Category: Uncategorized

What is the rule?

Never take a woman’s advice about women. Here is yet another example, courtesy of Jess Hart:

Spy a stunning model in a bar and thinking about trying your chances?

“Don’t,” the Sports Illustrated cover girl commands. The beautiful aren’t interested in the bold according to Hart.

“If you see me, or another model, in a bar wait until you are spoken too before you speak,” she orders.

Supermodel, super s— test. Clearing out the deltas and betas to make room for the alphas, that’s all it is. Ignore it to your benefit.

Krugman asks the question

Fresh from presenting a FIFTH Neo-Keynesian definition of inflation in the form of “core inflation”, Paul Krugman finally begins to pay attention to the actual issue at hand:

I’d like to highlight one aspect of this discussion that has been striking me: the conservative focus on the evils of increasing the money supply. You hear it all the time: the Fed is printing money! Danger, Will Robinson! In some comments on this blog I see assertions that the true measure of inflation isn’t prices, it’s what happens to the quantity of money.

Now, one thing you might immediately say is that for those who care about, know, actually buying things — you can’t eat money — it’s prices of goods that matter; and for the past three decades, as shown above, there has been remarkably little relationship between the standard monetary aggregates and the inflation rate.

But here’s an even more basic question: what is money, anyway?

As I’ve shown in the first two inflation videos on Channel Vox, it’s absurd for Krugman to talk about “the inflation rate” when he can’t settle on one single reliable definition of inflation. However, he would have been correct to say that the relationship between the standard money aggregates and those various definitions is questionable, but he ignores the fact that the monetarists utilize, (or, as it suits them, refuse to utilize) a fudge factor called “velocity” in order to explain the variances in that relationship.

About which more anon. I would have already released the third video if I hadn’t lost my voice last week. I hope to record it soon, but I doubt I’ll be able to get it down before Christmas. Regardless, I find it ironic that Austrian theory is logically strong enough that even a blind squirrel like Krugman can stumble onto the foundation of some of its definitions despite his willful ignorance of its teachings.

“The truth is that these days — with credit cards, electronic money, repo, and more all serving the purpose of medium of exchange — it’s not clear that any single number deserves to be called “the” money supply.”

Of course, Krugman still manages to miss the obvious conclusion, which is that either the inflation rate depends upon whatever metric most merits being described as the money supply or else there is no such thing as inflation. As for his statement that one can maintain a reasonable monetary policy without knowing what money actually is, one need only point to the track record of the Federal Reserve in maintaining price stability and full employment to shatter that assertion.

Ill-effects of immigration

Lest you doubt my assertion that sufficient amounts of immigration invariably imposes unwelcome change on the native population:

Dennis Jackson said it was over-reaching cultural sensitivity that led to being told his annual Santa appearances must cease at St. Peter Head Start classes for young children. Jackson said he was told “it was against some people’s wishes” for him to make the half-hour appearances for two classes catering to about three dozen children. He said St. Peter Head Start personnel gave him no reason for the action. He’s made Santa appearances there the past four years to dispense candy bought at his own expense….

Chris Marben, who coordinates regional Head Start programs through Mankato-based Minnesota Valley Action Council, said as much. “We have Somali families in the program,” she said. “We’re respecting the wishes of families in the program.”

Marben should be fired and those obnoxious Somali families should be sent back to Somalia. This is why distrust, dislike, and even downright hatred of immigrants is not only quite reasonable on occasion, but can be well-merited. All the people in Mankato want to do is celebrate Christmas the way they have always done, and thanks to a few obnoxious immigrants acting in combination with a petty autocratic bureaucracy, they are not permitted to do so. If the Somalis so dislike Santa, then they should stay in Santa-free Somalia.

Consider the Misean take on the subject, himself an immigrant to the United States: “Immigrants soon find their place in urban life, they soon adopt, externally, town manners and opinions, but for a long time they remain foreign to civic thought. One cannot make a social philosophy one’s own as easily as a new costume.”

Can you really blame God?

