Tag: trainwreck

Spanking is child abuse

But apparently chemical lobotomies are nothing more than good parenting:

The researchers found that doctor visits between 1993-1998 and 2005-2009 that involved a prescription of antipsychotic medication for children jumped sevenfold — from 0.24 to 1.83 per 100 people. For teens, 14 to 20 years old, the rate rose from 0.78 to 3.76 per 100 people, and for adults, it just about doubled, from 3.25 to 6.18 per 100 people….

Dr. Peter Breggin, a psychiatrist from Ithaca, N.Y., and an outspoken critic of widespread antipsychotic use in children, said these drugs damage developing brains

“We have a national catastrophe,” said Breggin. “This is a situation where we have ruined the brains of millions of children.” In controlling behavior, antipsychotics act on the frontal lobes of the brain — the same area of the brain targeted by a lobotomy, Breggin said. “These are lobotomizing drugs,” he added. “Of course, they will reduce all behavior, including irritability,” he said….

Between 2005 and 2009, controlling “disruptive behavior” accounted for 63 percent of the reason antipsychotics were given to children and almost 34 percent for adolescents, the researchers found.

To say nothing of what they do to long-term cognitive capacity. Between widespread chemical lobotomies and ubiquitous vaccines, I’m amazed that anyone still believes that medical “science” is genuinely focused on attempting to help children grow up to live healthy and productive lives.

It would be informative to know how these children on antipsychotics do on IQ tests before and after their brains are bathed in chemicals for years.

Send the Sikhs to safety

It seems that the Onion’s parody of Michele Bachmann’s fake response to the Wisconsin shootings wasn’t actually all that far off. Two-thirds of those killed weren’t Americans, which is why the savages are now attempting to attack the U.S. Constitution.

Top State Department officials including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have been working behind the scenes to assuage Indian anger following the attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin over the weekend by an Army veteran and alleged former white supremacist.

Indian government officials and Sikh leaders across India were outraged by the attack that left 6 dead, including 4 Indian nationals, at a Sikh temple near Milwaukee and called on the U.S. to do more to protect Sikhs living in the United Sates. Clinton called Indian Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna from her stop in South Africa Monday after Krishna criticized the U.S. for failed policies and a growing trend of violent incidents against religious minorities….

Protests broke out in several Indian cities in response to the news of the attack, some calling for stricter U.S. gun laws. Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal wrote to India Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to urge the Indian government to press the Obama administration to do more to protect Sikhs living in the U.S.

First of all, the Secretary of State’s message to the Indians should be a very short and succinct one. “Fuck you, fuck your emigrants, and if they don’t like our gun rights, then they can go home to live in unarmed filth and fear among your rabid, feral dogs.”

No country has as many stray dogs as India, and no country suffers as much from them. Free-roaming dogs number in the tens of millions and bite millions of people annually, including vast numbers of children. An estimated 20,000 people die every year from rabies infections — more than a third of the global rabies toll.

If the Indians were willing to fight for their own freedom to carry guns, they could save tens of thousand of lives by simply shooting the feral dogs that attack them. But they’d rather run their mouths trying to interfere with how Americans live in the USA than do anything about the squalor, filth, and tyranny of their own country. The Obama administration should agree to protect the Sikhs by putting them on a plane back to India.

It’s a mystery!

Massachusetts can’t figure out why its health care costs are growing:

Give Massachusetts credit for setting audacious health care goals. It took the lead in guaranteeing near-universal health insurance coverage for its residents, providing a template for the federal reforms to follow…. But when it comes to controlling health care costs, Massachusetts has no advantage, and in fact is starting behind most other states. Its costs are among the highest in the nation, and they have been growing in recent years at 6 percent to 7 percent while the economy has been growing at less than 4 percent.

The amusing thing about America’s left-liberals is that they are so “thoughtful” and “nuanced” and “complex” that they can’t see blatant causation when it is right in front of them. These are the sort of people who stare at a light, wonder what is meant by the red color, and then conclude that it must mean they are supposed to drive ahead. The subsequent car accident, of course, is nothing more than sheer happenstance and bad fortune.

Can you imagine if these jokers tried to run a restaurant?

“Bill, I’m confused. We’re serving more people, but for some inexplicable reason, we suddenly don’t seem to have enough food anymore.”

Gary North still hates Americans

Gary North is apparently foolish enough to continue shopping around that inept and deceptive article wherein he blatantly lies about the opponents of free trade and the arguments and critiques they present. Previously on Lew Rockwell, the same article is now featured by the Mises Institute:

I have found over the years that when I debate with people who promote tariffs, meaning sales taxes on imported goods that are enforced by people with badges and guns, they always adopt arguments that apply only to America’s side of the border. They refuse to adopt those very same arguments for people on the other side of the border.

