Category: Uncategorized

There is no birth certificate

Not in Hawaii, anyway:

“Senior officers in the City and County of Honolulu Elections Division told me on multiple occasions that no Hawaii long-form, hospital-generated birth certificate existed for Senator Obama in the Hawaii Department of Health,” Adams’ affidavit reads, “and there was no record that any such document had ever been on file in the Hawaii Department of Health or any other branch or department of the Hawaii government.”

In a recorded telephone interview, Adams told WND that it was common knowledge among election officials where he worked that no long-form, hospital-generated birth certificate could be found at the Hawaii Department of Health. “My supervisor came and told me, ‘Of course, there’s no birth certificate. What? You stupid,'” Adams said…..

Moreover, Adams was told that neither Queens Memorial Hospital nor Kapi’olani Medical Center had any records of Obama’s birth at their medical facilities: “Senior officers in the City and County of Honolulu Elections Division further told me on multiple occasions that Hawaii State government officials had made inquires about Sen. Obama’s birth records to officials at Queens Medical Center and Kapi’olani Medical Center in Honolulu and that neither hospital had any record of Senator Obama having been born there, even though Governor Abercrombie is now asserting and various Hawaii government officials continue to assert Barack Obama Jr. was born at Kapi’olani Medical Center on Aug. 4, 1961.”

You may recall that I not only insisted that Obama would be a one-term “president”, but I didn’t even think he would be the Democratic nominee. I am even more confident that he won’t be now, since his birth mythology appears to be rapidly collapsing and this time I doubt he’s going to be able to get away without having to produce some documentation to remain eligible in at least one state around the country. Too many people in power have become too suspicious of his credentials, or rather, lack of them. I don’t pretend to know where he was born, although Connecticut would be one obvious place to start looking. But wherever it was, it does not appear to have been Hawaii.

Mailvox: a public school experiment

SarahsDaughter writes of giving public school a fair shake:

We just returned to homeschooling after a 2 1/2 yr trial with public school. There are several incidences to site for our decision, here are a few:

-7th grade, my son was playing Halo online and was friend requested by one of his male teachers and was chatting live with him for a couple of minutes before we were made aware of it. We met said teacher in the principal’s office. He was confused why it was a concern and, his words: “it’s the same as if I’d met up with him at the bowling alley,” my husband almost physically beat that wheelchair bound man. The teacher went away for three days and my son was moved to a different class.

-7th grade Geography teacher’s lesson for the day, “The Space Shuttle is blasting holes in our ozone layer,” and “the world will end in 2012” (great thing to have pubescent teens be made aware of.) We met her in the principal’s office and requested that she stick to the book.

-8th grade Pre-Algebra progress report reflects a “D” for my otherwise straight “A” son. Turns out the lazy teacher failed to enter in the remaining 2 of 6 graded assignments into the computer. His actual grade was a 100% “A”. One would think math of all subjects should have more than 6 assignments in 4 weeks.

-8th grade Reading, our son has a solid “A” leading up to the final assignment that is worth 1/3 of the grade. After 2 weeks of knowing about it he spends 10 minutes working on it the night before it was due. He received a well deserved 41%. The next day he brought in 3 canned food items for their food drive and was awarded 5 points per can toward his grade. Then he gave the teacher $10 for an extra 20 points. Received an “A” for the final grade.

-Last straw, I wrote the following on a piece of paper and asked him to read it: .62, he replied “point six two,” I asked how it is actually “read” and he couldn’t answer sixty-two one hundredths. Then I asked him to convert it to a simplified fraction. I was apparently speaking a different language. Back to homeschooling we went.

I don’t have an intrinsic problem with a teacher playing online games with his students; I’ve probably played with thousands of kids online although I have no way of knowing how young or old my various opponents and teammates happen to be beyond simply observing their reflexes and speech patterns. The initiation of the friend request by the teacher, on the other hand, is a little creepy. If the kid knows Mr. X is a hardcore gamer, he very well might want to play with him, but in that case, the request has to come from the kid, not the teacher.

Of course, one could argue that the Reading teacher has taught her son a valuable life lesson. Probably not as important as being able to read, but certainly not without value. Everybody’s got their price.

Mailvox: is there a doctrine in the house?

Mats laments a church in the downward spiral:

Another church service, another feminist promotion. Well, not hardcore feminism, but the notion of a service with ONLY women singers, ONLY women motiffs, and specially, a female “preacher” was enough for me to walk away before the sermon.

