Vox Popoli

Since the testimonial evidence of the Apollo astronauts is considered significant when it comes to the lunar landing, what are we to make of this statement by an Apollo 14 astronaut?

Aliens have contacted humans several times but governments have hidden the truth for 60 years, the sixth man to walk on the moon has claimed. Apollo 14 astronaut Dr Edgar Mitchell, said he was aware of many UFO visits to Earth during his career with NASA but each one was covered up.

I think the solution is to be found in numerology. The number 14 is 2 x 7, and while 7 is a holy number, being the number of days in which God created the Earth – including the day of rest – 2 is an evil number indicating Man’s separation from God. Therefore, the 14 in Apollo is indicative of a lie, whereas 11, being an odd number and the number of Joseph’s brothers less Joseph himself, indicates a degree of ultimate reconciliation despite initial untrustworthiness.

Of course, 11 could also be read as 1+1, which would equal the evil number, in which case the separation almost surely represents the separation of the Moon from the Earth, thus indicating that the Moon landings were hoaxes. Ah well, perhaps the aliens will be able to work it out.

In which a women misinterprets the data:

A report from Britain’s leading universities found that for every 16-point increase in their IQ score, men were 35 per cent more likely to find themselves a wife. Yet for women, each 16-point advance in their intelligence decreased their chance of getting married by more than 40 per cent.

This, naturally, is somehow interpreted as men being afraid of successful women. First, this involves confusing intelligence with success; the two may be positively correlated but they are not synonymous. Even using income as a stand-in for success is not necessarily correct since it ignores wealth.

What’s left out of this equation is the fact that women are not helpless bystanders to the process. In most of the situations I’ve seen, it is the fact that many women refuse to consider getting involved with anyone they consider to be less successful, thereby limiting their marital options. For example, I knew several men in college who dated “townies”, but I can’t recall a single university woman ever doing so. In general, I would say it is much more accurate to say that women are scared of unsuccessful men than to say that men are scared of successful women.

But it is true that women significantly overrate the importance of their income and education to most men. While such things might be quite appealing to the lazy guy, the permanent adolescent, or the artistic dreamer, they’re simply irrelevant to the average man who is capable of supporting himself and is interested in having a family. He’s less likely to be concerned about a woman’s “success” and more concerned about the obstacles that “success” places in the way of her successfully being able to live up to the responsibilities of being a wife and mother.

Ian McLeod of the Clan McLeod wonders:

What is the cubic root of red?

6.341325705384997

Scott Hatfield asks a question:

It should be noted that Vox’s arguments are short on the sort of data that impress working biologists, but they are long on ‘information + intelligence + pattern recognition.’ But the question is, what if your intelligent attempts to recognize patterns are based on faulty information?

Then the attempts are doomed to near-certain failure. GIGO and all that. If there is nothing new about the epigenetic inheritance reported so breathlessly in New Scientist magazine and Lamarckism is not due for an unexpected revival, then obviously any conclusions based on that information are incorrect. Of course, my skepticism about ND-TENS long precedes Ms Young’s article and is in no way dependent upon the vagaries of prospective Neo-Lamarckism. While I still expect the Darwinian biological model to eventually go the way of the Ptolemaic cosmological model, the Marxian economic model, and the Freudian psychological model, I should be very surprised to see it happen within the next thirty years.

Now, if New Scientist magazine is little more than puffed-up science fiction, perhaps Scott or another science enthusiast would be so kind as to direct my attention to a more reliable source of science information. If scientists are genuinely concerned that the public is well-informed on science matters, it would seem to make sense for them to provide some reasonable means of doing so. I can’t say I’m terribly shocked to have the scientific legitimacy of New Scientist called into question, however, given the plethora of articles on largely unscientific concepts such as global warming, string theory, multiverses, and dark matter/energy/vapor.

On Pharyngula the other day, a man named Fr. J pointed out that PZ’s hate mail notwithstanding, it is atheists who are killing Christians rather than the other way around. Unsurprisingly, this prompted the expected reaction from PZ’s incredibly ignorant and mindlessly defensive readers:

“I read about how atheists kill and torture Christians all the time.”

