Category: Uncategorized

It’s a lot less fun going down than it is going up:

It is becoming increasingly difficult for people who live in the real world to communicate with those who don’t, and there is an increasing number of those who don’t just simply because most people believe what they are told and the lies they are being told are now monumental. Astronomical in size. That’s one of those universal rules about human beings; the majority will always go along with whatever you tell them. That’s just the way it always has been and always will be. All good propagandists know that.

For those who do think for themselves and live in the real world however, everything that is happening today has been entirely predictable and even expected. I mean, the corporate media will say “no one ever saw this” or “they never saw that” and really the case is they just choose not to have those people appear.

This is one reason why I haven’t written much on economics for the last few years. The dichotomy between what is and what is reported probably hasn’t been this great since the Soviet Union lost control of its newspapers.

By the way, I think it’s too soon to short gold even for the traders. I was thinking we were getting close, but based on my estimates, there’s another 100-115 to go, depending on how fast we get there. R-DMA 200 is only at 1.29, it was 1.4 at the 6 May 06 peak. Of course, it only took eight trading days to get there from 1.27, so a decent opportunity may be presenting itself soon.

Cassy Fiano encourages women to stop stabbing their men in the back:

And this “harmless” disparagement of husbands among wives is not harmless either, ladies. It may seem like it’s just fun and games to put down your husband when you’re gossiping with your girlfriends, but it isn’t. Would you say that kind of stuff to his face? Would you tell your husband that he can’t take care of himself if his life depended on it, that he’s selfish and doesn’t pay enough attention to his family? If you wouldn’t, then don’t go around laughing about it with your girlfriends without a second thought.

I can’t speak for what goes on when the girls are gabbing, but this sort of thing in mixed company irritates me to no end. I especially despise those women who try to hide behind the passive-aggressive “I’m just joking” game. As Spacebunny says, this sort of behavior reflects badly on the man. But it reflects even worse on the woman. And it’s certainly inspired some piling on at Dr. Helen’s place.

This sums up the destructive, self-hating nihilism of the equalitarians:

The women of America would do well to consider whether their much-cherished gains of the right to vote, work, murder and freely fornicate are worth destroying marriage, children, civilized Western society and little girls.

After 1.2 seconds of consideration, the answer is yes, fucking totally. This without any sarcasm whatsoever.

Those must be some really great Powerpoint presentations… it will be interesting to see how many people still feel this way once the housing crash and recession seriously get rolling.

David Brooks paints a vivid image of a character type:

Every society produces its own distinct brand of social misfits, I suppose, but our social structure seems to produce significant numbers of people with rank-link imbalances…. They rack up great grades and develop that coating of arrogance that forms on those who know that in the long run they will be more successful than the beauties and jocks who get dates.

Then they go into one of those fields like law, medicine or politics, where a person’s identity is defined by career rank. They develop the specific social skills that are useful on the climb up the greasy pole: the capacity to imply false intimacy; the ability to remember first names; the subtle skills of effective deference; the willingness to stand too close to other men while talking and touching them in a manly way. And, of course, these people succeed and enjoy their success. When Bigness descends upon them, they dominate every room they enter and graciously share their company with those who are thrilled to meet them….

These Type A men are just not equipped to have normal relationships. All their lives they’ve been a walking Asperger’s Convention, the kings of the emotionally avoidant. Because of disuse, their sensitivity synapses are still performing at preschool levels.

I’ve occasionally wondered what sort of developmentally stunted freak wants to spend most of his time being surrounded by adoring, wide-eyed fans. I mean, while I very much appreciate those who think well of my writing, I’d rather socialize with my friends. Half of them know that I write but don’t read my stuff, the other half are vaguely aware that I occasionally write now and then, but most have no idea what it is. None of them play my games either. On the other hand, I don’t spend much time investing in their portfolios, going over their code, using the products they manufacture or reading their legal briefs either.

Other than SB, the White Buffalo and the Original Cyberpunk, no one even reads this blog. And that’s not only fine, that’s normal. This is the best line from Brooks’s column: “Maybe they’d be O.K. if somewhere along the way they’d had true friends, defined as a group of people who share a mutual inability to take each other seriously.”

Life is too short and too crazy to take yourself seriously all the time. If you can’t laugh at yourself, you deserve the laughter that will eventually come your way.