Ricky Gervais provides a vivid demonstration of the way in which many atheists are prone to vastly overrate their own intelligence and ability to reason. Possibly the most amusing thing is the way that a gaggle of less famous atheists fall all over themselves attempting to proclaim the brilliance of Gervais’s ignorant, illogical, and error-ridden article in the subsequent comments:

Why don’t you believe in God? I get that question all the time. I always try to give a sensitive, reasoned answer. This is usually awkward, time consuming and pointless. People who believe in God don’t need proof of his existence, and they certainly don’t want evidence to the contrary. They are happy with their belief. They even say things like “it’s true to me” and “it’s faith.” I still give my logical answer because I feel that not being honest would be patronizing and impolite. It is ironic therefore that “I don’t believe in God because there is absolutely no scientific evidence for his existence and from what I’ve heard the very definition is a logical impossibility in this known universe,” comes across as both patronizing and impolite.

Arrogance is another accusation. Which seems particularly unfair. Science seeks the truth. And it does not discriminate. For better or worse it finds things out. Science is humble. It knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn’t know. It bases its conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence -­- evidence that is constantly updated and upgraded. It doesn’t get offended when new facts come along. It embraces the body of knowledge. It doesn’t hold on to medieval practices because they are tradition. If it did, you wouldn’t get a shot of penicillin, you’d pop a leach down your trousers and pray. Whatever you “believe,” this is not as effective as medicine. Again you can say, “It works for me,” but so do placebos. My point being, I’m saying God doesn’t exist. I’m not saying faith doesn’t exist. I know faith exists. I see it all the time. But believing in something doesn’t make it true. Hoping that something is true doesn’t make it true. The existence of God is not subjective. He either exists or he doesn’t. It’s not a matter of opinion. You can have your own opinions. But you can’t have your own facts.

No, you can’t have your own facts. And yet, that is exactly what Gervais attempts to do throughout his “sensitive and reasoned answer”. First, Gervais is too socially autistic to to understand that the statement “I don’t believe in God because there is absolutely no scientific evidence for his existence and from what I’ve heard the very definition is a logical impossibility in this known universe” is no more patronizing or impolite than science is arrogant.

It is Gervais himself that people find patronizing, impolite, and arrogant, not his illogical statement or anthropomorphized science. He is the walking, talking evidence of the existence of the definitive Dawkinsian atheist, who does not believe in God because he is an asshole. Despite his attempts to blame people’s natural dislike of him on other things, there is no irony to be found because there is simply nothing there.

No one accuses science of being arrogant, they accuse scientists of being arrogant, which they often are, sometimes even with reasonable justification. And they accuse science fetishists like Gervais of being arrogant, which they usually are on behalf of science in a weird, cultish, and totally unjustifiable manner. Gervais’s elevation of science into an anthropomorphized quasi-deity in which he places inordinate trust is downright hilarious, as science, by which he clearly means “scientody” or “the scientific method”, does not “know” anything, it is not “humble”, and “it doesn’t get offended” for the obvious reason that it cannot. Atheists like Gervais make a false god of science, place their blind and uncomprehending faith in it, then sputter in outrage when others quite reasonably point to what without question merits being described as religious behavior.

Gervais is not so much incorrect as completely incoherent when he says that science “bases its conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence”. First, he reveals the usual atheist’s inability to distinguish between “evidence” and “scientific evidence”. Second, science does not possess either conclusions or beliefs and it does not base them or anything else upon evidence; Gervais clearly doesn’t understand how the scientific method works because it is used to produce evidence (of the scientific variety), it is not based upon evidence of any kind. Third, his example is spectacularly ignorant, as science not only did not develop penicillin, but the parochial arrogance of scientists actually retarded the development of the effective medical application of what had been the very sort of traditional medieval practice that Gervais disdains for decades. His knowledge doesn’t even rise to the level of Wikipedia: see the story of Ernest Duchesne and his 1897 paper that was ignored by the Institut Pasteur.

Speaking of facts, Gervais blatantly makes up his own when he claims that “75 percent of Americans are God-­‐fearing Christians; 75 percent of prisoners are God-­‐fearing Christians. 10 percent of Americans are atheists; 0.2 percent of prisoners are atheists.” But he has no basis for this and we KNOW he has no basis for this because no reliable statistical study of American prisoners has ever been done. And we also know he is not only wrong, but dishonest because he is using a bait-and-switch on his definition of atheist; only 0.7% of Americans actually call themselves atheists versus the 15% who the American Religious Identification Survey describes as Nones/No Religion.

