Tag: trainwreck

Global Warming Nazis

I had previously preferred the term “global warming fascists”, but the term simply doesn’t do justice to these twisted, human-hating idealogues.  It appears we may end up eventually having to go to war with the sick bastards should they take over a country or two just like we did with their German predecessors; as with the National Socialists, the global warming extremists genuinely believe that their mad pseudo-scientific myths justify killing people. 

Fortunately, given that their tanks will be solar-powered and their cruise missiles will be launched by turbine windmills, it should take a lot less than five years to defeat them and wipe them out.  And, seeing how they won’t be utilizing carbon anymore afterwards, it will be a win-win.

It’s clear that the pro-warming media has the vague idea that something has gone seriously wrong here, even if they don’t quite understand what the negative reaction is all about.

“While many people said they found the short an amusing way of addressing the issue of apathy towards climate change issues, others found it tasteless and unnecessarily violent.”

Yeah, that was just explosively hilarious, wasn’t it? I mean, about the only thing that would have made it funnier if the self-appointed climate saviors were murdering Jewish schoolchildren… no, make that gay Jewish schoolchildren. Ho, ho, ho.

NRO endorses assassinating Americans

I am not a conservative. I am a Christian libertarian technodemocrat. But if this is what is actually supposed to pass for conservative opinion leadership at a leading conservative publication, it’s no wonder that the Tea Partiers are abandoning both the Republican Party and the conservative media:

The Obama administration is not, by authorizing Awlaki’s assassination, green-lighting his killing under all conceivable circumstances. The administration, I suspect, is just making sure that if he’s found congregating in a sanctuary with other terrorists, we can bomb the sanctuary — we don’t have to forfeit a worthy military operation just because one of the terrorists happens to be an American citizen. But if he’s found under other circumstances, where there is no demonstrable military value in killing him, he will be captured, held, interrogated (one hopes), and tried — either by a civilian or (I would hope) a military court.

This seems like common sense to me. The unfortunate thing is that the assassination authorization should never have been made public. Clearly, the administration leaked it to underscore the president’s willingness to fight al-Qaeda aggressively. All the leak has done, though, is cause unnecessary legal headaches. If the administration had handled this top-secret authorization appropriately, chances are: Awlaki would, at some point, have been either killed or captured; the attendant circumstances would have made it obvious why the option chosen (kill or capture) was chosen; and no one would ever have thought to ask whether Obama had authorized his assassination.

In other words, McCarthy is just fine with passing laws that authorize the government murder of its own citizens because it happens to be politically unviable at the moment. This is deeply, profoundly, and abysmally stupid. It is insane. And there is literally nothing conservative, in the American political sense of the word, about it.

If I were the editor of NRO, I would fire McCarthy on the spot for this defense of legalizing government murder.

His argument is risibly incompetent and not only depends entirely upon the transient nature of temporal politics but also upon what he imagines Obama’s reasoning behind the assassination authorization to be. McCarthy writes: “We are a political society, not a legal one. The executive branch typically has vast legal authority, but its exercise of that authority is hemmed in — thank goodness — by politics.”

Ergo, under his reasoning, once it becomes politically popular to murder certain American citizens en masse, it will be legal to do so. This isn’t merely madness, it is the familiar route to the guillotine, the gulag, and the gas chamber. To make this argument while simultaneously claiming to wear the mantle of Edmund Burke, among others, is a grotesque offense to reason, history, and conservatism itself.

If Awlaki is genuinely a traitor, the correct Constitutional thing to do is to arrest him, put him on trial for treason, and then execute him. The fact that the Obama administration is openly attempting to omit the first two steps with the support of the conservative and mainstream media alike is an indication of how completely lawless both the United States government and its lapdog media have become.

UPDATE: McCarthy isn’t the only NROcon to cheer on Obama’s American citizen assassination policy. David French writes: “We need to stop incentivizing enemy violations of the laws of war, and one way to do that is to find them and capture or kill them no matter their location, no matter their clothing, and no matter their nationality.”

He also attempts to claim that it’s not “assassination” so long as the person assassinated is an enemy. Which, no doubt, would be news to Abraham Lincoln, among others. And William F. Buckley wept.

NRO clings to sanity

Apparently they haven’t gotten completely blitzed on the Neocon-spiked Kool-aid:

The Awlaki case speaks to something even more fundamental than law: Decent nations do not permit their governments to assassinate their own citizens. I am willing to give the intelligence community, the covert-operations guys, and the military proper a pretty free hand when it comes to dealing with dispersed terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda and its affiliates. But citizenship, even when applied to a Grade-A certified rat like Awlaki, presents an important demarcation, a bright-line distinction in our politics.

