Author: VD

The end of entitlements and the occupations

After looking at the books, do you still think democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan is a priority?

50% of the federal budget right now goes to entitlements.

This last month we posted a record $220.9 billion budget deficit. We took in $107 billion but spent $328 billion.

Isn’t that special. We only funded 32% of expenditures?

Remember – entitlements were half of that $328 billion.

So let’s see if we can do the math here.

Entitlements were about $164 billion last month in spending. The rest was, of course, the rest.

But we only took in $107 billion.

So even if we eliminated all entitlement spending we still did not have enough money to cover the rest.

The insane thing is that the only pressure from the American people to date is to fight entitlement reduction even though eliminating all entitlements isn’t enough to stem the financial bleeding. One certainly can’t say they aren’t going to get what they deserve. Correct me if I’m wrong, but my impression is that even the Tea Partiers don’t want to cut back on military spending.

Quality sports hate

Even if you don’t care about baseball, you have to loathe the Yankees after reading this tale of attending a Yankees game:

My father-in-law was thrilled when we reached our seats. He couldn’t believe it. He’d never had seats this good. “Hey,” he said with a twinkle in his eye, “maybe we’ll catch a foul ball.”

I looked around. “We got a shot,” I said.

“You know,” he continued, “I’ve been coming to Yankees games for 65 years. Never caught a foul ball.”

Never caught a foul ball? Celebrating his 71st birthday? My father-in-law? Kids, we have a mission.

So we got to the seats, and remember, these were crazy good, expensive seats. Sitting behind us in Row 2 were four kids who I’d guess were between the ages of 8 and 10. A couple of things immediately stuck out about these kids:

1. They were bragging to one another about all the different toys, vacations, servants, whatever they all had.
2. There were no parents in sight.

Apparently, they were just dumped there or something. I know baseball is America’s pastime and kids are cute, but let me tell you something, and I’m not gonna lie. These kids were superannoying. They came across as spoiled, rich kids. They were loud, demanding and, just like you would expect of unsupervised children, completely without a care about anyone around them.

They were discussing foul balls and bragging to one another about how many they had. This one had five, this one had three, a third had four, so on and so on. They apparently came to these seats a lot.

The game started, and we were close enough that the players could hear us. The kids knew this. And started screaming at the players.

“Throw us a ball! Give us a ball! Hey, mister, we want a ball! Give us a ball! Hey, throw the ball here! We want a ball! Please, mister, throw us a ball!” On and on they went. “Hey, mister! Mister! MISTER! GIVE US A BALL!”

If you think that is annoying to read, imagine it being screamed during the game, constantly, inning after inning, directly behind you. In the bottom of the fourth inning, the Yankees went 1, 2, 3 with the final out a ground out. As the Blue Jays ran off the field, first baseman Carlos Delgado (told you it was a while ago) tossed the ball up into the stands. Many folks went for it, but I came down with it.

I turned to my father-in-law, all smiles. “Here’s your ball, Joe.”

As he looked at the ball, the kids started yelling. “Can we have the ball? Hey, mister, we want that ball. Give us the ball!” “We’ve been yelling,” and so on. My father-in-law turned to me and said, “If you want to give the kids the ball, that’s OK.”

Hells. No.

My father-in-law was a softy. I’m not. And I was not going to give up Joe’s first foul ball in 65 years so some spoiled brats could add it to their collection. Just because you beg for something in an annoying manner does not mean your efforts are rewarded. Learned that while dating in high school.

But some wise guy a few rows behind the kids started a chant. “Give-the-kid-the-ball. Give-the-kid-the-ball.” It picked up steam. “Give! The Kid! The Ball! Give! The Kid! The Ball!” Soon, the whole section was chanting this. GIVE! THE KID! THE BALL! GIVE! THE KID! THE BALL!

I ignored it and tried to watch the game. The kids turned from annoying to nasty. “Hey [mouth-washed-out-with-soap word No. 1]! Give us the ball, [mouth-washed-out-with-soap word No. 2]! He was throwing the ball to us, [mouth-washed-out-with-soap word No. 3, which, frankly, I’m not sure where an 8-to-10-year-old kid would learn].”

We continued to try to watch the game.

