Category: Uncategorized

47 years late and 55 trillion short

Larry Auster points out that conservatives never manage to conserve anything, not even the nation they supposedly love so dearly:

As long as there was a chance to stop the immigration and the resulting dispossession of Anglo-European America, the topic was forbidden.
But now that it’s happened, and there’s a sense that nothing can be
done about it, and therefore the identification of the fact that mass
nonwhite immigration is leading to the radical cultural and political
transformation of America does not logically require a call for restricting
that immigration, it’s become safe for Mark Steyn and all the other
despicable conservative cowards to come out from the shadows and say
bold-sounding things like, “Demographics is Destiny.” In the minds of
Steyn and the others, they are not issuing a warning against that transformation, as such a warning would make them racists; they are announcing the victory
of that transformation, combined with impotent little grumblings about
some of its negative effects. After all, what—other than impotent
grumbling—is conservatism about? 

Of course, just because it’s too late to do anything about it easily or peacefully doesn’t mean it’s actually too late for anything to be done about it.  And that is the real tragedy.

On the book front

It looks like we’re going to have to move the official release date for A THRONE OF BONES back two days until Monday.  I have the proof that’s being corrected for the hardcover; the book will be 950 pages and it looks really good.  However, the conversion to epub and the upload to Amazon is going to take a little time.  I’m sorry about the delay, but fortunately, it’s only going to be a brief one.

Mailvox: the ethics of hypocrisy

RE asks about the hypocrisy of the religious:

I am a longtime reader of your blog, which I have found to be very helpful over the years.  Also, your book the Irrational Atheist is a God send.   I hoping that you would give me your take on something.  I recently had “discussion” with my older brother on religion. My brother stated “religion is bullshit, its made up by man, its full of hypocrites.” He further explained the reason he doesn’t go church or practice his faith in anyway is because everyone that goes to church are hypocrites.

I am sure every church has its large share of “hypocrites”, but I feel he is being unreasonable.  I know it can be difficult to find the right place to fellowship with others, but I still find value in going to church, praying, and reading the Bible.  Can you please provide me another or your intelligent and witty rebuttals to his concern? 

First, relatively few of the religious, or anyone else for that matter, actually fits the proper description of hypocrisy, which is defined as follows:  a pretense of having a virtuous character, moral or religious beliefs or principles, etc., that one does not really possess.

Most people do not feign to having principles they do not really possess, but rather, fail to live up to the standards of those principles. What RE’s brother fails to realize, as do most people who regularly observe hypocrisy around them and make a meal of decrying it, is that professing ideals and failing to live up to them is not usually an indication that the profession is false, only that the professor has failed.  While it is possible for such failures to be a sign of the profession being false, it is far from being conclusive evidence of it.

Failure is not, in itself, necessarily indicative of hypocrisy.  Moreover, it makes no sense to accuse most Christians of hypocrisy, in that Christian theology expressly and specifically declares that all, without exception, are fallen.  No one is perfect.  No one is worthy.  One can more reasonably question if a self-righteous person is actually a Christian than to claim his self-righteousness is indicative of his hypocrisy being a consequence of his religion.

As for a rebuttal, I would suggest the following: the only reason you think they are hypocritical is because they have standards.  Why do you believe that a complete absence of standards is more indicative of good character than apparent hypocrisy? I mean, say what you like about the tenets of Christianity, dude, at least it’s an ethos.

Divine perfection

And the lack of Biblical evidence for it:

Is God perfect? You often hear philosophers describe “theism” as the
belief in a perfect being — a being whose attributes are said to include
being all-powerful, all-knowing, immutable, perfectly good, perfectly
simple, and necessarily existent (among others). And today, something
like this view is common among lay people as well.

There
are two famous problems with this view of God. The first is that it
appears to be impossible to make it coherent. For example, it seems
unlikely that God can be both perfectly powerful and perfectly good if
the world is filled (as it obviously is) with instances of terrible
injustice. Similarly, it’s hard to see how God can wield his infinite
power to instigate alteration and change in all things if he is flat-out
immutable. And there are more such contradictions where these came
from.

