A fascinating defense

PZ Myers makes a remarkable “argument from inhuman sociopathy” in defense of abortion:

[T]he standard bullying tactics of waving bloody fetuses might cow the squeamish, but I’m a biologist. I’ve guillotined rats. I’ve held eyeballs in my hand and peeled them apart with a pair of scissors. I’ve used a wet-vac to clean up a lake of half-clotted blood from an exsanguinated dog. I’ve opened bodies and watched the intestines do their slow writhing dance, I’ve been elbow deep in blood, I’ve split open cats and stabbed them in the heart with a perfusion needle. I’ve extracted the brains of mice…with a pair of pliers. I’ve scooped brains out of buckets, I’ve counted dendrites in slices cut from the brains of dead babies.

You want to make me back down by trying to inspire revulsion with dead baby pictures? I look at them unflinchingly and see meat. And meat does not frighten me.

It’s probably a good thing he is an atheist without any moral standards, otherwise he might demonstrate at least a modicum of conscience for the bloody acts in which he appears to take such pride. And if he happened to take any sexual gratification from them as well, who can say it is wrong from his perspective, given his total lack of any moral or ethical code. If he feels no revulsion at looking at the pictures of butchered babies, then he likely feels no revulsion and sees only meat when looking at pictures of dead Jews and murdered Ukrainians as well. The awful thing is not that the pictures do not frighten him; they do not frighten me either. The awful thing is that he does not find them revolting like any normal human being with even a minimal amount of empathy would.

This is the naked face of atheism, ladies and gentlemen. Look on it well and remember it, because it usually doesn’t dare to show its disgusting and anti-human nature so openly.

Pat Buchanan on China and free trade

The growing power of China and the decline of an indebted America is just one small aspect of the strong historical case against free trade:

Revalue your currency, we demand of the Chinese, stop running these trade surpluses at our expense, start practicing free trade, and abandon these mercantilist and protectionist policies. But why should they? Why should China abandon a trade policy that is working marvelously well for them, and adopt a trade policy that is failing dismally for us? Does that make sense?

Why should any nation emulate the U.S. trade policy of the Bush-Clinton-Bush era that has stripped us of a third of our manufacturing jobs and made us dependent on China and the world for the needs of our national life and the borrowed money to pay for them?

Why would China, seeking to make herself an independent and self-sufficient nation, adopt a policy that cost us our independence? And what are the Chinese doing in their ascendancy to first power on earth that we did not do in ours?

One of the interesting things that readily becomes apparent when reading Rothbard’s An Economic Perspective on the History of Economic Thought is that virtually everything the free traders – and I was once one of them – believe about economic history is wrong. They have various theoretical problems too, to be sure, but history provides an easier means of undermining the primary intellectual engine for totalitarian globalism than comparatively esoteric economic theory. Of course, the weakness of the free trade case is very easily seen in the way that they immediately retreat from their previous analogies and arguments as soon as their weaknesses are demonstrated.

Regarding number seven

The final NAR prices are in.  And while it wasn’t as close as 2008, it wasn’t too far off, especially since prices did plunge below $165,000 in February before bouncing back.

“7. The national median existing-home price will not rise 4% from $172,600 to $179,500 as predicted by NAR’s lead economist Lawrence Yun, but will fall below 165k instead.”

From the article entitled 2010 weakest year for home sales since 1997:  The median price for a home sold in December was $168,800, down 1 percent from a year ago.

Mailvox: le progrès, c’est moi

Remir throws down the gauntlet:

If you can beat an extrapolated 6.9 s for 10 clicks on a Meta, I will buy one. Likewise, if you beat 13.8 s for 20 clicks on a Meta, I will eat myself whole live on the Internet.

Now, I’m not saying that 21.59 s is slow, since it approaches the superhuman. I’m merely pointing out that you can’t reasonably expect to beat a jet with a propeller, even if it’s a turboprop.  Who needs extrapolation when you can simply do it for real?  Better start filing those teeth, Remir.

In addition to shattering the development team’s records, I thought it was interesting to note that the best of the 10 times that went into the 6.89 time was only 0.59, considerably slower than the present record of 0.41 that went into the 6.80 I clocked a few minutes later.  This led to an emotional epiphany in which I suddenly realized that I am presently at the very apex of human progress. The entire history of Man’s technological development and achievement over the millennia currently culminates right here: le progrès, c’est moi. Being a man who lost his fifth gear more than a decade ago, I harbor no illusions that this historical landmark in man-machine relations will be not surpassed soon, perhaps even today. But for one brief, shining, glorious moment, on a planet of 6,894,600,000 people, I can legitimately claim to be the world’s fastest mouser.

