Author: VD

I am not yet conceding anything, but in the event that I am forced to do so, I shall find a fair amount of pleasure in admitting that Hillary Clinton will not succeed her ur-nephew on the Cherry Blossom Throne:

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) says she is regularly approached “by women of all races, of all ages, of all faiths. They stop me, grab my hand and say, ‘Look what they’ve done to her, we were so close.’ They wanted this for their daughters and granddaughters. . . . It’s so heartbreaking.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m finding it pretty darn hard to resist the urge to break down and weep. It’s getting just a little dusty in here.

The quiz covering the events of Book Four, which took place during the seventh, eighth, and ninth year of the war can be taken here. Discuss at will, as all of the less interested parties have been shaken out by now. If you wish to take the previous quizzes, they are here. Next week’s reading is Book Five.

The History of the Peloponnesian War 1.1 to 1.115.

The History of the Peloponnesian War 1.116 to 2.46.

The History of the Peloponnesian War 2.47 to 2.103.

The History of the Peloponnesian War 3.1 to 3.116.

Italians aren’t all that big on immigrants these days. Canada would probably be the better option, since I can’t imagine her expatriating would make her any less annoying:

A class of primary school children in Naples has shocked Italy after submitting homework which supported the burning of gypsy camps. Teachers at the school had set the children the task of explaining how they felt about the persecution of the gypsies. The response was an alarming series of drawings and essays, many of which supported the vigilante action…. The attacks and essays come against a backdrop of growing intolerance to immigrants, fuelled by hard-line partners in the new government of prime minister Silvio Berlusconi….

Italy’s statistics agency, ISTAT, fanned the fires of anti-immigrant feeling yesterday by releasing numbers showing that immigrants are responsible for more than a third of the murders committed last year. ISTAT said foreigners had committed 70 per cent of all petty theft, 39 per cent of the sexual offences and 36 per cent of the murders.

As I wrote a few years ago, what’s happening in southern Italy will soon be happening elsewhere in Europe. Nationality is not merely an abstract concept there as it is in the United States. And the children are correct, because when a corrupt government not only refuses to recognize the will of the people but instead elects to repeatedly offend it, the people have no choice but to take force into their own hands.

And as students of history will recall, southern Italians have a long and rather famous tradition of dealing firmly with unwanted outsiders.

The majority of the Democratic Party rolls over, wakes up, opens its eyes, and then cringes in horror at what it appears to have done:

Barack Obama’s favorability ratings among white women has declined significantly in recent months, particularly among Democrats and independents, presenting an immediate obstacle for the likely Democratic nominee as he moves to shore up his party’s base. According to a new report by The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, half of white women now have a negative perception of Obama…. White women as a whole now prefer John McCain over Obama, by 49 percent to 41 percent.

I have to admit, while I don’t think it matters much who wins, I have found this presidential campaign to be incredibly entertaining. It’s like watching really good slapstick.

It’s deeply ironic that it is those who love to accuse their political opponents of mysogyny whose actions have led directly to the extermination of millions of little girls around the world:

The ratio of girls per 1,000 boys in these areas hovers around the 700s and 800s, with as few as 300 girls per 1,000 boys in some high-caste urban areas of Punjab. As investigative journalist Gita Aravamudan argues in her 2007 book, “Disappearing Daughters: The Tragedy of Female Feticide,” “Female infanticide is akin to serial killing. But female feticide is more like a holocaust. A whole gender is getting exterminated.” The problem extends beyond India….

A new study suggests that female feticide may be disturbingly common in some American communities. In an analysis of 2000 Census data published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Columbia University economists Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund examined the sex ratio of births among U.S.-born children of Chinese, Korean and Asian-Indian parents. They found “evidence of sex selection, most likely at the prenatal stage.”

The sex of a firstborn child in these families conformed to the natural pattern of 1.05 boys to every girl, a pattern that continued for other children when the firstborn was a boy. But if the firstborn child was a girl, the likelihood of a boy coming next was considerably higher than normal at 1.17-to-1. After two girls, the probability of a boy’s birth rose to a decidedly unnatural 1.51-to-1.

If abortion is a penumbran right, then a woman’s motivation for an abortion cannot be called into question. As usual, the feminist position is a hopelessly illogical one; the inevitable result of basing one’s positions on egoistic emotion rather than principle-based logic.

K-Lo may not have read the book, but she has no doubt that it must be really bad. And its author is dishonest and dishonorable to boot. He must be, because, you know, he is insufficiently disrespectful of George W. Bush, the Greatest President Republicans Have Ever Known:

I’m confused about Scott McClellan’s book. Without having read it, I think a couple of observations are nonetheless fair. What does it tell us when a White House insider gets outside and says that all those other people he used to work with are incompetent liars. If, as McClellan claims, the president made a “propaganda campaign” of the Iraq war, why didn’t Scotty say something at the time? Why wait until he’s out of the job to do the honorable thing? What kind of person continues to speak for (and cover up) a dishonest campaign for war when he knows the truth to be something else? What kind of person later says, hey, know what? That whole time I was working for the president? I thought he was a dishonest dolt, but I did it anyway . . . because…? Wait, because you were collecting material for a book? I’ll tell you what kind of person does that: Someone who is either dishonest or dishonorable — or both.

This is the first of EIGHT posts about Scott McClellan, the former White House Press Secretary, by the NRO editor. I mention this to remind the good folks at National Review that it is this sort of emotional knee-jerk defense – or in this case, counterattack – that is why National Review is generally considered to be in the bag for Bush and therefore part of conservatism’s current problem rather than part of any prospective solution.

Whether Scott is right or wrong, we may never know. But why should we believe him now when, with the same straight face he offered as press secretary, he says we shouldn’t have believed him then.

