Tag: society

Britain is leading the way in demonstrating the way in which secular atheist culture is little more than a very brief waystop in the return to paganism:

A Mail on Sunday investigation – which will alarm anyone concerned about animal cruelty – has revealed that schools, hospitals, pubs and famous sporting venues such as Ascot and Twickenham are controversially serving up meat slaughtered in accordance with strict Islamic law to unwitting members of the public.

All the beef, chicken and lamb sold to fans at Wembley has secretly been prepared in accordance with sharia law, while Cheltenham College, which boasts of its ‘strong Christian ethos’, is one of several top public schools which also serves halal chicken to pupils without informing them.

Even Britain’s biggest hotel and restaurant group Whitbread, which owns the Beefeater and Brewers Fayre chains, among many others, has admitted that more than three-quarters of its poultry is halal.

It will certainly be interesting to see if Britain’s aggressive public atheists speak out about this, or if they do what one would expect and remain silent since so many of them are actually more anti-Christian than they are anti-religion. The amusing thing, of course, is that the story is being portrayed as one that concerns animal cruelty, not corporate submission to Islam.

Needless to say, we can be confident that all of the tapes and videotapes of the unprovoked shooting are going to mysteriously vanish:

Erik Scott was a West Point graduate, Army veteran, MBA graduate of Duke University, and a medical sales rep for Boston Scientific. He was gunned down by three Las Vegas police officers after they responded to a 911 call by Costco store employees reporting a man with a gun, possibly on narcotics, behaving erratically.

Scott was 38 years old, shopping with his girlfriend for items they needed as they moved in together. Unfortunately, those are the only details of the story on which anyone agrees.

To hear the side of the story presented by Scott’s family, friends, and some eyewitnesses, Erik Scott’s death was the result of ignorance and embellishment on the part of the Costco staff, and a combative, deterministic mindset from responding officers….

There are no commands or communications between Erik Scott and police captured on a nine-minute audiotape during which the shooting occurred. Officers not directly in front of the store are heard over the radio establishing a perimeter and trying to block off access to the store’s parking lot. The first indication Scott and the police have made contact is when a officer breaks in to call “shots fired” after Scott is on the ground, already dying or dead.

It’s time for conservatives to wake up and realize that America’s jackbooted, militarized “law enforcement” thugs with badges and attitudes are not the friendly smalltown policemen of yore. The police are far more of a problem than most of the “criminals” they affect to be saving everyone from.

And I’d like to hear those who will seriously attempt to argue that it was just the inherent stress and confusion of the job that caused the Las Vegas police to murder a military vet shopping at Costco with his girlfriend and then immediately initiate a coverup try to rationalize away the behavior of this brave brother officer:

A former Boise Police officer charged with sexually abusing several infants has been sentenced. Stephen Young was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Wednesday. He’ll have to serve 12 and a half years before he’s eligible for parole. Young changed his plea in June from not guilty on four counts of lewd conduct to guilty of one count of sexual abuse of a minor. That charge was for a victim between 14 and 18 months old.

The fact is that the police are disproportionately sick and depraved individuals who get off on adrenaline and exercising power over others. They are also psychologically weaker than the norm; those who believe the reason they have more failed marriages and commit more suicide than the norm is the stresses of the job have failed to consider the mindset of the average individual who wants to become a law enforcement officer.

UPDATE: The “stress and danger” faced by the policeman in the course of his job is massively exaggerated. 15 per 100,000 police die on the job, (even fewer are killed), which is 7.5% of the 200 per 100,000 fatality rate of the most dangerous occupation in the country, that of fisherman. Loggers, airplane pilots, farmers and ranchers, roofers, ironworkers, sanitation workers, truckers and drivers, industrial machinists and construction workers all face more danger on the job than police do. And nurses, EMTs, and doctors all see much worse human carnage than police do on a daily basis.

