Tag: trainwreck

The deathwatch begins

Never let it be said that we are anti-science here. Let the record reflect that we have observed, we have hypothesized, and now we shall test the Curie-Hultgreen syndrome’s performance as a predictive model:

It is not a region known for its promotion of equal rights for women. However, a 28-year-old woman from Dubai has struck a blow for her Arabic sisters after becoming a train driver for the city’s Metro system. Not only is Mariam Al Safar the first female in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to get behind the controls of a train – she is also the first in the Middle East.

A pioneer! A female pioneer! I daresay I am more genuinely excited than the most hardened feminist about this. Needless to say, I shall be keeping an eye out for the eventual reappearance of Ms Al Safar’s name in the news.

Sic semper pusillus

One would have to have a heart of stone to fail to be amused by the death of this little punk:

A 65-year-old man who was knocked off his bicycle by three teenagers on a Pennsylvania trail shot two of them, killing one, police said according to reports. The Reading Eagle newspaper said the wounded teen, 16, was taken to hospital and the third, aged 15, was taken in for questioning and was later committed to a youth center…. According to police, the 65-year-old was riding his bicycle when the teens knocked him to the ground, the station said. Police said two teens then assaulted the man, who drew his gun and shot them.

What a pity that’s not on YouTube. Can you imagine the expression on the face of the dying little prick? One moment, he thinks he’s a happy-slapping bad ass impressing his friends with a little casual assault-and-battery and the very next moment, it’s game over. For good. Way to go, tough guy.

Concealed carry is certainly one of the more effective means of teaching the little bastards to show the elderly at least a modicum of respect.

Curie-Hultgreen Syndrome

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but have you ever noticed that female pioneers appear to have an extraordinary facility for offing themselves whilst engaged in their pioneering?

A woman who defied a driving ban on female motorists in Saudi Arabia has died in a car crash. Another was hurt in the crash in the only country in the world where females are banned from getting behind the wheel.

I have absolutely no doubt that the first woman to walk on the Moon would somehow manage to trip and break her neck. Even if her “Moon walk” was staged on the same film stage that was used for the Apollo “landings”. And the first female NFL referee will probably wind up getting crushed to death the first time she tries to sort out a fumble scrum.

I find it fascinating that female pioneers have a higher “suicide” rate than women who are actually trying to commit suicide.

It really doesn’t get better

Another young gay propagandist kills himself:

After nineteen years on this planet, throughout which he endured shocking levels of ostracism, abuse and rejection, this week gay filmmaker Eric James Borges decided shit actually wasn’t getting better and took his own life. In the It Gets Better video he shot one month ago, Borges describes his lifelong odyssey through various rings of hell-on-earth: he’d been teased since kindergarten, his parents tried to perform an exorcism on him when they learned he was gay, he was bullied throughout high school.

Borges was the second young gay propagandist to kill himself in recent months.

14-year-old Jamey Rodemeyer didn’t have many male friends. He hung out with girls, and he hung out on the internet, where he proclaimed and celebrated his love for Lady Gaga on his tumblr, wrote a personal blog, used twitter, opened a formspring account (like many people who open a formspring account, Jamey realized quickly that doing so was “a mistake”), and made videos for YouTube. In May 2011, Jamey Rodemeyer even made an “It Gets Better” video, in which he tells us that despite the bullying, his real friends were very supportive of his coming out. He thanked Lady Gaga for helping him learn to love himself…. This past Sunday, Jamey Rodemeyer was found dead outside his home in an apparent suicide.

It is said that the mark of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. Given that it is now 43 years since Stonewall and the present generation of children is the second in succession to have been subjected to nonstop, preschool-to-graduation pro-homosexual, anti-bully brainwashing, I think it is safe to conclude that no amount of repeatedly insisting that “gay is okay” and “homophobia is a mortal sin” is going to have even the slightest impact on reducing the amount of gay suicide.

