Category: Uncategorized

Still sniping, still running

It would appear PZ Myers is now too delicate to respond to me directly, so he’s responding to someone else quoting what I wrote, which totally doesn’t count as responding:

I don’t do debates anymore. One reason is that they give the other side far too much credibility; another is that the format rewards rhetoric, not honesty. But the other big reason is sheer disgust at the spectacle these loons can put on.

Imagine this metaphorical situation: you’re at a debate, and your opponent stands up and in the first round, starts punching himself in the face. Punching hard, until the blood spurts in great red rivers out of his nose. You’re aghast, but when your turn comes up, you try to make your points; in rebuttal, he pulls out a knife and starts gouging out one of his eyeballs. You just want to stop the whole debacle, call an ambulance, and have the poor warped goon hauled away. But then afterwards, he crows victory.

That’s a bit of hyperbole, but not by much. Theodore Beale, aka Vox Day, has leapt upon my post in which I used the status of women as evidence that religion does harm to humanity, and eagerly tries to rebut me in a spectacular act of self-mutilation. I won’t link directly to poor sick Theodore Beale — he needs psychiatric help — but fortunately Dave Futrelle quotes him extensively, so you can get the gist without feeding Beale’s pathology directly.

Right, that’s why the man whose intellectual courage inspired me to dub him “The Fowl Atheist” doesn’t debate anyone. It’s not because he can’t argue his way out of a paper bag and knows that he’ll get his pudgy ass exposed to the public before it is kicked all over the place, it’s because he’s too much of a humanitarian. You’d think he would know no one is going to buy that excuse, he’s a high-AQ militant atheist after all. He’s a fierce and focused hunter, with hunter’s hands and hunter’s eyes, not Sister Mary Margaret feeding the poor at the homeless shelter! I find it a little ironic that a man who openly admits to being closer to having Asperger’s Syndrome than being neurotypical is attempting to claim I need psychiatric help.

I never cease to find amusing how quickly these inept atheists resort to accusations of mental illness whenever their illogic is publicly illuminated and dissected. Why, one might almost begin to suspect they are projecting!

But there’s enough bile to make you wonder. I was arguing that many features of religion clearly don’t benefit women, so I asked:

How does throwing acid in their faces when they demand independence from men benefit women?

So Teddy rebuts that in the most appalling way.

[F]emale independence is strongly correlated with a whole host of social ills. Using the utilitarian metric favored by most atheists, a few acid-burned faces is a small price to pay for lasting marriages, stable families, legitimate children, low levels of debt, strong currencies, affordable housing, homogenous populations, low levels of crime, and demographic stability. If PZ has turned against utilitarianism or the concept of the collective welfare trumping the interests of the individual, I should be fascinated to hear it.

Say what? So his answer to how this benefits women is to say it’s bad for society for women to be independent, and that honor killings, stonings, and mutilation of women is a small price?

I think he just made my case for me.

Yes, that is precisely the answer. But this doesn’t make his case for him, instead, his response to my scientific answer only confirms Wilson’s original case against him, in which he claimed that PZ doesn’t act or think in a scientific manner. And while Wilson is correct and PZ truly doesn’t think like a scientist in any way, shape, or form, it’s actually worse than that because it’s clear that he also doesn’t understand what he reads. I not only provided an answer to his question that can be empirically and objectively analyzed, it was a scientific answer that was entirely in keeping with PZ’s own previously expressed statements on the subject. Consider what PZ wrote about the Taliban’s oppression of women only two years ago:

I also think that the desire for a successful society is not a scientific premise…it’s a kind of Darwinian criterion, because unsuccessful societies don’t survive. Can we use science to determine whether that is a good strategy for human success? I think we can, but not in the way Harris is trying to do so: we could ask empirically, after the fact, whether the Taliban was successful in expanding, maintaining its population, and responding to its environment in a productive way. We cannot, though, say a priori that it is wrong because abusing and denigrating half the population is unconscionable and vile, because that is not a scientific foundation for the conclusion. It’s an emotional one; it’s also a rational one, given the premise that we should treat all people equitably…but that premise can’t claim scientific justification.

