Category: Uncategorized

Apparently Kelly isn’t actually done with Chapter IV . Her post did seem uncharacteristically incomplete compared to the previous three, so it’s nice to know that it was merely the appetizer.

That’s how Dr. Helen has described the legal attitude towards murderous women in America. It appears in some circumstances, however, women are afforded as many as four free kills:

Jeff Carstensen was spooked when he learned his grandmother planned to buy him a $100,000 life insurance policy — and name herself the beneficiary…. The 76-year-old Georgia woman sits in a North Carolina jail, accused of hiring a hit man to kill fourth husband Harold Gentry. Authorities are re-examining the deaths of her first child and four of the five men she married, including Gentry.

It is simply not credible to state that men and women are treated in a similar manner by the American legal system. Can you imagine a man racking up a similar body count right out in the open without any suspicion on the part of the authorities?

Back in April, I wrote: “ND-TENS is now little more than a scientific model that is barely related to its Darwinian original; not only does it owe more to Mendel than Darwin, it’s even less precise than its dysfunctional counterpart in the Neo-Keynesian economic model. I’m confident that both Neo-Keynesianism and Neo-Darwinism will eventually be thrown out entirely in favor of superior models that reflect the observable empirical evidence much more accurately. I’m not sure what those models will be, but I think the conceptual blend of Austrian economics, socionomics and econometrics points the way towards one potential replacement, while game theory, AI design and evolutionary stable strategies may provide us with a way towards developing the other.”

It wasn’t the first time I’ve asserted this notion, one for which I have, unsurprisingly, been criticized by the science fetishists, mostly on the basis of my complete lack of educational credentials in the field of biology. However, educational credentials are a poor substitute for information + intelligence + pattern recognition, science marches on, and according to New Scientist, already appears to be on the verge of humiliating the Darwinian faithful who were foolish enough to insist, against both reason and the history of science, that ND-TENS is a solid and reliable scientific model in its current form:

The realisation that individuals can acquire characteristics through interaction with their environment and then pass these on to their offspring may force us to rethink evolutionary theory. While examples of this “transgenerational epigenetic inheritance” are only just emerging in mammals, there is long-standing and widespread evidence for it in plants and fungi. That may explain why botanists are much more ready to acknowledge and promote the idea that epigenetic inheritance has a significant role in evolution, whereas zoologists are generally reluctant to do so, says Eva Jablonka from Tel Aviv University, Israel….

For Bonduriansky the accumulating evidence calls for a radical rethink of how evolution works. Jablonka, too, believes that “Lamarckian” mechanisms should now be integrated into evolutionary theory, which should focus on mechanisms, rather than units, of inheritance.

Richard Dawkins’s reaction has to be read to be believed. He claims, apparently with a straight face, that these scientific developments cast “no doubt whatsoever” on the theory of the selfish gene, except for the small fact that it requires substituting abstract “replicators” for a material series of genomic sequences. Now, if this doesn’t suffice to demonstrate the incredibly nebulous nature of what passes for “science” in the field, it’s hard to imagine what could.

Watching evolutionists constantly modify their “facts” and radically alter their theories while claiming nothing essential has changed about the conceptual model is rather like watching medieval cosmologists redrawing their geometrical spheres with every new celestial observation. While the evidence for “transgenerational epigenetic inheritance” is unlikely to kill off the evolutionary model by itself even if it turns out to be incontrovertible, the fact that there is a probable need for the articulation of a neo-Neo-Darwinian synthesis incorporating neo-Lamarckism suggests that there is something fundamentally flawed about the basic theory of evolution by natural selection.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that, as Scott Hatfield reasonably suggests, “TENS will… not be so much replaced as regarded as a limiting case of a larger model, in the same way that Newtonian mechanics is a limiting case of the present Standard Model in Physics.” But the likely question is whether Darwin will ultimately be regarded as more akin to Ptolemy or Newton, and in either case, his theories will almost surely not be revered as the secular scripture and basis for societal revisioning that they have been for the past 140 years.

There were three great secular giants of the nineteenth century upon whom the secular vision of the 20th was constructed. Freud was the first to fall. Marx was the second. Darwin will be the third. This doesn’t mean that their ideas were wholly bereft of insight, only that the “scientific” worldview constructed upon their essential concepts is an intrinsically fallacious one unsupported by the scientific evidence.

It turns out that the Fowl Atheist actually defended the Muslim outrage sparked by the notorious Danish cartoons:

There are some things a cartoonist would be rightly excoriated for publishing: imagine that one had drawn an African-American figure as thick-lipped, low-browed, smirking clown with a watermelon in one hand and a fried chicken drumstick in the other. Feeding bigotry and flaunting racist stereotypes would be something that would drive me to protest any newspaper that endorsed it—of course, my protests would involve writing letters and canceling subscriptions, not rioting and burning down buildings. There is a genuine social concern here, I think. Muslims represent a poor and oppressed underclass, and those cartoons represent a ruling establishment intentionally taunting them and basically flipping them off. They have cause to be furious!

