It’s probably just as well Kurt Cobain didn’t live to see this. And somewhere in Hell, Jim Nash is pointing and laughing at Sub Pop.
Category: Uncategorized
The worst figures in American history
The Right Wing News polls the bloggers. John says: “While this is a fascinating list, this one is unusual in that I honestly don’t agree with a lot of the people on the list. Take a look at it and see if you feel the same way.”
Here were my nominees:
Alexander Hamilton
Abraham Lincoln
Woodrow Wilson
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Margaret Sanger
Susan B. Anthony
Alan Greenspan
Paul Warburg
David Rockefeller
Richard Nixon
I was frankly shocked to see that so many people agreed with me about Roosevelt and Wilson, but didn’t see fit to add “Honest Abe” to the list.
Morals aren’t evolving fast enough
At least, not fast enough to confer legitimacy on scientific fraud:
Dr. Hauser, whose field is the comparison of human and animal minds, is the author of “Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong.”
A Harvard press officer, Jeff Neal, at first refused to confirm that Dr. Hauser was on leave or that Harvard had conducted any investigation. But a message on Dr. Hauser’s laboratory phone says he will be on leave until the fall of 2011, and at least two scientific journals are acknowledging problems in Dr. Hauser’s articles that were brought to light by an internal Harvard inquiry.
The journal Cognition published an article by Dr. Hauser and others in 2002 saying that tamarin monkeys could learn certain rules much as human infants do. The journal is about to run a retraction saying that an internal examination by Harvard “found that the data do not support the reported findings. We therefore are retracting this article. MH accepts responsibility for the error.” The initials M.H. refer to Dr. Hauser.
Rah for the Orange… rah for the Orange… rah for the Orange and Blue! Now, I wouldn’t wish to judge my fellow Bucknellian overharshly, but if turns out that there has been any scientific malfeasance underlying Dr. Hauser’s inaccurate conclusions, it would be a strong indication that one should not take scientific theories about morality and moral development with a straight face. You have to seriously wonder about what is wrong someone who would actively deceive others in attempting to revise the traditional understanding of morality.
Dating down
This Daily Mail article helps demonstrate why women with casual sexual experience are prone to overrating themselves and underlines the sexual economics that underlies Game. The comparison between the virgin and the cougar-blimp is anecdotal and no doubt one could easily find an opposite pair to serve as a counterexample, but is there any doubt that a 31 year-old man with 50 lovers could not be as unattractive as the example shown here?
However, this is the part that I found the most indicative of Game theory:
I was rather prim when I was growing up – I didn’t have a sexual relationship until I was 17. That was a classic holiday romance – he was a Turkish student and I met him when I was on holiday in Turkey with my sister. He fished my shoe out of the sea, and we got chatting. We spent the entire week together and slept together after a few days. To me, sex meant commitment and I convinced myself I was madly in love. But like all holiday romances, it fizzled out.
Sending a young woman between the ages of 15 and 18 on a vacation without serious adult supervision is the close equivalent of buying a hooker for a young man of the same age. The difference is that there is a reasonable chance the hooker would be more acceptable as a long term partner. Send her to France and she’ll do a Frenchman, send her to the mountains of Peru and she’ll do a squatty Incan if the raffish tour guide isn’t available. For a variety of reasons, women are always much, much more prone to let their hair down and lift their skirts up whenever they have flown somewhere. Throw in curiosity and teenage hormones as well as the appeal of the exotic Other and it’s a virtual lock.
The most amusing part, however, are the famous last words uttered by the woman with 25 notches on her bedpost:
Jonny and I haven’t really talked about how many sexual partners we’ve had because we both take the same view that it’s the here and now that’s important, not the past. I don’t think he will be concerned when he reads my tally. He doesn’t judge me and I don’t judge him.
Of course he doesn’t… what a fortuitous coincidence that a man should happen to share an opinion with the woman he is casually banging! How often does that happen? It’s a shame there won’t be a follow-up piece explaining how Jonny, who no doubt finds it very hard to meet women in the music industry, read the article and eventually made use of it as an excuse to denounce Jodie as an incorrigible slut who is incapable of remaining faithful when he moved on to the next opportunity.
Slutty Jane is really not the category in which a woman wants to find herself when she’s ready to be done having fun and start settling down.
The crimson lining
There are few words sufficient to express the joy that one sees in the faces of the children and women in this video. But underlying that joy, one can also see an occasional glimpse of the stark terror of loss in which they have been living for months, if not years. The young woman who completely dissolves into tears after being surprised by the man in the wool hat is perhaps the most revealing example of this. It should be sobering to recall that there are 5,638 American soldiers, many more than were seen in this video, whose flag-draped return to their loved ones would be too painful to watch in a similar montage. The dream of a free and civilized Afghanistan and a free and peaceful Iraq is not an intrinsically bad thing. But even if it was a reasonably obtainable one, it is not in the American national interest and it is not worth the cost in American lives and American blood. It is not even worth tearing these fine men from their wives, children, and loved ones for a time. Bring them home. Bring them home now.
The Home of the Bankrupt
The bankrupt banks are pretending to be solvent. So, it should come as no surprise that the Federal government has been following their lead.
[T]he IMF has effectively pronounced the U.S. bankrupt. Section 6 of the July 2010 Selected Issues Paper says: “The U.S. fiscal gap associated with today’s federal fiscal policy is huge for plausible discount rates.” It adds that “closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 percent of U.S. GDP.”
The fiscal gap is the value today (the present value) of the difference between projected spending (including servicing official debt) and projected revenue in all future years.
