Tag: trainwreck

No sympathy

Given the present anti-father legal regime, why would any man feel any pity whatsoever for this clueless British mother who signed custody of her son away to her dead husband’s relatives?

Rebecca Jones signed legal papers written in Arabic and witnessed by her dead husband’s family – believing they were about an inheritance for her boy Adam. But instead the documents gave full custody to 77-year-old Mariam Al Madhaiki – who immediately swept the frightened child away from Rebecca and enrolled him in an Islamic school in Qatar. Last week, to Rebecca’s dismay, Sharia judges in the Middle East state THREW OUT her appeal to win him back after a seven-month battle – despite Adam sobbing in court: “I want my mother.”

The judges ruled she can see her son twice a week for just FOUR HOURS, supervised by cops in a room. Now the 43-year-old mum from Sheffield is going to the High Court to try to get justice over what she calls a “kidnap”.

“I was tricked into it. This is completely against the rights of my child and me as his mother,” she said.

So she lost custody of her son. Boo freaking hoo. Precisely how is that any worse than what happens every single day to men who are divorced by their wives, robbed of their children, and stripped of their assets? At least she had the option to NOT sign a contract she couldn’t read in a foreign country and she still gets to see him every week. Moreover, she doesn’t have to foot the bill for his expenses or the lifestyle of her in-laws either.

Notice the tone of the article. Newspapers don’t even bother to report on men losing their children because it happens so often and it is something that many journalists outright support. But if a mother loses custody of her child, then naturally it must be grounds for an international incident.

To be honest, I have zero sympathy for any Western woman who is foolish enough to get romantically involved with an Arab man these days regardless of how the relationship eventually implodes. The difference between Western and Middle Eastern legal and marital norms have been well known for at least two decades now, so there’s no excuse for claiming one didn’t know about them. And of course they all act charmingly modernized at first, it’s not as if anyone was ever likely to get a date riding around on a camel shrieking “death to the infidel!”

The cross of Goldman

The Republicans are determined to crucify themselves upon it:

Rep. Darrell Issa, the top Republican on the House Oversight committee, is demanding a slew of documents from the Securities and Exchange Commission, asserting that the timing of civil charges against Goldman Sachs raises “serious questions about the commission’s independence and impartiality.”

Issa’s letter, addressed to SEC Chairwoman Mary Schapiro and signed by eight other House Republicans, asks whether the commission had any contact about the case, prior to its public release, with White House aides, Democratic Party committee officials, or members of Congress or their staff.

“[W]e are concerned that politics have unduly influenced the decision and timing of the commission’s controversial enforcement action against Goldman,” Issa writes.

Beautiful! Simply beautiful! The Republicans are so astoundingly stupid, so uncompromisingly idiotic, that they are actually going to take on the SEC in defense of Goldman Sachs! Apparently they learned absolutely nothing from giving away the presidency in return for the banking bailout, now they’re threatening to get Obama re-elected on behalf of the Vampire Squid… who gave more money to Obama and the Democrats in 2008 anyhow.

No wonder they’re called the stupid party.

This is how you do it

PawnTakesQueen declared yesterday that those who do not believe that Obama has provided a legitimate birth certificate proving that he is a natural born citizen and is therefore Constitutionally qualified to hold the office of President are “dumbass Birthers” and are either “dumb, dishonest, or ignorant”. I was somewhat disappointed that those who responded to him demonstrated that they have not yet mastered the correct way to deal with aggressive interlocutors of inferior intelligence holding opinions that are unsupported by evidence or correctly applied logic. As I explained in the comments, the correct way to go about dismantling both the arguments and the intellectual credibility of these annoying individuals is not to pay any attention to their insulting statements about those with whom they disagree, because that is their only hope of being able to escape a critical dialogue relatively unscathed. In fact, the primary reason they always begin in such a provocative manner is that they need to keep the discussion at a level that permits them to avoid providing any objective information subject to independent verification. I recommended the following approach:

You simply ask direct questions about the assertions and assumptions that support their posturing, they immediately start evading, at which point you begin the process of pinning them down until they are eventually forced to run away or concede. Never skip ahead, as you only give them the chance to avoid being forced to defend their unsupportable assumptions.