Daniel Hannan points out the irony of the way in which the Fourth Reich’s second annexment of Austria is actually less democratic than the Third Reich’s was:

Two anniversaries are marked this week. Fifty years ago, the European Parliament met for the first time; seventy years ago, Austria was annexed by Hitler. The first anniversary is the subject of official self-congratulation; the second of official obloquy.

It’s funny how things look in retrospect. Both the Treaty of Rome and the Anschluss were acts of political integration. But whereas the Anschluss was endorsed by 99.8 per cent of Austrian voters in a referendum, European treaties are habitually rejected in referendums. The odd thing is that we are expected to deplore the former and applaud the latter in the name of democracy.

I’m very skeptical of democracy. But I’m even more dubious of non-democratic conquests hidden behind a faux-democratic veil. One needn’t be a Christian eschatologist to see that the EU is not going to end much better than Europe’s last totalitarian takeover.

My complete response to Kelly’s initial broadside is posted on the TIA forum. Feel free to comment either here or there. Here’s a snippet:

Day starts his list of the evils of atheism by blaming the philosophers of the Enlightenment era for paving the way for “the murderous excesses of the French Revolution and dozens of other massacres in the name of human progress,” which I find to be amusing given that were it not for such revolutions, we would still be living in feudal societies and caste systems quite antithetical to his own libertarian ideals. I wonder where he got those ideas regarding man’s free will and right to exercise it. Could it be…the Enlightenment? The irony is almost overwhelming. This is a point he brings up often. The philosophers of the time certainly did effect the populace, but not by advocating war or revolution. Senseless killing is certainly not rational, nor is being swept away in nationalistic fervor. If waking people up to the reality of their circumstance by giving them a vision of hope for a better tomorrow is a crime, it is one that should be committed more often. The people of the Enlightenment era were simply alerted to the fact that, to paraphrase Rousseau, despite being born free, they were “everywhere in chains.” The people reacted to this knowledge with revolution, and violence is an unfortunate byproduct of the overthrow of established regimes. If these things had not taken place, there would be no United States of America, no democracy, and certainly no libertarianism. Vox Day himself could be similarly vilified by the benefactors of his philosophy for espousing such views, assuming we lived in a world where the Enlightenment had never occurred.

As with the five atheists analyzed in TIA, history is not Kelly’s strong point. Feudalism and caste systems were not ended by the Enlightenment, indeed, the former is largely a fictional concept of medieval governmental structure popularized by Montesquieu in the 18th century and is as historically dubious as the long-discredited concept of “the Dark Ages”. The caste system never existed in Christendom and it still exists today in a number of Asian countries. Kelly’s statement about free will reveals a shocking ignorance of the concept, as it is not an Enlightenment idea in any way, shape, or form, it is a Christian one. In fact, its very existence is denied today by New Enlightenment thinkers such as Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett. Were she even slightly familiar with Christian philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas, or Augustine, or Enlightenment philosophers such as Voltaire, she’d realize that she is, in a very Harrisian manner, demonstrating the precise opposite of what she wishes to prove. The Enlightenment free will of Hume and Rousseau is holdover from the Christian traditions of their Christian societies, it was far from a new concept. Democracy predated the Enlightenment by literal millenia, and the statement that “senseless killing is certainly not rational” is a meaningless tautology that says nothing about the fact that most of the mass killing committed by atheist revolutionaries is perfectly rational given their stated goals of remaking human society according to the precepts of their new and shinier morality.

My publisher informs me that I’ll be a guest on G. Gordon Liddy’s show on Radio America today around noon EST. I don’t know if we’re talking about TIA, homeschooling or Title IX, but feel free to tune in if you happen to get it in your area.

Here is the MP3 from today’s show.

Vox’s First Law: Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity.

I do enjoy PZ’s little jabs, he’s such a coward that he’ll go on and on about my opinions while pointedly trying to ignore that I’ve published a book that cuts the heart out of his atheist icons. Now he’s afraid to even directly link to the very article he’s complaining about, which is why there’s not a single reference to Title IX in either his post or what he amusingly calls Mark Chu-Carroll’s “evisceration” of the column.

How does one “eviscerate” an argument when one fails to even mention, let alone refute, its central point? That word does not mean what he thinks it means.