Moreoever, we actually have comprehensive data regarding Gervais’s own country, the United Kingdom. (In fact, that’s likely where Gervais got his imaginary number for American atheists in prison, from the UK, which reported 122 atheists being held in English and Welsh jails That just happens to be 0.2 percent of the 65,256 prison population there.)

But in addition to those 122 atheists, there also happened to be another 20,639 prisoners, 31.6 percent of the total prison population, who claimed to possess “no religion.” And this was not simply a case of people falling through the cracks or refusing to provide an answer; the Inmate Information System is specific enough to distinguish between Druids, Scientologists, and Zoroastrians as well as between the Celestial Church of God, the Welsh Independent church, and the Non-Conformist church. It also features separate categories for “other Christian religion,” “other non-Christian religion,” and “not known.” At only two-tenths of a percent of the prison population, self-identifying atheists are, as previously suggested, extremely law-abiding. But when one compares the 31.6 percent of imprisoned no-religionists to the 15.1 percent of Britons who checked “none” or wrote in Jedi Knight, agnostic, atheist, or heathen in the 2001 national survey, it becomes clear that their practical atheist brethren are nearly four times more likely to be convicted and jailed for committing a crime than a Christian.

In other words, No Religion atheists are without question much more criminally inclined than Christians even if self-identified Scarlet-A Atheists are not. And since Gervais used the much larger 10% figure, he clearly had the No Religion atheists in mind, which shows the disingenuous nature of his original comparison between the ratio of Christians/Christians and Atheists/atheists. Remember, you can’t have your own facts, Ricky! There are many more errors of fact and logic that I have not troubled to highlight, but the reader should not find it difficult to identify them. Gervais goes on to plagiarize Stephen Roberts’s fallacious “One Less God” argument without crediting Roberts, admits his atheism is quite literally a childish belief, follows that admission with an exemplary demonstration of moral parasitism, and finally closes with a baseless and self-deluded declaration of his own good. This takes us right back to the starting point, which is that it is not science, but Gervais that is an arrogant ass.

Regardless of whether you believe in God’s existence or not,it is very difficult to read Gervais’s ludicrous attempt to justify his atheism and not reach three conclusions. First, it takes a truly epic fool to say, not only in his heart but in the Wall Street Journal as well, that there is no God. Second, this is less a case of atheistic evangelism than the agnostic variety as any intelligent atheist will be tempted to convert immediately to agnosticism out of sheer embarrassment. And third, if God does exist, it would be impossible to blame Him for deciding to throw such a smug and annoying little bastard into Hell when faced with the alternative of being inflicted with his company for eternity.

A conversation with Vox Day

Strike The Root ran an interview with me today:

What writers or philosophers have most influenced you? Has your political thought evolved over time, and if so, was there any particular author or event that pushed you in that direction?

The philosopher that has most influenced me is Marcus Aurelius. While I don’t always succeed in meeting the expected idiosyncrasies of humanity with perfect equanimity, I am very seldom surprised by them. The evil and foolishness of Man is without limit, so it makes no sense to expect much in the way of wisdom or even sense from the average individual. Readers of the Vox Popoli blog are familiar with the acronym MPAI, which means Most People Are Idiots. It’s not actually meant to be as contemptuous as it sounds, (although it certainly comes off that way), it’s merely a reminder that one’s expectations of others must always be mindful of their limitations.

No Christians allowed

It’s time to start cracking down hard on anti-Christian academia, who are not only violating common sense in their attempt to keep Christians out of the ivory towers they fund, but also Federal employment law:

In 2007, C. Martin Gaskell, an astronomer at the University of Nebraska, was a leading candidate for a job running an observatory at the University of Kentucky. But then somebody did what one does nowadays: an Internet search. That search turned up evidence of Dr. Gaskell’s evangelical Christian faith.

The University of Kentucky hired someone else. And Dr. Gaskell sued the institution. Whether his faith cost him the job and whether certain religious beliefs may legally render people unfit for certain jobs are among the questions raised by the case, Gaskell v. University of Kentucky. In late November, a federal judge in Kentucky ruled that the case could go forward, and a trial is scheduled for February. The case represents a rare example, experts say, of a lawsuit by a scientist who alleges academic persecution for his religious faith….

