Category: Uncategorized

Okay, not so much:

NHS records show that 3,645 people died as a result of “patient safety incidents” – including botched operations and the outbreak of infections – between April 2007 and March 2008. The figure was 1,370 higher than two years earlier. Patient groups have warned that the true toll is likely to be higher because some hospitals do not record all incidents.

It would also be interesting to see how the restricted supply inherent to socialized medicine affects patient mortality rates, assuming that those who are denied treatment are even factored into the figures. Remember, in the USA, HMOs were once considered to be the solution to the problem, now they are practically considered to be synonymous with it. It’s interesting to note how many self-proclaimed devotees of empiricism nevertheless support the empirical lunacy of socialized medicine.

This would tend to explain American voting patterns:

Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it’s long been recognized that city life is exhausting — that’s why Picasso left Paris — this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.

While city life has always held certain attractions for me, I’ve never had any serious desire to live in an urban center. I might have been an inveterate night club prowler in my late teens and early twenties, but I lived on an isolated private lake surrounded by a forest. Big Chilly and I briefly considered moving downtown when we started the Digital Ghetto, but instead we elected to set up shop in a quiet, wooded suburb. Which, of course, led to Micron’s famous quote: “Dude, we are the criminal element.” One thing I like about where we are now is that one can go for a nice quiet walk past the cows, the sheep, and the ubiquitous donkeys in the afternoon, then catch an opera or an intimate reading by a world-famous author in the evening.

(Not that we ever do, of course, since I’m far too busy slaughtering masses of Horde in Azeroth to have any time for culture. But we COULD, you see, that’s the important thing. It’s all about the perception.)

On a tangential note, I’ve noticed is that cities are seldom the ideal place to build stable, long-term relationships, especially not destination cities like New York City, San Francisco, or Los Angeles. It happens, of course, but people usually go there to have their big adventure, they don’t go there to settle down. So, if your long-term goal is to get married and have a family, about the very last thing you should do is apply for that exciting job in the great big city.

UPDATE – LP emails a comment:

Doing the big city life ruined my social life or my hope of becoming a married mom by 30. What was i thinking! Dumb ass 20 year old.

In time we learn what we knew not;
In youth one is an idiot.
Sagacity comes far too late
To be of use in youthful state.
And bitter indeed is the joke,
Time’s cruel, ironic, master stroke,
For when his ravage runs its course
We find we can afford the Porsche.

This is very good news. USA Today reports that homeschooling is not only growing, it is actually growing at an increasing rate:

The ranks of America’s home-schooled children have continued a steady climb over the past five years, and new research suggests broader reasons for the appeal.

The number of home-schooled kids hit 1.5 million in 2007, up 74% from when the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics started keeping track in 1999, and up 36% since 2003. The percentage of the school-age population that was home-schooled increased from 2.2% in 2003 to 2.9% in 2007. “There’s no reason to believe it would not keep going up,” says Gail Mulligan, a statistician at the center.

1999-2003: 9 percent/year
2003-2007: 9.5 percent/year

At the current rate of growth, there are now 1.64 million homeschoolers representing 3.2 percent of American schoolchildren. That’s nearly a third of the children who attend all of the private schools in the country combined. Since these families will represent the educated elite of the nation’s future, it’s also where libertarians should be focusing their political recruitment efforts.

The count finally comes out the way they wanted:

A state election board on Monday will announce Democrat Al Franken has defeated Republican incumbent Norm Coleman in Minnesota’s U.S. Senate race, state officials told CNN Sunday.
A board will say Al Franken won the U.S. Senate race by 225 votes, Minnesota’s secretary of state says. The canvassing board on Monday will say a recount determined Franken won by 225 votes, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie told CNN.

Norm Coleman’s defeat is no loss for Minnesotans or for conservatives, as the replacement with one liberal Jew born in New York with a more liberal Jew also born in New York is hardly going to make much of a difference; at least Franken grew up there and has some genuinely Minnesotan sensibilities. And, let’s face it, there’s even more prospective hilarity to be expected with Senator Franken than there was with Senator Wellstone and Governor Ventura combined.

Of course, his election should suffice to create some doubts among those who still seriously buy into the idea that voting is a sacred responsibility.

