#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
CrisisEraDynamo requests a rebuttal:
How do you plan to answer Ray Kurzweil, Aubrey de Grey, and Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit), all of whom assert that aging will be conquered Real Soon Now?
Watching them die.
NB: I have nothing against any of them, you understand, but all three of them are older than me.
James Cameron is only the latest member of the super-rich to exit America:
Cameron’s decision fits the trend of wealthy Americans pulling their money out of the country and reinvesting it to buy land in the southern hemisphere, escaping spiraling tax rates and protecting themselves against the potential for widespread social dislocation.
In 2010, John Malone, billionaire chairman of Liberty Media, announced that he had bought a retreat on the Quebec border as an insurance policy to “have a place to go if things blow up here,” adding that he was concerned about the survival of the dollar and whether or not “America (was) going to make it” through the economic crisis.
“My wife, who is very concerned about these things, moved all her personal cash to Australia and Canada,” Malone told the Wall Street Journal, “We own 18 miles on the border, so we can cross. Anytime we want to we can get away.”
The political class are also seeking financial refuge in foreign land buys. The Bush family purchased 100,000 acres in Paraguay back in 2006.
Growing concern that economic stagnation could lead to widespread civil unrest, allied to crippling tax hikes, is causing many members of the super-rich to abandon the United States in pursuit of more stable countries with friendlier financial conditions for those with wealth. According to the Census Bureau, “The top-earning 1% of US taxpayers are leaving the USA at the highest rate in history.” In addition, a Zogby International poll found that more than 3 million US citizens relocate abroad every year, as record numbers of rich US citizens renounce their citizenship to escape punishing levels of taxation.
Now, it’s entirely possible that these elite individuals are all moving abroad for the Tuscan sun and New Zealand sheep-shagging. But that seems unlikely. I don’t think it’s so much a taxation issue as it is a sense that the goose doesn’t have a lot of gold remaining in it.
And yet, it would certainly be interesting to know what it is these very wealthy, very connected individuals know that is driving them to take such drastic, life-altering measures.
Unless you genuinely expect to live to 128:
So why is there more age anxiety than ever?
The prime culprits, Ms. Cohen asserts, are boomers themselves. As marketers in the cosmetics, advertising and entertainment industries, they have been eager collaborators in the lucrative enterprise of rehabbing the image of middle age. It looks ever “thinner, smoother, sexier, wealthier, happier and hipper.” In fact, middle-agers have never been more powerful, more active or more alluring. But in the dark of morning, when you don’t get up in time for fitness class, does a nagging voice whisper, “You’ll never be as thin as Jane Fonda”?
First, there is no question that middle-age is past one’s prime. 25 to 35 is the prime of one’s life in practically every way. Make the most of it, because it’s definitely downhill from there. That doesn’t mean you can’t do important things or enjoy yourself thoroughly, only that you’re not going to do it as readily or as easily as you do then.
The great thing about youth is its energy and sense of possibility. Those things simply don’t exist to the same extent once one is past one’s thirties. I am far more fit and energetic than most men my age, and to be honest, than most men ten years younger. But it is nothing compared to how I was when I was 25. If I tried to do what was my weekly workout routine for even a single week now, I’m pretty sure I’d end up in the doctor’s office, if not the hospital.
The idiot Boomers are a perfect example of how one shouldn’t approach aging. Rather than deny one’s age, make the most of it. Exploit your experience, make use of what you’ve learned, and occasionally, throw yourself into something to recapture that sense of times gone by.
Last night I was talking with a friend of mine about the new Creative Assembly game, Shogun II, and we were discussing how much we disliked what they’d previously done with Medieval II in speeding up the combat to the point that there is no time to think about tactics, just send all your troops forward in one big rush. We both still prefer the original Medieval to the more recent one.
“It’s ridiculous, it’s just too fast,” I told him.
“We’re getting old,” he said.
I held up the PS/3 mike he’d just given me, which I hope will allow me to encourage at least one sniper to set up a bloody SOFLAM when I’m packing a Javelin and reminded him that I’d racked up a 1.625 k/d ratio and two Flag Attacker ribbons in three BF3 missions without any teamwork by my squad earlier. “We’re not done yet.”
He laughed. “No, we’re not done yet.”
Or so Gallup appears to indicate:
Gallup released their annual state-by-state presidential approval numbers yesterday, and the results should have 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue very worried. If President Obama carries only those states where he had a net positive approval rating in 2011 (e.g. Michigan where he is up 48 percent to 44 percent), Obama would lose the 2012 election to the Republican nominee 323 electoral votes to 215.
