Category: Uncategorized

Faith as economic artifact

Right on the socionomic schedule, the growth of the irreligious population begins to slow:

After years of marked growth, the size of Americans who identify with no religion slowed in 2012, according to a study released Thursday.  Since 2008, the percentage of Americans who identify as religious “nones” has grown from 14.6% to 17.8% in 2012, according to the Gallup survey. That number, which grew nearly one percentage point every year from 2008 to 2011, grew only 0.3% last year – from 17.5% in 2011 to 17.8% in 2012 – making it the smallest increase over the past five years….

Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of Gallup, says these results suggest “that religion may be maintaining itself or even increasing in the years ahead.”  “Our current ability to look at it over five years with these big surveys suggests the possibility that the growth [of the nones] may not be inexorable,” Newport says….

Atheist and humanist activists disagree and pushed back against the Gallup study.

Given that the vast economic depression that began in 2008 still hasn’t even been officially recognized, it should be no surprise that the pendulum has merely slowed, and not turned entirely.  I find it amusing that the atheists and humanists are so openly anti-science; one wonders what, precisely, their argument for the continued decline of religion might be founded upon.

What should actually concern the atheist and humanist activists is not the socionomic prediction that non-religious identification will decline as economic conditions continue to worsen.  What should bother them is that the growth in religious “nones” considerably outpaces the growth of those willing to identify themselves as atheism.  Not only do Low Church Atheists not identify with High Church Atheists, they often have a more favorable view of the religious than they do of their “fellow” atheists.

As for the inevitable appeal to “the youth”, the linear projections never pan out for the obvious reason that young people are stupid, inexperienced, and clueless.  Eventually, most of them grow out of it.

Spengler and the geography myth

In Form and Actuality, Spengler also appears to have anticipated my expressed doubts about the ability of non-Anglo Saxons to correctly grasp, let alone uphold and sustain, the Common Law-based Rights of Englishmen, on the basis of changes in their geographic locations:

“Today we think in continents, and it is only our philosophers and historians who have not realized that we do so. Of what significance to us, then, are conceptions and purviews that they put before us as universally valid, when in truth their furthest horizon does not extend beyond the intellectual atmosphere of Western Man?

“Examine, from this point of view, our best books. When Plato speaks of humanity, he means the Hellenes in contrast to the barbarians, which is entirely consonant with the ahistoric mode of the Classical life and thought, and his premisses take him to conclusions that for Greeks were complete and significant. When, however, Kant philosophizes, say on ethical ideas, he maintains the validity of his theses for men of all times and places. He does not say this in so many words, for, for himself and his readers, it is something that goes without saying. In his aesthetics he formulates the principles, not of Phidias’s art, or Rembrandt’s art, but of Art generally. But what he poses as necessary forms of thought are in reality only necessary forms of Western thought, though a glance at Aristotle and his essentially different conclusions should have sufficed to show that Aristotle’s intellect, not less penetrating than his own, was of different structure from it. The categories of the Westerner are just as alien to Russian thought as those of the Chinaman or the ancient Greek are to him. For us, the effective and complete comprehension of Classical root-words is just as impossible as that of Russian and Indian, and for the modern Chinese or Arab, with their utterly different intellectual constitutions, “philosophy from Bacon to Kant” has only a curiosity value.

“It is this that is lacking to the Western thinker, the very thinker in whom we might have expected to find it — insight into the historically relative character of his data, which are expressions of one specific existence and one only; knowledge of the necessary limits of their validity; the conviction that his “unshakable” truths and “eternal” views are simply true for him and eternal for his world-view; the duty of looking beyond them to find out what the men of other Cultures have with equal certainty evolved out of themselves. That and nothing else will impart completeness to the philosophy of the future, and only through an understanding of the living world shall we understand the symbolism of history. Here there is nothing constant, nothing universal. We must cease to speak of the forms of “Thought,” the principles of “Tragedy,” the mission of “The State.” Universal validity involves always the fallacy of arguing from particular to particular.”