UPDATE – Every vote counts. And some votes count twice:

Under Minnesota law, election officials are required to make a duplicate ballot if the original is damaged during Election Night counting. Officials are supposed to mark these as “duplicate” and segregate the original ballots. But it appears some officials may have failed to mark ballots as duplicates, which are now being counted in addition to the originals. This helps explain why more than 25 precincts now have more ballots than voters who signed in to vote.

In which questions are asked about one of my critics’ favorite columns:

I’m a 24 year old young woman and a Christian. I happened to have stumbled across your article “The Morality of Rape” and from there I found your blog. Needless to say, you have some very interesting thoughts about rape, feminism, and other issues. I admit, they got me thinking.

I understand your opinion that “date-rape” doesn’t exist (rape is rape no matter what circumstance). The thing is, I think it’s just another example of our need to categorize things, case in point “acquaintance rape”. Also, I do believe that there are precautions that women and girls need to take to protect themselves, especially when going out to parties and clubs. But when you say the women can be partially blamed for their rape, in what situations are you talking about in general. Know the whole “getting drunk” or “walking alone at night in a secluded area when you didn’t have to” one, but what about a girl who was just hanging out with someone who she thought of as a friend? I know personally I hung out in a friend’s room who was male. We weren’t dating, no fooling around, and I trusted him. The only thing we did was lay on his bed for a bit and watched TV (fully clothed).

Furthermore, what about a girl on a date who made it clear that she doesn’t want sex whether during the date or before? The guy just simply over-powered her. I also remember a scenario from one of your posts in which a woman changed her mind during or when she was about to have sex. Do you think that a woman has no room to change her mind and that she should just go along with it?

First of all, I think it’s important for everyone, particularly women, to step back, take a deep breath, and turn on their brains before contemplating such an emotionally charged issue. Shrieking about the immorality and criminality of rape being universally axiomatic and declaring that every man accused by any woman of anything should be immediately hung, drawn, and fifthed is not only pointless, it combines near-complete irrationality with an embarrassing degree of historical ignorance.

Let me answer your questions, which as near as I can tell boil down to two, very briefly, then explain my thinking in more detail. 1. Caveat Emptor. Any woman who voluntarily places herself in a position where rape is possible bears precisely the same responsibility for any subsequent rape that the defrauded victims of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scam bear for the loss of their investment funds. Are they to blame for the fact that Madoff was a fraud? Absolutely not. Are they to blame for the fact that they trusted him? Of course, for who else made the decision to place their trust in him? Responsibility is not a zero-sum game. While one cannot blame a victim for being victimized, one can, indeed, one must, hold a victim responsible for any decisions that rendered that victimization possible. 2. In most circumstances, once given, consent is not easily revoked. This is a nebulous area, especially since explicit consent is seldom given in intimate matters. However, I would say that from a Judeo-Christian moral perspective the question of withdrawn consent is irrelevant, because if obtaining consent is an issue, in most cases the act is already determined to be immoral. (One could also raise the scriptural direction to let your yes be yes and your no be no.) From a legal perspective, the question should also be irrelevant given the probable absence of witnesses. And from the non-Christian moral perspective, well, that completely depends upon the particular morality and the individual conscience. Or lack thereof.

The first serious question, then, is whether we are talking about morality or legality. These are two completely different questions. As to the question of morality, there is no question that every form of rape, including the various forms of non-rape sometimes errantly described as “date rape” or “acquaintance rape”, are immoral under the Judeo-Christian ethic, with the possible exception of “marital rape”. (Forget the latter for now, however, since it can be dealt with as part of the legality question for reasons that will eventually become clear.)

