Mailvox: pressing for the kill

Revan put some of my arguments to the test and finds they are effective in practice:

Your posts have inspired me to start debating atheists and the early results are amusing to say the least…. In short, arguments presented on your blog were able to put them on their heels and quickly retreating toward rationalization mode.  The problem I’m having is being able to go in for the kill and expose their weakness for what it is. If you or any of the Ilk have suggestions on how I can improve then I would appreciate it.

I posed versions of three questions that I have read on your blog:

  1. What is the average rate of speciation?
  2. How many mutations, on average, are required per speciation?
  3. Even if it can be demonstrated that speciation has occurred then what is the evidence that the various mechanisms are sufficient enough to make a creator unnecessary?

The first response I received was a wall of talking points:

• All life shows a fundamental unity in the mechanisms of replication, heritability, catalysis, and metabolism.

• Common descent predicts a nested hierarchy pattern, or groups within groups. We see just such an arrangement in a unique, consistent, well-defined hierarchy, the so-called tree of life.

• Different lines of evidence give the same arrangement of the tree of life. We get essentially the same results whether we look at morphological, biochemical, or genetic traits.

• Fossil animals fit in the same tree of life. We find several cases of transitional forms in the fossil record.

• The fossils appear in a chronological order, showing change consistent with common descent over hundreds of millions of years and inconsistent with sudden creation.

• Many organisms show rudimentary, vestigial characters, such as sightless eyes or wings useless for flight.

• Atavisms sometimes occur. An atavism is the reappearance of a character present in a distant ancestor but lost in the organism’s immediate ancestors. We only see atavisms consistent with organisms’ evolutionary histories.

• Ontogeny (embryology and developmental biology) gives information about the historical pathway of an organism’s evolution. For example, as embryos whales and many snakes develop hind limbs that are reabsorbed before birth.

• The distribution of species is consistent with their evolutionary history. For example, marsupials are mostly limited to Australia, and the exceptions are explained by continental drift. Remote islands often have species groups that are highly diverse in habits and general appearance but closely related genetically. Squirrel diversity coincides with tectonic and sea level changes (Mercer and Roth 2003). Such consistency still holds when the distribution of fossil species is included.

• Evolution predicts that new structures are adapted from other structures that already exist, and thus similarity in structures should reflect evolutionary history rather than function. We see this frequently. For example, human hands, bat wings, horse legs, whale flippers, and mole forelimbs all have similar bone structure despite their different functions.

• The same principle applies on a molecular level. Humans share a large percentage of their genes, probably more than 70 percent, with a fruit fly or a nematode worm.

• When two organisms evolve the same function independently, different structures are often recruited. For example, wings of birds, bats, pterosaurs, and insects all have different structures. Gliding has been implemented in many additional ways. Again, this applies on a molecular level, too.

• The constraints of evolutionary history sometimes lead to suboptimal structures and functions. For example, the human throat and respiratory system make it impossible to breathe and swallow at the same time and make us susceptible to choking.

• Suboptimality appears also on the molecular level. For example, much DNA is nonfunctional.

• Some nonfunctional DNA, such as certain transposons, pseudogenes, and endogenous viruses, show a pattern of inheritance indicating common ancestry.

• Speciation has been observed.

• The day-to-day aspects of evolution — heritable genetic change, morphological variation and change, functional change, and natural selection — are seen to occur at rates consistent with common descent. Furthermore, the different lines of evidence are consistent; they all point to the same big picture. For example, evidence from gene duplications in the yeast genome shows that its ability to ferment glucose evolved about eighty million years ago. Fossil evidence shows that fermentable fruits became prominent about the same time. Genetic evidence for major change around that time also is found in fruiting plants and fruit flies. The evidence is extensive and consistent, and it points unambiguously to evolution, including common descent, change over time, and adaptation influenced by natural selection. It would be preposterous to refer to these as anything other than facts.

When I pressed them to answer the first question I got this:

That’s impossible to quantify. Mutations are random and we cannot predict exactly how the environment will determine which mutations survive and which will not. Those kind of predictions in evolution are like meteorologists trying to predict the weather next year. Both evolution and the weather are chaos systems.