It would be a mistake to confuse Spengler’s historical relativism with modern moral relativism.  Anyone who speaks more than one language is familiar with the phenomenon of the untranslatable word; how much more untranslatable are the concepts that cross temporal, genetic, and cultural boundaries as well as mere linguistic ones? What the Ancient Greeks meant by the term we translate as “barbarian” is very different than our concept of the word, while even words as seemingly simple and straightforward as “African” and “infringed” are today interpreted very differently by people living at the same time within the same political boundaries.

Spengler’s observation underlies the problematic nature of mass immigration in general as well as the total madness of permitting mass immigration from non-European nations in a quasi-democracy in particular.  To expect any respect for the totemic foundations of Western civilization from those whose very structural worldviews are, quite literally, alien, is to defy both logic as well as millennia of recorded observations through history.  And even the modern fear of addressing the consequences of this madness beautifully illustrates Spengler’s point; would the highly civilized Athenians who brutally butchered the Melians for the crime of remaining neutral in the Peloponnesian War, hesitate to act in seeing their agoras overrun by aliens?  Would the Romans, who went to war with their own socii rather than permit them to claim Roman citizenship? Would the Chinese, past or present?

Why girls get better grades

It isn’t because they actually know the material better, but because they don’t annoy the teacher:

Despite having higher scores on standardized tests, boys get lower
grades than girls. Why? Because teachers are basing grades at least
partly on classroom behavior, and the standards are very much geared to
female norms….

“Boys in all racial categories across all subject areas are not
represented in grade distributions where their test scores would
predict. Even those boys who perform equally as well as girls on
reading, math and science tests are nevertheless graded less favorably
by their teachers.”

In summary, girls are able to substitute apple-polishing and classroom etiquette for an amount of knowing the material, and they are being rewarded for it, beginning in kindergarten.  Their better grades are eventually used to give them priority of place in college, thereby leading observers to erroneously conclude that they are “outperforming” men. 

Unsurprisingly, the boys who are smart enough to figure out the deck is stacked against them lose all respect for the system and opt out in varying degrees.

Guns and the slave mentality

Contrast New York Times columnist Charles Blow’s call for gun control with Robert Heinlein’s statement about freedom:

We don’t want to pass the point where society is so saturated with the most dangerous kinds of weaponry that people feel compelled to arm themselves or be left vulnerable, if indeed we haven’t already passed that point.

According to The Associated Press, a small Utah town is making a “gun in every home a priority.” The A.P. reported:

“Spring City Councilman Neil Sorensen first proposed an ordinance requiring a gun in every household in the town of 1,000. The rest of the council scoffed at making it a requirement, but they unanimously agreed to move forward with an ordinance ‘recommending’ the idea. The council also approved funding to offer concealed firearms training Friday to the 20 teachers and administrators at the local elementary school.”

That is not where we want to be as a country.

No, Charles, that is precisely where we want to be as a country.  America is a nation of armed free men who answer to no earthly power, it is not a nation of unarmed slave boys who cower before their masters in Washington D.C. lest they apply the whip.

“You cannot enslave a free man, only kill him.” 
 – Robert Heinlein

Blow doesn’t appear to realize that he is advocating a return to the evil that was inflicted upon his ancestors.  What is worse, not only does he not wish to be a free man, he doesn’t want anyone else to be free either.

What was the point of freeing blacks like him when they use their freedom to beg to be returned to their chains?  Instead of obediently carrying water like a servile house negro on the NYT plantation, Blow should recall the words of the free man, Frederick Douglas:

“Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.”

Those with the slave mentality of Charles Blow will quietly submit to the violation and elimination of their Constitutional right to bear arms.  Free men will never do so.  Nor should ever be so foolish as to do so, as Karl Denninger points out:

All told the count is somewhere north of 170 million citizens that have been executed not by combat in war or as “collateral damage” (accidental injury) but rather simply because once the government obtained an absolute monopoly on force it was able to slaughter people with impunity, and did.

170 million people is an extraordinary number.  Since we’re only 330 million out of a world population of something like 7 billion, it is not fair to charge all of them against us when making comparisons.  We’re about 5% of the world population, basically, so you could “charge” 8.5 million of those deaths (5%) to us in comparison.