Then the food bombardment started. Peanuts, hot dogs and beer were thrown at us. Repeatedly. Security was nowhere to be found. We asked folks to stop, which made it worse. We tried to ignore it. But the food, beer and insults kept coming.

Order was finally restored a half-inning later when the first-base umpire came over and handed the kids some balls. The kids bragged to us. “Told you we’d get a ball, a–hole.”

And that’s why I hate the Yankees.

It’s not just the team and the way it is run. It’s not just its owner or the cheating, performance-enhancing drug users A-Rod and Andy Pettitte.

It’s the collective known as Yankee Nation.

I came away from that game with a hatred of the Yankees and was absolute in this belief: Yankees fans are subhuman. Everything they and the Yankees stand for was represented during that half-inning. Like the kids, they are spoiled and demanding and see things only from their self-indulgent point of view. Like the adults, they act out when they don’t get their way.

Of course, there is a better reason to despise the Yankees. They are, after all, the New York Yankees.

The end of medical privacy

I wonder what the average over/under is on how long it takes a government to misuse, abuse, or publicly release the statistical data it originally gathered under the aegis of keeping it completely secret:

Patients’ medical records go online without consent

Patients’ confidential medical records are being placed on a controversial NHS database without their knowledge, doctors’ leaders have warned. At present 1.29 million people have had their details placed on the system. A further 8.9 million records are due to be added by June. By the end of next year, the NHS hopes to have more than 50 million uploaded. The “summary” records contain basic medical information including illnesses, vaccination history, and could include medication patients have been given. Ages and addresses are also included.

Seriously, who still falls for the idea that government can collect data without abusing it in some way, shape, or form? Where are the usual suspects? Forget the libertarians, you would think the pro-abortionists and gays, at the very least, would be totally up in arms about anyone being able to go online and see how many infants a woman has murdered and find out who is rolling with six strains of herpes in a suspicious location. And what bizarre mutation of “liberalism” could possibly entail placing the most intimate information about millions of people in the public’s hands?

Keep in mind that this is almost surely going to be a consequence of Obamacare. Once you give the government complete control, you can expect absolutely no ability to influence whatever madness results.

Murdering girls for women’s rights

As I have said many times before, calling a feminist a feminazi is an insult to the German National Socialist Worker’s Party. Abortion is a global human holocaust that dwarfs the scale of the Endlosung by an order of magnitude, and it is a predominantly anti-female holocaust.

According to CASS, China in 2020 will have 30m-40m more men of this age than young women. For comparison, there are 23m boys below the age of 20 in Germany, France and Britain combined and around 40m American boys and young men…. And, as is becoming clear, the war against baby girls is not confined to China.

Parts of India have sex ratios as skewed as anything in its northern neighbour. Other East Asian countries—South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan—have peculiarly high numbers of male births. So, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, have former communist countries in the Caucasus and the western Balkans. Even subsets of America’s population are following suit, though not the population as a whole.

Abortion simply must to be banned for what it is and has always been, first-degree murder. The feminist fall-back position, protecting a woman’s right to choose so long as she chooses in an approved manner, is not only a moral monstrosity, it is a logical absurdity.

I am often falsely accused of being misogynistic because I point out the readily apparent economic and societal infelicities of the modern mythology of sexual equality as well as the way the American legal system abuses men, particularly fathers. But if I genuinely hated women, then surely I would celebrate the ongoing destruction of millions of baby girls instead of opposing it so vociferously. And it is eminently fair to ask, in return, how anyone can reasonably be considered a supporter of women’s rights when they are in favor of permitting literally millions of baby girls to be put to death around the globe.

A woman’s place

Here is an easy way to determine where you should be looking to invest over the next 20 years:

Women head governments, run companies and comprise about half the world’s workforce, but a global poll shows that one in four people, most of them young, believe a woman’s place is in the home. The survey of over 24,000 adults in 23 countries, conducted by Reuters/Ipsos and released on the eve of International Women’s Day, showed that people from India (54 percent), Turkey (52 percent), Japan (48 percent), China, Russia, Hungary (34 percent each) and South Korea (33 percent) were most likely to agree that women should not work. And, perhaps surprisingly, people aged between 18 and 34 years are most likely to hold that view, not those from the older, and more traditional, generation.

