Category: Uncategorized

You’d better sit down for this one

I’m certain we’re all just absolutely shocked by this revelation:

U.S. intelligence officials knew within 24 hours of the
assault on the U.S. Consulate in Libya that it was a terrorist attack
and suspected Al Qaeda-tied elements were involved, sources told Fox
News — though it took the administration a week to acknowledge it.  The
account sharply conflicts with claims on the Sunday after the attack by
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice that the
administration believed the strike was a “spontaneous” event triggered
by protests in Egypt over an anti-Islam film.

 It’s always so hard to see innocence shattered.  So much for the feared rage of Jihad Boy.  Sure, we all knew that Obama and his handlers were liars, but the remarkable thing is how bad at it they are.  Mitt Romney, now, there is a politician who can tell perfectly credible lies without blinking, insofar as he can resist contradicting himself.

Juxtaposition

I happened to read two articles describing the same thing from very different perspectives earlier this week.

Item One:

Though few may doubt that Jewish life in America could be threatened, Gordis effectively explains why this luxury is precisely because of
the modern state of Israel. In the most powerful passages of the
lengthy piece, he describes the Israeli contribution to the strength of
the American Jewish psyche and standing. There was an era not long ago in which American Jews
tiptoed around America, nervously striving to stay beneath the radar.
They evoked that image of the spies who reported back to Moses after
surveying the Promised Land: “We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves,
and so we appeared to them.” The American Jews who believe they could
survive the loss of Israel do not remember that era. They take it as
entirely natural that thousands of American citizens confidently ascend
the steps of the Capitol Hill on the lobbying day at AIPAC’s annual
Policy Conference….

Jews today no longer think of themselves as a tiptoeing people. When
Soviet Jews awakened and wanted out of their national prison, American
Jews supported them, and the State of Israel made their rescue a
national project. When an Air France flight filled with Jews was
hijacked to Entebbe, the State of Israel rescued them, and American Jews
were filled with unprecedented pride. When Ethiopian Jews were caught
in the crosshairs of a deadly civil war, the State of Israel whisked
them out, and American philanthropists continue to make them a key
priority. Much of what fuels American Jewish pride is the existence and
the behavior of the State of Israel.  In ways we do not sufficiently recognize, Israel has changed the
existential condition of Jews everywhere, even in America. Without the
State of Israel, the self-confidence and sense of belonging that
American Jews now take for granted would quickly disappear.

 Item Two:

So what is all the fuss about? It’s a paper entitled “Preparing For A
Post Israel Middle East”, an 82-page analysis that concludes that the
American national interest in fundamentally at odds with that of Zionist
Israel. The authors conclude that Israel is currently the greatest
threat to US national interests because its nature and actions prevent
normal US relations  with  Arab and  Muslim countries and, to a growing
degree, the wider international community….
Among the many findings:
  • Gross Israeli interference in the internal affairs of the United
    States through spying and illegal US arms transfers. This includes
    supporting more than 60 ‘front organizations’ and  approximately 7,500
    US officials who do Israel’s bidding and seek to dominate and intimidate
    the media and agencies of  the US government which should no longer be
    condoned;
  • That the United States government no longer has the financial
    resources, or public support to continue funding Israel. The billions of
    dollars in direct and indirect aid from US taxpayers to Israel since
    1967 is not affordable and is increasingly being objected to by US
    taxpayers who oppose continuing American military involvement in the
    Middle East. US public opinion no longer supports funding and executing
    widely perceived illegal US wars on Israel’s behalf. This view is
    increasingly being shared by Europe, Asia and the International public;
Taken in tandem,
it rather looks as if history may be threatening to repeat itself yet
again.  If the existence of Israel has made American Jews confident
enough to stop tiptoeing around America and openly dominate Washington,
Hollywood, and Wall Street to an extent the various American
intelligence agencies believe should no longer be condoned, this would
appear to be setting the stage for a power struggle of the sort that
always seems to wind up with the Jews being expelled through no fault of their own.  It raises two questions in my mind:

  1. Have the Jews ever come out on top in such a conflict?
  2. If not, what is the benefit of swaggering proudly rather than tiptoeing politely when one is a tiny minority of the population.

The descent from dialectic

Over the course of the discussion of female solipsism that took place at Alpha Game, HUS, and other Game blogs, the distinction between dialectic and rhetoric, and between logic and emotion, has repeatedly come up.  Two things have become obvious as a result, which is that 1) men have no choice but to accept the observable female inclination for solipsism, rhetoric, and emotion, and 2) women have to accept that those men who strongly prefer objective perspectives, dialectic, and logic are never going to look favorably upon women’s rejection of those things even if they accept the fact of the female disinclination.