It should be reasonably easy to statistically demonstrate that the police are the psychologically weak individuals their bullying behavior suggests them to be. If they have higher rates of suicide despite facing less danger than the more dangerous occupations and less stress than the emergency medical occupations, the logical conclusion will be that the problem is with the individuals who seek to become police rather than the nature of the job itself.

One guess as to my opinion about Terry Jones’s announcement that he intended to burn a Talmud and a Koran on September 11th. Here’s the hint… I’m a libertarian.

I didn’t get outraged by Mr. Myers assaulting a communion cracker or trashcanning a Koran and I’m certainly not bothered by Mr. Jones burning whatever book he wants to burn so long as he happens to own it. What is far more troublesome is the reaction of so many public figures, mainstream and conservative alike, as they fall all over each other to condemn a man exercising his Constitutionally-protected free speech rights. It is obvious that they are far more afraid of provoking the wrath of foreign Muslims than they are of provoking the wrath of the decadent American citizenry.

Needless to say, the anti-book burners won’t decry the Afghans burning American flags and chanting “Death to Christians” in response to the mere suggestion that someone intends to burn a Koran. They are no defenders of freedom or respect for religion, they are already subservient dhimmis.

In which it is argued, contra my prediction of the brothel/burqah option, American women are rather far along in the process of abandoning marriage in favor of concubinage:

If one takes a close look at contemporary American society, it appears that concubinage is gradually reasserting itself in Western culture and law. This is an inevitable result of the idea that men have an obligation to financially support illegitimate children; an idea that was rejected by Christians because it fatally weakens the incentives for women without significant property to engage in monogamous marriage. In fact, Islam prohibits concubinage as well, and dictates that although a man may have up to four wives, each one will have the same status under the law. Abuses have always occurred, but the contrast between European and East Asian society (Chinese in particular) was stark up until modernization in Asia. Rich Chinese men often had a “first wife” and varying numbers of concubines, the Emperor would have hundreds of them, and lots of ordinary Chinese men had to make do sharing prostitutes or going entirely without a woman.

For young women, a life as a concubine is often preferable to being married to a poor man, and increasingly that option is open to them in the US. For the lucky few women – usually the exceptionally attractive and mercenary – a sexual relationship with a wealthy businessman, athlete or politician can guarantee decades of support if she manages to get pregnant. Rielle Hunter, John Edwards’ adulterous lover, is an example of a woman who pulled it off. Scores of women manage to hit the jackpot with young, unsophisticated athletes; thousands upon thousands of others we’ve never heard of take advantage of relatively wealthy men. In these cases, where child support will be enough to live on, the arrangement is concubinage in all but name. The only argument against equivalency is that sexual exclusivity is not guaranteed, as it usually was in ancient forms of concubinage, but given that sexual exclusivity is neither guaranteed nor enforced in marriage any longer and concubinage has always been held to be a lesser alternative to full marriage, it is fulfilling the exact same role the institution did in ancient times.

It’s an interesting historical correlation, but I don’t think the devolution into modern concubinage is so much an end state as a stage on the continued devolution into full female subjugation. The reality is that economics and demographics alike predict the unviability of any society with universal suffrage and concomitant legal favoritism towards women. Therefore, anything that naturally develops from that society is irrelevant, since the society is going to either collapse or be conquered and be replaced by a competing one.

Derbyshire explains why it is an effective and PC-subversive television show:

For a strictly limited time period, we’re permitted take a break from official reality to ponder unpalatable truths.

In a post-Malthusian society that has shed most customary constraints on mating (class/race/religious endogamy, arranged marriage, doweries, etc.) and un-hitched sex from procreation, mating is an open Darwinian struggle. Beautiful young women and men gifted with the seductive arts (“game”) mate a lot; plain women and gauche men are left in the dust.

Inside a pretty woman there is often a slut, who can be awakened by a man with good “game.” But …

… ceteris paribus, a woman’s desire for long-term commitment is greater than a man’s.

Meek provider-type males with no “game” rather frequently end up having their life blood, and bank balance, drained away by whiny self-centered ex-wives.