I haven’t been hearing as many rumblings about Democrats attempting to encourage Obama to step aside; most of them now appear to involve Biden stepping down as vice-president. But I wouldn’t be convinced that he won’t until he actually accepts the nomination at the Democratic convention this summer. In addition to the eligibility and intra-party pressure issues, Obama simply doesn’t strike me as the sort of personality who is willing to lose when he has the option of claiming instead that he didn’t even try to win.
This can’t help Japan’s demographic decline:
A startling number of Japanese youths have turned their backs on sex and relationships, a new survey has found. The survey, conducted by the Japan Family Planning Association, found that 36% of males aged 16 to 19 said that they had “no interest” in or even “despised” sex. That’s almost a 19% increase since the survey was last conducted in 2008.
If that’s not bad enough, The Wall Street Journal reports that a whopping 59% of female respondents aged 16 to 19 said they were uninterested in or averse to sex, a near 12% increase since 2008.
Combine an economic downturn with the increasing excellence of porn and video games, then throw in female economic independence and this is the result. For all that they are decried as soshoku danshi, the position of the “herbivores” is a perfectly reasonable one.
People often point out that “a real woman” is better than the autoerotic options, but the fact is that a) the real women tend to come with considerably more negatives than they did 50 years ago and b) the gap between a real woman and autoerotica has narrowed considerably in that time, especially for men who are not in the upper half of the socio-sexual rankings.
Throw in the difference in time and money expenditure, and one can see it is a real testimony to how highly men value actual women when one considers how compelling the alternatives have become in the last two decades.
dh appears to find it hard to distinguish between “X” and “virtually X”:
This will be difficult for VD to walk back in the future when he wants to try to hold his various intellectual foes to account for words they use. “Virtually Impossible” = “something that happens every day”. Got it.
First, as I have had to point out many times before, the purpose of an adjective or an adverb is to modify a word. Therefore, something that is “virtually impossible” is, by definition, not impossible. It is merely highly improbable. Does the state senator’s comment qualify?
As I pointed out in the comments, the Center for Disease Control reported that an average of 473 white men were annually infected with HIV through heterosexual contact over the course of a four-year statistical study. Now, dh had already admitted that the chances of being infected for anyone, male or female, having heterosexual relations with an infected individual, was 30 in 10,000, or one in 333. Is that sufficiently improbable to qualify as “virtually impossible”? No, I don’t think so. However, we’re not done yet.
However, this does not distinguish between men and women, which is necessary because it is easier to transmit the virus from male to female than from female to male. That is why an average of 841 white women annually contracted the virus through heterosexual contact in the same study. This means that men are estimated to contract the virus at a rate that is about 60 percent of the female rate, thereby lowering the one in 333 figure to around one in 500.
Still not “virtually impossible” in my book, but we’re getting closer. Now we have to take into account the fact that these one in 500 odds only apply to sex with an infected female. So, we have to return to the CDC, which tells us that there are 682,668 Americans presently living with HIV, 26,966 of whom are white females. This represents one in 3,649 of the 98,408,776 white females in America. Note that it is appropriate to include the entire female population here because children are also included in the AIDS statistics that we are citing due to mother-to-child transmission.
Since it isn’t possible to contract the virus from someone who doesn’t have it, this means that a white man who has sex with a white woman has approximately a 1 in 1,824,682 chance of contracting the virus. This compares rather favorably with the 1 in 58,618 chance of being legally executed, the 1 in 147,717 chance of dying in a dog attack, and the 1 in 615,488 chance of dying in a fireworks discharge.
In other words, for a normal white man like Stacey Campfield, it is, in statistical fact, highly improbable, or if you prefer, “virtually impossible”, to acquire the HIV virus, which of course is necessary in order to spread it.
And before anyone starts complaining that white-on-white heterosexual relations doesn’t encompass everyone, I will note that the entire context in which the statement was made concerned the significant difference in practical risk factors among different population demographics. Campfield’s point, and it was entirely correct, is that it is totally absurd to discuss HIV infection as if it presents a similar risk to everyone, regardless of their race, sex, or sexual behavior, which of course is the main reason the mainstream media’s dire predictions of a heterosexual AIDS epidemic, still less “a national disaster as great as a thermonuclear war”, were so wildly incorrect.
And in conclusion, I will point out that in a nation of 310 million people, a “virtually impossible”, one in 1.9 million event is indeed very likely to happen every single day. Or, as is the case here, about 1.3 times per day.
At least on a percentage basis:
Census figures show only 57 percent of moms required to pay child support — 385,000 women out of a total of 674,000 — give up some or all of the money they owe. That leaves some 289,000 “deadbeat” mothers out there, a fact that has barely been reported in the media. That compares with 68 percent of dads who pay up, according to the figures….