How’s that work out?

Well, we have 11,000 firearms homicides, more or less, annually.

Objectively looking at this issue it would take 772 years for civilians to murder 8.5 million people, most of them one at a time, but the comparison table only runs in the last century.

It is therefore nearly eight times more likely that you will be slaughtered by your government wholesale if you give up your guns than the risk you run of being murdered by a bad guy if you don’t and this assumes that all of the 11,000 gun murders do not happen if we ban all or some firearms.

Guns in the hands of the American people are not the problem.  Guns in the hand of the American people are the PREVENTION of the problem.  If Charles Blow wants to return to slavery, then let him do so.  But he is a damned fool if he thinks free men, black, white, or any other color, are going to follow him there.

Another argument against registration

Registration of firearms of any kind cannot and should not be permitted, both due to its historical use in subsequent confiscations and because it is a clear violation of the Second Amendment, being a law that clearly hinders the right to bear arms.  However, there is now another powerful argument to use against registration, which is the way that anti-gun media organizations are making public the lists of registered gun owners:

A gossip site has taken the controversial decision to post the name of every licensed gun owner in New York City online as the debate over gun control rages on. Gawker posted the list of names, which is already publicly available, today. It follows the move by the Journal News to publish home addresses of gun permit owners in Westchester and Rockland counties last month.

No doubt Nick Denton, Gawker’s owner, will soon be cowering behind armed guards like the Journal News editor, Caryn A. McBride.  It is clear that at least some of these anti-gunners are looking for a war.  That they are dumb enough to seek one with a people who are clearly armed and more than willing to fight to defend their Second Amendment rights staggers the imagination.  I suspect, that like the Germans and the Japanese before them, they mistake the American people’s reluctance to fight for an unwillingness or an inability to do so.

I can’t help but notice that Denton, like Piers Morgan, is another Redcoat attempting to disarm the Americans.  Even after more than 200 years, they still haven’t learned.

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? 

Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… 

The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough.” 
 – Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn 

UPDATE: It appears another map of gun owners has been published.

Rape, corrected

The predecessor of this corrected infographic has been going around, and remarkably, it appears that even card-carrying feminists have begun to realize that writing fantasy fiction about rape statistics is no longer going to convince anyone of anything anymore.  I’ve corrected this on the basis of actual empirical data, which has shown that between 41 and 50  percent of all reported rapes are false reports.  And by false reports, I mean the purported victim has recanted and admitted that the charge was false, either voluntarily or when faced with a polygraph test.  Furthermore, DNA evidence has been used to show that a statistically significant number of reported, charged, and convicted rapists are, in fact, innocent.  Consider this 2009 article in the Forensic Examiner:

Very little formal research has been conducted on the prevalence of false allegations of rape. One study looked at the 109 cases of forcible rape that were disposed of in one small midwestern town between 1978 and 1987 (Kanin, 1994). The given town was specifically selected for study because the police department used a uniquely objective and thorough protocol when investigating rape complaints. Among other procedural safeguards, officers did not have the discretion to drop rape investigations if they concluded the complaint was “suspect” or unfounded. Every rape accusation had to be thoroughly investigated and included offering a polygraph to both the accuser and the accused. Cases were only determined to be false if and when the accuser admitted that no rape occurred.

The researchers further investigated those cases that the police, through their investigation, had ultimately determined were “false” or fabricated. During the follow-up investigation, the complainants held fast to their assertion that their rape allegation had been true, despite being told they would face penalties for filing a false report. As a result, 41% of all of the forcible rape complaints were found to be false. To further this study, a similar analysis was conducted on all of the forcible rape complaints filed at two large midwestern public universities over a 3-year period. Here, where polygraphs were not offered as part of the investigatory procedure, it was found that 50% of the complaints were false.