As for the commenter’s question about why Sam Harris would respond to me? Probably because unlike these fourth-raters, he is capable of recognizing a superior intellect that is demonstrably capable of dismantling his arguments. If he wants to improve those arguments, then it is in his direct interest to pay attention any criticism that is relevant regardless of the source. One doesn’t have to be bestest buddies with one’s critics in order to benefit from their input. I don’t mind that PZ takes shots at me, I merely regret that his criticism is so lightweight.

RK writes to inform us of a tale of two emails:

I got two EMails from Amazon today.

1. My order was cancelled for not acknowledging the delay. (Which I was never asked about).

2. My book was shipped.

Wonder what happens next?

Does RK’s book exist or not? The question is beyond my ability to answer, perhaps a Dark Vaporist could utilize his miraculous powers of observation to let us know.

A few days ago, during the discussion about the existence or non-existence of dark matter and dark energy, I wrote: “Scientists and science fetishists may hate it that a part-time rebel scientist such as myself should so confidently express contempt for the current consensus, but you don’t need impressive scientific credentials or even to make use the scientific method to recognize when a group of people are attempting to BS everyone else, you simply need to keep your eyes open and possess sufficient experience with human nature.”

So it was a happy coincidence that I discovered, in the process of trying and failing to straighten out my office for the Nth time in six months, an unread 24 September 2007 issue of New Scientist. Naturally, I abandoned the effort and kicked back in The Comfy Chair, and was promptly rewarded with the very amusing sight of a headline that read “Dimmer outlook for dark matter” on page 12:

Dimmer outlook for dark matter

Though we can’t see it, dark matter is supposed to make up 22 per cent of the universe. Now it turns out it might not exist at all. Earlier this year, the discovery of a ring-like astronomical feature, invisible except for the way its gravity distorts background galaxies, was hailed as proof for the existence of dark matter and the death knell for a rival theory known as modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND)…. Jee’s team dismissed the MOND explanation because they thought it predicts that there should be no enhanced gravity without visible matter to do the enhancing. “This is a common misconception,” says Milgrom. “In fact, in MOND there does not necessarily have to be visible matter there to boost gravity – it is naturally boosted in the transition region.” No one knows what physics may underpin such a transition.

“I am interested to hear that the transition between the Newtonian and MONDian regime also gives rise to a ring,” says Jee. “In general, I am happy whenever there comes a theory which is simpler but can explain more observations.”

Stronger evidence may be found in three dwarf galaxies which were formed in galactic collisions near the galaxy NGC 5291, discovered this year by a team led by Frederic Bournaud of the French Atomic Energy Commission in Paris. “The collision should have stripped the galaxies of all their dark matter yet they still have enhanced gravity,” says Milgrom. “MOND explains things naturally whereas dark matter proponents have to propose the existence of yet another type of dark matter – cold molecular gas.”

Yes, I did laugh out loud upon reading that, less at the inevitable discomfiture of Bad Astronomy and his space fetish crew than the thought of a momentary flicker of despair flashing through Scott Hatfield’s mind about the ultimate fate of another consensus theory of which I am similarly skeptical. May I propose the term Dark Vapor to accompany its fellows Dark Matter and Dark Energy to complete the unobservable trilogy of Dark Mystery? It seems rather fitting. As I have previously written, the more one has to weld epicycles and epiphenomena to one’s theory in order to make it work, the less likely it is to stand up over time. And it doesn’t take a complete understanding of a theory to recognize when such furious retro-fitting is being done to it.

I don’t actually care whether Dark Vapor exists or not. For all I know, it does. Having no capacity for making a judgment based on the empirical data myself, I merely run what I’m informed through the logic machine, and anyhow, my attitude towards most of these things tends to be rather similar to that of Sherlock Holmes. But due partly to my belief in the need for science reform, and partly to my fundamental character flaws, I do so enjoy seeing their unmitigated faith in scientific snapshots landing the stupidly arrogant scientific faithful on their asses yet again. What passes for science these days is beginning to sound like a Monty Python skit:

“Dark Matter and Dark Energy…Dark Matter and Dark Energy…. Our two explanations are Dark Matter and Dark Energy…and Dark Vapor…. Our three explanations are Dark Matter, and Dark Energy, and Dark Vapor…and an almost fanatical devotion to Karl Popper…. Our four…no… Amongst our explanations are such elements as Dark Matter, Dark Energy…. I’ll come in again.”