I really don’t mind it when I see a woman take the pulpit. That’s when I know that I no longer have to bother attending that church anymore, as it’s only a matter of time before they abandon every other principle of Christian doctrine. It might make for some interesting research to track when women are first permitted leadership positions in a church against the church’s congregation size and the abandonment of specific doctrinal positions.

WND column

Dark Lords of Student Debt

The dark secret of the college-loan system is that it is not designed to help students pay for college and generate a reasonable interest-profit for the loan provider that will be paid off within a short period of time after the student begins working and receives a degree-enhanced salary. It is specifically designed to keep the graduate on a treadmill of debt that will ideally never be repaid.

This should be readily apparent upon considering the fact that there is presently $850 billion in outstanding student-loan debt in the United States. Since there is a total undergraduate enrollment of 14,473,884 students paying an average of $10,871 to attend college, the total annual cost of all college education is $157.3 billion. This means that past and present students are burdened with 5.4 times more debt than it costs to educate every single student currently enrolled in college. Since 44 percent of college students don’t graduate within six years, (and notice how the metric has climbed from four years to six years to artificially raise the graduation rate), the debt is 10 times the cost of educating a single national graduating class.

NFC North rivalries

It’s been interesting to read all of the stories about the supposedly bitter Packers-Bears rivalry. It all sounds rather manufactured, whereas if this had been Packers-Vikes, everyone would be at Def-Con 5. You see, having married a Wisconsinite, I’m not exactly unfamiliar with Packers fans. And while the Bears, with their storied NFL history and legendary Hall of Fame players, are no doubt deeply respected by both Vikings fans and Packers fans alike, I don’t think I’ve ever known a single Packers fan to be more obsessed with the Bears than they are with the Vikings, even though the Bears have been to two more Super Bowls than the Vikings since the end of the 1970s. And on sites like ProFootballTalk, Packers fans are CONSTANTLY sniping at the Vikings, never at the Bears.

For example, is there even a single pejorative term they habitually use to describe the Bears? I could give you a comprehensive list of the ones that are used to describe the Vikings, starting with Vi-Queens and working down from there. (They are a clever lot, aren’t they.) In fact, I tend to suspect that even the claim the Bears are the Packers’ primary divisional rivals is one that is manufactured in a futile attempt to get under the skin of Vikings fans. Which, of course, is useless, since Vikings fans don’t usually care much what Packers fans do or think, except to be amused by them when they get suicidal over losing to the Vikes. (Packers fans put this down to our supposedly fair-weather nature, when it’s just down to actually having other entertainment options than obsessing over who will be the third-string right tackle… in June.)

The strangest thing was the way Packers fans thought we were lording it over them last year when Favre decided to play in purple. This wasn’t the case at all; they still care about him far more than we ever did even when he was winning games for us. It wasn’t Favre that particularly excited us so much as the fact that The Tarvaris Jackson Experiment wasn’t behind center.

Now, there is nothing in football I love more than seeing the Vikings beat the Packers, but I’m actually quite pleased to see two NFC Central (North) teams playing for the NFC Championship, even if I’m vaguely nauseous at the thought of either of them, much less the Steelers, winning another Super Bowl. I don’t know which team I’d rather see win; I tend to prefer the Packers since I like the small town ownership arrangement and honor the memory of the late, great Reggie White. On the other hand, the thought of Jay Cutler, Super Bowl MVP offers serious humor potential. So, I’ll probably just watch and enjoy the game.

And, of course, any Packers fans who wish to articulate the case for the Bears as their primary rivals are certainly free to make their case. But you know, I cannot think of a single time that there was ever a big Monday Night Football party thrown just because the Packers were playing the Bears nor do I ever recall Packers fans wearing their jerseys to work because the Pack was playing Chicago that upcoming weekend.

Homeschool or die vol. 6

Why would the police need to investigate students simply attempting to finish their homework at school instead of taking it home?

A second-grade teacher in Northern California was placed on leave while a school and police investigate accounts by students that classmates engaged in oral sex and stripped off some of their clothes during class, officials said Friday.

As Spacebunny wryly noted, clearly homeschooling parents are going to have to significantly broaden their curriculums if they are going to keep up with the public school standard. And the amazing thing is that now it’s become common knowledge that homeschoolers are scholastically ahead of their group-schooled peers, critics of homeschooling actually attempt to use the “socialization” argument.

If the critics simply applied the same standards to public schools that they would like to apply to homeschoolers, the public schools would have been banned already.

