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When one attempts to forcibly remake society, it’s almost impossible to guess how the Law of Unintended Consequences is going to cause things to go awry. But it will always strike somehow:

These and thousands of other children stolen from the teeming industrial hubs of China’s Pearl River Delta have never been recovered by their parents or by the police. But anecdotal evidence suggests the children do not travel far. Although some are sold to buyers in Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam, most of the boys are purchased domestically by families desperate for a male heir, parents of abducted children and some law enforcement officials who have investigated the matter say.

I don’t have much that’s positive to say about the Chinese Communists. But I rather doubt that they anticipated, or desired, mass kidnappings as a result of their literally inhuman One Child policy. Since we’ve already seen some bizarre behavior of this type in the West, particularly among women, it will be interesting to see if children become more of a commodity as they become less common outside the religious communities.

It seems Mr. Teleprompter must have missed the flight:

Barack Obama, the World’s Greatest Orator (™all news organisations), didn’t exactly cover himself in glory when the BBC’s political editor Nick Robinson asked him a question about who was to blame for the financial crisis. Normally word perfect, Obama ummed, ahed and waffled for the best part of two and a half minutes.

It’s not exactly a mystery. As I’ve shown before, the man doesn’t possess a superior intelligence and he is almost completely unable to speak coherently unless he’s reading. Notice how much Obama laughs when he’s interviewed… he uses it as a means of covering up the fact that he cannot construct complete sentences on the fly.

Seriously, who is still babbling things like this by the time they reach the END of a statement: “I’m a great believer in looking forwards than looking backwards.” Did the newspaper blow the transcript or is this some sort of presidential ebonics?

Earlier this week, I had the excellent fortune to run into a friend I met last year. I don’t use the word “amazing” very often, but he is a genuinely amazing pianist. It’s not that he did things with the piano I hadn’t seen before, it’s that he did things I’d never even heard of before. Yesterday evening he put on a performance, at least part of which I know was impromptu, that was musically spectacular.

To describe the man as talented doesn’t half do him justice, and ironically, unlike many individuals who aren’t anywhere nearly as gifted, he’s an intelligent and personable guy who is remarkably down to earth. I highly recommend checking out his music if you happen to have any appreciation for the piano.

When your economic model fails again and your economy is once more on the verge of collapse, what’s the solution? Do the same thing but big it up!

World leaders on Thursday heralded the G20 summit as the day the world “fought back against the recession” as they put on a show of unity that lifted global markets and mapped out a new future for financial regulation. Gordon Brown, UK prime minister, host of the summit, said the meeting marked the emergence of a “new world order”, as he unveiled what leaders claimed was a $1,100bn package of measures to tackle the global downturn, including support for lower income countries and a $250bn plan to boost the international money supply.

There’s a pattern at work here. After the 1987 Asian currency fiasco nearly sunk Wall Street, the Fed managed to inflate the tech equity bubble. When that blew up in 2000, they used the martial response to 9/11 and the housing bubble to reinflate. Now, since their usual national tools have failed, they’re attempting to throw the combined weight of the G20’s resources at the problem, based on the same precisely the same set of assumptions that have repeatedly made the problem worse!

This action doesn’t “save the world”, in fact, it makes it much more likely that what was mostly an American depression from 1929 to 1940 will be repeated on a scope that is an order of magnitude larger. If we’re unfortunate, it will also be on a scale that is an order of magnitude larger as well.

The fundamental problem isn’t a lack of resources, it is a misallocation of resources. Giving GM more money isn’t going to cause more people to want to buy GM cars, it merely postpones the inevitable collapse and increases its economic and social costs. And don’t forget what happened the last time the media announced the world’s salvation… in February 1999.

PZ Myers provides amusement by worrying about the economic crisis harming America’s “intellectual infrastructure”:

One of the challenges facing the country right now in this time of economic crisis is that we’re also about to be confronted by the result of a decade of neglect of the nation’s infrastructure, in particular, the chronic starvation of our universities. It’s an insidious problem, because as administrations have discovered time and again, you can cut an education budget and nothing bad happens, from their perspective.