Now, it’s important to understand that rape was not considered to be immoral under most historical non-Christian ethical systems. To the extent it was frowned upon, it was more akin to a property-related crime with compensation due to the offended property owner. Consider, for example, the pagan sacrament of burial among the Rus, as told by Ahmad ibn Fadlān ibn al-Abbās ibn Rašīd ibn Hammād, secretary to the ambassador from the Caliph of Baghdad to the Bulgars in 922:

“The tenth day, they brought the deceased out of the ground and put him inside the pavilion and put around him different kinds of flowers and fragrant plants. Many men and women gathered and played musical instruments, and each of his kinsman built a pavilion around his pavilion at some distance. The slave girl arrayed herself and went to the pavilions of the kinsmen of the dead man, and the master of each had sexual intercourse once with her, saying in a loud voice, ‘Tell your master that I have exercised the right of love and friendship.’ And so, as she went to all the pavilions to the last one, all the men had intercourse with her. When this was over, they cut a dog in two halves and put in into the boat, then, having cut the head off a rooster, they threw it, head and body, to the right and left of the ship…. Then the old woman sized her head and made her enter the pavilion and entered with her. Thereupon the men began to strike with sticks on the shields so that her cries would not be heard and the other slave girls would not be frightened and seek to escape death with their masters. Then six men went into the pavilion and each had intercourse with the girl. Then they laid her at the side of her master; two held her feet and two her hands; the old woman known as the Angel of Death re-entered and looped a cord around her neck and gave the crossed ends to the two men for them to pull. Then she approached her with a broad-bladed dagger, which she plunged between her ribs repeatedly, and the men strangled her with the cord until she was dead.”

It was only after the violent religious festivities had ended that the famous ship-burning took place. They usually seem to leave out the preceding parts in the movies and medieval fantasies, don’t they…. In defense of the Rus, it must be noted that the girl is a nominal volunteer. On the other hand, she is a slave who is guarded closely after her “volunteering”, she’s forcibly intoxicated, and steps are taken to prevent her screams from being heard prior to her murder. But whether she volunteers for her death or not, the casual way in which she is passed from one man to another makes it readily apparent that the Rus had no ethical problem with a failure to obtain consent prior to intimate relations. It’s a bit much to imagine one hard-bitten pagan warrior after another politely offering variants on this theme: “Oh, ah, I know you’re drunk off your skull and a mad old woman is going to strangle you in a moment, but I say, you don’t object if I have a go first, do you, my dear?”

The Rus were hardly alone in this either, as from a purely materialist perspective there is no logical reason to raise any moral objection to rape, because the specific location of various collections of atoms at any one point in time are simply not a moral matter. In order to construct any objection, it’s first necessary to elevate the discussion beyond the purely material or the scientific.

– more later –

The nice thing about yesterday’s wins by the Cardinals and the Chargers is that it should shut up TMQ and all the other lunatics who were crying about the fact that two 8-8 division champions made it to the playoffs. Arizona and San Diego are now 9-8 and have conclusively proved that they merited their place. The NFL isn’t broken, so people who claim to be fans should stop trying to fix it.

I’d rather go the other direction and get rid of the wild card teams altogether. If you want to win a championship, then you can start by winning your division.

I like Arizona and Indianapolis today. UPDATE – Lawyer Milloy is getting eaten alive by the Cardinal WRs.

Dominic Saltarelli raises an interesting question:

If we all agree that “faith” is trust in a source, this still begs the question of who to trust and why. I’ve always taken evidence to mean things that you can verify for yourself. If my own mother came up to me and told me something outrageous, like a block of cheese told her where her favorite shoes were, I’d be skeptical. Now, I trust my Mom more than anybody, but until I start conversing with dairy myself, I simply wouldn’t believe her story. I’d just think my Mom had gone nuts (and if she’s reading this, Hey Mom! Love you too!)

Similarly, if the Bible tells me that Jesus really did rise from the dead, why should I believe its account, but NOT believe Hercules killed a hydra, or Mohammed flew around on a winged horse?

This is a perfectly reasonable perspective, although it is a mistake to think that evidence is something verifiable, as it is merely anything that provides grounds for belief. A man will believe his mother loved him because she told him so when he was a child, while a scientist will believe what he reads in an old scientific journal because he has confidence in the scholarly reputations of the editors. In both cases, the belief has reasonable evidential grounds even if it is not verifiable by the believer; the mother may be dead and the scientist may lack the expertise or the resources required to imitate the experiment reported. And yet, the evidence remains, even if it is only the memory of words spoken long ago.