So while the desire for a successful society is not a scientific premise, determining the way in which a society can become successful is. Note that Myers admits that one cannot say throwing acid in a woman’s face when she demands independence is wrong from the scientific perspective. He even acknowledges that science could support, on the basis of the Darwinian criterion, horrific actions in support of societal success and survival. This is not to say he supports such actions, only that his opposition to them is based on entirely non-scientific reasoning. In that previous post, he adds:

I agree with Harris entirely that the oppression of women is an evil, a wrong, a violation of a social contract that all members of a society should share. I just don’t see a scientific reason for that — I see reasons of biological predisposition (we are empathic, social animals), of culture (this is a conclusion of Enlightenment history), and personal values, but not science. Science is an amoral judge: science could find that a slave culture of ant-like servility was a species optimum, or that a strong behavioral sexual dimorphism, where men and women had radically different statuses in society, was an excellent working solution.

So, we see that Wilson was correct. PZ is not thinking as a scientist about these matters, by his own words he is clearly thinking about them according to his biological predisposition, his culture, and his personal values. Of course, the biological predisposition, the culture, and the personal values of those who throw acid in women’s faces to keep them in their place are not only different than PZ’s, but may actually be superior to them in both scientific and moral terms. PZ hasn’t even begun to attempt to make any case for the superiority of his own biological predisposition, culture, and personal values, in fact, he has devoted considerable effort over the years to demonizing the Christian culture in which he was raised.

But how about this: Beale has not made the case that destroying women’s lives is a necessary price to pay for social stability. I reject his bargain; I say we can have a more stable, healthier, stronger society if human beings live in mutually loving and respectful relationships. I do not have to hover over my wife with a threatening jar of acid in order for both of us to live together happily; in fact, a life where I had to compel a partnership with terror would be a horror and a nightmare.

One more. I also asked this:

How does letting women die rather than giving them an abortion benefit women?

Here’s his answer.

Because far more women are aborted than die as a result of their pregnancies going awry. The very idea that letting a few women die is worse than killing literally millions of unborn women shows that PZ not only isn’t thinking like a scientist, he’s quite clearly not thinking rationally at all. If PZ is going to be intellectually consistent here, then he should be quite willing to support the abortion of all black fetuses, since blacks disproportionately commit murder and 17x more people could be saved by aborting black fetuses than permitting the use of abortion to save the life of a mother. 466 American women die in pregnancy every year whereas 8,012 people died at the hands of black murderers in 2010.

A fetus is not a woman. I’m used to hearing those wacky anti-choicers call the fetus a “baby”, with all those emotional connotations, but this is the first time I’ve heard them called “women”.

The racist tirade is just sickening. So now Beale wants us to lump all black people together as “murderers” to justify forced sterilization, as a logical consequence of my values? I’ve heard of that tactic somewhere else before.

Again with the logical fallacies. Here’s a hint: the death of women in back-alley abortions can be directly addressed by legalizing abortion and providing responsible medical treatment; the socioeconomic conditions that create an environment of crime are not addressed by racially-defined forced abortion. If we want to end murders by any population (yes, please), the answer is not the extermination of that population, but the correction of social and economic inequity and providing opportunity for advancement.

Of course I haven’t made the case that destroying women’s lives is a necessary price to pay for social stability. I didn’t need to make that case in order to make my point, which is that the scientific case could be made and that in refusing to consider it, PZ was proving Wilson right about his failure to think like a scientist about it. He can say whatever he likes, but his position would be no weaker if he had instead declared that we can have a more stable, healthier, stronger society if human beings began the day by pledging their loyalty to Yog-Sothoth and committing seven deadly sins each morning before breakfast.

PZ then reveals that in addition to his demonstrated inability to think like a scientist, he’s not even able to think logically. If “a fetus is not a woman”, then obviously “a black fetus is not a black adult”. It’s simple multiplication by zero. If there is no harm done in aborting one fetus, there can be no harm in aborting all the black fetuses in America, plus there will be a net benefit that will save 17 times more lives every single year than merely permitting abortions to save the lives of pregnant women. The logical consequences of PZ’s position on abortion are inescapable. If it is worthwhile to utilize abortion to save 466 pregnant women every year, then it is clearly worthwhile to utilize it to save 8,012 murder victims, as either way, the cost is trivial, since according to PZ, the fetus is not a baby, a woman, or a black adult meriting protection of the law. The appeal to socioeconomic conditions is irrelevant, as PZ is wrong and murders committed by blacks can be directly addressed by utilizing abortion; nonexistent people cannot murder anyone. That there may or may not be other ways of addressing the same social ill does not change that simple and undeniable fact.

