Ban government marriage

The State’s push to force homogamy on the Church has finally resulted in the realization that the Church should never have accepted the State’s encroachment in its affairs in the 19th century:

State lawmakers are considering throwing out marriage in Oklahoma.The idea stems from a bill filed by Rep. Mike Turner (R-Edmond). Turner says it’s an attempt to keep same-sex marriage illegal in Oklahoma while satisfying the U.S. Constitution. Critics are calling it a political stunt while supporters say it’s what Oklahomans want.

“[My constituents are] willing to have that discussion about whether marriage needs to be regulated by the state at all,” Turner said. Other conservative lawmakers feel the same way, according to Turner.

Banning state interference with marriage is the conservative position. Since most people are historical ignoramuses, it will likely surprise many that marriage licenses didn’t even exist until 1631. And as I noted in my 2004 WND column entitled Divorcing the State, some State governments didn’t interfere with the sacrament until 1958.

All the misguided attempts to accommodate the State have failed. It is time for the American Church to accept the fact that it must now go into the implacable resistance mode that has characterized Christianity for a good part of its historical existence. This may mean persecutions and the falling away of those of weaker faith in time, but then, that is nothing that the Church has not seen or survived before.

Rep. Turner’s action is well-advised. Oklahoma would do well to cease recognizing all marriages as would the other States. If they don’t, they will find that people will simply cease to bother obtaining marriage licenses as is the case in the majority of the black community and an increasing percentage of the white community as well.

Banning government marriage is the right thing to do on libertarian grounds, on religious grounds, on practical grounds, and on the grounds of sexual fairness. I am pro-marriage but I would not recommend obtaining a marriage license to any unmarried young man or woman these days. And if a woman isn’t willing to marry a man without a marriage license, that will serve as sufficient notice that she is already married to the State.

Suckering the liberty-minded

After eight years of attacking libertarians more furiously than anyone in the Democratic Party, the Republican Party is trying to play them for suckers:

Liberty Republicans. They are the young, more libertarian-minded, grassroots supporters that used to be identified chiefly by their favorite Republican presidential candidate, former Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas.

Now, as the Republican National Committee tries to repair relationships and increase outreach to all political groups, they are doing their best to entice more libertarian Republicans into the fold.

Some of these supporters were turned off by what was described as the “railroading” of Ron Paul supporters by RNC Chairman Reince Priebus during the 2012 convention in Tampa.

But the RNC wants to appear welcoming to the libertarian element in their party, which more established members of the party once derided as “Paultards” after they disrupted events in favor of their candidate.

Remember, the Republican Party elite have successfully been playing social conservatives for suckers since 1980. Now, after twice seeing their “electable” RINOs prove that they were anything but, they’re trying to make nice and pretend that they aren’t the Big Government “conservatives” that they have shown themselves to be since the first Bush ’43 administration.

Don’t buy it. Republicans are nothing but Democrats with a pseudo-conservative PR department.

The Fifth Horseman 12

This is the second of Peter Boghossian’s Interventions. In this dialogue, notice how failing to question Boghossian’s naked assertions and blithely agreeing to his inaccurate statements permits him to appear to make his point without ever doing anything more than getting the other person to concur with him. This demonstrates the importance of understanding how the Socratic method can be used to deceive and obscure rather than illuminate.

To repeat: “the dirty little secret of the Socratic method is the way it can be used
to create false dilemmas and illusionary contradictions. This is why
you never, ever, grant someone attempting to use it the right to define
anything, or even agree with any of their seemingly legitimate
statements. Instead, force dictionary definitions on them, as doing so
reliably disrupts their attempt to present their false dilemmas as well
as calls their credibility into question as they attempt to deny that a
dictionary definition is as legitimate as their own question-begging
inventions.”

KP: Do you trust your wife?

PB: To do what? To fly a plane, no. To diagnose a basic medical condition, yes. [My wife is a board certified physician and professor of medicine.]

KP: Well, I mean, you have faith in your wife.

