Euro 2012 Day 1

I didn’t watch Greece-Poland because, well, it was Greece and Poland. It sounds like it was a 1-1 snoozefest enlivened only by the referee, who is a card-happy monster from La Liga that sent off a Greek defender in the first half and the Polish goalie in the second. Russia-Czech Republic was interesting mostly because the Russian attack is seriously lethal. It could have easily been 7-1 if Kerzhakov had any ability whatsoever to even put the ball on goal, forget actually putting it in the net. After what seemed like the 45th perfect little through ball past the defense, he blasted a one-touch shot from about 8 meters out that was wider than Vanderjagt’s miss against the Steelers. That was enough for the Russian manager, who promptly took him out. It was a shame, because Kerzhakov was always in the right place at the right time, demanding the ball from the midfield by virtue of being the optimal pass, only to look like someone who had never played soccer before.

Dzagoev promptly justified the manager’s move, as Kerzhakov’s absence meant the Russian midfield began targeting him with its passes and he promptly buried the very sort of ball that Kerzhakov had been missing in the back of the net. The substitute striker, Pavlyuchenko, then put on what was one of the most simultaneously selfish, stubborn, and brilliant displays I’ve ever seen, taking on three Czech defenders at the left top of the box, staunchly refusing to pass or cross it, then somehow firing a hard, almost Cruyffian-turn shot past the Czech goalie. The Czechs really weren’t bad, but the Russians were an order of magnitude better.

Israel and Immigration II

Chelm continues to insist that Vox is Wrong in Comparing Israel’s African Immigrant Problem and the Medieval Jewish Expulsions:

This post is going to be dedicated to Vox’s assertion that Israel’s deportation of African Immigrants would provide and ex post facto justification of the medieval deportations of Jews and the Arab expulsions in the 1950s. This is of course, laughable, but before I start, I want to point out a few places where Vox has conceded my arguments in his last post on the subject. Vox wrote:

I do agree that Americans are largely unprepared for European openness about matters of race in general and Jews in particular. I would simply assert that I am using primarily American language on the blog, though I suppose it’s entirely possible that I’m not always as conscious of the distinctions anymore given how long it has been since I left.

In this paragraph Vox has conceded the following points:

He did not dispute that there is a correlation between the frequency anti-semitic speech and actual violence against Jews.
He did not dispute that an increase in anti-semitic speech often proceeds actual violence against Jews.
And that his writing regarding Jews can reasonably be viewed as a change in discourse for the subject of Jews in America… so can be reasonably be classified as dangerous.

…which was the the whole point of my original post, that the alt-right philosophy is dangerous. So, thank you Vox for conceding the point.

I found this to be more than a little amusing, because Chelm has confused a failure to dispute something with a concession. In that paragraph, I also failed to dispute the Moon landings, the historical legitimacy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the superiority of the Green Bay Packers, and the Palestinian right of return. But I did not concede any of those things, any more than I conceded the four points that Chelm has tried to claim that I conceded. In his eagerness to score a point and claim a concession, Chelm has done nothing more than attack his own credibility.

But since this is a teachable moment, I will not use this minor debacle as an excuse to blow off the rest of his argument, but will proceed to read through it.

First, I would like to remind Vox that I believe that a mass deportation of the 60,000 African immigrants in Israel is not likely to happen. The government of Israel has willingly taken them into the country (if unlawfully) and now bears some responsibility for their welfare. Even the proposals of deportation floated by the Israeli government envisions giving the immigrants a stipend after deporting them.

While I’m sure we are all interested in Chelm’s ability to prognosticate, it would appear events have already overtaken his stated opinion, as Netanyahu has ordered the deportation of 25,000 of the 60,000 undocumented workers, or as the Israelis describe them, illegal infiltrators. “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered his ministers to accelerate efforts to deport citizens of South Sudan, the Ivory Coast, Ghana and Ethiopia who are living in Israel illegally on Sunday.” Moreover, the other 35,000 are going to be installed in desert holding facilities, as Netanyahu “ordered a substantial expansion of the Saharonim lockup in the Negev.” For all that the Jews never seem to stop complaining about the Jewish ghettos of Europe, they can’t honestly say that they spent the entire Middle Ages jailed in the desert.

I take issue with his characterization of the deportations as non-violent. All deportation actions are by their very nature violent, in that the threat of violence is required to compel compliance with the deportation order. I assume he is using non-violent vs. violent as a proxy for the government exercising legitimate vs illegitimate authority… and that he believes that the massacres were illegitimate, while deportations were a legitimate exercise of the authority of state. If that is the case, he should have said so, because to characterize the deportations as non-violent fits a rhetorical pattern Vox has of minimizing and trivializing the impact of European persecution of the Jews and reveals to some extent his bias against them.

