Category: Uncategorized

The intellectual atheist

One of the more interesting atheist arguments is that there cannot be a God because smart and educated people are more likely to be convinced that He does not exist.  Setting aside that this is a logically fallacious appeal to intelligence and education, there are other reasons to find it dubious:

A math professor at Michigan State University allegedly stripped naked, ran naked through his classroom and screamed “There is no f*cking God!” before police apprehended him, according to several reports…. “He was screaming profanities and things you really couldn’t understand,
and something about religion,” David Grabowski, an MSU senior, told
MLive.com.

That being said, I do find the professor’s unique argument to be rather more convincing than most of the public testimonies presented by various Pharyngulans.  The sad thing is that running around naked and screaming like a lunatic is more coherent than most of their irrationalizations.

Mailvox: certainly self-comlimentary

BB affects to be surprised:

I found this site by accident. This discussion of evolution is certainly on a low level for a site that is so deeply self-comlimentary. I am always surprised that people refuse to accept biological evolution because of its supposed implausibility, yet easily accept the idea of spontaneous human appearance. God, in this view, did not need to develop, but just “is.” The plausibility of God goes unquestioned. Said another way, the argument is that man evolved is unsupportable, but the idea that God is and was forever, self-conceiving, is logical.

By the way, I believe in God.

I suggest you apply the same argument to God and man. But I readily admit that doing so will not answer the Question that you and I both have. The old question of something out of nothing.

Color me dubious.  An affectation of disinterest, followed by a nonsensical naked assertion, followed by a complete strawman.  And notice how quickly the “defense” of evolution rapidly transitions to its scientific plausibility to a philosophical attack on God.  What I find amusing is how the Neo-Darwinian faithful continue to insist that evolution is every bit as probable no matter how much the necessary complexity is observed to have increased. 

The recent recognition – long expected by me and others – that genetics are much more complex than previously understood and that junk DNA is somehow involved in the process, to say nothing of the toppling of the “tree of life”, all significantly increase the improbability and necessary time scales of evolution by natural selection.  And yet, there hasn’t even been any attempt to account for these additional complexities, partly because evolutionary biologists are both relatively innumerate and logically challenged, but mostly because the so-called science is little more than an article of willfully blind faith.

WND column

A Government of Lies

For years, the media and all right-thinking individuals have
ridiculed the Americans who don’t believe the official story that Saudi
hijackers armed with box cutters brought down three buildings in New
York, deriding them as “truthers.” Since 2008, the media and all
right-thinking individuals have ridiculed the Americans who don’t
believe the official story that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii to
married parents, deriding them as “birthers.”

What, then, shall we call the Americans who don’t believe the
official story that the Libyan assault on the American consulate in
Benghazi, which killed four Americans, including the American ambassador
to Libya, was the direct consequence of a YouTube film produced by an
immigrant scam artist? Shall we call them “filmers”?

VPFL 2012 Week 3

100 Fromundah Cheezheads (3-0)
67  D.C. Hangmen (0-3)

89 ’63Mercury Marauders (3-0)
52 Suburban Churchians (0-3)

68 Bane Sidhe (3-0)
45 Luna City Gamma Rays (1-2)

66 Bailout Banksters (2-1)
33 Greenfield Grizzlies (1-2)

56 RR Redbeards (1-2)
52 Moundsview Meerkats (1-2)

This is your weekly open NFL thread

Navies in space

Foreign Policy interviews a naval analyst concerning what science fiction gets right and what it gets wrong about warfare, especially from the naval perspective upon which so much fictional space war is based.

FP: The United States is in the midst of a major
debate on what our defense policy, especially given shrinking budgets and the
rise of China as Pacific sea power.  Does
sci-fi offer lessons on how the United States can resolve this?

CW: Fiction does not replace policy analysis.  But science fiction is the literature of
“what if?”  Not just “what
if X happens?” but also “what if we continue what we’re doing?”  In that way, science fiction can inform
policy making directly, and it can inform those who build scenarios for
wargames and exercises and the like. One of the great strengths of science
fiction is that it allows you have a conversation about something that you
otherwise couldn’t talk about because it’s too politically charged. It allows
you to create the universe you need in order to have the conversation you want
to have. Battlestar Galactica spent a lot of time talking about the war in
Iraq. There were lots of things on that show about how you treat prisoners.
They never came out and said that directly. They didn’t have to. At the Naval
War College, one of the core courses on strategy and policy had a section on
the Peloponnesian War. It was added to the curriculum in the mid-1970s because
the Vietnam War was too close, so they couldn’t talk about it, except by going
back to 400 BC. 

I’m a big believer in the martial utility of wargaming, but as the article notes, most wargames and all science fiction tend to completely omit the more tedious elements of war, especially logistics and bureaucracy.  Unsurprisingly, wargames tend to do a better job of addressing strategic assumptions and strategic goals than other entertainment media, although even the wargaming implimentation are usually built into the game design rather than left up to the player.

Land of the Unfree

American’s embrace Big Brother in the sky:

Close to half of Americans say they are in favour of police departments deploying surveillance drones domestically. According to a survey conducted
by The Associated Press and The National Constitution Center, 44
percent support the idea of police using unmanned aerial vehicles to
track suspects and carry out investigations. Only 36 percent said that they “strongly oppose” or “somewhat oppose” police use of drones, according to the survey.

