Blog — April, 2009

Sorry, but with those two God-botherers being too stupid to keep their nitwit ideas to themselves, I just couldn't help myself anymore:

The good news is that if we manage to mess up the world too bad, God will fix it, 'cause He already gave us dominion over all the creepy creeping things that creepeth. Or else he'll just expedite the Second Coming, which would be even way better.

Either way, Jesus still loves us. And that's the most important thing!

That's why I wanna be a scientifically illiterate, magical-thinking Catholic too! Just like Dan 'n' Darleen! See you beside the throne of God, my new bestest buds!! (Sorry Goldstein, I don't think you're gettin' in!)

Gay marriage bad! Abortion bad! Evolution bad! Global-Warming non-denial bad! BIBLE GOOD!!

'Cause the Word of God is a lot more logical and evidence-based than AGW, that's for sure! It could hardly be less, right buds? If Jesus had to choose just one of them, I think I know which one he'd choose!!

With a song in my heart: "Where the streets are paved with gold/And elders 'round the throne/In that funny place called ... heaven!"

No Anthropogenic Heavenly Warming, either, praise Jesus! 'Cause there's no CO2 or methane on that side of the pearly gates! (Unless cows still fart in heaven?)

"Oh, the world of God is a funny, funny place/Where everyone wears a resurrected face...." Come on, D&D, you know the words!

God Bless!!

Honestly, these children-dressed-as-adults can believe six utterly impossible Biblical things before breakfast, and then they want incontrovertible proof for global warming, which at least might be real? Talk about straining at the gnat, and swallowing the elephant! (And I don't mean Ganesh, either.) Might as well believe in UFOs (e.g., Ezekiel's chariot) while you're at it!

(For those of you who didn't grow up watching North American cartoons, the theme song for "The Tales of the Wizard of Oz " had lyrics sort of like the above lines. The lion, tin man, and scarecrow were a Trinity, with straw being ritually transmuted into the scarecrow's body. No, wait....)

To summarize: Pigs will never fly, and human-caused global warming will never be real ... but Jesus died for our sins, and rose from the grave!

"Cor blimey, is that a ... a pig flying?"

"No, I do believe it's ... our Lord and Savior!"

Cut to Python animation....

Of all the God-bothering dumbfucks on the face of the Earth, Dan and Darleen are the God-bothering dumbfuckiest.

The thing is, rewind a few hundred years, and the same Catholic Church and doctrine that D&D base their lives (and core opposition to abortion and gay marriage, etc.) on today would have been quite happy to burn me at the stake for what I just wrote, above. Would D&D of a few centuries ago agree with doing that? Probably not. Would they have had the guts to speak out against it, if doing so meant putting their own necks on the line? I very much doubt it. And in that sense, they're very similar to moderate Muslims today, who may not agree with honor-killings and the like ... but who are too afraid of their own "Church" to stand up and be counted.

It's only thanks to the thought and efforts of Enlightenment philosophers, scientists, and their ilk in facing reality and refusing to back down, that that Catholic Church isn't still burning witches and Inquisitioning us all today. If it wasn't for the pressures of secular thought, they wouldn't have changed at all. And neither Collins nor Click are smart or independent-thinking enough in their cult-following to figure even that much out.

Meanwhile, back in Thailand:

Senior Thai monks are to teach Buddhist etiquette to homosexual novices to help curb "flamboyant" behaviour including wearing lipstick and overly tightening their saffron robes.

They said numerous reports of new monks plucking their eyebrows into a feminine arch, walking with a exaggerated swing of the hips and carrying handbags were all sullying the reputation of the conservative Buddhist faith.

"The aim of teaching them etiquette is to educate them on how they should act, talk, eat and dress properly," leading preacher Phra Vudhijaya Vajiramedhi, who is launching the behaviour classes next month, said.

"The biggest concerns are they don't walk properly, they wear lipstick... and carry colourful bags. Some also indulge in sexual behaviour," he said.

But Phra Vudhijaya Vajiramedhi said that, while monks found to have sex in their sleeping quarters would be thrown out, homosexuality itself was not banned.

