And yet you doubt

More technofascismo from Apple:

Apple Inc. is now collecting the “precise,” “real-time geographic location” of its users’ iPhones, iPads and computers. In an updated version of its privacy policy, the company added a paragraph noting that once users agree, Apple and unspecified “partners and licensees” may collect and store user location data.

When users attempt to download apps or media from the iTunes store, they are prompted to agree to the new terms and conditions. Until they agree, they cannot download anything through the store.

I now await with no little interest hearing the Macintossers explain how all of this is wonderful and to the great benefit of Apple’s cool, creative and totally unique customers. Seriously, what does Apple have to do to convince you that they’re every bit as evil as Microsoft and more, start making batteries from the blood of aborted Chinese girls? Batteries that you can’t replace!

Oh, wait, they already did that.

A good reason to change churches

The Blogger Blaster provides an excellent metric to determine whether your church is one worth attending or not:

Lets start by looking at Mothers Day. Now… Sermons on both days have formulas that are almost always followed… but in each case… are slightly different. On mothers day… women will be celebrated and praised to the point of near worship. Mary will be mentioned over and over again. Then… in the sermon… the minister will take some particular positive attribute of mothers… and use it as a lesson… and hold it up as something for everyone to aspire to.

Then Fathers Day comes along. its a whole different story. It often starts with a mens breakfast… where an old man will stand up and read a list of fatherly attributes… and its assumed of course that you don’t meet them… then you are chastised for not meeting them… and challenged to meet them in the future. Then the service rolls around… and everyone will lament the failures in society and blame them on who? Right. Dads. And then the formulaic sermon… of course there will be no mention of Joseph… no… instead the minister takes a negative attribute of males… this morning at my church it was pride… and complains about how it affects the family of fathers… and uses it as a negative example to show people something to avoid.

Let me be perfectly clear. I will never, ever, attend a church that makes a habit of putting women on a pedestal and celebrating female traits while repeatedly demonizing men and castigating male traits. That is the hallmark of a church which has abandoned the worship of God the Father in favor of elevating current societal norms to sacred writ.

Because men have their flaws and engage in sin, it is correct for a pastor to exhort them and hold them accountable. But if your pastor is not capable of holding both men and women to account for their behavior, he should be your ex-pastor.

WND column

The Bank Failure Recovery

“Regulators on Friday shut down a Nevada bank, raising to 83 the number of U.S. bank failures this year. The 83 closures so far this year is more than double the pace set in all of 2009, which was itself a brisk year for shutdowns. By this time last year, regulators had closed 40 banks. The pace has accelerated as banks’ losses mount on loans made for commercial property and development.”
– June 19, 2010, the Associated Press

According to the many expert economists who completely failed to see the financial crisis of 2008 or the subsequent economic contraction coming, the American economy is no longer in a recession but is nearly a year into a recovery. However, it is worth noting that the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Business Cycle Dating Committee, which is the government committee charged with delineating the official beginnings and ends of recessions, has refused thus far to state that the economic contraction that began in 2008 is, in fact, over.

While the GDP figures are positive, other statistics such as the unemployment rate, the velocity of the money supply and the ongoing reduction of debt in the financial and household sectors strongly indicate that the supposed recovery is nothing more than a statistical artifact that is the direct result of a 57 percent increase in outstanding federal debt since the second quarter of 2008. Since government spending is a primary component of the GDP equation, the G in C+I+G+(X-M), literally all of the reported growth in GDP is the result of the increase in outstanding federal debt from $5.2 trillion on June 30, 2008, to $8.3 trillion on March 31, 2010.

Addendum: Here is another piece of evidence that the so-called recovery is nothing more than an artifact of the massive increase in federal borrowing and spending.  Notice how far below the average historical 2% increase the three private sectors have fallen and remember that the Finance sector alone is twice as large as the Federal sector.

For the children

The looming bankruptcy of many state and local governments has made the public leeches desperate. Now that the politicians are more afraid of their bondholders than the unions, the unions are attempting take their mindless “brains more brains” message straight to the electorate with all the subtlety and sophistication that you’d expect.