The key phrase there being “most of them young”. Why is that? Because their understanding of the costs of women working is based on actual experience of them, whereas for the older generation, those costs are tangential at best. The severing of women from their traditional, and only absolutely vital role, is why secular Western society has turned into one of history’s many dead ends for a civilization. Change is the one constant of history, and it is now demographically certain that liberal democratic secular society will not survive for another fifty years.

The future belongs to those who show up for it. And the plan to preserve secular society by substituting indoctrination for propagation has clearly failed.

The flatulence of Tom Friedman

Jonah Goldberg steamrolls America’s silliest would-be grand thinker:

All this reductio ad flatus stemmed from a conversation Friedman had with Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys, in Banga­lore, India. Nilekani said something that was intellectu­ally, uh, flat about the effects of globalization on international competition: “Tom, the playing field is being leveled.”

“As I left the Infosys campus that evening along the road back to Bangalore,” Friedman explains, “I kept chewing on that phrase: The playing field is being leveled.” Indeed, he masticated it to the point where it was meaningless cud and then had his eureka moment: “What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened . . . Flattened? Flattened? My God, he’s telling me the world is flat!”

The rational response to this is: “My God! That is so not what he’s saying!” As countless others have noted, saying that a playing field is level is not remotely the same thing as saying that the world is flat, even metaphorically. Playing fields are defined by rules, often highly complex, that the participants agree to in advance; “leveling the playing field” means making competition in a specified arena fair….

He claims to be simplifying complex ideas and making them more understandable. But what he is in fact doing is taking an already simple idea — say, that of a level playing field — and making it meaningless. You can boil something down to the essentials, but if you keep boiling it you’re just left with nonsense. The level playing field is already a boiled-down idea, comprehensible by high-school sophomores and Charlie Rose alike. Friedman’s alchemist’s brain transmutes the dross of the banal into the bullion of bull.

Unlike Paul Krugman, however, Friedman’s ideas are essentially harmless. Although some of them, such as his wistful advocacy of totalitarian rule in the Chinese mode, would be rightly seen as dangerous in the mind of a more substantive writer, Friedman’s essential silliness which is best exemplified by his incompetent abuse of metaphors renders him little more than a delightfully comic figure. He is the funny pages of the NYT op/ed paper. When the intelligent reader reads a Krugman editorial, he often finds his eyes narrowing as he thinks “that bastard damn well knows better than that!” But when he reads Friedman, he can always relax and chuckle at the absurd literary juggling in the knowledge that no matter how important the editorial purports to be, it is no more to be taken seriously than a Maureen Dowd column.

Mailvox: in which we hear from Densa

Clearly the world needs a club to honor those intrepid commenters who don’t let their possession of sub-68 IQs stand in the way of taking part in the grand democratic discourse that is the Internet. Here are three magnificent examples:

“I am extremely disturbed by your complete lack of compassion. I am cursed with the knowledge that all life is one, and it is terrible to know that there are people like you who believe that I will suffer horribly for eternity, and that you are okay with that. And you think of yourself as being ‘righteous’. And some people believe you. My tears will never run dry.”

First, this is absolutely false. One will search eight years of columns and 8,313 posts on this blog in vain for any evidence that I think of myself as being righteous or even ‘righteous’. As a Christian, I know perfectly well that I am not righteous because no one is or has ever been righteous except for the Son of Man. And more importantly, any righteousness that is achieved though him is on offer to everyone. It’s true, I am perfectly okay with people drowning because they are too proud to grab onto the lifeline and burning to death because they reject the idea that the building is on fire. Because if God has troubled to grant them free will, who am I to wish to take it from them? Why should anyone feel any compassion for those who are willfully, pridefully, and unnecessarily embracing their own destruction?

I am extremely sympathetic to the doubters, to the skeptics, and to those who seek and have not yet found. But I have only contempt for those who refuse to see the abyss yawning ahead of them because they are too busy looking back and down at their noses at everyone else, all the while crowing how stupid they all are for going a different way.

Jared Diamond’s argument makes perfect sense. Of course early humans living on what we now call continental Europe were the most environmentally advantaged in the world at the time by having more indigenous domesticable animal and plant species. Wild pigs and sheep were simply easier to domesticate than Africa’s lions or wildebeasts. How hard is this to understand?