The Census Bureau last month also released numbers showing fathers paid an average of $3,000 to custodial moms in 1997. Women paid little over half that. Moms also get about 60 percent of what they are owed, whereas dads only get 48 percent. Not only are the dads paying up more when they don’t have custody, but when the court does hand the kids over to dads, they work more than moms who have custody.
I’d heard this was true but I didn’t have any statistical evidence for it before. I would expect that whereas men who don’t make child support payments are subject to the modern form of debtor’s prison, very few, if any women are similarly incarcerated.
The charade of the Newt Gingrich comes to its inevitable end:
Last week, New York magazine’s John Heilemann pointed out a deep truth about Newt Gingrich’s peculiar presidential campaign: The very media elite that Gingrich delights in hammering has actually been in his corner all along. The press likes a horse race; the press likes outsize personalities; the press favors an underdog; and the press even takes a strange sort of delight in being ruthlessly attacked.
Of course most political reporters don’t want Gingrich in the White House. But they’ve had every incentive to keep him in the headlines and overrate his odds of defeating Mitt Romney for the nomination.
Tuesday night’s Floridian drubbing won’t change those incentives, so we can expect a last burst of media chatter about how Gingrich could still recover, ride a wilderness campaign to a Super Tuesday comeback and fight Romney tooth and nail all the way to the convention. But chatter is all it will be. For Gingrich and his media enablers alike, the dream died in Florida….
The sooner Gingrich is out, the better. The only substantive choice is between Mitt Romney and Ron Paul. Even if Romney ultimately turns out to be the clear and unabashed choice of Republicans, as I expect him to be, at least people will have been presented a clear choice between debt-laden doom and the only way out of the banking abyss.
I think providing this public school experience is going to be a real challenge for most homeschooling parents:
A Los Angeles elementary school teacher was charged with committing lewd acts against nearly two dozen students after a film processor gave authorities bondage-style photographs showing children in blindfolds with their mouths taped, and some with cockroaches on their faces, authorities said Tuesday.
Mark Berndt, 61, was arrested Monday at his Torrance home and remained jailed on $2.3 million bail, according to a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department statement. The charges involve 23 boys and girls ages 7 to 10 between 2008 and 2010
In fairness to Mr. Berndt, the combination of cockroaches and prepubescent boys is pretty hard to resist… sweet Kinsey, but even the Marquis de Sade would probably be inclined to look at the guy askance and wonder what was wrong with him. Anyhow, I would be deeply skeptical of any man who voluntarily chooses to work as an elementary school teacher under the current public school regime. These days, I’d probably be more surprised to learn a male elementary school teacher didn’t have some sort of abnormal sexual orientation.
Gay activists really don’t appear to be all that intelligent. Simply because they’ve been permitted to prance out of the closet with impunity for a few decades across a decadent and declining West, they suddenly think they can start discriminating against the majority of the population who believe, on the basis of considerable material evidence, that homosexuals are an immoral, abnormal, and disease-ridden section of the citizenry:
A restaurant in Knoxville, Tennessee refused to serve state Sen. Stacey Campfield, the man who sponsored the state’s “don’t say gay” bill, compared homosexuality to bestiality, and most recently told Michelangelo Signorile that it’s virtually impossible to spread HIV/AIDS through heterosexual sex. “I hope that Stacy Campfield now knows what if feels like to be unfairly discriminated against,” the Bistro at the Bijou wrote on its Facebook wall on Sunday.
Don’t get me wrong. As long as they leave the children alone, I have nothing for or against gays, and I completely support the right of the Bistro at the Bijou to not serve anyone it doesn’t want to serve. I’m a libertarian and I fully support everyone’s right to parachute into Hell, (or for our godless friends, into the Void), in the specific manner of his choosing. Of course, I also support the right of everyone else to choose not to do business with anyone, for any reason, and I am under the impression that, by definition, the population demographics don’t tend to favor the abnormally oriented. It strike me as being akin to bringing a toothpick to the battle of Kursk.
There is some seriously perverse illogic being exhibited here if the gay community thinks it can successfully justify practicing active discrimination against its political opponents while simultaneously decrying everyone else’s ability to exert their Constitutional rights of free association. And it also demonstrates a stunning lack of foresight – although I suppose that’s not really all that stunning among a community dumb enough to actively fight against quarantining the confirmed carriers of a lethal sexual disease – as one would think they would be far more concerned about importing millions of potential voters who believe homosexuals should have walls dropped on them than they are about the fairly conventional opinions of a state legislator.
The consequences of a Straight-Queer discrimination war are just too terrible to contemplate. Think about those poor straight Hollywood actors, choreographers, interior decorators, Broadway playwrights, elementary school teachers, and Republican senators, who would all find themselves shunned by their peers. I have no doubt it would make life very uncomfortable for Rand Paul and at least five or six other men across the country.