If Awlaki were to be killed on a battlefield, I’d shed no tears. But ordering the premeditated, extrajudicial killing of an American citizen in Yemen or Pakistan is no different from ordering the premeditated, extrajudicial killing of an American citizen in New York or Washington or Topeka — American citizens are American citizens, wherever they go. I’m an old-fashioned limited-government guy, and I am not willing to grant Washington the power to assassinate U.S. citizens, even rotten ones. The three most powerful people in government at this moment are Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, a fact that should give pause even to the most hawkish conservative. I would hope that other conservatives see this at least as a matter of prudence, if not a burning moral question.

We’ve reached a very problematic state of affairs when the so-called “liberals” have endorsed a policy of the federal government intentionally murdering American citizens and most of the so-called “conservative” media is kind of maybe okay with it.

All your income are belong to us

I imagine the IRS will regard this as a brilliant notion.

The UK’s tax collection agency is putting forth a proposal that all employers send employee paychecks to the government, after which the government would deduct what it deems as the appropriate tax and pay the employees by bank transfer. The proposal by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) stresses the need for employers to provide real-time information to the government so that it can monitor all payments and make a better assessment of whether the correct tax is being paid.

This should suffice to guarantee the complete exit of all mobile capital from the UK.

Government efficiency

$2 million per job:

DPW has received $70.65 million and created or retained 45.46 jobs, though they are expected to create 238 jobs overall (the fraction of a job created or retained correlates to the number of actual hours works). LADOT has been awarded $40.8 million and created or retained 9 jobs, though they are expected to create 26 jobs overall. Overall, the Departments have received $111 million in federal stimulus funds out of the $594 million the City has been awarded so far and created or retained 54.46 jobs.

I’m disappointed that we’ve only created or retained 55 jobs after receiving $111 million in ARRA funds.

At that price, one wonders what these jobs involve. NFL quarterbacking? Jobs programs don’t work. They’d be better off just cutting a direct check to people.

Torture is illegal

But only if it isn’t secret:

A federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled that former prisoners of the C.I.A. could not sue over their alleged torture in overseas prisons because such a lawsuit might expose secret government information. The sharply divided ruling was a major victory for the Obama administration’s efforts to advance a sweeping view of executive secrecy powers. It strengthens the White House’s hand as it has pushed an array of assertive counterterrorism policies, while raising an opportunity for the Supreme Court to rule for the first time in decades on the scope of the president’s power to restrict litigation that could reveal state secrets.

If you don’t understand that the US has completely abandoned even the pretense of the rule of law by now, you’re probably not going to recognize it until either guillotines and/or pyres have been set up on the Mall or you find yourself in a detention camp. This is a truly remarkable and totalitarian decision by the federal court. It has declared that the mere possibility of exposing secret government information to the electorate – in a nominal democracy – trumps all of the unalienable rights endowed by the Creator and delineated in the Constitution.

It was a terrible mistake for the Supreme Court to create the abominable “state-secrets privilege” 50 years ago; this assertion of a privilege to secretly torture and assassinate is merely the inevitable consequence of expanding the central state’s power to conceal its actions from the citizenry.

Yowzers

In which Karl Denninger prison-rapes Paul Krugman’s bizarre meanderings on Social Security:

Seriously. This tripe is so bereft of logic and actual mental acuity that it is unworthy of graduation from elementary school:

“About that math: Legally, Social Security has its own, dedicated funding, via the payroll tax (“FICA” on your pay statement). But it’s also part of the broader federal budget. This dual accounting means that there are two ways Social Security could face financial problems. First, that dedicated funding could prove inadequate, forcing the program either to cut benefits or to turn to Congress for aid. Second, Social Security costs could prove unsupportable for the federal budget as a whole.”

Baloney. This is called fraud in the private-sector. First, there is no dedicated funding. Second, all the money taken in over the years was not “invested”, it was spent.

“Social Security has been running surpluses for the last quarter-century, banking those surpluses in a special account, the so-called trust fund.”

That so-called “trust fund” is a fraud. It does not exist.

Here’s what actually happens (and Krugman knows this, which makes him a damned liar besides):

1. Your tax dollars go to Treasury
2. Treasury keeps them and issues “special” Treasury bonds to the Social Security “trust fund.”
3. Treasury counts these tax receipts against the federal deficit, making it look (much, until the last year) smaller than it really is.

