Category: Uncategorized

Games are good for you

It is medical science:

Dr Micklewright was equally surprised by the number of characteristics gamers did share with top athletes. He said: ”Their reaction time, motor skill, competitiveness and emotions were pretty close. Elite athletes have unusually high levels of positive feelings and low levels of negative feelings such as depression and fatigue.”

Okay, granted, you still have to get to the gym. But combining the gym and games is the way to turn yourself into an elite physical and mental specimen. And best of all, you never have to enter The Big Room.

The bittersweet moment

We saw a young viszla running through the woods yesterday. It was so familiar, like a fleeting glance through a temporal window back to a time when it was Mithra who was dashing gleefully, back and forth amongst the trees. It was simultaneously heartwarming and sad. Most of all, it was a reminder of how much I miss my dog.

“The stimulus failed”

In which I am not exactly surprised to be proven correct again:

Originally, I intended to just clip out the statement from Keynesian economist Jeffrey Sachs that “the stimulus failed,” which Joe Scarborough had to dig to get, but the entire segment is worth viewing. First, Sachs confirms — on MS-NBC, no less — that the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress had no strategy for long-term growth. The stimulus was a collection of short-term minor stimuli, combined with liberal hobby horses that Democrats had ridden for twenty years. Scarborough tries to defend Keynesianism from the Keynesians, but the failure can’t be separated from the philosophy.

The amusing thing about the failure of the stimulus isn’t that its failure was predictable, but rather that the shameless excuse-making of the Neo-Keynesians regarding its failure was also not only predictable, but predicted too.

And note all the talk about double-dip recessions, coming right on schedule in Q2 2010. Remember, as per RGD, the Great Depression 2.0 talk isn’t supposed to kick off in earnest for another two quarters.

WND column

Solving the Middle East

Helen Thomas has come in for an amount of criticism for her suggestion that the Jewish population of Israel should return to Germany and Poland. Setting the increasingly ineffective histrionics about anti-Semitism aside, (an accusation that has lost its potency since the professionally offended hate hustlers began slinging it at everything from Merry Christmas greetings to criticism of Wall Street felons), that criticism is well justified.

Encouraging Jewish emigration to Europe is an absurd idea for several reasons. The Europeans don’t want them, as was made eminently clear some 50 years ago. Nor do the New Ummayads, who make up a miniature and increasingly independent Umma within the creaky seculardom of the European Union. And most importantly, Israeli Jews don’t harbor any desire to return to a continent where they were banished from various kingdoms more than 30 different times over the centuries.

The next civil war

Looks to be more East vs West than North vs South:

There were half a million fewer whites in California in 2008 than in 2000, a period when the state’s overall population grew by 4 million to 38.1 million, according to a study released Thursday by the state Department of Finance. By 2008, whites made up 40 percent of Californians, down from 47 percent at the turn of the century. In 2000, Hispanics comprised 32 percent of the population; that number grew to 37 percent in 2008.

It’s not going to take until 2042 for Hispanics to become a majority in California. The problem with linear projections of the sort in the article is that they do not take dynamic behavioral responses into account; whites will flee California even faster as the Hispanic population naturally begins to turn its numbers into political dominance. And, as we’ve seen, the Aztlan independence movement has already taken its first baby steps.

However, there are alternatives to this expected future, some of which might surprise you. See tomorrow’s column for details.

Mailvox: a consensus of go karts

JB muses on the limits of science:

It’s funny how the same bad epidemiological science (weak and inconsistent macro correlations instead of hard causations) that underpins the disaster of modern dietetics is also responsible for the entirety of the case against smoking. Confusion also arises on both issues when experiments conflate the effects of processed, unfresh, adulterated ingredients with fresh, unadulterated ones, and forget to factor the rise of industrial processing into their timelines.

These massive scientific errors have caused untold premature deaths. The entirety of western civilizational diseases, including cavities, heart disease, cancer and diabetes, could be eliminated in an instant by returning to a paleolithic high or all meat diet. This is indisputable: the onset of all these diseases has been observed in paleolithic societies switching to western food.

But then, the fifth highest cause of death in America is medical error. And global warming scientists recently attempted to construct a framework for world government on a knowingly fraudulent premise. So we should all be wary of science.

What else has science disastrously gotten wrong? Ah yes, psychology, politics, history, sociology, the family, gender relations, economics… better to ask what science gets right: Physics. Math. Engineering. Repeatable, testable, non-human endeavors.

Human-heavy fields are still too filled with biases and complications and dynamism for one to trust the scientific consensus to be correct, much less the popular consensus. It is necessary to read widely and with a mind not only open but eager to absorb ideas intelligently presented but patently insane. Otherwise one will never escape the idiosyncratic mental strictures of one’s time and place.