The problem is that emotion and rhetoric are both dishonest, the former intrinsically and the latter practically.  This is not to say that the emotions are bad, only that because they are dynamic and the truth is static, emotion-based reasoning is guaranteed to be false at least part of the time.  Rhetoric, on the other hand, does not have to be dishonest, but because it is designed to manipulate and convince those who, as Aristotle pointed out in Rhetoric, “cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument, or follow a long
chain of reasoning”, it usually has to be at least somewhat in variance with the complete truth because it is designed to appeal to the emotions.

More at Alpha Game… including an argument for gun control and two counterarguments!  But please keep the inevitable gun discussion here at VP.

Hey, not gay!

Contra the accusations of the occasional critic, it would appear that Steve Sailer’s system precludes my homosexuality.  I know I’ll sleep better, for one:

Checking out these claims and insinuations is highly time-consuming and uncertain, but there is now a way to at least rapidly measure public perceptions of celebrities using what I call Google Gaydar.

When you begin typing a search phrase, Google offers ten auto-completion prompts in order of popularity. (This convenience came into the news recently when the wife of a German politician sued Google for auto-finishing searches on her name with helpful suggestions such as “prostitute” and “escort.”)

We can use the rank order of Google’s prompts to quantify what Mickey Kaus called the “Undernews” back when only the National Enquirer dared report on presidential candidate John Edwards’s illegitimate baby.

Apparently I am so straight that even typing in “Vox Day Ga” produces the results Vox Day Game, Vox Day Gamma, Vox Day Game Chart, Vox Day Game Thrones, and Vox Day Game Theory.  Contrast this to Kevin Spacey, who only requires “Kevin Sp” for autocomplete to throw out “Kevin Spacey Gay”.  And then, there is Tom Cruise, who requires nothing more than one merely think about typing the letter T in order for Google to suggest “Tom Cruise Gay”.

Clearly this is solid scientific evidence of my hypothesis that it takes a real and very straight man to drink a chick drink with umbrellas while wearing Italian loafers.  Oh, who am I kidding.  I’m living a lie.  In truth, I don’t drink anything but red wine and prosecco these days.

Homeschool vaccine survey

If you live in Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, or Oregon and homeschool your children, please consider taking part in this NHERI-sponsored pilot study:

A lot of people feel strongly about the
importance of all children being vaccinated for their own good and
society’s good. Others feel just as strongly that vaccines are dangerous
and do more harm than good.

Maybe you haven’t really thought about
it and are rather neutral about the issue. But wouldn’t it be
interesting to find out the facts about what might be going on with
vaccines and the health of our children and society?

This is a great opportunity for you to
participate in a study to help everyone understand this critical and
controversial subject. Homeschoolers, with either vaccinated or non-vaccinated children, are in a unique position to inform this area of research.

Study participants will remain anonymous. We fully understand the importance of confidentiality and anonymity.

This should be interesting, as there has been a great deal of theorizing about homeschoolers and vaccinations without anyone actually possessing much in the way of relevant evidence concerning it.

The need to restrict drone use

Those discussing the use of killer drones, both pro and con, at the New York Times somehow managed to completely fail to consider the two most problematic aspects of their use:

One point in favor of drone strikes is that they are weakening Al
Qaeda, the Taliban and affiliated groups, and hence protecting lives,
American and other.

Also, there don’t seem to be better means of doing
so.

Points against drone strikes are the cost in civilian lives, the
alienation of parts of the Islamic world, potential harm to the
authority of international law, and the possibility that drone use will
spread around the world, generating more conflict and harming long-term
U.S. interests.

These are all valid points, and I respect that reasonable people
could be convinced by either set. My own reasoning turns on four
arguments.

  1. First, states have a primary responsibility for the protection of
    their own citizens. If drone strikes are the best way to remove an
    all-too-real threat to American lives, then that is an especially
    weighty consideration.
  2. Second, I doubt that ending drone strikes would substantially reduce
    anti-Americanism in the Islamic world or put a dent in radical
    recruitment.
  3. Third, the U.S can do a lot to moderate some harms caused by its use
    of drones. By being clearer about what it’s doing and offering detailed
    legal justification, the U.S. could mitigate damage to international
    law and the threat of uncontrolled proliferation.
  4. Finally, there is evidence that drone strikes are less harmful to
    civilians than other means of reaching Al Qaeda and affiliates in
    remote, lawless regions (for example, large-scale military operations).

There are two serious problems with the use of drones overseas, both of which outweigh their potential benefits.  First, it has successfully established a precedent for using them domestically for routine law enforcement.  Second, and more problematic, the administration has foolishly granted a comprehensive justification for the use of drones by foreign forces against Americans on American soil.  When foreign militaries acquire access to drones, and they will, the US will find little sympathy from other nations when the equivalent of Hellfire missiles begin raining down on New York and California.

And the threat of disproportionate response won’t necessarily be a convincing deterrent, because clever attackers will be careful to disguise who is piloting the drone.  An Iranian drone might actually belong to China.  A Chinese drone might actually be utilized by American rebels… or by China making it look like American rebels.  The widespread use of drones is a very foolish move on the part of the U.S. Commander-in-Chief and can be safely expected to result in some serious blowback.

