Mr. One-term

Or so Gallup appears to indicate:

Gallup released their annual state-by-state presidential approval numbers yesterday, and the results should have 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue very worried. If President Obama carries only those states where he had a net positive approval rating in 2011 (e.g. Michigan where he is up 48 percent to 44 percent), Obama would lose the 2012 election to the Republican nominee 323 electoral votes to 215.

I haven’t been hearing as many rumblings about Democrats attempting to encourage Obama to step aside; most of them now appear to involve Biden stepping down as vice-president. But I wouldn’t be convinced that he won’t until he actually accepts the nomination at the Democratic convention this summer. In addition to the eligibility and intra-party pressure issues, Obama simply doesn’t strike me as the sort of personality who is willing to lose when he has the option of claiming instead that he didn’t even try to win.

The death of sex

This can’t help Japan’s demographic decline:

A startling number of Japanese youths have turned their backs on sex and relationships, a new survey has found. The survey, conducted by the Japan Family Planning Association, found that 36% of males aged 16 to 19 said that they had “no interest” in or even “despised” sex. That’s almost a 19% increase since the survey was last conducted in 2008.

If that’s not bad enough, The Wall Street Journal reports that a whopping 59% of female respondents aged 16 to 19 said they were uninterested in or averse to sex, a near 12% increase since 2008.

Combine an economic downturn with the increasing excellence of porn and video games, then throw in female economic independence and this is the result. For all that they are decried as soshoku danshi, the position of the “herbivores” is a perfectly reasonable one.

People often point out that “a real woman” is better than the autoerotic options, but the fact is that a) the real women tend to come with considerably more negatives than they did 50 years ago and b) the gap between a real woman and autoerotica has narrowed considerably in that time, especially for men who are not in the upper half of the socio-sexual rankings.

Throw in the difference in time and money expenditure, and one can see it is a real testimony to how highly men value actual women when one considers how compelling the alternatives have become in the last two decades.

Mailvox: statistical illiteracy

dh appears to find it hard to distinguish between “X” and “virtually X”:

This will be difficult for VD to walk back in the future when he wants to try to hold his various intellectual foes to account for words they use. “Virtually Impossible” = “something that happens every day”. Got it.

First, as I have had to point out many times before, the purpose of an adjective or an adverb is to modify a word. Therefore, something that is “virtually impossible” is, by definition, not impossible. It is merely highly improbable. Does the state senator’s comment qualify?

As I pointed out in the comments, the Center for Disease Control reported that an average of 473 white men were annually infected with HIV through heterosexual contact over the course of a four-year statistical study. Now, dh had already admitted that the chances of being infected for anyone, male or female, having heterosexual relations with an infected individual, was 30 in 10,000, or one in 333. Is that sufficiently improbable to qualify as “virtually impossible”? No, I don’t think so. However, we’re not done yet.

However, this does not distinguish between men and women, which is necessary because it is easier to transmit the virus from male to female than from female to male. That is why an average of 841 white women annually contracted the virus through heterosexual contact in the same study. This means that men are estimated to contract the virus at a rate that is about 60 percent of the female rate, thereby lowering the one in 333 figure to around one in 500.

Still not “virtually impossible” in my book, but we’re getting closer. Now we have to take into account the fact that these one in 500 odds only apply to sex with an infected female. So, we have to return to the CDC, which tells us that there are 682,668 Americans presently living with HIV, 26,966 of whom are white females. This represents one in 3,649 of the 98,408,776 white females in America. Note that it is appropriate to include the entire female population here because children are also included in the AIDS statistics that we are citing due to mother-to-child transmission.

Since it isn’t possible to contract the virus from someone who doesn’t have it, this means that a white man who has sex with a white woman has approximately a 1 in 1,824,682 chance of contracting the virus. This compares rather favorably with the 1 in 58,618 chance of being legally executed, the 1 in 147,717 chance of dying in a dog attack, and the 1 in 615,488 chance of dying in a fireworks discharge.

In other words, for a normal white man like Stacey Campfield, it is, in statistical fact, highly improbable, or if you prefer, “virtually impossible”, to acquire the HIV virus, which of course is necessary in order to spread it.

And before anyone starts complaining that white-on-white heterosexual relations doesn’t encompass everyone, I will note that the entire context in which the statement was made concerned the significant difference in practical risk factors among different population demographics. Campfield’s point, and it was entirely correct, is that it is totally absurd to discuss HIV infection as if it presents a similar risk to everyone, regardless of their race, sex, or sexual behavior, which of course is the main reason the mainstream media’s dire predictions of a heterosexual AIDS epidemic, still less “a national disaster as great as a thermonuclear war”, were so wildly incorrect.

