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WND column

The Moral Landscape

Sam Harris’s first two books were commercial successes and intellectual failures. Riddled with basic factual and logical errors, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation served as little more than godless red meat snapped up by unthinking atheists around the English-speaking world. His third book, The Moral Landscape, is also a challenge to established wisdom, but it is a much more sober, serious and interesting book than its predecessors.

The basis for the book is Harris’s own neuroscience experiments, in which he tested his hypothesis that when hooked up to an fMRI scanner, the human brain would produce an observable difference in its activity when contemplating non-religious beliefs than when considering religious beliefs. As it happens, the hypothesis was found to be incorrect, as the same responses were elicited from both the believing group and the non-believing group for religious and nonreligious stimuli alike. (Full disclosure: I was one of the Christians asked by Mr. Harris to review the religious stimuli to ensure their theological verisimilitude. In my opinion, the questions utilized were both reasonable and fair.)

NOTE: For those who happen to be interested in the subject, I will be posting the bookmarked notes I made in the course of reading The Moral Landscape here later this week.

Strip search USA

No nation that is willing to collectively submit to this behavior is one that deserves to survive. Only a nation of fat and worthless sheep who have wholly abandoned their inheritance of liberty would prefer to have its children strip-searched than give up air travel. On a potentially related note, not that you had any doubt, but the big banks are definitely going to need the expected TARP II soon. It turns out that many of the so-called mortgage-backed securities didn’t have any mortgages backing them.

Countrywide Routinely Failed to Send Key Docs to MBS Trustees, B of A Employee Says, by Kate Berry, American Banker: Countrywide, the mortgage giant that’s now part of Bank of America Corp., routinely didn’t bother to transfer essential documents for loans sold to investors, an employee testified…. it was customary for Countrywide to maintain possession of the original note and related loan documents.

Denninger explains the significance at the Market Ticker.

VPFL Week 10

89 RR Redbeards (4-5-1)
61 Moundsview Meerkats (2-7-1)

80 MS Swamp Spartans (5-4-1)
58 Blackmouth Banksters (6-4-0)

81 Greenfield Grizzlies (4-5-1)
69 Valders Quixotes (7-3-0)

71 Bane Sidhe (6-4-0)
57 Judean Rhyneauxs (5-5-0)

69 Meigs Marauders (5-5-0)
66 Winston Reverends (4-6-0)

I honestly thought I had a good chance at that game despite Aaron Rodgers being on the bye. And then Michael Vick scored 46 points! Going into week 11, my kicker has already been outscored by the Blackmouth kicker 13-0. My only goal left is to finish in the top three in points scored while remaining on the bottom of the league standings. In other news, watch out for a raging bear market; the Grizzlies appear to be making their move.

Dowd goes nuclear

Her column entitled Nuking the White House is subtitled: “Would Republicans make Indianapolis collateral damage in their eagerness to wipe out Obama?”

I can’t speak for Republicans, not being one, but I would say no, since Indianapolis never did anything to anyone except Baltimore and it would be unnecessary anyhow since Obama is politically wiping himself out about as fast as is humanly possible. However, I suspect a great many Americans would be quite willing to accept New York City, Washington DC, and Los Angeles as collateral damage.

However, there is an ominous warning to Republicans in her column. It does not bode well for them that the new House Majority Leader didn’t see fit to allow himself to be subjected to a gate rape last week. Keep this in mind if he comes out in support of the TSA and opposes Ron Paul’s new bill.

“The Times’s Jeff Zeleny was on the scene and reported that John Boehner did not wait in line or go through security: he “was escorted around the metal detectors and body scanners, and taken directly to the gate.”

It’s amazing how clueless politicians are when it comes to PR when one considers how much their careers depend upon it. If Boehner had any PR skills at all, he would have opted out of the scan, then shouted “don’t touch my junk” at the first TSA agent to approach him. The crowd would have roared and his approval rating would be in the 80s… among Democrats.

