Category: Uncategorized

The English are scratching their heads… don’t the criminals know that guns are illegal?

Labour has been accused of losing control of gun crime as new figures show a sharp rise in armed robberies. Guns were used in 4,120 robberies last year – a 10% jump – including a 9% rise to 1,439 in the number of street robberies where guns were used.

There was also a rapid and unexplained increase in the number of times householders were confronted in their own homes by armed criminals. Residential firearms robberies show a 46% leap, a record 645 cases in England and Wales – up 204 on the previous year and four times the level recorded in 2000-01.

Gee, do you think assuring the criminals that their potential victims are unarmed might not be a great idea? Really?

The Home Office is trying to cover up by saying that “Firearm offences have fallen significantly, by 14% in the year up to September 2006, which amounts to 1,642 fewer incidents”, but of course, they don’t define a firearm office, which most likely includes the “crime” of merely owning a unregistered firearm.

So, fewer law-abiding people were caught with illicit firearms, but the criminals are making more use of them. Yeah, that balances out nicely.

Michael Yon admits that the Iraqi war is being lost:

[It’s] getting pretty kinetic here. During my first 5 days we lost 6 KIA Americans and 1 terp, so that was 7, plus quite a few others who were really messed up. Serious business, but ISF making serious progress in Mosul. This place is dicey, though. I need to downgrade my initial assessment. The ISF is much better, but this “deal is not sealed” as it were. At this point I would say we are probably actually losing the war, but I really think this can be turned around. Petraeus is just the man who can do it. He’s brilliant and is ready to slam those militias. We need to kill Sadr. We will lose a lot of people taking on the militias, but we should either take them on or pack up and go home. I vote for killing them.

I greatly admire Michael Yon as well as the soldiers on whom he is reporting. But no amount of individual heroics, no amount of brilliant tactics, can possibly compensate for a fundamental strategic blunder of astounding proportions.

The USA won the second Iraqi war when it took out Saddam Hussein and eliminated the possibility of WMDs. This was likely an illegal action under the US Constitution, but it was a popular one and speedy success will almost always be excused. Get in, get it done, and go. That should have been the strategy, but the neocons, who are largely unfamiliar with military history, were intoxicated with their initial success.

It is the third Iraqi war that has now been lost. The “battle for hearts and minds” cannot be won by a military force, nor is the ability to kill large quantities of people meaningful when dealing with deep-set philosophical differences. Russia has killed approximately half the Chechen population without establishing a lasting peace there, and even if the Iraqi factions are not as intransigent as the historically stubborn Chechens, they are more than stubborn enough to resist the amount of lethal force that the American people are willing to direct against them.

The president’s war has failed, the nation has been invaded by 10-12 million aliens and there are no shortage of problems on the horizon. It is long past time to admit failure, admit that the Middle East is not going to be forced into peaceful quasi-democracy and bring the troops home.

You cannot empty a swimming pool by repeatedly smashing a rock against the surface of the water. Increasing the size of the rock by 16 percent may convince the superficial observer you are doing something productive, but it is an irrelevant action nevertheless.

Burma ‘orders Christians to be wiped out‘

The military regime in Burma is intent on wiping out Christianity in the country, according to claims in a secret document believed to have been leaked from a government ministry. Entitled “Programme to destroy the Christian religion in Burma”, the incendiary memo contains point by point instructions on how to drive Christians out of the state.

The text, which opens with the line “There shall be no home where the Christian religion is practised”, calls for anyone caught evangelising to be imprisoned. It advises: “The Christian religion is very gentle – identify and utilise its weakness.”

Its discovery follows widespread reports of religious persecution, with churches burnt to the ground, Christians forced to convert to the state religion, Buddhism, and their children barred from school.

Notice that it is those notoriously peaceful Buddhists who are persecuting others. This may come as a surprise to parochial, historically ignorant individuals such as Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, but to those of us whose educations actually included subjects outside of the traditional West, the violent traditions of Buddhism are no surprise.

In fact, rampaging Buddhist monks entered the fictional menagerie long before the first foam-flecked evangelical made his first of many frightening appearances in bad science fiction stories. In “The Tale of Genji”, the 11th century Japanese classic by Murasaki Shikibu, raids by monks storming down from their mountain monasteries occur nearly as often as the Shining Prince cries or seduces a Heian court beauty.

