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WND column

Quis procuratiet ipsos scientodes?

A few years ago, when I published “The Irrational Atheist,” one of the most controversial statements I made was that Sam Harris’ Extinction Equation, which postulates that the combination of increasingly deadly technologies with religion meant that the human race was at risk of eliminating itself, was an indictment of science, not religion. Religion, after all, has been around for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years, during which time the human race has prospered and multiplied.

Science, on the other hand, only dates back to the 17th century. And as I pointed out in the book, during that time it has produced, either directly or indirectly, the only serious threats to the existence of the human race that man has known since, depending upon your perspective, he was either being hunted by saber-toothed tigers or being drowned to near-extinction during Noah’s flood.

TEBOW!

Unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable. I really thought Denver had given a very winnable game away, between McGahee’s fumble as the Broncos were driving into range for a putaway field goal, then Champ Bailey dropped a relatively easy interception to win the game. When Tebow missed a wide open receiver on third-and-eight after a horrendous no-call on a blatant facemask, it looked as if events and the referees were conspiring to end The Miracle of Tebow.

But then the Denver defense finally stepped up and made a play, sacking Roethlisberger once, then strip-sacking him to force overtime. Mike Tomlin showed his yellow belly by not letting Suisham try for the 69-yard FG with three seconds left – I have no doubts that Fox would have given Prater a shot – and accepting overtime instead. That set the stage for the lightning strike… game over.

Considering Tebow’s first start against Miami, to say nothing of the disastrous last three weeks, it seems almost impossible for any knowledgeable football fan to not interpret what was not only a Denver victory, but Tim Tebow beating the league’s top-rated defense with his arm, as incontrovertible proof of the existence of God.

316 yards and two touchdowns in the air, 50 yards and one touchdown on the ground. I saw it and I still don’t believe it. As ProFootballTalk concluded: “If someone was writing this stuff into a Tim Tebow movie, they would have been fired by now because it all sounds too unbelievable.”

2011 VPFL Champions

86 Bailout Banksters
71 Mounds View Meerkats

Congratulations to the 2011 VPFL champions. It would appear that it is still good to be a Bankster. I have to confess, I was VERY disappointed to lose this game, as Aaron Rodgers showed up even bigger than I’d anticipated with a 35-point game and Arian Foster performed precisely as projected. Ironically, considering that I am usually mocked for overdrafting them, it was the kickers and defenses that let me down.

The Banksters got 23 points out of a projected 21 from New England’s Gostkowski and the Cincinnati defense, I got 2 out of a projected 20 from Dallas’s Bailey and the Washington defense. And that 20-point difference was the ballgame. The painful thing is that for the last four weeks, I tried four different defenses to little avail, and each time considered, then decided against Buffalo since they were playing the low-turnover Broncos. Naturally, the Bills defense put up 25 points in Week 16. But it was a good and competitive year, as Greenfield looked dominant early, then Mounds View entered the picture with Foster’s recovery, only to see Bailout close strong and carry their end of season momentum through the playoffs.

And so yet another football season goes by without a fantasy championship. I can’t help but notice this marks the fifth championship game I have lost, dating back to the old MFL. How fortunate that I am so well-prepared for the experience.

Umberto Eco on Italy’s new dictator

I was extremely curious to know how Umberto Eco would react to Italy’s peaceful departure from democracy, given his left-wing ideology as well as his childhood experience with Fascism and the post-WWII ideological battles. He did not disappoint as his take on it is fascinating, not only in his characteristic use of an apt literary analogy, but in the way that he appears to almost completely ignore the salient point. The key word there being “almost”, as if one considers the specifics of the analogy, one can see that his view of the matter may not be quite as favorable as it seems on the surface.

But we asked it of him

There is no relationship between the tall and elegant professor Monti and a ball of tallow, and yet I see one between his vicissitudes and the short story of the same name by Maupassant. Everyone, I hope, is familiar with the story: during the Franco-Prussian war traveled a carriage that, among its various passengers, carried a prostitute, provocative and curvacious. Accepted ungraciously by her travel companions only because she offered to everyone the provisions she had with her in a basket, she became responsible for the halting of the carriage on the part of a Prussian official, who threatened to refuse to permit anyone to depart if the girl did not concede her favors to him.

Although she had already granted them to many, the patriotic “escort” refused to let her offer her services to the hated enemy. The carriage therefore remained halted, until little by little, the travelers began to remonstrate with Ball of Tallow for harming everyone over one foolish little point. Through various arguments and moral blackmail, they pushed her to concede. Reluctantly, and for the good of the community, she accepted. The illicit goods consumed, the carriage departed, but at that point the travelers began to regard the wretched girl with contempt because she was a prostitute, even though she had pulled their chestnuts from the fire.