I marvel at the fact that anyone could be surprised at an employee’s failure to speak his mind when he thinks his boss is a dishonest idiot doing the wrong thing. Has K-Lo never read Dilbert? Government employees aren’t exactly samurai, and while they are known for many things, honor and truthfulness are not two of them. The reason we should at least consider believing him now is because NOW HE IS NOT BEING PAID IN ORDER TO MANIPULATE PUBLIC OPINION.

You would think that a member of the professional media would know what a press secretary’s responsibilities entail.

UPDATE – Unfortunately, VDH elects to join the choir of the disingenuous Bush defenders:

But if all of the above were true, why in the world would McClellan have stayed on in 2004? So it is either: (1) I didn’t like the message of 2004, but did like my job that the new message provided?, or (2) Only now when promoting a book attacking my former employer do I realize that I was ‘blinded by the right,’ and in fact my idealism of 2000 was betrayed by the realities of 2004? In the former case, he is a dead soul; in the latter, a simple huckster.

Given that pretty much all PR flacks are soulless hucksters, by definition, how does this “logic” call into question the accuracy of McClellan’s charges. Methinks the ladies are protesting far too much.

For the most amusing abuse of metaphor, video. All that’s missing is the obvious Hendrix sample.

Once the kids are back with their families, it’s time to see some heads start rolling:

The high court affirmed a decision by an appellate court last week, saying Child Protective Services failed to show an immediate danger to the more than 400 children swept up from the Yearning For Zion Ranch nearly two months ago. “On the record before us, removal of the children was not warranted,” the justices said in their ruling issued in Austin. The high court let stand the appellate court’s order that Texas District Judge Barbara Walther return the children from foster care to their parents. It’s not clear how soon that may happen, but the appellate court ordered her to do it within a reasonable time period.

Rod Dreher muses on the diversity dilemma of the Blogosphere:

So here is the perfect medium for liberating all those qualified minority and female “voices” that are being silenced by the mainstream media’s gatekeepers. According to diversity theory, they should be far more heavily represented in the blogosphere’s upper reaches than they are in traditional journalism. In fact, the opposite is the case, as the Washington Post’s Keith Jenkins pointed out. The elite blogging world is far less “diverse” than the mainstream media.

Given that there are many white males who take the “need” for diversity as seriously as I do, I am shocked that there aren’t more fake bloggers like “Michelle Malkin” out there. I mean, it’s not exactly a secret that the actual “Michelle” is actually a 45-year old male ghostwriter who works for the American Enterprise Institute. How else can you explain the difference between “her” blogging and the abysmal performance provided whenever the sock puppet is required to repeat talking points on television or by video blog?

Vaccine enthusiasts such as Megan McArdle, Respectful Insolence and others very much like to point out that there is no scientific link between autism and the modern vaccine schedule. They particularly enjoy pointing out that no scientific study has been shown that vaccines have any negative effects on childhood development. And they are correct, but what they never seem to see fit to mention is that this is because no actual scientific studies have been done on the matter. What have been provided instead are statistical studies, temporal correlations and metastudies that are little more meaningful than the statistical “study” referenced in TIA wherein I proved that atheism is linked to Asperger’s Syndrome.

However, that missing evidence of vaccine harm appears to have been detected by a researcher who got around the supposed ethical problem of studying vaccines by using monkeys. (The vaccine cheerleaders have historically attempted to evade the use of actual science to investigate the matter by claiming it would be unethical to make use of an unvaccinated control group, thereby begging the question.)

The vaccine hypothesis was bolstered recently by a five-year study in monkeys who were given the same vaccinations that American children are routinely given. Last week, Dr Laura Hewitson, a specialist in obstetrics, gynaecology and reproductive sciences at the University of Pittsburgh, told the International Meeting for Autism Research in London that in the double-blind placebo-controlled study, 13 vaccinated animals showed increased aggression, impaired cognitive skills and developmental delay. The three unvaccinated animals in the study developed normally.

“There was a significant difference between the two groups,” said Hewitson. “The vaccinated group had trouble developing reflexes?… They also became more insular and more aggressive. There was an increase in aggressive behaviour after they had their MMR vaccines, and they stopped exploring their surroundings as much.”

Abnormal brain activity was found in the monkeys, and higher sensitivity to a naturally occurring brain chemical linked to sleeplessness, hallucinations, lack of social skills and a high pain threshold – all symptoms found in children on the autistic spectrum. The monkeys also exhibited abnormalities of the amygdala, the part of the brain which regulates emotions.

“We can’t conclude that vaccines cause autism from this study,” said Hewitson, “What we can conclude is that the vaccinated monkeys showed significant negative behavioural differences before and after the MMR.”

Obviously, the matter is far from concluded. This is a very small study that involves monkeys rather than humans. It is possible that further studies will achieve different results. But what the vaccine defenders will have to explain away – and just watch them try to evade the topic and change the subject to the benefits of herd immunity – is that there is direct scientific evidence that the modern American vaccine schedule impairs cognitive development.

I am not opposed to all vaccines. I don’t know if the vaccine schedule causes autism or other forms of harm. But I am opposed to an accelerated schedule that injects far more chemicals into children at a much younger age than was required to achieve the historical results in suppressing various childhood diseases, especially when there is absolutely no scientific evidence to demonstrate that the modern schedule is not harming children. Those who attempt to paint every critic of the modern vaccine schedule as pre-Industrial ignoramuses bent on living in disease-ridden squalor are being disingenuous, if not downright dishonest, and their opinions about vaccine safety should be taken about as seriously as a vaccine salesman working for a Big Pharma company.

Consider this: if the vaccine schedule is not harmful to a statistically significant number of children, then why are its advocates so afraid of proper long-term double-blind studies of the sort that Dr. Hewitson has done?