Tag: society

The amorphous Official Story

This belated announcement demonstrates why you should never, ever, pay much credence to official government statements about major events:

Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant experienced full meltdowns at three reactors in the wake of an earthquake and tsunami in March, the country’s Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters said Monday.

The nuclear group’s new evaluation, released Monday, goes further than previous statements in describing the extent of the damage caused by an earthquake and tsunami on March 11. The announcement will not change plans for how to stabilize the Fukushima Daiichi plant, the agency said.

THERE IS NO MELTDOWN. DO NOT PANIC! THERE IS NO MELTDOWN. ALL THE REACTORS ARE STABLE… okay, well, there was maybe a meltdown. Um, three, actually, if you insist on being precise.

Statistical illiterates

In fairness, the estimates would probably be right on if one only counts celebrities and fictional television characters:

U.S. adults, on average, estimate that 25% of Americans are gay or lesbian. More specifically, over half of Americans (52%) estimate that at least one in five Americans are gay or lesbian, including 35% who estimate that more than one in four are. Thirty percent put the figure at less than 15%.

Only four percent got the answer right, “Less than 5%”. The actual number is less than half of that, around two percent, not that you’d know it from the way that Hollywood now portrays America as being half Jewish, half Gay, and one quarter Clean, Articulate Black. I expect that Gallup would get similarly overestimated results if it polled Americans on the percentage of Jews in the population too.

I don’t know about you, but I look forward to the touching final episode of Glee, when the very last student at [whatever] high school a) learns that her great-grandmother died in the Holocaust and b) is deconverted from her insidious heterosexuality by Sue Sylvester.

And yet some wonder why I don’t bother to conceal my complete contempt for mainstream opinion. Given its wildly delusional foundations, I would be gravely insulted to learn that my thoughts were considered to be even remotely related to the mainstream.

HT Steve Sailer

Mailvox: why do white women choose black men?

The Spartan inquires:

Why is it that in my town, there is a lot of White Women hanging around Blacks. It seems that every Black man in this town has a white wife, white mistress, white girlfriend. Walk into the Salvation Army soup kitchen and every poor white trash woman (or her grandmother) is lugging around some mulatto child.

How does Game answer this? Should not every Beta White male go around in blackface and talk jive? If reproduction is about genes, and moving up the ladder, why are white women flocking to black men, especially on college campuses?

One can never be certain when attempting to ascertain the motivations behind the actions of others. Never forget some of the most important words of Ludwig von Mises from Human Action: “No dialectical artifice can spirit away the fact that man is driven by the aim to achieve certain ends…. We cannot approach our subject if we disregard the meaning which acting man attaches to the situation, i.e. the given state of affairs and to his own behavior with regard to this situation.”

The problem, of course, is that Man in general and women in particular are very seldom able to explain the actual reasons for their actions, they are much better at providing ex post facto rationalizations of them. But, I have made the following observations over time.

1. The media has been pushing multi-racial romance very, very hard for the last 12-15 years, specifically the white female-black male combination. (I would bet that there are at least 10x more WF-BM couples portrayed than BF-WM couples.) There is nary a commercial on television that does not include a token black man with a funky pseudo-afro at the party or a drama that does not feature a romance between a Handsome Black Man and an Open-Minded White Woman. This tends to have an effect on the class most susceptible to mass marketing, the 18-24 crowd, which also the only group without sufficient life experience to understand that the “racist” stereotypes they so enjoy opposing are based on statistical fact.

2. Black men tend to be more aggressive and forward than white men, on the average. They not only take a shotgun approach, but don’t tend to agonize much over being shot down. Possessing -1SD average IQs, they are less likely to be crippled by introspection and second-guessing than white and Asian men. Recall that Roissy has asserted that high intelligence is actually a handicap with regards to sexual status. Also, the observable black male disinclination for monogamous relationships dictates that a higher percentage of them will remain on the market regardless of their current relationship status.

3. Low rank white women tend to be overvalued by black men. The woman who can attract only white 3s is often able to attract black 7s. I know several black male-white female couples where the black man is significantly more attractive than the white woman. This phenomenon is also often seen in white male-Asian female couples. When a woman has the option to increase her sex rank simply by expanding the pool of acceptable men, it should come as no surprise that many elect to do so.

