Category: Uncategorized

Spacebunny emailed me this news today:

MEPs want TV regulators in the EU to set guidelines which would see the end of anything deemed to portray women as sex objects or reinforce gender stereotypes. This could potentially mean an end to attractive women advertising perfume, housewives in the kitchen or men doing DIY. Such classic adverts as the Diet Coke commercial featuring the bare-chested builder, or Wonderbra’s “Hello Boys” featuring model Eva Herzigova would have been banned.

The new rules come in a report by the EU’s women’s rights committee. Swedish MEP Eva-Britt Svensson urged Britain and other members to use existing equality, sexism and discrimination laws to control advertising. She wants regulatory bodies set up to monitor ads and introduce a “zero-tolerance” policy against “sexist insults or degrading images”.

Isn’t it interesting how the secularists always seem to do whatever they claim to be afraid of conservatives and Christians doing? It looks as if secular Europeans are far more puritanical than the American religious right would ever dream of being. Some time ago I wrote that women’s rights were a disease… it’s clear that cancer would have been the most apt comparison. Perhaps by the time men are banned from smoking, drinking, having sex, playing video games, watching football, or leaving the house without express written consent from a woman, people will begin to realize that my warning was dead-on.

No wonder the media is freaking out. It appears that Palin just single-handedly destroyed the post-convention bounce, and she did it before her superlative speech:

The presidential race between Barack Obama and John McCain is now even at 42 percent, according to a new CBS News poll conducted Monday-Wednesday of this week. Twelve percent are undecided according to the poll, and one percent said they wouldn’t vote. This is in contrast to a poll conducted last weekend, where the Obama-Biden ticket led McCain-Palin by eight points, 48 percent to 40 percent.

Note that the “gender gap” is a bigger problem for Obama than it is for McCain – he loses more men than McCain loses women. By the way, isn’t it fascinating to see how conservatives react when a genuine conservative enters play in the place of the Rudy-Fred McRombee sort that requires all of the right-wing bloggers to try to convince themselves that if they just squint at him the right way in just the right light, he might kind of look a little bit like Reagan.

Can you even imagine how utterly crazy this race and its media coverage would become if McCain began his speech tonight with the words:

“My fellow Americans. It has been my honor to serve my country as a United States naval aviator, to serve the good people of Arizona as their Senator, and to serve the Republican Party as its candidate for President.

To me, public service, not personal ambition, has always been the highest calling. So now, in order to better serve the people of this great country, I am withdrawing my name from consideration for the nomination. And I am deeply, profoundly, honored, and absolutely delighted to nominate the Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, as the Republican Party’s candidate for President of the United States….”

Now, THAT would inspire a media conniption worth watching! McCain may or may not become the next president, but he’d make himself an immortal by becoming the president-maker. Obama had a similar opportunity with Hillary a few months ago, but he was too short-sighted and egotistical to seize it.

Hillary would be the very last one to want to see that; as it is, she’s almost going to have to sign up for the old maverick:

Possibly the most depressed liberal in the country today (other than Obama) is Hillary Clinton. She has been dogged, patient. She has spent years preparing to win the presidency. She’s weathered public humiliation. She was planning to be the frontrunner for 2012. But last night she saw the future and she’s not in it.

I would have assumed that Hillary could beat Palin following four more years of Bush-McCainery, but that’s a questionable assumption at best after last night’s steller performance. Having forgone the chance at an insurrection, Hillary’s best chance now is if McCain to wins this fall and then runs again for re-election in 2012. The interesting question to consider is if Palin would run in 2012 against an incumbent President Obama in the event of a McCain loss. My first inclination is to think she wouldn’t, but then, if Obama screws up the way I’d expect him to, I think Republicans would not only draft Palin for president, but lynch any Republican who thought to oppose her.

By the way, the MSM’s ability to analyze events is best shown by the recent suggestions that Republicans might demand Palin’s withdrawal from the ticket. Of course, there hasn’t been even a whisper of that, instead, they’re loudly wishing that the ticket was upended. Clueless, simply clueless.

This is a typical example of their cluelessness:

Several moderate-Democrat friends of mine have been emailing–few if any would ever vote for McCain–but all agree that Palin was very strong. The more liberal among them are a little panicked. I completely misjudged how negative she would be. Her lines about Obama were brutally cutting and possibly over the top in places.