With the singularity approaching before the next century, human brains will soon be regarded as little more than go karts in a world of F-15s. Now why would one blindly trust a consensus of go karts?

I have always found it amusing that science fetishists seldom realize how hopelessly wrong their understanding of material reality is. For example, they genuinely believe that technology is the fruit of science, when both history and logic conclusively demonstrate that science is the result of technological advancement. They have the basic relationship between the two precisely backward.

Given their inability to understand such a simple and obvious fact, to say nothing of all of the many manifest failure of the scientific method in areas where its application is either complicated or simply inappropriate, their confidence in it as the only method of human understanding or “progress” is not only remarkable, but risible. Hence the quasi-religious aspect of scienceology, which should never be confused with the actual scientific method.

Less school, better scores

It is amazing how people can stubbornly resist reaching the obvious conclusion:

Don’t bother showing up for school. The doors are locked and the lights are off.

Peach County is one of more than 120 school districts across the country where students attend school just four days a week, a cost-saving tactic gaining popularity among cash-strapped districts struggling to make ends meet. The 4,000-student district started shaving a day off its weekly school calendar last year to help fill a $1 million budget shortfall….

The results? Test scores went up.

So did attendance — for both students and teachers. The district is spending one-third of what it once did on substitute teachers, Clark said. And the graduation rate likely will be more than 80 percent for the first time in years, Clark said.

Imagine if they went to zero! Consider this. Children learn to crawl, walk, and speak multiple languages without ever sitting in a classroom or having a formal teacher. Why, then, is it assumed that they absolutely require one in order to learn history, math, or science? Especially when one takes into account the demonstrated ignorance of those who have had the supposed benefit of 12 or more years of mass education.

Liberal fascism is back

Assuming it ever really went away. And eugenics is back with it:

Both Gates and Rumsfeld’s presence at this year’s event indicates that some very important developments are set to unfold over the course of the next 12 months, particularly with regard to Iran as well as the global warming agenda, which has been on the ropes since the Climategate scandal and the failed Copenhagen summit in December.

Gates’ Bilderberg presentation will also likely include information about his eugenicist projects to lower global population figures.

During a recent TED conference, an organization which is sponsored by one of the largest toxic waste polluters on the planet, Gates told the audience that vaccines need to be used to reduce world population figures in order to solve global warming and lower CO2 emissions to almost zero.

Stating that the global population was heading towards 9 billion, Gates said, “If we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services (abortion), we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 per cent.”

Quite how an improvement in health care and vaccines that supposedly save lives would lead to a lowering in global population is an oxymoron, unless Gates is referring to vaccines that sterilize people, which is precisely the same method advocated in White House science advisor John P. Holdren’s 1977 textbook Ecoscience, which calls for a dictatorial “planetary regime” to enforce draconian measures of population reduction via all manner of oppressive techniques, including sterilization.

This points to the inherent incoherency of left-liberal thought. Bill Gates has spent loads of money expanding the global population by fighting diseases in third world countries. Now he wants to end the very lives he was previously so concerned with saving. And remember, these New Eugenicists are the very people who deny their ideology can be linked in any way to Fascist and Nazi ideologies despite the fact that they are advocating precisely the same deadly policies.

What are they going to inject in those population-reducing vaccines, Zyklon-B?

Mailvox: give to Caesar

JB wonders when it applies:

Not sure if you’ve run into this, but I’ve noticed a pattern when debating a liberal (Christian or not) about taxes and big government. When they get to the point where they have lost the argument, they throw a grenade with the statement, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s”.

Now, I’m not one to take the words of Christ lightly. It is true, Jesus did not go out of His way to incite rebellion against Rome, and seemed to endorse the concept of taxation with that statement. However, something doesn’t sit right with the liberal’s logic when they resort to that statement.

I wonder if you or the Ilk have a solid response to the Render Unto Caesar argument.

I usually run into this with regards to taxes. My response is always the same as the response that preceded the advice. “Show me the coin used for paying the tax. Whose portrait is this? And whose inscription?” In other words, show me Caesar! So, while you can reasonably use this verse to justify writing a check to assorted dead men or the Federal Reserve, it is a poor argument in support of state or Federal taxation.

Now, it is important to note that it is not any wiser to refuse to pay the tax money demanded by the IRS than it is to refuse to pay the protection money demanded by the Mafia. But it does mean that the Biblical justification doesn’t apply.

As for government, the liberal Christian’s logic breaks down because what applies to a divine Emperor manifestly does not apply to a democracy, not even a constitutional republic in which the democracy is strictly limited. Whereas the imperial subject owes the Emperor nothing but obedience, the citizen of the republic has a duty to ensure that his duly elected government acts legitimately according to the bounds of the republic’s constitution.