Category: Uncategorized

The treatment of auto dealers like this doesn’t seem right, but as for the nullification of the franchise contracts by the bankruptcy court, I think it’s reasonably common practice for bankrupt companies to be released from contractual obligations.

On Thursday, May 14, 2009 I was notified that my Dodge franchise, that we purchased, will be taken away from my family on June 9, 2009 without compensation and given to another dealer at no cost to them. My new vehicle inventory consists of 125 vehicles with a financed balance of 3 million dollars. This inventory becomes impossible to sell with no factory incentives beyond June 9, 2009. Without the Dodge franchise we can no longer sell a new Dodge as “new,” nor will we be able to do any warranty service work. Additionally, my Dodge parts inventory, (approximately $300,000.) is virtually worthless without the ability to perform warranty service. There is no offer from Chrysler to buy back the vehicles or parts inventory.

Our facility was recently totally renovated at Chrysler’s insistence, incurring a multi-million dollar debt in the form of a mortgage at Sun Trust Bank.

HOW IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CAN THIS HAPPEN?

THIS IS A PRIVATE BUSINESS NOT A GOVERNMENT ENTITY

This is beyond imagination! My business is being stolen from me through NO FAULT OF OUR OWN. We did NOTHING wrong.

However, even from this admittedly plaintive email, it’s not hard to point out that the man is incorrect. He did do something wrong. He put his business in debt because another party told him to. If the facility renovations were so important to Chrysler, then Chrysler should have funded them. If they weren’t willing to take the risk of doing so, the dealer should have known better than to take the risk for them.

Everyone makes mistakes. I’ve made some humdingers. But, in general, going into debt in order to do something of benefit to another party is an inexcusable one. No doubt his justification was that Chrysler might have threatened to pull the franchise. Well, if that’s the sort of business partner you have, you’re better off without them. Now he’s in pretty much the same situation he would have been if he’d told Chrysler to take a hike, but with the addition of millions in debt to pay off.

Travis brings up what he considers to be five good points made by the New Atheists:

My premise is that the new atheists do have some good points that hold warrant and should make any Christian scratch their head. Now I will not claim these points show that one should become an atheist. All the new atheists have done for me is make me question my beliefs and have me lean towards accepting agnosticism, I certainly haven’t felt any tug to become an atheist. Okay, enough already, here are the points.

1. Biblical Ethics are below par at best. The Christian must believe in objective morality, for God is the source of morality. If God is the source of objective morality why do we see ethical commands justifying rape and the harsh treatment of foreign slaves? If Biblical ethics is the objective standard than Wilbeforce was a sinner for trying to eliminate slavery, for the Bible certainly does not decree the abolition of slavery? If we take a progressive approach to scripture we all could still certainly agree that the movement toward a better ethical system could have certainly moved faster.

Sam Harris brings this up in “Letter to a Christian Nation”

2. “Over 99 percent of the species that ever walked, flew, or slithered upon this earth are now extinct….When we look at the natural world, we see extraordinary complexity, but we do not see optimal design….The truth is that, while there are now around three hundred and fifty thousand known species of beetles, God appears to have an even greater fondness for viruses. Biologists estimate that there are at least ten strains of viruses for every species of animal on earth.” Sam Harris

Which viewpoint makes more sense in accounting for this: Unguided evolution or the God of Christianity?

3. “It is safe to say that almost every person living in New Orleans at the moment Hurrican Katrina struck shared your belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, and compassionate God. But what was God doing while Katrina laid waste to their city? Surely He heard the parayers of those elderly men and women who fled the rising waters for the safety of their attics, only to be slowly drowned.”

Sam Harris, “Letter to a Christian Nation” Now obvious you can go the Douglas Wilson route and say atheists do not have a basis for objective morality. This is true, but the Christian does have objective morality and the Christian makes objective claims. Two of them being, God is all powerful and all loving. Given these two attributes why do we see so much senseless suffering? The atheist need not believe that evil exists in order to point out the unlikelyhood that there is not an all powerful and all loving God in the world we are living in. Isn’t it hard to see a moral justification in permitting childhood cancer? Again, which worldview fits the best explanation of what we see around us?

4. “If God answers prayers why wouldn’t He occasionally heal a deserving amputee? And why wouldn’t people of faith expect prayer to work in such cases?”

Sam Harris, “Letter to a Christian Nation”.