Scott Adams dips his toe into the swamp of moral superiority claims:

Have you ever wondered what percentage of prison inmates are atheists? It must be a lot, given that non-believers have no moral center and spend most of their days robbing, and killing, and sodomizing farm animals. That’s what you do when you have no morality.

According to Adherents.com, 16% of the world’s 6.25 billion people are non-religious. That includes atheists, agnostics, and secular humanists. That’s just over 1 billion godless (and Budahless) infidels.

According to this, there are 8.75 million people in jail in the entire world. And that includes people who haven’t been convicted. Hmm. That seems too low by about, um, a billion infidels that should be behind bars….

In other words, only 8 million of the 1 BILLION non-believers who damned well SHOULD be in prison are actually there. There is only one conclusion that I can draw from this rigorous scientific analysis: Atheists are lazy.

Skipping over the obvious answer to this tongue-in-cheek version of a common defense of atheism – moral inertia causes non-believers to behave similarly to believers for a generation or three – there are a few ways we can test this assertion of superior atheist behavior by traditional moral standards.

1. There should be a lower percentage of atheists in jail than in the population.
2. Those imprisoned who participate in prison ministries should have a higher rate of recidivism.
3. Crime rates should decline as religious belief declines.

I’ve already dealt with the first topic, as the English survey showed that atheists/agnostics were overrepresented in English prisons by 105.8 percent. In other words, atheist Englishmen were more than twice as likely to be convicted criminals as the average Englishman. Amusingly enough, this is roughly the same ratio that Adams himself suggests, as he cites 16 percent of the population being non-religious compared to 33 percent of his hypothetical jail population being non-religious. As a defense of atheism, it’s certainly an original one, if perhaps sub-optimal.

Second, a 1990 study on the effectiveness of prison ministries concluded the following: The group’s study involved 190 prisoners who between 1975 and 1979 had taken part in Christian discipleship training, and a similar number who had not, matched by age, race, gender and other factors. Both groups had been released from prison eight to 14 years prior to the study.

It found that the religion-trained ones had an 11 percentage point lower recidivism rate than the control group. Forty percent of the religion-schooled group committed new offenses, while 51 percent of the others did so. The religiously trained group also had a longer crime-free period following release, and when they did commit new crimes, the crimes were less severe compared to past offenses. The control group had increased crime-severity.

Strike two.

As for the third factor, consider France, which was found to be the most atheist country in Europe, with 33 percent of those polled declaring that they did not believe in any sort of spirit, God, or life force. France also has the fastest rising crime rate in Europe, 16 percent compared to the EU average of 4 percent, (International Review of Crime Statistics) and also led the EU with the greatest increase in violent crime (50% from 1997 to 2001 compared to an EU average of 22 percent.)

Personally, I suspect this increasing crime rate in France is far more likely to be the result of a surfeit of young Muslims in the inner cities, but that’s a matter for another day. The point is that not only is there no evidence to suggest that atheists are better behaved than the average individual, but there is a plethora of evidence suggesting that they are demonstrably more likely to behave badly by both traditional moral and legal measures.

If we accept the concepts, for which there is some evidence, that a) atheists are smarter and better-educated, and b) smarter and better-educated people are less likely to be in prison, then atheism must be a truly negative force indeed if it is powerful enough to overcome a pair of powerful positive correlations as evidenced by the disproportionate number of atheists in prison.

Funny, I would have thought that the feminists would be the first ones to fire up the re-education camps:

Grey’s Anatomy star Isaiah Washington has entered a residential treatment facility in an effort to quell the controversy surrounding his anti-gay remarks — and save his job, Life & Style has learned exclusively. According to an insider, Isaiah, who issued an apology for his statements on Jan. 18, agreed to undergo a psychological assessment after talks with ABC executives….

“ABC has told him he must enter a program to examine why he would say such hateful words,” the insider says.

Anyhow, it seems that it won’t be long before it will be a hate crime to deny access to any part of your body that happens to be of particular interest to a member of the sexually preferred class.

Let this be a lesson to all of us….