To put 14 percent of gross domestic product in perspective, current federal revenue totals 14.9 percent of GDP. So the IMF is saying that closing the U.S. fiscal gap, from the revenue side, requires, roughly speaking, an immediate and permanent doubling of our personal-income, corporate and federal taxes as well as the payroll levy set down in the Federal Insurance Contribution Act.
Such a tax hike would leave the U.S. running a surplus equal to 5 percent of GDP this year, rather than a 9 percent deficit. So the IMF is really saying the U.S. needs to run a huge surplus now and for many years to come to pay for the spending that is scheduled.
The scary thing is that these calculations indicating national insolvency are based on numbers that are ludicrously optimistic. As I have been saying for more than two years now, it’s not a question of if the system collapses, it’s only a question of when.
Pro-science or pro-feminist
One can’t help but notice that the science fetishists who are constantly worrying about the “threat” that teaching Creationism or Intelligent Design poses to school children never seem to make a peep about what one British biologist describes as an actual threat to science in the schools:
In an interview with Horticulture Week, the man in charge of the herbariums at the Natural History Museum, said Britain faced a shortage of naturalists in the future just when the country will need experts to deal with the threat of climate change and biodiversity loss. He blamed the problem on a “lack of teachers who know about the natural world”.
“Even if the Government decided to put natural history on the primary curriculum, how would it do so with teachers who don’t have the basic skills? They are often terrified of the natural world – they scream at the sight of insects and tell the children ‘don’t touch’. The whole point is to engage them, but when people are frightened of handling soil, then we have a problem.”
This presents an interesting dividing line between the Darwinian cultists who are driven by their atheistic ideology, which takes a very pro-feminist position, and the science-driven evolutionists who are non-partisan on ideological matters. If teachers who are afraid of dirt and insects are having such a markedly negative effect on the teaching of natural science, then why haven’t we heard anything from the biology blowhards on the subject?
There has been a similar silence on Title IX science, which tends to indicate that political correctness is much more important to them than science.
Anklebiters Anonymous
In the interest of helping our resident trolls evolve into substantive commenters, as well as assisting non-Ilk readers recognize the usual suspects, I have decided to create a “best of” series which should serve as both amusement and edification. The honor of the first “Beezle” award goes to Cabal, whose epic defense of science he quite clearly doesn’t understand was eviscerated by the merciless duo of Bob Mando and DaveD. Please note that the ellipses are Cabal’s; his award-winning comment is quoted precisely and in full.
“Every single living organism that we know of is carbon-based and all of them require oxygen to live…without exception. And carbon is a by product of oxygen. the relationship between the 2 couldnt be clearer.”
– Cabal: 8/10/10 10:37 AM, Science gets it wrong… again
“Pure, unadulterated BS. there are numerous KNOWN organisms which will die in the presence of oxygen.
a – photosynthesis is possible without oxygen, even by carbon based life forms.
b – it is a founding principle of Evolution that cyanobacteria generated the free oxygen that exists in the atmosphere now as waste products.
c – it is a founding principle of Evolution that cyanobacteria ‘evolved’ from more primitive forms of bacteria which did not use oxygen at all in the photosynthesis process.
You are wrong about … well, pretty much everything, really. Carbon is a non-radioactive base element, number 6. Oxygen is also a non-radioactive base element, number 8. Neither of these elements can ever be a “product” of the other without the intervention of fusion or quantum manipulation. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, is a compound element which breaks down into one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms through simple chemical processes.”
– Bob K. Mando
“You have shown yourself to be profoundly ignorant of both biology (“Every single living organism….require oxygen to live…without exception.” Except the ones that don’t.) and basic chemistry (“And carbon is a by product of oxygen.”) You haven’t even grasped the most basic elements of the observable world, which you interact with everyday. Why, then, should we pay any attention at all to your ramblings on the more abstract aspects of life and the universe?”
– DaveD
Congratulations to all. The award is named for the banned commenter Beelzebub, whose ability to mangle facts and logic in the process of attempting to “correct” others is unparalleled.
UPDATE – Cabal amused the crowd by accepting his award, but not the chemistry lesson. Cabal: 8/12/10 9:57 AM: “I was not in error. Remove oxygen molecules from the universe and carbon based life becomes impossible.”
More sex, less age
Put more sex in your life: It slows aging. A Scottish study found that thrice-weekly action stripped at least four years off participants’ faces, and getting busy even boosts immunity and reduces heart disease
I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that who you are having sex with also matters. I don’t think thrice-weekly gay sex with a Haitian drug addict is going to slow aging, except perhaps in the sense that one actually isn’t getting any older.
You must zell!
When did it become a federal law that you must sell houses to black people?
In this tough real estate market, you would think that agents would be itching to sell their properties to anyone with money in hand. But a Chicago couple, their agent, and their broker are accused of some nasty discrimination that goes beyond being overly particular. Daniel and Adrienne Sabbia have been charged with refusing to sell a Bridgeport home to a Black couple because of their race, reports Chicago Breaking News.
Just in case you weren’t entirely sure that the civil rights movement killed the U.S. Constitution and the right of free association it contained, this prosecution should serve as sufficient evidence. In a free society, it’s not your business, my business, or the government’s business why someone chooses to sell or not sell anything to anyone. I’d like to see HUD go whole hog on this and declare that in the interest of expanding black homeownership, all purchase offers made by black individuals must be accepted at any price. Whether the home is listed for sale or not. Now that the principle of the free market in housing has been abandoned, there’s no reason not to set the parameters wherever the HUD bureaucrats happen to think best at the moment.