Death of a White Knight: Episode III

Another would-be White Knight manages to get himself killed unnecessarily:

Wednesday night during a fight outside his Conejo Valley apartment, authorities said. The suspect, who was injured in the fight, was arrested and booked into Ventura County Jail on suspicion of murder, Ventura County sheriff’s officials said. Authorities declined to comment on what sparked the fatal fight. The victim’s daughter said relatives were told he was stabbed while intervening in an altercation between a woman and man….

Barnes died of stab wounds to his torso, said Michael Tellez, a deputy medical examiner. It was unclear if Otal and Barnes knew each other, officials said.

So again I will advise all the deltas and gammas prone to white-knighting: if a man and woman are engaged in a verbal or physical altercation, stay out of it! It’s not your concern and if the man doesn’t attack you, the woman probably will. On a tangential note, it would be very interesting to know if those who thought a woman is justified in aborting her child in order to save herself to raise the rest of her family also believe that it is right for a man to intervene in domestic altercations.

Mailvox: no harm, no foul

The ElusiveWapiti is offended on the blog’s behalf:

Pharyngula makes the list of “Top 100 Blogs” but VP does not. Blasphemy, I’d say.

Actually, that was a pretty good list. I’m delighted to see Karl, Susan, Roissy, Athol, and Ferdinand all receiving well-deserved notice. Ritzholtz’s blog is a good choice too, although I would have liked to see Mish and Steve Keen in the Economics category. Scalzi’s blog used to be quite good when he had the time to post daily, and although I don’t read it now that it’s mostly authors writing about their own books, I can see where that would be appealing to many readers. The list is a bit dated and lefty, since as Instapundit noted, Wonkette is all but dead and Boing Boing is stultifyingly boring.

As for Pharyngula, it is the home of the moderately intelligent, college-educated, angry, and unpopular. Since there is no shortage of such creatures, I think it eminently merits its recognition as a top blog. I wouldn’t characterize it as “smart”, but then, I don’t have an IQ of 100 either. Of course the readers of this blog don’t find it to be intelligent since most of you are more intelligent than PZ, but from the average perspective, it is pretty smart. One can’t be an idiot to get things that completely wrong.

I would be very surprised if VP was ever named on such a list, since even after the publication of RGD you won’t find it on a list of top 100 Economics blogs. Nor do I mind that it isn’t. This blog is too esoteric for the mainstream and too iconoclastic for the moderately intelligent; I would tend to consider it a failure if it was not. What I said about women is also true of men. I don’t expect most people to agree with me because I don’t expect them to be able to understand me.

The problem is that when you make a habit of dealing in the realm of the unthinkable, few can fathom it. So, even when I’m correct about some previously outlandish possibility, I am unlikely to receive any credit for it because such things are considered to be, by definition, black swans. Since no one can possibly have imagined it, no one could have predicted it, therefore any claims to have done so are inherently false. This is but one of the many examples of modern/medieval logic that has, ironically enough, returned to supplant the empiricism that previously usurped its primacy.

Special Needs Mountain

So I went skiing today. And while I don’t completely object to the idea of putting helmets on little kids since they sometimes get going and don’t know how to stop, it is astonishing to see how many adults and teenagers wear them now. It’s ridiculous. I started skiing when I was three and I don’t recall seeing or even hearing of anyone ever impaling their skull on a tree branch.

And another thing. Those short, fat skis that everyone uses nowadays. It’s the Alpine equivalent of people walking around wearing clown shoes with suits. They supposedly make it easier to ski, but when I tried them I found it far too irritating to have to keep my skis apart. So, often I’m the only one on the mountain with what I consider to be proper skis. I suppose I’d feel like a dinosaur if everyone else didn’t look like such retarded clowns.

Loads of time

You really have to wonder about the feminist claims to be “pro-woman” considering how readily they have fed false information to young women in what has proven to be a serious obstacle to the long-term objectives of many of them:

Doctors have issued a stark warning to couples not to leave it too late to try for a baby. With more and more women pursuing careers, they and their partners are leaving parenthood to at least their late thirties. But women aged 35 are six times more likely to have problems conceiving compared to those ten years younger, warns a major study from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.

The report says older parents are making it harder for themselves to have children – and increasing the likelihood of serious medical complications for both mother and baby. By the age of 40, a woman is more likely to have a miscarriage than give birth.

In light of how drenched in feminist propaganda and false biological horologies most young women are today, it is probably necessary for more scientifically astute and family-friendly individuals to take the literal offensive when confronted with the mindless “I’m still young, I have plenty of time” mantra of the average college-educated woman. The correct response is, “of course you do, darling, so long as you don’t mind having two miscarriages and a retardspecial needs child.”

Killing the Internet

Succession riots in Egypt:

Egyptians are telling me Egypt’s internet has been disabled and that mobile phone service may be next. Twitter, used to coordinate public protests, has already been cut off.

This tends to raise the question… why does Obama feel that he needs a kill switch for the US internet?

A very good start

It’s hard to quibble with this first action by Sen. Paul:

In his first major legislative proposal, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul has proposed cutting government spending by $500 billion in a year, including eliminating the Departments of Energy and Housing and Urban Development and most of the Department of Education. Paul, R-Ky., said the plan he rolled out Tuesday would cut almost 40 percent of the country’s projected deficit by abolishing programs that he said are outside the government’s constitutional scope.

Throw in the DEA and I’m sold.