So much for all those Pharyngulans attempting to defend PZ as some sort of equal-opportunity offender. Also, perhaps someone could explain to PZ that there isn’t exactly a shortage of wealth in the Muslim world. And while there is a global elite, I’m certain it’s not based in Copenhagen. I can’t help wonder, when canceling his subscription, would Associate Professor Myers have also called for the dismissal of the responsible cartoonist?

Being a confirmed anti-French Revolutionary, I’ve never celebrated Bastille Day. Gerald Warner provides a good, succinct explanation why no reasonable man should:

When you are reduced to celebrating the murder by the canaille of Paris in 1789 of the French equivalent of the Chelsea Pensioners, you are inadvertently advertising the sinister origins of the dysfunctional state you are trying to prop up with a mythology as grotesque as it is pathetic. The Umpteenth French Republic is the one entity whose absorption by the European Union is not to be regretted.

Pompous parades will today celebrate the event that triggered the French Revolution, that is to say, the most appalling bloodbath anterior to the Russian Revolution. Seven prisoners were released from the Bastille – four counterfeiters, an accomplice to murder and two lunatics – whose return to the community was hardly beneficial. The attack on the prison, reserved for the well-off, was orchestrated by the Marquis de Sade and Camille Desmoulins on behalf of the Nine Sisters masonic lodge.

There followed the September massacres, the marriages republicains in which people of opposite sexes were stripped naked and lashed together in obscene postures before being drowned, mothers forced to watch their children being guillotined and the massacre of 400,000 Catholic royalists – the majority of them women and children – in La Vendee.

As I pointed out in TIA, the EUSSR is only the latest iteration of the same ideological virus that travelled from Paris to London, then to Moscow, then back again to Paris. It’s interesting to note that Warner clearly sees the intellectual lineage as well.

To virtually no one’s surprise, the Fed and the Treasury aren’t going to let capitalism take its course with Freddie and Fannie. This should remove any last vestiges of doubt from those of you who still believe that the USA is a capitalist society. Or, for that matter, a free market one:

The US Government took dramatic steps to prop up America’s financial system last night, announcing that it was prepared to pump billions of dollars into the country’s mortgage market in a desperate measure to prevent the economy going into a tailspin. In a late-night announcement designed to calm increasing panic on Wall Street before today’s market opening, the US Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve issued a joint statement in which they pledged to spend billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to bail out the two American mortgage giants that collectively underpin the entire housing market “if needed”.

And no, it’s not going to work. The housing crash has barely begun. But don’t think everything is going to head south in a hurry, as the more the government draws it out by fighting the market forces, the longer it’s going to take. Use the inevitable 400-point rally days as exit opportunities and keep in mind that giant one- and two-day rallies are the hallmark of a bear market, not the return of a bull.

Shockingly, British corporations aren’t terribly enthusiastic about hiring people who aren’t required to actually work for them:

The radical extension of maternity leave is in danger of sabotaging women’s careers, the head of the new equality watchdog has warned. With women now entitled to a year off for each child, Nicola Brewer, the chief executive of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, said employers were thinking twice about offering them jobs or promotion. She said that her concerns were underlined when the entrepreneur Sir Alan Sugar said that many employers simply binned CVs of women of child-bearing age.

This isn’t new. I remember when my mother was running an HR department, and it was her principle to only hire women under the age of 30 for positions that weren’t career-oriented. It didn’t matter what the young woman said about her plans; she’d seen too many women who swore up and down that they intended to continue working suddenly change their plans after getting married.

That’s not a bad thing, as children are much better off with their mother at home. But this need to fix the fix is just one more indication of the unsustainability of equalitarian culture, as with socialism and other forms of interventionist society, the unstable foundation on irrational premises requires constant adjustments by the government, the cumulative effect of which will permanently destabilize the society and cause it to collapse.

I’m not, strictly speaking, on Facebook, to the extent that I actually intend to make any use of it. But since Blackblade was kind enough to create a profile for me there – I think we’ll be using it for some interesting automated CoComment stuff soon – I thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to let those of you who make use of Facebook know about it, since a few folks have clearly run across it.

I have to admit, I find the whole “will you be my friend” thing to be rather cringeworthy, but then, this is hardly the first social trend that has left me entirely mystified. I mean, why on Azaroth would you waste time collecting friends on Facebook when you could be racking up a seven-digit body count in the battlegrounds?

Okay, maybe I am just a tad anti-social.

UPDATE – Speaking of social networks, Spacebunny has created a homeschool group for those who might be interested. If you want to join, login to CoComment and request an invitation from her.