“The Sacramento County, Calif., sheriff’s deputies union is using mobile billboards, mailers and radio and newspaper ads with vivid images and messages in a bid to avert more layoffs. The campaign includes a photo of a child with an adult’s hand over its mouth and the words, “Your child could be at risk!” Another shows a masked man breaking through a door and asks, “Do you feel safe?””

The irony, of course, is that the masked man most likely to break through a citizen of Sacramento County’s door at night is a member of a SWAT team.

Adios Anelka

I could not figure out what in the name of the 18th Fructidor French manager Raymond Domenech was doing naming Nicolas Anelka to Les Blues, let alone STARTING him. Anelka isn’t quite as bad as Emile Heskey, (word out of the England camp is that Fabio Capelli has finally given up on starting him), but he’s only scored 14 goals in 64 games for one of Europe’s elite teams. Contrast that with Andriy Shevchenko’s 45 goals in 94 games for Ukraine, Gabriel Batistuta’s 56 goals in 78 games for Argentina, or more importantly, Thierry Henry’s 51 goals in 122 games for France.

Given that record of poor performance, one can’t doubt the wisdom of the French Football Federation to kick Anelka off the team and send him home given his behavior during the French loss to Mexico.

“It’s shocking, because if anyone has protected Anelka, it’s Domenech. Domenech has played Anelka throughout the past two years” — vice president of the French Football Federation, Noel le Graet, after taking the decision to send Nicolas Anelka home immediately.

“Go f–k yourself, you dirty son of a b—h” — what Anelka said to Raymond Domenech (shortly after the coach told him to stop moving out of position, and shortly before being subbed off against Mexico) to get himself into hot water.

For some reason, many soccer managers cannot seem to distinguish between African athletes and African strikers. The only thing that real strikers like Eto’o, Drogba, and Henry have in common with athletes who happen to be assigned an attacking position like Heskey and Anelka is that they are of African descent. If a striker cannot maintain at least a 25% scoring rate per game, he should not be starting and probably shouldn’t even be on the team barring the possession of a particular support skill.

I was a little surprised to see Cameroon lose to Denmark, who was amazingly careless in back. The Dutch had some trouble with the Japanese discipline, but did enough to win and go through with a game to spare, and Australia would do well to hire a new manager who is capable of explaining the rules of the game to the Socceroos. Kewell’s handball in the box wasn’t the worst I’ve seen, or the most inexplicable, but it clearly merited the whistle given the tight way this tournament is being called.

Atheism and action

In which the connection between godlessness and the commission of acts of mass violence is explained by Napoleon, as per his personal secretary and biographer, Bourrienne:

During the negotiations with the Holy Father Bonaparte one day said to me, “In every country religion is useful to the Government, and those who govern ought to avail themselves of it to influence mankind. I was a Mahometan in Egypt; I am a Catholic in France. With relation to the police of the religion of a state, it should be entirely in the hands of the sovereign. Many persons have urged me to found a Gallican Church, and make myself its head; but they do not know France. If they did, they would know that the majority of the people would not like a rupture with Rome. Before I can resolve on such a measure the Pope must push matters to an extremity; but I believe he will not do so.”—”You are right, General, and you recall to my memory what Cardinal Consalvi said: ‘The Pope will do all the First Consul desires.'”—”That is the best course for him. Let him not suppose that he has to do with an idiot. What do you think is the point his negotiations put most forward? The salvation of my soul! But with me immortality is the recollection one leaves in the memory of man. That idea prompts to great actions. It would be better for a man never to have lived than to leave behind him no traces of his existence.”

It is those last three sentences that demonstrate the connection between atheism and large-scale tragedy that Richard Dawkins and other historically illiterate atheists have so much trouble recognizing. It is not atheism itself that is the problem, but as I explained in TIA, atheism combined with a burning ambition to achieve immortality through material ends. Whether this immortality is achieved through military glory, the creation of a New Man, or the construction of a new society on the ashes of the old one is not important, the point is that the underlying motivation to commit acts of horrific violence involves more than the simple absence of the belief that one will face judgment for one’s actions in this life.