Charles P. McDowell, a researcher in the United States Air Force Special Studies Division, studied the 1,218 reports of rape that were made between 1980 and 1984 on Air Force bases throughout the world (McDowell, 1985). Of those, 460 were found to be “proven” allegations either because the “overwhelming preponderance of the evidence” strongly supported the allegation or because there was a conviction in the case. Another 212 of the total reports were found to be “disproved” as the alleged victim convincingly admitted the complaint was a “hoax” at some point during the initial investigation. The researchers then investigated the 546 remaining or “unresolved” rape allegations including having the accusers submit to a polygraph. Twenty-seven percent (27%) of these complainants admitted they had fabricated their accusation just before taking the polygraph or right after they failed the test. (It should be noted that whenever there was any doubt, the unresolved case was re-classified as a “proven” rape.) Combining this 27% with the initial 212 “disproved” cases, it was determined that approximately 45% of the total rape allegations were false.

The reality is that rape is a relatively uncommon crime in the United States; the one in five figures bandied about by feminists at candlelight vigils are pure and unmitigated fantasy.  Of course, it is not exactly a mystery why so many women are more than a little disposed to fantasize about rape.

It’s worse than that

It is belatedly dawning on everyone that not everyone should go to college:

Richard Meeusen, chairman, president and CEO of Racine Federated’s parent company, Badger Meter. “We have presidents and leaders who say every child should have the opportunity to go to college.

“Unfortunately, it sends the message to parents that if they don’t send their kids to college, they’re failing.”

“Now we’re saying, ‘Where are our electricians, auto mechanics, HVAC (heating, ventilation and air-conditioning) workers and CNC (computer numeric control) operators?’” Meeusen said.

He added, “We’ve ripped out all the shop classes and replace them with calculus.”

The problem isn’t that we’ve ripped out all the shop classes and replaced them with calculus.  It’s that we’ve ripped them out and replaced them with diversity classes that teach how Harriet Tubman won the civil war, “science” classes about outmoded evolutionary theory and nonexistent global warming, and “sex-ed” classes about Heather’s two mommies and Cho Fong’s two daddies.

What we’re seeing is nothing less than a complete divorce of education and academic accreditation.  All an academic degree now assures is that the individual has been extensively immersed in the expected ideological and socio-sexual propaganda.

Homeschool and social awkwardness

LH asks a serious question about socialization and homeschool:

My observations are this. Academically, homeschoolers are just pure genius. But the world does not work based on your grade point average. In the business world, it all also depends on who you know and how well you get along with people. And I’ve noticed that homeschooled adults–people in their twenties and thirties–often seem to struggle with the rest of the working world.

Now, I am asking for opinions on these observations. I’m not drawing a line in the sand, making any declarations against homeschooling, or anything like that. I’m looking for other people’s observations and testimonies that might prove hopeful.

I think it is a genuine issue.  I have observed the phenomenon on numerous occasions myself.  For example, at my eldest son’s first soccer practice with a new team, all of the other players sat down and listened to the coach when he started addressing them.  My son continued to stand, bouncing a ball, and was observably paying no attention to the coach.

Now, obviously I explained that his behavior was unacceptable after the practice and likely to lead to a lack of playing time.  But the fact that I had to explain this to him, when he had been playing soccer for years, was indicative of what can either be seen as a feature or a bug.  That is to say, he simply does not appear to feel any peer pressure.  The fact that everyone else is doing X not only does not instill in him any need to do X, he doesn’t appear to assign any significance to it whatsoever.

This isn’t necessarily the result of homeschooling, of course.  I am a socio-sexual Sigma and a lone wolf.  Spacebunny is also, by female standards, a lone wolf.  Both of us were public-schooled.  So, it should not be at all surprising that our son would tend to be highly independent regardless of how he was schooled, and yet, there is still a material difference between his perception of the significance of the behavior of others to him, and ours.

On the other hand, once a parent is aware of this lack of awareness, it is quite easily dealt with.  The incident at practice was two years ago.  It has not happened since; once the team begins to line up in front of the coach, he recognizes the signal and not infrequently is among the first to sit down and pay attention.  However, it appears to remain a conscious behavior and not an unconscious one.  I happen to think this will serve him well in time, as unlike the others, he has the option to go along with the crowd or not, as he consciously chooses.  Independence and auto-conformity are mutually exclusive; the parent who fears the occasional social awkwardness later in life would do well to consider what sort of problems are more likely to occur with an auto-conforming child.

