Category: Uncategorized

Not a strength. It certainly took the social scientists long enough to demonstrate the obvious:

A bleak picture of the corrosive effects of ethnic diversity has been revealed in research by Harvard University’s Robert Putnam, one of the world’s most influential political scientists.

His research shows that the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone – from their next-door neighbour to the mayor….

The core message of the research was that, “in the presence of diversity, we hunker down”, he said. “We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us.”

Diversity is a nightmare. It doesn’t work, and moreover, it never has worked or ethnic nations wouldn’t have developed and been the dominant form of voluntary mass human organization for millenia.

It’s long past time to put the lie to rest.

I imagine this news is going to pop up a lot in the future from those who already like to compare Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to Germany’s treatment of the Jews. No doubt the usual suspects at NRO will be requiring fainting couches:

Four senior doctors at Kaplan Hospital in Rehovot and the Hartzfeld Geriatric Hospital in Gedera were arrested yesterday on suspicion of carrying out hundreds of illegal experiments on elderly patients without their consent.

The doctors – including Shmuel Levy, deputy director of Kaplan-Hartzfeld, who was responsible for Hartzfeld; Nadya Kagansky; and Alona Smirnov – are suspected of wrongful death through negligence, abuse of helpless victims, aggravated assault, fraud, violation of a statutory obligation and interference in an investigation.

I understand that the Hippocratic Oath has gone out of fashion at medical schools these days, but seriously, what part of “first, do no harm” is so hard to understand. Or at least “do you mind if I try X on you?”

I don’t have a problem with medical researchers experimenting on puppies and monkeys even if I find it rather cringe-inducing, but I do think playing Dr. Mengele on a bunch of helpless elderly people who don’t realize they’re being used as guinea pigs is just a bit much.

The New York Times discovers a new class of victims:

Still, it is not only the increasing number of these incidents that is causing alarm but also the singular perversity — for want of a less anthropocentric term — of recent elephant aggression. Since the early 1990’s, for example, young male elephants in Pilanesberg National Park and the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve in South Africa have been raping and killing rhinoceroses; this abnormal behavior, according to a 2001 study in the journal Pachyderm, has been reported in ‘‘a number of reserves’’ in the region….

For a number of biologists and ethologists who have spent their careers studying elephant behavior, the attacks have become so abnormal in both number and kind that they can no longer be attributed entirely to the customary factors. Typically, elephant researchers have cited, as a cause of aggression, the high levels of testosterone in newly matured male elephants or the competition for land and resources between elephants and humans. But in ‘‘Elephant Breakdown,’’ a 2005 essay in the journal Nature, Bradshaw and several colleagues argued that today’s elephant populations are suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma. Decades of poaching and culling and habitat loss, they claim, have so disrupted the intricate web of familial and societal relations by which young elephants have traditionally been raised in the wild, and by which established elephant herds are governed, that what we are now witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of elephant culture.

I’d like to think I’m not a rhinophobe or a pachychauvinist, but there’s something disturbingly funny about rampaging elephants raping rhinoceroses. And before we condemn the elephants out of hand, it would be only fair to examine the previous history of the rhinoceroses as well as the way in which the rhinos may have sought these exotic encounters.

More seriously, though, if human beings are animals, what makes our sociologists think that young male humans will fare any better outside of “the intricate web of familial and societal relations” in which they have traditionally been raised than do the young male elephants?

True, humans are not elephants, but the available data seems to strongly suggest that similar pathologies will result from an abandonment of traditional child-raising, although I, for one, would be tremendously surprised to witness the advent of rhino rape in American society.

PH writes from 2002:

You keep mentioning “kos”. Who -or what- is this and why should anybody care?

I really love and appreciate your columns. You make reference to things and ideas very few know or have taken the time to contemplate. Referencing something as obscure as “kos” causes one to click away. Yes, I could search if I cared. If this were a book would you require the reader to put the work down and search a reference?

You cannot keep an audience that way. I’m sorry, working in television has taught me that attention is the most important commodity next to oil.

BTW: If “kos” is a “blog” you’ll find no quarter here. Blogs are portfolios without audience. If “kos” is an actual author then I’d like to see the work. If “kos” is a real Conservative without being a Republican, all the better.

I’m sorry you lost me at “kos”. If you’d mentioned “Buchanan” then you’d have had my undivided attention.

Where would we be without the lessons of television, wherein one is regaled by lectures from hairsprayed individuals with orange makeup, straight white teeth and double-digit IQs? Actually, the only lesson I’ve learned from television is not to waste my time on any non-interactive visual product that purports to be more intellectual than a sporting event.

