Category: Uncategorized

John McCain really, really, really wants to make absolutely sure that he doesn’t somehow win by accident:

John McCain is going to be doing more of these themed tours of America, and one of them is going to be on energy and global climate change. It could get him into trouble with Republicans, of course, and with the base, who don’t think there is much climate change going on, but it is something that he’s very passionate about and he’s going to be talking about it.

On the one hand, we have the computer models of the global warming crowd. On the other, we have the temperature readings of the last ten years demonstrating that the global climate is actually cooling. I must have missed the memo. When did computer games become science?

Never forget that John McCain’s favorite pasttime is demonstrating to the media that he is not a conservative or a Republican. Obama may be proving to be a more difficult obstacle than Hillary expected, but McCain is clearly bending over backward to make sure that everyone understands that he’s not standing in her way. It kind of makes you wonder if someone told the Clinton camp that the Magic Negro was going to be in Burma last week.

The General provides his list of freedoms that have been gained in the United States since women’s suffrage:

Obtain Abortions
Marry anyone of any race
Live in the location of your choice
Attend the school of your choice
Sit in any seat on the Bus
Sit in any seat in a diner
Obtain entrance to State Bar Associations
Purchase alcohol
Have alcohol shipped to you
18 year old may vote
Be free of being prayed at by the state in classrooms
Burn a flag
Marry someone of the same sex
Form legally binding domestic partnerships between members of the same sex
Engage in Sodomy with no risk of legal penalty
Use Birth Control

First, I note that most of these “freedoms” are partial at best, and in some cases are incorrect. There is no such thing as a freedom “of being prayed at by the state in classrooms”, for example, and both Congress and various state legislatures passed laws banning flag burning during the suffrage era. But it’s not important, as these “freedoms” are far outweighed by previously enjoyed freedoms that have been lost since 1920. Here is a list of 10 major ones:

1. Freedom of speech. McCain-Feingold and various hate crime legislation, 2002.
2. Freedom of association. Civil Rights Act, 1964.
3. Right to bear arms. National Firearms Act, 1934.
4. Own gold. Presidential Executive Order 6102, 1933
5. Deposit money into bank of choice. Glass-Steagall Act, 1933.
6. Withdraw money from your bank in privacy. Currency and Foreign Transactions Reporting Act, 1970.
7. Work for a wage of your determination. Fair Labor Standards Act, 1938.
8. Keep your own cash. Comprehensive Crime Control Act, 1984.
9. Use marijuana, cocaine, and heroine. Controlled Substances Act, 1970.
10. Right to property. Kelo vs City of New London, 2005.

I’ll be talking about TIA with Bob Dutko on his show today at 1 PM EST.

Rachel Lucas reads Mere Christianity and reassesses a few previous assumptions:

I’ll be perfectly honest: I’ve spent many, many years refusing to accept the idea that a truly rational, reasonable, smart adult could sincerely believe in any religion, including Christianity….. I’ve realized lately that part of my problem with the whole subject was that I was doing exactly what I so very much HATE for other people to do: projecting. I assumed the majority of you who are Christian were such because either someone told you to be or more to the point, because you didn’t know any better, simply because you had not bothered to do the research. Well, hello. My name is Rachl Lukis and guess what? I hadn’t bothered to do the research.

One line from Lewis’ book that actually made me laugh out loud (at myself) was that if people “cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them”. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve read the Bible a couple of times, but the thing is, I didn’t read it as a real grown-up. The last time I read it, I was actively looking for faults to prove that I was right. I wasn’t truly being objective and considering it in a historical or scholarly context.

It’s difficult to articulate on a blog why I’m even bothering trying to learn about Christianity now because as I’ve mentioned before, I hate being misunderstood. The truth is that I am not exactly seeking salvation or God or anything like that, and frankly if I were, I would not talk about it with virtual strangers at this stage of the game. At this moment, my biggest aim is simply trying to relieve myself of the terrifying feeling I’ve had for years that I live in a society full of and run by people who believe a theology I don’t believe in, and that therefore I am surrounded by crazy people. It’s a bit of cognitive dissonance that I simply couldn’t take anymore.

Is my dad a crazy person? Are 90% of the people who read my blog crazy people? Are most of my friends crazy people? If I think Christianity is crazy, then the only answer to those questions is YES. But it just never added up. I had to know how they could believe something that I do not think is real and somehow not be crazy. That’s why I started asking about it here and why I started reading books like the Lewis one. And I have to tell you that the mission has been accomplished. It’s not even remotely “crazy” to believe in Christianity, and Christians have perfectly sound reasons to believe what they do, even if I disagree with some of their conclusions.