I further note that I am not a supporter of abortion for any reason, including the elimination of crime and the life of the mother. I am merely explicating the logical consequences of PZ’s reasoning. Nor is it racist to cite the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report; one could make precisely the same case, although it would be a less effective and efficient one, for the abortion of white fetuses. If PZ doesn’t like the inescapable logical implications of his reasoning, then I suggest he should consider rethinking his assumptions. And if he doesn’t like scientists and non-scientists alike pointing out the obvious fact that he does not reason or behave like a scientist, perhaps he should start trying to actually think like one rather than like an irrational, emotional, atheist propagandist.

And with that, I’m sufficiently repulsed not to want to continue. Beale/Day has apparently been whiningly demanding to debate me for the last few years; now you know why I won’t even consider it. Getting his words as second-hand text is nauseating enough, I’d rather not have to deal with the poisonous little scumbag directly.

Still sniping and running. After all these years, still sniping and running. The thing is, as anyone who has ever fired a gun knows, it’s a lot easier to hit your target if you stand still and take the time to aim at it. Of course, then you have to take the risk that you’re up against a much better marksman who will blow you away before you can even get a shot off….

Two methods, same diagnosis

Karl Denninger calculates how much excessive credit exists in the US economy:

[T]here is no recognition here or elsewhere that the problem is overspending compared to taxation, and counterfeiting credit into the economy by private banks. That’s what led to the mess in the first place and nothing has been done to withdraw that excessive credit — indeed, the distortions to maintain that excessive credit have become extreme as the market would otherwise force it back out all on its own! How bad is this? In the United States alone it’s $37 trillion in size, or about 70% of the total credit in the system today! How did I compute that? Simple — I added up the “extra” credit between GDP and credit growth in the below chart from 1980 to 2008.

Those who have read RGD know that I use a different method, which is the Z1/GDP ratio. It is a little more accurate than Karl’s method, being inherently more up-to-date, but it is better seen as a supplement to his method than a substitute. Z1 is presently $54,134.3 billion, which is currently 3.5x more than the $15,454 billion GDP. So, after four years of economic stagnancy, the debt ratio has marginally improved from 375 percent down to 350 percent. (Note that by my method, we can see that about 10 percent of the $37 trillion excess calculated by Karl has already been eliminated.) Since the historical post-Depression norm that the economy can sustain is around 150 percent, this means the amount of excess credit currently present in the system is around $31 trillion.

In other words, all of the economic pain that the global economy has been through over the last four years is about one-tenth of the amount that is eventually in store for it. Contra most observers’ perceptions, the situation is not getting worse, and at least in the United States it has objectively gotten a little better. The problem is that the situation was much, much worse, and orders of magnitude larger, than anyone who wasn’t looking at the debt figures realized. While it may be shocking to learn that there has been no real economic growth in the USA since 1980, a coldly analytical look at the shabby state of the national infrastructure tends to support the statistics.

RIP Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury — author of The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and many more literary classics — died this morning in Los Angeles, at the age of 91.

Ray Bradbury was one of my consistently favorite authors since I first read The Veldt in junior high. While my memories of other favorite authors from my youth were diminished when I read them later in life, Dandelion Wine remains one of my favorite novels. He also wrote the most powerful Christian science fiction story I’ve ever read; despite never once mentioning Jesus Christ or even delving into Christian theology, he painted an indelible image of the difference between those who do not truly seek and those who find.

He was the master of the small, the personal, and the intimate. Somehow, he managed to capture the essence of childhood in his words. I know some found him too schmalzy and precious, but I think he did a better job of capturing the little joys of life than anyone. He had the gift of giving a story poignancy with just a simple twist, or a turn of phrase; even when his literary tricks had become predictable, they were still emotionally powerful. I also admired his darker side; his was the nervous walk through the warm darkness of a summer night in your hometown, not the icy primordial terror of Lovecraft, the feverish descent into insanity of Maupassant, or the cartoonish schlockfest of modern horror.

I didn’t know Ray Bradbury. I can’t honestly say I will mis him. But I am grateful for him and I am glad that he wrote the books that still have a treasured place in my library.

The end of the evolution debate

It’s always very telling when the so-called scientists resort to wishful thinking and ideological propaganda:

Richard Leakey predicts skepticism over evolution will soon be history. Not that the avowed atheist has any doubts himself. Sometime in the next 15 to 30 years, the Kenyan-born paleoanthropologist expects scientific discoveries will have accelerated to the point that “even the skeptics can accept it. If you get to the stage where you can persuade people on the evidence, that it’s solid, that we are all African, that color is superficial, that stages of development of culture are all interactive,” Leakey says, “then I think we have a chance of a world that will respond better to global challenges.”