Therefore, I asked PTQ the following question: “[W]hat are your reasons for believing that Obama was born in the United States? They must be remarkably conclusive for you to conclude that anyone believing otherwise is either dumb, dishonest, or ignorant!” And, as I expected, he responded in a manner which demonstrates that he has absolutely nothing which is even remotely capable of justifying the dismissive stance he assumed from the outset.

My reasoning for believing that Obama was born in the United States?

Well, for starters we’re not talking about a normal vetting process here. You don’t think the CIA checked him out? This wasn’t for some entry level CIA agent position. We’re talking the Presidency of the United States. Top secret clearance? Try the very highest, strictest security clearance. You think they’d let a Kenyan get through? You think something so ridiculously fundamental as a fake birth certificate would get past the CIA, FBI, NSA, and the other 13 U.S. intelligence agencies? Of course you do. They’re all included in your conspiracy theory apparently. Or maybe you didn’t think of that. You are, after all, a dumbass birther. Actually “dumbass birther” is redundant, but it’s fun to say.

First, note that despite answering the question – commendable – PTQ still attempts to direct the discussion back to the perjorative level. Second, notice that he does nothing more than appeal to logic in contradicting the logic that points towards precisely the opposite conclusion. And he has far less evidence in support of that logical appeal; whereas the large amount of manpower and money expended in pursuit of concealing Obama’s actual birth documentation, kindergarten records, Punahou school records, Occidental College records, Columbia University records, Columbia thesis, Harvard Law School records, Harvard Law Review articles, scholarly articles from the University of Chicago, passport, medical records, Illinois state senate files, Illinois State Bar Association records, and adoption records has been widely reported and is not in dispute, PTQ cites no evidence whatsoever that the CIA, FBI, NSA, or any government agency has ever vetted Obama, or for that matter, any other presidential candidate in the past.

Moreoever, PTQ’s argument makes no sense because the citizenship-related aspect of top secret national security clearances only relates to citizenship, not natural born citizenship. “Subject must be a U.S. citizen. Independent verification of citizenship received directly from appropriate registration authority. For foreign-born immediate family members, verification of citizenship or legal status is also required.”

And finally, the idea that the very federal agencies which are known to have been involved in some of the worst abuses of the U.S. Constitution in American history are in any way concerned with guarding against the Constitutional illegitimacy of a sitting U.S. Senator is risible. There is no question of those agencies letting “a fake birth certificate” get past them; the Hawaiian document which has been produced is a real document, the problem is that it is not the relevant long-form documentation of birth that is required in order to prove Obama’s claims. No document of that sort, fake or real, has been produced to date. There is no reason that agencies with no responsibility or authority to vet the Constitutional legitimacy of a U.S. citizen and U.S. Senator should not have accepted the Hawaiian certificate at face value in lieu of the relevant long-form document despite its shortcomings, just as the mainstream media and PTQ himself have done.

As for the other reason he provided, that “corporate America, including Big Pharma, the AMA, Big Oil, and all the rest of the businesses who don’t want to pay higher taxes under a Democratic president” would not “let this fake birth certificate stuff slide”, PTQ clearly does not realize that Obama raised more money from Big Pharma than McCain did, the AMA supported Obama and even endorsed his health plan, and Obama received significant donations from Big Oil, although only about a third of what McCain received. Corporate America has no objection to Obama whatsoever, primarily because he is as beholden to Wall Street as McCain and nearly every other national Democrat or Republican are. It should be obvious that these corporate Obama supporters have zero interest in rending their investments in him worthless.

Now, perhaps PTQ has other reasons for believing that Obama was born in the United States that he has not shared with us. But clearly the reasons that he has provided so far are not only superficial, inconclusive and incorrect, but rest upon logic that is much more questionable than the competing logical reasoning that he previously rejected in such perjorative terms. The amusing thing, of course, is that I told PTQ yesterday exactly what I was going to do prior to his response and warned him that there was nothing he could do about it. I leave it to you to ascertain the accuracy of that prediction.

