The dangers of day care

Is a mother’s career really worth the loss of a child? And whatever happened to the liberal’s customary “if it saves just one child’s life” standard?

A Star Tribune examination of hundreds of public records shows that the number of children dying in child care has nearly doubled in the past five years — reaching the rate of one per month. Nearly all the deaths have occurred at in-home providers (also known as family care), and most involved a child sleeping. The newspaper’s investigation also found more unsafe-sleep citations, such as lack of training or children in unsafe sleep positions, at in-home settings than at large child-care centers.

The Department of Human Services (DHS), the state’s top child-care regulator, is treating the rise in deaths as a public health crisis. “It’s huge,” said DHS Inspector General Jerry Kerber. “It makes it clear that something has got to be done. What that something is, I think, is going to take the work. … It’s completely unacceptable.”

Using a state licensing website, the Star Tribune reviewed 217 licensed family homes and 185 child-care centers that have been cited since July 2010 for violations of state regulations. Some 20 percent of these family homes were cited for having children in unsafe sleeping positions — such as sleeping on open beds or in mechanical swings — or sleeping with heavy blankets that present suffocation hazards. About 12 percent of the child-care centers were cited for such violations.

What should be done is that married women with young children should be encouraged and given financial incentives to stay home and raise them. What will be done, I suspect, is a useless increase in regulation, perhaps combined with a ban on family homes that will no doubt be strongly supported by the corporations that own the large child-care centers.

What is particularly unfortunate about this incident is that it made almost no financial sense for the baby to be in day care anyhow. “The Fletchers’ tragedy started with a dilemma faced by thousands of working parents across Minnesota. Just weeks after Blake was born, in February of that year, Amanda was making plans to return to her $9-an-hour job as a medical records clerk. “It’s kind of the American way,” she said. “You have the baby, you stay home with them and then you are back to work to support your family.” So they began looking for child care. They weighed cost, convenience and availability of providers in Park Rapids. They found that a local child-care center would charge $120 per month more than in-home providers. That’s not unusual in Minnesota, where the average annual cost of infant care in a center is $12,900, third-highest in the nation.”

In other words, Amanda Fletcher had to work 1,433 hours per year – 35 weeks – simply to pay for average child care. Factor in the payroll and income taxes at approximately 20 percent of her income, and she’d have to work 1,791 hours, or 45 weeks, simply to break even. Even with the cheaper and substandard family home day care, at $7,350 per year she had to work 1,020 hours, or half the year, just to pay for it. If that is the American way, then the American way is as economically illiterate as it is unsustainable.

In the absence of action

Breivik happens:

Nearly every time I read something Breivik has said about Europe’s “Islamification” being enabled by the Euro left’s ideology of multiculturalism I find myself thinking: “He’s right.”

This defines me instantly as a “right-wing racist extremist” and therefore both “insane” and “evil.”

I am not alone in my insane and evil right-wing racist extremist thoughts. I reckon that most Europeans think exactly the same way as me. It is merely that they are too afraid, or not allowed, to say so. But I am also certain that neither I nor the majority in Europe are right-wing racist extremists, nor are we insane or evil.

We are simply normal. It’s multiculturalism that is abnormal.

I live in Europe and I’m not sure that I know anyone, left or right, who still genuinely believes multiculturalism is viable. I know some very left-wing people who wish that it was, and who would vehemently oppose any attempt to fix the problems they reluctantly admit, but even they will confess, when pressed, that they don’t hold out any hope of Muslim and African integration, much less the happy vibrancy promised by the multiculturalists. They mostly don’t want to think about it and prefer to hope that the problems somehow goes away on their own.

But they won’t. And in the absence of thought or action by people of generally good faith, action by the more extreme and violent is assured.

I note that the French election results tend to support my assertion, in the immediate aftermath of the Utoya shootings, that Breivik’s actions would be seen as an early harbinger of popular nationalism rather than a tactical blunder that increased popular support for the multiculturalists.

Mailvox: evolutionary ideology

Anonymous Conservative writes of an amusing spin on the “science says conservatives are crazy” theme:

I’ve done a ton of research into the linkage between r/K Selection Theory in Evolutionary Ecology and political ideology. The short of it is
ideology looks like it’s just an intellectual expression of the underlying psychologies motivating r/K behaviors. Obviously, this likely speaks to the mechanism by which our ideologies evolved. That ideology and r/K behaviors are both related to the same DRD4 gene, and that the brain
structures which govern these behaviors is also the same also raises interesting questions about their evolutionary linkage.

This material is pure gold, if you’ve ever wondered why our species has this psychological divide within it. It even answers where exactly
Liberals came from, given their obvious reduced ability to function in what we often call “the state of nature” (ie a K-selected, competitive
state of nature – they would thrive in an r-selected stated of nature, where competitiveness is disfavored).