This is a red herring. First, the threat of violence is not the use of violence. Second, if all deportations are intrinsically violent, then obviously the Israeli deportations of the Africans are violent as well and there is no point in getting into the issue as it proves my assertion of equivalence. The reason that I was pointing out the non-violent nature of the historical Jewish deportations is because I was being careful to distinguish between them and the pogroms which were often very violent in nature. But Chelm is correct and I believe that the massacres were illegitimate – note that many of them were even illegal at the time, and some of them, such as the worst one in English history, brought down the wrath of the king on those who committed them – whereas the deportations were a legitimate exercise of the relevant authority then as now.

I will address the rest of his post tomorrow. However, Chelm may wish to note that his attempt to deny the historical parallels is being made increasingly difficult by the actions of the people in Israel.

“An apartment housing 10 Eritreans has been firebombed in Jerusalem, against the backdrop of rising anti-migrant sentiment in Israel. Four of the occupants were taken to hospital suffering burns and smoke inhalation. Graffiti sprayed on the walls of the building said: “Get out of the neighbourhood.” During a tour of the fence on Sunday, a member of the Israeli parliament said that troops should fire on anyone attempting to cross the border illegally. “Anyone that penetrates Israel’s border should be shot, a Swedish tourist, Sudanese from Eritrea, Eritreans from Sudan, Asians from Sinai. Whoever touches Israel’s border – shot,” said Aryeh Eldad.”

The demolition proceeds

Homogamy has never been about the imitation of marriage. The vast majority of gays don’t even want the public pretense of monogamy that “gay marriage” typically entails. The entire political effort has never been much more than an attempt to force the organized Church to sacrifice Christian values and submit to the mores of the secular state. While the American aspect of the movement is vowing up and down that no church will be forced to perform such “marriages”, the spearhead Danish aspect has already made it clear that no resistance of the state-imposed morality will be permitted.

The country’s parliament voted through the new law on same-sex marriage by a large majority, making it mandatory for all churches to conduct gay marriages. Denmark’s church minister, Manu Sareen, called the vote “historic”. “I think it’s very important to give all members of the church the possibility to get married. Today, it’s only heterosexual couples.”

Denmark has been a pioneer in gay rights since 1989, when it became the first country in the world to offer civil unions for gay couples.

This sort of thing is why I am completely relaxed about the coming decline and devastation of the secular West. Seldom has a civilization more fully merited its fate. The secular hypothesis is that a society built upon a foundation of Christian morality can not only survive, but thrive, after systematically demolishing its foundation. Seculars believe they have already proved the validity of the hypothesis by the fact that the societies of the West have not completely crumbled yet, but they forget that they have only removed a portion of the foundation to date and the demolition process continues. The empirical test is not over, indeed, it is barely underway.

At least it gets the kids outside

I would have thought it would be difficult to come up with a less intelligent, more oblivious response to my explication of why David Sloan Wilson was correct to declare that PZ Myers does not think or act like a scientist when it comes to religion. But somehow, someone named David Futrelle actually managed to surpasss the Fowl Atheist when he asked “Does Manosphere Blogger Vox Day Really Support the Murder and Mutilation of Women?”

I suppose it depends. Does a hobby counts as “support”? Anyhow, Mr. Futrelle managed to rise from his fainting couch long enough to demonstrate that he has all the reading comprehension of an illiterate, brain-damaged chimpanzee raised in poverty by a single mother:

In one of the most repellant manosphere rants I’ve run across yet, Vox attempts to rebut PZ Myers’ critiques of evolutionary psychology with a series of bizarre and hateful assertions about women, offering his own “scientific” rationales for keeping women down. Is this all somehow satire on his part? He certainly seems sincere.

TRIGGER WARNING for all that follows; Vox explicitly defends the maiming and murder of women….

Despite Vox Day’s repellent ideas about women – and his proud racism – he’s an influential figure in the manosphere, mentioned approvingly and regularly cited by others who present themselves as more moderate voices. It may not be a shock that the reactionary antifeminist blogger Dalrock includes Vox in his blogroll, and cites his work with approval (see here and here for examples). But, astoundingly, he’s also regularly cited approvingly by antifeminist “relationship expert” Susan Walsh of Hooking Up Smart (see here, here, and here). And she has even written at least one guest post on Vox’s “game blog” Alpha Game. At this point I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked by any of this. But I still am.

