s an ex-scientist who hasn’t published in years and now teaches at a former community college. “When I told PZ Myers that in order for everyone to be equal we would have to make the smart people stupid. His response was to tell me that instead everyone should be educated. In order for everyone to be equal through education, we would have to force everyone to understand university level biology. Not only that, but everyone would have to understand university level mathematics, university level physics, university level English, and so forth.”

Equality through education. The amusing thing is that PZ’s idea of a solution is one of the concepts used to bring about the dumbing-down of American education in the first place. The clueless professor doesn’t even grasp the basic concept of the lowest common denominator, probably because he is too close to it. Nor does he understand that educators cannot educate intelligence any more than basketball coaches can coach height.

Employing the imprisoned

One in 31 adults are under the control of the correctional system (prison, parole, probation) according to a March 2009 Pew Center Report. 1 in every one hundred adults are imprisoned in jail, state prisons, or federal facilities. 25 years ago those under the control of the correctional system was one in 77 adults…. By historical standards the rate of imprisonment in the US is 350+ percent of what it was in 1980. Globally, the US is 3 times higher than the next in line for imprisonment, seven times higher than the median rate for an OCED country, and seventeen times higher than Iceland which has the lowest rate of incarceration.

After reading this, I did a little research and learned that according to the National Institute of Corrections, the cost of imprisoning my father will be right around $500,000 if he serves most of the 15 years he was sentenced. That is just over 40% of the amount he was convicted of not paying in taxes; if one takes into account the amount of taxes he actually did pay over the previous decade, the federal government can expect to be out around 13x more than they believe to have lost on his taxes alone. And that doesn’t even begin to take into account all of the jobs that were lost and the opportunities that are presently being forgone as a result of locking up a proven entrepreneur. I understand the logic of making an example, of course, but I tend to doubt even those who conceptually support the long-term imprisonment of “tax evaders” would conclude that spending at least $13 to chase $1 is an intelligent investment, especially not for a nation in which the debt per taxpayer is already $120,000.

Meanwhile, John Kerry, Tim Geithner and other “public servants” who have never contributed anything in the way of creating jobs or economic activity continue to go about their business of interfering with the economy unmolested. Now, I’m not looking for any justice here nor am I ranting about the US tax or correctional systems; they are what they are and I’m not interested in their idiosyncracies. I am merely observing that the statistics related to them are another obvious sign of the structural precariousness of the current economic system.

Rather than borrowing money to imprison people, wouldn’t it make more sense to hire out minimum-security prisoners on foreign contracts? That’s not all that far off from how the English settled Australia, after all, and surely it would be to everyone’s benefit if the US had talented business executives, computer programmers, technical experts and even movie stars available for overseas hire. Let them remain in exile for the duration of their sentence and have one-quarter of the revenue they generate go towards paying the costs of the correctional system. Another quarter would go towards allowing them to pay off their fines before they are released from the system, and half would be their incentive to perform well.

This would also help mitigate an imminent problem. With the increase in crime and decline in tax payments that have already been observed as a result of the economic contraction, it is very unlikely that the automatic reaction – to imprison all of the new offenders – is going to be an option given the way in which the overloaded correctional system is already helping drive states like California and Illinois into bankruptcy. We know that 1 in 77 is sustainable. But I don’t think either the economy or the nation can hope to survive a ratio of 1 in 25, which at this rate will be reached in early 2014.

Perhaps exile employment contracts sound too exotic and potentially enjoyable to serve as “corrections”. But I don’t think too many people would sign up for running a technology company in Iraq, overseeing mining operations in Afghanistan, or starring in low-budget Venezuelan action-flicks of their own accord. And as the projections indicate, the system is going to be forced to change very, very soon.

Good luck, ladies

If you happen to be a woman who genuinely thinks life as a middle-aged divorcee with kids is a worthwhile trade for not getting flowers and a card on a Hallmark holiday, I’d say your ex-husband-to-be is getting an even better deal:

Momlogic has exclusively learned that 31,427 women signed up for AshleyMadison.com yesterday — which is over ten times the average number of women who typically sign up on any given Monday. Ashley Madison took a sample survey of the women who signed up yesterday, and found that:

* 67 percent identified themselves as stay-at-home moms.
* The average age was 36.
* Over two-thirds had been considering an affair before Mother’s Day.

Roissy, meanwhile, correctly ascertains what are the first and third biggest signup days for Cheater Central. The days after Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Day. I wouldn’t put too much significance on the high percentage of stay-at-home moms, though. Women who work at an office don’t need the help of a web site if they are inclined to seek a surreptitious ride or two on the carousel.

All that being said, let me note that this all sounds rather like a calculated PR stunt to me.

Brett Favre retires again

Brett Favre’s stint with the Minnesota Vikings appears to be over after a single season. Favre has informed the Vikings he will not return to Minnesota this fall, a person with knowledge of the situation told The Associated Press on Tuesday.,

The 40-year-old Favre called coach Brad Childress to say his injured ankle is not responding as well to surgery and rehabilitation as he had hoped, according to the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the team had not made an official announcement.

I’ll believe it when I don’t see it at the end of training camp. Either way, that game against San Francisco alone was worth all the lunacy. I’m glad they didn’t trade for McNabb, but I would prefer to avoid a return to the Tarvaris Jackson Experiment.