I’ll leave it up to the Dread Ilk to indicate how Revan can best press for the kill once it has become apparent that the advocates of evolution by natural selection have no ability to quantify the very processes they claim to be incontrovertible fact. But rest assured there are several effective lines of attack. The key is to not permit them to do what they will almost always try to do, which is to change the subject away from the specific matter at hand.

Remember, concepts which cannot be quantified may exist, but they cannot be reasonably described as either mathematic or scientific except as axioms or hypotheses.

Pro-Replacement Republicans

The professional Republican politicians are still absolutely determined to betray the remnants of the American people:

House Republicans are preparing to unveil their own broad template for overhauling the nation’s immigration system this week, potentially offering a small opening for President Obama and congressional Democrats to pass bipartisan legislation before the end of the year.

Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio and other Republican leaders are expected to release a one-page statement of immigration principles this week at their annual retreat in Cambridge, Md., according to aides with knowledge of the plan. The document is expected to call for border security and enforcement measures, as well as providing a path to legal status — but not citizenship — for many of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country, the aides said.

The Republican effort comes as Mr. Obama is expected to push once again for an overhaul of the immigration system in his State of the Union address Tuesday, and as lawmakers from both parties describe immigration as one of the few potential areas for bipartisan compromise before the end of the current Congress.

It should be abundantly clear, at this point, that Republicans have no interest whatsoever in American survival. From banks to new electorates, literally everything they do is to the detriment of the American people. Not that the Democrats are any better, but it is absurd to think that electing more Republicans is going to solve anything. They are part of the problem, not the solution.

Enjoy the decline.

Democracy in the Middle East

New York Times neocons never, ever, learn from their past disasters:

David Kirkpatrick, my colleague in Cairo, said it all in this brilliant, depressing lead:
“Thousands of Egyptians celebrated the third anniversary of their
revolt against autocracy on Saturday by holding a rally for the military
leader who ousted the country’s first democratically elected
president.”

…

There is plenty of blame to go around — for Obama, for the hapless
Morsi, for the paranoid power-grabbing Muslim Brotherhood, for the
controlling military. But above all I blame the squabbling Egyptian
liberals who fought for Mubarak’s ouster but did not give democracy a
chance.

Did not give democracy a chance? The Muslim Brotherhood was democracy in action. Some of you will recall the way in which I dismissed the so-called Arab Spring; there were no shortage of the usual suspects attempting to claim that I was wrong, that all the experts were right about the miraculous democratic transformation of the Middle East.

As a general rule, unless one is dealing with technology, it is very seldom different. This is as true of politics as it is of economics. Democracy in the Middle East means Islamic rule, just as the importation of barbarians and savages into the USA means that they will henceforth serve as the deciding factor in government so long as some vestiges of democracy survive in the declining West.

The huge mistake of the immigration enthusiasts was to fail to realize that immigration and democracy are no more compatible than Islam and democracy. Celler, Hart, and Kennedy claimed that Americans could open their borders to the world and keep their nation, but they no more told the truth than Obama did when he told Americans they could keep their doctor.

Spying on Angry Birds

I don’t know about you, but I feel much safer to know that the NSA is keeping close tabs on middle-aged housewives playing Candy Crush:

The National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have been developing capabilities to take advantage of “leaky” smartphone apps, such as the wildly popular Angry Birds game, that transmit users’ private information across the internet, according to top secret documents.

The data pouring onto communication networks from the new generation of iPhone and Android apps ranges from phone model and screen size to personal details such as age, gender and location. Some apps, the documents state, can share users’ most sensitive information such as sexual orientation – and one app recorded in the material even sends specific sexual preferences such as whether or not the user may be a swinger.

Many smartphone owners will be unaware of the full extent this information is being shared across the internet, and even the most sophisticated would be unlikely to realise that all of it is available for the spy agencies to collect.

Dozens of classified documents, provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden and reported in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica, detail the NSA and GCHQ efforts to piggyback on this commercial data collection for their own purposes.