Woah, proofs? And while you’re at it, care to talk about the jews you guys killed and tortured for supposedly desecrating the host?
Posted by: Michelle | July 22, 2008 3:27 PM

You lying sack of crap… where have the actual threats and actions of physical harm come from in this inceident? WHERE? Answer the question. Then go away.
Posted by: Celtic_Evolution | July 22, 2008 3:25 PM

No you don’t, you fucking liar.
Posted by: Brownian, OM | July 22, 2008 3:22 PM

That is a big fat case of your pants being on fire lying.
Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp | July 22, 2008 3:32 PM

And I read about Kirk sky-diving from orbit! IT MUST BE TRUE.
Seriously, with this comment you’ve embarrassed yourself past even most christians being willing to defend you.
Posted by: NanuNanu | July 22, 2008 3:41 PM

I can believe that’s true if you spend all your time reading medical reports documenting the delusions of schizophrenics.
Posted by: Emmet Caulfield | July 22, 2008 4:00 PM

There are four atheist countries in which atheists are presently jailing, torturing, and murdering Christians. These countries are China, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam. (Cuba was doing the same in the past, but has shown some respect for religious freedom for nearly a decade now.) While American atheists customarily try to fall back on a spurious No True Atheist defense, government documents prove this defense to not only be illogical, but incontrovertibly false. For example, the motivation for China’s most recent wave of anti-Christian persecution was laid out in a government document entitled “Notice on Further Strengthening Marxist Atheism Research, Propaganda and Education“. This proves that the motivation underlying the persecution is atheism; specifically the Marxist variant which is the heart of a godless worldview that correctly sees Christianity as a serious threat.

A subsequent document laid out the case against the Christian church: “We have dealt with the Falun-gong. We have arrested and put their leaders on the run. Now we must resolutely and strongly deal with the unregistered house churches. They are too numerous — too many. We must deal with them strongly.”

Given that at least 1,600 Falun Gong practitioners have been tortured to death and a number of recent Christian deaths have also been confirmed, such as the beating death of Ms. Jiang Zongxiu in prison on June 18, 2004 and the death of Bishop John Han Dingxian on September 12, 2007, there is absolutely no question that Chinese atheists are murdering Christians today and intend to continue doing so.

The situation is much worse in North Korea. In TIA, I quoted a 2004 article published by The Guardian: “The number of prisoners held in the North Korean gulag is not known: one estimate is 200,000, held in 12 or more centres. Camp 22 is thought to hold 50,000. Most are imprisoned because their relatives are believed to be critical of the regime. Many are Christians, a religion believed by Kim Jong-il to be one of the greatest threats to his power.” These North Koreans are not “Kim Jong-ilists”; they are atheists and correctly identify themselves as such. Their atheist self-identification is less dubious than that of the American atheist who makes a fetish of science and/or Darwinism and believes in the ever-ineffable “progress” towards a shiny, secular, material paradise.

In Vietnam, the atheist regime is currently persecuting the Montagnards, a predominantly Christian minority. This is probably done as much for ethnic reasons as anti-religious ones, but the persecution has been purely religious and directed against ethnic Vietnamese Christians in the recent past. Persecution is most intense for the ethnic minorities, especially the Montagnards from the hill country. Many of these people have attempted to flee to neighbouring Cambodia. However, under an agreement with the Vietnamese government, the authorities there have been returning the refugees to Vietnam to collect a bounty. Those who are returned are imprisoned, tortured or killed. Despite the persecution, instead of being destroyed, the church in Vietnam is growing and becoming stronger. Christians now make up almost ten percent of the population.

In Laos, Christians are considered to be enemies of the state and have been viciously persecuted since 1975. Although the persecution has not been as intense in the last three years, it still continues: “At least thirteen Christian villagers who were falsely accused of stirring rebel dissent have been killed by authorities in Laos over the past month, according to an August 7, [2007] report from Compass Direct. The report also states that approximately 200 Christians in the village of Sai Jerern have been arrested and imprisoned.”

Atheists have been murdering Christians almost non-stop around the world for the last 91 years and they have done so with predictable regularity in the majority of countries where they have obtained political dominance. It is all too typical that American atheists are far more concerned about Christian crimes committed against non-atheists in Europe more than 500 years ago than they are about the crimes being committed by avowed atheists against Asian Christians today.

But the persecutions will fail in the end, as they always do, and as Western Christianity continues to decline amidst its sloth, wealth, and apostasy, Eastern Christianity will rise, energized by the bloody test of its faith in the risen Lord Jesus Christ.

First, Spacebunny alerted me to the arrival of…THE LANDMARK HERODOTUS! It’s not on the short list for the next book study, but it’s a really lovely book. By the way, if your paperback Thucydides fell apart too, let me know. I took a picture of mine and I’m contacting the publisher, so perhaps we can arrange for an exchange or something.