Idiocracy through immigration

We are watching the intellectual and human capital decline of the USA in real time:

President Obama has bragged about his supposed revolution in education over and over during this election cycle. He says he’s interested in upping standards while simultaneously appeasing teachers unions. But the performance of American students continues to sink to all-time lows.

2012’s high school seniors have the worst SAT reading score since 1972; they scored 486 on reading, out of a possible 800. In writing, students also dropped dramatically, down to 488. That’s a nine-point drop since 2006.

The tendency from leftists is to challenge the efficacy of the SAT in measuring performance – but it’s a standardized test with great care taken for consistency. Instead, the Washington Post’s Emma Brown suggests that more and more minority students are taking the SATs. “More than 1.66 million graduating seniors last year took the test, the highest number in history. Nearly half were minorities and about a quarter reported that English was not exclusively their first language.

The problematic thing about this is that the SAT has been dumbed-down considerably since 1972; it is now an achievement test rather than an aptitude test.  And yet, the supposed demographic saviors, despite trillions in spending, the best education that the public schools can provide, and the huge increase in college attendance, have repeatedly demonstrated that they are simply not as capable as the Americans they have been brought in to replace.

It is more than a little ironic that the very people who preached the need for a more intelligent and better educated 21st century labor force have, with their blind enthusiasm for replacing the native population, ensured that the 21st century USA will possess a dumber, less educated, less capable labor force with which to compete.  Look at what Southern California is like these days.  That’s what life in your town is going to be like within the next 20 years.

Bombs before GDP

Karl Denninger considers the problem of energy production in a world of increasingly expensive oil and coal:

We experimented with Thorium as a nuclear fuel in the 1950s
and 1960s.  Carried in a molten salt there are a number of significant
advantages to this fuel cycle.  Chief among them is that the reactors
operate at atmospheric pressure, have a strongly-negative temperature
coefficient (that is, reactivity drops as temperature increases) and
because they operate with their fuel dispersed in the coolant and rely
on a fixed moderator in the reaction vessel shutting them down is
simply a matter of draining the working fuel into a tank with sufficient
surface area to dissipate decay heat.  This can be accomplished
passively; active cooling of a freeze plug in the bottom of the reactor
vessel can be employed during normal operation and if for any reason
that cooling is lost the plug melts, the coolant and working fluid
drains to tanks and the reactor shuts down.  In addition thorium is about as abundant in the environment as is lead, making its supply effectively infinite.

Finally, these reactors operate at a much
higher temperature; the units we have run (yes, we’ve built them
experimentally in the 1950s – 1970s!) run in the neighborhood of 650C. 
This allows closed-cycle turbine systems that are more efficient than
the conventional turbines in existing designs, making practical the
location of reactors in places that don’t have large amounts of water
available.  That in turn means that the risk of geological and other
similar accidents (e.g. tsunamis!) is greatly reduced or eliminated. 
Finally, the fuel cycle is mostly-closed internally;
that is, rather than requiring both fast-breeder reactors and external
large-scale reprocessing plants to be practical, along with a way to
store a lot of high-level waste these units burn up most of their
high-level waste internally and produce their own fuel internally as
well as an inherent part of their operation.

So why didn’t we pursue this path for nuclear power?

That’s simple: It is entirely-unsuitable for production of nuclear bombs as it produces negligible amounts of plutonium.

A decision that might have made sense in the middle of the 1950s arms
race doesn’t make sense more than 60 years later.  So, why aren’t we
utilizing thorium-based nuclear power plants?

Gay marriage eliminates motherhood

Time exposes yet another lie from the pro-homogamy crowd:

France is set to ban the words “mother” and “father” from all official documents under controversial plans to legalise gay marriage.  The move, which has outraged Catholics, means only the word “parents”
would be used in identical marriage ceremonies for all heterosexual and
same-sex couples. The draft law states that “marriage is a union of two people, of
different or the same gender”. It says all references to “mothers and fathers” in the civil code –
which enshrines French law – will be swapped for simply “parents”. 

The homogamy advocates often like to ask how government-approved “gay marriage” could possibly affect normal heterosexual marriages.  Here is the answer: by eliminating both maternal and paternal status in law.  Nor is France the only place this legal assault on the traditional concepts of motherhood and fatherhood are taking place; the California Senate has sent up a trial balloon in its bill 777 which appears to be an attempt to remove the traditional concepts from the state educational system.

The interesting thing will be how this end to the legal statuses of “mother” and “father” will affect divorce law.  After all, it won’t be possible to assume that child custody will be given to the mother, once that position is legally abolished.  One wonders if the pro-homogamy members of the more progressive sex will rethink their support for the fake institution if they realize it may eventually result in their losing a substantial portion of their family court advantage.