Category: Uncategorized

More guns, less crime

The left’s shameless attempts to debunk and disqualify John Lott’s landmark study never made much sense, because eventually, over time, the facts of the matter were bound to become readily apparent.  As, for example, the case of falling violent crime rates in Virginia shows:

In a real life demonstration of scholar John Lott’s maxim “more guns, less crime,” violent crime has dropped in Virginia as gun ownership has increased. According to a Fox News report, firearms sales in Virginia were 16 percent higher in 2012 over 2011 and violent crime went down by 5 percent.

This correlation between more guns and less crime hasn’t just been observed once or twice.  It has been observed over and over again, just as the dozens of predictions concerning the consequences of concealed carry laws and the removal of firearms restrictions keep failing to produce the expected bloodbaths and shootouts in the suburban streets.

It also shows the intrinsically unscientific thinking of the Left. To them, it doesn’t matter how well, or how poorly, a predictive model fares, because their dull and programmed minds aren’t about to change no matter what happens.  Or rather, they aren’t about to change until the credentialed authorities they recognize tell them to change their minds, at which point they will do so in lockstep, conveniently forgetting that they ever believed otherwise.

Mailvox: four erroneous arguments

Ann Morgan appears to have no idea that she’s in completely over her head here. Her anti-Christian reasoning is specious and rests on a foundation of ignorance and error.

Christianity generally fails when one or more of a few things happen:

1.
Those who claim something is ‘sinful’ cannot give any reason why it is,
other than ‘Because God says so’. In the absence of actual proof of
God, functionally, that statement is no different than ‘Because I say
so’.

2. A person is promised various rewards during their life
for being ‘good’, only to have the promise broken, and the rewards
either not given out at all, or given to those who were not good. Sooner
or later, they will conclude that the promise of an afterlife is just
one more promise that is going to be broken.

3. The wealth earned
by a person believing in Christian ethics ends up in the hands of those
promoting the Christian ethics. At some point they are going to
conclude that the entire business of Christianity is a con, to trick
them out of their wealth.

4. The promise of ‘forgiveness’ sounds
nice, but the way it functions is that people who harm others and their
society their whole lives, get to repent at the end of their lives and
go to heaven. This will end up in some sort of ‘tragedy of the commons’.
If you don’t want the commons overgrazed, you need to be vigilant about
those who are overgrazing it; allowing them to overgraze it for years,
ruin the commons for everyone else while getting fat cattle for
themselves, then tell them everything will be fine because they ‘repent’
is a recipe for disaster.

Even her introduction is false.  Christianity does not, and cannot, fail on the basis of any of these points.

  1. There is no other reason than “God says so”.  In the absence of God, sin does not exist.  This is hardly philosophical or theological news.  However, makes the basic error of confusing an objective statement with a subjective one.  For example, it makes no difference whether the Magna Carta exists or not, the statement that “the Magna Carta says you must do X” is materially different than “I say you must do X”.  This should be completely obvious, since when the Christian says “God says Y is a sin” and cites a document that existed before he was born, that statement cannot possibly be considered equal to “because I say so” whether God exists or not.
  2. This is irrelevant.  The Bible says that all are fallen and no one is good, save God.  Her argument is based on a false premise and indicates her ignorance concerning Christian theology.  Luke 18:19: “And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? none is good, save one, that is, God.”
  3. This is observably false, as evidenced by the fact of billions of Christians who have not, in fact, concluded that the entire business of Christianity is a con.  It would be a poor con that settles for ten percent when the federal government takes, on average, twice that.
  4. This is logically fallacious because it rests on a false assumption.  The fact is that there are relatively few deathbed conversions and there are billions of Christians who do not wait to repent of their sins.  Ergo, no tragedy of the commons. Let reason be silent when experience gainsays its conclusions.

Vaccines is safe because SCIENCE!

In addition to demonstrating that vaccines are not intrinsically safe, this posterior-covering action by the CDC should suffice to conclusively prove that the organization cannot be trusted with regards to its statements concerning vaccine safety:

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has once again been caught removing pertinent but indicting information about vaccines from its website. This time it involves the infamous polio vaccine, up to 98 million doses of which have been exposed as containing a cancer-causing virus that is now believed to be responsible for causing millions of cancers in America, according to the CDC.