It is hard to understand because it doesn’t align temporally with recorded human history. If “early humans living on what we now call continental Europe were the most environmentally advantaged in the world at the time”, it would be inexplicable how continental European civilization should have remained so stubbornly backward in comparison with various non-European civilizations such as the Sumerian, Assyrian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Chinese, Japanese, and even Mayan civilizations. Even if one cites Greek civilization, in which case one is primarily referring to Athenian society, the Diamond hypothesis doesn’t explain how Hellenic accomplishments eluded what is by far the greater part of continental Europe.

“The church wasn’t persecuting anyone ‘using a scientific or medical process’. No one. Not even Galileo.” …is one of the biggest pieces of nonsense I’ve seen in awhile. No, Galileo wasn’t put in a prison cell, but he was absolutely persecuted for heresy by the Inquisition of the Catholic Church for his writing in support of the Copernican model of heliocentrism and put on house arrest for the remainder of his life. This is well-documented. I’ve heard Christians do lots of revisionist history, but this is a new one to me. Holy crap.

Actually, that is accurate history, not revisionist. Notice how he does not cite a single example of an individual persecuted for using a scientific or medical process, mostly because there aren’t any. As for Galileo, he was not prosecuted for writing in support of the Catholic ecclesiastic’s model of heliocentrism, whose book had been in the possession of every major mathematician and astronomer for the 90 years prior to Galileo’s trial. Even Wikipedia is clear on the reason Galileo found himself in hot water.

The book, “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems”, was published in 1632, with formal authorization from the Inquisition and papal permission…. Pope Urban VIII had personally asked Galileo to give arguments for and against heliocentrism in the book, and to be careful not to advocate heliocentrism. He made another request, that his own views on the matter be included in Galileo’s book. Only the latter of those requests was fulfilled by Galileo. Whether unknowingly or deliberately, Simplicio, the defender of the Aristotelian Geocentric view in “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems”, was often caught in his own errors and sometimes came across as a fool. Indeed, although Galileo states in the preface of his book that the character is named after a famous Aristotelian philosopher (Simplicius in Latin, Simplicio in Italian), the name “Simplicio” in Italian also has the connotation of “simpleton.”[99] This portrayal of Simplicio made “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems” appear as an advocacy book: an attack on Aristotelian geocentrism and defence of the Copernican theory. Unfortunately for his relationship with the Pope, Galileo put the words of Urban VIII into the mouth of Simplicio.

So Galileo disobeyed and betrayed the Pope, then publicly attacked him and made him look like a fool. The fact that Galileo wasn’t simply beheaded on the spot, as would have likely been the case if he had treated any other medieval ruler this way, is testimony to how reasonable the Roman Inquisition was. The most ridiculous thing about the attempt to cite the Galileo incident as proof that the Christianity is anti-science is that geocentrism was a pagan concept while heliocentrism was developed by a Christian canon who took Church orders and may have been a full priest.

Hitchens outs himself

This self-outing isn’t exactly a jaw-dropping revelation. It may also explain an amount of Christopher Hitchens’s obsession with religious strictures on sexual behavior, to say nothing of his bizarre, quasi-Islamic vision of secular paradise provided in god is Not Great:

Which two ministers of Margaret Thatcher’s government had gay relations with the writer Christopher Hitchens while at Oxford? Since Hitchens’s extraordinary claim emerged this week, the louche figure, now 60, who has been married twice, has fended off all requests for further information…. For although he has always enjoyed a reputation as a womaniser, at Oxford Hitchens was known to be bisexual. According to one contemporary: ‘He had a reputation for being AC/DC and, although a Trot, he was fancied by quite a few gay Tories and moved in those circles.’

Let’s face it, it’s only a matter of time before Dawkins comes out too. All that incoherent rage against the Christian faith exhibited by the New Atheists doesn’t come from an intellectual or even a rational place. It wouldn’t surprise me if pictures of Hitchens dressed in Nazi regalia surfaced at some point in time either. Unlike Dawkins, Hitchens is a likable, if roguish, character, but sometimes he really appears to be more of a likable caricature.