We is not I

Have you ever noticed that it’s always men who refer to their wives as “their better half”? Have you ever heard a woman introduce her husband that way? I don’t know why, but that phrase has always given me the willies and makes me wonder if those men are speaking tongue in cheek or are simply oleaginous gammas. Either way, it doesn’t seem like a promising sign to me.

Peak beauty

And the female descent into invisibility. An aging British woman laments the inevitable:

As every woman of a certain age comes to learn, there is a point when you become invisible. People stop paying you attention. No doubt evolutionary biologists have explanations for this. But we know, unless we choose to ignore it, that there is all too much truth in the words of the old song: keep young and beautiful if you want to be loved and — which is part of the same thing — if you want to hold on to whatever power you had in your prime.

This female invisibility is nothing more than the natural and obvious consequence of completely failing to develop an attractive personality or interests outside of yourself. It’s also something for which no man is likely to feel the even the slightest bit of sympathy, since only the Alphas don’t know what it’s like to have been invisible to the opposite sex and they’re not inclined to be overly concerned about how an old woman not worth bagging happens to feel. As we can also see from what Roissy describes as The Wall, female invisibility actually proceeds in stages; what Ms Marrin is describing is merely the final stage in a long process which begins when the average woman hits her peak beauty somewhere between 25-27. How quickly the decline takes place depends upon the individual woman’s genetics, commitment to fitness, and diet, but it’s a natural and unavoidable process.

Of course, all this does is place the older woman on an equal footing with virtually all men, wherein she must earn social visibility through merit. However, it is difficult for those who have never had to develop their personalities or their minds, but have gotten by on their superficial attributes instead, to begin to do so after a lifetime of neglect. I once asked one of my philandering friends why he can’t seem to be content for long with any of the very beautiful women with whom he is always involved. (He’s a smart and very successful guy, definite Alpha.) His answer was that once the novelty of the new wore off, he inevitably discovered they never had anything interesting to say, which caused them to first become boring, and then downright burdensome.

But beauty does not necessarily preclude being interesting. My recommendation to women who don’t want to gradually decline into invisibility is to develop a genuine interest in things outside one’s self and one’s social circle. The fading of the superficialities may be inevitable, but the concomitant social invisibility doesn’t have to be. Just as the male athlete has to accept that his time in the spotlight is one day going to come to an end and his fans will turn their attention to younger, more capable performers, the attractive woman has to accept that the enjoyable experience of basking in the immediate arousal of the men around her will also cease in time.

What a woman does about this, either in anticipation or in response, depends entirely upon what a woman wants out of life. There is no correct answer. I’m not saying that a woman shouldn’t enjoy her moment in the sun while it lasts anymore than an athlete shouldn’t exert himself to the utmost of his potential. But I am saying that the sun will go down on your beauty, usually sooner than later, and graceless denial of the inevitable is never attractive to anyone.

Coddling the Climategate criminals

The so-called “six-month” statute of limitations that is supposedly protecting the Climategate charlatans doesn’t exist:

There is something very odd indeed about the statement by the Information Commission on its investigation into “Climategate”, the leak of emails from East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. Gordon Smith, the deputy commissioner, confirms that the university’s refusal to answer legitimate inquiries made in 2007 and 2008 was an offence under S.77 of the Information Act. But he goes on to claim that the Commission is powerless to bring charges, thanks to a loophole in the law – “because the legislation requires action within six months of the offence taking place”.

Careful examination of the Act, however, shows that it says nothing whatever about a time limit. The Commission appears to be trying to confuse this with a provision of the Magistrates Act, that charges for an offence cannot be brought more than six months after it has been drawn to the authorities’ attention – not after it was committed. In this case, the Commission only became aware of the offence two months ago when the emails were leaked – showing that the small group of British and American scientists at the top of the IPCC were discussing with each other and with the university ways to break the law, not least by destroying evidence, an offence in itself.

I’m with James Delingpole on this. Prosecute and imprison the lying, thieving little bastards. Force them to repay the millions in grant money they fraudulently obtained. Actually, they deserve far worse than penury and prison, for they were at the heart of a scheme to reduce all of Mankind to serfdom in the name of science.