Kristof fails to grok Christianity

I often find it amazing how the various modern perversions of Christianity don’t get it wrong so much as turn it completely on its head:

The National Catholic Reporter newspaper put it best: “Just days before Christians celebrated Christmas, Jesus got evicted.” Yet the person giving Jesus the heave-ho in this case was not a Bethlehem innkeeper. Nor was it an overzealous mayor angering conservatives by pulling down Christmas decorations. Rather, it was a prominent bishop, Thomas Olmsted, stripping St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix of its affiliation with the Roman Catholic diocese.

The hospital’s offense? It had terminated a pregnancy to save the life of the mother. The hospital says the 27-year-old woman, a mother of four children, would almost certainly have died otherwise.

Bishop Olmsted initially excommunicated a nun, Sister Margaret McBride, who had been on the hospital’s ethics committee and had approved of the decision. That seems to have been a failed attempt to bully the hospital into submission, but it refused to cave and continues to employ Sister Margaret. Now the bishop, in effect, is excommunicating the entire hospital — all because it saved a woman’s life.

Unsurprisingly, the New York Times columnist betrays that he has absolutely no understanding of one of the core teachings of Christianity, the very commandment that Jesus gives his disciples. Christianity is not about saving lives, especially not at the expense of others. It is about sacrificing one’s life for others, something that the mother, the nun, and the hospital actually committed murder in order to avoid doing.

This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

The bishop did right to excommunicate those who killed a child in order to potentially save the life of its mother. And if we lived in a moral society, the state would do right to prosecute them.

Tech update

Needless to say, I was much amused by this patent application in light of all of the Macintossers initially dismissing the multibutton approach and declaring how stylistically horrific it is. Clearly it is much better to imitate the multibutton approach, only to do so in a manner that forces one operate by sight instead of by touch and places the virtual buttons directly under one’s palm, if for no other reason than Apple has blessed the approach.

Speaking of comparing the effectiveness of different interface approaches, we’re going to be releasing the performance results of various mice soon and it looks to be a bit of a scandal. We have compiled strong empirical evidence indicating that in between the switch from mechanical rollers to optical sensors and the advent of the the multibutton interface, there has been essentially no actual performance difference between so-called high performance gaming mice and cheap office mice. Here is a comparison of four mice, two of which have multibutton support and two of which do not. The difference in performance between the two multibutton mice is the result of their different approaches to the interface; there is a reason, after all, that clumsy people are described as being “all thumbs”. That comparison marks the fastest speeds recorded at 1920×1200 resolution, whereas the sustainable speeds that one can reasonably expect to maintain in consistent use are about 15% slower on both the conventional and multibutton interfaces.

Finally, on the practical application side, there is a new video focused on Mozilla Firefox and demonstrating how the default Firefox mode operates for those who might be interested.

Dating up means dating older

John Molloy offers some advice to women looking to get married that is based on real world statistical behavior rather than Disney movies and HBO television shows:

One of the most common mistakes young women make is to assume that because they’re ready for marriage in their early- or mid-twenties, the men they date are, as well. But as the above research shows, that’s usually not the case. If a woman is seriously trying to find a husband, she should date men who have reached the age of commitment. She can date men slightly before they reach that age, because by the time she’s gone out with a man for a year, he may have reached the point of being receptive to the idea of marriage. But this is taking a gamble that the man is typical, because the figures I’ve just given are educated estimates. Not all men mature at the same rate, and other factors can and do affect a man’s readiness to marry.

His advice corresponds pretty well with my own observations of my friends who have and have not married. Both logic and economics dictate that women should not get involved with men of their own age unless they are planning to marry between the ages of 18 and 20. The problem is that because women hypergamous, those who want to start thinking about getting married around the age of 27 after riding the carouselhaving fun for a few years face the choice of a) pursuing men of equal or higher status and competing with younger women who are more focused on getting married than they are, or b) pursuing men of lower status. Game theory – of the logical sort, not the sociobiological variety – indicates that the correct play for a woman is to be the younger woman looking for marriage among the men at the next higher age of commitment.

This means a woman who is not going to college should look for men who are twenty-three or twenty-four, while college women should look for men who are twenty-six or twenty-seven. Women over the age of thirty should look for men who are thirty-eight to forty, while those over forty should look primarily at divorced men and widowers since men who haven’t married at all by forty have become confirmed bachelors and seldom want to get married or are capable of altering their lifestyles to accomodate it.

These are general guidelines, not hard and fast laws, but they should help women significantly increase their chances of having relationships that blossom into marriage rather than a series of disappointing ones that never go anywhere.

Calling Obama’s bluff

Arizona looks set to tell Obama to show his cards:

A plan in Arizona to require presidential candidates to prove their eligibility to occupy the Oval Office is approaching critical mass, even though it has just been introduced. The proposal from state Rep. Judy Burges, who carried a similar plan that fell short last year only because of political maneuvering, was introduced yesterday with 16 members of the state Senate as co-sponsors.

It needs only 16 votes in the Senate to pass.

In the House, there are 25 co-sponsors, with the need for only 31 votes for passage, and Burges told WND that there were several chamber members who confirmed they support the plan and will vote for it, but simply didn’t wish to be listed as co-sponsors.

It should be interesting to see how many Arizona and national Democrats oppose this perfectly sensible state law. It should be kept in mind that any opposition to it is a tacit admission that Obama is not, in fact, eligible to be president, so I doubt the New York Times will dare to do its usual hand-wringing about Arizona.