Also, I finally managed to get not one, but TWO high scores on our Wii Fit. Spacebunny is absolutely crushing me at nearly everything; at one point, the only thing I had the high score on was pushups, she had the other 60 or whatever. Now, it’s true that she spends rather more time on it than I do, but even so, it’s just been an all-around horrible performance by me.

Here’s the quiz for the final chapter of Thucydides. I’d like to have a separate discussion of some of the appendices to accompany the final test that will be posted next Saturday. In the meantime, do discuss away:

The Landmark Thucydides 8.1 to 8.109

For those who wondered how I could possibly write in TIA that the death sentence imposed on Socrates by the Athenians was justified, this chapter should suffice to explain quite a bit.

I’m quite a bit late in chiming in here on chapter seven, but it’s my blog so I’m going to go ahead and do so. While I find the political speeches and the section on revolution to be the most insightful parts of the history, the chapter on the Sicilian Expedition is easily the most fascinating to anyone with even the slightest interest in wargames.

The first thing that leaps out at one is the fact that what is quite clearly a major invasion has somehow come to be characterized as an “expedition”. Just as we are expected to cheer for the Romans, we are supposed to cheer for the noble and intellectual Athenians, who would never to anything so vulgar and grasping as to “invade” a rich and prosperous land. They’re just attempting to spread democracy around Greece and Italy, some 2,400 years in advance of the neocon world democratic revolution. It’s intriguing to note that not even the pretension to be altruistically spreading democracy under the force of arms is new.

The second thing that is striking is the very crude state of siege warfare at this point in time. Sparta has been staring helplessly at the walls of Athens for some time, in Syracuse, the landside circumvallation of the city is assumed to be its death knell by both sides. The frantic wall-building on both sides seems a little strange, especially the notion of a perpendicular wall as a serious counter-measure, but then, without any reasonable siegecraft, it would have amounted to an effective land-sea blockade.

As for the omens, I tend to doubt that they played as big a part in Nicias’s decision to delay the Athenian departure once Demosthenes’s attack failed as is customarily supposed to be the case. It seems pretty clear that Nicias had good cause to believe that returning to Athens would probably end in a death sentence for him, as he later makes his preference in this regard quite specific. So, the omens strike me as much more of an excuse to justify his stupid and selfish decision to keep the expeditionary forces at Syracuse, especially given the not-entirely-serious manner with which many Athenians customarily practiced their religion, to say nothing of giving the reported fifth column more time to work inside the Syracusan walls. There is little doubt that the Spartans, on the other hand, really did take their ceremonies and omens very seriously indeed, considering how many times they sacrificed the initiative because of an ill-timed earthquake on the peninsula.

The most important lesson of the Sicilian Expedition, in my opinion, is the way it shows how foreign military adventures tend to weaken a powerful empire rather than strengthen it. How many powerful military nations have fallen after engaging in aggressive action? Expanding empires tend to be marked by smaller forces carving up huge chunks of land almost haphazardly, as the British did in India, the French in Africa and the Spanish in South America. But massive military actions seem to often be the prelude to a collapse, often in connection with the failure of the aggression.

This does not bode well for the current USA, given its shaky economic position and the multiple military occupations in which it is engaged around the world.

John Derbyshire muses on the difficulty of speaking with the differently intelligenced:

William Deresiewicz in The American Scholar, wrote recently about the difficulty of talking to a plumber:

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League [degrees], and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.

It’s a horrifying story, but not a surprising one. This is indeed what we have come to. An acquaintance of mine, an academic in the human sciences (not Charles Murray) holds the opinion that across an IQ gap of more than one standard deviation (i.e. about 15 points), communication between two people becomes difficult, and that beyond two standard deviations it is effectively impossible.

I think this is somewhat of an exaggeration. There’s no question that crossing the intelligence chasm can be very hard, but it can be done if there is sufficient patience and respect on both sides. I doubt it has escaped the attention of many readers how often I am accused of being crazy despite the obvious trappings that indicate a high level of social functionality; these accusations mostly stem from there being a gap of three standard deviations between me and many of my critics. They simply can’t understand what on Earth I’m talking about, and because they know they are of above-average intelligence and therefore not stupid, they conclude that I must be insane.

Hence Vox’s First Law.

I didn’t formulate that law due to any Internet skirmish, by the way, but long before I first put pen to paper. The reason was that I happened to notice how almost every single person of exceptionally high intelligence I knew was considered to be more or less off their rockers by the majority of normal people of their acquaintance. Some dealt with this well, others retreated into a drug-infused shell and wound up turning the popular perception into an auto-fulfilling prophecy.