PB: Well that’s not the same as trusting my wife, right? Trust and faith are not the same.

KP: Well, yeah, I mean, you do have faith in your wife, right?
VD: Of course they are. Have you never read a thesaurus? They are synonyms. Trust is defined as “reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or thing”. Faith is defined as “confidence or trust in a person or thing” Trust is a subset of Faith.

PB: No, actually, no. I don’t have faith in my wife. I trust my wife to do or not do certain things. I trust her to not abuse our children. I trust her to not pull a Lorena Bobbitt on me. But that has nothing to do with faith. Why do you ask?

KP: I’m asking because you said that faith is always bad, you know. And I think that you have faith.
VD: Of course that has something to do with faith. Even by your own definition of faith being the pretense of knowing what you don’t know, it should be obvious that you don’t actually know that your wife hasn’t abused your children. You have no way of knowing that she isn’t planning  to Bobbit you tonight. And furthermore, let’s not forget that you’re pretending to know that your daughter is your child when we both know perfectly well that she isn’t. Look at her! She’s freaking Chinese! You’re not Chinese, Peter. Do the math.

PB: What do I have faith in?

KP: Well, lots of stuff. [Motioning to my wife] Your wife. When you flick a switch the light will go on—

PB: I have no faith. My life is joyfully devoid of faith.
(Mutual laughter)

PB: I don’t have faith that the light will go on when I flick a switch. I know it will both because of past experience and because of the scientific process that enabled that to occur in the first place. Why do you think that has anything to do with faith, or with unwarranted belief?

KP: Because you don’t know the light will go on.

PB: That’s true. The light could be burned out—

KP: So you do have faith that the light isn’t burned out.

PB: No. I hope the light isn’t burned out, but it’s always possible it is. That’s hope, that’s not faith. I don’t believe it’s burned out unless I see it’s burned out. And if it is burned out, then I’ll just replace it. And I know that replacing it will likely work because of my history with replacing bulbs. So I don’t need faith. Faith isn’t required at all. Or am I missing something? Is my reasoning in error?
VD: Yes, your reasoning is in error. You said you know the light will go on when you flick a light switch. But if it doesn’t go on, then obviously you were pretending to know something you didn’t. By your own definition, you had faith that the light would go on, and it was a misplaced faith due to the bulb being burned out or the switch being broken.

(Pause)

KP: No, I guess not.

PB: So, can we agree that when it comes to my wife, or to flicking a light switch, we don’t need faith?

(Long pause)

KP: Yeah, I guess so.
VD: No, because you were wrong in both cases. You have faith in your wife. You have faith every time you go to flick a light switch. And your level of knowledge quite clearly doesn’t rise to the level of Webster’s or Roget’s.

PB: Cool. So we now need to extend this further and talk about why we don’t need—shouldn’t have—faith at all. Faith, just say no. (Laughter)

I can’t stress this enough. Never simply agree with the Street Epistemologist’s assertions. Make them prove every single statement and every single assertion, no matter how reasonable it sounds, by an objective source. They will not be able to do so because Boghossian’s entire approach is a verbal Three-Card-Monte, and by forcing them to show all of their cards, you will expose the game for the intellectually fraudulent one it is.

30 years of Macintosh

Stephen Fry commemorates the 30th anniversary of the introduction of the Macintosh by lamenting one of the great mischances of history:

In one of the world’s most extraordinary missed meetings in industrial, commercial or any other kind of human history, a Henry Morton Stanley failed to encounter a Dr Livingston in the most dramatic and comical fashion.

In the early 90s a young British computer scientist, Tim Berners-Lee had been tasked by CERN (Centre Européeen pour la Recherche Nucléaire the now famous large hardon collider that found the Higgs Boson or a tiny thing pretending to be it) to go in and see if he could find a way of getting the Tower of Babel of different computing platforms used by the hundreds of physicists at the plant to talk to each other. He came up with something that made use of metatextual techniques that he called The Information Mine. Being a very very modest man he realised that those initials spelled out his name, TIM, so he changed it at the last minute to the World Wide Web. He wrote a language HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), a set of communication protocols (chiefly htttp — the hypertext transfer protocol) and an application, as we would now say, on which all these could run, which he called a browser.