Note the slight-of-hand here. Social Security gets an alleged “bond” but they can’t sell it to anyone but the Treasury. That is, legally it is an IOU, not a bond. A bond can be marketed in the open market to anyone who is willing to buy, for whatever they’re willing to pay. These are unmarketable (intentionally) and thus can only be redeemed in one place – at Treasury.

The problem is that Treasury spent the money and thus doesn’t have anything with which to redeem the IOUs!

Seriously, even people who don’t pay any attention to either politics or economics knows that the Social Security “trust fund” is nonexistent and that Congress has been operating on a pay-as-you-go system all along. I can’t even pretend to understand what Krugman was thinking when he wrote this ridiculous column. The money in the so-called “lock box” isn’t there because the box doesn’t exist either. The money is nothing more than yet another government debt as it was all spent years ago.

Anklebiters Anonymous

In the interest of helping our resident trolls evolve into substantive commenters, as well as assisting non-Ilk readers recognize the usual suspects, I have decided to create a “best of” series which should serve as both amusement and edification. The honor of the first “Beezle” award goes to Cabal, whose epic defense of science he quite clearly doesn’t understand was eviscerated by the merciless duo of Bob Mando and DaveD. Please note that the ellipses are Cabal’s; his award-winning comment is quoted precisely and in full.

“Every single living organism that we know of is carbon-based and all of them require oxygen to live…without exception. And carbon is a by product of oxygen. the relationship between the 2 couldnt be clearer.”
– Cabal: 8/10/10 10:37 AM, Science gets it wrong… again

“Pure, unadulterated BS. there are numerous KNOWN organisms which will die in the presence of oxygen.

a – photosynthesis is possible without oxygen, even by carbon based life forms.
b – it is a founding principle of Evolution that cyanobacteria generated the free oxygen that exists in the atmosphere now as waste products.
c – it is a founding principle of Evolution that cyanobacteria ‘evolved’ from more primitive forms of bacteria which did not use oxygen at all in the photosynthesis process.

You are wrong about … well, pretty much everything, really. Carbon is a non-radioactive base element, number 6. Oxygen is also a non-radioactive base element, number 8. Neither of these elements can ever be a “product” of the other without the intervention of fusion or quantum manipulation. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, is a compound element which breaks down into one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms through simple chemical processes.”
– Bob K. Mando

“You have shown yourself to be profoundly ignorant of both biology (“Every single living organism….require oxygen to live…without exception.” Except the ones that don’t.) and basic chemistry (“And carbon is a by product of oxygen.”) You haven’t even grasped the most basic elements of the observable world, which you interact with everyday. Why, then, should we pay any attention at all to your ramblings on the more abstract aspects of life and the universe?”
– DaveD

Congratulations to all. The award is named for the banned commenter Beelzebub, whose ability to mangle facts and logic in the process of attempting to “correct” others is unparalleled.

UPDATE – Cabal amused the crowd by accepting his award, but not the chemistry lesson. Cabal: 8/12/10 9:57 AM: “I was not in error. Remove oxygen molecules from the universe and carbon based life becomes impossible.”

More excuses from the Fowl Atheist

PZ Myers tries to defend his cowardly fear of public debate and his inability to formulate effective arguments under the guise of criticizing the idea of a science section on a popular web site:

[JL Vernon] “The most resounding message emerging from the opposition is the idea that having “real science” share a platform with “bad science” will ultimately tarnish the reputation of the legitimate scientists and science communicators who choose to participate. This is essentially the same argument Richard Dawkins, PZ Meyers and others take when refusing to debate evolutionists. The concept here being that by sharing the stage with creationists, scientists lend credibility to the creationist arguments. In some ways, I think this is a cowardly response. If you have a sound argument, the opposition should not win the debate.

That’s wrong on multiple levels. First, a debate is not won by sound argument; it’s by persuasive rhetoric. Many creationists have that skill (I have to repeat a mantra I’ve got: creationists are not stupid, just ignorant and misled by ignorant arguments), so it is a serious tactical error to think that because all the facts and science are on your side, you’re going to win debates. That’s a recipe for consistent failure.

The other problem here is that I’ve “won” most of my debates…because the other side is just nuts. Jerry Bergman and Geoff Simmons, to name two, were raving loonies who made me embarrassed to be sharing a spotlight with them. There was no gain for me, and plenty for them. You get two possibilities: you’ll face an eloquent rhetorician who will run rings around you despite your command of the facts, or you’ll get a nutcase who makes you feel like you’re sharing the podium with a brain-damaged hobo. Neither are great options.