Scooping up information the apps are sending about their users allows the agencies to collect large quantities of mobile phone data from their existing mass surveillance tools – such as cable taps, or from international mobile networks – rather than solely from hacking into individual mobile handsets.

What a freaking joke. Every single employee in the NSA ought to be marched off to jail immediately. Pretty soon we’re going to learn that they’re spying on smart refrigerators too. How they rationalize this is Constitutional is beyond me. This is well beyond mere police state and deeply into farce.

Lapine spells

Oswald Spengler had the rabbits pegged in The Decline of the West. He explains why they are so prone to not only name-calling, but viewing name-calling as sufficient to make a case against a perceived foe.

“The world-fear is stilled when an intellectual form-language hammers out brazen vessels in which the mysterious is captured and made comprehensible. This is the idea of “taboo” which plays a decisive part in the spiritual life of all primitive men,  though the original content of the word lies so far from us that it is incapable of any translation into any ripe culture-language. Blind terror, religious awe, deep loneliness, melancholy, hate, obscure impulses to draw near, to be merged, to escape – all those formed feelings of mature souls are in the childish condition blurred in a monotonous indecision.”

Rabbits are not merely barbarians, but primitives. Thus the incantation “homophobe” is considered enough to banish the moralistic thought-criminal, even as the magic spell “raciss” is deemed sufficient to banish the ethno-cultural thought-criminal.

Spengler even offers an explanation for why they cannot create anything original, but more on that another time. But in the meantime, Kalel points out that Bradbury, too, identified the Nothing People:

“For these beings, fall is ever the normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth….Such are the autumn people.”

Autumn is such a beautiful time of year that it seems a travesty to identify them by that noble name. I prefer to think of them as the Nothing People, the empty-eyed, soulless creatures of the Abyss. But it is fascinating to me to see how thinkers, philosophers, and artists have all observed the same phenomenon in certain people around them.

Alhough it is ironic. Who would have ever imagined that the Wicked in Something Wicked This Way Comes would turn out to be the hollow and petty evil that is perhaps best exemplified today by the likes of John Scalzi and the shambling shoggoths of the SFWA.

Wall Street loses Krugman

Wow, I have to admit that I didn’t expect to see this out of the former Enron advisor:

Normal people take it in stride; even if they’re angry and bitter over political setbacks, they don’t cry persecution, compare their critics to Nazis and insist that the world revolves around their hurt feelings. But the rich are different from you and me.

And yes, that’s partly because they have more money, and the power that goes with it. They can and all too often do surround themselves with courtiers who tell them what they want to hear and never, ever, tell them they’re being foolish. They’re accustomed to being treated with deference, not just by the people they hire but by politicians who want their campaign contributions. And so they are shocked to discover that money can’t buy everything, can’t insulate them from all adversity.

I also suspect that today’s Masters of the Universe are insecure about the nature of their success. We’re not talking captains of industry here, men who make stuff. We are, instead, talking about wheeler-dealers, men who push money around and get rich by skimming some off the top as it sloshes by. They may boast that they are job creators, the people who make the economy work, but are they really adding value? Many of us doubt it — and so, I suspect, do some of the wealthy themselves, a form of self-doubt that causes them to lash out even more furiously at their critics.

Nice call-out to F. Scott Fitzgerald there on the part of the quasi-Nobel winner too. But Krugman fails to notice that there is an amount of truth to Perkins’s complaint about the coming Kristallnacht of the so-called One Percent, especially given that a disproportionate amount of the parasitical One Percent are Jewish.

It’s not paranoia when someone really is out to get you. And self-doubt is more than justified when you know damn well that you eminently deserve to have people out to get you. The financial skimmers of Wall Street not only don’t make the economy work, they have destroyed the wealthiest economy history has ever known through the massive malinvestments their massive credit bubble has created. And they have made matters worse by coopting the federal government into making good their losses at the expense of the American people.

When the final crash comes, I expect a considerable portion of the One Percent to be wiped out by an angry and well-armed populace. And no one should shed a tear for them, because they eminently deserve their such bitter desserts. The wolves of Wall Street who preyed upon the helpless for decades will become the hunted.