But where is the evidence that America’s universities are its intellectual infrastructure? It’s a self-serving assumption, and a problematic one when considered in a realistic light. The comments are an absolute gold mine of comedy – to which I have referred before – as the hard scientists begin by beating up on the humanities and the fake sciences until eventually both sides join hands, sing Kumbaya, and reach a general agreement that Womyns’ Studies and Postmodern Philosophy are just as important as Biology and Physics and that every academic discipline should be lavishly funded by the taxpayers.

However, the Pharyngulans are confusing theory with reality here, as they discuss what the liberal arts are theoretically supposed to be as opposed to what they actually are at an American university. This is ironic, as their community is one of the foremost examples of how an American university system does not teach one how to think ; indeed, it does precisely the opposite as one will not find a less thoughtful, more dogmatic individual than the average American academic.

And, as others have noticed, it’s becoming evident that the best and brightest coming out of America’s most elite universities are actively contributing to America’s economic demise. There is arguably a stronger case for shutting down the universities entirely than there is for not reducing their funding; paying to obtain a piece of paper calling itself a university degree is no longer tantamount to obtaining what passes for an education. From politics and business to economics and the liberal arts, the American university system has been a massive failure.

““It is so obvious that something big has failed,” said Angel Cabrera, dean of the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Arizona. “We can look the other way, but come on. The chief executive officers of those companies, those are people we used to brag about. We cannot say, ‘Well, it wasn’t our fault’ when there is such a systemic, widespread failure of leadership.”

Minnesota continues its descent into utter madness:

Muslim workers receive $1.35 million under a religious discrimination settlement. A federal judge gave approval for Gold’n Plump Inc. and an employment agency to pay $1.35 million to settle lawsuits alleging religious discrimination against Muslims at a chicken processing plant in Cold Spring, Minn. The money will go to 128 Somali Muslims who claim that St. Cloud-based Gold’n Plump violated their religious rights by refusing to allow them prayer breaks during work hours, and to another 28 workers who said a St. Paul employment agency, the Work Connection Inc., required them to sign forms acknowledging they would be required to handle pork.

During the latter days of Rome, I wonder how many Roman citizens found themselves looking around at all their new Teutonic neighbors and thinking: “yep, we’re well into the decline and heading fast for the fall.” Seriously, how can anyone possibly imagine that this is going to end well?

The author of Atheism: a very short introduction, declares the New Atheism to be “destructive”:

This is most evident when you consider the poverty of the new atheism’s “error theory”, which is needed to explain why, if atheism is indeed the view evidence and reason demands, so many very bright people are still religious. The usual answers given to this are not good enough. They tend to stress psychological blind-spots and wishful thinking. For instance, Dawkins says “the meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.”

But if very intelligent people are so easily led astray by such things, then shouldn’t the new atheists themselves be more sceptical about the role reason plays in their own belief formation? You cannot, on the one hand, put forward a view that says great intelligence is easily over-ridden by psychological delusions and, on the other, claim that one unique group of people can see clearly what reason demands and free themselves from such grips. Either many religious people are not as irrational as they seem, or atheists are not entitled to assume they are as rational as they seem to themselves.

Baggini’s efforts are well-placed, but one thing he misses in his essay is that the New Atheists, having seen their “error theory” repeatedly blown away and shown for the logical and empirical nonsense that it is, are in the process of shifting to what can be described as the “compartmental” theory. This hasn’t yet made its way down to the run-of-the-mill internet atheists, whose primary form of “debate” still consists of calling people stupid despite the fact that all of the available evidence demonstrates rather conclusively that the objects of their ridicule are, as a point of fact, rather more intelligent than the atheist himself.

It is a pity that Baggini hasn’t actually troubled himself to read the New Atheist tomes. Had he done so, there can be little doubt that he would not only describe the New Atheism as destructive, but as a hopeless parody of an intellectual movement as well.

Atheism will always exist. As it is written, there have always been fools who have said in their hearts that there is no God. But the cancerous form of anti-intellectual and ill-tempered atheism that is the New Atheism, as exemplified by the evangelicalism of Richard Dawkins, has already seen what passes for its heyday and its lifespan will be a short one.

