#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
I’m sure moving to New York City is going to completely reduce Tim Tebow’s media presence:
Mike Klis of the Denver Post reports that the Jets will send the Broncos their fourth-round draft pick. Additionally, the Broncos will send a seventh-round pick to the Jets and receive a sixth-round pick from the Jets.
And in other news, an entire season’s suspension for Sean Payton strikes me as within the realm of reason, but a bit on the heavy side.
It’s not that a gold standard won’t help governments address problems, it’s that it won’t permit them to create a lot of them:
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Tuesday took aim at proponents of the gold standard, saying that such a system handicaps the government’s ability to address economic conditions.
Bernanke spoke in the first of a series of four public lectures at George Washington University that is the central bank’s latest effort to counter a raft of negative public sentiment that has arisen from its handling of the financial crisis. The former Princeton economics professor delivers a second lecture on Thursday and two more next week.
“Since the gold standard determines the money supply, there is not much scope for the central bank to use monetary policy to stabilize the economy,” Bernanke said. “Under a gold standard, typically the money supply goes up and interest rates go down in a period of strong economic activity – so that’s the reverse of what a central bank would normally do today.”
It is the reverse of what central banks do today… and given the negative consequences of what the central banks have done, one would think that was a good thing. The fact that Bernanke even feels the need to createaddress the subject is a strong indication that the solution of central bank-created money is failing. Again.
They’re now openly embracing technocratic world totalitarianism:
Since doing that issue, I’ve come to the conclusion that the technical details are the easy part. It’s the social engineering that’s the killer. Moon shots and Manhattan Projects are child’s play compared to needed changes in the way we behave.
A policy article authored by several dozen scientists appeared online March 15 in Science to acknowledge this point: “Human societies must now change course and steer away from critical tipping points in the Earth system that might lead to rapid and irreversible change. This requires fundamental reorientation and restructuring of national and international institutions toward more effective Earth system governance and planetary stewardship.”
Scientists have been on the wrong side of every political movement of the 20th century. Because they are narrowly educated elitists almost completely unschooled in both logic and history, they tend to be heavily inclined towards top-down authoritarianism. And there is absolutely no reason to believe they will be on the right side of any of the geo-political issues of the 21st century.
In which Charles Murray’s cowardly refusal to take on female hypergamy is correctly criticized:
Women’s improved employment numbers, education and earning power (some of it contributed by government largesse) has had the effect of SHRINKING their acceptable dating pool. Material resources and occupational status are one way women judge men’s mate worthiness (not the only way, but the one way that viscerally matters to most beta males), and the innate female sexual disposition to be attracted — ANIMALISTICALLY ATTRACTED — to men with higher status and more resources than themselves necessarily means that financially independent women and government-assisted women are going to find fewer men in their social milieu attractive.
Result? Men slowly discover that the effort to win women’s attention via employment is not rewarding them the way it did for their dads and granddads, and that now only herculean efforts to make considerably more than women will give them an edge in the mating market. The male fecklessness that Murray lambasts is actually a rational male response to a changing sexual market where the rewards of female sexuality go disproportionately to charming, aloof jerks over meager beta providers.
And make no mistake, the jerks are exactly to whom women, particularly lower class women, are dispensing their favors. When earning power and employment as a male attractiveness criteria has been subconsciously debased by women who don’t need male provisions, then women will shift their sexual adaptation algorithm to sexy cads for their thrills and romantic chills.
Knowing this, it makes more sense to shame women equally as vigorously as one shames men for social and family breakdown. In fact, as I have argued, if a prosperous, civilized, self-reliant society is your goal it actually makes sense to shame women MORE than men, because women are the gatekeepers of sex, and as such their combined sexual marketplace decisions carry more import in the direction the culture takes.
Read the whole thing. Roissy is absolutely correct. Murray has made a mistake in focusing on a consequence instead of one of the primary causal factors. Murry himself needs to man up and target the real problem, which is the sexual liberation of women from the civilized standards that are required to maintain the continuation of civilization.
The logic is impeccable. Consider:
1. IF women are permitted to have sex with whomever they please.
2. AND women show an observable preference to have sex with men who do not exhibit civilization-building or civilization-maintaining behaviors.
3. THEN men will increasingly cease to engage in civilization-building or civilization-maintaining behaviors.
After that, it’s just a matter of time before the civilization collapses and it’s back to the barbarism of mud huts, rape, and pillage. Or, alternatively, preventative action is taken regarding points (1) and (2). Which one is more feasible? Women often like to angrily demand of men of sufficient foresight if they want to control women’s sexuality. That’s the wrong and irrelevant question. The correct one is: do you like electricity, a reliable food supply, and the ability to live peaceably without having to shoot strangers on sight?
Peyton Manning decides to play in Denver:
ESPN’s Adam Schefter and Chris Mortensen are reporting that free agent quarterback Peyton Manning has told his agent, Tom Condon, to open contract negotiations with the Denver Broncos.
And barring an “unexpected snag” in contract talks, Schefter and Mort are reporting that Manning will become the next quarterback of the Broncos.
The Broncos will try to trade Tim Tebow.
Like Tiki, I am flabbergasted. Not that the Broncos chose to sign Manning rather than let it ride with The Miracle of Tebow, but that Manning chose Denver over San Francisco. Time will tell, of course, but if his goal was to win one more Super Bowl, I think it’s pretty obvious that San Francisco would have been the more certain bet.
I’d assume Denver will trade Tebow to Jacksonville; if nothing else, he’ll sell plenty of jerseys and tickets.
In which a new character is introduced.