Based on the level of intellectual sophistication shown here, I would expect Mr. Futrelle to be surprised every time he hears voices come out of the magic box with the moving lights. I wasn’t attempting to “rebut PZ Myers’ critiques of evolutionary psychology with a series of bizarre and hateful assertions about women”, I wasn’t attempting to rebut anything. I was simply demonstrating that Wilson was correct and Myers’s arguments, if they can even be described as such, were intrinsically unscientific. Which I subsequently proved, utilizing PZ Myers’s own words, to show that scientific answers to his questions could be provided and that his own arguments were based on his biological predisposition, his culture, and his personal values rather than science, thus supporting Wilson’s claim. The fact that I can make an intellectual case does not mean that I subscribe to it any more than every defense attorney who argues a case on behalf of a client believes in his client’s innocence. Pointing out that the maiming and murder of women can be defended on various grounds is not tantamount to defending it on any of them.

Note that Myers himself wrote the following about the Taliban’s oppression of women. “We cannot, though, say a priori that it is wrong because abusing and denigrating half the population is unconscionable and vile, because that is not a scientific foundation for the conclusion.” I am sure we can all eagerly anticipate Mr. Futrelle’s next histrionic post: Does Godless Blogger PZ Myers Really Support Sharia and Stoning Women?

And one more thing. Yes, Mr. Futrelle, in my mind “female fetuses are “unborn women.”” At least, those female fetuses carried by members of the species known as homo sapiens sapiens. What on Earth do you think they are? Chimpanzees? Caterpillars? Prospective unicorns?

Still sniping, still running

It would appear PZ Myers is now too delicate to respond to me directly, so he’s responding to someone else quoting what I wrote, which totally doesn’t count as responding:

I don’t do debates anymore. One reason is that they give the other side far too much credibility; another is that the format rewards rhetoric, not honesty. But the other big reason is sheer disgust at the spectacle these loons can put on.

Imagine this metaphorical situation: you’re at a debate, and your opponent stands up and in the first round, starts punching himself in the face. Punching hard, until the blood spurts in great red rivers out of his nose. You’re aghast, but when your turn comes up, you try to make your points; in rebuttal, he pulls out a knife and starts gouging out one of his eyeballs. You just want to stop the whole debacle, call an ambulance, and have the poor warped goon hauled away. But then afterwards, he crows victory.

That’s a bit of hyperbole, but not by much. Theodore Beale, aka Vox Day, has leapt upon my post in which I used the status of women as evidence that religion does harm to humanity, and eagerly tries to rebut me in a spectacular act of self-mutilation. I won’t link directly to poor sick Theodore Beale — he needs psychiatric help — but fortunately Dave Futrelle quotes him extensively, so you can get the gist without feeding Beale’s pathology directly.

Right, that’s why the man whose intellectual courage inspired me to dub him “The Fowl Atheist” doesn’t debate anyone. It’s not because he can’t argue his way out of a paper bag and knows that he’ll get his pudgy ass exposed to the public before it is kicked all over the place, it’s because he’s too much of a humanitarian. You’d think he would know no one is going to buy that excuse, he’s a high-AQ militant atheist after all. He’s a fierce and focused hunter, with hunter’s hands and hunter’s eyes, not Sister Mary Margaret feeding the poor at the homeless shelter! I find it a little ironic that a man who openly admits to being closer to having Asperger’s Syndrome than being neurotypical is attempting to claim I need psychiatric help.

I never cease to find amusing how quickly these inept atheists resort to accusations of mental illness whenever their illogic is publicly illuminated and dissected. Why, one might almost begin to suspect they are projecting!

But there’s enough bile to make you wonder. I was arguing that many features of religion clearly don’t benefit women, so I asked:

How does throwing acid in their faces when they demand independence from men benefit women?

So Teddy rebuts that in the most appalling way.

[F]emale independence is strongly correlated with a whole host of social ills. Using the utilitarian metric favored by most atheists, a few acid-burned faces is a small price to pay for lasting marriages, stable families, legitimate children, low levels of debt, strong currencies, affordable housing, homogenous populations, low levels of crime, and demographic stability. If PZ has turned against utilitarianism or the concept of the collective welfare trumping the interests of the individual, I should be fascinated to hear it.

Say what? So his answer to how this benefits women is to say it’s bad for society for women to be independent, and that honor killings, stonings, and mutilation of women is a small price?

I think he just made my case for me.