First, they were all taken completely by surprise when McCain made the most obvious and effective choice for vice-president. Second, they actually thought conservatives and the religious right would somehow be turned off by a pregnant girl marrying the father of her child and having the baby! Here’s a little secret for the irreligious Left: religious people not only believe that sin exists, they believe that everyone engages in it. True, it’s best to avoid sin, but the far more important thing is how you attempt to amend for your errant actions when you, like everyone else, fall short of perfection.

Now they’re all surprised that a woman whose nickname is “Barracuda”, who compares her kind of woman to a pitbull, who took on and beat the corrupt old boys of Republican politics in Alaska, should turn out to be an effective attack dog. Whoever could have imagined it?

This is why I don’t read much political commentary except as a guide to what the clueless parrots will be repeating. With a few exceptions, it’s almost completely useless.

This was a particularly good line of attack: ““Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves. I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities.”

One shot, two hits. The rabid Democrats in the media, lacking in both intelligence and perspective, have failed to account for the obvious. Wasilla may have only 9,780 residents, but there are more voting Americans living in similarly small towns than are living in the big cities that journalists apparently believe are the only places that matter. I won’t vote for McCain-Palin, but I suspect that a lot of people who would never have voted for McCain alone will.

Forgot to mention, doing a bit of radio now. You can listen here.

is paved by science:

Let’s face it, we really trust science. In fact, studies suggest that the vast majority of people will murder another human being, if a guy in a lab coat tells them it’s OK. But surely in their insatiable curiosity and desire to put knowledge above all things, science would never, say, inadvertently set off a chain of events that lead to some sort of disaster that ended the world. Right?

This, of course, says nothing of the insistence of keeping the 1917 flu virus on ice, the continued research on new and better ways to kill people, and the scientific contribution to anthropogenic global warming. Just out of curiosity, I thought I’d take a stab at the five greatest dangers presented to the planet by religion.

1. Islamic fanatics sweeping across the Atlantic on camelback. Evolved amphibious camels!
2. Neo-aztecs sacrificing six billion people with stone knives atop a rebuilt Great Pyramid at Tenochtitlan.
3. Jews successfully converting the rest of the planet to Judaism, then being holocausted en masse by the twelve remaining Christians holding them collectively and retroactively responsible for killing Jesus two thousand some years ago.
4. This is the perfect time for the revival of the Spanish Inquisition, since no one is expecting it.
5. Evangelical Bhowanee-thugeeism.

Gary North sounds as if he was taken a little off guard by recent naval movements:

The most important news for the month of August was the fact that President Bush has quietly sent the largest armada into the Persian Gulf since the Iraq war began in 2003, when there were six carrier groups. This is a huge number of ships to be concentrated in one location in peacetime.

This story has been completely ignored by the news media all over the West. The only coverage is from special-interest websites.

I’ve been paying attention to this myself, although I haven’t wanted to cry wolf having been wrong about this last summer. I’ve been expecting some sort of Iran strike before Bush leaves office. I know there’s been a large number of false alarms with regards to Iran, but then, such a remarkable assembling of forces seldom takes place without there being a purpose for it.

It could be mere sabre-rattling, but I doubt it. Surely one or two carrier groups would suffice for that. As Stratfor noted last week, preparations for an Iran strike help explain the near-complete non-response to Russia’s activity in Georgia.

It’s hard to decide which is the more ridiculous idea: (a) That the governor of Alaska successfully faked a pregnancy and is passing off her grandson as her son, or (b) that Bristol Palin’s pregnancy somehow demonstrates the inefficacy of abstinence-based education.

Both notions require brain damage, an IQ at least 35 points below the norm, or willful ideological blinders for anyone who spends more than five seconds thinking about the matter to adhere to them. Palin’s pregnancy has been sufficiently attested to that it needs no further explication here. As for the abstinence argument, consider the following facts:

1. In 2001, the federal and state governments together spent $4,403,000 in Alaska on contraceptive services and supplies for 141,000 women of childbearing age.

2. Almost all U.S. schoolchildren receive sex education by eighth grade, most begin receiving sex education in fifth grade. This sex education may include abstinence programs, but it is almost never limited to them.