Mailvox: beyond overload

HW writes of the effects of engaging in an intellectually hazardous adventure:

Effects of reading 7 years of Vox Popoli entries in two months:

I started following your blog and somehow came to the insane conclusion that I should read every single one of your posts, starting from 2003. I came to Vox Popoli after reading TIA and thoroughly enjoying the unapologetic demolition of the New Atheists’ best arguments. While I know that TIA is not meant as a defense of Christianity, its author was clearly a believer, and not the kind whose confused imagination portrays Christ as a limp-wristed hippy. Vox’s posts on feminism piqued my interest further and I decided to read the entire archive. You know, for fun.

How has concentrated exposure to Vox’s writing affected my life? Let’s break it down by category.

Career: Won’t try to become a professional writer.

Economics: Intense feelings of doom.

Child-rearing: First child is due in January. Won’t be vaccinating, (at least immediately), will be homeschooling. It’s clear now that my public school education was not only inefficient, but just plain wrong at times. The Dark Ages never happened? Who knew?!

Politics: Clearer view of how police power is dangerous and needs to be severely restricted. I previously described myself as a conservative, and though my political leanings were similar to libertarianism, I consistently voted Republican. However, as I reached the end of the 2008 archives, that changed. Two years of the Obama administration has conditioned me to blame everything on him, and the bailouts fit his modus operandi perfectly, so my brain naturally added the farcical attempts at recovery to his list of sins. Then a shocking realization: Bush was still President. The man I VOTED FOR was governing like Obama. The time-travel effect of the archives has convinced me that Bush was not conservative, and I now regret voting for McCain. Fortunately, this was in time for the November elections, and my wife and I cast our first votes for libertarian candidates.

Digesting the archives was a thoroughly enjoyable experience and while it challenged several of my concepts of the world, I don’t feel that it’s any exaggeration to say that I’m better off for it. I’m taking steps to cure my historical blind spots and my wife happened to be convincing me that homeschooling was superior at the same time as I was reading Vox’s posts on the subject. The only downside to finishing this little project is that I have to wait until you post now, instead of being able to simply move on to the next month. I guess I’ll start Summa Elvetica…

I know the feeling, I did much the same thing a few years ago when I discovered Fred Reed’s articles. I am pleased that HW found the experience to be a useful one, especially because it appears to have encouraged him to think for himself and to heighten his critical faculties. The primary goal of this blog is to encourage myself and others to raise our intellectual game in a free, casual, and reasonably civil manner.

Speaking of which, I have an idea for a book which would require an amount of fairly serious research help from the Ilk. Despite the copious amounts of ink and its digital substitute that have been devoted to blathering in ignorance about religion and war, there has never been a serious book about it from the military historians, the military strategists, or the critics of religion. So, I’m contemplating the expansion of the two chapters of TIA devoted to the subject into a book entitled God and War that deals with the use and utility of religion in historical warfare dating back to the earliest written records.

This would not be a book of apologetics or even an attack on the hypothesis that religion causes war, it would be a straightforward summary of all the known facts about the relationship between religion and the causes and practice of war. This strikes me as a more useful contribution to the sum of human knowledge than continuing to beat up on intellectual lightweights like the New Atheists and Keynesian economists. It’s a rather large-scale undertaking and will take an amount of time to write since I can’t devote any work time to it, so it would help speed up the process if if five or ten people would be willing to help with digging up the details on specific wars that have either eluded the three-volumes of the Encyclopedia of Wars or been given insufficient shrift by the authors of that very useful reference work.

Anyhow, it’s just an idea at this stage, so let me know if it would be of any interest to you, either as a reader or a potential volunteer.

Bank run

What would appear to be the first of many to come across the insolvent West:

A slow steady bleed has turned into a mad dash for cash at Allied Irish Banks. Allied Irish Banks has had to rely on Central Bank funding as customers withdraw $18 billion, a stunning 17 percent of its deposit base. Without Central Bank funding, there would indeed be outright panic.