Yes, that is precisely the answer. But this doesn’t make his case for him, instead, his response to my scientific answer only confirms Wilson’s original case against him, in which he claimed that PZ doesn’t act or think in a scientific manner. And while Wilson is correct and PZ truly doesn’t think like a scientist in any way, shape, or form, it’s actually worse than that because it’s clear that he also doesn’t understand what he reads. I not only provided an answer to his question that can be empirically and objectively analyzed, it was a scientific answer that was entirely in keeping with PZ’s own previously expressed statements on the subject. Consider what PZ wrote about the Taliban’s oppression of women only two years ago:

I also think that the desire for a successful society is not a scientific premise…it’s a kind of Darwinian criterion, because unsuccessful societies don’t survive. Can we use science to determine whether that is a good strategy for human success? I think we can, but not in the way Harris is trying to do so: we could ask empirically, after the fact, whether the Taliban was successful in expanding, maintaining its population, and responding to its environment in a productive way. We cannot, though, say a priori that it is wrong because abusing and denigrating half the population is unconscionable and vile, because that is not a scientific foundation for the conclusion. It’s an emotional one; it’s also a rational one, given the premise that we should treat all people equitably…but that premise can’t claim scientific justification.

So while the desire for a successful society is not a scientific premise, determining the way in which a society can become successful is. Note that Myers admits that one cannot say throwing acid in a woman’s face when she demands independence is wrong from the scientific perspective. He even acknowledges that science could support, on the basis of the Darwinian criterion, horrific actions in support of societal success and survival. This is not to say he supports such actions, only that his opposition to them is based on entirely non-scientific reasoning. In that previous post, he adds:

I agree with Harris entirely that the oppression of women is an evil, a wrong, a violation of a social contract that all members of a society should share. I just don’t see a scientific reason for that — I see reasons of biological predisposition (we are empathic, social animals), of culture (this is a conclusion of Enlightenment history), and personal values, but not science. Science is an amoral judge: science could find that a slave culture of ant-like servility was a species optimum, or that a strong behavioral sexual dimorphism, where men and women had radically different statuses in society, was an excellent working solution.

So, we see that Wilson was correct. PZ is not thinking as a scientist about these matters, by his own words he is clearly thinking about them according to his biological predisposition, his culture, and his personal values. Of course, the biological predisposition, the culture, and the personal values of those who throw acid in women’s faces to keep them in their place are not only different than PZ’s, but may actually be superior to them in both scientific and moral terms. PZ hasn’t even begun to attempt to make any case for the superiority of his own biological predisposition, culture, and personal values, in fact, he has devoted considerable effort over the years to demonizing the Christian culture in which he was raised.

But how about this: Beale has not made the case that destroying women’s lives is a necessary price to pay for social stability. I reject his bargain; I say we can have a more stable, healthier, stronger society if human beings live in mutually loving and respectful relationships. I do not have to hover over my wife with a threatening jar of acid in order for both of us to live together happily; in fact, a life where I had to compel a partnership with terror would be a horror and a nightmare.

One more. I also asked this:

How does letting women die rather than giving them an abortion benefit women?

Here’s his answer.

Because far more women are aborted than die as a result of their pregnancies going awry. The very idea that letting a few women die is worse than killing literally millions of unborn women shows that PZ not only isn’t thinking like a scientist, he’s quite clearly not thinking rationally at all. If PZ is going to be intellectually consistent here, then he should be quite willing to support the abortion of all black fetuses, since blacks disproportionately commit murder and 17x more people could be saved by aborting black fetuses than permitting the use of abortion to save the life of a mother. 466 American women die in pregnancy every year whereas 8,012 people died at the hands of black murderers in 2010.

A fetus is not a woman. I’m used to hearing those wacky anti-choicers call the fetus a “baby”, with all those emotional connotations, but this is the first time I’ve heard them called “women”.

The racist tirade is just sickening. So now Beale wants us to lump all black people together as “murderers” to justify forced sterilization, as a logical consequence of my values? I’ve heard of that tactic somewhere else before.

Again with the logical fallacies. Here’s a hint: the death of women in back-alley abortions can be directly addressed by legalizing abortion and providing responsible medical treatment; the socioeconomic conditions that create an environment of crime are not addressed by racially-defined forced abortion. If we want to end murders by any population (yes, please), the answer is not the extermination of that population, but the correction of social and economic inequity and providing opportunity for advancement.