This is an interesting post, because it is an honest admission of what far too many atheists obviously find themselves doing, whether they realize it or not. Most atheists haven’t actually reasoned anything through for themselves and because they’re operating on intellectual autopilot, they assume that everyone else must be too. This is why people like Kelly of the RRS, the three-chapter reviewers, and even a few of the New Atheists such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens are so easily thrown off kilter by TIA and/or demolished in rational discourse; they simply have no idea of the depth of intellectual activity taking place on the other side and are therefore ill-prepared to defend their own positions.

Reliant upon superficial and inaccurate sound bites, the average atheist reliably reveals near-total ignorance of not only theology, but also history, philosophy, logic and even the dictionary. There are few things I find more amusing than hearing an atheist get started on the “evidence” line; I have yet to run into a single atheist who is not stopped dead in his tracks and forced to backpedal by the simple observation that scientific evidence is but a subset of the various forms of evidence known to Man. There are surely exceptions to this particular intellectual ineptitude – Richard Dawkins being one – but I’ve yet to meet one personally.

I don’t think it’s crazy to be an atheist and I completely understand the appeal of atheism, especially for the young. What’s not to like about a behavioral carte blanche limited only by one’s desires, societal mores and the policeman around the corner? There is much that is compelling about the concept of Enlightenment 2.0 and the shiny secular science fiction society it promises the true believers. Unfortunately, I happen to find that progressive vision far less rationally credible than I do an ancient tribal anthology telling the story of a fallen creature who is congenitally incapable of lifting himself out of his own evil.

The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes the Title IX set:

If girls and young women ruptured their A.C.L.’s at just twice the rate of boys and young men, it would be notable. Three times the rate would be astounding. But some researchers believe that in sports that both sexes play, and with similar rules — soccer, basketball, volleyball — female athletes rupture their A.C.L.’s at rates as high as five times that of males.

Unless you’re an athlete or former athlete, you may not be aware how often and how badly women regularly get injured, even playing non-contact sports. It’s not that men don’t get injured too – my soccer team’s season resembles the Bataan Death March again this year – but then we’ve got 45-year old guys playing 90 minutes who refuse to stretch before the game and smoke during halftime. (And we don’t substitute until you’re injured or done for the game; it’s completely insane.) On my college track team, two of the male sprinters in our sprinter/jumper/hurdler group blew out their hamstrings, but that’s an expected risk. About a third of the women ended the season hurt, most of them for things that you wouldn’t have thought had anything to do with coming out of the blocks and running a short distance from point A to point B. Shin splints and stress fractures were the most common problem, if I recall correctly.

It is not only harmful, it is amazingly hypocritical to use federal law to actively push girls into competitive sports without either acknowledging or making them aware that they’ve got a much higher chance of being permanently injured. The fact that it is done more in the interest of a political fiction rather than the genuine sporting interests of the girls only makes it that much more reprehensible.

As one female researcher puts it: “If your job is to encourage inclusion of more women in sport, maybe you are not going to accentuate the negative. You don’t want to paint women in a negative light and tell a girl that if you play sports, your knees, by the time you are 30 or 35, may be in bad shape.”

Dr. Helen considers the propriety of the post-partum present:

If male, should husbands be giving gifts to their wives as payment for having kids or, if female, do you feel entitled to a “push present” from your husband, and if so, why?

This might surprise those who are convinced that I am one of the Internet’s leading woman-haters, but my feeling is that considering the burden of nine months of labor, the sleep-deprived Hell that is all too often the first three months of post-partum life, and the combination of self-loathing and despair that afflicts many women when contemplating the challenge of getting their bodies back into attractive shape again, it’s a nice gesture for a husband to recognize the sacrifice his wife has made and express his joy at becoming a father by giving her something shiny that will please her. On the other hand, it is obnoxious of a woman to expect such a gift, let alone demand one.

A baby gift doesn’t need to be anything massive; something shiny that relates to the child’s birthstone is a good place to start. And certainly, it’s not something that is owed to her, as a gift that is required is not a gift, but rather a demand. That being said, “push present” is a disgusting term and I’m pleased that “baby gift” is the only description I’ve ever heard used in my social circles.

