Author: VD

Towards a free England

A parliamentary revolution in Great Britain:

Not only was Mr Martin the wrong choice; he turned out to be a catastrophic one as well. His fate is symbolic of the rottenness of a political system that was once the envy of the world. That system now lies broken and demoralised. With its sovereignty already dissipated by the power of the European Union, the role of the House in scrutinising legislation has been further undermined by the placing of time limits on all debates; the hours it sits have shrunk, the chamber is often virtually empty, and MPs routinely fail to articulate the concerns and aspirations of the people who elect them. Westminster has sunk into a slough of despond. The dwindling turnout at successive elections is testament to what the country thinks of the system. Mr Martin, as Speaker, has presided over this sorry shambles.

A vote for Cameron and the Tories is merely a vote for more of the same. The BNP are sound on the EU, but that’s about it. UKIP strikes me as the only party that is both pro-British and pro-freedom. Or perhaps a new party will rise to the fore; I believe there is a British Libertarian party. Regardless, England is badly in need of another revolution to free it of its Brussels and Scottish masters.

“The principal aim of the Party is that the United Kingdom (“UK”) shall again be governed by laws made to suit its own needs by its own Parliament, which must be directly and solely accountable to the electorate of the UK. The second aim is to preserve the integrity of the UK. To this intent the Party’s objects are to withdraw the UK from the European Union and to resist membership of any other international organisation, or grouping, the membership of which is incompatible with the above aims and to oppose any form of government within the UK, which may undermine its integrity.”

Idiots at the chalkboard

I may have been too generous when I calculated that the average school teacher’s IQ to be around 91:

According to state education officials, nearly three-quarters of the people who took the state elementary school teacher’s licensing exam this year failed the new math section. The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education released the results Tuesday. They say that only 27 percent of the more than 600 candidates who took the test passed.

Remember this the next time someone asks you about your credentials to homeschool your children. In my opinion, the mere fact of not being mentally sub-normal trumps a degree from a paper-selling institution that hands them out to everyone with a pulse and the requisite cash.

Falsification

Let’s just say I’m underwhelmed:

The discovery of the 95%-complete ‘lemur monkey’ – dubbed Ida – is described by experts as the “eighth wonder of the world”. They say its impact on the world of palaeontology will be “somewhat like an asteroid falling down to Earth”. Researchers say proof of this transitional species finally confirms Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the then radical, outlandish ideas he came up with during his time aboard the Beagle.

Of course they do. Let’s see the hands of all the theory of evolution believers who will disavow it when – not if – Ida turns out to be yet another trivial artifact in the ever-expanding bone box that proves absolutely nothing of import whatsoever. And to think they found it just in time for Darwin’s 200th anniversary too! Why, it must be a scientific miracle!

As Sarah points out, it’s interesting to learn that as of yesterday, evolution had not been confirmed. And it’s good to know that should this fossil du jour fades into obscurity for one reason or another, we’ll know evolution is once more unconfirmed. Unfortunately for the Darwinian faithful, falsification cuts both ways.

There’s always someone stronger

Or smarter, faster, richer, nicer, or better-looking than you out there somewhere. I was feeling pretty self-satisfied at the gym today after ripping through four sets of dumbbell shoulder press. I thought I’d go for reps instead of weight, so I did a 12-10-10-10 series starting with a pair of 20 kilos and ending at 26 kilos. I was feeling pretty good, I just felt kind of… felt kind of invincible.

And then this guy came over, picked up the 26-kilo dumbbells and started doing shoulders too. He did a set of 10 as well. The thing is, he did a set of 10 flies.

Stanley Fish discovers atheists

He does seem a bit taken aback by the militancy of the Internet variety, if rightly unimpressed by what passes for their arguments:

So to sum up, the epistemological critique of religion — it is an inferior way of knowing — is the flip side of a naïve and untenable positivism. And the critique of religion’s content — it’s cotton-candy fluff — is the product of incredible ignorance.

It’s interesting to see how Fish correctly hammers the oft-heard but moronic “evidence” argument, albeit in a less straightforward manner than he could have. Most of these “evidence” arguments border on dishonesty, when they do not leap across the line with all the enthusiasm of a Kampuchean atheist smashing skulls with shovels, in that they completely depend on redefining the word “evidence” in a manner that is not recognized by any dictionary on the planet. It’s also interesting to see Fish hit the epistemological angle, which one seldom sees outside of evangelical Christian theologians and traditionally minded philosophers. Of course, it will avail him little, since if militant atheists were epistemologically competent, they wouldn’t be militant atheists in the first place. While mathematicians are capable of understanding postulates, the average science fetishist merely stares blankly when confronted with the fact that his deified method involves fundamental assumptions.

It’s true that science works. But then, there’s no shortage of empirical and scientific evidence that religion works too, and in some cases, even better. This is particularly true if one considers their comparative ability to provide predictive models of human behavior.

The most amusing comment was this one, which so perfectly demonstrates the social autism of the average atheist: “If religion is all about doubt and questioning, then I might be more religious than most born-again Christians. For some reason, though, born-again Christians don’t seem to enjoy me doubting and questioning their faith.”

Interestingly enough, I have found that for some reason atheist science fetishists don’t seem to enjoy me doubting and questioning THEIR faith either. For, as Sam Harris has shown, it is atheists who tend to assert their beliefs far more rigidly and dogmatically than Christians. One wonders if atheists would be similarly inclined to answer this particular question the same way if it concerned anything but God – note that the key term which clearly highlights the atheist tendency towards mindless dogmatism is the word “suggest”. The only rationally correct answer is “agree”, which can be easily understood by substituting anything from “cancer” to “bull market” for “God”; regardless, contrary to the New Atheist propaganda, the scientific evidence shows that it is Christians who are the more open-minded.