He planned, devised, programmed and completed this most revolutionary code in Geneva on one of Steve Jobs’s black cube NeXT computers. Hugging his close to him he took the train to Paris where Jobs was going to be present at a NeXT developers’ conference. Clutching the optical disc that contained the most important computer code in history he sat at a desk while Steve marched up and down looking at hopeful programs and applications. As in all of Steve’s judgments they either sucked or were insanely great. Like a Duchess inspecting a flower show he continued along the rows sniffing and frowning until he got two away from the man who had created the code which would change everything, everything in our world. “Sorry Steve, we need to be out of here if we’re going to catch that plane,” whispered an aide into Jobs’s ear. So, with an an encouraging wave Steve left, two footsteps away from being the first man outside Cern to see the World Wide Web. The two men never met and now, since Steve’s death, never can.

Those who only know me as an inveterate Apple-hater probably don’t realize that I started out as an Apple guy. While my father built his fortune on the IBM PC, first on its need for memory cards, then on its need for high-resolution graphics, (he created and sold the first 1024×768 board for it, the ARTIST card.), my pride and joy and constant companion was an Apple //e. It was stacked, with two disk drives, a color monitor, and a 300 baud modem. I loved that machine, but I gave it up reluctantly when I went off to college and it became apparent that I was going to need something better suited to writing papers.

So, my parents gave me a Macintosh Plus, which gave me a huge advantage over other students, who had to wait their turn in the computer labs when they needed to write their papers. I had a particularly nice setup, since I lived in the only dorm with its own computer lab, complete with Macintosh computers and printers, so I could write my papers, then walk the disk down to the computer lab at 4 AM and print them out without delay. I remember, in particular, one paper on Alfred the Great that blew my professor away because it included a map of England on which I’d drawn the various extents of the Danelaw.

Not that he was unfamiliar with the Danelaw, but it was the first time he’d ever seen a printed graphic in a student paper. That was the power of the Macintosh. I don’t think I ever turned in a paper again without some visual example. In fact, looking at the two college papers I still have with me today, one on the economic development of Japan and the Soviet Union, the other on the Italian condottieri, I can see crosshatched maps of Italy and several charts very similar to those that regularly litter my economics posts. That Macintosh Plus created a habit of readily resorting to bar charts that apparently persists even today.

Where the Macintosh ultimately fell down was not in its failure to penetrate the business market. That’s the conventional wisdom, but it is wrong. Apple was never going to dislodge IBM and Microsoft there and was wise not to kill itself trying. The opportunity that Steve Jobs mysteriously missed, long before the World Wide Web, was the games market. Despite its GUI, the failure to adopt color for three years after the PS/2 introduced VGA/MCGA, as well as its reluctance to embrace a non-serious market, meant that Apple conceded the games market to DOS.

Papers be damned. The first time I saw Wing Commander, I switched immediately over to DOS and picked up a Compaq 386/25. I haven’t looked back since.

I admire the late Steve Jobs. He was an amazingly innovative corporate genius. It is deeply lamentable that his chief legacy as a technologist appears likely to be the walled garden of Apple.

A plague of fake reviews

It’s not just Amazon and the political trolls:

Sites
such as Amazon, TripAdvisor and Yelp are now the go-to destinations for
customers who want to cut through advertising waffle and discover what
products and services are really like. Yet, according to research that
is sure to panic business owners across the world, a fifth of Americans
have left online reviews for items they’ve never bought or even used. 
This figure is even higher (32 per cent) among parents with children
under 18 and the most popular reason why online shoppers questioned did
this was simply because ‘they felt like it.’

I think
“panic” is too strong a word. But I do think the online retailers need
to do a much better job of eliminating fake reviews and providing
meaningful rating systems than they do.

