Author: VD

I found this chapter to be interesting, because it managed to be extremely informative without ever quite pulling a coherent case together. In certain places, it’s more than a little apparent that Liberal Fascism is a debut and I thought that this chapter was one of them. But the value of the historical material serves to redeem the structural flaws. On a tangential note, one of my great-uncles, an accomplished artist, was a devoted Dewey enthusiast. While I quite liked him, even as a child I could never quite lose the impression that there was something rather ominous about the philosophy.

Next week’s reading is Chapter Seven, “Liberal Racism: The Eugenic Ghost in the Fascist Machine”. The quiz for it will be posted on Saturday, August 1st.

Sunny Lucas died on Tuesday, July 21st. The void she leaves behind in the electronic firmament will be much regretted by canine-lovers around the world. Our condolences to Rachel and the rest of the Lucas family.

Only two weeks ago, I estimated that bank failures calculated as a percentage of total deposits would be more than twice that of 1931. My estimate of 0.77 percent was actually a slight exaggeration of that which would be a straightforward doubling of the January-June total, since it included bank failures 46 through 52 that were actually reported on July 2nd. Therefore, from a strict calender perspective, they should not have been included in the failures of the first six months.

My reasons for stretching the period for two days to include those additional seven banks were twofold. First, the FDIC always reports bank failures at the end of the day on Friday, so it’s probable that most of those seven banks actually filed their paperwork prior to the end of June. Second, because the pace of the failures appears to be increasing, leaving them out would have led to an estimate that was likely to be too low.

This was almost certainly the right decision because with one Bank Failure Friday still left in July, one bank has failed for each of the twelve days since the column was published on July 13th. These 64 failed banks held deposits sufficient to bring the running total to $34.9 billion for the year; when multiplied by 12/7, this indicates a 2009 deposit failure rate of 0.79 percent. Furthermore, the shaky state of the $7.6 billion Corus Bank and the $14 billion Guaranty Financial Group strongly suggests that failed deposits will exceed one percent of the $7.6 trillion in total bank deposits by the end of the year. This would be more than THREE times the percentage of failed deposits in 1931.

I have to admit, I always find it to be a little ominous when my alarmingly bearish observations turn out to be too optimistic.

It would appear that the Darwinist habit of attempting to shift the discourse by attacking their critics in lieu of defending their beliefs is not a new one:

Christian theologians, almost without exception, likewise accepted the fact that the earth is a sphere. The only two Christian writers known to have advocated a flat earth were a 4th-century heretic, Lactantius, and an obscure 6th-century Egyptian Monk, Cosmas Indicopleustes. Later, these two obscure and uninfluential writers were used as the prime evidence to prove that the flat-earth view was accepted by the Church as a whole—or at least by large parts of it.

While I was aware that the Catholic Church had never declared any doctrine of a flat earth, I wasn’t aware that the Darwinists had dug so deeply into the obscure and the heretical in order to provide a basis for their misleading accusation of a dogmatic Christian belief in a flat earth. Lactantius and Cosmas Indicopleustes – this is the first I’ve ever heard of either man – weren’t exactly Tertullian and Origen, much less Augustine and Aquinas. Also, if anyone is in possession of any information that contradicts the information at the link, I’d quite like to see it.

Because as it stands, this tends to call the intellectual honesty of the nineteenth century champions of Darwinism into question in addition to further demonstrating the historical unreliability of the secularist camp.

David Brooks wonders why he calls himself a Republican:

It made me wonder, are they really my guys? Do I have guys anymore?

Certainly in childhood I felt a strong affinity for the Democrats. Everybody I knew was one. The Democrats were obviously forces for justice and morality. Then sometime in adulthood I did come to naturally assume that the Republicans were the vehicles for the things I thought were best.

But you never know the workings of your own mind until you get an unexpected cold blast from somewhere deep inside. The thought that I’m part of the G.O.P.’s fan base sent such a blast, though it’s complicated.

Needless to say, he is very far from the only Republican to wonder why David Brooks calls himself a Republican. There’s certainly very little that’s “republican” about his ideology as evinced in his columns. And Gail? They really don’t….

His fake conscience is uneasy:

We all know that there’s no fucking way in the world we should have microwave ovens and refrigerators and TV sets and everything else at the prices we’re paying for them. There’s no way we get all this stuff and everything is done fair and square and everyone gets treated right. No way. And don’t be confused — what we’re talking about here is our way of life. Our standard of living. You want to “fix things in China,” well, it’s gonna cost you.

This is a real problem. One simply can’t manufacture anything in the West if one wishes to be able to sell it to Western customers. And then, the fact that Western customers aren’t actually paying for a significant percentage of these things, but buying them on credit only compounds the problem.