I challenge defenders of tariffs to state their arguments in terms of both of the people who want to trade, not just the American. The ethics and economics of restricted trade surely apply to the person who wants to trade on the other side of the invisible line known as a national border. If the arguments for restricted trade apply to the American economy, then surely they apply to the other nation’s economy. Logic and ethics do not change just because we cross an invisible judicial line. I take this position because I want the pro-tariff person to face the implications of his position.

Of course, Mr. North doesn’t hold himself accountable to the same standard as he flees from the obvious and inescapable conclusions that are logically dictated by his dogmatic free trade positions. Despite his challenge, I can almost guarantee he won’t address this argument for restricted trade, which transcends economics and applies to Americans, Frenchmen, and Chinese alike. Consider:

1. Free trade, in its true, complete, and intellectually coherent form, is not limited to the free movement of goods, but includes the free movement of capital and labor as well. (Note, for example, that the “invisible judicial line” doesn’t magically become visible when because human bodies are involved.)

2. The difference between domestic economies and the global international economy is not trivial, but is substantive, material, and based on significant genetic, cultural, traditional, and legal differences between various self-identified peoples.

3. Free trade is totally incompatible with national sovereignty, democracy, and self-determination, as well as the existence of independent nation-states with the right and ability to set their own laws according to the preferences of their residents.

4. Therefore, free trade must be opposed by every sovereign, democratic, or self-determined people, be they American, Chinese, German, or Zambian, who wish to preserve themselves as a free and distinct nation possessed of its own culture, traditions, and laws.

I invite Gary North or any other advocate of free trade to dispute or attempt to correct that argument. Now let’s consider the facts. Free trade advocates often claim that there is no reason for any difference between the U.S. domestic economy and the international economy. They believe there should be no more barriers between sovereign nation-states than there are between the several and united American States. And yet, look at the difference between labor mobility in the USA versus the European Union.

In the former EU15, only about 0.1% of the working age population changes its country of residence in a given year. Conversely, in the US, about 3% of the working age population moves to a different state every year,

These institutional and cultural differences suggest comparing internal geographical mobility in the US with the situation within EU Member States rather than between Member States. In doing so, the figures narrow the ‘mobility gap’ between Europe and the US. Between 2000 and 2005, about 1% of the working age population had changed residence each year from one region to another within the EU15 countries, compared to an overall interstate mobility rate of 2.8%-3.4% in the US during the same period of time.”
– Peter Ester and Hubert Krieger, “Comparing labour mobility in Europe and the US: facts and pitfalls”, 2008

What this means is that US workers are about 3x more willing to change their state of residence than European workers are willing to change their region of residence within national borders, and 30x more inclined to change their state of residence than Europeans are inclined to change their country of residence, even though the US state-to-state change likely involves a bigger geographic move than the EU country-to-country one.

It should be noted that increasing this country-to-country labor mobility rate within the EU is not only a major goal of the EU economic advisers, but the explicitly stated reason for this goal is their belief that increased labor mobility is required in order to increase economic growth.

Now, let’s look at what that annual 3 percent intra-US mobility translates to in terms of the overall population. The statistics are as follows for Americans between the ages of 25 and 44:

US overall 50.5 percent
East 54.3 percent
Midwest 65.0 percent
South 47.3 percent
West 40.2 percent

This is why the Midwest has changed much less over the last 40 years than either the East Coast or the West Coast; more Midwesterners stay in the Midwest and maintain their laws and cultural traditions. But more importantly, note what this signifies for the USA if the apostles of free trade were ever able to achieve their goal of permitting international trade to take place on the same terms as American domestic trade in a manner that realized the anticipated economic benefits: very nearly half of all American workers would be expected to leave the USA by the average age of 35!

This vast exodus of young Americans would say nothing, of course, of the hundreds of millions of non-American workers who would be expected to enter the USA, with all of the various consequences to be expected as a result of immigration that is an order of magnitude larger than the current wave.

The logic of free trade is inescapable. It amounts to a choice between a steadily declining living standard if free trade is limited to goods and capital versus the total destruction of the nation and the replacement of a majority of its population within a single lifetime if it is pursued to the full beneficial extent of the concept.

To paraphrase North, if you still refuse to give up the idea of free trade as a desirable means to increase the wealth of nations, then you should at least admit to yourself and others that you favor the total destruction of national sovereignty, the elimination of the U.S. Constitution, and the end of America and other historical nations. It’s time to come clean. You favor the politics of ein Welt, ein Recht, ein Volk.