However, it is interesting to note that despite the race-mixing at the prole level, very little of it takes place among the marrying classes. Virtually no white women actually marry black men; even Asian marriages to white men are on the order of 2 percent of all Asian female marriages. As with most cultural degradations such as crime and illegitimacy, multi-racial non-marital relationships are for the lower classes while the shrinking middle and upper classes of all races remain homogenous.

So, on the basis of his email, I can conclude the Spartan’s town is an economically depressed one that is largely comprised of lower class whites with a large minority population. As far as the question about Game goes, the rule is to mimic whatever behavior is proven to be successful. If the Spartan is interested in overweight, peroxide-blonde 3s, he would probably be wise to imitate the behavior of those gentlemen who are presently attracting them.

The benefits of immigration

So much for the idea of shiny, sexy, secular post-Christianity in Britain:

Women who do not wear headscarves are being threatened with violence and even death by Islamic extremists intent on imposing sharia law on parts of Britain, it was claimed today. Other targets of the ‘Talibanesque thugs’, being investigated by police in the Tower Hamlets area of London, include homosexuals.

Stickers have been plastered on public walls stating: ‘Gay free zone. Verily Allah is severe in punishment’.

The enthusiastic embrace of the importation of non-Christian religionists by secular multiculturalists hoping to reduce the cultural influence of Christianity is without question going to be considered one of the most disastrous policies in the history of the West. I wonder how long it will be before the first British government official is assassinated by a Sharia-seeking radical. I, for one, will find it tremendously amusing when feminist professors begin wearing headscarfs for fear of their students.

The secular community in government, media, and academia decided to ally itself with Islam against Christianity some time ago. I wonder how many of them are beginning to rethink the wisdom of that decision.

2037

I thought Paul Ryan’s comments were interesting, in that we finally have a politician who is, unlike all the mainstream economists, actually looking at debt levels instead of GDP and the money supply.

“We’re on a debt crisis path. We are on a path where the government goes from 20 percent of GDP, to 40 percent then 60 percent of GDP. We’re on a path where our debt goes from about 68 percent of GDP to 800 percent of GDP over the three-generation window,” Ryan said.

“I asked CBO to run the model going out and they told me that their computer simulation crashes in 2037 because CBO can’t conceive of any way in which the economy can continue past the year 2037 because of debt burdens,” said Ryan.

I also found the CBO simulation crash of 2037 to be fascinating, given that I have predicted 2033 to be the date by which the United States will have either disintegrated or lost its national sovereignty. What Ryan, like Sean Hannity yesterday, leaves out is that government debt is only part of the equation and a relatively small part at that. The combined Federal/State & Local debt has increased from 16% of the total to 22.5% since 2005. If private debt continues to decline, from 31.5% to 27% for financials and 28% to 24.3% for households, then government debt will have to increase in order to prevent the economy from shrinking.

This is why I said that there is no easy way out of it. The Ryan plan isn’t awful, but it isn’t sufficient either.

They aren’t smart enough

I’m down with Steyn on his condemnation of the would-be speech police:

When I wrote over the weekend about the trial of Australia’s most prominent columnist for expressing his opinions, I did not expect it to be quite so immediately relevant to the United States. But perhaps what’s most disturbing about Lindsey Graham’s dismal defense of his inclinations to censorship is the lack of even the slightest attempt to underpin his position with any kind of principle. He all but literally wraps himself in the flag, and, once you pry him out of the folds of Old Glory, what you’re left with is a member of the governing class far too comfortable with the idea that he and his colleagues should determine the bounds of public discourse.

I’m sick of that. I’m sick of it in Canada, sick of it in Britain, in Australia, in Europe, and I’m now sick of it in America – in part because, as Senator Graham has demonstrated in his fatuous defense, guys like him aren’t smart enough to set the rules for what the rest of us are allowed to think.

The irony, of course, is that Sen. Graham (R-SC), is talking about throwing out the First Amendment in order to defend non-Americans who wish to establish Sharia in the United States from criticism by Americans. That should be more than enough to deny him the Republican nomination in his next electoral campaign. It is time to restore the Constitutional rights of free speech and free association to Americans. I propose establishing the following principles:

a) Any private employer can hire or fire any employee for any reason.
b) No public employer may deny employment or fire any employee for any expressed opinion about anything.

If you are a private employer, then it is your business and only your business if you want to employ nothing but black lesbian Marxists or Holocaust-denying Scottish neo-Nazis. But if you are a public employer, then you have absolutely no right to favor one socio-political perspective over another. Free association and free speech. It doesn’t get anymore fundamentally American than that.