Peggy Noonan complains about the coarsening of societal discourse, and in particular, the publicly demeaning and diminishing of women based on the fact that they are women, in her article titled “America’s Real War on Women.” As one would expect of yet another article about the difficulty of women’s lives written by a woman, it is long on emotion and short on logic. But it is also more than a little amusing. Noonan’s theory, you see, is that the Internet is to blame. Curse those inanimate objects and their iniquitous ways!
By the way, I should note that in addition to modifying the name of the column and changing the link to Roissy’s site, WND also edited the last sentence of the column. I have no objection to them doing so; their site, their call. That being said, here is the real final sentence:
What Peggy Noonan does not realize is that whereas men once assumed that a woman was a lady until proven otherwise, increasing numbers of them now quite reasonably assume that women are shallow and superficial sluts until they are provided with credible evidence to the contrary.
Guilty for the crime of demanding a day in court:
The jury, which deliberated for more than two days, rejected a bunch of counts against Ravi, including the hate crime charges involving Clementi’s visitor (who testfied during the trial, identified only as M.B.). Because of this selectivity, one juror told the Trenton Star-Ledger, “You feel like justice has been served.” I don’t. Ravi is scheduled to be sentenced on May 21. In addition to a potentially lengthy prison sentence, he faces the likelihood of deportation to India, where he was born. Reprehensible as his conduct was, he does not deserve either of those punishments. Had Clementi not killed himself a few days after what he dismissively called Ravi’s “five sec peep,” leading to the completely unproven conjecture that Ravi’s spying drove him to suicide (a claim the prosecution never made during the trial), Ravi probably would not have faced criminal charges at all, let alone a possible 10-year sentence. Before the trial the prosecutors offered him a deal that involved no jail time and a chance to avoid deportation, which suggests even they do not believe he should be punished as severely as a violent felon. So in addition to all of the questionable crimes for which Ravi is about to be punished, there is one more: insisting on his right to a trial.
Setting aside the absurdity of the “bias intimidation” laws and the idea that the jury was capable of correctly reading, post mortem, the late roommate’s thoughts in the absence of any testimonial or documentary evidence, Jacob Sullum is right to note that the main reason Dharun Ravi is facing jail time is because he refused to be served up as the sacrificial victim demanded by the increasingly gay-influenced mainstream media.
While it makes practical sense to offer criminals far lighter sentencing in order to avoid the time and expense of trying them, it is a complete miscarriage of justice. Such a system rapidly devolves into one where even the completely innocent given massive incentive to plea guilty, not only because they avoid the risk of a disproportionate punishment, but also save themselves the expense of defending themselves.
The New Scientist doesn’t understand what “a prediction” is, and in doing so, underlines the very point it is attempting to dismiss:
Cosmologists make precise predictions about what will happen to the universe in 20 billion years’ time. Biologists struggle to predict how a few bacteria in a dish might evolve over 20 hours. Some claim that this lack of precise predictive power means evolution is not scientific.
However, what matters in science is not how much you can predict on the basis of a theory or how precise those predictions are, but whether the predictions you can make turn out to be right. Meteorologists don’t reject chaos theory because it tells them it is impossible to predict the weather 100% accurately – on the contrary, they accept it because weather follows the broad patterns predicted by chaos theory.
The amusing thing is that in an effort to claim that evolution really is a predictive science despite the inability of scientists to use it to predict anything, the article then denies that the failure of any evolution-based predictions could falsify the theory. And it is telling that the primary examples it cites cannot be reasonably described as predictions, which relate to the future and not to the past.
“Most predictions relate to very specific aspects of evolutionary theory. If a eusocial mammal like the naked mole-rat had not been found, for instance, it would have proved only that Alexander’s ideas about the evolution of eusocial behaviour were probably wrong, not that there is anything wrong with the wider theory.”
Right, just like the failure of Keynesian theory to predict the simultaneous rising inflation and unemployment of the 1970s only related to the very specific aspects of the historical American economy, not that there was anything wrong with the wider theory. This article makes it very clear that evolution, or if one wishes to be more specific, the theory of evolution by (probably) natural selection is not a science when viewed from either a predictive or Popperian perspective.
Peggy Noonan gets the vapors:
But the real war is against women in American public life, in politics and media most obviously, but in other spheres as well. In this war, leaders who are women are publicly demeaned and diminished based on the fact that they are women. They are the object of sexual slurs, and insulted in sexual terms. The words used are vulgar, and are meant to tear down and embarrass. Every woman in American public life knows of it. They talk about it in private. They’ve all experienced it.
Here are some of the words that have been hurled the past few years at public figures who are female: “slut,” “whore,” “prostitute,” “bimbo.” You know the other, coarser words that have been used. But the point is, these are not private insults. They are said in public. This is something new in American political life, that women can be spoken of this way.
Wait, I thought they wanted equality… they wanted equality, right? So, why shouldn’t one call a slut a slut? Now, I am thankfully not privy to the details of Ms Sandra Fluke’s sex life, but given that we know she is a 30 year-old unmarried woman who claims to spend $3,0001,000 on birth control annually, I think that “slut” is probably a significant understatement. According to the Internet – that same Internet which Ms Noonan holds responsible for giving her the vapors – a box of 12 Trojan Magnum XL Condoms is $9.29.
So, we can conclude that if Ms Fluke requires $1,000 annually, she must be having sex around 3,8751,292 times per year. Frankly, it’s amazing that she has any time to attend her law school classes, much less testify before Potemkin Congressional panels.
Noonan claims openly expressed male contempt for women is “the real war on women”, which is more than a little ironic, as her argument is only likely to generate more contempt, especially among the sort of men who tend to believe that the abortion of millions of female babies every year is an activity much more deserving of the title.