However, the most significant testimony I have ever heard concerning socialization and homeschool was from the children’s pediatrician, who is a doctor of no little international repute.  We were the only homeschooling family in his practice at the start and he initially harbored some reservations about it.  However, after ten years, he mentioned that he was now fully supportive of it, in part because he had observed that our children were not only advanced intellectually, they were also the happiest children in his practice.

I think one should step back and consider what the working world presently is before concluding that those who struggle with it are somehow deficient.  What is natural or normal about spending 8-10 hours per day in a small grey cubicle, living like a rat in a cage and shuffling virtual papers while attempting to avoid conflict with various unproductive individuals of varying degrees of medication and reflexive hostility?  Considering how much the average worker has to modify his normal behavior just to avoid getting in trouble with HR these days, can one reasonably conclude that it is the homeschooled individual and not the increasingly outdated working world that is the problem?

The experts tell us that to succeed in the working world of tomorrow, it will be increasingly necessary to be independent, free of reliance upon the corporate patterns of the past, flexible, and agile.  To me, it sounds as if much of the “awkwardness” of the homeschooled individual in the eyes of the more conventionally schooled is akin to the strangeness of the mammal when viewed from the perspective of the dinosaur.

My suspicion is that the socially awkward homeschooler primarily represents a failure of the homeschooling parent to address socio-sexual issues with the child, and is little different from the tendency of most conventionally schooled men to be sexually awkward due to the maleducations they receive on the topic.  The fact that the homeschooled child is likely to automatically receive less socio-sexual education than the crude mindless one received by the conventionally schooled child does not mean that he is necessarily uneducable in the subject.

Fueling the death spiral

Glenn Reynolds notes that homeschools are putting one of America’s most enervating evils at risk, the public school:

For “notoriously inadequate” public school systems, as I argue in a new “Broadside” from Encounter Books, The K-12 Implosion, the risk is that the outflow of kids will turn from a trickle into a flood. At some point, it’s a death-spiral: As kids (often the best students) leave because schools are “notoriously inadequate,” the schools become even more notoriously inadequate, and funding — which is computed on a per-pupil basis — dries up. This, of course, encourages more parents to move their kids elsewhere, in a vicious cycle.

Does this mean the end of public education? No. But it does mean that the old model — which dates to the 19th Century, when schools were explicitly compared to factories — is at risk. Smarter educators will start thinking about how to update a 19th Century product to suit 21st Century realities. Less-smart educators will hunker down and fight change tooth and nail.
Who will win out in the end? Well, how many 19th Century business models do you see flourishing, here in the 21st?

The risk is to be embraced with enthusiasm.  I’ve been arguing for years that the very concept of “school” is completely and utterly outdated.  It’s inefficient, ineffective, and intellectually crippling.  Although there are many ominous signs on the horizon, there are a few bright rays of light shining as well, and one of them is the continued rapid growth of parents deciding to homeschool their children.

Of austerity and contraction

Texas cuts spending, tax revenues go up:

In 2011, when it looked as if Texas was facing a multi-billion-dollar
budget deficit, the Texas Legislature cut spending, especially funding
for education, Bloomberg notes. However, partly because of the fracking
boom, revenues from the sale of oil and gas soared, bringing in
unexpected tax revenues. The jobless rate also declined sharply,
currently down to 6.2 percent. Revenue from sales taxes has increased as
well.

Meanwhile, California has lost over $1 billion in tax revenues in less than two months by increasing spending and tax rates:

After Proposition 30 passed on November 6, 2012, the State of California experienced a decline in the total state revenue for the month of November. California State Controller John Chiang reported that the total revenue for the month of November declined by $806.8 million, which is 10.8 percent below budget.

The State of California experienced a decline in its revenue as several of the high income earners have relocated to other states, and have also relocated their businesses out of state. This led to a decline in corporate and income tax revenues by more than $1 billion.

It’s 2013.  How is it possible that any government, at any level, is still using static revenue models?  At some point, inept ideology can only be described as willful idiocy.