It seems to me that the same thing is happening to Monti. Everyone has asked him to remove the chestnuts from the fire, to take those severe measures that otherwise they have not known or wanted to take even at the risk of unpopularity. Now that he has done it, everyone has begun to look at him negatively. Maupassant understood these things.

Now, I would first argue that it is far, far too soon to argue that the unelected, IMF-installed Professor Monti has pulled anyone’s chestnuts from the fire, except perhaps the balance sheets of a few international banks. And while some degree of fiscal responsibility is in order, it wasn’t the Italian people who asked for him because they have never voted for him. For anything. But the analogy is a brilliant one regardless, because Monti most certainly is a prostitute and the nation of Italy is being occupied, in a very real, albeit non-military, sense, by the Franco-Prussians.

If for some reason you’re reading the original article at La Repubblica, please note that this particular Bustina comes in two parts. I skipped the first one, which concerned poetry and a Spaziani novel, and was of no interest to me.

A painful admission

I recently learned that I am a victim of rape. Hold me, Ralph:

Since 1929, the FBI has defined rape as the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will. The revised definition covers any gender of victim or attacker and includes instances in which the victim is incapable of giving consent due to the influence of drugs or alcohol or because of age. Physical resistance is not required.

It’s very hard for me to admit this, or even to come to terms with it after all these years. But, it is very important, so I will be brave and come forward and admit the terrible truth at long last. I am a rape victim.

During my four years at Bucknell University, I was raped on various occasions by a band of serial female rapists whose nefarious actions were known and materially supported by the university administration through its “health office” and enabled by their sorority sisters. Being incapable of giving consent due to the influence of alcohol, I was repeatedly subjected to the most horrific abuse humanity can ever suffer and I am still attempting to come to terms with the psychological damage that has resulted from the delayed post-rape trauma.

There is significant photographic, testimonial, and in one case, even police-recorded blood alcohol content evidence of my inability to provide consent. Therefore, although the statute of limitations has passed concerning any criminal charges, I have contacted a lawyer and expect to be filing a civil lawsuit against the university as well as the sororities Delta Delta Delta, Kappa Kappa Gamma, and Pi Beta Phi.

I appreciate your support. I know I am not alone in this, and there are many men who have suffered in a similar manner. But together, we can be strong and fight against the violent, criminal actions of predatory women who take advantage of innocent and incapacitated young men.

“Tarred” with the truth

National Review makes a half-hearted attempt to defend Santorum against Ron Paul’s charge of corruption, then throws in the towel:

I agree with you that for the Paul team to cite the leftist CREW in the way they did was a low blow, and the rest of the commercial comes with the usual attack ad trimmings. At the same time, it makes a fair point in contrasting Santorum’s current attempts to create an aw shucks outsider image with the actual Beltway reality…. Was I terribly surprised? Unfortunately not: it’s how American government currently works and, Santorum is, for good or bad, ultimately a government guy.

Which is, of course, the entire point. Santorum is “ultimately a government guy”. He is ultimately a corrupt phony who is just as much a creature of the Bank Party’s status quo as Romney, Gingrich, or Obama. He’s not an alternative to Romney, he is simply yet another variant.

The insidious aspect of immigration

Now, it is entirely possible that the names of the three contributors advocating the legalization of foreign money in US elections are Yaakov Roth, Viet Dinh, and Toni Massaro. No doubt there are plenty of short-sighted individuals with Anglo-Saxon names and an English or Scots-Irish heritage who could make the same case. But the arguments made by these children of the various waves of mass immigration to America underlines the extent to which the Constitutional principles upon which America was founded have been steadily adulterated by the Germans, Scandinavians, and Irish of the nineteenth century, and by the Italians, Jews, Asians, and Hispanics of the twentieth century.

Even as they cloak their arguments in the language of freedom and the Constitution, they act to destroy it in order to a) maximize the political influence of their immigrant group and b) attempt to make the laws of the state to which they have immigrated more like those of the state they left. The important fact that the pro-immigration forces fail to recognize is that simply because one sees better economic opportunity elsewhere does not mean that one has any respect for, or desire to live under, the laws and cultural traditions of the place to which one immigrates.

As an immigrant myself, I have seen this play out time and time again in the expatriate community. In my experience, most – not many, but most – expatriates have very little respect or regard for the laws and traditions of the land in which they are living. Many never trouble to even bother learning the language. I see no evidence that this is any different in the USA than it is in Europe.