In fact, it is entirely possible that the endless propaganda is actually more to blame for what Ellen Degeneres has described as a “gay teen suicide epidemic” than the anti-gay bullying itself. If the propaganda is encouraging more borderline young men to experiment with a deviant lifestyle that has long been known to correspond with various health-related disorders, including mental health, then it is contributing to an increasing suicide rate rather than decreasing it.

The core problem is that by focusing on the bullying of these gay teenagers, those wishing to reduce the suicide rate may be entirely missing the causal factor. While it is a reasonable assumption that the bullying is the cause, the failure of the propaganda tends to suggest that it may not be. There are other groups that are similarly bullied, for example, the small, the unattractive, and the retarded, and yet they do not appear to commit suicide at the same rate.

If people genuinely wish to discourage gay teen suicide, they very much need to rethink their basic assumptions concerning the subject and look at whether gay suicide has increased or decreased with its increased societal visibility and if there is even any direct relationship between the amount of bullying an individual receives and the likelihood that he will kill himself. While I’m sure it must feel very satisfying to blame everything on “homophobes” and insufficient societal admiration, the weight of observable evidence doesn’t presently tend to indicate that they have much, if anything, to do with the actual problem.

In the meantime, whoever is behind the “It Gets Better” program should do a much more careful job vetting its spokesmen, since at the moment, it looks an awful lot like an inadvertant homosexual suicide campaign straight out of the movie Heathers. All they need is a video featuring a cheesy 80s band singing “Gay teen suicide, don’t do it!” Recruiting unstable young men to lie to teenage boys simply isn’t a long-term prescription for success.

“Get back on board right now!”

This is a fascinating glimpse into a news story. It is the recording of the conversation between the commander of the port of Livorno and the captain of the cruise ship that sank. Even if you don’t speak Italian, you can hear the total disbelief, then anger in the voice of the commander as he realizes that the captain has not only abandoned his ship with the passengers still on it, but has no idea how many passengers are still on board. The captain seems to want to try to BS his way out of his responsibility to get back on the ship, but the commander is having none of it.

At one point, the commander even threatens the captain, telling him that he needs to know how many people are on board. This isn’t a perfectly literal translation, but it better captures the spirit of the conversation:

Commander: “Look, Schettino, you may have gotten out of the sea but if you don’t get back on board, I will make it seriously bad for you. Go get back on board, dammit!”

Captain: “Commander, for pity’s sake.”

Commander: No, for pity’s sake, you go get back on board now!”

Here is a complete translation.

We are amused

I thought this was pretty funny exchange. It’s an object lesson in how those who are barely above average intelligence and overrate themselves accordingly have no ability whatsoever to understand how much smarter the highly intelligent are.

Spacebunny: “He’s smarter than literally 95% of the people on the planet for pity’s sake.”

Anklebiter: “I was always suspicious of VD’s Mensa claims, thanks for confirming that he is not qualified.”

It’s pretty clear that this anklebiter couldn’t make any similar claims, given the stellar cognitive capacity on display here. But since this apparently isn’t completely obvious to everyone, I will spell it out. A statement that an individual is more intelligent than X percent of the population in no way implies, let alone confirms, that he is not also more intelligent than X+Y percent of the population. Or 99.999 percent, for that matter.

I’ve noticed that a number of people seem to have a similar problems understanding what Mensa membership signifies. It does not mean that one has an IQ of 132, it means that one has an IQ of at least 132. The oft-seen inability to grasp this simple fact occasionally makes me wonder if such people have similar problems mixing up the floor of their house with its ceiling. Are they often found on a ladder nailing up carpet? Do they install fans and light fixtures on the floor?

Redefining reality

One thing we see here again and again, primarily from evangelical atheists, but not infrequently from other ideologues of various strains, is redefining clearly defined, well-understood terms in order to protect their subjective reality from the objective one. Thus, we see absurdities such as an atheist state redefined as “religious” state while a state with an official state church is redefined as “secular” and so forth.