Ambitious, worldly parents are resented by their offspring, and …

… such parents in turn regard the less successful of those offspring with mild contempt.

Kids, even intelligent kids, often dislike school. Boys particularly dislike the feminized PC pablum that forms the curriculum of the average American public school today. They would sit all day eating junk food, watching TV cop shows, and playing Call of Duty on a GameBoy if they could.

Low-class white women are often obese and coarse.

It is also interesting to watch how being engaged to Chelsea is rapidly turning Charlie into a gamma as he fails test after test with her. The minute she turns a stern look on him and says his name in a deep voice, he caves. I don’t know if this is the result of new writers attempting to “tame” him and thereby ruin the show or if they are setting the stage for Charlie to stand his ground as a man and declare non servium while bringing the show to a close in a glorious blaze of alcohol and escorts as Alan marries the annoying woman instead.

I assume the former, however, since Chelsea didn’t seem the sort who would hold any significant appeal for Charlie from the beginning. But then, I tend to catch the show sporadically and out of order, so I could easily be missing something. In any event, it would appear Charlie Sheen may be the last American hero to be permitted to the masses on television.

Intel CEO reminds Washington that capital is mobile. Especially human capital:

Otellini’s remarks during dinner at the Technology Policy Institute’s Aspen Forum here amounted to a warning to the administration officials and assorted Capitol Hill aides in the audience: Unless government policies are altered, he predicted, “the next big thing will not be invented here. Jobs will not be created here.”

The U.S. legal environment has become so hostile to business, Otellini said, that there is likely to be “an inevitable erosion and shift of wealth, much like we’re seeing today in Europe–this is the bitter truth.”

I think he is dead on target here. My father was a pioneer in the computer graphics industry and he’s certainly not creating any new technologies or jobs in prison. I was one of the leaders in bringing graphics hardware to the computer game industry – no one believes this but you can look it up in the Computer Gaming World archives – and have invented a few things from a next-gen sound card to the world’s most advanced mouse and an AI system. I left the country more than a decade ago because I saw signs on the horizon of what Otellini is now pointing out. Furthermore, I run into Americans moving abroad to set up businesses on a regular basis, not every day, but a lot more often than I did 10 years ago. Between the high corporate taxes, the inflexible bureaucracy, the insane amount of regulations and paperwork required, and the global reach of the Internet, it simply doesn’t make much sense to start any business that isn’t a location-tied service one in the USA anymore.

As Schumpeter explained, no entrepeneurs means no economic growth, which means declining societal wealth and eventually grass hut city time. Unfortunately, most people are demanding even more government and they’re getting what they vote for while John Galt votes with his feet.

Do you honestly believe American police are any less corrupt?

The killers came for Mayor Cavazos in the early hours of Aug. 16 when seven SUV’s rolled up and men in police uniforms descended on his palatial home. Servants stood back terrified, as their boss was forced away at gunpoint. On Aug. 18, his corpse was dumped on a nearby road. There was a mercy of sorts in the manner of his killing – shot dead with two bullets in the head and one in the chest, and spared the mutilation and rape inflicted on so many other victims. The following day, hundreds of residents wept over his coffin in Santiago’s central plaza, lining the stairs up to the church with candles and holding signs calling for peace.

Then on Aug. 20, more disturbing news broke. State agents arrested six of the mayor’s own police officers and said they confessed to involvement in the murder.

In fact, given the draconian seizure laws that permit American police to arrest money and keep a percentage of it, there is a sound basis for arguing that American police forces are even more structurally corrupt than their Mexican counterparts. They may not be murdering any mayors, but then, they make even more money without having to do wetwork for hire. The American history of Prohibition strongly suggests that main reason for the insane violence on the Mexican side of the border and the police corruption on the American side is that some drugs are deemed illegal. Legalizing all drugs would eliminate both the violence and the corruption, which of course is why most police oppose drug legalization so strongly. It would mean the end of their drug war-financed gravy train, which is worth around $450 million$1.58 billion per year to the LOCAL law enforcement agencies of the country.