Author: VD

France lets the Irish know what they’re in for if they’re dumb enough to ratify the European ConstitutionLisbon Treaty:

Irish Euro-enthusiasts are furious because the French have announced, in advance of their EU presidency, that they want to harmonise business taxes across the EU. Ireland’s Europe Minister, Dick Roche, called the French economy minister’s remarks “untimely, unhelpful and inappropriate”. Note his language: “untimely” rather than “untrue”. What he really means is: Why couldn’t that Frenchwoman keep her big gob shut until after our referendum?

There are few things that I find more deliciously just than seeing secularists forced to confront the reality of Western post-Christianity for which they have labored so long and hard:

Recently, I wrote about Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA), a K-8 charter school in Inver Grove Heights. Charter schools are public schools and by law must not endorse or promote religion. Evidence suggests, however, that TIZA is an Islamic school, funded by Minnesota taxpayers…. Why does the Minnesota Department of Education allow this sort of religious activity at a public school? According to Zaman, the department inspects TIZA regularly — and has done so “numerous times” — to ensure that it is not a religious school.

There’s your stage call, o brave secular warriors of godlessness! I quite look forward to seeing your bold verbal attacks and insulting rhetoric directed towards this particular group of theists violating the hallowed separation of church and state… I mean, school. In the meantime, Minnesota Christians and other theists shouldn’t hesitate to push whatever religious beliefs they see fit at their local public schools, as the precedent has clearly been set.

There will NEVER be a post-religious society. It will not happen. Secular science fiction societies are no more viable than the magical systems featured in fantasy novels. Secularism and atheism are merely gateways toward a societal return to paganism. And most likely, it will fall to Christians to rebuild the Western civilization we have decided to abandon.

She’s also quite sound on the apparent sociopathology of the Lizard Queen.

We have not defeated the “Islamo-fascists” in Iraq; we have simply created more of them around the world by radicalizing an entire generation of young Muslims. There is no finite number of terrorists whom we can neutralize through conventional warfare or a humiliating occupation. Neither do I believe that a genuinely stable democracy is in the near future for Iraq. The murderous ethnic and religious rivalries will seethe on and on, as they have in that region for 5,000 years. Let’s get our troops out of the way and back home where they belong.

You know, whatever happened to all those comparisons about the German and Japanese occupations the neo-cons were making a few years ago? And I haven’t heard a lot of “we are at war” either. Paglia is entirely right about this and the occupation should end today. It should have ended in early 2004. Keep in mind that the Rumsfeldian metric for success from the very start was whether the USA could kill more jihadists than it created. By that measure, the war and occupation is clearly a complete failure, and in retrospect it is quite clear that it was doomed to fail from the start.

Apparently Spacebunny and I only have 52 of the 110 best books that make up the Perfect Library according to the Telegraph. We’re particularly bad on Books That Changed Your World, as Hitchhikers is the only one of the ten I own, although I have read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (rolls eyes). History is rather better, as we not only own seven out of the ten, but have all seven right here in my office. Only nine of ten on SF, I don’t have Day of the Triffids, at least not that I’m aware of. But how is Orwell SF and how can you possibly leave out Heinlein?

The list isn’t that bad, although it cheats by counting series as books and I think you could throw out the entire Books That Changed Your World section without any loss after putting Adams into SF. Also, the inclusion of Das Kapital is a joke, almost no one outside of seriously committed Communists or hard-core Austrians actually reads the whole thing and The Wealth of Nations is far more integral to a basic understanding of economics. Leaving out Dorothy Sayers and Rex Stout in favor of Thomas Harris, Elmore Leonard and Patricia Highsmith is criminal, and neither Pullman nor Rowling belong in the children’s section. I’d replace those two with Lloyd Alexander and Laura Ingalls Wilder. The total absence of Asian literature is also bothersome, where are Murasaki Shikibu, Confucius and Sun Tzu, at the bare minimum?

Of course, leaving off most of the great philosophical and religious works borders on the bizarre. It seems most strange to ignore Plato, Aristotle and the Bible.

I know that Arsenal was knocked out of the Champions League by Liverpool last night. I don’t want to talk about it. I especially don’t want to talk about the officiating.

Forget the problem of evil. A much knottier problem is the problem of FIFA officiating.

Unsurprisingly, it’s an econonomist who appears to have caught psychological researchers making a basic fallacy. Of course, this can’t possibly have happened, since we have been repeatedly informed that without proper training and credentials in a specific science, it is impossible to render any meaningful criticism of that science:

The Monty Hall Problem has struck again, and this time it’s not merely embarrassing mathematicians. If the calculations of a Yale economist are correct, there’s a sneaky logical fallacy in some of the most famous experiments in psychology.

The economist, M. Keith Chen, has challenged research into cognitive dissonance, including the 1956 experiment that first identified a remarkable ability of people to rationalize their choices. Dr. Chen says that choice rationalization could still turn out to be a real phenomenon, but he maintains that there’s a fatal flaw in the classic 1956 experiment and hundreds of similar ones. He says researchers have fallen for a version of what mathematicians call the Monty Hall Problem, in honor of the host of the old television show, “Let’s Make a Deal.”