Any hope for mankind’s future, he insists, rests on accepting existing scientific evidence of its past…. Leakey, who clearly cherishes investigating the past, is less optimistic about the future. “We may be on the cusp of some very real disasters that have nothing to do with whether the elephant survives, or a cheetah survives, but if we survive.”

Leakey is letting the atheist evolutionary cat out of the bag here. Unlike the likes of Harris, whose revolutionary Enlightenment 2.0 globalism is never advertised and can only be confirmed by carefully reading through his books, Leakey is quite willing to draw the connection between evolution, atheism, multiculturalism, all intended to lead towards the long-term utopian fantasy of rule by a scientific and technocratic global oligarchy.

My prediction is quite the opposite. I am increasingly convinced that genetic science will render the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis scientifically unviable in the same manner it previously required the development of the synthesis by rendering untenable classic fossil-based Darwinian evolution by natural selection. One thing that has escaped most professional biologists, who are neither historians of science nor logicians, is that the increasing complexity of the DNA/RNA interplay along with growing understanding of mutations renders the present evolutionary timelines increasingly improbable. Whereas the decoding of the human and other genomes was supposed to provide not only answers, but even conclusive proof of macroevolution, it has instead raised considerably more questions. And while the growing number of proposed evolutionary mechanisms are not necessarily proof that macroevolution has not happened in the past and is not happening in the present, they do show the need to develop epicycles that is always indicative of a theory that is in trouble and on its way to being falsified and ultimately jettisoned.

Could I be incorrect? Of course. That is why I describe myself as an evolutionary skeptic rather than an anti-evolutionist. But once again, we see a conflict between pattern recognition and scientific consensus, and I expect that as has usually happened before, pattern recognition will win out because scientific consensus is not always science, it is often logical conclusions drawn from science by scientists. And the history of science shows that scientists are, for the most part, inept logicians, which is why they tend to keep making the same type of mistakes with each new generation of scientist. So, I am quite comfortable asserting, contra Leakey, that in 15 years, skepticism over evolution will not only not be history, but will be both more popular and more scientifically credible than it is now.

The lawmen fear the law

I am, of course, moved to tears by the concerns of this fine, upstanding officer of the law:

Every time police Sergeant Joseph Hubbard stops a speeder or serves a search warrant, he says he worries suspects assume they can open fire — without breaking the law. Hubbard, a 17-year veteran of the police department in Jeffersonville, Indiana, says his apprehension stems from a state law approved this year that allows residents to use deadly force in response to the “unlawful intrusion” by a “public servant” to protect themselves and others, or their property.

The solution this is simple: Don’t undertake unlawful intrusions.

The issue arises because of a case in Indiana where the State Supreme Court held that you had no right to resist an unlawful entry by the police.

That’s patent nonsense. An unlawful act by the police is exactly the same, in terms of the law, as that of an armed criminal.

Hey, the police and their propagandists are always telling us that if you don’t do anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to fear. So deal with that, Mr. Law Enforcement Officer. Because, after all, it’s the law!

A scientist beats up PZ

As if the Fowl Atheist didn’t have enough trouble with all the religious people methodically exposing his rank idiocy whenever he opens his mouth, now even atheist scientists are calling him out on his clueless nonsense. David Sloan Wilson points out the obvious, which is that PZ Myers doesn’t act or think in a scientific manner where religion is concerned.

In the spirit of science as a process of constructive disagreement, Evolution: This View of Life is pleased to feature a critique of my previous article “The New Atheism and Evolutionary Religious Studies: Clarifying Their Relationship” by evolutionist and prolific blogger PZ Myers, titled “You Want Evidence that Religion is Bad for Our Species? OPEN YOUR EYES.” Unfortunately, Myer’s critique raises the issue of whether he is functioning as a scientist at all on the subject of religion.

Imagine Myers teaching a class on his academic specialty — evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) — and telling his students that all they must do to understand the topic is to open their eyes. This would be absurd. The whole point of science is to understand topics that are too complex to be self-evident. I have written about the problem of scientists who use their reputation in one topic area to hold forth on other topic areas without doing the same homework that a good science journalist would do, and even without functioning as a scientist in any way at all. PZ Myers has a fine reputation as an evolutionary developmental biologist, but on the topic of religion he is defrocked.

As longtime readers here know, it’s not just the subject of religion concerning which PZ is hapless, but pretty much every subject he attempts to address outside of his own professional specialty. He’s equally incompetent with regards to philosophy, politics, and economics, just to name three more. And even with regards to his scientific specialty, he hasn’t mastered it sufficiently to be confident of winning a debate on evolution by natural selection with me. But for the purposes of both amusement and edification, consider PZ’s inept response to Wilson, especially the specific questions he poses:

Rather than condescendingly telling us about evolutionary dynamics, I’d like Wilson to get specific.

