Category: Uncategorized

Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law states: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I propose a law paraphrasing it thusly: “Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity”.

You need an IQ this high –> 115

Those who grew up in the former Communist nations recognize an articifially manufactured Truth by Diktat when they see one:

Q: IPCC has released its report and you say that the global warming is a false myth. How did you get this idea, Mr President?

A: It’s not my idea. Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so. It is not fair to refer to the U.N. panel. IPCC is not a scientific institution: it’s a political body, a sort of non-government organization of green flavor. It’s neither a forum of neutral scientists nor a balanced group of scientists. These people are politicized scientists who arrive there with a one-sided opinion and a one-sided assignment. Also, it’s an undignified slapstick that people don’t wait for the full report in May 2007 but instead respond, in such a serious way, to the summary for policymakers where all the “but’s” are scratched, removed, and replaced by oversimplified theses. This is clearly such an incredible failure of so many people, from journalists to politicians. If the European Commission is instantly going to buy such a trick, we have another very good reason to think that the countries themselves, not the Commission, should be deciding about similar issues.

But, but, nine out of ten dentists AGREE that Dentine fights tooth decay! Meanwhile, Charles Stross complains that the American Enterprise Institute is paying scientists to write papers demonstrating the fraud of global warming.

As if there aren’t dozens of UN NGO’s doing precisely the same thing for the other side. Global warming is a political and ideological battle, it isn’t a scientific one. The fact that there are scientists arrayed as weapons on both sides doesn’t make it science.

In which The Quick and the Dead is reminded that the inevitable doesn’t always happen immediately:

Amanda and Melissa safe, for now

John Edwards isn’t going to fire his two new bloggers for being, well, bloggers. And that’s a good thing. It would have cost him more in the long run to cave to the likes of Donohue, than it has to apologize and deal…. So you have to wonder why intelligent people like Vox Day were so sure that Amynda would be tossed to the wolves.

Where on Earth do I come up with my crazy, crazy ideas? I swear, sometimes I think I should be kicked out of Mensa and forced to wear a dunce cap!

Oh, and by the way, Amynda has a little announcement for everyone:

Regardless, it was creating a situation where I felt that every time I coughed, I was risking the Edwards campaign. No matter what you think about the campaign, I signed on to be a supporter and a tireless employee for them, and if I can’t do the job I was hired to do because Bill Donohue doesn’t have anything better to do with his time than harass me, then I won’t do it. I resigned my position today and they accepted.

I’m sure they did, with alacrity. And yet the whole thing really wasn’t Amynda’s fault – although if she understood the first thing about politics she never would have accepted the position in the first place – so if John Edwards has any executive capacity at all, he will wait one week and quietly fire the person responsible for creating the media debacle in the first place.

Of course, by attempting to place all the blame on Bill Donohue, Amynda demonstrates that she hasn’t learned anything from her experience. Donohue was simply the first of what would have been many fingers on the trigger, Pandagon was the gun and Amynda’s words were the plentiful bandolier of bullets.

It is, of course, vastly amusing that she managed to publicly eschew the integrity of her writing before being forced to exit anyhow. As I wrote last week, she’ll be making a regular meal of these words for a long time to come.

The manner of her exit is a good lesson for everyone else, though. Never crawl. Few things are worth it and such crawling seldom serves its nominal purpose anyhow. No doubt she wishes she had shown some backbone and stuck by her words now.

UPDATE: Some people simply will not learn:

“On the why did I apologize thing—I never apologized for my opinions or beliefs. I do feel bad if people read my comments out of context and are hurt, but I don’t think that’s my fault so much as the fault of people who take my writing out of context.”
– Amanda Marcotte

Amynda’s grasp of “context” is as accurate as Alannis Morrisette’s grasp of irony.

In celebration of the 148th anniversary of the publication of “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”, I shall be asking various evolutionary biologists about their opinion on precisely how much more intra-species differentiation is required to separate the Yellow Race from the Negro, and how long this will be expected to take.