Never be rude to a faggot,
A flamer, or homo, or queer.
Never be rude to a battiboy,
No matter what you hear.

I, for one, welcome our new Reptilesbian overlordess.

You don’t have to be brain-dead to be a Republican Senator, but it helps:

Republican leaders generally expressed support for Bush’s Iraq strategy. “If we fail in Iraq, or withdraw our troops prematurely, the terrorists will follow us home. Success is our only option,” said Rep. John Boehner of Ohio.

This is one of the most moronic things I’ve ever heard come out of Washington DC, which is impressive. There is nothing – NOTHING – about the Iraqi invasion or occupation that keeps terrorists out of the United States. In fact, the administration is not doing the only three things that could keep terrorists out, namely, refusing entry to Muslims at the various points of entry, protecting the northern and southern borders and deporting all illegal aliens and foreign nationals from hostile nations.

To put it bluntly, if you still support the ongoing occupation of Iraq, you’re clearly too stupid to learn from the mistakes of others and are doomed to a life of learning by personal experience.

It doesn’t matter how many times the Three Monkeys mindlessly chant “success is the only option”, that isn’t going to make the occupation any less of a failure or convince a single individual that they really should be more enthusiastic about playing referee to an intra-Islamic conflict. In the back-stabbing tradition of his father, George Bush has not only destroyed the Republican majority, he is on the verge of destroying its chances at majority status for a generation.

You’d think his increasingly reluctant supporters at the National Review would be bright enough to pick up on this, but instead, most of them are cheering on potential candidates who will lead the GOP right into another 40-year wilderness.

And people say there isn’t any justice to be found in this world.

Always take a closer look at those who bend standard definitions:

Social critics like Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, the author of “Why There Are No Good Men Left” (2003), and Sylvia Ann Hewlett, the author of “Creating a Life” (2002), worry that this trend is especially problematic for young achievement-oriented women. The conventional wisdom holds that if women excel in higher education and spend their 20s investing in their careers, men will be intimidated by their accomplishments, women will find it hard to meet a suitable mate, and marriage and childbirth will be unattainable.

“Nowadays, the rule of thumb seems to be that the more successful a woman, the less likely it is she will find a husband or bear a child,” writes Ms. Hewlett, arguing that high-achieving women who were still single at age 30 have a less than 10% chance of ever marrying.

In fact, the opposite is true. Marriage rates are increasing among college-educated men and women, even if the marriage age is older: According to the 2006 Current Population Survey data, among 35- to 39-year-old women, 88% with advanced degrees have married, compared with 81% of women without college degrees. And once married, these smart, successful women are no less likely to have children.

I haven’t been able to find the data yet, but one thing that I’ve noticed in all of these much-cited statements about educated women and marriage is that they always conflate “college-educated” with “advanced degrees”. But a college education – a bachelor’s degree – is never described as an “advanced degree”. That’s a masters or a doctoral degree, and it’s the women who hold those that are the high flyers of whom I, and others, have written so critically.

By way of demonstration, note that the U.S. Census Bureau specifically differentiates between bachelor’s degrees and advanced degrees: “New information from the U.S. Census Bureau reinforces the value of a college education: workers 18 and over with a bachelor’s degree earn an average of $51,206 a year, while those with a high school diploma earn $27,915. Workers with an advanced degree make an average of $74,602, and those without a high school diploma average $18,734.”

Now, it’s possible that the author of the Opinion Journal piece is playing it straight, but I’m suspicious. Why not break the marriage statistics down into the four groups as was done for the income group? Wouldn’t that be more informative? The most likely explanation is that she didn’t because it would show that the most-educated group features lower marriage rate than at least one of the less educated groups, thereby disproving her thesis.

Isn’t it supposed to be the worstest, most deadliest disease ever in the history of Mankind? Perhaps TB is simply too dangerous to be fully unleashed on the planet.

South Africa may forcibly isolate patients being treated for a highly drug-resistant form of tuberculosis to prevent new infections from spreading on the AIDS-hit continent, health officials said.

“Holding the patient against their will is not ideal but may have to be considered in the interest of the public,” Ronnie Green-Thompson, a special advisor to the Health Department, said in a statement.