Abdication is a choice

Whilst I am sympathetic to men who have been royally abused over by their ex-wives and the insane Family Court system in the USA and the UK, I think men also have to take a certain amount of responsibility for the way in which they have abdicated their paternal roles:

Fathers, who enjoyed absolute authority within the household for several millennia, now find themselves at the beck and call of their wives and children. Indeed, most of my male friends are not fathers in any traditional sense at all; they occupy roughly the same status in their households as the help. They don’t guide their children through the moral quandaries of life — they guide them to their extracurricular activities from behind the wheel of a Dodge minivan….

It’s pretty simple. If you are unwilling to do something that’s been demanded of you, then don’t do it. You don’t have to be an ass about it, you don’t need to be impolite about it, you don’t even necessarily have to say anything at all. Just don’t do it. And that goes for the ex-husbands too. If you don’t want to be a court-appointed slave to your ex-wife, then don’t be. Go and lead that exciting life you always kind of wanted to lead but couldn’t. Join a mercenary troop in Iraq or an outlaw drug gang in Colombia. Climb a mountain in Tibet. Become a river guide in the Amazon. Leave and don’t look back. You’re not going to be permitted to be a father to you children anyhow, so stop pretending you are and enabling the system.

We all make compromises. They’re a necessary part of life with other people. But if you’re the only one making them, then you’re not compromising, you’re just surrendering. And yes, that actually does make you less of a man. Spacebunny often points out that women could not be the overweening bitch-queens of the family if their husbands did not permit them to be. If your home life is so terrible, what are you afraid of losing?

Filet de Neanderthal

I don’t know why this amuses me so much, but it does:

One of science’s most puzzling mysteries – the disappearance of the Neanderthals – may have been solved. Modern humans ate them, says a leading fossil expert. The controversial suggestion follows publication of a study in the Journal of Anthropological Sciences about a Neanderthal jawbone apparently butchered by modern humans. Now the leader of the research team says he believes the flesh had been eaten by humans, while its teeth may have been used to make a necklace.

Now that I think about it, it’s probably because it tends to destroy Rousseau’s concept of the Noble Savage while simultaneously illustrating the way scientists are reluctant to follow the evidence when it doesn’t support their preconceived notions. I rather enjoyed the one scientist’s theory that maybe someone just found the jawbone and turned it into jewelry for some inexplicable reason, although it would have been much more amusing if he’d theorized a series of shaving accidents instead. Neanderthals were rather hairy, after all.

It strikes me that I really do rather better science than the average scientist. After all, how many scientists can claim to be as demonstrably multi-disciplined as the Japanese scientist who developed Dark Vapor Theory in astrophysics while concocting Evolutionary Stable Strategies in biology in the same year? When you’re an Internet Superintelligence, every year is an Anno Mirabilis.

WND column

The Flaw in the Ointment

According to the modern Friedman-Keynes synthesis, there are two tools in the hands of most national authorities that permit them to attempt fine-tuning the economy. The first tool, monetary policy, is the bailiwick of the central bank, which in the United States is known as the Federal Reserve. It has great influence over interest rates, which represent the price of money. Increasing the interest rate is supposed to force the economy to contract, while lowering it is believed to encourage the economy to grow.

“There is the possibility, for the reasons discussed above, that, after the rate of interest has fallen to a certain level, liquidity preference may become virtually absolute in the sense that almost everyone prefers cash to holding a debt which yields so low a rate of interest. In this event the monetary authority would have lost effective control over the rate of interest. But whilst this limiting case might become practically important in future, I know of no example of it hitherto.”

– John Maynard Keynes, “The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money”

At the Black Gate

In which I consider the possibility of extending the reboot concept to SF/F literature:

There has been a lot of discussion, understandably, about the new Star Trek movie. Let me admit, first off, that I have seen very little Star Trek and what little I have seen I pretty much loathed and despised. (NB: I’m neither judging nor prosecuting here, merely expressing a personal opinion. Live long and prosper.) That being said, the talk about the so-called “rebooting” has me wondering why television and film are so prone to remakes while there appears to be no similar practice in literature.

I should be glad to hear of your candidates for rebooting. As for why I loathe Star Trek, it’s hard to know where to start. But I suppose the smug incoherence of a saga about a warship charged with peacefully enforcing the supremacy of its “tolerant” culture at laser point would be as good a place to start as any. I used to watch re-runs of the original series as a kid, but was deeply disappointed with TNG when it was launched.

The ultimate irony

Pravda criticizes American Marxism:

Prime Minister Putin, less then two months ago, warned Obama and UK’s Blair, not to follow the path to Marxism, it only leads to disaster. Apparently, even though we suffered 70 years of this Western sponsored horror show, we know nothing, as foolish, drunken Russians, so let our “wise” Anglo-Saxon fools find out the folly of their own pride.

Again, the American public has taken this with barely a whimper…but a “freeman” whimper…. The proud American will go down into his slavery without a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is. The world will only snicker.

It’s absolutely true. When I left more than 10 years ago, one of the first things I noticed was that despite the assumptions and surface appearances, one was actually more free in many European countries than in the United States. Even in corrupt Italy, one need not fear having one’s money arrested, for example, while US corporate tax rates are among the highest in the world these days. And the gulf between perception and reality has only widened in the intervening decade.