Hope, Change, and Murdering American Citizens

I don’t think this is what the Obamatrons had in mind. And I’m not sure which is more appalling. The news that Barack Obama has just decided to start killing American citizens without granting them the benefit of an arrest, a trial, or a conviction, or the fact that writers at National Review are actually supporting his dictate:

The Obama administration has authorized operations to capture or kill a U.S.-born Muslim cleric based in Yemen, who is described by a key lawmaker as Americas’s top terrorist threat, officials said on Tuesday. The decision to add Anwar al-Awlaki, of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, to the target list followed a National Security Council review prompted by his status as a U.S. citizen.

Officials said Awlaki directly threatened the United States. “Awlaki is a proven threat,” said a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “He’s being targeted.”

Rep. Jane Harman, chairwoman of the House of Representatives Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence, described Awlaki as “probably the person, the terrorist, who would be terrorist No. 1 in terms of threat against us. He is very much in the sights of the Yemenis, with us helping them,” said Harman, who recently visited Yemen to meet with U.S. and Yemeni officials. She told Reuters that Awlaki’s U.S. citizenship made going after him “certainly complicated.”

To his credit, Kevin D. Williamson is among the sane “conservatives” left at NRO:

I hate to play the squish, but am I the only one who is just a little bit queasy over the fact that the president of the United States is authorizing the assassination of American citizens? Andy writes that this is “obviously the right call.” I might be persuaded that this is, in fact, the right call. But obviously? No hesitation there? It seems to me that the fact of U.S. citizenship ought to be a bright line on the political map.

Surely there has to be some operational constraint on the executive when it comes to the killing of U.S. citizens. It is not impossible to imagine a president who, for instance, sincerely believes that Andy McCarthy is undermining the Justice Department’s ability to prosecute the war on terror on the legal front. A government that can kill its citizens can shut them up, no? I ask this not as a legal question, but as a moral and political question: How is it that a government that can assassinate Citizen Awlaki is unable to censor Citizen McCarthy, or drop him in an oubliette? Practically every journalist of any consequence in Washington has illegally handled a piece of classified information. Can the president have them assassinated in the name of national security? Under the Awlaki standard, why not?

Odious as Awlaki is, this seems to me to be setting an awful and reckless precedent. Consider how “interstate commerce” has been redefined over time to cover that which is neither interstate nor commerce, for the sake of political expediency. It is easy to imagine “national security” being treated the same way, particularly in an open-ended conflict against a loosely defined enemy.

No, this is not the right call. This is madness. And it is another step in the descent to open and unmitigated evil. There is no other way to describe it. The sickening thing is that without the ludicrous decision to grant citizenship to so many third worlders possessing zero loyalty to the nation, there would be no excuse for legally painting federal crosshairs on each and every U.S. citizen. This isn’t merely a direct assault on the Constitution, it is far more impeachment-worthy than anything Bill Clinton ever did.

If Citizen Awlaki is deemed worthy of government assassination today, you can be assured that other American citizens will deemed “a proven threat” in the future.

And they wonder why we laugh

No woman who is incapable of figuring out that Time always outruns Beauty in the end can reasonably be considered intelligent. Consider Elizabeth Wurtzel’s lament that while beauty fades, loneliness lasts:

When I was still in my twenties, for several years I had this wonderful boyfriend; I’ll call him Gregg—he’s the one we’re all waiting for: tall, blue-eyed, with this thick black hair, all smart and sensitive, an inveterate graduate student who used to rub my feet at the end of the day with a lovely pink peppermint lotion from the Body Shop. It was young and romantic. You’d have thought we were happy. I think really we were happy. He was good for me: People met him and liked me better because I was going out with him; his sweetness redounded to me like a sunny day on a dark sidewalk. I could have and probably should have spent the rest of my life with him…. I became seasick with contentment. It was nauseating daily, and I couldn’t still myself against a funny feeling that there had to be more to life than waking up every day beside the same person. To say I was bored would be to misunderstand boredom: I did not need to take up table tennis or ballroom dancing—I needed a sense that this wasn’t the end of the story. The idea of forever with any single person, even someone great whom I loved so much like Gregg, really did seem like what death actually is: a permanent stop….