Of course I haven’t made the case that destroying women’s lives is a necessary price to pay for social stability. I didn’t need to make that case in order to make my point, which is that the scientific case could be made and that in refusing to consider it, PZ was proving Wilson right about his failure to think like a scientist about it. He can say whatever he likes, but his position would be no weaker if he had instead declared that we can have a more stable, healthier, stronger society if human beings began the day by pledging their loyalty to Yog-Sothoth and committing seven deadly sins each morning before breakfast.

PZ then reveals that in addition to his demonstrated inability to think like a scientist, he’s not even able to think logically. If “a fetus is not a woman”, then obviously “a black fetus is not a black adult”. It’s simple multiplication by zero. If there is no harm done in aborting one fetus, there can be no harm in aborting all the black fetuses in America, plus there will be a net benefit that will save 17 times more lives every single year than merely permitting abortions to save the lives of pregnant women. The logical consequences of PZ’s position on abortion are inescapable. If it is worthwhile to utilize abortion to save 466 pregnant women every year, then it is clearly worthwhile to utilize it to save 8,012 murder victims, as either way, the cost is trivial, since according to PZ, the fetus is not a baby, a woman, or a black adult meriting protection of the law. The appeal to socioeconomic conditions is irrelevant, as PZ is wrong and murders committed by blacks can be directly addressed by utilizing abortion; nonexistent people cannot murder anyone. That there may or may not be other ways of addressing the same social ill does not change that simple and undeniable fact.

I further note that I am not a supporter of abortion for any reason, including the elimination of crime and the life of the mother. I am merely explicating the logical consequences of PZ’s reasoning. Nor is it racist to cite the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report; one could make precisely the same case, although it would be a less effective and efficient one, for the abortion of white fetuses. If PZ doesn’t like the inescapable logical implications of his reasoning, then I suggest he should consider rethinking his assumptions. And if he doesn’t like scientists and non-scientists alike pointing out the obvious fact that he does not reason or behave like a scientist, perhaps he should start trying to actually think like one rather than like an irrational, emotional, atheist propagandist.

And with that, I’m sufficiently repulsed not to want to continue. Beale/Day has apparently been whiningly demanding to debate me for the last few years; now you know why I won’t even consider it. Getting his words as second-hand text is nauseating enough, I’d rather not have to deal with the poisonous little scumbag directly.

Still sniping and running. After all these years, still sniping and running. The thing is, as anyone who has ever fired a gun knows, it’s a lot easier to hit your target if you stand still and take the time to aim at it. Of course, then you have to take the risk that you’re up against a much better marksman who will blow you away before you can even get a shot off….

Two methods, same diagnosis

Karl Denninger calculates how much excessive credit exists in the US economy:

[T]here is no recognition here or elsewhere that the problem is overspending compared to taxation, and counterfeiting credit into the economy by private banks. That’s what led to the mess in the first place and nothing has been done to withdraw that excessive credit — indeed, the distortions to maintain that excessive credit have become extreme as the market would otherwise force it back out all on its own! How bad is this? In the United States alone it’s $37 trillion in size, or about 70% of the total credit in the system today! How did I compute that? Simple — I added up the “extra” credit between GDP and credit growth in the below chart from 1980 to 2008.

Those who have read RGD know that I use a different method, which is the Z1/GDP ratio. It is a little more accurate than Karl’s method, being inherently more up-to-date, but it is better seen as a supplement to his method than a substitute. Z1 is presently $54,134.3 billion, which is currently 3.5x more than the $15,454 billion GDP. So, after four years of economic stagnancy, the debt ratio has marginally improved from 375 percent down to 350 percent. (Note that by my method, we can see that about 10 percent of the $37 trillion excess calculated by Karl has already been eliminated.) Since the historical post-Depression norm that the economy can sustain is around 150 percent, this means the amount of excess credit currently present in the system is around $31 trillion.

In other words, all of the economic pain that the global economy has been through over the last four years is about one-tenth of the amount that is eventually in store for it. Contra most observers’ perceptions, the situation is not getting worse, and at least in the United States it has objectively gotten a little better. The problem is that the situation was much, much worse, and orders of magnitude larger, than anyone who wasn’t looking at the debt figures realized. While it may be shocking to learn that there has been no real economic growth in the USA since 1980, a coldly analytical look at the shabby state of the national infrastructure tends to support the statistics.

RIP Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury — author of The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and many more literary classics — died this morning in Los Angeles, at the age of 91.