The second problem is that
while this “theist” view of God is supposed to be a description of the
God of the Bible, it’s hard to find any evidence that the prophets and
scholars who wrote the Hebrew Bible (or “Old Testament”) thought of God
in this way at all. The God of Hebrew Scripture is not depicted as
immutable, but repeatedly changes his mind about things (for example, he
regrets having made man). He is not all-knowing, since he’s repeatedly
surprised by things (like the Israelites abandoning him for a statue of a
cow). He is not perfectly powerful either, in that he famously cannot
control Israel and get its people to do what he wants. And so on.

As those of you who have read TIA know, I do not subscribe to the concept of God as a “perfect” being, or even think that it is meaningful to describe Him as “good”, but rather, a tautology.  And given our intrinsically limited perspective, I think it is stupid to claim we have any means of distinguishing between omniscience and superhuman tantiscience or voliscience. But it is fascinating to see that the Aprevistan view appears to finally have penetrated mainstream thinking.

The gun, she smokes

One of the main reasons I am a vaccine skeptic is that the organizations which vaccine advocates repeatedly cite in their attempt to claim vaccine safety are caught concealing information that indicates the opposite:

 Documentation received from the National Coalition of
Organized Women (NCOW) states that between 2009 and 2010 the
mercury-laden combined flu vaccinations have increased Vaccine Adverse
Events Reporting Systems (VAERS) fetal death reports by 4,250 percent in
pregnant women. Eileen Dannemann, NCOW’s director, made abundantly
clear that despite these figures being known to the Centers for Disease
Control (CDC), the multiple-strain, inactivated flu vaccine containing
mercury (Thimerosal) has once again been recommended to pregnant women
as a safe vaccination this season….

Despite evidence that the CDC knew of the 4,250 percent increase in
fetal death reports in 2009/2010, in order to ensure the continuance of
the vaccine program for pregnant women, the CDC published a study in
AJOG authored by Dr. Pedro Moro of the CDC in the fall of 2010. The
study articulated that there were only 23 miscarriages caused by the
single flu vaccine in 19 years between 1990 – 2009, an average of 1.2
miscarriages per year. This study formed the basis of a CDC worldwide
publicity campaign that the flu shot was safe for pregnant women by
willfully and strategically excluding the 2009 pandemic data, which was
available to them.

For those who blithely argue that all vaccines are developed scientifically and therefore safe – a fascinating approach from a logical perspective – and insist that the CDC should be considered more reliable than other government regulatory agencies such as the BEA or the SEC, I wonder how they can defend the notion that the CDC data is trustworthy when it is confirmed that the organization is making knowingly false statements concerning the safety of vaccines known to cause adverse effects.

The wrong side of the curve

The UK discovers the Laffer Curve matters:

In the 2009-10 tax year, more than 16,000 people declared an annual income of
more than £1 million to HM Revenue and Customs. This number fell to just 6,000 after Gordon Brown introduced the new 50p top
rate of income tax shortly before the last general election. The figures have been seized upon by the Conservatives to claim that
increasing the highest rate of tax actually led to a loss in revenues for
the Government. It is believed that rich Britons moved abroad or took steps to avoid paying
the new levy by reducing their taxable incomes.

Anyone who believes in the myth of human progress has to have their faith shaken by the total inability of governments to grasp the concept of cause and effect despite literally thousands of years of historical evidence upon which to draw.

Financial innovations?

Or maybe those rising stock prices are the result of all that additional productivity now made possible by 3G/4G, Android, and iPad:

Lauren is correct.  Look at the TNX compared to when QE was instituted in all cases and then what happened when it ended.  When The Fed intervenes it says it is trying to depress interest rates but in fact the opposite happens.

Why?  Because interest rates are the time-value of money including the expected devaluation.  When you raise that figure rates go up.

In addition credit and currency are fungible.

Peter has long argued for “coming hyperinflation.”  He’s been dead wrong.  He’s wrong because the inflation already happened through the issuance of bogus credit.

Doubt me?  What do you call stock prices going up by a factor of 14 over the last 30 years?