But don’t worry. There’s so much more fraud and chicanery left to be uncovered that the scientists will have to be thrown to the wolves before long.

Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based. A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia’s climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

As I have stated repeatedly, scientists are no more trustworthy than anyone else, their self-serving claim to objectivity by virtue of academic training is no more credible than that made by journalists. Scientists whose income is dependent upon achieving specific results are no more trustworthy than used-car salesmen. And peer review is a worthless method for policing science, as it is primarily useful for passing off non-science as science. Regardless, it is becoming ever more clear that the age of the scientist as sage and secular priest is over.

So kill yourself already

Terry Pratchett is an author of wonderful fantasy books. He is also, quite lamentably, a victim of early-onset Alzheimers. And as an ethicist, logician, and political activist I can only say that he makes a wonderful fantasy author:

Sir Terry said that if he knew he could end his life at a time of his choosing, without the fear of incriminating a friend or family member, he would enjoy the rest of his life far more. “If I knew that I could die at any time I wanted, then suddenly every day would be as precious as a million pounds. If I knew that I could die, I would live. My life, my death, my choice,”

Sir Terry can already die at any time he likes. He can walk out in front of an onrushing truck today. He can blow out his brains with a .50 Desert Eagle tomorrow. Alternatively, next Thursday he can walk into one of the many mosques of Londonistan and wave around a penciled caricature of a certain individual who is not under any circumstances to be depicted. The motto: “My life, my death, my choice” is not only misleading, it is a cowardly evasion of the obvious. It is the frightened cry of a stricken man who is afraid to kill himself and prefers for someone else to take the responsibility from him.

There is room for reasonable disagreement about how those who are unexpectedly rendered helpless are treated, particularly if their previous wishes are clearly expressed in notarized writing. But any man who is capable of giving a public lecture on assisted suicideconsensual murder is also clearly capable of exercising his own choice with regards to the continuation of his present existence. Do not misunderstand me here; I don’t dislike Terry Pratchett nor do I want him to die. I would vastly prefer that he survive long enough for them to find a cure so that he can keep writing his excellent and underrated books. And while I have sympathy for the man, I have none for the suicide activist.

If the man really wants to die for fear of his disease, then he should simply go ahead and take responsibility for the act himself, whether that is today, tomorrow, or two years from now. It’s precisely because it is his own decision that no one else can assume the responsibility for ending his life. It is evil and stupid and cowardly to attempt to lay the foundation for what is already known to have led to the murder of more than 15 children per year in the Netherlands simply because you don’t have the fortitude to commit suicide while you’re of sufficiently sound mind and body.

I hope that Mr. Pratchett has not seriously thought the matter through, as it’s hard to imagine that he genuinely desires the English infanticide that would inevitably follow to become a part of his legacy. Law should not be based on enjoyment, especially when a more accurate description of what Pratchett is saying is “my life, my death, my choice, your action.”

On the Apollo fakery

It is eminently clear that I must totally revise my opinion regarding precisely how and why the Apollo Moon landings were faked:

It should be understood from the beginning that The Shining is Stanley Kubrick’s most personal film (outside of, possibly, Eyes Wide Shut). Before we are done here it will be easy to see that Kubrick was only using Stephen King’s novel as a launching pad (excuse the pun) to be able to tell a completely different story under the guise of making a film based on a best-selling novel. He did this for a very important reason – mainly to save his life.

I’m not sure which I find more enjoyable. The film interpretation, which is 110 percent pure awesome, or the hysterical reactions of people who can’t read manage to read all four pages for fear that they might start to believe it.

WND column

The Map is not the Land

Thanks to media that have absolutely no understanding of the economic-related news they are attempting to cover, it is commonly believed that the U.S. is no longer in a recession. The Bureau of Economic Analysis’ advance report for fourth-quarter Gross Domestic Product, usually known as GDP, increased at a rate equivalent to 5.7 percent growth on an annual basis, more than twice the average GDP growth since 1950. This would be astonishing if there were any chance whatsoever that it was real.