The information was posted on an official CDC fact sheet entitled Cancer, Simian Virus 40 (SV40), and Polio Vaccine, which has since been removed from the CDC’s website. Fortunately, RealFarmacy.com was able to archive the damning page before the CDC ultimately removed it, presumably because SV40 has been receiving considerable attention lately due to its connection to causing cancer.

This also explodes Orac’s attempt to utilize “clinical equipoise” in order to justify not performing scientific studies.  Due to that “equipose”, putting 98up to 30 million Americans at an increased risk of cancer may turn out to be little more that the tip of the iceberg.  I know that biologists and epidemiologists are not trained in logic or basic risk/reward calculations, but I would think that even those whose academic backgrounds are in the softer sciences could handle the math involved in balancing the potential risk to a few hundred, or a few thousand, children provided placebos versus the risks involved in administering a completely untested schedule combining dozens of vaccines to hundreds of millions of very young children.

Mailvox: the null hypothesis

CKK has a few questions about God:

I
read your blog and find that you make interesting points. I have a few
questions for you which revolve around the Null Hypothesis as it relates
to the evidence and knowledge of God.

First, do you
ground your faith in God based upon an evidentiary standpoint? I know
the trend (and often impasse) in discourse between atheists/agnostics
and Christians revolves around which side has the burden of proof and I
am wondering how God has satisfied any logical hiccups you may have come
across in your life.

Second, in regards to other
people who lack faith, how can God ask people to perform a logical leap
to believe in Him which they don’t do in every other part of their
lives? For example, a basic precept of just criminal courts is the idea
of being innocent until proven guilty; the burden of proof is always on
the accuser (in the form of the State) as they are the ones making the
claim of guilt. This is the same with every other arena of life and even
forms the basis of the scientific method. Yet this isn’t done for God.
We are given antidotes based on argument but not necessarily based on
evidence.

Third, and this relates to the first, is who
does the burden of proof regarding the evidence of God falls upon? Those
who claim His existence or those who deny Him?

I
would say my faith is more grounded in a logical standpoint than in one
based purely on evidence, although I am entirely content with the
evidence for God as it exists to date.  The inability of secular and
pagan philosophers to produce coherent moral systems, combined with the
logical absurdity of most non-Christian moral systems, leaves me
entirely satisfied with the Christian moral structure, even if I find
occasionally find the application of that structure to social policy to
be difficult, if not impossible.  Since a Creator God is a necessary
anchor for that moral structure, I conclude that not only must He exist,
but that it is necessary for Man to postulate His existence even if
there were no evidence for that existence to be found.

I
find it remarkable, and rather stupid, that individuals who don’t
hesitate to accept mathematical postulates in order to permit a
considerable quantity of mathematical equations to function effectively
are so terrified of accepting the existence of God as a moral
postulate.  It strikes me as even less intelligent than rejecting basic
math postulates and thereby refusing to utilize any of the math that
follows from them.

How can God ask people to perform a
leap of faith rather than logic?  Very easily, since obedience is
clearly more important to God than understanding.  I neither ask nor
care if my dog, my children, or my teammates understand my orders, I
simply want them to follow them.  If I yell “square” to a teammate with
the ball, it is of no concern to me whether he grasps all the relative
positions of the various players on the field, I just want him to react
by immediately passing the ball 90 degrees to one side.  If I can test
my teammate’s confidence in me by telling him to pass the ball based on
faith, God can certainly test our confidence in Him by telling us to
believe without proof.

It’s not as if both Jesus Christ
and Aristotle haven’t independently explained the reason anyhow.  Many
people saw Jesus perform miracles and didn’t believe. And as Aristotle
observed centuries before Jesus was performing those miracles, some
people cannot be instructed by knowledge.  I tend to doubt this
observation of basic human behavior would have escaped God.

The
burden of proof always falls upon the individual asserting something to
another individual.  If I ask you if you believe God exists and you
tell me that you do not, you have no burden of proof.  You were simply
asked about a simple fact and you have no need to justify that fact to
me or anyone else.  If, on the other hand, you tell me that God does not
exist, then you have made an assertion and the burden of proving the
truth of that assertion lies with you.