A new study out this week urged South Africa to consider mandatory isolation to control extreme drug resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB), which has killed at least 74 people in the country since 2005.

The ironic thing is that those inclined to support a forced quarantine of AIDS patients would probably be accused of “homophobia”. Because, everyone who really, really hates gays wants to prevent them from contracting a deadly disease.

Now, perhaps it’s just not a big deal anymore because people can live with AIDS thanks to the pharmaceutical companies. But in that case, why are we supposed to pay any more attention to it than we do to diabetes or high blood pressure?

I don’t see eye to eye with Mr. Scalzi on very many things, but I couldn’t agree with him more here:

Perhaps since I give out a whole bunch of largely unsolicited writing advice, I am often asked by readers if I would look at the unpublished story/novel/screenplay/poem they’re working on and give them some feedback or advice. Indeed, perhaps you yourself have been thinking of asking me this very same thing. I have two things to say to this sort of request:

1. I’m really flattered that you would think of asking me to critique your work and would trust me to give you valuable feedback. Thank you.

2. No.

While I enjoy working with people with whom I have a personal relationship, it’s work. While my literary success can best be described as “limited”, I still get bombarded by people that want me to read their work, critique their ideas and so forth. In the spirit of “giving back to the community” I did participate in the Critters Workshop for a while, only to discover that the vast majority of people don’t want criticism that will help them improve, they want encouragement. And I don’t do that.

The truth is that most would-be writers aren’t writers for a very good reason – they can’t write. A brief perusal of ten random blogs should suffice to demonstrate that to even the most optimistic idnvidual’s satisfaction. There are only two ways to become a successful author:

1. Write a lot, submit a lot and keep getting up after you get knocked down.

2. Become famous in some other field, preferably something involving large breast implants, and have your agent contact publishers about finding you a ghostwriter.

If you’re even somewhat attractive, I recommend the latter as your chances of success are much, much higher. (See: Price, Katie, Anderson, Pamela and Jameson, Jenna.)

The SFWA elections approach:

*Call for Candidates 2007

Between books? Irked at the way things are run in the industry? You have a solution before you! With the new year, a new SFWA elections season dawns. Run for SFWA office, and save the world!

Offices up for election this year are:

President
Vice President
Treasurer
Secretary
Canadian Regional Director
South Central Regional Director

As it happens, I do have a few ideas for improving the operations of the SFWA and turning it into an organization that is capable of more than pointless carping about book piracy and the decline of the publishing industry. Here’s my prospective platform thus far:

1. Increase the prestige of the Nebula novel award by awarding the winner a cash prize in addition to the lucite trophy. I have already spoken to publishers who would be interested in providing sponsorship for the award. It’s worth noting that the most prestigious prizes in the world, from the Nobel to the Booker, are inevitably accompanied by an amount of cash.

2. Replace the Nebula Scripts category with “Best SF-related non-fiction book”. There’s a lot more of these works being published than scripts these days, furthermore, Hollywood script writers couldn’t care less about the Nebula, whereas the publishers publishing SF-related non-fiction are quite clearly committed to the genre.

3. Rename the Bulletin to SFWA Monthly and turn it into a bona-fide magazine of interest to the greater science fiction and fantasy community by publishing a novella and three short stories in every issue. Decisions should not be made on the fearful assumption that adults will squabble like self-interested children, but rather, the best interests of the organization as measured by magazine sales and subscriptions.

4. Increase the power of the Nebula juries by having the short fiction jury submit its recommendations for the fiction to be published in the SFWA Monthly to the editor and by allowing the juries to REMOVE works that have qualified for the Nebula ballot. This should bring an end to the award-by-popularity contests that are so grossly embarrassing to the organization.

5. Change SFWA policy from anti-ebook to pro-ebook. Turn the SFWA web site into the premier online science fiction and fantasy e-library by providing freely downloadable works available in all formats from every SFWA member interested in contributing. All of the evidence suggests that freely distributable ebooks help those authors who are not among the 50 best-selling in the world, they don’t hurt them. Blindly following the RIAA’s lead in attempting to protect dubious “rights” is stupid and shortsighted.

Anyone have any more ideas for my platform?