The binary choice

Children have to belong to someone who is responsible for their upbringing. For centuries in the West, they belonged to the father. Thanks to feminist family law, they are now generally assumed to belong to the mother by default. Here’s how well that has worked out:

Welcome to 2011: post-morality and stigma-free. One in eight children under five will never meet the man who donated half their genes. Seventy per cent of young offenders were raised in a lone-parent home. It’s an anguished statistic. “I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection,” said Sigmund Freud. Yet, in some of the poorest parts of the UK, families have been without fathers for three generations. For every feckless Keith, there is an uncertain young dad who would love a chance to be near his children if only their ex-partners would let them. Panorama asked a 20-year-old single mother if she thought her two little boys would miss out by not having a dad around. She could not have been more bemused if they’d offered her a crinoline and a horse-drawn carriage. For young mums like her, fathers are an extinct species. The dadda is deader than the dodo.

The solution is as simple as it is obvious. First, all children must remain in the full legal and financial custody of their genetic fathers regardless of the marital state of the mother and father. Second, no public money will be allotted to the private maintenance of children or their mothers. If private charities and churches wish to provide assistance, they are of course welcome to do so. But either the subsidizing of socially destructive reproductive behavior will end or society itself will collapse. The author’s inevitable recommendation of “education” is as feckless as the reproductive behavior of her poster boy. And if you think the measures I recommend are too harsh, then contemplate the alternative of maintaining the present course.

Hmmm, this could be embarrassing

The newly self-appointed defender of the Obama birthplace appears to find himself at a loss:

Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie suggested in an interview published today that a long-form, hospital-generated birth certificate for Barack Obama may not exist within the vital records maintained by the Hawaii Department of Health. Abercrombie told the Honolulu Star Advertiser he was searching within the Hawaii Department of Health to find definitive vital records that would prove Obama was born in Hawaii, because the continuing eligibility controversy could hurt the president’s chances of re-election in 2012.

This is rather interesting given the long and public history of people insisting that the information had already been released. Perhaps Gov. Abercrombie should be looking in Connecticut… or, you know, Kenya.

Roissy reviews a movie

It’s certainly an unusual take on the usual reviewer’s formula. And significantly more insightful:

Blue Valentine is an exploration of a modern marriage in the process of disintegrating, told via alternating scenes between the couple’s sordid present and their romantically heady past of five or six years ago. The flashback scenes aren’t labeled as such; the viewer knows they are flashbacks by the youthful hairline of Ryan Gosling’s character, Dean, and by the fact that there’s no kid around. The effect of the flashbacks is like a prolonged near-death experience, where the characters’ dying relationship is punctuated by gauzy vignettes of happier times.

Although the theater was filled with SWPL women probably on a bender from Glee house parties, don’t mistake this film for a chick flic. There’s too much truth told in the portrayal of a relationship hitting the skids for this to be anything resembling the typical sappy romance movie. For one, there’s no happy ending. Women’s faces after a manipulative cheese-fest chick flic show the telltale signs of throat-lumped weepiness: the glisten of fresh tears on cheeks. But the crowd of women filing out of the theater after Blue Valentine had only the vacant-eyed look of a shellshocked soldier who has just seen his buddy catch shrapnel. Or, in this case, catch a little too much reality.

Quite simply, there hasn’t been a movie in our lifetimes which depicts the fall of a man from charming nascent alpha to inept needy beta, and the loathing that this engenders in his lover, better than Blue Valentine.

There are apparently “spoilers” in the review, although since I assume most of the readers of this blog are about as likely to see Blue Valentine as I am to win the Powerball lottery, (never having purchased a lottery ticket in my life), there is no reason not to read it. And it’s interesting to learn that Hollywood, in at least this one instance, has abandoned the Disney Snowflake formula in favor of a more realistic Game-like perspective.