I’ve run this work by liberals, and it devastating to them, on a visceral level. They do not want to be the bunny-rabbit people, embodying a prey
species psychology within a highly K-selected, competitive species. I posted for a bit at TED, very benignly on this, just to test my
presentation in a hostile, more Liberal environment. I got the feedback and insight I needed (every liberal abandoned any thread this was posted
to), and then I left for six months. When I went back every one of my postings referencing this had been quietly deleted, despite the fact I
purposely was hyper-civil and cited everything I asserted. I don’t think they’ve ever done that to anyone else. Liberals are horrified by this
work, and the implications which naturally arise from it.

Now, I tend to regard all of this evo-psych as a ludicrous joke, especially since I am a confirmed evolutionary skeptic. Because there is so little scientific evidence in support of evolution by natural selection, I conclude it is unlikely to be the mechanism distinguishing the liberal Bunny People from the conservative Wolf People. And, of course, being a libertarian and rejecting both big government ideologies, I have neither a wolf nor a rabbit in that hunt. That being said, this is certainly a potentially useful rhetorical response to the faux-scientific rhetoric so often presented by liberals in a misguided attempt to somehow shame conservatives out of their psychologically inferior ideological perspective. (The very attempt betrays both the intrinsic intellectual flexibility of liberals as well as their inability to understand the other side.) And it certainly explains the way in which liberals are constantly looking to the government as a way to rein in their more successful competitors; because the Bunny People can’t do anything to control the Wolf People themselves, they need to appeal to the Hunter… never stopping to think that the Hunter is just as pleased to shoot bunnies as wolves… and may in fact prefer eating rabbit meat.

Anyhow, if you happen to find this sort of thing interesting, you can read a related paper on it.

No-Growth Nation

I no longer pay any attention to the headline unemployement rate, which is presently reported at 8.1 percent for U3. But it is relatively meaningless due to the statistical shenanigans that are being played with the labor force participation rate, as various commentators are now noting. For me, the more important and less easily gamed statistic is the EPR, or Employment-Population Ratio, which has remained essentially flat, between 58.5 and 58.2 percent, since October 2009. Needless to say, this is not indicative of a growing economy, since it reflects a ratio not seen in the USA since the recession of the early 1980s. One wonders how low the EPR has to fall before people begin to connect their unemployment to the 60 million population increase since 1990 – more than the entire population of the UK – most of which is the result of the post-1986 immigration wave.

Suffice it to say that the present economic depression will eventually kill the claim that immigration is good for the economy as dead as the 1970s recession killed the Keynesian claim that it was impossible to simultaneously have inflation and unemployment.

Mailvox: the fifty trillion dollar question

KJ offers the opportunity to ask a question of some European functionaries:

The former and long-serving vice chancellor of Germany (Dr Joschka Fischer) and the EU’s High Representative for Common and Security Policy (Dr. Javier Solana) are here… debating the economic situation (and potential solutions). The Spaniard is (in summary) saying the situation is looking pretty shit right now and it could be fixed by Germany “opening up” to the rest of poorer/less-productive Europe (when pressed he confessed that includes offering up more of its – i.e. Germany’s – money).
The German is (in summary) saying the situation is looking pretty shit and what we need is to centralise and consolidate political power in Europe. Lol! 4th Reich anyone!? According to both, the Euro breaking up would just be catastrophic. We can ask questions but I don’t have the heart to ask any. It’s so depressing listening to this glossy, typical politic speak from which no straight answers can be extracted. Do you questions for the German Vice Chancellor or EU’s High Representative?

I wrote back: Yes. Since inflation or default are the only way to escape debt of this magnitude, which is the vice-chancellor’s preference? If you get a second question, ask why the successful bank defaults in Iceland have not been permitted to take place in the EU.

Completely admits that historic 1920s inflation destroyed the German middle class, and admits not a result of market developments but intentionally by German central bank to write off war debt, so accepts inflation is going to have to play its part in the current situation!! Greek default, (and kicking them out), is not an option apparently, not forthcoming as to why other than that it would be “hugely detrimental to the rest of Europe”. No luck on the second question; earlier on he had alluded to “endless lawsuits” and “serious capital restrictions” to anyone taking the opt-out of paying their debts which he implied would make that option not viable. I didn’t hear Iceland mentioned at all.

This lends further support to what most of us here have always assumed, that the central banks and governments will inflate. The question is, can they do so? This is where the question of the nature of money, and if credit is more properly considered money or simply the accounting of money, becomes the 50 trillion dollar question. Nate and I will be debating this in the reasonably near future, but I’ll leave you with this thought: given their performance over the last four years, what are the chances that the core monetary assumption of the central banks and governments is correct?