Although the
inaccurate headline is misleading. A fifth of all online reviews are not
fake. A fifth of Americans have, at some point, left a fake review.

Rights roundup

Climate Data Rigged by U.S. Government?

Yet another smoking gun in the fraud-filled field of “climate science”
has been discovered and this one appears to be even more damning than
the hockey-stick chart, “hide the decline,” and the attempt by U.K.
government scientists to prevent others from replicating their work.

Bipartisan Renegade Bureaucracy

Republicans will be tempted to blame the recent IRS and NSA scandals on the Obama Administration. After all, Obama is closely and personally tied to both of them. The IRS audits of the Tea Party and other organizations and individuals followed Obama’s imitation of Henry II calling for the murder of Thomas Becket: “Will no one audit these turbulent critics?” That’s taking considerable liberties with the paraphrasing, but I don’t recall many previous presidents “joking” about siccing the IRS on their political opponents.

Granted, Bill Clinton used to do it too, but at least he didn’t single out the targets in public beforehand.

The Fifth Horseman 11

This is the first of what Peter Boghossian calls his Interventions. I can’t testify to the veracity of these dialogues, but it is clear that he intends them as examples of how he puts his anti-apologetics into practice. Notice how in addition to being an unmitigated asshole, he’s not actually trying to convince his colleague of anything, merely plant some seeds of doubt. My own recommended response is in italics, underneath JM’s responses. Pay attention to how at each point, they disrupt the Street Epistemologist’s attempt to move the dialogue onto a rote path that permits him to attack without having to defend even the most absurd assertions.

The dirty little secret of the Socratic method is the way it can be used to create false dilemmas and illusionary contradictions. This is why you never, ever, grant someone attempting to use it the right to define anything, or even agree with any of their seemingly legitimate statements. Instead, force dictionary definitions on them, as doing so reliably disrupts their attempt to present their false dilemmas as well as calls their credibility into question as they attempt to deny that a dictionary definition is as legitimate as their own question-begging inventions.

I’ll now show how I’ve used these responses in two brief informal, dialectical interventions. The purpose of the interventions was to change targeted beliefs held by my interlocutors. The first intervention was with a colleague (JM) I bumped into on the street.

JM: What you seem to want to do is to take away everyone’s faith.

PB: Yeah. Why is that a problem?

JM: Well what the hell do you think? I mean what do you really think?
VD: Because what other people believe is not your business. And because faith is proven to be beneficial to literally billions of people around the world. Materially beneficial. (see anti-apologetic #8)

PB: It’s not about what I think, it’s about what you think. Why is that a problem?

JM: I’m not one of your students. Don’t answer a question with a question.
[Excellent response – VD]

PB: Okay. Here’s what I really think. I think I should be given some type of community service award for devoting my life to helping people learn to reason effectively. Now could you please answer my question? Why is helping people to abandon their faith a bad thing?

JM: Because for the most part these are good, decent people. You’re taking good, kind, Christian people and you’re taking away something that they rely on.
VD: Don’t try to evade the question. I asked you why you think that isn’t a problem. I didn’t ask if you think you should be given an award or if you think the Trail Blazers will win next weekend. Answer the question!

PB: Do you think the thing that they rely upon [faith], do you think that will lead them to the truth?

JM: Of course not. No sane person could. But it [faith] not only makes them feel good, it also keeps them in check. What do you think would happen if you and X [a colleague] had your way?
VD: You seem to think that faith is an epistemology. It isn’t. It is nothing more than choosing an operative axiom, just like one does in science and mathematics. You’re committing a category error.

PB: What do you think would happen?

JM: You know what would happen, that’s why you’re asking me what would happen. They’d be murdering and raping and who only knows what else.

PB: So you mean that by taking away a bad way of reasoning the natural consequence is that people become murderers?

JM: The reason that a lot of people don’t rape and murder in the first place is because of religion.