Those who trouble to actually read the words of the historical individuals will see a striking similarity in the mindset of men as superficially different as Napoleon, Lenin, and Mao. Again and again, it becomes apparent that the ideology that supposedly drove each of them was merely cover for their burning personal desire to seek immortality through action. This is the most obvious in the case of Napoleon, who secretly loathed both the liberty and the bloody regicides of the Republic whose armies he led so effectively, because his biographer was privy to his private thoughts long before his actions began to contradict his supposed republicanism. But, the same concept quite obviously applies to many of the more lethal Communist leaders as well, since most of them were no more genuinely committed to Communism than Napoleon was to liberty, equality, and the French Republic.

For such men of burning ambition, ideology is nothing more than a means to a self-serving end. Men have little to fear from an atheist libertarian or a Christian monarch, but they have everything to fear from an ambitious atheist who dreams of great actions and is determined to leave the world with the recollection of his existence.

Breaking civilization

Scientists confirm the ideas of the Game theoreticians:

The results show that if there were no returns to career choices in the marriage market, men would tend to work less, study less, and choose blue‐collar jobs over white‐collar jobs. These findings suggest that the existing literature underestimates the true returns to human capital investments by ignoring their returns in the marriage market.

Source: “Marriage and Career: The Dynamic Decisions of Young Men” from “Journal of Human Capital”

Result: men turning away from the drudgery of building careers as a surefire investment strategy for acquiring [sexual interest from women]. The ROI of a corporate 9 to 5er is decreasing rapidly, and men are beginning to catch onto this.

Prediction: as long as women remain a large and growing segment of the white collar job market, men will continue to “drop out”. Replacement strategies for men include:

– prostitution (with concomitant calls for legalization)
– sexbots/3D porn
– video gaming
– growth of high paying blue collar trade jobs that women studiously avoid
– thuggishness
– game and assorted pickup strategies. (i.e. the birth of the “alpha mimicry market”.)

A few years ago, I demonstrated one way that the increase in female labor force participation from 30% to 60% has significantly harmed married women by forcing them into the workforce to replace the wages of their husbands lost to the increase in labor supply. That was pure economics. What Roissy is talking about here is a related socio-sexual cost of female labor force participation; since the hierarchical benefit to men working white collar jobs is decreasing even as the compensation for those jobs has fallen due to the increased white collar labor supply, men are becoming less influenced by their natural instinct to impress women.

Despite being groomed for a career in “the office”, I left that environment at 22 and never once looked back. But this makes me think that there is a seventh option that Roissy hasn’t considered, which is more male self-employment and virtual offices. Self-employment will become increasingly important as female-dominated HR departments institute credentialism that will favor female hires and corporate regulations that men aren’t willing to accept. And technology makes the virtual office not only possible, but more effective than the traditional office.

This suggests that men will not, as so many who only think in terms of linear projections presently assume, lose out due to increasing female domination of education. Instead, women will take over the dinosaur corporations just in time to help them die off more quickly even as men increasingly move towards working in a faster, more technologically evolved and lucrative manner.

A well-deserved red

I have no sympathy for Germany. Miroslav Klose’s card was for stupidity more than anything else. Yes, the Spanish ref is calling a strict game, but as a player, you have a responsibility to pay attention to that. Klose had already been whistled twice for tackles from behind and verbally warned about it, then went ahead and committed two more fouls in exactly the same manner.

UPDATE: 1-0 to Serbia. The Germans were literally handed an opportunity to tie the game after a Serbian defender committed the most inexplicable handball I have ever seen in more than three decades of soccer, but Podolsky’s weak penalty shot was saved by the keeper. The German defeat casts an even harsher light on Australia’s feeble performance in the first game.

UPDATE II: An absolutely shameful call by the referee to disallow the USA’s third goal. FIFA has done an excellent job in forcing the side judges to stop calling phantom offsides, now they need to stop the referees from calling phantom fouls in the box. The only fouls being committed were by the Slovenian players. Absurd. The USA well-merited the three points by fighting back from a two-goal deficit, but now it will be necessary to beat Algeria if they’re going to qualify. Fortunately, they would appear to have the fortitude to do exactly that.