5. If abortion is wrong why is God the #1 abortion doctor? Sam Harris brings this up and Douglas Wilson’s response is basically “God gives and takes away.” It is what the Bible says but which worldview makes the most sense given the large number of miscarriages?

Considering this is pretty long already I hope you are okay if I just give you five. I thought this would be quite enough for now. Is that okay?

Five is certainly sufficient, so long as Travis is willing to admit that a successful refutation of all five will leave us back where we started, which was my assertion that the New Atheists do not have any effective arguments to offer. That’s why I specifically requested the 10 arguments that Travis believed were the best they had to offer and these are the five upon which he’s settled. I will certainly respond to all five, in full, which isn’t a problem since with the exceptions of questions 2 and 4, I have addressed them in TIA. However, at Bethyada’s request, I will give everyone here an opportunity to have a crack at them before I post my reply tomorrow. Don’t expect Travis to respond to them, however, he asked for MY answers and so isn’t obliged to respond to anyone else’s.

I rather doubt this will be the last post-facto revision from the Fed:

The Fed’s forecasts, released as part of the minutes from its April meeting, show that its staff now expects the unemployment rate to rise to between 9.2% and 9.6% this year. The central bank had forecast in January that the jobless rate would be in a range of 8.5% to 8.8%, but the unemployment rate topped that in April, hitting 8.9%. The Fed also now expects the gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the nation’s economic activity, to post a drop of between 1.3% and 2% this year. It had previously expected only a 0.5% to 1.3% decline.

Of course, the “unemployment rate” is a complete fiction given that it doesn’t count a sizeable number of people who are unemployed. According to my calculations, which is based on a more objective metric, the percentage of not-employed in the United States is 54 percent of the population, up from the all-time employment peak of 51.46 percent although much better than the economic low point of 68.74 percent in 1933.

I find the concept of the “labor force” to artificial and misleading, as well as subject to statistical shenanigans. Moreover, it inhibits meaningful analysis of the effect of an increasing young and middle-age women start working as young men and elderly men stop doing so.

In the Fish piece the other day, one of the commenters wrote something about how he thought that debating Dawkins or Hitchens would put Fish in his place. Which is somewhat amusing, considering that the New Atheists keep getting their heads handed to them whenever they dare debate anyone but decrepit Anglicans and lady journalists:

Knowing Hitchens’ penchant for denouncing and ridiculing religion, I decided to approach the subject of God’s existence, not from the standpoint of religion, but from the standpoint of philosophy. Hitchens seems to have no appreciation at all of the fact that one of the central questions of philosophy is whether God exists and that, regardless of religion, there is a long history of arguments for/against God’s existence. As a professional philosopher, I said that in the debate I was going to focus on the arguments and leave other issues aside.

This strategy worked beautifully, as Hitchens showed himself utterly incapable of interacting with the arguments in a substantive way. By his third speech he had reverted to his usual railing against God as a North Korean dictator who robs us of our freedom. Hitchens actually forfeited his closing statement in favor of taking audience questions, so that I wound up having the last word in the debate.

The reaction in the blogosphere was immediate and unanimous. Hitchens was uniformly denounced for his empty rhetoric and posturing and his failure to interact with the arguments. One atheist blogger summed it up: “Hitchens was rambling and incoherent, with the occasional rhetorical jab. Frankly, Craig spanked Hitchens like a foolish child.” For my part, I’m gratified that one of the so-called four horsemen of the new atheism should be publicly exposed in this way.

As I’ve pointed out in TIA, and as numerous individuals from D’Souza, Wilson, and Craig have demonstrated in their debates, neither Hitchens nor Dawkins actually have any effective arguments to offer. What little they do have is nothing more than appeals to personal experience and ad hominem attacks on irrelevant strawmen; they have absolutely no capacity for defending either their atheism or their secular humanism. The fact that the second-tier atheists are cowardly buffoons and overmatched strippers like PZ Myers and Kelly O’Conner tends to support my contention that the New Atheist moment has come and gone.

A parliamentary revolution in Great Britain:

Not only was Mr Martin the wrong choice; he turned out to be a catastrophic one as well. His fate is symbolic of the rottenness of a political system that was once the envy of the world. That system now lies broken and demoralised. With its sovereignty already dissipated by the power of the European Union, the role of the House in scrutinising legislation has been further undermined by the placing of time limits on all debates; the hours it sits have shrunk, the chamber is often virtually empty, and MPs routinely fail to articulate the concerns and aspirations of the people who elect them. Westminster has sunk into a slough of despond. The dwindling turnout at successive elections is testament to what the country thinks of the system. Mr Martin, as Speaker, has presided over this sorry shambles.