Empty gold vaults

We were having dinner with friends last night and talking about the gold markets when I mentioned two, and he mentioned two, and logic suggested four.  He told me about the reported Bank of England’s gold leasing:

Based on recent figures from the Bank of England, it appears as though
the Bank of England has directed the leasing of about 1,300 tonnes of
central bank gold from their vaults in a four month period from March
through June. 

Or at least that is the surmise, given the inventory level at the end of
February and the stated inventory on the Bank of England website at the
end of June.  Macleod thinks that this was done in support of the gold
price smackdown.

One has to wonder how that bullion will eventually be returned to its
rightful owners, given that it apparently has been taken from the vault
and delivered to the refineries en route to the East, or may even be
sitting in some vault somewhere with a high stack of paper claims set
against it.

Leased to whom?  Well, it would appear to be fairly obvious in light of this announcement last week:

The Economic Coordination Committee of the Cabinet, headed by Finance Minister Ishaq Dar, took the decision to ban the import of the yellow metal for one month with immediate effect.

During a meeting with Dar in Karachi last week, the Exchange Companies Association of Pakistan (ECAP) had claimed that smuggling of gold to India was causing rupee devaluation, as the importers were mopping up dollars from the market to meet the needs of the Indian buyers. After the Indian government’s decision to discourage gold import by imposing 8% duties, the buyers had shifted to Pakistan where the commodity was allowed to be imported duty free since 2001.

Our conclusion is that because the Indian and Pakistani government attempts to limit the physical gold demand has failed, the Bank of England, and possibly the Federal Reserve as well, are sending their gold East in order to prevent the price from rising and blowing up banks like J.P. Morgan that are holding massive short positions against the price of gold.

The Ponzi pyramid is quaking and this is the sort of thing that could easily cause it to collapse.

The State does not “protect” children

Given the horrific reports that repeatedly surface from every so-called “Child Protective” service, it is eminently clear that the State should play absolutely no role in how parents raise their children or have any ability to remove children from their parents and extended families:

A foster parent in Milam County is in jail charged with murder after the two-year-old girl she was taking care of died in her custody. According to Rockdale police, emergency crews responded to Sherill Small’s home in Rockdale when they received a 9-1-1 call on Monday evening stating that a child was not breathing and unresponsive. The child, Alexandria Hill, was flown to Scott and White McLane Children’s Hospital in Temple where she was placed on life support.

Doctors determined that Alexandria had brain hemorrhaging and retinal hemorrhaging in both eyes. Detectives said the explanation Small, 54, gave of the child’s injuries were not consistent with the nature of the injuries determined by the doctors. The child was removed from life support on Wednesday and Small was arrested for murder the following day. Small admitted to authorities that she threw Alexandria to the ground…..

According to court records, Alexandria’s mother had a medical condition that does not allow for the child to be left alone with her. The TDFPS also received allegations that Hill used marijuana on a regular basis and on one occasion Hill almost dropped Alexandria while going down the stairs of the home as he was trying to hand the child to his sister. During the month of November, Alexandria was being cared for by her paternal grandmother before the State intervened on Nov. 26.

It doesn’t matter how bad the parents are.  If they commit a criminal act that merits prison, then guardianship of the children should be given to the nearest relatives, not to people whose only interest in the children is pecuniary.  There are evil and abusive parents, but the percentage of them is much lower than the percentage of evil and abusive people in the foster care system.

Predators go where the prey is. The fact that they can also arrange to get paid while being provided access to their victims is an indication that the system is entirely insane.  As for the idea that the system is regulated, well, so are banks and motor vehicles and we all know how efficient the State is with them.

Respect their wishes

And buy your books somewhere else.  Considering how difficult the retail environment is supposed to be for booksellers, I can only conclude that the owners of McKay’s Books in Knoxville genuinely believe that gun owners don’t buy books.

I have blogged many times before of my love for McKay’s Books in Knoxville. I don’t know how much money I’ve left in there in the last decade, but it runs well into four figures, if not five. Many is the year when “books” may have been the single largest line-item expense in my personal budget except for…

…except for guns. And this sign seen on the front door today tells me that my money is not wanted there anymore.