The secular inquisition

In which Enlightenment secularism is once more proven to be a false dawn:

I never thought I’d have an opportunity to see a real-life heresy trial in 21st-century Australia, but that’s exactly what’s been going on this week in Melbourne’s Federal Court. Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt has been dragged before a judge and accused of thought crimes against the high church of political correctness. He’s being prosecuted and persecuted for the lese-majesty of challenging the cult of victimhood that dominates racial discourse in Australia.

The plaintiffs in this case claim to be aggrieved by several Bolt newspaper columns that cast doubt upon the authenticity of their Aboriginality…. These Aboriginal leaders seek not only an apology, but also a court order that would prevent Bolt from ever expressing similar views again.

It is remarkable to repeatedly see demonstrated how little value the modern secularists place on the Christian humanistic values to which they claim to more committed than the theists who first established them.

Mailvox: on optimism

SN wonders why I am such a cheerful prophet of doom:

As Christendom falls in England and the march of the Sodomites continues unabated, it is easy to feel glum. In spite of Christianity maintaining some sort of respectability within philosophical circles, its status as a position of social and moral respectability is experiencing a precipitous decline. Hollywood, the media and the elite universities of western civilization are anti-Christian. Not to rely solely on personal anecdote, but I just had the unpleasant experience of applying to do a research PhD in Theology at [top university], only to discover while researching potential supervisors that more than half of the Theology faculty are atheists. Given Lewis’ social ostracism among the dons of his day, I suppose I should not have been surprised.

More to the point, does the decline of Christianity in the west ever get you down? We talk of Christianity’s growth among Africans and Chinese and cyclical periods of persecution that inspire a resurgence of the Church, but all evidence appears to indicate that things are going to get pretty rough. We’re heading into a Depression, the secular state is on the rise and totalitarianism lies on the horizon, if it is not here already.

How do you rise above it all, is what I am asking? What practical advice could you share with the average Christian who is trying to educate him/herself as much as possible about their Christian heritage, and as a result, is more aware of how bad the situation actually is?

You always seem clear eyed about the situation, yet optimistic. I look around, expecting to see jack boots come marching round the corner any second. Is that madness or informed paranoia?

First, it is informed paranoia. The jackboots are coming, just as they have done since they were hobnailed sandals. As to why that doesn’t get me down, well, the truth is that from time to time it does. But that probably does not show much because the emotion that the ongoing collapse of civilization primarily inspires in me is one of irritation that humanity can’t seem to learn the most elementary lessons from its own history. It’s hard to feel too sorry for an individual, a society, or a species that repeatedly insists on smashing its face into a brick wall with so little regard for what happened the last time it did that.

In other words, I see it more as comedic farce than tragedy because I don’t expect anything better from the mass of humanity or its arrogant, short-sighted, self-styled ruling elite. It is impossible to read history and reach any other conclusion. When I was a child, I read the Bible and marveled at the way the Israelites would willfully put themselves into danger by ignoring God’s commands, end up suffering through tremendous hardship, cry out to God and get rescued, then go on to repeat the process within a generation or three. I thought the Israelites were a remarkably stupid people and assumed that God made them His chosen people in much the same way we regard a child as being “special” today.

But the more history I read, the more I saw that the Israelites’ behavior is the normal pattern of human behavior. Man stands on the shoulders of giants and thinks himself tall, only to learn otherwise when he strides boldly forward. Perhaps that makes you cry, but it tends to make me laugh, even if it does sound a little hollow and sardonic even to me. But how can you not laugh, as atheists and pagans blithely assemble the infrastructure of the old slaughterhouse and call it progress, never imagining for a second that they will not only be its victims again, but will find themselves crying out to God for rescue from the destiny they so ardently desired.

As for the root of my optimism, it is three-fold. First is that in the grand historical scheme, I see the some of the darker elements prophesied in the Bible unfolding. This reinforces my confidence, (not that it was necessary) that this is only the first level of the game of life. The second is that I tend to live day-to-day. We can plan for tomorrow, but we can’t actually know what it will bring. And the third is that I do my best to find joy where it can be found, even if it is the bitter joy of seeing that one’s cynical take on events has once more been proven correct.