1. How does depriving girls of an education benefit women?

2. How does raising girls with the expectation that their purpose in life is to bear children benefit women?

3. How does throwing acid in their faces when they demand independence from men benefit women?

4. How do honor killings benefit women?

5. How does stoning rape victims benefit women?

6. How does female genital mutilation benefit women?

7. How does letting women die rather than giving them an abortion benefit women?

What is amusing here is the way that PZ throws out these questions as if they are at all difficult to answer, as if he is making some sort of cogent point simply by asking them. Now, I’m sure Wilson would come up with some different answers, but as will be seen by the answers I provide, by asking some of them, Myers is doing little more than demonstrating the very unscientific attitude of which he is accused! It’s important to understand that one need not find these answers to be absolutely conclusive or even convincing to recognize that they are scientifically valid answers, which is to say that they can be used to generate hypotheses and then subsequently put to the scientific test, at least to the extent that social science can reasonably be considered science.

1. Because educating women is strongly correlated with reducing their disposition and ability to reproduce themselves. Educating them tends to make them evolutionary dead ends. “Germany now has the highest number of childless women in the world. This trend has been going on since at least the 90s. What we also know is that the higher the level of education, the more likely a woman is to remain childless.” -Professor Norbert Schneider, Mainz University. 40% of German women with college degrees are childless. Does PZ seriously wish to claim that not reproducing is intrinsically beneficial to women? Does he really find it hard to understand how not reproducing is evolutionary disadvantageous?

2. Because raising girls with the expectation that their purpose in life is to bear children allows them to pursue marriage at the age of their peak fertility, increase the wage rates of their prospective marital partners, and live in stable, low-crime, homogenous societies that are not demographically dying. It also grants them privileged status, as they alone are able to ensure the continued survival of the society and the species alike. Women are not needed in any profession or occupation except that of child-bearer and child-rearer, and even in the case of the latter, they are only superior, they are not absolutely required.

3. Because female independence is strongly correlated with a whole host of social ills. Using the utilitarian metric favored by most atheists, a few acid-burned faces is a small price to pay for lasting marriages, stable families, legitimate children, low levels of debt, strong currencies, affordable housing, homogenous populations, low levels of crime, and demographic stability. If PZ has turned against utilitarianism or the concept of the collective welfare trumping the interests of the individual, I should be fascinated to hear it.

4. Because female promiscuity and divorce are strongly correlated with a whole host of social ills, from low birth and marriage rates to high levels of illegitimacy.

5. I don’t see how this benefits women in any way. The effect in dramatically reducing the number of false rape accusations would, of course, benefit men, but since there is no reliable penalty for false rape accusations in modern society, reducing it would be of little benefit to them.

6. By reducing female promiscuity, which is strongly correlated with a whole host of social ills, from low birth and marriage rates to high levels of illegitimacy. But it may not even do so, in which case there wouldn’t appear to be any case for it, since female genital mutilation tends to make health matters worse, unlike male genital mutilation, which appears to improve health matters somewhat.

7. Because far more women are aborted than die as a result of their pregnancies going awry. The very idea that letting a few women die is worse than killing literally millions of unborn women shows that PZ not only isn’t thinking like a scientist, he’s quite clearly not thinking rationally at all. If PZ is going to be intellectually consistent here, then he should be quite willing to support the abortion of all black fetuses, since blacks disproportionately commit murder and 17x more people could be saved by aborting black fetuses than permitting the use of abortion to save the life of a mother. 466 American women die in pregnancy every year whereas 8,012 people died at the hands of black murderers in 2010.

The scientific attitude would be to develop a hypothesis and test it as best one is able. But it’s quite clear that PZ doesn’t want to consider the possibility of anything beyond his philosophical commitment to the unicorn of so-called “equality”. Wilson is right to observe that PZ’s behavior with regards to these matters is entirely unscientific, indeed, one might even surmise that it is outright anti-scientific.

Not a bad day

Hit 200k words on the novel this morning and 5×260 on the bench for the first time in a while. Not ideal, but not bad either. It almost makes up for that choke in front of goal that cost my team a victory instead of a tie last week – I changed my mind at the last possible second and the hesitation took all the velocity off my shot so it blooped up and right into the keeper’s hands. That was the last game of the season, so I’ll be seeing that one all summer. The trick now is to try to stay in cardio shape so the first August practices don’t hit like a truck. Like a very large truck with malicious intent.