And in conclusion, I will point out that in a nation of 310 million people, a “virtually impossible”, one in 1.9 million event is indeed very likely to happen every single day. Or, as is the case here, about 1.3 times per day.

There are more deadbeat moms than dads

At least on a percentage basis:

Census figures show only 57 percent of moms required to pay child support — 385,000 women out of a total of 674,000 — give up some or all of the money they owe. That leaves some 289,000 “deadbeat” mothers out there, a fact that has barely been reported in the media. That compares with 68 percent of dads who pay up, according to the figures….

The Census Bureau last month also released numbers showing fathers paid an average of $3,000 to custodial moms in 1997. Women paid little over half that. Moms also get about 60 percent of what they are owed, whereas dads only get 48 percent. Not only are the dads paying up more when they don’t have custody, but when the court does hand the kids over to dads, they work more than moms who have custody.

I’d heard this was true but I didn’t have any statistical evidence for it before. I would expect that whereas men who don’t make child support payments are subject to the modern form of debtor’s prison, very few, if any women are similarly incarcerated.

Drowned in the swamps of Florida

The charade of the Newt Gingrich comes to its inevitable end:

Last week, New York magazine’s John Heilemann pointed out a deep truth about Newt Gingrich’s peculiar presidential campaign: The very media elite that Gingrich delights in hammering has actually been in his corner all along. The press likes a horse race; the press likes outsize personalities; the press favors an underdog; and the press even takes a strange sort of delight in being ruthlessly attacked.

Of course most political reporters don’t want Gingrich in the White House. But they’ve had every incentive to keep him in the headlines and overrate his odds of defeating Mitt Romney for the nomination.

Tuesday night’s Floridian drubbing won’t change those incentives, so we can expect a last burst of media chatter about how Gingrich could still recover, ride a wilderness campaign to a Super Tuesday comeback and fight Romney tooth and nail all the way to the convention. But chatter is all it will be. For Gingrich and his media enablers alike, the dream died in Florida….

The sooner Gingrich is out, the better. The only substantive choice is between Mitt Romney and Ron Paul. Even if Romney ultimately turns out to be the clear and unabashed choice of Republicans, as I expect him to be, at least people will have been presented a clear choice between debt-laden doom and the only way out of the banking abyss.

Homeschool or Die, part 39

I think providing this public school experience is going to be a real challenge for most homeschooling parents:

A Los Angeles elementary school teacher was charged with committing lewd acts against nearly two dozen students after a film processor gave authorities bondage-style photographs showing children in blindfolds with their mouths taped, and some with cockroaches on their faces, authorities said Tuesday.

Mark Berndt, 61, was arrested Monday at his Torrance home and remained jailed on $2.3 million bail, according to a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department statement. The charges involve 23 boys and girls ages 7 to 10 between 2008 and 2010

In fairness to Mr. Berndt, the combination of cockroaches and prepubescent boys is pretty hard to resist… sweet Kinsey, but even the Marquis de Sade would probably be inclined to look at the guy askance and wonder what was wrong with him. Anyhow, I would be deeply skeptical of any man who voluntarily chooses to work as an elementary school teacher under the current public school regime. These days, I’d probably be more surprised to learn a male elementary school teacher didn’t have some sort of abnormal sexual orientation.

Do they really want to play that game?

Gay activists really don’t appear to be all that intelligent. Simply because they’ve been permitted to prance out of the closet with impunity for a few decades across a decadent and declining West, they suddenly think they can start discriminating against the majority of the population who believe, on the basis of considerable material evidence, that homosexuals are an immoral, abnormal, and disease-ridden section of the citizenry:

A restaurant in Knoxville, Tennessee refused to serve state Sen. Stacey Campfield, the man who sponsored the state’s “don’t say gay” bill, compared homosexuality to bestiality, and most recently told Michelangelo Signorile that it’s virtually impossible to spread HIV/AIDS through heterosexual sex. “I hope that Stacy Campfield now knows what if feels like to be unfairly discriminated against,” the Bistro at the Bijou wrote on its Facebook wall on Sunday.

Don’t get me wrong. As long as they leave the children alone, I have nothing for or against gays, and I completely support the right of the Bistro at the Bijou to not serve anyone it doesn’t want to serve. I’m a libertarian and I fully support everyone’s right to parachute into Hell, (or for our godless friends, into the Void), in the specific manner of his choosing. Of course, I also support the right of everyone else to choose not to do business with anyone, for any reason, and I am under the impression that, by definition, the population demographics don’t tend to favor the abnormally oriented. It strike me as being akin to bringing a toothpick to the battle of Kursk.