In much the same way that those who support high tax levels cannot understand the counter-intuitive fact that the higher tax rates do not always lead to higher tax revenues, free trade advocates fail to understand that reducing national trade barriers will not always lead to increased wealth or liberty. If one believes that America was ever any sort of paragon of wealth and freedom, then it is obviously insane to advocate any policy that will cause America to return to the global average with regards to either, even if that policy would tend to raise the global average to some degree.

A crisis wasted

The Obama administration needn’t have gone to all that trouble to shoot up that Denver theater:

The weeks-long conference at the United Nations to produce an Arms Trade Treaty is ending without the creation of a treaty. None of the draft treaties which have circulated in the past several days came remotely close to finding consensus support. The impossibility of achieving consensus involved a wide variety of issues and nations, far beyond the Second Amendment concerns that have been raised by many American citizens.

What an embarrassment! To go to all that trouble and get nothing out of it but a few million more concealed carry permit holders. Don’t those troublesome member states and NGOs realize that the White House can’t override the Second Amendment without a solid international treaty to use as an excuse?

In defense of mass murder

I find myself contemplating quitting. No, not the blog. And not writing in general. But it is really incredible to see how few people at WND are interested in substantive matters like a conceptual revolution in economics versus other, considerably less significant issues.

There are all of two comments on today’s WND column. That’s less than one-twentieth of how many comment on any given column. And it’s not the WND readership, it wouldn’t be any better if I wrote for Salon, the New York Times, or the Daily Show. I mean, it’s not that I don’t understand MPAI, I coined the acronym after all. But that’s true for varying degrees of “most” and sometimes the percentage is just a little higher than I can fathom. I mean, the world is on the brink of a total economic meltdown, and still no one gives a damn about why? I feel like Jonah staring at the walls of Nineveh, stomping up and down the beach, gesticulating wildly and saying: “Go ahead and do it, Lord, let them have it, you know they deserve it!”

Seriously, I’m not sure I can deal with trying to pretend I don’t think a world where the best-selling novel is Twilight fan fiction deserves to perish in fire and ice. I used to wonder to whom the old Norse pagan religion held any appeal, but now I understand completely. If I read one more idiot Republican bank apologist claiming that the root cause of the financial crisis was Democratic politicians forcing banks to provide home loans to minorities, I may climb the Rainbow Bridge, wrest the horn from Heimdall and blow it myself. Then I’ll sit there and cheer for the frost giants and fire demons.

I’m considering a literary experiment of sorts. I’m wondering how much more interest would be expressed in the dumbest, most lowbrow column I can get past the editors devoted to the simple and straightforward concept of Obama being bad. Bad for the nation. Bad for the world! Bad. So bad. I’m thinking of calling it: Obama is Bad. Subtitled: Obama is really and truly very bad for America.

And if the column hits Drudge and results in an offer from Fox News to host my own cable news show, I’m going to give up op/ed, study genetics, build a lab, and start creating customized killer viruses.

Hultgreen-Curie strikes again

Yet another pioneer is struck down by the infamous Hultgreen-Curie syndrome:

Maria De Villota, 32, from Spain, was taking part in her first test for the F1 team at Duxford Airfield in Cambridgeshire this morning when she inexplicably crashed into a support truck for her team after completing her opening lap. After treatment by trackside paramedics, she was taken to the local Addenbrooke’s Hospital. One of only two females in test-drive roles at F1 level, she was running the rule over the Marussia car which will be raced by Timo Glock at the British Grand Prix in Silverstone this weekend.

Inexplicable… and yet somehow entirely predictable.

German court finds Muslim guilty; Jews suffer most

I was pretty sure when I read this that we could count on some hysterical reactions from those who can detect anti-semitism in cloud formations:

German Court Declares Judaism A Crime

Hard to believe, but that’s what the decision handed down by the regional court in Cologne, Germany means: circumcising a child under the age of consent is a crime, notwithstanding the religious beliefs of the parents…. Jews believe that the circumcision of infants is a necessary act; the command to circumcise male children at the age of eight days is the first command that God gives Abraham to mark their covenant; for thousands of years this has been a foundation of Jewish life. To ban infant circumcision is essentially to make the practice of Judaism illegal in Germany; it is now once again a crime to be a Jew in the Reich.

First of all, no one seems to have any problem with ignoring the religious beliefs of the parents when it comes to circumcising girls, so it seems more than a little bit hypocritical for anyone to simultaneously claim that there is a religious right to chop off part of a boy’s body off, but not any part of a girl’s body. Does Mr. Mead support the right of female circumcision for those Muslims who practice that?