The UK employment debacle is one of the sillier atheist misconceptions of science put into practice. You may recall Sam Harris’s absurd polemics in the Wall Street Journal and The Moral Landscape, in which he insisted, contra all the available evidence, that the head of the Human Genome Project, was incapable of performing science due to his Christianity. (This is yet another example of the reliable New Atheist preference for nonsensical pseudo-logic to confirmable facts and correctly applied reason.)

The ironic thing about the academic insistence on conformity to cross-disciplinary dogma is that if it were consistently applied, it would render at least 50 percent of the academics in American instantly unemployable. If one considers all of the left-wing biologists and physicists who reject the most basic tenets of economics, to say nothing of all the female humanities professors who reject the very concept of biological differences and patriarchal male science, adoption of the Kentucky standard would mean a professorial purge of such a scale to make Stalin blush.

Given how badly they are outnumbered in America, you would think atheists and other statistically insignificant belief-groups would want to think twice before supporting a legal standard that permits barring those possessing specific beliefs from obtaining employment. But then, as I have often demonstrated, atheists tend to more often honor reason in its breach instead of its application.

WND column

Merry Christmas, Everyone

For many Americans, this Christmas will be a difficult one. Millions have lost their homes in the past year, millions more have lost their jobs and many of those who are fortunate enough to still own their homes and possess their jobs are deeply in debt. Many families will not be together for the holidays because they can’t afford to travel, they do not wish to be gate-raped or one of their family members is among the 2.3 million who make up the American prison population. It is understandably hard for many Americans to celebrate what has become an increasingly commercial holiday when their prospects for the future look less than rosy.

VPFL Week 14

81 Bane Sidhe (10-4-0)
36 Greenfield Grizzlies (7-6-1)

83 Valders Quixotes (9-5-0)
26 Blackmouth Banksters (7-7-0)

89 MS Swamp Spartans (8-5-1)
52 Winston Reverends (4-10-0)

63 Judean Rhyneauxs (7-7-0)
50 Moundsview Meerkats (4-9-1)

89 RR Redbeards (7-6-1)
56 Meigs Marauders (5-9-0)

The regular season came to a close with Bane claiming the top seed and Greenfield edging out the Redbeards for the last playoff spot. That sets up a second straight Bane-Greenfield game in two weeks while the Quixotes and Swamp Spartans face off in the other playoff games. The Redbeards’ Tom Brady was the MVP, scoring 232 points to lead the league.

A fabulous military

No one cognizant of history would think to deny that homosexual men are capable of fighting effectively. The Sacred Band of Thebes alone would suffice to disprove that notion. However, one salient fact to consider about the Sacred Band was that it was a band, which is to say, it was a military unit that was set apart from other military units that did not share the particular predilection that made it such a remarkably cohesive unit.

The repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, which effectively permits the many closeted homosexuals in the U.S. armed forces to openly exhibit their abnormal preferences and presumably to act upon them, is therefore likely to prove less salutary to American military efficiency and effectiveness. While it is true that other Western militaries have eliminated their bans on homosexuals, it is also worth noting that none of them are presently capable of successfully invading Jerry Jones’s new stadium even if it were defended only by the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders.

So, it is at the very least questionable to assume that there will be only minor negative consequences from this latest experiment in social engineering. Although the ambitious and politically correct general officers won’t admit it, the grand experiment of women in the military has been a massive failure whereas the integration of black soldiers was a success. Only time will tell if the result of this third great experiment will be more akin to the first one or the second.

DREAM is dead

Illegal immigration isn’t the problem, too much immigration is. Legalizing those here illegally would only have made the problem worse, as the consequences of the 1986 amnesty conclusively demonstrate.

The Senate on Saturday blocked a bill that would have created a path to citizenship for certain young illegal immigrants who came to the United States as children, completed two years of college or military service and met other requirements, including passing a criminal background check.

Cue the sob stories… but if you’re moved by emotional appeals rather than logic, you might at least consider the fate of the many unemployed Americans, most of whom would be able to find work if millions of immigrants did not have those jobs. And spare the ignorant “jobs Americans won’t do” argument, which reveals nothing more than a failure to consider supply and demand. Let’s face it, most businesses that employ immigrants, legal or illegal, would employ even cheaper Chinese prison labor if they could figure out a way to get them over here.