Demonstrating ignorance

Gary Gutting of Notre Dame upsets the league of the ignorant godless:

In these popular debates about God’s existence, the winners are neither theists nor atheists, but agnostics — the neglected step-children of religious controversy, who rightly point out that neither side in the debate has made its case. This is the position supported by the consensus of expert philosophical opinion. This conclusion should particularly discomfit popular proponents of atheism, such as Richard Dawkins, whose position is entirely based on demonstrably faulty arguments.

A professional academic’s dismissal of Richard Dawkins hapless arguments? Make that the league of the indignant and ignorant godless. The comments are hilarious, as the immediate reaction from the usual sort of moderate-IQ atheist is demands for Gutting to “support” or “prove” his factual statement that Dawkins’s position is “entirely based on demonstrably faulty arguments”. Of course, whenever someone does bother to demonstrate precisely how Dawkins’s arguments are factually and logically flawed, the reaction of most such atheists is to a) refuse to read it, b) lie about the substance and attack strawman substitutes, and c) fall into an abrupt silence and hope the criticism goes away on its own.

On a tangential note, Half-Sigma’s argument for superior atheist intelligence is almost Hitchensian in its self-refuting quality.

I want to address the controversy of “atheism” vs. “agnosticism.” In the comment section, some people said that agnostics are smarter than atheists. I find this unlikely. Rather, smarter people are more adept at fitting in and avoiding controversy.

That’s what passes for his argument. Note how this fits the classic pattern of atheist illogic, to say nothing of the bait-and-switch of turning to fundamentally philosophical arguments instead of making any use of the science upon which they claim to rely. Half-Sigma happens to personally “find” it unlikely, (as opposed to “believing” it), ergo it must not be. But who fits in better and avoids more controversy, agnostics or atheists? Agnostics, quite clearly. So, agnostics are smarter than atheists by Half-Sigma’s own metric, his real argument is that he doesn’t believe (find?) that they are truly agnostic, the Archbishop of Oxford’s statement that he himself is actually an agnostic who leans atheist, not a genuine strong atheist notwithstanding.

If I did not believe in the existence of God, I would be downright embarrassed to call myself an atheist these days. I don’t know if it is because they are all studying butterfly collecting and evolution by something that is vaguely related to natural selection rather than history, philosophy, and literature, but they are simply incapable of presenting coherent arguments, let alone valid ones.

As for the myth of high atheist intelligence, that is one of several myths that are addressed in the Against the New Atheism slide show. You don’t have to be of limited intelligence to be a militant atheist, but it most certainly helps. The ironic thing is that like Ilya Somin of the Volokh Conspiracy, Half-Sigma is neither as stupid nor as ignorant as his reflexive atheism makes him sound. Consider, for example, Steve Sailer’s citation of his correct take on the results of meritocratic testing: “For example, a few years, Mayor Bloomberg and NYC schools supremo Joel Klein decided to fix the ramshackle admissions process to the gifted schools by imposing a standardized test on all applicants. Blogger Half Sigma immediately predicted that the percentage of Asians and whites admitted would rise at the expense of blacks and Hispanics, which would cause a sizable unexpected political problem for Bloomberg and Klein. All that has come to pass.”

It was obvious, perhaps, but sound reasoning even so. The problem is that due to a combination of factors that tend to include familial relationships, social inadequacies, sexual obsessions, group dynamics, and intellectual pride, otherwise intelligent atheists insist on continuing to dumb themselves down by repeatedly staking out completely indefensible positions contra religion, especially Christianity. I don’t mind that they do so, since it only makes it that much easier to shoot them down, but for the sake of intellectual exercise if nothing else we theists would be better served by a higher class of atheist apologists.

The culture of science fetishism

The New York Times belatedly discovers that sciencebloggers don’t actually give a damn about science qua science.

Clearly I’ve been out of some loop for too long, but does everyone take for granted now that science sites are where graduate students, researchers, doctors and the “skeptical community” go not to interpret data or review experiments but to chip off one-liners, promote their books and jeer at smokers, fat people and churchgoers? And can anyone who still enjoys this class-inflected bloodsport tell me why it has to happen under the banner of science?

Hammering away at an ideology, substituting stridency for contemplation, pummeling its enemies in absentia: ScienceBlogs has become Fox News for the religion-baiting, peak-oil crowd. Though Myers and other science bloggers boast that they can be jerky in the service of anti-charlatanism, that’s not what’s bothersome about them. What’s bothersome is that the site is misleading. It’s not science by scientists, not even remotely; it’s science blogging by science bloggers. And science blogging, apparently, is a form of redundant and effortfully incendiary rhetoric that draws bad-faith moral authority from the word “science” and from occasional invocations of “peer-reviewed” thises and thats.

There is the salient bit: “rhetoric that draws bad-faith moral authority from the word “science”.” That is exactly the same point about the fraudulent bait-and-switch so often utilized by scientists upon which I have been hammering for several years now. It is interesting that an increasingly broad spectrum of people are now beginning to notice that just as not all that glitters is gold, not all that identifies itself with science is actually scientific. Writing about science isn’t science. Bitching about the Catholic church isn’t science. Molesting food with malicious intent isn’t science. Even teaching about science isn’t science. These things may be important, they may be necessary, they may be entertaining, but they are not science. This is precisely why I have always identified PZ Myers and others like him as charlatans; they claim to be scientists on the basis of their academic credentials rather than because they are actually doing any science.

By which logic I note that I am not only an economist, but East Asian to boot. If studying Japan doesn’t make you Japanese, studying science cannot make you a scientist.