Numerology

As much as most women absolutely hate it, the evidence that there is a statistical correlation between past and future behavior is remorseless. The Audacious Epigone goes through the GSS and uncovers the following data related to the number of men with whom a woman reports she has had sex and the percentage of married women who admit that they have been unfaithful:

00.0% 1 (by definition)
10.4% 2
14.9% 3
17.7% 4
21.6% 5
26.0% 6-10
36.7% 11-20
46.8% 21+

It’s interesting to see that most married women still do not report cheating regardless of their personal history; one might have imagined the 21+ crowd to surpass 50%. Some of the other interesting data derived from the GSS data is that male atheists are the most likely to be unfaithful (30.2%) while women who are vaguely spiritual and believe in Some Higher Power are the worst risk (25%). And only 2.6% of Slim women report cheating while married versus 15.7% of Stocky ones.

On a related note is what young women tend to deprioritize in terms of what they want in a man. And unsurprisingly, it isn’t what they will later prioritize in a marriage.

“A second measure is the number of sex partners that “sub-optimal men” have had. I define that group as men who are 22 years old, dropped out of high school and don’t have a full-time job — men who don’t have a lot going for them. We compare the number of partners they’ve had with the number of partners of a male college graduate who is employed full-time. Theoretically, if sex is valuable to her then she’s not going to trade it away to just some crummy man, and when we look at the data, we find that those sub-optimal men report a lot more partners than men who actually have a lot going for them.”

As with most things, it all comes down to economics in the end.

A fascinating defense

PZ Myers makes a remarkable “argument from inhuman sociopathy” in defense of abortion:

[T]he standard bullying tactics of waving bloody fetuses might cow the squeamish, but I’m a biologist. I’ve guillotined rats. I’ve held eyeballs in my hand and peeled them apart with a pair of scissors. I’ve used a wet-vac to clean up a lake of half-clotted blood from an exsanguinated dog. I’ve opened bodies and watched the intestines do their slow writhing dance, I’ve been elbow deep in blood, I’ve split open cats and stabbed them in the heart with a perfusion needle. I’ve extracted the brains of mice…with a pair of pliers. I’ve scooped brains out of buckets, I’ve counted dendrites in slices cut from the brains of dead babies.

You want to make me back down by trying to inspire revulsion with dead baby pictures? I look at them unflinchingly and see meat. And meat does not frighten me.

It’s probably a good thing he is an atheist without any moral standards, otherwise he might demonstrate at least a modicum of conscience for the bloody acts in which he appears to take such pride. And if he happened to take any sexual gratification from them as well, who can say it is wrong from his perspective, given his total lack of any moral or ethical code. If he feels no revulsion at looking at the pictures of butchered babies, then he likely feels no revulsion and sees only meat when looking at pictures of dead Jews and murdered Ukrainians as well. The awful thing is not that the pictures do not frighten him; they do not frighten me either. The awful thing is that he does not find them revolting like any normal human being with even a minimal amount of empathy would.

This is the naked face of atheism, ladies and gentlemen. Look on it well and remember it, because it usually doesn’t dare to show its disgusting and anti-human nature so openly.

Pat Buchanan on China and free trade

The growing power of China and the decline of an indebted America is just one small aspect of the strong historical case against free trade:

Revalue your currency, we demand of the Chinese, stop running these trade surpluses at our expense, start practicing free trade, and abandon these mercantilist and protectionist policies. But why should they? Why should China abandon a trade policy that is working marvelously well for them, and adopt a trade policy that is failing dismally for us? Does that make sense?

Why should any nation emulate the U.S. trade policy of the Bush-Clinton-Bush era that has stripped us of a third of our manufacturing jobs and made us dependent on China and the world for the needs of our national life and the borrowed money to pay for them?

Why would China, seeking to make herself an independent and self-sufficient nation, adopt a policy that cost us our independence? And what are the Chinese doing in their ascendancy to first power on earth that we did not do in ours?

One of the interesting things that readily becomes apparent when reading Rothbard’s An Economic Perspective on the History of Economic Thought is that virtually everything the free traders – and I was once one of them – believe about economic history is wrong. They have various theoretical problems too, to be sure, but history provides an easier means of undermining the primary intellectual engine for totalitarian globalism than comparatively esoteric economic theory. Of course, the weakness of the free trade case is very easily seen in the way that they immediately retreat from their previous analogies and arguments as soon as their weaknesses are demonstrated.