Add David Ricardo’s theory of Comparative Advantage to the list of things supposedly settled of which I have grown skeptical.

On the other hand, I suppose climate change that isn’t happening is every bit as dangerous as terrorists who aren’t attacking:

Massive crop devastation, melting glaciers, water shortages, millions of displaced people — all of these will drag the US military into conflict if global climate change goes unchecked, a Senate panel was warned today.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, convened by Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, focused on what so far has received only modest attention in the climate change debate: the effect it is bound to have on national defense.

“Addressing the consequences of changes in the Earth’s climate is not simply about saving polar bears or preserving the beauty of mountain glaciers,” retired Navy Vice Adm. Lee F. Gunn, president of the American Security Project, told the panel. “Climate change is a threat to our national security.”

And frankly, even if AGW/CC was occurring, I don’t know if the U.S. military would be up to the challenge of defending the American people from rampaging super-evolved aquatic polar bears anyhow.

I marvel at the fact that people find it so difficult to grasp that equality not only does not exist, it cannot exist. But I suppose one must admit that this writer’s heart is in the right place, especially considering that she’s a feminist:

Bob and Jane are a middle class couple. They have two children. They get an amicable divorce. There is a custody hearing. Both of them are good parents. Both of them want to be the primary custody holder. Who gets the children? Seriously, every single time, unless Jane lights up a crack pipe in the courtroom she will get physical custody. Bob is expected by society to be happy with every other weekend and two weeks in the summer. Don’t believe me? What would you think if you heard that a woman only saw her children every other weekend and a few holidays? I PROMISE you would think, “What did she do to lose her kids?” But, with men, that’s just the way it goes, right?

The mythic concept of quality aside, current “family court” system is insane by any rational measure. Of course, everyone is deeply shocked when boys in these situations grow up to believe all women are sluts and whores and the girls are on the pole at eighteen. There are few things so easily predictable as societal failure, and yet most people not only refuse to see it developing, but remarkably, continue to subscribe to the idea of ongoing social progress.

“Reliabilities of identifying positive selection by the branch-site and the site-prediction methods” is merely one piece of evidence indicating that TENS rests on much shakier empirical foundations than most scientists realize:

“Our finding means that hundreds of published studies on natural selection may have drawn incorrect conclusions,” said Masatoshi Nei, Penn State Evan Pugh Professor of Biology and the team’s leader…. To demonstrate the faultiness of the statistical methods, Nei’s team compiled data collected by their Emory University colleague, Shozo Yokoyama, on the genes that control the abilities of fish to see light at different water depths and on the genes that control color vision in a variety of animals. The team used these data to compare statistically predicted sites of natural selection with experimentally determined sites. They found that the statistical methods rarely predicted the actual sites of natural selection, which had been identified by Yokoyama through experiments.

“In some cases, statistical method completely failed to identify the true sites where natural selection occurred,” said Nei. “This particular exercise demonstrated the difficulty with which statistical methods are able to detect natural selection.”

To demonstrate how small sample sizes can lead to incorrect results, the team used computer simulations to examine the evolution of genes in three primates: humans, chimpanzees and macaques. The scientists mimicked the procedures used by the authors of a 2007 paper, which applied the branch-site method to 14,000 orthologous genes — genes that are genealogically identical among different species — and which found that the method predicted selection in 32 of the genes. Nei and his team also studied selection using Fisher’s exact test, but this test did not detect any selection.

“The results indicate that the number of nucleotide substitutions that occurred were too small to detect any selection; therefore, all of the 32 cases obtained by the branch-site method must be false positives,” said Nozawa.

“These statistical methods have led many scientists to believe that natural selection acted on many more genes in humans than it did in chimpanzees, and they conclude that this is the reason why humans have developed large brains and other morphological differences,” said Nei. “But I believe that these scientists are wrong. The number of genes that have undergone selection should be nearly the same in humans and chimps. The differences that make us human are more likely due to mutations that were favorable to us in the particular environment into which we moved, and these mutations then accumulated through time.”

Nei said that to obtain a more realistic picture of natural selection, biologists should pair experimental data with their statistical data whenever possible. Scientists usually do not use experimental data because such experiments can be difficult to conduct and because they are very time-consuming.

In other words, scientists usually do not bother to do science because it is difficult and it takes too long. But, non-scientists should still trust their results because on those rare occasions that scientists actually do make use of the scientific method, it works rather well. And, of course, one should trust biologists because physicists get amazingly accurate results.

Needless to say, the quality of their rationalizations tends to indicate that scientists don’t often make use of logic either.