There is some seriously perverse illogic being exhibited here if the gay community thinks it can successfully justify practicing active discrimination against its political opponents while simultaneously decrying everyone else’s ability to exert their Constitutional rights of free association. And it also demonstrates a stunning lack of foresight – although I suppose that’s not really all that stunning among a community dumb enough to actively fight against quarantining the confirmed carriers of a lethal sexual disease – as one would think they would be far more concerned about importing millions of potential voters who believe homosexuals should have walls dropped on them than they are about the fairly conventional opinions of a state legislator.

The consequences of a Straight-Queer discrimination war are just too terrible to contemplate. Think about those poor straight Hollywood actors, choreographers, interior decorators, Broadway playwrights, elementary school teachers, and Republican senators, who would all find themselves shunned by their peers. I have no doubt it would make life very uncomfortable for Rand Paul and at least five or six other men across the country.

Selective and belated protest

Karl Denninger, himself a Catholic, points out the absurdity of the Roman Catholic Church finally finding something in Medicaid to which it can object:

The Church already supported this unjust law for decades. By supporting mandated cost-shifting of medical care and the tax system that funds it, most-particularly (but not limited to) Medicaid, the Catholic Church has long supported these procedures with their direct employment tax dollars as well as espousing the belief that the Church laity is morally (say much less legally) bound to pay said taxes despite the fact that some part of those taxes, no matter how small, is used to fund these procedures, drugs and devices.

You, Mr. Sample, along with the rest of the Bishops emitting this speech and all the prelates who gave this sermon (or any derivative of it) are hypocrites. Forced cost-shifting of “procedures that violate conscience” was just fine so long as it could be foisted off on the congregation and in fact was fine so long as it was “hidden” among the weeds!

The Church has been paying its employment taxes without complaint just like everyone else, even though Medicaid provides for birth control pills and other related services including, in some cases, abortion!

There has been no organized objection, no refusal to pay those taxes and no call for the laity to refuse to pay those taxes.

Now, Catholic Bishops and prelates, you see the price of your own hypocritical behavior and “forced charity.” Rather than stand on liberty, personal choice and conscience you have deigned to seize only on this specific instance in Obamacare while leaving the provision of Medicaid, which everyone has to pay for that has earned income or pays employees, including the Church, alone!

Where were you in the 1980s? In the 1990s? In the 2000s? When Obamacare was being debated — and Catholic Charities supported it? Oh, it was all ok then, because you felt Catholics had an obligation to cede our particular moral values for the “poor” and “less advantaged” irrespective of how that need for care happened and irrespective of personal liberty, freedom and morality.

Unfortunately, while most people are idiots, even non-idiots are completely incapable of drawing logical conclusions concerning the probable consequences of current trends. I remember how my father’s political activism was regarded with amused indulgence by a friend of his, who believed that his concerns about the creeping expansion of government were completely overblown. It didn’t matter how many new laws and bureaucratic outrages were cited by my father, they were always waved off as trivial and irrelevant. However, once the State of Minnesota announced its plans for revising health insurance, which had a direct and negative effect on this friend’s income, he suddenly became tremendously concerned about the terrible dangers of government involvement in the economy.

It was, of course, much too late by that time. And since he had never had any concerns about the effects of government expansion on others, he had neither right nor reason to expect anyone else would give a damn about their effects on him. Thus the State conquers, slowly, inexorably, laying one small brick at a time.

I think it is great that the Roman Catholic Church is finally being leashed and brought to heel. Perhaps now it will finally understand that a government that possesses the power to dictate to others in accordance with your wishes is a government with the power to dictate to you in accordance with the wishes of others. The Church has always been at its best when it is standing in opposition to the governments of the world, and at its worst when it is working in collaboration with them.

The deathwatch begins

Never let it be said that we are anti-science here. Let the record reflect that we have observed, we have hypothesized, and now we shall test the Curie-Hultgreen syndrome’s performance as a predictive model:

It is not a region known for its promotion of equal rights for women. However, a 28-year-old woman from Dubai has struck a blow for her Arabic sisters after becoming a train driver for the city’s Metro system. Not only is Mariam Al Safar the first female in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to get behind the controls of a train – she is also the first in the Middle East.

A pioneer! A female pioneer! I daresay I am more genuinely excited than the most hardened feminist about this. Needless to say, I shall be keeping an eye out for the eventual reappearance of Ms Al Safar’s name in the news.

The True and Obscure History of Psykosonik, part III

The enthusiastic response to our first collaboration, Sex Me Up, made Paul realize that somehow, we had inadvertently laid what could be the foundation of a pretty good band. The DJ at The Perimeter played the song every Friday and Saturday night at the height of the evening, and within two weeks, people knew the lyrics and were shouting out the climactic phrases. Of course, we didn’t have a name for the band, we didn’t have any other songs, and we didn’t have the ability to play anywhere even if we’d been asked given the fact that it was a two-man band, only one of whom had any significant musical talent. Fortunately, he had enough for the two of us.