The Nothing People

John C. Wright on the restless hearts of the empty souls, who are never content no matter what they achieve and regardless of what gains they make:

Being without a sense of the objective nature of reality, they are without a belief in objective morals. Being without a belief in objective morals, they lack honor, and, lacking honor, they lack courage, lack decency, lack courtesy.

Hence, their one, sole and only means of discussing their principles in debate is to accuse whomever dares question them of any and every thing they think evil: they call normal people stupid and evil and heartless, bigoted and racist and fascist and thisist and thatist.

The content of the accusation does not matter, only the relief of being able to accuse, and accuse, and accuse.

Their only consistent principle — a principle never admitted, of course, but obvious in their every manifesto — is the Unreality Principle, which holds that it is better and braver to believe in make-believe than in real reality. The more unreal the belief, the less based on fact, the more open the self contradiction, the greater the power of will and nobility of spirit needed to believe it, and hence the greatest applause from the modern mind is reserved to those of their number that believe the most unreal and unrealistic things. And yet, with typical unselfaware modern irony, they call themselves the reality-based community.

In sum, their philosophy consists of the single principle that no philosophy is valid. Their ethics consist of a single precept that making ethical judgments is ‘judgmental’ that is, ethically wrong. Their economic theory, socialism, consists of an arrogant denial that the laws of economics apply to economic phenomena. Their theory of psychology says that men do not have free will, because cause and effect is absolute; their theory of metaphysics is that subatomic particles do have free will, because cause and effect is statistical, approximate, uncertain, incomplete, and illusory. And on and on. All their thought is one self-refuting statement after another.

Philosophically, theologically and morally, the modern mindset is an end-state. Once a man has utterly rejected reason, he cannot reason himself to another conclusion. Once he has rejected morality, he has no sense of honor to compel him to live up to a philosophy more demanding than narrow selfishness.

Again, once he had rejected the authority of tradition, so that his one precept is to ignore all precepts of his teachers, he has no motive and no way to pass along to the next generation this selfsame precept, for he then is himself a teacher teaching them to ignore all teachers. And so on.

No compromise is possible with these people. I use the term loosely, for they are not morally accountable Men and Women in the full sense of the term. They are intellectual nomads, always on the move, always parasitical, always acting to destroy, always needing an accusational high that is more powerful than the one before.

This is why attempts to appease them are always fruitless, why they always devour their own. You might as rationally attempt to reason with the weather as attempt to reason with them. They eat their own as readily as they devour those they overcome, and their bitterest hatred is reserved for those who stand up to them and tell them, with all the contempt that they merit, “you are nothing and you will never be anything”. Never ever back down to them.

If there is one thing they hate to hear, it is that they are fallen. They cling furiously to their pride and to their pretense to superiority because that is all they have. They are de facto psychopaths; they have no ability to empathize for all that they claim to empathize with everything and everyone from the snail darter to a bullied homosexual teen. They have endless hypothetical love for humanity and nothing of the real thing for their neighbors or anyone but themselves.

The real and the decent people sense their emptiness. We tiptoe around them, trying not to trigger the endless minefield of their sensitivities. This is pointless. Like insects, they thrive in darkness; whenever exposed to the harsh light of truth they are desperate to conceal their words and their deeds, to hide their empty sickness. But this is wrong, because there is only one hope for them, and that is the crushing of their pride.

There is nothing that can fill up the vast abyss within them except God. Nothing. So do not spare them. Remind them that they are nothing. Remind them that they are evil. Tell them the truth because they already know it and the reason for their frenetic activity is that they are running from it. Remind them their only hope at the joy they envy and crave is to abandon their empty, narcissistic pride and allow the Way, the Truth, and the Life to fill up the void within.

One of my friends once asked me why I seem to run into so many of these people, both personally and professionally. The answer is simple. I see them, they know I see them, and their instinctive reaction is to immediately attack those who recognize them for what they are. You see, the Nothing People always lie and thereby sentence themselves to a lifetime of policing the perceptions of others. It’s not that I recognize their lies so much as I recognize the constant scanning of others perception of them in which they necessarily engage.