With the new law in Tennessee, the same one that allows you to CCW into places that serve alcohol, these little signs at the door are no longer just a formality.

I would never enter a bookstore that banned concealed carry whether I was carrying or not.  And, I suspect, there are millions of Americans who feel precisely the same way.  I suspect that either the anti-gun sign comes down within a two weeks or McKay’s Books goes out of business within 18 months.

Carry laws and stand your ground laws are hugely popular, and only an ideologically blinded idiot would be dumb enough to alienate a statistically significant percentage of its customers, especially in a business that is known to be struggling and operating on narrow margins.

A view on black crime and white decline

In which I ask Huggums for his opinion about the observation that blacks have higher crime rates in a wide sampling of societies:

What is your currently preferred theory for higher black crime rates? You
know mine is a combination of genetic and cultural factors leading to
lower average time preferences, I’m just interested in knowing what
yours happens to be.

Pretty much the same, but I don’t think the
genetic influence is quite as strong as many believe it to be. I think
that depending on the cultural environment and the existence of positive
social pressure, just about any human trait can find a positive mode of
expression.

The genetic issue can only really be “solved” with
time. Of course, if white liberals are any indication, even if some
environmental catastrophe or social upheaval pushed the next generations
of black people towards civilization, once that civilization reaches
its apex, it will begin working feverishly to destroy itself. Either
that or just start massacring its own citizens because of whatever
thin-as-wet-tissue-paper reason it happens to come up with.

Huggums raises an important point here, which is the flip side of my controversial observation that the African population, taken in the whole, can only be half-civilized because fully civilizing a people appears to require about 1,000 years of exposure to civilization.  This, I have argued, is the primary reason blacks have repeatedly shown themselves unable to maintain advanced societies everywhere from Detroit to Zimbabwe, and why the more savage portion of the population has demonstrated that it cannot even constructively participate in an advanced society.

However, whites and other distinct human populations should not be too impressed with the accomplishments of their ancestors simply because they happened to get an earlier start on the process, because if the process of civilization is hard, maintaining it is observably even more difficult.  Indeed, one could even argue that it is impossible and eventual failure is only a matter of time.

It would be very hard to argue with Huggums’s observation that there are a considerable quantity of whites who have been working feverishly, and in some cases purposefully, to destroy white Christian European civilization.  Indeed, one could observe that their actions are a logical extension of the white European destruction of traditional Chinese civilization, traditional Japanese civilization, traditional Russian half-civilization, and even traditional Aztec/Inca quarter-civilization.

If I am correct and extended average time preferences is a critical factor in developing and maintaining civilization, then it would appear the white population has taken several significant steps towards savagery, in both intellectual and behavioral terms. The Keynesian concept of economic growth through inflation and debt-spending is literal intellectual savagery, as intrinsically magical and nonsensical as the illiterate Australian aborigines ideas about causation. And it is not hard to determine where “if it feels good, do it” falls on the time preferences spectrum.

And this highlights the intrinsic danger of inviting the barbarians inside the gates and encouraging them to integrate with the civilized citizenry. It is easier to bring down than to build up. It is much easier to infect the civilized youth with the idea of living for today and letting tomorrow take care of itself than it is to convince the savage youth to restrain their impulses and save for tomorrow what could be be consumed today. 

Daniel Patrick Moynihan once described the pathologies of black America as a warning of the coming pathologies of white America.  He was more prophetic than he knew; the dire effects of the behavioral problems to which he attempted to draw America’s attention turned out to be even worse than he had feared.  Black hip-hop culture may have been the most noticeable symptom of the cancer of anti-civilizational savagery, but it was the wigger adoption of it that signified the metastasis.

We are now well past the point of peak American civilization. The only question now is how far into savagery we are going to fall before the process can be reversed.  If it can be reversed.

Who wore it better?