There is nothing new under the sun. We, and the generation before us, have enjoyed the lazy days of economic summer. And while it is a little hard to see the leaves turning brown and dying as winter approaches, we can steel ourselves by knowing that it is not the first one and that what our ancestors survived, we, too, can hope to survive. The prince of this world may be preparing his horsemen for another terrible ride, but God is still God and God is still good.

The shadows grow ever longer, but never forget that somewhere beyond the shadows there is light.

The land of rape and sunnis

I don’t know why anyone would be expected to intervene and attempt stopping a rapist when they’re not even permitted to defend themselves and their own property.

Gary Gunstone stalked the woman through the streets of Bideford, North Devon, just after midnight as she walked to her parents home after visiting her boyfriend. The 15-stone brute dragged her to the ground and raped her in full view of passing drivers….

‘One bizarre feature of this case is that a couple of times cars went by as he was raping her on the side of the road. He was prepared to rape her right on the pavement without any apparent concern for being detected. He made no attempt to hide what he was doing. It was just something he wanted to do there and then and he did it. It is every woman’s nightmare to be attacked in a public place by a complete stranger but you always think of it happening in some remote area, not on a pavement with cars going by. It is very unusual. Unfortunately none of the cars that passed has stopped and so he was able to go as far as he wanted to go.’

What can possibly be considered bizarre about passers-by declining to get involved in the situation, considering that their two options were a) getting hurt, and b) getting arrested? I don’t know why anyone in England should be either upset or surprised by this, as this is exactly the progressive, secular, post-Christian England that the Laborite voters in the U.K. apparently sought after the Thatcher era. It is obvious that a society where men are not permitted to defend themselves is a society where men do not defend women either. And if that society only punishes attempted rape with a sentence of 12 months, then it is one that has every reason to expect more rape attempts.

At this rate of secular progress, another 50 years will see men openly raping women in public and not even being arrested for it. Although it might earn the woman a few lashes….

Abusive social workers vs pedophile priests

I somehow doubt we’ll ever hear anywhere nearly as much about this, and the rampant child abuse being committed on a daily basis by teachers and other public school personnel, as we do about the behavior of pedophile priests from six decades ago. But give The New York Times credit for going against left-liberal orthodoxy and publishing the results of its investigation:

A New York Times investigation over the past year has found widespread problems in the more than 2,000 state-run homes. In hundreds of cases reviewed by The Times, employees who sexually abused, beat or taunted residents were rarely fired, even after repeated offenses, and in many cases, were simply transferred to other group homes run by the state. And, despite a state law requiring that incidents in which a crime may have been committed be reported to law enforcement, such referrals are rare: State records show that of some 13,000 allegations of abuse in 2009 within state-operated and licensed homes, fewer than 5 percent were referred to law enforcement.

Note that in the United States, 10,667 people made allegations of child sexual abuse between 1950 and 2002 against 4,392 priests. This represented around 4 percent of the 109,694 priests who were ordained and active during that time. Given that there were 13,000 allegations of abuse in one state representing one-fifteenth of the U.S. population in 2009 alone, this indicates that state social workers are 951 times more likely to abuse a disabled person under their supervision than a Catholic priest was to sexually abuse a child.

This doesn’t excuse what the pedophile priests did nor does it excuse the diabolical decision of the Vatican to permit homosexuals to join the priesthood in the first place. They eminently deserve whatever punishment they receive, in both this world and the next. But it puts the scale of their evil deeds into the proper statistical perspective. And while one could argue that physical beatings and psychological abuse are not as bad as sexual abuse and should be omitted from the comparison, one also has to keep in mind that none of the crimes committed by the priests rose to the lethal level either.

It also shows the tremendous hypocrisy of those who simultaneously claim that there is no truth to religion and yet attempt to hold religious individuals to a higher standard than they hold anyone else. Social workers and schoolteachers commit far more abuse, sexual and otherwise, than religious leaders, especially if religious leaders who are openly in direct violation of their religious standards are omitted from the equation as logic dictates they must be. (Why should we be surprised that a man who rejects the Church’s stand on homosexuality should also reject the Church’s stand on the sexual abuse of children or anything else?) But it is quite clear from the reaction of the state agency to the crimes of its agents that the Catholic Church’s reaction to the crimes committed by its priests was an entirely normal bureaucratic one. It can, and should, be condemned by Christians who believe in a higher standard for Christian leaders. Secular individuals, who don’t believe in any such standards, have no such grounds for similar condemnation, especially when they show so little interest in the far more common crimes committed by secular agents of the state.