Age is a terrible avenger. The lessons of life give you so much to work with, but by the time you’ve got all this great wisdom, you don’t get to be young anymore. And in this world, that’s just about the worst thing that can happen—especially to a woman. Whoever said youth is wasted on the young actually got it wrong; it’s more that maturity is wasted on the old.

The single most amusing thing about the women of modernity is that in their pursuit of finding happiness through imitating masculinity, they have forgotten that most basic of market principle: buy low, sell high. Time is not cruel, but it is both indifferent and inexorable. In almost every circumstance, the women that I have seen turn down good men of suitable quality who wanted to marry them in their early and middle twenties wound up settling for lower quality men in their late twenties and thirties. And they are the fortunate and happy ones; those who are still unmarried and childless in their early forties are nearly all full of regrets for the various opportunities they either rejected or simply allowed to pass them by.

The root problem seems to be that women are horrifically bad at anticipating what they are going to want in the future. The usual female pattern proceeds thusly: In her teens, a woman wants to focus on her education and having fun through a series of practice relationships. Her main concern is actually how much admiration she generates from men and her concomitant status among women. In her early to middle twenties, she wants to focus on her job and having fun through sampling a variety of penises; her main concern is actually not getting tied down to any commitments, professional or personal. In both stages A and B, she will swear up and down that she doesn’t ever want to have children for some nonsensical reason or another, although she is open to getting married someday off in the distant and nebulous future.

Stage C begins when her friends start getting engaged, usually in her late-twenties. Then she decides that she might be “okay” with one or two children and begins a desultory search for a marriageable man. However, this search is usually interrupted by a series of disastrous affairs with various Alphas, bad boys, and marriage-allergic men. She often talks about how confused she is and has no coherent focus; her main concern is to maintain her social equivalency with her female friends. At this point, the smarter women settle down and get married to the best available man since their marriage value is still high enough that they can attract a man of reasonable quality. The more foolish women convince themselves that they are even more attractive than they were in their early twenties due to their educations and careers and decide they have another decade before they “have to settle”.

Stage D is the early to middle thirties. A detectable edge of desperation begins to set in; you will seldom talk to a woman in her thirties who does not bring up science out of the blue and and ramble on about how it will allow her to have children in her forties. She is often in total denial about the decline in her market value and often wastes years dating higher quality men who are not actually on the marriage market. Her focus is now getting married as soon as possible so she can still have children, however, her inability to properly value herself causes her to pass over the sort of men who are actually willing to settle for her.

Elizabeth Wurtzel is in stage E. She is past her prime, she knows she is past it, and she is now regretting the potential husband she foolishly threw away in stage C. Her focus is now on finding a husband, although she knows it is probably too late for children. She appears destined to be a Stage F failure, also known as a Companion to Many Cats. This is not a worthless societal role, or necessarily an undignified one, but it is not one that most young women in their teens dream about.

The basic problem of female self-valuation is compounded by the challenge posed by the male Madonna-Whore division. What is attractive to a man on a short term basis is not necessarily attractive to a man on a long term basis. I would estimate that a woman can expect to regularly attract men who are two points higher in Whore mode than she can in Madonna mode. If you’re a 20 year-old seven who regularly has flings with men you rate as eights and nines, you should actively look for marriage material among the men you would rate as fives to sevens. This will significantly increase your chances of long term success; remember that in 15 years you are going to be a five, not a seven, while that five that you find barely attractive now has the potential to move up to a six or even a seven on the scale due to the way women value financial success and social substance over physical looks.

There are always outliers, of course. And the progression I describe obviously doesn’t apply to all women. There are even a few lucky women who are more attractive in Stage C than in Stage A or B. But in general, a woman will be well served by applying the buy low, sell high principle and marrying a man who is between five and ten years older before she reaches the age of 25. And above all, remember that what you think you will want in ten years is almost surely not what you will actually want in ten years and that drama is much more entertaining on television than it is in real life.