Like most medications, immigration can strengthen a nation if it occurs in small doses, separated by reasonable interludes. But mass immigration is akin to a drug overdose and will inevitably destroy the laws, traditions, and customs of the invaded country.

Regulation doesn’t work

Those who put their faith in government control of society always turn to the same solution when it is pointed out that people simply don’t follow government dictates because their behavior has been dictated. But regulation never creates compliance unless it is backed up by the use of consistent and inordinate force, which is why it consistently fails. Consider the way in which English school employees are resisting being held accountable for their failing educational products:

A report published in the Times Educational Supplement on Friday outlines a number of tactics used by schools to outwit official inspectors. It was based on a TES internet forum that received 110 submissions from anonymous teachers in a month.

Cases highlighted included:

• Certain poor teachers being told to go off sick when Ofsted was due in;

• Schools sending badly behaved pupils on a trip – or telling them to take the day off – to hide them from inspectors;

• Pupils being required to learn decent lessons by heart and perform them in front of Ofsted officials;

• Top teachers from a school being put “on standby” to pose as staff at neighbouring schools “at 45 minutes’ notice”.

In 2010, a leading supply teacher, Tom Trust, told the Commons education select committee that he had been asked to take the place of teachers who had trouble controlling “terrible classes” during an inspection.

And in 2004, a secondary school in Hull was criticised after sending nine pupils on a week-long course and drafting in four teachers from another school to coincide with an Ofsted visit.

The lesson is that you can’t take a fundamentally bad concept and fix it by regulations and inspections. As Charles Murray has pointed out for years, the majority of the population doesn’t benefit from, isn’t interested in, and really isn’t capable of learning for learning’s sake. Instead of admitting this and allowing parents to have free rein in deciding what, and if, their children learn anything, the government engages in a vast and expensive system that is riddled with fraud and pretense from start to finish.

The concept of mass schooling is more than 100 years out of date. The shift from an industrial society to an information society rendered it not only irrelevant, but counterproductive. There is simply no reason for children to sit in classrooms with thirty other children staring at a teacher and a blackboard for eight hours a day; it’s not even effective propaganda anymore. They would learn more and get equally indoctrinated by spending an hour each day reading the New York Times and watching CNN.

Life, the mystery

I enjoy seeing how life is always a complete mystery to the politically correct:

A new wave of execution-style shootings in Sweden’s third largest city has left police puzzled, raising concerns that Malmo has become a magnet for gang-related killings. On Thursday dozens of police took to the streets in the southern Swedish city of 250,000 to try calm the public and to collect tips about the attacks, which come only a year after a suspected serial shooter was arrested there.

“We’ve never experienced anything like this before. It’s exceptional that there have been so many murders in such a short period of time,” police spokesman Lars-Hakan Lindholm said. “People are worried of course and want to talk about it.”

In less than six weeks, five people have been shot dead in execution-style killings, prompting local police to ask for back-up from national investigators and for Malmo Mayor Ilmar Reepalu to call on the country’s justice minister to implement tougher gun laws. Sweden’s gun control laws are fairly strict. Penalties for possessing illegal arms typically involve fines or up to one year in prison, but serious breaches of the law can result in a four-year sentence.

Lindholm said that due to the fast escalating death-toll police presence has now been bumped up by about 30 extra officers in the city on weekdays and by around 40 on the weekends. Malmo is an eclectic city, where about 40 percent of its residents are first- or second-generation immigrants.

Logic would dictate that the reason that they’ve never seen anything like it before is because Sweden used to be almost entirely populated by Swedes. It is, of course, quite shocking to learn that people who are not Swedish do not behave like Swedes. Not even when they find themselves in Sweden.

As it happens, I am given to understand that the Mongols did not give up their horse archery and human skullpiles for tantric yoga when they immigrated to India, nor did the Macedonians decided to exchange their imperial monarchy for democracy when Philip of Macedon conquered Athens. And I don’t believe American soldiers devote much of their time seducing donkeys no matter how long they are in Afghanistan.

I’m always a little curious to hear how the politically correct who are in denial about the observable fact of human sub-species explain the differences in human behavior. If I understand their logic correctly, human genetics have no impact on human behavior, as it is dictated by, apparently, geography. That being said, I do recall having a sudden craving to eat jellied cod soaked in lye and to sail across the North Atlantic, raping and pillaging, the last time I was in Stockholm. So, maybe there is something in the ley line theory after all. Or perhaps it is simply the somnolent dream whispers of the slumbering Elder Gods.