Paul was just getting into reading Mondo 2000 at the time and I was a huge fan of William Gibson throughout high school and college, so it was natural that most of our ideas for a band name revolved around the cyberpunk theme, (which, strangely enough, was a neologism coined by the writer with whom I would later collaborate, Bruce Bethke). Most of our ideas came right out of Gibson; I can remember Burning Chrome and Chrome 23 being two of the potential names discussed and rejected. I really liked the name Mona Lisa Overdrive, but it was so obvious and recognizable that we never even considered it.  However, I did scan the cover of the paperback version, which later paid some unexpected dividends.

I think it was Paul who suggested stealing a line from our own song for the band name. In Sex Me Up, just before the guitar solo, by way of introducing it, I said “Go psycho sonic at the count of three.”  Paul liked the idea of using “Psycho Sonic” as a name since it was descriptive of the sound we wanted to create, combining fast dance beats, funky bass lines, rock guitar, and an aggressive attitude. We also thought it was a pretty good description of our partnership, since he brought the Sonic while I more or less provided the Psycho. We didn’t really have a musical model, as we both knew that the band we liked best, Duran Duran, was entirely outmoded, but to the very limited extent that we wanted to imitate anything out there, it was the EMF song Unbelievable. That wasn’t what we wanted to do, exactly, but it served as a useful reference point of sorts.

My one reservation about the name was that I considered Psycho Sonic to be too reminiscent of Sonic Youth, which I always thought was rather a lame name for a band, with shades of “Up With People” or “Hitler Youth”. For some reason, I never thought of Sonic the Hedgehog even though I had a Sega Genesis and the game had recently come out. But I liked the name as well as Paul’s reasoning, so we decided to put the words together and to further distinguish it by spelling it with “k” in the place of the hard “c”. Thus Psykosonik was formed.

We knew we needed more members and more songs, so we set about finding the former and writing the latter that winter. The second song we wrote was a bizarre melange of the cyberpunk motif and my political nihilism; it’s interesting to look back from the distance of 20 years, 10 of them spent writing national political commentary, and see what an unadulterated anarchist I was at the time. I scribbled down some lyrics, Paul laid down a fast beat and bassline over which we recorded some vocals, and I went off to the Bay Area for two weeks in a futile, but ultimately worthwhile attempt to convince companies like Creative Labs, Diamond, and Hercules to abandon their investment into video acceleration in favor of the radical new idea of 3D hardware acceleration.

Upon my return, the first thing I did was to drive to Paul’s condo to hear what he was promising was the finished version of Down to the Ground.  The end result was even better than I had imagined, as he had thrown in a Prince-like guitar solo in at the end and the final product was even more energetic than our first song.  I particularly liked the way the sampled crowd noise abruptly cuts off at the end, making it readily apparent that it isn’t real. We sat and listened to it five or six times in a row, when Paul mused that the two songs were so good, he thought we might be able to get a record deal on the strength of them.

Although a song named Down to the Ground can be found on the first Psykosonik album, it is a very, very different version than the one we originally recorded.  The album version is not a bad song, in fact, I still quite like what we usually called “the lush mix”, but in retrospect, I think it really tends to pale in comparison with raw energy of the original.

And yes, “Feel the blade of ’89” absolutely refers to the French Revolution of 1789.

The one thing we decided we absolutely needed if we were ever going to play live was a drummer; while neither of us minded electronics in the least, we both always thought it was lame when there was no visible percussion, especially for music that was going to be as percussion-heavy as ours was looking to be. Although Paul’s younger brother Nick had been his drummer in Smilehouse, Paul said that he was really impressed with how well Nick’s friend, who was barely out of high school, had managed to blend live drums with the programmed ones when we had played at the frat party. Apparently that is rather difficult to do well.  Since I didn’t know any drummers myself and found Mike to be likeable and extremely easy-going, I had no objections. We invited him to join the band and he accepted.

Thanks to his boosting of our two songs at the nightclubs around town, we’d become friends with the aforementioned nightclub DJ, who was a cameraman at the local ABC news affiliate during the day.  That New Year’s Eve, Paul and I ended up going out in a group that included him and his girlfriend Giselle. Paul noticed that Dan had some pretty serious music equipment at his place, which combined with his finely-tuned dance music sensibilities, sparked a discussion that culminated in an decision to invite him to join the band.  Psykosonik not only had two songs under its belt, it was now complete.