PB: Well what about Scandinavia?
VD: What about it? Scandinavia has the highest rape rates in Europe. Sweden does, to be specific. You’re proving the point. (See anti-apologetic #11)

JM: You people love to talk about Scandinavia.

PB: Well?

JM: Well that’s not the same.

PB: The same as what?

JM: The conditions there are not the same as the conditions here, and you know it.

PB: I have no idea what you’re talking about. What do you mean?

JM: You know exactly what I mean. I mean they’re not analogous, and you’re making them analogous.

PB: You mean if all other variables were held constant and the Scandinavians became more faithful, the murder and rape rates would drop?

(Sigh and a long pause)

JM: You’re impossible.

PB: So are you willing to change your mind and agree that helping to rid large numbers of people from an unreliable process of reasoning will not have a detrimental effect on the society?

(Sigh)

PB: Well?

(Sigh)

JM got off to a good start, but instead of pressing after he initially knocked Boghossian back, he gave up. But where JM really went off the track here is with his consequential appeal to immorality. This is defensible, but only if you’re prepared to go into considerably more detail than he was. A much better line of response concerning the negative effect of what would happen if Boghossian got his wish is the inevitable decline and fall of Western society. Atheism is observably parasitical on a religious population and it is much harder for Street Epistemologists to deny falling birth rates and the mass replacement of the increasingly irreligious First World population by religious Third World immigrants than to defend the question of whether people are more or less moral than before.

Of course, it’s hilarious that Boggie interprets (sigh) as “you win, there is no intellectually credible response to the brilliance of your wit and reason” rather than “wow, I cannot believe what a hopeless asshole you are.” Vegas would give shorter odds to Boghossian having a higher-than-normal Asperger’s Quotient than to Peyton Manning facing the 2013 Vikings secondary.

The implications of complexity

I find it remarkable that despite this apparent order of magnitude, (or more), change in the complexity of the DNA code, (now codes), even the genetic scientists who made the discovery are failing to grasp its obvious implications with regards to conventional Neo-Darwinian selectionism:

“For over 40 years we have assumed that DNA changes affecting the genetic code solely impact how proteins are made,” said Stamatoyannopoulos. “Now we know that this basic assumption about reading the human genome missed half of the picture. These new findings highlight that DNA is an incredibly powerful information storage device, which nature has fully exploited in unexpected ways.”

The genetic code is similar for all organisms and is stored in one of the two DNA strands as non-overlapping, linear sequence of nitrogenous bases Adenine (A), Guanine (G), Cytosine (C) and Thymine (T). These four letters are the ‘alphabet’ of the genetic code and are used to write code words. The code consists of three-letter words (also called triplets or codons). There are a total of 64 codons.

Now, researchers have found that the codons, which they refer to as duons, can be used for gene control. The team says that about 15 percent of codons could act as duons and that these bilingual genetic codes have shaped protein evolution.

At this point, one is beginning to wonder if the scientists are so focused on the evolutionary trees that even a copyright notice would somehow escape their attention. Copyright (c) 6000 BC God. All rights reserved. “Well, obviously that is a codal pattern that evolved early in a common ancestor and merely happens to look like alphabetical characters, from which the various divergent mutations didn’t happen to provide any selection advantages.”

Here is the point that so many die-hard evolutionists can’t seem to grasp. Let me try to walk them through the logic of my skepticism with a simple analogy.

Charlie has a car. Charlie is speaking to you in Minneapolis. Charlie says he left Chicago seven hours ago and drove to Minneapolis on a single tank of gas. However, in the car, you discover two receipts, both dated today, from gas stations in Colorado Springs and Sioux Falls.

Now, if you can understand how this indicates that Charlie’s story is false, you should be able to understand how adding an additional order of magnitude of complexity to the DNA programming process completely rules out the time-scale of the conventional Neo-Darwinian selectionist model. There were already real problems with the model, hence the development of hypothesized excuses such as Punctuated Equilibrium.