PH’s email is useful, however, in reminding us that only a fraction of the populace pays any attention to what passes for the news, and only a fraction of that fraction – though admittedly one that has grown over the last two years – pays any attention to the blogosphere.

Not that I really need that reminder, as virtually none of my friends and family follow either my column or my blog, which is absolutely fine with me. It’s not as if I pay close attention to their little hobbies either.

One might wonder how effective the “netroots” can hope to be when someone in the television industry claims never to have heard of Kos. That’s entirely possible, of course, and yet something in PH’s language smacks of affectation.

I have to say, though, that I’m shocked at the complaint about the Kos reference. The Braddock Washington one, sure, but Kos? On an online commentary site?

Mr. Reversion to the Mean strikes again:

Oh for Pete’s Sake [John Podhoretz]
Republican voters are going to stay at home because of internet gambling legislation? Um….let me think about this…hmmm….NO.

Right, because 10 million white guys with computers and plenty of disposable income aren’t the sort of people normally inclined to support Republicans… and they surely won’t hold the banning of their favorite pasttime against a group of politicians who are supposedly dedicated to the concept of government that doesn’t interfere in people’s lives.

I mean, it’s not as if gamblers tend to be obsessive about things, right?

An interesting vote looms:

Like other South Dakotans, people in this tiny farming town are confronting a historic opportunity on Nov. 7. They’ll sway a tortuous national debate by making a choice no statewide electorate has faced before: whether to approve a sweeping ban on virtually all abortions….

The most recent independent poll, in July, found 47 percent of voters opposed the ban, 39 percent favored it, 14 percent were undecided. When asked if they would approve a ban with exceptions for rape and incest, support rose to 59 percent.

This is actual democracy at work. The state legislature has approved the ban and the people’s referendum, not a handful of judges, will settle the matter. Despite its flaws, I find it vastly preferable to the limited, representative faux-democracy which is expressly designed to reduce the impact of the people’s will it purports to champion in almost every way.

There are no shortage of Americans who don’t see abortion as murder, and while their number has no more moral weight than the numbers of Germans who didn’t see Jew-killing as murder or Turks who didn’t see Armenian-killing as murder, this vote will make it difficult for them or the pro-life side to continue to deny the reality of where the country stands on the issue.

As for me, I find abortion and the murderous mothers who choose to commit it to be equally disgusting. Their twisted logic and foam-flecked defensiveness make it perfectly clear that they know very well that what they are doing is evil. Consider the words of this blogging abortionette, who is the beneficiary of a Pandagonian fundraiser contrived to aid her in the obliteration of her offspring:

When you know that you’re crossing that fucking picket line where those protestors will be screaming the same sort of shit that those commenters did, well….where does the anger go? When you understand that there are those that would fucking KILL you, leaving your existing children to be raised without a mother you start resenting that potential life more than you’ve ever resented anything before….I resent that there are so many that would have me put a gun to my head, or, better yet, they’d do it for me all because I had sex.

This would be downright humorous if it weren’t for the tragic fact that she is actively seeking to slaughter her unborn child. While I can’t declare with certainty that everyone is as totally indifferent to her having sex as I am, I am certain that the primary reason so many people despise her and even see her as meriting death is because she is blatantly stating her intentions to kill a child! Would she be similarly outraged by those who decried her intention to drown one of her other children?

The concept of a child’s life being more important than an adult’s is hardly a novel one, as it is inherent in the concept of “women and children first” as well as the male duty to defend his family and his nation. How unsurprising that a woman, particularly a feminist woman, should totally fail to grasp that honorable concept of duty and self-sacrifice.

The abortionette argument that the unborn can be slain at will because they aren’t human is no more compelling to anyone with a reasonably developed moral sense than the identical jihadist justification for killing Jews. To permit those embracing practices so barbaric that the pagan Greeks rejected them more than two thousand years ago to remain members of good standing in our society only demonstrates the depths to which our society has devolved.

The truth is what it is, regardless of how palatable or convenient we find it. I am open to the possibility that I am wrong, that there is nothing immoral about terminating pregnancies and we should therefore feel free to enjoy abortion-on-demand or even to advocate mandatory abortions of unpopular minorities.

But if I am correct and it is true that the wages of sin are death, then an increasingly infanticidal Western civilization will well merit its decline into ignominy and eventual historical obscurity.