As far as I’m concerned, giving the mother of your child a present to commemorate the event is rather like holding a door open for a woman. You don’t have to do it, but if you’ve got any class or style at all, then you’ll do it without even thinking about it.

Instapundit complains about the media coverage of Iraq:

The basic rule of press coverage is that if there’s fighting, we must be losing.

This is justifiable because it is true. The combat phase of the war ended nearly five years ago; there wasn’t much fighting taking place in Japan in 1950, after all. More importantly, fighting is a pretty strong indication that the “hearts and minds” strategy is not working. Ergo, we must be losing, as indeed we are. There’s not a lot of happy talk about Iraq democracy or comparisons to the post-WWII occupations, after all, but lots of sabre-rattling about Iran, and to a lesser extent, Syria.

This wasn’t exactly hard to predict; it’s precisely why I compared the conquest of Iraq to successfully invading Schleswig-Holstein in 1944 and announcing victory in Europe four years ago.

A new book from Susan Pinker demonstrates a fundamental flaw in the philosophy of the nonexistent, namely, that “equality” appears to be self-refuting:

If Pinker is right, then women who have the luxury of making career choices may actually increase, not decrease, the sexual division of labour. That is certainly what happened in kibbutzes that were studied over four generations, where all choices were freely available to men and women but where, in each generation, men chose to do progressively less childcare and women less construction work.

What does that mean for our current notions of equality? If women choose not to be corporate CEOs, does it matter? How can we find ways to better value what they do decide to do? If women really are more wired for empathy, this also raises questions about what policies are really “family-friendly”. Pinker cites potentially devastating evidence, from one Ivy League university, that male professors use parental leave to do research, while female professors use it to care for children.

He returns with a book, and she with a backlog. So greater equality in family policy could paradoxically discriminate against women.

Equality is, of course, totally absurd. It demonstrably doesn’t exist in any material sense; the irony is that those who insist that God does not exist are quite willing to believe in equality despite the fact that there is far more evidence for the former than the latter. Perhaps we need to consider developing a Theory of Abstract Belief Systems, which states that the further an abstract concept departs from observable reality and available evidence, the less willing its adherents are to endure any criticism from skeptics.

Thus, the sound evidential and experiential nature of Christian doctrine enables most normal Christians to entertain doubts about the faith with equanimity and the sound scientific support for modern physics allows most normal physicists to not be bothered by those postulating bizarre alternative models, but the scientific difficulties of TENS and the total absence of evidence of any kind for equality causes normal evolutionists and feminists to froth at the mouth at the merest suggestion that their abstract beliefs are founded in error.

You should know that when everyone is a white-collar worker, white-collar workers will earn far less than blue-collar workers. Or didn’t you take Econ 101 while going into debt in order to buy your ticket to the white-collar worker life?

Now even resident tuition in a state university plus the cost of living near campus comes to more than most undergraduates can make. It’s true that bright students who can prove they’re high up on the right side of the Bell Curve can manage “scholarships” and “grants” that serve to cut the costs, and some do escape huge debt loads on graduation: but then those well out to the right side of the Bell Curve usually manage one way or another.

It’s the IQ 80 – 120 who end up debtors for the rest of their lives.

Of course many of them ought not be in college to begin with. If our high schools and junior (community) colleges were anything like what they ought to be, anyone to the left of IQ 115 wouldn’t bother with college. What they learn in a 4 year college isn’t going to be all that much help; what they need to learn can be taught for a lot less money than our Universities charge. And those out to the right of the Bell Curve find themselves in classes taught by immigrant grad students who speak incomprehensible dialects said to be English; the Universities have to have jobs for these people (whose governments often pay full tuition) and the size of classes leaves the university little choice….

The points here are two: first, pretending that everyone is competent to go to university drives the cost of university education up to the point that many will have to go heavily into debt in order to afford a university education; and secondly, the major universities are so awash in money now that they can afford — and WANT to afford — Priya Venkatesan to teach French Narrative Theory in Freshman Composition.

Ideally, one should prepare one’s children to be flexible enough to take advantage of however the economy develops. Providing them with both the skills to a trade and a high-quality intellectual education – if they’re capable of it – is probably the best one can do for them.

Rod Dreher is considering the issue himself:

It is surely better to live in truth than dwell in the therapeutic fiction that all kids are capable of being above average in school, or that everyone should go to college.

Just another ramble, I’m afraid. But if you’d like to listen to an interpretative application of the Law of Supply and Demand involving gasoline prices and an attack on Iran, no one is going to stop you.