"Otherwise more than half of them would be defrocked," he said.

And back in Japan:

Descendants of Japanese emigrants from Latin and South America, namely Brazil, are being told by the government of Japan that they will pay them to leave and go back to their home countries. Many of these people were born by Japanese emigrants who moved abroad in the past for work, and so have direct ties to Japanese culture through their families.

Now they are being told, thanks for playing, here's a little coin for airfare, have a nice life. And if you take the door prize, your visa is void. So you can't ever come back to work here. Thanks for playing!

One Japanese government official, Jiro Kawasaki, a senior lawmaker of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, was quoted in The New York Times as saying: "We should stop letting unskilled laborers into Japan. We should make sure that even the three-K jobs are paid well, and that they are filled by Japanese," he said. "I do not think that Japan should ever become a multiethnic society."

What a pack of little yellow racists! How can they not be welcoming multiculturalism in their own country?!

The three-K jobs refer to "kitsui, kitanai, kiken—hard, dirty and dangerous," mostly in manufacturing, which is going through very hard times in Japan, and most parts of the world.

The (LGF, etc.) objection to such mass deportations (of wetbacks and goat-fuckers) from the West, of course, is always that it would result in many deaths, in between the rioting and whatnot. And yet, the Japanese seem to be handling that aspect of things alright, don't you think? Their collective conscience not bothering them too much about uprooting families, for the good of their own country and ethnic group?

We should really try to be more like the Japanese, eh?

P.S. More breathtaking scientific illiteracy and dishonest cherry-picking of data by Kate at SDA: Y2Kyoto: Tie Me Polar Bear Down, Sport.

She actually has a Mensa logo on her home page. You wouldn't guess so from her consistent displays of scientific illiteracy, but she does.

But that's what happens, quite predictably, when artists and political activists try to fake their way through science, eh? They genuinely think that because they've been able to guess their way through art and politics, just learning it as they go along with no formal training or testing, that getting science right should be just as easy. Well, it isn't. (Further, they think they can predict/evaluate science on the basis of politics, as if AGW was just a left-wing scheme.)

Also, notice how I snookered her readers in the comments, with the link to "more of the same" in Steven Dutch's debunking. "Gotcha!"

Hmm, hadn't previously known about this: The Cloak.

Computer Program Self-Discovers Laws of Physics:

Lipson and Schmidt designed their program to identify linked factors within a dataset fed to the program, then generate equations to describe their relationship. The dataset described the movements of simple mechanical systems like spring-loaded oscillators, single pendulums and double pendulums—mechanisms used by professors to illustrate physical laws.

The program started with near-random combinations of basic mathematical processes—addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and a few algebraic operators.

Initially, the equations generated by the program failed to explain the data, but some failures were slightly less wrong than others. Using a genetic algorithm, the program modified the most promising failures, tested them again, chose the best, and repeated the process until a set of equations evolved to describe the systems. Turns out, some of these equations were very familiar: the law of conservation of momentum, and Newton's second law of motion.

And from Multiculturalism’s Scandal-Ridden Academic Discipline:

Boas knew there was a delicate problem in linking brain volume to intelligence, since female brains are smaller; but he imagined this sex difference was due to factors other than general intelligence. He was thus entirely vindicated when, in 1998, it became clear that the bigger male brain is indeed due not to the brain's central gray matter that is responsible for general intelligence, but to the white matter which probably underpins spatial orientation abilities (once so necessary for the male hunter).

Interesting "Bad Science" article on subgroup analysis, i.e., post-hoc data-mining for apparent effects of a treatment the experimental subjects:

A frankly thin contrivance for writing on the fascinating issue of subgroup analysis.

And Richard Dawkins: When Religion Steps on Science's Turf.

Plus, Pascal Boyer: Why Is Religion Natural?