Ender’s team did surprisingly well at the large international tournament. They finished in the top half thanks to a big upset on the first day of the Ukrainian team that finished fifth overall. They would have won their last game, too, if their coach hadn’t made an inexplicable tactical blunder and subbing out their staunch central defender for a mediocre female midfielder who had literally no clue how to play defense. They went from being up 1-0 and in near total control of the game to spending the rest of it on the backs of their heels and eventually losing 2-1. Neither I nor the other fathers, including the girl’s father, have any idea what inspired that coaching masterpiece. I explained to Ender that coaches have bad games sometimes just like players do, but it’s difficult to see the kids play so hard and then get undermined by a momentary flash of unfathomable stupidity.

WND column

Sudden Vaccine Death Syndrome

Vaccine advocates – although propagandists would be a more accurate term – often correctly claim that there is no scientific evidence proving that vaccines have ever killed anyone or caused autism. Therefore, they claim vaccines can be considered the cause of nothing but a cure for cancer, an end to war and the elimination of all human disease except that caused by dirty, unvaccinated children who are homeschooled by religious bigots. To even consider the mere possibility of questioning the intrinsic and perfect goodness of vaccines, any vaccine given for any reason, is to be not only anti-science, but personally responsible for murdering anyone who died of a disease that would have been prevented by vaccination.

Lest you think I’m exaggerating, please note that there is a site called “The Jenny McCarthy Bodycount,” which claims that the blonde actress is responsible for 888 deaths since June 3, 2007, which makes her the second most lethal American after Chuck Norris.

Additional vaccine info

After yesterday’s post on the potential link between the vaccine schedule and the twin VAERS and SIDS death spikes at 2-4 months, I spent a little time playing around with the VAERS database myself. Here are some of the things I found interesting:

1. In the last five years, from 2007 through the end of 2011, 28.5 percent of ALL reported vaccine-related deaths for ALL AGES occurred between the ages of 2-4 months. It is truly remarkable that a two-month period that represents one-fifth of one percent of a person’s expected lifespan should account for nearly a third of the reported vaccine-related deaths, especially because the death rate is much higher than in the two months that immediately follow childbirth. That percentage is 13,500 percent higher than would be statistically indicated. The pattern continues in 2012 as 55 percent of the 20 vaccine-related deaths reported so far this year took place in that same two-month window.

2. I was too conservative in my estimates yesterday. During that same five year period, 60 PERCENT of all reported vaccine-related deaths under the age of one occurred between 2-4 months. The period from 2-3 months alone accounted for the previously estimated 40 percent.

3. The 2-4 month death spike appears consistently even if one goes all the way back to 1990, the earliest date available. The situation appears to have improved consideraby, as the worst years were 1991 through 1994, so it would be informative to learn if there was a change in the vaccine schedule between 1994 and 1995. It is also interesting to note that SIDS deaths are reported to have declined from 1993 to 2004, and by a proportion similar to the decline in VAERS-reported deaths. Of course, it’s also theoretically possible that the anti-SIDS sleep campaign which began in 1994 is responsible for decline in vaccine deaths, as perhaps stomach sleeping somehow exacerbates the problem of receiving a vaccine overload.

None of this can be considered conclusive yet. Perhaps it is just a 22-year coincidence that parents and doctors are more likely to report the deaths of 2-4 month old children than those of 8-10 month old children, or any other age, for that matter. But the statistical evidence is unusually consistent and the growing number of correlations does appear to indicate that there is a causal factor involved, most likely concerning the size of the child and the amount of the vaccines administered, which suggests that simply delaying the current schedule by six months or more would significantly reduce the risk of fatal vaccine damage to a child.

Counterproductive

After Qaddafi is shot dead, Mubarak is sentenced to life in prison:

For nearly 30 years he was the pharaoh-like ruler whose word was law; the plunderer of billions of pounds of government money and controller of Egypt’s brutal police state. On Saturday night Hosni Mubarak began a new life as a convicted murderer. A broken and humiliated man of 84, he was flown by helicopter to Torah prison – where many of his enemies had once been jailed – just two hours after hearing a Cairo judge pronounce a life sentence on him for complicity in the murder of 850 protesters.

Well, if Western leaders are looking to make sure that Assad and the remaining Arab dictators fight to the very last drop of their people’s blood, they’re certainly going about it the right way. If you want to get rid of a rat, always leave him a safe out.