And they vote.  Do you know, I used to wonder how Germans could possibly have been dumb enough to support the National Socialists, to say nothing of overwhelmingly voting for the four plebiscites that solidified their power.  It’s not exactly a mystery these days.

Harbinger

The future of the 21st century USA, encapsulated:

Students at a high school in Victorville said violent fights have
been breaking out between African-Americans and Latinos for the past two
days. Rafael Muñoz said a group of people started the fights at Silverado High on Wednesday, which have poured out into the streets.

Forget Somali jihadists in Minneapolis, what really blows the mind is the fact that Compton is now 65 percent Hispanic.  It’s remarkable that academia and the media are still caught up with an increasingly outdated monochrome fixation when the most intense societal fracture lines look to be between the black and brown communities.

So much for efficient markets

It would certainly be interesting to hear the remaining advocates of the efficient markets hypothesis attempt to explain these recent price movements:

Broker Sent Oil Prices to Eight Month High in a Drunken Stupor

Although not authorised to invest company cash in trades Steve Perkins, a long standing, senior broker at PVM Oil Futures, had managed to spend $520 million on oil futures contracts throughout the night.On the morning of the 30th an admin clerk called Mr Perkins to ask why he had bought 7 million barrels of crude during the night. Mr Perkins had no recollection of the transactions, and it turned out that he had made the trades during a “drunken blackout.”

By the time PVM had realised the transactions had not been authorised by a client, they had incurred losses of $9,763,252. Between the hours of 1.22am and 3.41am, Mr Perkins gradually bought 69 percent of the global market, whilst driving prices up from $71.40 to $73.05, by bidding higher each time.

About the only thing more patently absurd than the EMH is the myth of the rational voter.

Kick back, have a beer

And let her get on with the housework.  You’ll not only both be happier, but you’re less likely to end up divorced:

In what appears to be a slap in the face for gender equality, the report found
the divorce rate among couples who shared housework equally was around 50
per cent higher than among those where the woman did most of the work.
“What we’ve seen is that sharing equal responsibility for work in the home
doesn’t necessarily contribute to contentment,” said Thomas Hansen,
co-author of the study entitled “Equality in the Home”.
The lack of correlation between equality at home and quality of life was
surprising, the researcher said.  “One would think that break-ups would occur more often in families with less
equality at home, but our statistics show the opposite,” he said. The figures clearly show that “the more a man does in the home, the higher the
divorce rate,” he went on.

The idea that the values held by members of equalitarian households are to blame sounds reasonable, but I think the real cause is a natural consequence of men and women having fundamentally different standards.  If you’re going to end up doing it one way or the other, it’s a lot more annoying to have to do it when you thought – however unreasonable the expectation – that someone was going to do it to your liking for you.  A woman who has no expectation of household equality is naturally going to be much happier than one who thought she was going to get it, but didn’t.

The equalitarian households are simply more likely to discover this than the more traditional ones.  If the homemaking isn’t left to the homemaker, it shouldn’t be a tremendous surprise that things don’t go well.  The household is hardly the only place where it is a terrible idea to assign the job to the individual who cares least about it.  The lesson, as always, is that if you care a lot about how well something is done, you should always do it yourself.

On the other hand, I suppose it is possible that men doing too much housework is simply a grotesque DLV and they’re actively repelling their wives by turning themselves into disgusting socio-sexual gamma males.

I found the following to be an interesting conclusion of another study, which does not actually contradict the one cited above, as it is completely in line with the conclusions of a month-long experiment conducted by one of my friends.

The researchers expected to find that where men shouldered more of the burden,
women’s happiness levels were higher. In fact they found that it was the men
who were happier while their wives and girlfriends appeared to be largely
unmoved. 

If it makes you happier, then do more housework.  If not, then don’t.  Either way, don’t think that it’s going to score you any points or make her any happier, because you’re probably not going to do it to her satisfaction and it’s even possible that your well-intentioned efforts are making you sexually repulsive to her.

Silver lining in the vibrant cloud

Imagine there’s no FBI, it’s easy if you try:

In a stunning development, President-elect Enrique Peña and his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), who won control of Mexico’s government on July 1st, moved to dissolve the Agencia Federal de Investigación (AFI).

Modeled after the United States FBI, the AFI was founded in 2001 to crack down on Mexico’s pervasive government corruption and drug trafficking. With rival drug cartels murdering between 47,500 to 67,000 Mexicans over the last six years, the move by the PRI represents the total surrender of Mexico’s sovereignty back to the money and violence of Mexico’s two main drug cartels, the Sinaloa Federation and Los Zetas. 

I find it amusing that the pro-drug war writer of this article fails to recognize the connection between the founding of the AFI, the Mexican drug war, and the subsequent increase in the drug-related violence in Mexico.  If the drug violence falls considerably with the dissolution of the AFI and the eventual legalization of drugs in Mexico, no doubt he’ll also fail to draw the obvious conclusion there as well.

There haven’t been a lot of observable societal benefits to the influx of 50 million Mexicans, but getting rid of the FBI, the DEA, and the drug war would certainly be a major one.