Second, there are severe restrictions on religious freedom in Germany. One cannot homeschool there, wear a headscarf, or be excused from classes on evolution for religious purposes, so it seems a bit much to expect to be able to cut pieces off other people’s bodies there on that basis. If you want to practice your religion in freedom, Germany is simply not the place for you. This is neither news nor rocket science.

Third, circumcision is not Judaism, as should be obvious given the fact that many Christians and Muslims are circumcised and are not Jews. So, it is simply false to claim that Germany has declared Judaism to be a crime. And fourth, why do Jews still want to live in Germany anyway? One finds it hard to imagine that the Germans have not made it sufficiently clear that they do not cherish living with Jews among them any more than Israelis enjoy living with Sudanese in their midst.

UPDATE: I have zero sympathy for Jews whining about this court decision. They have no grounds for complaining about finding themselves on the short end of the freedom of religion law this time given this previous German court case: “In 1973, a Jew complained successfully that his freedom of religion was violated by the obligation to speak in a German courtroom decorated by a cross.“

Do you want your traditions to be respected? Then keep your nose out of everyone else’s.

Oh, relax and enjoy it, Kate

One of the things I find remarkable is the readiness of outspoken feminist women to crucify themselves with their own words. It’s as if they have absolutely no conception of the logical consequences of their ideas, and despite their confrontational tone, they appear to have no expectation that their position can or will be criticized.

Consider the following excerpts from the linked cartoon, which features a retarded form of Socratic dialogue between a cartoon figure and an even more cartoonish version of anti-feminist arguments.

It’s not fair that I have to be terrified when I go jogging after 6 PM or when I’m on the bus or going to get milk.

Then don’t go out alone at night. That’s common sense.

That’s rape culture! When you tell me it’s my responsibility not to get hurt, you take away the responsibility of a human being not to rape!

Why are we even talking about this? I’m not a rapist.

Because it gets really fucking exhausting trying to believe in a future where I’m not treated like a crazy person for believing in equality!

First of all, Kate being terrified of rape when she goes to get milk is her problem. Some women are terrified of bats, others are afraid of heights, and those fears are no more your problem or my problem than Kate’s terror of rape on the milk run. It is very, very easy for Kate to significantly reduce her chances of being raped, as getting a concealed carry permit and avoiding the company of black and Hispanic men will virtually eliminate the possibility that she will be forcibly raped. Even without taking any such defensive measures, the national rate of forcible rape is only 24.7 per 100,000 population, one-third lower than it was in 1990. This means that in a population of 308 million, Kate’s chances of being raped in any given year are less than one in 12,000 and declining. This cannot be reasonably described as a “rape culture”.

If Kate genuinely lives in constant terror of a one in 12,000 risk, she is delusional and may be clinically paranoid. And this doesn’t even begin to take into account that unless a woman is raped at home by someone breaking into her residence, it is very difficult for a woman to get raped without her not only contributing to the situation, but contributing significantly to it. And yes, in such situations, that does make the victim at least partially culpable from a legal perspective. If you don’t understand that, try looking at it this way. If insurance companies sold rape insurance, are there any behaviors that would conceivably increase or decrease the premium?

Furthermore, Kate is quite obviously crazy. If she had said “it gets really fucking exhausting trying to believe in a future where I’m not treated like a crazy person for believing in rainbow-tailed unicorns”, everyone would quite correctly conclude that she is a lunatic. But there is no more evidence for equality than there is for rainbow-tailed unicorns. Human equality simply doesn’t exist and it has never existed. As I have pointed out before, both logic and genetic science demonstrate that human beings are not even all equally human. Her lunacy is further evidenced by her bizarre attempt to justify her broaching the topic with the non-rapist by an appeal to her own exhaustion. That does not follow. Moreover, it is apparent that Kate, by her own admission, doesn’t actually believe in equality anyway. Consider her final rant:

So fuck ANYONE who thinks they have the right to tell me not to care! FUCK THEM! I do care. I will always care.

Here Kate is expressly denying that others have the right to free speech, which is not only encoded into various legal systems but also happens to observably exist in a material manner, while simultaneously asserting the legitimacy of her attempt to believe in a future that is not only nonexistent, but improbable to the point of near impossibility. From which we are forced to conclude that she’s not only crazy, she’s outrageously stupid to boot.

The fundamentally nonsensical thing about her position is that she wants others to do what she will not. If she can’t be bothered to put any effort into defending herself against rape, why should anyone else? If it’s not her responsibility to act on something about which she professes to care so deeply, how could it possibly be mine, or anyone else’s, when we do not care in the slightest about her feelings or her fate.