And this comment really says it all: “I was shocked at my visceral response to reading this column. I cried uncontrollably. I’m tearing up as I type this comment. There are so many reasons why Elizabeth’s story had such an effect on me…. I spent my entire life working towards my career and then lost it in the blink of an eye. Meanwhile, men were basically play things coming in and out of my life. (Think Samantha; Sex and the City.) I was never the relationship type. My longest relationship lasted a year during my junior year of college. That was 20 years ago. Now, I’ll be 40 in July.”

Yes, I’m not ashamed to admit it. I laughed, I did.

A question for Ed Brayton

Michael Heath attempts an illogical defense of Ed Brayton:

Ed’s response to the comments regarding him in this thread is here. Ed does have a debating background. He is not a scientist in a relevant field, however he’s scientifically literate and has an in-depth understanding of both the evidence for evolution and creationist attempts to discredit those claims.

One of his commentors in the link above regarding this debate suggested Ed only debate in written form, I agree. I’ve yet to experience a creationist that can debate this subject without complete dependence on rhetorical and logical fallacies coupled to frequent use of the Gish Gallop. A written debate provides no cover for such intellectual dishonesty.

We such a rhetorical fallacy here where Mr. Day fails to address Mr. Brayton’s point and instead moves straight into avoidance mode.

We have absolutely nothing of the kind here. Ed Brayton asked Ellis Washington a question for the apparent purposes of evading a debate with him. Calling my non-response to a question asked of Ellis Washington “a rhetorical fallacy” isn’t just ridiculous, it doesn’t even make sense. First, asking such a question is not an appropriate response to a debate challenge; one does not engage in the debate prior to it actually taking place. Second, asking a question in lieu of a clear yes-or-no response strongly suggests that the individual asking the question does not wish to engage in the debate. Third, it’s a ridiculous and logically fallacious question because the absence of an alternative hypothesis does not, in itself, testify to the accuracy of the current hypothesis. For example, Keynesian general theory has been shown to be false on both logical and empirical grounds and it would still be false on those grounds even in the absence of Neo-Classical, Austrian, or Post-Keynesian Minskyan models.

Of course, one can’t expect much in the way of logic from either biologists or journalists who are said to possess “an in-depth understanding” of “the evidence for evolution”. So, what does Brayton himself have to say?

“Someone went and posted a link to my response to Ellis Washington and my question about endogenous retroviruses in a comment on Vox Day’s blog. Vox did manage to stop combing his mohawk and counting his world class IQ long enough to make a couple of nasty and substanceless comments about me, as did several of his readers. Guess what none of them attempted to do? Explain the patterns found in retroviruses without common descent. I bet Ellis won’t either. What he will do, as I predicted earlier, is try to change the subject from evolution and common descent to atheism. What else can he do?”

Nasty and substanceless comments? Let’s see, what did I say:

1. Brayton doesn’t want to debate Washington. That’s neither nasty nor substanceless. Notice that in neither of his two posts has he answered the obvious question of whether he wants to or not.

2. Brayton wants to avoid debating Washington without looking like he is ducking Washington. That’s neither nasty nor substanceless, that’s exactly what it looks like. And if this is incorrect, Brayton can make it clear that he will debate Washington and will ask Washington the question during their debate.

3. Brayton is a coward. Nasty, perhaps. Not substanceless. Possibly true. That’s exactly what it looks like now to me and pretty much everyone else on both sides of the issue. Michael Heath’s assertion that “Ed has a debating background” says absolutely nothing about whether he wants to debate Washington or not. Now, I know nothing about Ellis Washington and am perfectly open to the possibility that Brayton would destroy him. But, considering Brayton’s past demonstration of illogical infelicities, it is by no means a given.

4. Brayton isn’t very bright. That’s neither nasty nor substanceless, it’s just an observation. He’s a journalist, which is a field well-known for being filled with poorly educated bubbleheads, and his blog shows little in the way of evidence for intelligence much higher than the average literate individual. Furthermore, the fact that he thinks Washington has no options other than turning the discussion from evolution and common descent to atheism shows that his “in-depth understanding of evolution” is nothing of the kind. Brayton appears to be engaging in psychological projection here, for as the past discussions of evolution on this blog will testify, it is usually atheist supporters of evolution who prefer to turn the subject to religion whenever direct questions addressing the various flaws in the theory of evolution by natural selection and common descent are asked.