Vernon is right. It is a cowardly response. It is also a very revealing response about how genuinely confident the individual is in the arguments he makes. (That confidence may or may not be well-placed, of course.) As I have demonstrated here on numerous occasions, if one is possessed of a sufficient command of the relevant facts, it is a very simple thing to dismantle the credibility of one’s opponent and demonstrate the logical fallacies and factual errors utilized in his arguments. It escapes no one’s attention that frauds like Dawkins never hesitate to debate decrepit elderly priests and clueless female journalists, but run for shelter the moment a competent opponent appears on the horizon. The amusing thing is that pseudo-scientists like PZ simply can’t understand the reason they are regularly losing the battle for public opinion is that they have increasingly abandoned science in favor of political and ideological activism. Worse, they have done so in favor of an anti-democratic technocratic authoritarianism that is far more dangerous than the imaginary theocracies of their fevered nightmares.

Consider this bit from “Science Turns Authoritarian“: Science is losing its credibility because it has adopted an authoritarian tone, and has let itself be co-opted by politics…. We searched Nexis for the following phrases to see how their use has changed over the last 30 years: “science says we must,” “science says we should,” “science tells us we must,” “science tells us we should,” “science commands,” “science requires,” “science dictates,” and “science compels.”

What we found surprised us. One phrase, in particular, has become dramatically more frequent in recent years: “Science tells us we should.” Increased usage of this phrase leads to a chart resembling a steep mountain climb (or, for those with a mischievous bent, a “hockey stick”). The use of the phrase “science requires” also increases sharply over time. The chart (below) vividly shows the increasing use of those particular phrases. Some of this may simply reflect the general growth of media output and the growth of new media, but if that were the case, we would expect all of the terms to have shown similar growth, which they do not.

In other words, around the end of the 1980s, science (at least science reporting) took on a distinctly authoritarian tone. Whether because of funding availability or a desire by some senior academics for greater relevance, or just the spread of activism through the university, scientists stopped speaking objectively and started telling people what to do.

I am not at all opposed to science qua science, but I am inexorably opposed to all forms of science-flavored authoritarianism. Needless to say, any refusal to bow before the misapplication of science by scientists is enough cause one to be labled “anti-science” even though it is the short-sighted actions of scientists that are rapidly destroying the credibility of science. All of this makes me wonder… perhaps WND needs a science section. And, of course, a master of persuasive rhetoric as the editor.

Lest you wonder

Why the business and economics coverage at The Atlantic is so abysmal. Megan McClueless, the “libertarian” who voted for Obama, tries another take on Game:

My off the cuff observation was a genuine one; this whole thing sounds like what girls used to do.  And in fact, at some level the PUAs have to know that it’s not really particularly manly.  Why do I think this?  Because if your girlfriend (however temporary) caught you mimicking Tom Cruise in front of the mirror, or spending your spare time trolling message boards for magic tricks to impress women with . . . well, would she be more enamored, or would she slither out of bed in disgust and start looking for her clothes?

I am not against people attempting to upgrade their social skills, nor am I horrified at the thought that “beta” males will somehow sneak into the gene pool; after all, I live in the city often called “Hollywood for Nerds”.  But the combination of artificiality, superficiality, and manipulation in the PUA manifestos makes it really hard not to snicker.

We have certainly reached a nadir of understanding when a method which was originally developed and is still primarily used to have sex with women is denigrated as unmanly.  And to appeal to a hypothetical girlfriend’s opinion is to miss the point entirely.  What horrifies McClueless is the idea that after 40+ years of relentless feminist indoctrination, the men of the West have shattered the pedestal of intrinsic female superiority that had been so painstakingly constructed.  Ironically, it takes the non-economist Roissy to explain the core of the matter to the credentialed economist.

The herculean efforts required of the vast majority of men to seduce women that strike McArdle as unseemly and calculating when compared to the relatively easy go of it women in their prime years have when setting about to seduce men is just a reflection of the biological inequality between the sexes in their value on the sexual market. Sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive, and all that. McArdle is mistaken to assume this disparity in degree of mating effort caused by intrinsic sex differences is proof of men’s venality or women’s nobility.

The CDC statistics indicate that the primary sociosexual problem is that 75% of the women are primarily attracted to only 10% of the men. There is little that can be done about the demand side since women like what they like, so the solution has to come from the supply side. This is in everyone’s interest, male and female alike, since an expansion of the supply of men who are attractive to women will have the effect of lowering the high price women are forced to pay for the privilege of receiving Alpha attention.

But McArdle’s inept critique is a helpful reminder of an important maxim. Never pay any attention to what a woman says about what attracts women. Pay attention to what she does. And more importantly, who she does.