The “skeptic” confesses

After all of his endless babbling about the necessity of uncertainty and the terrible dangers of certainty, to say nothing of his attempts to criticize others on the basis of their presumed certainty, the Prince of Wängst finally comes clean and admits that he is not, in fact, the skeptic he presents himself as being:

I’m a skeptical naturalist. Have been for quite some time now…. The fact is, I am dogmatic. I do have unwavering faith in a set of claims. I may affect suspicion of them, but FAPP, I use them as apodictic truths. So what are they? Since you can only criticize explicit assumptions, it would probably be a good idea to enumerate them here, if only to make the shape of my bias clear.

The No-Dogma Dogma

1) Not all claims are equal.

2) The world is ambiguous because it is supercomplex.

3) Humans are cognitive egoists. We are hardwired to unconsciously game ambiguities to our own advantage – to make scripture out of habit and self-interest.

4) Humans are theoretical morons. We are hardwired for groundless belief in invisible things.

5) The feeling of certainty is a bloody pathological liar.

6) Science is a social cognitive prosthetic, an institution that, when functioning properly, lets us see past our manifold cognitive shortcomings, and produce theoretical knowledge.

7) Contemporary culture, by and large, is bent on concealing the fact of 2, 3, 4, and 5.

These are the biggies, I think, the one’s that trouble me the most because I seem to repeat them ad nauseum.

It’s not exactly up there with the Golden Rule or the Ten Commandments, but at least it’s something, even if they are no more intrinsically valid postulates than “God created the Heavens and the Earth” or “The world rests upon the shell of a giant turtle”. What his dogma reveals is that he’s just another incoherent science fetishist wrapped up in philosopher’s clothing, which is pretty much what I’ve been pointing out since last August. The thing is, even when Bakker is coming clean, he’s still attempting to strike philosophical poses, as there is absolutely no justification for claiming that his dogma is “No-Dogma”. But let’s look at his seven claims.

1) Observably and logically true.
2) Begs the question and debatable at best. Complexity does not necessitate ambiguity.
3) Perhaps, but hardly a certainty. And is contradicted by four.
4) False. Most people are idiots whose actions are not in accordance with their objectives, but not all of them. One wonders what his metric is for supporting the claim of theoretical moronism. If it’s the philosophical definition of knowledge, then we know his claim is false.
5) Trivially true. What feeling is reliable? One seldom sees anyone building bridges using their feelings as a guide.
6) False. Science doesn’t allow us to see past our “cognitive shortcomings”, but rather, acts as a force multiplier for them.
7) False. To the extent contemporary culture is bent on concealing anything, which strictly speaking, doesn’t even make sense, it is demonstrably much more focused on 1 and 5 than any of the others.

It must be admitted that FAPP is an excellent description of Wängsty’s No-Dogma Dogma, especially if one loses the second P. And those with sufficient recall will no doubt note that none of this serves as any rational basis for claiming that certainty is more dangerous, or less moral, than uncertainty.

MF Global, Mark II

Ann Barnhardt says it’s time to get out of the markets entirely:

The Penson ship is going down, it appears. They were in trouble last year when MF Global happened and were looking to dump their European divisions, and they did bounce a bit after MF Global when they unloaded their Aussie holdings, but it looks like it is all but over for them. The stock is cratering, and there is chatter on the net that they are taking forever to get cash withdrawls out, posted and cleared. That’s a very bad sign. MF global was the same way in the weeks before the end. The extreme danger is that the CME is going to do with Penson what they did with MF Global and NOT backstop and keep customers liquid when the end comes. MF Global proved that the CME is no longer going to fulfill its fiduciary duty and will screw clients twelve ways from Sunday without hesitation. DO NOT get caught up in that crap. Just get out of the whole, stinking, festering, putrefied mess. Get out of the markets ENTIRELY.

If you’ve still got your money in the markets, you really need to think again. Something like 90 percent of the trading is now just machines trading with other machines. The brokers are using their customers’ money as a backstop and the regulators aren’t stopping them. You’d arguably be better off, and have a better time, simply going to Vegas and playing blackjack. No one knows when the entire mass of corruption and crap will finally melt down under its own weight, all we really know is that it’s eventually going to happen. But MF Global has taught us that there are no consequences for the financial industry’s criminal shenanigans. No one is going to stop them, most likely because everyone on the inside knows that as soon as the music stops, it all comes crashing down.

Greens causing local warming

This is an application of the “think globally, act locally” directive that I’d certainly never imagined:

Satellite data over a large area in Texas, that is now covered by four of the world’s largest wind farms, found that over a decade the local temperature went up by almost 1C as more turbines are built. This could have long term effects on wildlife living in the immediate areas of larger wind farms. It could also affect regional weather patterns as warmer areas affect the formation of cloud and even wind speeds.