One uncomfortable observation that men would do well to accept is that even with the best will in the world, when a man makes a habit of automatically deferring to a woman’s wishes, it tends to cause her to develop contempt for him. It’s simply how they are wired; it can be astonishing to see how quickly a woman develops a prickly queen bee attitude towards others as soon as she has her social status upgraded for one reason or another. Also, because women are dynamic, (which is admittedly part of their charm), they can’t necessarily articulate what they happen to want at any given moment, so the gamma’s plea of “tell me what you want and I’ll do it” not only sounds craven and off-putting to them, it’s not even relevant. The correct thing is to simply do whatever it is that you do and understand that a woman will be with you as long as she chooses, all promises and vows notwithstanding.

Men should pay very little attention to what a woman says. That’s just a snapshot of her emotional state at the moment, which, for good or for ill, is guaranteed to change. In the end, it is only what she has done in the past that is informative and what she decides to do now and in the future that matters. And if she doesn’t want to be with you, why would you want her to stick around anyhow? There are literally three billion other members of the opposite sex out there, after all, and the chances are pretty high that at least one of them will appreciate you considerably more than a woman who has gradually come to dislike or even loathe you.

The pointless college non-education

Wine, women, and song would arguably make for a better and more educational investment:

You are told that to make it in life, you must go to college. You work hard to get there. You or your parents drain savings or take out huge loans to pay for it all.

And you end up learning … not much.

A study of more than 2,300 undergraduates found 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years. Not much is asked of students, either. Half did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during their prior semester, and one-third did not take a single course requiring even 40 pages of reading per week.

The ironic thing is that this near-complete lack of learning doesn’t stop the average college student from believing that he’s somehow learning something by osmosis. The most cocksure and clueless critics are almost invariably college students, who aren’t learning anything substantive at their universities but haven’t been smacked in the back of the head by reality yet either.

The crazy thing is that even the Voxiversity quizzes, which cost you nothing at all and take me about 30 minutes to write, are more challenging than anything you’re likely to encounter in a history or literature class at an Ivy League university.

Speed freaks

Speaking of technological visions, as the Dread Ilk are aware, I am not in the habit of making assertions that I am not fully prepared to back up. In light of this, Markku and I have created a means of verifying our claims regarding the speed of our new mouse interface. While this is designed to permit one to test the Meta interface against the traditional interfaces, it also happens to serve as an excellent means of testing one mouse against another on the traditional point-and-click interfaces. We also included 20 of the most common hotkeys simply to see how the three mouse interfaces fared against it, but that’s really neither here nor there since practically no one uses more than five or six of the basic ones and you don’t leave your finger positioned over the Ctrl key in normal usage.

So, if you’re interested in trying it out and seeing how fast your mouse is against the best and average times of our interface, you can download the 5.3 meg zipfile here. Unzip it, click on the executable, and you’re in. First maximize the window, then select the interface you’re testing under Options; you can’t use Meta unless you have one, of course. Click on the black button with the blue logo to start the timer and it will stop once you click on the correct icon or menu. The logo will flash green, the timer will stop, and the logo will turn blue again, waiting for your next click.

Do at least 20 to get an average score, although 100 is better. If you have a high performance gaming mouse, please email me with the mouse model and your best average for 100 on icons and menu. You can see how it compares with my scores and the development team’s record scores below – I managed to beat the best single time but couldn’t maintain that pace.  And if you can beat Markku on his Logitech MX-518 on the menus, (34.19 for Menu 20 at 1920×1200 resolution), I’ll be very impressed indeed.

The end of Apple

My implacable hatred for Apple’s relentlessly fascistic vision of technology notwithstanding, I am a longtime admirer of Steve Jobs. I even regard him as somewhat of a role model since I am as confident in my own technological visions as he is in his. It is his unique talent for not only having a vision but also successfully communicating it that makes his recent departure so potentially ruinous to Apple:

Apple has not elaborated on the reasons for Steve Jobs’ medical leave, and it probably won’t unless/until it has to. As a result, those who care about the company and Steve can be forgiven for wondering how serious Steve’s condition is and for looking for clues about this in every communication.

In this vein, in our opinion, the wording of one sentence of Steve’s email to Apple staff is not encouraging: “I love Apple so much and hope to be back as soon as I can.”

In our opinion, those are not the words of someone taking a short leave who is confident he will be back at the company soon (or ever). Rather, in our opinion, they read like the tragic, heartfelt sentiments of someone who thinks he might never be coming back.

I wish Steve Jobs all the best and sincerely hope he makes a full recovery in order to come back and subject a new generation of Macintossers to imprisonment in his beautifully landscaped, walled-in, fascist, techno-utopian garden.