Of course, this can’t happen in the USA where bank deposits are insured by the FDIC… which happens to be in the red.

“Science” vs History

I have to admit, Scott Locklin identifies the invention of science long before I had imagined; I always assumed that it was considered to have begun with Galileo, the so-called Father of Science. Of course, neither scenario fits at all well with the revisionist history of the atheist secularists and their passionate attachment to the ridiculous idea that science and religion are intrinsically at odds:

Pope Benedict’s trip to Ole Blighty is over, and that sanctimonious gasbag Dawkins didn’t manage to arrest him in the name of secular humanism. While I’m not a believer myself, I often wonder at such professional atheists who cover themselves in the mantle of “science.” Don’t they know any history?

What we refer to today as “science” is something which was invented by humans, rather than springing forth from Jove’s forehead in some ancient time before time. There is a definite date before which there was no science and a date after which there was science. This isn’t controversial or mysterious: We know exactly when it happened, and some of the original manuscripts which invented science and modern thought still exist….

History’s first scientist was Robert Grosseteste, although his work is little known in popular education today. He was born in 1170 or so to a humble Suffolk family. He found his calling in the Catholic Church, as important a source of social mobility then as the university system is now. It was Grosseteste who formulated the first description of the scientific process. He was the first European in centuries to study Aristotle’s works and the first to study Arab natural philosopher Abu Ibn al-Haytham’s writings. From these thinkers he developed the idea of “composition and resolution,” which is the scientific method in itself.

Interesting. And of course, as we know from other areas of their demonstrated ignorance, the short answer is: no, the professional atheists don’t know any history. And as a general rule, when science and history happen to conflict, it’s usually wise to bet on history.

From 1066 to 2066

Albion is being invaded and settled for the first time since Hastings:

White British people will be in a MINORITY in their own country by 2066, an expert warned last night. David Coleman, professor of demography at Oxford University, said they will make up less than HALF the population in just over 50 years. And soaring immigrant birthrates mean white British kids will be in a minority of youngsters in the UK even sooner. The dramatic decline will be fuelled by record-breaking levels of immigration, coupled with the departure of thousands of Brits for a better life abroad, the population analyst said.

Correction: it’s not their country anymore. It’s just a province of the European Union… at least until the Euro collapses. While some innocents and disingenues still insist that there is not even the theoretical possibility of a difference between a majority white country and a minority white country based on the idea that all humans are not only equal, but interchangeable, both recent and ancient history strongly suggest otherwise. Once immigration transforms into migration, the invaded culture is on its way to the dustbin.  Consider, for example, the difference in employment rates between natives, and first-generation, and second-generation non-European immigrants in three major European countries, which directly contradicts the multiculturalist assumption that integration is a function of time.

If ethnocentrism, relative poverty, or a lack of integration was the primary reason non-European immigrants were employed at lower rates than native Europeans, one would expect second-generation immigrants to be employed at higher rates than the preceding generation.  But this is not the case, and the same pattern can be seen in Hispanic immigration to the United States as well.  Needless to say, a 20% reduction in the productive percentage of the population is likely to have significant social and economic effects over time.

A liberal champion of free speech

“There’s a little bug inside of me which wants to get the FCC to say to FOX and to MSNBC: ‘Out. Off. End. Goodbye.’ It would be a big favor to political discourse; our ability to do our work here in Congress, and to the American people, to be able to talk with each other and have some faith in their government and more importantly, in their future.”
– Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV)

Remember this the next time an American liberal attempts to tell you that liberals are the defenders of individual human rights.  While it’s true that real liberals support human rights, what passes for “liberal” in modern American terms isn’t liberal at all.  but is progressive, leftist, fascistic, and is absolutely opposed to all individual rights that contradict anything that is perceived to be of benefit to the collective.  “Faith in government” is their religion.