Unsurprisingly, Dominic’s perspective betrays an unconscious bias towards “scientific evidence” which is, ironically enough, a bit of a misnomer. Consider the definition of evidence: “that which tends to prove or disprove something; ground for belief“. Since scientists tell us repeatedly that science is not in the logical proof business but rather the pragmatic and effective model business, one could construct a perfectly rational case that there is no such thing as scientific evidence as the very concept borders on oxymoronic. But, as this would be taking pedantry to an inutile extreme in these circumstances, we shall forgo that line of thought for the present and focus on answering Dominic’s question.

I believe the issue of Hercules has already been dealt with to Dominic’s satisfaction, so let’s consider the comparative value of the sources for Jesus Christ’s resurrection and Mohammed’s flying horse. In the case of the latter, the oldest extant source is the one written down by Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Bukhari, who is reported to have collected over 300,000 hadith told to him and wrote down the 2,602 stories that he personally felt to be authentic. Al-Bukhari wrote down these tales in 846, 214 years after the death of Mohammed. Furthermore, one of the two major branches of Islam, the Shia, reject the Sahih Bukhari, going so far as to state that “There is NO requirement in Islam to believe in Sahih Bukhari….”

The story of Jesus Christ’s resurrection, on the other hand, is reportedly told by several of his personal companions, who claim to have encountered him subsequent to his very public death. The oldest manuscript to date is the Magdelen Papyrus, which contains Matthew 26 and has been dated as early as 66 AD, 33 years after the events it describes. The Lukan Papyrus is dated between 67 and 77 years after Christ’s reported death, and there are another 230 extant manuscripts compiled within 500 years of the event.

Contrast with this the earliest copies of the works of historians such as Thucydides, Herodotus, Aristotle, Caesar, and Tacitus. There are no more than 20 copies of any of these manuscripts and the earliest extant copy was made more than 1,000 years after the original. If it were not for the seemingly absurd claims about a man doing miracles and rising from the dead, no one would even think to question the historical veracity of the Bible. And there’s simply no comparison between the veracity of an account to which every Christian today subscribes and the Islamic hadith, in which many Muslims place no credence.

Now, it would be one thing if the event described in Gospels was claimed to be a quotidian reality that, nevertheless, no one has witnessed since. But that is not the case, as the accounts are very clear about the astonishing, even singular, nature of the event. Common sense dictates that one ask oneself the question: if the resurrection of God’s Son was a one-time historical event as it purports to be, how else could eyewitness reports possibly have been recorded given the technology of the time, and what alternative explanation beyond the convincing nature of the reports will suffice to explain the enormous number of ancient manuscripts that were produced and circulated long before the Edict of Milan ended the Imperial persecution of Christianity and the Church achieved its position of intellectual domination that allowed it to put thousands of monks to work making manuscripts.

The truth is that modern doubts about the Gospel accounts have a basis that is no more objectively legitimate than that upon which al-Buhkari’s rejection of the vast majority of hadiths he was told rests. They’re subjective, and they’re based on nothing more than personal feelings and the obvious difficulty in testing a historical event. If the ancients are trusted to have reliably passed on the accounts of the Peloponnesian war for 1300 years, then they were quite obviously just as capable of faithfully passing on the eyewitness accounts of a strange event that took place in Jerusalem nearly two thousand years ago for a few decades. Based on the available evidence, logic dictates that one either tentatively accept the essential reliability of the record testifying to Jesus Christ’s resurrection or reject the greater part of Mankind’s recorded history.

This may explain in part the peculiar nature of the New Atheism, given the obvious deficiencies of the New Atheists with regards to both logic and history. Now, does this prove beyond any reasonable shadow of a doubt that Jesus Christ rose from the dead? No, it does not. But it should be more than enough to prove why that account is far more credible than the tale of a flying horse.

Note – any discussion of evolution or Creationism is off-topic and will be promptly deleted.

Last week was a surprisingly strong showing by the Voxiversians, as more than 100 people took the test despite the distraction of the holidays. This is more than double the number of individuals who survived to the same point in the Thucydides study, so well done, everyone. There’s only three chapters to go, but by this point I expect the broader message of the study has penetrated through even the thickest skulls, to wit: the discomforting panoply of similarities between the reaction of the fiscal and monetary authorities to the 1930s crisis and their reaction to the present one.

For next week, Chapter 10: 1931 – “The Tragic Year”.