Anyhow, it’s quite easy to establish if I am correct in my suspicions about Ed Brayton by asking him one simple yes-or-no question. Mr. Brayton, do you want to debate Ellis Washington?

UPDATE: Further evidence supporting my hypothesis that Brayton isn’t that bright: “I made a simple factual claim: there is no coherent, reasonable explanation for the patterns found in endogenous retroviruses other than comment descent (i.e. the theory of evolution). If that’s wrong, show why it’s wrong; if you can’t, then all this talk of arrogance, snobbery and “Christophobia” is irrelevant.”

Brayton clearly doesn’t understand that it does not matter if his “simple factual claim” is wrong or not. What matters is that the truth or falsehood of that “simple factual claim” says nothing about the truth or falsehood of the theory of evolution by natural selection, which happens to be the subject that Washington raised with him. The proposition that there is only one coherent, reasonable explanation for something is not tantamount to the proposition that the coherent, reasonable explanation is actually correct.

Mailvox: Let’s describe a certain female

A few of you asked me why I came down so hard on Dana Loesch aka Mamalogues after her moronic blathering about how she’s all for small government and Ron Paul so long as it doesn’t get in the way of invading and occupying every country that might conceivably harbor a terrorist somewhere. Here’s a reminder of how remarkably clueless she was even before she jumped on the hapless Tea Party bandwagon and threw over mommyblogging* for life on the road as an Instapundit groupie:

The ripples of this extended all the way over to World Net Daily, whose columnist by the pseudonym of Vox Day (seriously, I think there were like 20 of those pseudonyms back in my junior high AOL chatroom days) – excuse me – Christian columnist Vox Day (real name Theodore Beale; he’s a rich kid and his dad was on the board at WND, which undoubtedly helped Beale to get some ink) decided to go on a rant against women with emphasis on mothers who blog and basically called us all stupid. I realize that intelligence is probably very important to a man who works “I’m in Mensa” in every biographical footnote and pick-up lines, all the while juxtaposing it next to a standard Myspace headshot replete with a hairstyle and goatee sported by every teenage male member of my Ozark family…. I would go so far as to say Day is acting like a “manazi.

It’s hard to know where to begin cataloging the dumb bitch’s errors… I suppose the fact that I’ve never had a goatee would probably be a reasonable one. I had no idea who the blithering little idiot was until she took exception to my pointing out that one of her fellow mommybloggers was a vacuous cow. (Stops and consults blog archives.) Excuse me, I stand corrected. A narcissistic, brainless, lactating cow. Now she’s followed Michelle Malkin’s lead in parlaying her attractive-for-a-thirty-something looks into a minor degree of Internet notoriety, but she clearly hasn’t gotten any smarter. And, of course, she’s a confirmed liar as well.

So it is more than a little amusing to see wannabee political analysts like her rambling on and on about the interfactional horse races and engaging in pointless Tea Party posturing while the very ground beneath the vast edifice that sustains their superficial activities continues to crumble. It’s not unlike watching partisans of the Greens and Blues argue about who has the better charioteer as a giant Persian army storms the undefended walls. Also, in my experience, I’ve noticed that the only people who give a damn about my Mensa membership are those who are almost, but not quite, qualified to join.

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m not interested in US politics per se. They’re irrelevant, as Scott Brown’s support of Obama’s $15 billion jobs bill shows. Huge victory there, Tea Partiers! Who could have ever seen that one coming? And I’m even less interested in the commentator-as-career game. I don’t care who ends up on Fox or MSNBC since I don’t watch it and no amount of television appearances or radio cameos will make anything one says or writes any more intelligent. Not only does the accuracy of one’s analysis have no positive correlation to the size of one’s audience, but recent media history strongly suggests that the relationship between accuracy and audience size is a negative one. Most people are idiots, after all, and Ms Loesch is clearly a woman of the people.

Always outnumbered, never outgunned.

*The woman may actually still be mommyblogging for all I know. I don’t read her and never have.