Ray Bradbury was one of my consistently favorite authors since I first read The Veldt in junior high. While my memories of other favorite authors from my youth were diminished when I read them later in life, Dandelion Wine remains one of my favorite novels. He also wrote the most powerful Christian science fiction story I’ve ever read; despite never once mentioning Jesus Christ or even delving into Christian theology, he painted an indelible image of the difference between those who do not truly seek and those who find.

He was the master of the small, the personal, and the intimate. Somehow, he managed to capture the essence of childhood in his words. I know some found him too schmalzy and precious, but I think he did a better job of capturing the little joys of life than anyone. He had the gift of giving a story poignancy with just a simple twist, or a turn of phrase; even when his literary tricks had become predictable, they were still emotionally powerful. I also admired his darker side; his was the nervous walk through the warm darkness of a summer night in your hometown, not the icy primordial terror of Lovecraft, the feverish descent into insanity of Maupassant, or the cartoonish schlockfest of modern horror.

I didn’t know Ray Bradbury. I can’t honestly say I will mis him. But I am grateful for him and I am glad that he wrote the books that still have a treasured place in my library.

The end of the evolution debate

It’s always very telling when the so-called scientists resort to wishful thinking and ideological propaganda:

Richard Leakey predicts skepticism over evolution will soon be history. Not that the avowed atheist has any doubts himself. Sometime in the next 15 to 30 years, the Kenyan-born paleoanthropologist expects scientific discoveries will have accelerated to the point that “even the skeptics can accept it. If you get to the stage where you can persuade people on the evidence, that it’s solid, that we are all African, that color is superficial, that stages of development of culture are all interactive,” Leakey says, “then I think we have a chance of a world that will respond better to global challenges.”

Any hope for mankind’s future, he insists, rests on accepting existing scientific evidence of its past…. Leakey, who clearly cherishes investigating the past, is less optimistic about the future. “We may be on the cusp of some very real disasters that have nothing to do with whether the elephant survives, or a cheetah survives, but if we survive.”

Leakey is letting the atheist evolutionary cat out of the bag here. Unlike the likes of Harris, whose revolutionary Enlightenment 2.0 globalism is never advertised and can only be confirmed by carefully reading through his books, Leakey is quite willing to draw the connection between evolution, atheism, multiculturalism, all intended to lead towards the long-term utopian fantasy of rule by a scientific and technocratic global oligarchy.

My prediction is quite the opposite. I am increasingly convinced that genetic science will render the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis scientifically unviable in the same manner it previously required the development of the synthesis by rendering untenable classic fossil-based Darwinian evolution by natural selection. One thing that has escaped most professional biologists, who are neither historians of science nor logicians, is that the increasing complexity of the DNA/RNA interplay along with growing understanding of mutations renders the present evolutionary timelines increasingly improbable. Whereas the decoding of the human and other genomes was supposed to provide not only answers, but even conclusive proof of macroevolution, it has instead raised considerably more questions. And while the growing number of proposed evolutionary mechanisms are not necessarily proof that macroevolution has not happened in the past and is not happening in the present, they do show the need to develop epicycles that is always indicative of a theory that is in trouble and on its way to being falsified and ultimately jettisoned.

Could I be incorrect? Of course. That is why I describe myself as an evolutionary skeptic rather than an anti-evolutionist. But once again, we see a conflict between pattern recognition and scientific consensus, and I expect that as has usually happened before, pattern recognition will win out because scientific consensus is not always science, it is often logical conclusions drawn from science by scientists. And the history of science shows that scientists are, for the most part, inept logicians, which is why they tend to keep making the same type of mistakes with each new generation of scientist. So, I am quite comfortable asserting, contra Leakey, that in 15 years, skepticism over evolution will not only not be history, but will be both more popular and more scientifically credible than it is now.

The lawmen fear the law

I am, of course, moved to tears by the concerns of this fine, upstanding officer of the law:

Every time police Sergeant Joseph Hubbard stops a speeder or serves a search warrant, he says he worries suspects assume they can open fire — without breaking the law. Hubbard, a 17-year veteran of the police department in Jeffersonville, Indiana, says his apprehension stems from a state law approved this year that allows residents to use deadly force in response to the “unlawful intrusion” by a “public servant” to protect themselves and others, or their property.

The solution this is simple: Don’t undertake unlawful intrusions.

The issue arises because of a case in Indiana where the State Supreme Court held that you had no right to resist an unlawful entry by the police.

That’s patent nonsense. An unlawful act by the police is exactly the same, in terms of the law, as that of an armed criminal.

Hey, the police and their propagandists are always telling us that if you don’t do anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to fear. So deal with that, Mr. Law Enforcement Officer. Because, after all, it’s the law!