On the left, we have Hugo Schwyzer, recently disgraced professor and self-described adulterer.  On the right, we have John Scalzi, award-winning science fiction author and self-described rapist. I think those who still doubt the intellectual legitimacy of Game should find it informative to observe that public figures who so confidently present themselves as pro-feminist critics of masculinity are so inclined to display themselves in a sexually creepy manner.  It does tend to underline the concept of the Gamma male as a female-oriented mind in a male body.

And it is certainly more than a little ironic to observe that both men also often claim that they represent models for superior male behavior and offer advice accordingly.  I leave it to the reader to decide for himself how justified those claims are, as well as the wisdom of taking their advice.

UPDATE: Speaking of female-oriented minds, one of these two paragons of mental stability pretended to attempt suicide last week.

Hugo Schwyzer, the social sciences academic at Pasadena City College
best known as the “porn professor,” tried to commit suicide last night,
he told the Weekly today. He was visiting his mother in the Monterey area, where he grew up,
when it happened about 10 p.m., he said. He was placed on a 72-hour
psychiatric hold at Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, the
professor said: “I took an entire bottle of Klonapin,” he said. That’s a muscle relaxant and anti-anxiety drug.

One can only assume that by “took an entire bottle of Klonapin” he actually meant “washed down a pair of Advil with a wine cooler”.  Gammas are prone to striking false poses, particularly self-harming ones.  Hugo Danger has no more intention of harming himself over his most recent round of public humiliation than I do over ATOB finishing third in the 2013 Clive Staples voting.

The legacy of slavery

It is informative to note that the black population in the UK, which is less racially mixed than the black population in the USA, commits violent crimes at an even higher rate than the latter:

The official figures, which examine the ethnicity of those accused of violent
offences in London, suggest the majority of men held responsible by police
for gun crimes, robberies and street crimes are black….

The data provide a breakdown of the ethnicity of the 18,091 men and boys who
police took action against for a range of violent and sexual offences in
London in 2009-10. They show that among those proceeded against for street crimes, 54 per cent
were black; for robbery, 59 per cent; and for gun crimes, 67 per cent.
Street crimes include muggings, assault with intent to rob and snatching
property.

Just over 12 per cent of London’s 7.5 million population is black, including
those of mixed black and white parentage, while 69 per cent is white,
according to the Office for National Statistics….

On sex offences, black men made up 32 per cent of male suspects proceeded
against, and white men 49 per cent. The statistics also suggest that black
women are responsible for a disproportionate amount of violent crime
committed by females. 

These UK statistics are likely to be useful when responding to those who attempt to blame the legacy of slavery for disproportionately criminal behavior among the American black community.  And remember, it is blacks who suffer disproportionately from criminal black predation, especially in the UK where they do not have the ability to defend themselves due to the absence of concealed carry and stand your ground laws.  Hiding this statistical data and refusing to take it into account when formulating policy will tend to harm more blacks than the individuals of any other race.

Since women are more prone to equalitarianism than men, I’ve found the most useful tactic when discussing the connection between race and crime is to appeal to their heightened fears of sex crime.  However, it is intriguing to observe that comparative sex crimes do not follow the pattern of violent crimes.  In the UK, the average black man is 275 percent more likely to commit a sex offense than the average white man, the comparable delta in the USA is 763 percent.  However, I suspect this is mostly an artifact of the larger and more segregated black population because 24 percent of all American sex offenses are black-on-black. The relevant delta for a white American woman is much closer to the overall UK figure at 334 percent.

Still, the fact that the average black man poses more than four times the sexual assault risk to a white woman than the average white man is not something that is taught to young American women despite the fact that most women’s studies programs spend a great deal of time discussing the sexual dangers posed by men.  Then again, math is hard….

I note that vaccines are declared to be safe on statistical grounds that are far less sound than the statistical correlations reliably observed between race and criminal behavior in various societies.  As usual, the merciless application of the facts across the board will tend to expose the attempt of the ideological left to conceal the truth through ignorance, deceit, and sophistry.

Science and statistics are gradually destroying the myth of equality, which is why we have now reached the point that many governments, including the US federal government, are being forced to resort to hiding statistics they once deemed necessary in order to continue justifying their false equalitarian dogma.  But the truth is what it is, whether we like it or not, and deceit that flies in the face of observable reality is eventually going to be exposed.