There are a number of ways to deal with the problem, my solution was to embrace an area of broad common interest, athletics. Martial arts worked out very well, since no one in the dojo cares what you think, who you are, or what you do. The only thing that matters is how good you are and how tough you are. It was a brutal janitor with broken teeth who taught me how to talk to plumbers; years later he told me that when I first walked in, he couldn’t wait to beat the hell out of this pansy-ass rich boy with a Porsche. And he did, for years, although I do remember that once, after about the twentieth time that he’d decked me with a right to the jaw, he stepped back and nodded approvingly when I pushed myself back to my feet. It was the first friendly gesture he’d made in six months.

It took me four years of training and weightlifting six days a week to reach the point where I could fight him on reasonably equal terms, although he was always the better fighter. By that time, we were reasonably friendly and we always had plenty to talk about, whether it was mocking the flashy Tae Kwon Do kickers, musing about the feasibility of adding Aikido techniques to our repertoire or trying to figure out how to deal with that damned Muy Thai centerline trap. (His brilliant solution, unsurprisingly, was to go in hard enough to send them reeling with the first shot. Of course, that works a lot better when you go 225 instead of 175.)

So, I think the problem mentioned by Deresiewicz is less about the very real intelligence gap referenced by Derb and more about the general unwillingness of the highly intelligent to grant the less intelligent the respect they deserve as autonomous individuals with their own unique interests and occupations, however boring or pointless one might find them to be.

On a tangential note, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Deresiewicz couldn’t actually speak very much to people from other countries in other languages. In addition to the “Ivy retardation” of which he speaks, there is also the “Ivy illusion”, which is the tendency of many Ivy Leaguers to vastly overrate their own individual competencies on the basis of their alma maters. From what I have seen over the last 10 years in Europe, most of the people who studied a language in college don’t really speak it.

Not with Russia and China holding the U.S. economy hostage:

Today, fully 21% of Russia’s monetary reserves are invested in the obligations of Fannie, Freddie and the Home Loan Banks. And the largest holder of Fannie and Freddie debt is another friendly foreigner, China. The middle kingdom, according to the FreedomWorks organization, owns $376 billion worth of U.S. agency bonds.

This is an interesting fact with some implications I had not considered before. It may explain the unusual combination of verbal bellicosity with total inaction that we’ve seen from the White House over the last six months. Despite the hysterical neocon lobbying for a third undeclared war, the Federal Reserve bailout guarantee would appear to ensure there will not be any U.S. attack on Iran without approval first being granted by the two largest holders of Fannie and Freddie debt. Now, it’s not hard to imagine Russia being at least open an invasion given how they’d stand to profit from a massive jump in oil prices. But the Russians are probably not keen to see a second U.S. military presence established so close to their area of influence. They’re also a long-time Iranian ally, Iran is an important buyer of Russian technology, and furthermore, there is no way that China, an oil importer, would be amenable to seeing its production and transportation expenses continue to rise. So, the logical conclusion is that the U.S. mortgage system is now hostage for U.S. behavior with regards to Iran.

Of course, this analysis relies heavily on the idea that the Bush administration would like to avoid the complete collapse of the U.S. mortgage banking system and the negative consequences of such a collapse on the U.S. economy. Given the near-complete contempt the administration has shown for the long-term health of the economy over the last eight years, this may be an unwarranted assumption.

An Israeli historian turns up the volume in an attempt to get the USA to do the dirty work on Israel’s behalf:

“Israel,” he avers, “will almost surely attack Iran’s nuclear sites in the next four to seven months.” Either that, he writes, or else Israel will eventually have to launch “a preemptive nuclear strike.” His message to the West: take out Iran, or we’ll nuke ’em!

The Israelis have been threatening to strike for the past six months, so nothing new there, except for the tone of certainty. Morris is no fringe nut-job flailing away on his obscure blog; he’s a prominent Israeli historian writing on the most noted opinion page of them all, a veritable bulletin board for governing elites worldwide. As such, he is almost certainly speaking with some insight into Israeli government plans. It is, in any case, almost inconceivable that he wrote his piece without the foreknowledge and consent of Israeli government officials.

I have no problem with Israel defending itself, none at all. Israel has both a right and an obligation to do so. But it does not have the right to demand that the USA do its fighting for it; in fact, this reliance on the superior power of an ally has been quite often been disastrous for both the smaller and the greater ally.

The president and the neocons would be wise to resist Israeli pleas and threats, not only in America’s interest, but in Israel’s too. An Israel that is reliant upon American military force for its own defense is an Israel that is weaker than it should be.