Almost 1 degree Celsius? That’s more warming than we’ve seen in the last decade. Now, obviously there aren’t enough wind farms yet to have a global impact, but if one considers how many would be required to replace conventional sources of energy, it should be obvious that this renders the Green energy program dead prior to arrival. I suppose that leaves Plan B: mass population reduction.

Mailvox: exposing the false skeptic

R. Scott Bakker asks why I believe his skepticism is nothing more than a pose:

And what is ‘faux’ about my skepticism?

That’s a fair question. I can count seven reasons right off the bat, but it’s hardly a comprehensive list.

1. His skepticism predominantly runs in one direction. This indicates that he isn’t actually a skeptic, he is merely using skeptical tactics as a tool in service to his dogma, his very conventional left-liberal dogma. When he talks about the “need” to challenge those who are certain of various things and the danger their certainty presents, he openly demonstrates his anti-skepticism.

2. He does not construct his arguments on the basis of what other people hold to be true. For example, when he has taken exception to what I have written, he does not exclusively utilize my beliefs, convictions, and assumptions, but instead attempts to criticize them on the basis of his own first-order beliefs. Again, he’s showing that he is a dogmatist, using dogmatic dialectic, not a skeptic using skeptical dialectic.

3. He makes absolutely no attempt to reach suspension of judgment. Quite the contrary, as a matter of fact, he repeatedly attempts to judge his interlocutors and place himself in an assumed position of superiority vis-a-vis them. I presume this is why he fears to engage in an actual debate, as opposed to his usual sniping and empty posturing.

4. He does not place competing dogmas in opposition to each other, but rather, attempts to change the discussion to a nonsensical one concerning second-order beliefs. He doesn’t seem to understand that repeatedly asking “why?” and “but how do you know that you know?” is a childish tactic, not a skeptical one.

5. He observably possess little imperturbability or tranquility. By this metric, even I am far more of a skeptic than he will ever be. I can only think of a few authors who are more sensitive and more prone to getting upset over perceived criticism than The Prince of Wängst. That’s how he earned the title in the first place!

6. He assents to many things that are unknown. His confessed faith in science, for example, is profoundly unskeptical.

7. He does not pay any observable heed to nature or the tradition of laws and customs. In fact, he even uses his faux skepticism as an excuse to attack traditional laws and customs as well as those who hold to them.

UPDATE – Cornucopia makes some fascinating admissions concerning the supposed skepticism of the Three Pound Brain gang:

I don’t know of anyone here who has used skepticism in such a way as “we cannot know for sure that water boils at 100 deg.” If that is actually true, nobody here really gives a damn. As far as I now it’s usually limited to categories of moral certainty and things like that, where skepticism may really could have an impact for the better. There’s the Hitler example and the Breivik example. What good might have come if these men had continued to second guess themselves and not convinced themselves they were sure of what they believed?

Maybe you’re generalizing a little too much, in which case I can see why a lot of what’s been said might seem hypocritical. True, a lot of people here are probably to the left of center, which by Phrrhonism standards is probably an off limits opinion. Oh well.

While it may be true that no one there uses skepticism in such a way, all that objection serves to do is prove my point that no one there is a philosophical skeptic. The attempt to limit skepticism to the categories “of moral certainty and things like that” is precisely why I am both mocking the TPB gang for its intellectual incoherence and condemning it for its intellectual dishonesty. There is absolutely no basis in skeptical philosophy for anyone to attempt to limit its scope to the realm of morality; the very idea that “skepticism may really have an impact for the better” on phenomena is itself intrinsically anti-skeptical! Cornucopia is admitting exactly what I accused Scott of doing: utilizing the pretense of skepticism in service of his own dogma.

He brings up two examples, Hitler and Breivik, and asks what good might have come of it if either man had been less sure of himself. Conversely, what if the Wehrmacht generals possessed more certainty, stopped second guessing themselves, and deposed Hitler before the Austrian Anschluss? That would have brought about precisely the same hypothetical good… never mind that preventing World War II and the Holocaust cannot be considered by the skeptic to be an abstract good in the first place. And what if the Norwegian left had been less certain about the good of multiculturalism and not permitted massive third world immigration? That, even more definitely than uncertainty on Breivik’s part, would have prevented the slaughter on Utoya island.

Does everyone see what I did there? That is actual skepticism at work. Balancing two ideas that are opposed to each other and thus reaching suspension of judgment. Philosophical skepticism isn’t something that one can simply apply here and there as one wishes to attack someone else’s beliefs. It’s a system, even an agōgē, if we are to believe Delavagus. What Cornucopia and Scott are advocating isn’t merely dogmatic, anti-skeptical, and incoherent, it’s also dishonest and intellectually reprehensible.

Seau suicide

Former pro football great and Oceanside sports legend Junior Seau has committed suicide, found at his beachfront home with a gunshot wound to the chest, according to multiple sources.

WTH? That’s the sum total of my reaction, except to note that the man could play the game.