Now, we’re seeing a similar concept, which is basically the progressive language which Orwell described as Newspeak, being utilized in the financial world:

“China’s biggest provincial borrowers are deferring payment on their loans just two months after the country’s regulator said some local government companies would be allowed to do so….Hunan Provincial Expressway Construction Group is delaying payment on 3.11 billion yuan in interest, documents governing the securities show this month. Guangdong Provincial Communications Group Co, the second-largest debtor, is following suit. So are two others among the biggest 11 debtors, for a total of 30.16 billion yuan, according to bond prospectuses from 55 local authorities that have raised money in capital markets since the beginning of November.” So not even two months in and companies are already becoming serial defaulters, pardon, “loan payment deferrers?” And China is supposed to bail out the world? Ironically, in a world in which can kicking is now an art form, China will show everyone just how it is done, by effectively upturning the capital structure and saying that paying interest is, well, optional.

These sorts of linguistic gymnastics and redefinitions are going to serve the financial world little better than it has the argumentative atheists. It might fool a few of the more gullible for a short period of time, but sooner or later, objective reality will reassert itself. Unless the name of the game is simply to buy a little more time in order to allow the responsible parties to prepare for the consequences, this strikes me rather as an NFL team calling a timeout it doesn’t have in a futile attempt to buy time.

PZ Myers attempts economics

Bemusement ensues. I haven’t thought much of PZ Myers ever since I was under the mistaken impression that he was a strange woman producing nonsensical criticisms of my WND columns. What I have come to find uniquely amusing about him is the way he applies his intellectually inexcusable Courtier’s Reply as a general intellectual principle; the man never allows complete ignorance to prevent him from spouting a ludicrous and uninformed opinion:

It reminds me why I detest Libertarians, and Ron Paul in particular. The man would be a total disaster for the economy, in addition to being a poisonous social regressive.

Just to be clear, PZ Myer’s believes Ron Paul would be a total disaster for the economy. What is so insane about this is that even neocons and moderate Republicans who absolutely loathe Ron Paul and are pulling out all the stops to prevent his nomination will readily admit that Ron Paul is the only national American politician who knows the first thing about economics, being the only one who repeatedly, for literal decades, warned about the evils of an economy built on credit.

Statements like this offer conclusive proof that self-styled champions of science often don’t give a damn about science or empirical evidence, they are merely using the patina of science to further their philosophical and political ideologies.

The Harassinator strikes again!

Herman Cain says he was just helping a woman financially… in much the same way that Eddie Murphy was just giving that tranny prostitute a ride and Hugh Grant was just helping Destiny Brown floss her teeth. Such good samaritans, the three of them:

An Atlanta businesswoman is breaking her silence, claiming she has been involved in a 13-year-long affair with Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain…. She says the physical relationship ended about eight months ago, right before Cain announced he was running for president. But the communication did not. When we asked for any corroborating evidence, she pointed us to her cell phone contacts. One name: Herman Cain.

She showed us some of her cell phone bills that included 61 phone calls or text messages to or from a number starting with 678. She says it is Herman Cain’s private cell phone. The calls were made during four different months– calls or texts made as early as 4:26 in the early morning, and as late as 7:52 at night. The latest were in September of this year.

“We’ve never worked together,” said White. “And I can’t imagine someone phoning or texting me for the last two and a half years, just because.”

We texted the number and Herman Cain called us back. He told us he “knew Ginger White” but said these are “more false allegations.” He said she had his number because he was “trying to help her financially.”

I’m sure he is telling the truth, if by “help her financially” he meant “provide her with a taste of that sweet, sweet, forbidden fruit that is known by the name of Herman Cain”. The best part is the way she describes him: “Herman Cain loves Herman Cain.” That sums it all up right there. You may recall that I told you, right from the start, that the man’s candidacy was a joke.

I shall now commence to bathe in the invigorating saline waters of Fred Backer’s tears.

UPDATE: In a conference call this morning, Herman Cain told his senior staff that he is “reassessing” whether to remain in the race. He will make his final decision “over the next several days.”

Exit Perry

Somehow, I don’t think Ron Paul would have had any problem naming the agencies he would eliminate. Of course, this shouldn’t disqualify Perry as a potential president, considering that our current one believes there are 57 states.