China: two stories

First, this Forbes report is NOT true: “The People’s Bank of China , the central bank, has just ordered commercial banks to halt cash transfers.” The false report was particularly worrisome in light of the way it appeared to coincide with HSBC’s recent attempt to crack down on all withdrawals of more than 3,000 pounds in the UK. (HSBC appears to have backed down on that following widespread outrage.) However, that does not mean that all is well with the Chinese economy, which you will recall has been engaged in much bigger credit inflation and government spending stimulus programs since 2009 than the USA or the European governments. From Zerohedge two weeks ago:

the big problem in big China remains that of an out-of-control credit creation process that is blowing up. As we previously noted, instead of crushing credit creation, the PBOC’s liquidity rationing has forced distressed companies into high-interest-cost products in the shadow-banking world. Investors on the other side of “troubled shadow banking products” had assumed that ‘someone’ would bail them out but this evening Reuters reports that ICBC has confirmed that it will not rescue holders of the “Credit Equals Gold #1 Collective Trust Product”, due to mature Jan 31st with $492 million outstanding.

A single $492 million default sounds very small compared to the overall size of the shadow banking market, but the problem is that what expands by the multiplication effect will contract even faster. There are many multiples of credit dollars stacked upon each actual dollar, so a default has a domino effect that is one or two orders of magnitude greater than the size of the default itself.

It’s probably not a coincidence that the banks appear to be a little nervous leading up to this default, because it’s not possible to know exactly what the effects of the Friday default will be. I expect next weekend will be a very busy one throughout the financial industry as the markets position for the fallout on Monday; I imagine the central banks’ printing presses will be smoking.

It’s not your money

In case you were wondering why a bank can refuse to give you “your money” when you ask for it, it is because the terms of the loan you provided them permit it.

Stephen Cotton went to his local HSBC branch this month to withdraw £7,000 from his instant access savings account to pay back a loan from his mother. A year before, he had withdrawn a larger sum in cash from HSBC without a problem.

But this time it was different, as he told Money Box: “When we presented them with the withdrawal slip, they declined to give us the money because we could not provide them with a satisfactory explanation for what the money was for. They wanted a letter from the person involved.”

Mr Cotton says the staff refused to tell him how much he could have: “So I wrote out a few slips. I said, ‘Can I have £5,000?’ They said no. I said, ‘Can I have £4,000?’ They said no. And then I wrote one out for £3,000 and they said, ‘OK, we’ll give you that.’ “

He asked if he could return later that day to withdraw another £3,000, but he was told he could not do the same thing twice in one day.He wrote to complain to HSBC about the new rules and also that he had not been informed of any change.

The bank said it did not have to tell him. “As this was not a change to the Terms and Conditions of your bank account, we had no need to pre-notify customers of the change,” HSBC wrote.

The only way you can be certain to get your money back is by calling the
loan, or to put it in more common terms, closing your account.

The phony Dark Enlightenment

As I have previously noted, I don’t buy into this Dark Enlightenment nonsense. And these comparisons should suffice to demonstrate the absurdity that Nick Land, a British philsopher of whom I had literally never heard before, is any sort of leader, intellectual or otherwise, of a coherent movement.

Now, Alexa is very far from reliable, but the sheer scale of the differences indicates what a more accurate traffic metric would likely show. First look at the two individuals who have been mentioned by the leftists as leaders of this dangerous Dark Enlightenment.

Nick Land (xenosystems.net)
Global 658,815, USA 268,030

Moldbug
Global 882,792, USA 279,490

Pretty influential, are they not? Now let’s look at some of the others who are more or less well-regarded throughout the non-mainstream Right.

Steve Sailer
Global 161,960, USA 38,356  

Roissy/Heartiste
Global 29,405, USA 10,307

Vox Day
Global 31,286, USA 4,969  

Fred Reed
Global 313,779, USA 84,841

The so-called Dark Enlightenment is just another fantasy media “trend”, about as credible as the New York Times annual stories on junior high school sex rings.