3. Bristol Palin was not homeschooled for most of her education and her fiance is a hockey player at a public school.

Therefore, Bristol Palin’s pregnancy is much more reasonably viewed as a failure of comprehensive sex education because that is the form of sex education she and her fiance almost certainly received, rather than a failure of the abstinence-only program that her mother favors and which she did not receive. One would have to be extraordinarily logically handicapped to indict a program that cannot possibly be held responsible for a situation while trying to claim that the program actually involved would have somehow magically prevented the situation even though it manifestly did not.

Furthermore, abstinence programs are superior to other forms of sex education, at least when measured in terms of reduced STD contraction. This is what I noted in analyzing Sam Harris’s statistically tortured attempt to attack abstinence programs: “What he neglected to mention was that while the study showed that 4.6 percent of the abstinence-pledged teens contracted an STD, this was 35 percent less than the 7 percent of non-pledged teens who also acquired one.” – TIA p. 127

In which both the inherently unreliable nature of science and the declining probability of anthropogenic global warming are demonstrated:

The sun has reached a milestone not seen for nearly 100 years: an entire month has passed without a single visible sunspot being noted. The event is significant as many climatologists now believe solar magnetic activity – which determines the number of sunspots — is an influencing factor for climate on earth….

In 2005, a pair of astronomers from the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson attempted to publish a paper in the journal Science. The pair looked at minute spectroscopic and magnetic changes in the sun. By extrapolating forward, they reached the startling result that, within 10 years, sunspots would vanish entirely. At the time, the sun was very active. Most of their peers laughed at what they considered an unsubstantiated conclusion.

The journal ultimately rejected the paper as being too controversial.

Scientists like to consider themselves more educated and more intelligent than the great unwashed who know nothing about science. This is, for the most part, true. But they save their real dislike for those non-scientists who are not only more intelligent than most scientists, but are sufficiently educated about science to point out the inconvenient fact that the inherently unstable – or “dynamic”, if you prefer – nature of science renders it frequently unreliable and therefore useless as a tool in matters outside science.

For example, there are still many scientists who say that the Earth is warming despite the fact that it has been getting colder over the last decade and there is a valid theory based on empirical observation which suggests it will continue to do so for some time. All decisions made on the unsound basis of the former consensus would have probably been incorrect, and the absence of a current consensus renders all of the related science of zero value at this particular point in time.

As with many things, the human variable renders science far less useful than it might otherwise be, and it’s profoundly dishonest for scientists to pretend that the human variable is not there. Scientists like to brag that science is self-correcting, which is largely true over time but is also a confession that it can be completely unreliable at any single point in time. This doesn’t make the entire endeavor worthless, but it does mean that science always has to be examined with a much more skeptical eye than most scientists are usually willing to endure.

UPDATE – A Slashdot commenter sums it up reasonably well: “The reality is that scientific “proof” consists of general agreement among communities of people about the interpretation of observed phenomena, and that agreement can be driven by MANY factors, not just how well the data fits. One CANNOT get to the level of mathematical proof. So there will always be a role for skeptics, and those that just won’t accept that, if you have a square peg and a round hole, you just pretend the peg’s squareness doesn’t exist, because it MUST fit into the round hole.“

Although I’d be most amused to see him sworn in as president, I’ve been almost completely underwhelmed by Obama’s increasingly bizarre performance since the early part of the Democratic primary when he was driving Team Clinton nuts. That being said, Obama handled the dangerous curve ball of the pregnancy in the Palin family much, much better than many of his supporters:

Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, was asked at a brief press conference in Monroe, Mich., about the suggestion by some Republicans that Democrats – particularly liberal bloggers – were trying to advance rumors about the Palin family.

“Our people were not involved in any way in this and they will not be,” Mr. Obama snapped, his voice raised. “And if I ever thought there was somebody in my campaign that was involved in something like that, they’d be fired, O.K.?”

And that ends that. Well done. All may be fair in love, war, and politics, but there are some attacks that are more dangerous for the attacker than the target. When one considers the fact that the Palin family quite obviously love children, attacking the VP candidate’s daughter for having a baby would be crazy. Throw in Obama’s position on abortion and it would be a recipe for self-inflicted disaster. The Christian family values crowd has no inherent problem with 17-year old mothers; remember, they’re not the ones who believe all women should go to college, obtain graduate degrees, and work in an office for at least ten years before contacting their doctors about their IVF regime before giving up and settling down with six cats and/or an overweight lesbian partner.