For while we are all one species now, in “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea”, Daniel Dennett explicates how Saint Darwin is quite clear on how it is only a matter of time before the human species subdivides into divergent parts that are incapable of intermingling.

(Well, okay, Dennett specifically mentions dogs and coyotes, but let’s face it, those are CLEARLY just code words for blacks and Mexicans.)

And isn’t it fascinating how science fiction, for all its enthusiasm for evolution and its pretensions to being bold and daring, never seems to explore this obvious scientific inevitability!

That is the question:

How does one tell the difference between hearing the Voice of God, and the onset of paranoid schizophrenia?

Well, that’s the crucial question now, isn’t it. But in the aforementioned case of Elisha and Elijah, I think that seeing fire come down from Heaven and incinerating dozens of priests of Baal would likely serve as sufficient proof to even the most precariously balanced or skeptical minds that they were not, in fact, delusional.

There’s no question that God understands our doubts. Jesus Christ was not only sympathetic towards his dubious friend Thomas, but he specifically said that talk was cheap, hence the miracles.

The Dixie Chicks, a band with which I am pleased to be utterly unfamiliar, take a bold stance against everyday Americans:

The Dixie Chicks, who stirred up a hornet’s nest with a jibe at President Bush, won all five Grammys for which they were nominated on Sunday, including the coveted album of the year. The victory marked a stunning validation for the female country music trio from Texas, almost four years after their dream run as the darlings of Nashville came to an abrupt end.

Singer Natalie Maines told fans during a 2003 concert she was ashamed to come from the same state as Bush, and the group was transformed overnight into pariahs. Radio stations stopped playing their songs, while album and ticket sales suffered….

“I think people are using their freedom of speech tonight with all of these awards,” Maines said.

Obviously Miss Maines isn’t particularly gifted in the brains department. The last time I checked, the Grammy Awards weren’t given by the public, who tend to vote with their radio requests, album purchases and ticket buys. And it’s hardly a surprise that they’re so popular with sort of left-wing losers who dedicate their lives to pursuing fame by making howlingly bad music and posing for the paparazzi; I’d be surprised if I owned more than ten CDs by Grammy-winning “artists”.

I don’t recall Ministry, Mozart or My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult ever winning anything, anyhow.

You have to consider the criteria. I mean, if you set a few of my more anti-Bush columns to music, I’d probably stand a decent shot at getting nominated for a Grammy.

Jefferson poses a feeble trap:

If your god revealed to you in a set of flawless communications you could not dispute that you should kill every child you see under the age of 2, would you?

I don’t see what the problem is, or why people were avoiding this last night. I mean, of course it’s supposed to be a trap but it’s a toothless one of no concern to any sufficiently intelligent individual. The answer is yes, and how would you possibly take issue with that position regardless of whether you believe in my god or don’t believe in any god?

If I am correct that my God is the Creator God, that we are all his creations, then killing every child under two on the planet is no more inherently significant than a programmer unilaterally wiping out his AI-bots in a game universe. He alone has the right to define right and wrong, and as the Biblical example of King Saul and the Amalekites demonstrates, He has occasionally deemed it a moral duty to wipe out a people.

And as we are informed in Revelation, He will wipe out many peoples through the acts of (presumably) His angels. Jefferson can complain that this makes God unworthy of worship all he likes, but that’s as irrelevant as complaining that Stalin wasn’t properly elected according to the Soviet Constitution. Although in this case it isn’t might makes right, it is a much simpler case of might = right. Obey or perish.

If you accept that argument from the IRS without question, then why would you refuse to accept it from the Creator of the Universe? Because excepting the unusual case of an exceptionally brave individual, the logical answer is that you don’t actually believe the choice you are posing.