Some of you will recall I tried to explain that credit was money to Mr. Schiff, but to no avail.  It’s not that M2 doesn’t matter, it’s just that Z1 matters more.  What I don’t understand is why those individuals who say that debt doesn’t matter always insist on increasing taxes.  If debt doesn’t matter, then why tax anyone?  We’re already borrowing and spending more money than we used to tax-and-spend, so obviously, there is no need to fund the government through taxation.

The half-life of the secular utopia

Post-Christianity is all secular fun and games until the vacuum is filled.  And we all know how nature fills about vacuums:

Muslim immigrants in a town near Copenhagen have forced the
cancellation of traditional Christmas displays this year even while
spending lavishly on the Islamic Eid celebration marking the end of
Ramadan.

The controversy has escalated into an angry nationwide debate over
the role of Islam in post-Christian Denmark, where a burgeoning Muslim
population is becoming increasingly assertive in imposing its will on a
wide range of social and civic issues.

A spokesman for the Danish Conservative Party, Tom Behnke, says he fears there are people who want to convert Denmark into a Muslim country. In an interview with DR News, Behnke said: “I think it is deeply alarming that our integration efforts are so ineffective that the moment there is a Muslim majority, we do away with good-old Danish traditions and introduce Muslim traditions instead. We are living in Denmark, and people have to adapt to the situation that applies here.”

When asked whether housing associations with a Muslim minority should sponsor an Eid party, Behnke replied: “We have to remember that in the past, an Eid festival was the Muslims’ victory celebration after they had slaughtered the Christians, so I don’t know how much there is to celebrate in Denmark. Still, people should be allowed to celebrate whatever festivals they want to, but they also must respect the festivals in the country they have come to.”

Behnke added: “There is no point in wanting to convert Denmark into a Muslim country because you yourself have a Muslim background. That must never happen. On the contrary, we must have mutual respect for one another. This is a lack of respect for Danish traditions and culture. We must not have a Denmark where Danish traditions disappear as soon as there is a Muslim majority.”

Of course, the only way for Denmark to avoid losing its Danish traditions is to not have a Muslim majority.  As I have repeatedly attempted to spell out for the atheists and agnostics in our midst, there is not and there will never be a secular science-based utopia.  It is a fundamental category error to pretend it is even remotely possible.  What passes for secularism is merely the transitional state between one dominant religious form and its successor. Post-Christian culture is neither secular nor scientific, it is pagan and pre-Western civilization.

There are two choices on offer.  The secular enlightenment isn’t one of them.  What passes for progress is actually a large-scale societal reversion of significant proportions, and neither technology nor ever-increasing quantities of debt, (which presently pass for wealth), are going to prevent that.

Based on what we’re observing, the half-life of a secular society is about twenty years.

5772nd verse, same as the first

The Jews never seem to learn from their own history:

Circumcision is one of Judaism’s most important laws and for
generations of faithful it has symbolized a Biblical covenant with God. But in Israel, more and more Jewish parents are saying no to the blade. “It’s such a taboo in Israel and in Judaism,” said
Gali, nursing her six-week-old son, about the decision not to have him
circumcised.

When I was a kid reading the Bible, I always found it to be inexplicable how the Jews would no sooner be saved by God than they would do something bound to piss Him off and land them in some nasty soup.  Now that I am older and a bit more versed in the perversity of human nature, I merely wonder what the inevitable consequence of their willful disobedience is going to be.

And yet some say religion doesn’t provide any predictive models….

The important questions

I think they are not being sufficiently addressed by America’s foremost philosophers, by whom I of course mean the ladies of The View:

The ladies on The View are never short of opinions and they quickly weighed in on the Chris Brown Twitter argument with comedy writer Jenny Johnson.  Elisabeth Hasselbeck went as far as to call Chris Brown’s words verbal rape as she lambasted the singer after he shut down his social network account.  Speaking on The View, Elisabeth, 35, said: ‘I think it’s disgusting, first of all. But also, it seems like verbal rape to me.’

This is, you understand, the most vital intellectual discourse currently taking place on the American scene.  And yet, our vaunted philosophers failed to consider the most important question raised by the subject, which is whether or not abortion should be legally permitted in the event of a verbal rape resulting in pregnancy.

Perhaps Dr. John Scalzi, our resident expert on matters of rape and abortion, would be so kind as to render his expert opinion on the subject.