Kate declares her opinion that angry posturing on behalf of nonexistent female rights is “hot as hell”. Which is fine, I suppose, so long as she is hoping to attract angry, rancid feminist women. But it certainly isn’t going to be attractive to men who have access to better options, such as Internet porn or voluntary chastity.

For further amusement, I highly recommend the emotional posturing in which various Pharyngulans are engaging as they attempt to demonstrate which one of them is the anti-rapiest of all. Apparently the winner will be awarded a tiara carved from the horn of a pink unicorn by PZ Myers himself. This was one of the finer examples of the intellectual fireworks on display:

I can’t think of one, even one, precaution that a woman (or man) can take that actually has a good chance of preventing rape that would also be considered “reasonable” by any rational or honest individual…. And if you want to talk about “reasonable” precautions, I think, the first burden on you is to describe your proposed precaution and demonstrate that it actually works to prevent rape.

This total inability of humanity to prevent any rape no doubt explains why rape rates never change over time and do not vary from one nation to another. It is a very strange belief system indeed where human action can modify the global climate, but rape is random, inevitable, and completely immune to human action. Of course, it would be deplorably raciss to notice that a 31 percent increase in the number of incarcerated black men, mostly for harmless drug charges, has corresponded with the 33 percent decline in forcible rapes per 100,000, from 41.2 in 1990 to 27.5 in 2010.

At least it gets the kids outside

I would have thought it would be difficult to come up with a less intelligent, more oblivious response to my explication of why David Sloan Wilson was correct to declare that PZ Myers does not think or act like a scientist when it comes to religion. But somehow, someone named David Futrelle actually managed to surpasss the Fowl Atheist when he asked “Does Manosphere Blogger Vox Day Really Support the Murder and Mutilation of Women?”

I suppose it depends. Does a hobby counts as “support”? Anyhow, Mr. Futrelle managed to rise from his fainting couch long enough to demonstrate that he has all the reading comprehension of an illiterate, brain-damaged chimpanzee raised in poverty by a single mother:

In one of the most repellant manosphere rants I’ve run across yet, Vox attempts to rebut PZ Myers’ critiques of evolutionary psychology with a series of bizarre and hateful assertions about women, offering his own “scientific” rationales for keeping women down. Is this all somehow satire on his part? He certainly seems sincere.

TRIGGER WARNING for all that follows; Vox explicitly defends the maiming and murder of women….

Despite Vox Day’s repellent ideas about women – and his proud racism – he’s an influential figure in the manosphere, mentioned approvingly and regularly cited by others who present themselves as more moderate voices. It may not be a shock that the reactionary antifeminist blogger Dalrock includes Vox in his blogroll, and cites his work with approval (see here and here for examples). But, astoundingly, he’s also regularly cited approvingly by antifeminist “relationship expert” Susan Walsh of Hooking Up Smart (see here, here, and here). And she has even written at least one guest post on Vox’s “game blog” Alpha Game. At this point I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked by any of this. But I still am.

Based on the level of intellectual sophistication shown here, I would expect Mr. Futrelle to be surprised every time he hears voices come out of the magic box with the moving lights. I wasn’t attempting to “rebut PZ Myers’ critiques of evolutionary psychology with a series of bizarre and hateful assertions about women”, I wasn’t attempting to rebut anything. I was simply demonstrating that Wilson was correct and Myers’s arguments, if they can even be described as such, were intrinsically unscientific. Which I subsequently proved, utilizing PZ Myers’s own words, to show that scientific answers to his questions could be provided and that his own arguments were based on his biological predisposition, his culture, and his personal values rather than science, thus supporting Wilson’s claim. The fact that I can make an intellectual case does not mean that I subscribe to it any more than every defense attorney who argues a case on behalf of a client believes in his client’s innocence. Pointing out that the maiming and murder of women can be defended on various grounds is not tantamount to defending it on any of them.

Note that Myers himself wrote the following about the Taliban’s oppression of women. “We cannot, though, say a priori that it is wrong because abusing and denigrating half the population is unconscionable and vile, because that is not a scientific foundation for the conclusion.” I am sure we can all eagerly anticipate Mr. Futrelle’s next histrionic post: Does Godless Blogger PZ Myers Really Support Sharia and Stoning Women?

And one more thing. Yes, Mr. Futrelle, in my mind “female fetuses are “unborn women.”” At least, those female fetuses carried by members of the species known as homo sapiens sapiens. What on Earth do you think they are? Chimpanzees? Caterpillars? Prospective unicorns?