But by adding the time needed for another level of mutation on top of what was already required by the previous single-code model, I don’t see how it is possible to seriously insist that the conventional natural selection model can hold up in light of this discovery. Now, perhaps I’m missing something, but it seems to me that either the DNA mutation process has to take place considerably faster than has been observed over the past 50 years or a new model will be required.

My guess is that the initial explanatory defense will be that the mutations are more frequent, but more significant using the two-code process, but this is a defense unlikely to do more than buy a little time, as it will soon be possible to observe whether such mutations are actually taking place or not. Remember, the main reason that TENS has been able to survive so long is that its long timescales required resisted observation. If the timescales are shorter and the mutations selected more frequent, then we can observe and falsify them.

And, of course, even if the new, faster model turns out to be correct, this opens up a whole new can of worms that Jonathan Haidt correctly identifies as the likely consequences of a faster evolutionary model:

A wall has long protected respectable evolutionary inquiry from accusations of aiding and abetting racism. That wall is the belief that genetic change happens at such a glacial pace that there simply was not time, in the 50,000 years since humans spread out from Africa, for selection pressures to have altered the genome in anything but the most trivial way (e.g., changes in skin color and nose shape were adaptive responses to cold climates). Evolutionary psychology has therefore focused on the Pleistocene era – the period from about 1.8 million years ago to the dawn of agriculture — during which our common humanity was forged for the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. But the writing is on the wall.

Science is more dangerous than religion

In TIA, I pointed out that if the New Atheists were consistent, they would be arguing for the elimination of science on the same basis that they argue for the end of religion. After all, it is science that presently poses the only serious dangers to Mankind and while it is science that is presently causing a tremendous number of casualties around the world.

Remember, the worst religious crime of the entire Middle Ages was the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in which King Charles IX of France ordered an estimated 10,000 Huegenots killed. Now Karl Denninger draws our attention to an article in Forbes concerning the estimated consequences of a single case of apparent “research misconduct”:

Last summer British researchers provoked concern when they published a paper raising the possibility that by following an established guideline UK doctors may have caused as many as 10,000 deaths each year. Now they have gone a step further and published an estimate that the same guideline may have led to the deaths of as many as 800,00 people in Europe over the last five years. The finding, they write, “is so large that the only context in the last 50 years comes from the largest scale professional failures in the political sphere.” The 800,000 deaths are comparable in size to the worst cases of genocide and mass murder in recent history. In their new article published in the European Heart Journal, Graham Cole and Darrel Francis continue to explore the extent and implications of the damage caused by the Don Poldermans research misconduct case.

This isn’t to say there are not benefits to science, of course, but the problem is that virtually no one ever pays any attention to its risks, which is precisely why this sort of human tragedy is possible. Moreover, the reason it can happen is because science as it is actually practiced falls very far short of the ideal Science that exists only in the minds of its fetishists.

Perhaps it would be wise for doctors to return to the pre-scientific concept of: First, Do No Harm.

It’s also worth noting that no priest or cleric has ever exploded a nuclear bomb in the name of Allah, Jesus Christ, or Damballah Wedo. There have been at least 2,084 nuclear explosions set off by scientists.

Democracy in Virginia

Virginia’s attorney general single-handedly overturns the will of Virginia’s voters:

Virginia’s attorney general has concluded that the state’s ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional and he will no longer defend it in federal lawsuits challenging it, his office said Thursday. In an email to The Associated Press, Michael Kelly, a spokesman for Attorney General Mark Herring, said the state will instead side with the plaintiffs who are seeking to have the ban struck down.

I find it interesting that homosexual advocates think that overturning the will of the people is a good idea, when history clearly demonstrates that what cannot be imposed by votes will eventually be imposed by force. All this sort of thing does is demonstrate what the extremists have been pointing out for decades: democracy in the United States is a sham.

It’s fascinating to see that the USA is now observably less democratic than Uganda and other African states where homosexual activities have been outlawed. Imagine if positions were reversed and the Ugandan people voted to legalized homosexuality, but a single official overturned them and announced that it would remain criminalized. What would the reaction of the US media be?