Relax and enjoy it:

Defying worldwide appeals and threats of sanctions, North Korea appears to have made good on a promise to conduct its first nuclear bomb test. A South Korean government official first reported a test had been detected, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency….

In Washington, a senior Bush administration official confirmed for Fox News Channel just before midnight that the test had been detected by the U.S. The U.S. Geological Survey reported a 4.2 tremor in North Korea coinciding with the time of the test.

North Korea gleefully announced its test was successful.

Since the Bush administration responded to a Saudi terrorist attack by invading Iraq, no doubt they will respond to this North Korean action by invading Iran. It will be interesting to hear how this is all Clinton’s fault when Bush has had six years to prevent the North Koreans from weaponizing their nuclear technology, and how an Iraq without WMDs was more dangerous than a North Korea with them.

The truth, as I have previously pointed out, is that it is impossible to prevent nuclear proliferation. Every attempt at preventing the spread of military – or any other – technology has failed since China was jealously guarding the secret of the silkworm and Charlemagne was trying to prevent the Magyars from obtaining iron armor.

Given the contempt which the Republican elite has for the Three Monkeys, I expect the president to announce that North Korea’s nuclear weapons only proves why an Iranian invasion is necessary…. never mind that he didn’t do anything about North Korea despite the massive American military presence right on its border. Even worse, I expect the Three Monkey Republicans will fall for it.

A few weeks ago, the Original Cyberpunk was wondering about an October Surprise. Now we’ve got the Gay Old Pedophiles dealing with nuclear North Korea. What was that about being the only global superpower, again?

Amynda was too busy with Womyn’s Studies to take statistics:

The erroneous notion that gay men are more likely to molest children is absolutely wrong, and anyone who was a teenage girl can attest that the notion that straight men mind their manners around teenage girls that are way too young for them is absolute horseshit. The stereotype that gay men are more likely to prey on children is a way to justify bigotry and a way to live in denial about the behavior of some straight men in a community.

And a teenage girl who can do math would know that the fact there are somewhere between 36x and 49x more normal men than gay men means that despite there being more girls being molested by men than boys, a gay man is between 8 and 11 times more likely to prey on children.

This is why there is no heterosexual equivalent to NAMBLA and the worldwide push to drive the age of consent lower is almost uniformly led by gay men. But why pay attention to statistics from the Department of Justice when you can instead rely upon Amynda’s persuasive adverbs and convincingly earthy assertions!

One result of the relentless pushing of homosexuality on mainstream America has been that far more normal Americans are to some degree familiar with aspects of the gay subculture. Thus, they are well aware of homosexuality’s cult of youth and less susceptible to falling for blatantly dishonest defenses like this one.

UPDATE: What is it with this inability of female bloggers to deal with basic math? Instapundit recently linked to a woman who is very, very upset about judicial punishments in Iran and while stoning women for adultery seems rather barbaric by Western standards – though who are multiculturalists to judge – I had to roll my eyes at this statement: By the time you read this, seven more women in Iran will most likely have been stoned to death after being convicted of committing adultery.

Let’s say that I read very slowly and it took me 10 seconds to read that. This would mean that 7,560 women were stoned to death while I was watching the Packers-Rams game, and more than 22 million Iranian women will be stoned to death this year.

The population of Iran is 68 million. This suggests that MLB should be looking to Iran for pitchers who can throw a complete nine innings.

Darth Shiite comes out in favor of a 51st State of the Union:

The cleric spoke at length about his vision for the future of the country concluding:

“What we need to do now is get a working government. But that government has to be based on a constitution. That constitution has to be written by all the Iraqi people. It has to be founded on the democratic principles, and it must take care of everyone regardless of their religion, of their ethnic background.

“Once we have this, then we can have an Iraqi government. We can begin to be a democratic state. We can be a beacon of light in the Middle East.”

Darth Vader began to raise his voice. “So we must follow these principles and we must put together a democracy together and we have to write a constitution built on the principles of Jesus Christ. …

“We’ll have this government. Once we have this government you bring us in as the 51st state.”

That is too funny. Words cannot express my disappointment that the pro-Empire neocons didn’t manage to convince President Bush to embrace Darth Shiite’s proposal to make Iraq a part of the United States. It’s got to be particularly disappointing to Ben Shapiro, who would have not only seen his dreams of American Empire come to pas, but had the chance to further develop his dark powers as Darth Shiite’s apprentice.

Seriously, hearing George Bush explain how Iraq was going to become the 51st state would have made for the best Presidential speech ever. He could have followed that up by appointing Mark Foley as the nation’s Childcare Czar.

An opportunity lost….