Chen’s observation hasn’t disproved the concept of choice rationalization, but he’s certainly called an amount of the reported evidence for it into question. As I’ve contended numerous times in the past, I expect similar weaknesses, fallacies and unfounded assumptions to be discovered in various sciences, including astrophysics, biology and economics. Some models will need to be thrown out, others will survive the test and be made stronger. That is as it should be; the resistance of scientists to sound logical and factual criticism of their models does not testify to confidence in their proper application of the scientific method.

It may surprise some to know that I am every bit as critical of the mainstream Neo-Keynesian economics model as I am of the mainstream Neo-Darwinian biological model. If I don’t write about the former as often, it’s because the subject is of less interest to most people, being far too esoteric for the average individual who cannot grasp that there is no inherent value to a U.S. paper dollar, let alone the fact that not even the eminent former head of the Federal Reserve can say what “money” is. But then, that’s what the podcasts are for. Tomorrow’s interview must unfortunately remain nameless, but I think I can guarantee that it will be of no little interest to those who are interested in the subject of the global economy.

John Scalzi considers the Big Idea behind The Irrational Atheist. And while Mr. Scalzi is a Confirmed Troublemaker, I highly advise behaving yourself in his house.

Rod Dreher sums it up:

The difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is the Dems will tax us to blow our money, and the Republicans will just put the shopping spree on a credit card.

And that’s pretty much it. They both love pointless wars with no plausible American interest, they both love the idea of electing a new people via migration and neither of them have any intention of reducing the size or scope of the federal government.

Brazilians have long held a reputation for being the giants of football, now they can also lay claim to being the first country with a team made up entirely of dwarves…. The average size of the team is about 4ft, while the smallest player is just 3ft 3in.

This is awesome, the guy with the ball looks rather like Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink wearing a Ronaldinho wig. And their name is great too, Gigantes do Norte, Giants of the North. How can you not admire their spirit?

Equalitarians don’t seem to understand that the primary role of the military is to do very bad things to people, many of whom don’t deserve it:

The stories are shocking in their simplicity and brutality: A female military recruit is pinned down at knifepoint and raped repeatedly in her own barracks. Her attackers hid their faces but she identified them by their uniforms; they were her fellow soldiers. During a routine gynecological exam, a female soldier is attacked and raped by her military physician. Yet another young soldier, still adapting to life in a war zone, is raped by her commanding officer. Afraid for her standing in her unit, she feels she has nowhere to turn. These are true stories, and, sadly, not isolated incidents. Women serving in the U.S. military are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq.

The scope of the problem was brought into acute focus for me during a visit to the West Los Angeles VA Healthcare Center, where I met with female veterans and their doctors. My jaw dropped when the doctors told me that 41% of female veterans seen at the clinic say they were victims of sexual assault while in the military, and 29% report being raped during their military service.

This isn’t shocking, this is entirely predictable. It was predicted, as it was one of the many reasons that sane individuals have opposed women serving in the military from the very start. The idea that you can overcome Man’s moral resistence to murdering people so that he will kill on command without having any impact whatsoever on his other moral restraints is a classic example of the Education Fallacy.

Soldiers have always raped women; a kinder, gentler, more civilized military that is incapable of rape is also a military that is going to crumble in disarray before the onslaught of military forces less concerned with social niceties and more focused on winning wars. As every brilliant commander who ever loosed his troops on a defeated city knew, military discipline has its limits and attempting to stretch those limits risks sacrificing discipline entirely. And if you don’t want the hard men on the front lines subject to military discipline with their attentions focused on an external enemy, then where do you want them? Wandering around suburban malls? Working as policemen and security guards? With sufficient training, one can turn a human wolf into an extremely effective sheepdog, but one can never hope to turn him into a toy poodle.

It’s worth noting how one soldier explains why soldiers have so much contempt for the female “soldiers” in their midst: “As an infantryman in the Army, my view is that the simple fact of the matter is that the large majority of women in the military are not soldiers. They may wear a uniform…even passed basic training..but they are not soldiers. They are chicks who like to dress like soldiers. They expect special treatment for being female (and often get it), have lower standards, have almost no respect for military courtesy and discipline, pay lipservice to equality and then cry foul when they get treated the same as their male co-workers, and all to often, their advance in paygrade is tied not to their job performance, but who they are sleeping with. Men don’t take them seriously because they don’t take the job, the standards of military culture, their fellow servicepeople, or themselves seriously. I have no doubts that there are legitimate cases of rape and assault within the military, but since the military became coed, fraternization has gone rampant and it is very hard…very hard….to be able to distinguish the legitimate cases from the ones where a female is screaming sour grapes because she tried to trade sex for rank and lost out on the deal…particularly if the “victim” already has a reputation of sleeping around to get things she wants. That is why so many cases get dropped because of lack of evidence.”