A vote for Cameron and the Tories is merely a vote for more of the same. The BNP are sound on the EU, but that’s about it. UKIP strikes me as the only party that is both pro-British and pro-freedom. Or perhaps a new party will rise to the fore; I believe there is a British Libertarian party. Regardless, England is badly in need of another revolution to free it of its Brussels and Scottish masters.

“The principal aim of the Party is that the United Kingdom (“UK”) shall again be governed by laws made to suit its own needs by its own Parliament, which must be directly and solely accountable to the electorate of the UK. The second aim is to preserve the integrity of the UK. To this intent the Party’s objects are to withdraw the UK from the European Union and to resist membership of any other international organisation, or grouping, the membership of which is incompatible with the above aims and to oppose any form of government within the UK, which may undermine its integrity.”

I may have been too generous when I calculated that the average school teacher’s IQ to be around 91:

According to state education officials, nearly three-quarters of the people who took the state elementary school teacher’s licensing exam this year failed the new math section. The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education released the results Tuesday. They say that only 27 percent of the more than 600 candidates who took the test passed.

Remember this the next time someone asks you about your credentials to homeschool your children. In my opinion, the mere fact of not being mentally sub-normal trumps a degree from a paper-selling institution that hands them out to everyone with a pulse and the requisite cash.

Let’s just say I’m underwhelmed:

The discovery of the 95%-complete ‘lemur monkey’ – dubbed Ida – is described by experts as the “eighth wonder of the world”. They say its impact on the world of palaeontology will be “somewhat like an asteroid falling down to Earth”. Researchers say proof of this transitional species finally confirms Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the then radical, outlandish ideas he came up with during his time aboard the Beagle.

Of course they do. Let’s see the hands of all the theory of evolution believers who will disavow it when – not if – Ida turns out to be yet another trivial artifact in the ever-expanding bone box that proves absolutely nothing of import whatsoever. And to think they found it just in time for Darwin’s 200th anniversary too! Why, it must be a scientific miracle!

As Sarah points out, it’s interesting to learn that as of yesterday, evolution had not been confirmed. And it’s good to know that should this fossil du jour fades into obscurity for one reason or another, we’ll know evolution is once more unconfirmed. Unfortunately for the Darwinian faithful, falsification cuts both ways.

Or smarter, faster, richer, nicer, or better-looking than you out there somewhere. I was feeling pretty self-satisfied at the gym today after ripping through four sets of dumbbell shoulder press. I thought I’d go for reps instead of weight, so I did a 12-10-10-10 series starting with a pair of 20 kilos and ending at 26 kilos. I was feeling pretty good, I just felt kind of… felt kind of invincible.

And then this guy came over, picked up the 26-kilo dumbbells and started doing shoulders too. He did a set of 10 as well. The thing is, he did a set of 10 flies.

Whilst I am sympathetic to men who have been royally abused over by their ex-wives and the insane Family Court system in the USA and the UK, I think men also have to take a certain amount of responsibility for the way in which they have abdicated their paternal roles:

Fathers, who enjoyed absolute authority within the household for several millennia, now find themselves at the beck and call of their wives and children. Indeed, most of my male friends are not fathers in any traditional sense at all; they occupy roughly the same status in their households as the help. They don’t guide their children through the moral quandaries of life — they guide them to their extracurricular activities from behind the wheel of a Dodge minivan….

It’s pretty simple. If you are unwilling to do something that’s been demanded of you, then don’t do it. You don’t have to be an ass about it, you don’t need to be impolite about it, you don’t even necessarily have to say anything at all. Just don’t do it. And that goes for the ex-husbands too. If you don’t want to be a court-appointed slave to your ex-wife, then don’t be. Go and lead that exciting life you always kind of wanted to lead but couldn’t. Join a mercenary troop in Iraq or an outlaw drug gang in Colombia. Climb a mountain in Tibet. Become a river guide in the Amazon. Leave and don’t look back. You’re not going to be permitted to be a father to you children anyhow, so stop pretending you are and enabling the system.

We all make compromises. They’re a necessary part of life with other people. But if you’re the only one making them, then you’re not compromising, you’re just surrendering. And yes, that actually does make you less of a man. Spacebunny often points out that women could not be the overweening bitch-queens of the family if their husbands did not permit them to be. If your home life is so terrible, what are you afraid of losing?