I posted about the infuriating behavior of the British police standing by and watching people burn to death yesterday, but I deleted the post because it was simply too vicious. Mark Steyn has a rather more civilized post on the further decline of the British people:

The incident has strange echoes of that fire at a school in Saudi Arabia not long after 9/11, where the fleeing schoolgirls escaped the blazing building but, because they were unveiled, were beaten back by the stick-wielding religious police to die in the flames. In both cases, the emergency responders who are supposed to save you (or at least make an attempt) instead wind up killing you – because a rote prostration before rule enforcement trumps their basic humanity. In recent years, the British police have evolved from being merely useless (at least when it comes to traditional activities such as solving crime) into what John O’Sullivan calls “the paramilitary wing of The Guardian” – the blundering enforcers of the nanny state.

It’s clear that the governments of the world are actively seeking to raise humans that are more sheep than wolves. Americans should seriously consider fighting against government-funding for genetic research, as there can be little question that if the sort of lunatics who are now running the capital city asylums are ever given the opportunity to incorporate sheep DNA into the citizenry, they’ll do it in a heartbeat.

Don’t defend yourself. Don’t rescue your neighbors. Just sit there and bleat, and perhaps the badge gang will elect to help you. Or not, as the case may be.

Americans who like to trumpet the wonders of the British NHS should probably think twice before subjecting themselves to its tender mercies:

Patients admitted for emergency treatment at an NHS Trust were subjected to “shocking and appalling” care that included untrained receptionists carrying out medical checks and heart monitors being switched off, a report concluded today. The Healthcare Commission, the NHS standards watchdog, said that evidence suggested that as many as 400 deaths at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust could have been prevented and may have been the result of poor care.

That’s 400 deaths at a single hospital. When discussing how the government – the government! – is going to save money by running things, does no one ever stop to think precisely how the government is going to save that money? The answer is pretty simple. Reduce and Remove. They’ll REDUCE the quality the service or product and justify that by REMOVING your other options.

UPDATE – Make that 400 to 1200 deaths, in three years! On the plus side, if a socialized nationalized health service does kill dear old mum as the reports indicate is not at all unlikely, you will get an apology from the Prime Minister and the Health Secretary. Which, it has to be admitted, is more than you’d ever get from a private corporation or church charity. One could, of course, argue that they’re a great deal less likely to kill dear old mum in the first place, but let’s not focus on the negative:

The British government apologised Wednesday after a damning official report into a hospital likened by one patient’s relative to “a Third World” health centre. Stafford Hospital in central England was found to have appalling standards of care, putting patients at risk and leading to some dying, according to a report on Tuesday. Between 400 and 1,200 more people died than would have been expected in a three-year period at the National Health Service (NHS) hospital, according to an investigation by the Healthcare Commission watchdog.

“We do apologise to all those people who have suffered from the mistakes that have been made in the Stafford Hospital,” said Prime Minister Gordon Brown, questioned on the matter at his weekly grilling in the House of Commons….

Health Secretary Alan Johnson said: “I apologise on behalf of the government and the NHS, for the pain and anguish caused to so many patients and their families by the appalling standards of care at Stafford Hospital.

You know there’s a Fox News executive reading about patients wandering around fighting each other and thinking: “I know… reality TV show…. Survivor: Death Hospital!”

While the Europeans finally seem to have this sort of thing under control, it is still all too common in African stadiums. Tragedies like this one just don’t bode well for the next World Cup:

At least 22 people were killed and 132 wounded in a crush at a football stadium during a World Cup qualifier in Ivory Coast. Fans panicked after a wall collapsed at the Houphouet-Boigny Stadium in Abidjan on Sunday, prompting a stampede. Police are said to have fired tear gas at the crowds.

I certainly hope the 2010 tournament in South Africa is without incident, but when one considers that the level of excitement is likely to be several orders of magnitude higher than it is for the qualifiers, I don’t see how one can reasonably confident that it will be.