And then, if I am incorrect and my god does not exist, then we must ask why Jefferson, an atheist, should object to one set of meaningless atomic arrangements being randomly sorted into different arrangements. A reason, that is, besides the one that he has previously provided, which is that he would not like it. As adults do not accept that as sufficient justification for a course of action from toddlers, there is no reason why we should accept it from him either.

Now, I admit that if I was wrong and my god did not exist but another one did, one of his worshippers could likely provide a rational reason for why I it would be immoral to embark upon a toddler-slaying rampage. Of course, that would depend on the moral code of that other deity. And then, a Christian could certainly call into question the legitimacy of my divine orders; I’m quite sure that every Christian of my acquaintance would, in fact, do so.

Nevertheless, this is remarkably dangerous ground, not for Christians, but rather for anyone who is pro-science. If you are going to debate the legitimacy of a belief system based on the potential danger it presents, secular scientists are vastly more vulnerable than Christians.

Cedarford raises a spurious issue:

Nice flap starting about Iran’s weapons killing hundreds of troops since 2004. High tech weapons the Mullahs tested out using Hezbollah in Lebanon are being built in 3 Iranian factories and shipped across the Iraqi Border. With targeting and electronic security under the direction of Iranian al Quds Forces that report straight to Ayatollah Khamenei.

140 Iraqis cops/soldiers killed, 17 Brits killed, 170 Americans killed and 600 wounded (including over 200 horrific maimings) by Iranian Explosively Formed Projectiles.

The weapon is only 10 inches by 6 inches, easly concealable, and will penetrate all armored US vehicles. They are made in 3 Iranian factories in military production parks north of Tehran.

Iranian 81mm mortars, sniper rifles, RPGs – made and delivered after 2004 – account for hundreds more Iraqi deaths and dozens of US troops.

Do we do something about it?

In short, no. That would be incredibly short-sighted, considering that there are far more countries that could regard US weapons sales as a justifiable casus belli. By this reckoning, the September 11th attacks were fully justified due to the many Islamists killed by the Egyptian and Saudi Arabian governments armed by the USA.

You cannot claim that you are beyond justice simply because you happen to be the most powerful at the moment. You can, of course, simply operate on the principle that might makes right, but there are no shortage of historical examples demonstrating how the powerful usually overestimate their power and the way in which things usually ends poorly for those who primarily upon it.

If you don’t want to see American troops killed, then perhaps you should not order them to play target in a kill zone.

The neocons are really starting to reach here and it’s not going to work. The American people will not support any military effort against Iran without first experiencing one or more major attacks, preferably atomic or nuclear, blamed on Iran. Even that might not be enough considering the widespread suspicions about the current administration’s willingness to manufacture another Maine/Lusitania/Gulf of Tonkin incident.

This doesn’t mean the administration won’t simply go ahead and do what it wants without public support. Bush has already eviscerated the Republican Party’s political prospects – you may recall I was one of the only people predicting this a few years ago – so he might as well go ahead and destroy it for the next two generations by leaping headlong into a third undeclared and unpopular war.

Hey, it worked for the kid:

Witnessed in a Supermarket, surrounded by dry goods

CAST:
Mother, late twenties, early thirties, pushing a cart with;

Daughter (presumably) in front little seat, age two, possibly three.

Daughter: **crying inconsolably**
Mother: No, I won’t let you do this to me. No, You can’t blackmail me with your tears. No!
Daughter: **continues crying**
Mother: STOP! You can’t do this to ME! Who do you think you are! STOP!
Daughter: **cries louder**
Mother: NO! I won’t put up with this abuse! **breaks down, also begins to cry**

I rather enjoy negotiating with three year-old girls myself. Most of the little cabbage heads will sign away practically everything from their future loss of virginity to their social security payments in exchange for a kitten or a lollipop. But you have to watch out for abusive hard cases like this one clearly was, the crafty little bitches can take you down like a semi hitting a squirrel if you make the mistake of falling for that whole wide-eyed sweet and innocent act.

I’m glad I didn’t have to witness this. I might have started crying myself… with laughter.