Scientific consensus = false

The fraud and deception of the “scientific consensus” on anthropogenic global warming/climate change continues to pile higher:

The IPCC made a prominent claim in its 2007 report, again citing the WWF as its authority, that climate change could endanger “up to 40 per cent” of the Amazon rainforest – as iconic to warmists as those Himalayan glaciers and polar bears. This WWF report, it turned out, was co-authored by Andy Rowell, an anti-smoking and food safety campaigner who has worked for WWF and Greenpeace, and contributed pieces to Britain’s two most committed environmentalist newspapers. Rowell and his co-author claimed their findings were based on an article in Nature. But the focus of that piece, it emerges, was not global warming at all but the effects of logging.

A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC’s report which cite similarly non-peer-reviewed WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority, and other researchers have been uncovering a host of similarly dubious claims and attributions all through the report. These range from groundless allegations about the increased frequency of “extreme weather events” such as hurricanes, droughts and heatwaves, to a headline claim that global warming would put billions of people at the mercy of water shortages – when the study cited as its authority indicated exactly the opposite, that rising temperatures could increase the supply of water.

I’ve been a total skeptic from the beginning and even I think this is beginning to get ridiculous. They haven’t gotten ANYTHING right! By the time this round of exposes is done, I half expect to be told that Al Gore and the climate change “scientists” are humanoid aliens from Europa who require a frozen climate to live comfortably.

Mailvox: Surmounting Gamma

An anonymous reader has a request:

Your recent posts on the whole alpha/beta scale and specifically your post “Hierarchy test: the answer key” fits right into somethings I have been pondering in my life. In it you write “Gammas constantly sabotage their efforts to reach their goals because they want them so badly.” and “Gammas always engage in preemptive rejection.”

I have an IQ that is well above average and a somewhat rounded skillset/abilities but despite that I don’t find success and have determined that I am somehow self-sabotaging. Its an unconscious “gift” that I would really like to be rid of and something I have been pondering of late. And while I hadn’t thought of it previously I think that “preemptive rejection” ties right into it.

Now I realize that your post was more to do with Game but that isn’t really what I am looking at. Sure it would be nice to do better with women, but I have a child to take care of and so my focus is more on life in general and I was wondering what advice you might have for those of us who find far too much of your description of Gamma in our lives.

As I have been repeatedly attempting to tell the Deltas, Gammas, and Omegas who wish to identify themselves as anything but what they are, the first step is to recognize clearly where you are perceived on the social hierarchy. Ask five women and five men if you want to get a more objective perspective on it. Others usually view us more clearly than we are able to see ourselves.

The first thing a Gamma has to do is stop seeking the approval of others. Gammas are often easy to identify because when they talk, there is usually an unspoken question in their voice. This can be indicated by hesitancy or a rising tone at the end of the sentence. It’s not a coincidence that this is also how children talk, it’s an indication of instinctive approval-seeking. Like Demosthenes getting rid of his stutter with his stones at the beach, this may require an amount of practice to eradicate. Also note that rather like someone who normally represses his temper tends to lose it with a bang, the Gamma usually overdoes it when he attempts to speak with more authority; inappropriate overemphasis is a dead giveaway of low social status.

But that’s just the outward manifestation of the inner problem…. more later. In the meantime, those of you with positive suggestions might consider offering them.

Voxiversity IV

I’m getting more than a little tired of economics after four months of writing RGD and more than thirty interviews in two months, so I think it makes sense to accede to the will of the readers and go with the Inferno portion of La Commedia Divina, which beat RGD by a vote of 133 to 128. I’d previously been leaning towards Commentarii de Bello Gallico, but that finished a distant fourth with only 28 votes. Here is a link to the Cary translation; those who prefer Longfellow or Norton translations may be interested in this three-way comparison site. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll use Cary supported by the bilingual edition that features Robert Pinsky’s translation.

Ironically after all that, the translation with which I’m most familiar, and which inspired my economic satire, was Lawrence Binyon’s. But I think it’s best to work with the freely available texts. Start reading Canto 1 for next Saturday.