And, from Gary Marcus's Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (p. 63):

While all norman human beings acquire language, the ability to use formal logic to acquire and reason about beliefs may be more of a cultural product than an evolutionary one, something made possible by evolution but not guaranteed by it. Formal reason [i.e., "formop"] seems to be present, if at all, primarily in literate cultures but difficult to discern in preliterate ones. The Russian psychologist Alexander Luria, for example, went to the mountains of central Asia in the late 1930s and asked the indigenous people to consider the logic of syllogisms like this one: "In a certain town in Siberia all bears are white. Your neighbor went to that town and he saw a bear. What color was that bear?" His respondents just didn't get it; a typical response would be, in essence, "How should I know? Why doesn't the professor go ask the neighbor himself?" Further studies later in the twentieth century essentially confirmed this pattern; people in nonliterate societies generally respond to queries about syllogisms by relying on the facts that they already know [i.e., in concrete operational thinking, reasoning only from the concrete experiences they themselves have had], apparently blind to the abstract logical relations that experimenters are inquiring about.

So that's the state of mind in which shamanism evolved in the paleolithic era: One in which they couldn't conceive of the idea of systematically trying all possible combinations (of food ingredients, herbs, tools, etc.), but could rather only work out the results by trial and error, haphazardly combining the components until they stumbled on a product that worked.

It's also the state of mind of two-thirds of the adult population in the West, today.

Yet they vote (as a majority), and they reproduce.

Scientists didn't even determine with certainty that the brain was the source of thinking until the seventeenth century. (Aristotle, for one, thought the purpose of the brain was to cool the blood, inferring this backward from the fact that large-brain humans were less "hot-blooded" than other creatures.)

Of course, there's also this (Marcus, p. 130):

I see pedophilia as immoral—not because it is not procreative but simply because one party in the equation is not mature enough to genuinely give consent; likewise, of course, for bestiality.

But then, murder is worse than rape (even when lower animals are involved); so if you're eating meat, that's clearly morally worse than it would be to eat a vegetarian diet while having sex with animals. Am I the only one to whom that's blindingly obvious?

Not that I've ever ... you know....

(Okay, maybe a hundred rapes is worse than one murder; I'm not sure exactly how you'd calculate that. But certainly, one murder is worse than one rape.)

Plus, Marcus' argument sort of sidesteps the issue of whether animals can give consent to each other. If they can't, is doggie-on-doggie sex immoral? If it isn't, then is sex among underage human children immoral?

P.S. Sailer:

On none of the major tests used by professional and graduates schools do blacks come close to scoring at a percentile 80% as high as whites. On the Graduate Record Exam-Verbal, black college graduates on average score only three-eighths as well as whites (i.e., at what would be the 18th percentile for whites). And that's their best showing. On the Medical College Admission Test, blacks only reach the one-fifth level.

Whites at that (18th percentile) level are not competent—the bottom 20% of the people in any job do only around 4% of the total work, measured by productivity. Blacks at the same level aren't competent or capable of ever pulling their own weight in the world either; but that level happens to be their dismal average, rather than the low tail-end of the distribution.

Reading Taner Edis' excellent Science And Nonbelief. From which (p. 271-2):

In New Age circles, [Ken] Wilber has acquired a reputation for profound, science-informed philosophy. This [The Essential Ken Wilber] sampling of his typically opaque mystical prose might help with understanding why the New Age so often meets with contempt in mainstream scientific circles.

LOL!

Further to conservatism and conformity: What I think is happening there is that well-meaning current and former free-spirit hippies and liberals like myself want so much just to be allowed to "live and let live" by the conformist, intrusive, witch-hunting conservative-religious half of the population, that we pass laws that make it illegal to discriminate against anyone simply for expressing their individuality, or for being "different" (in sexuality, skin color, religion, etc.).

Those laws then impact on the freedoms of the (conformist, gun-totin') conservatives to discriminate against "long-haired freaky people," etc., ... and they then reframe it as if liberals are less individualistic than they (the morally superior ones) are. 'Cause that's exactly what it looks like, to them, when liberal laws restrict their individual-but-conformist ability to discriminate in the free market.

But really, if God-bothering, anti-abortion, anti-gay-marriage utter dumbfucks like Darleen Click and Dan Collins (at Protein Wisdom) didn't keep stepping on our freedoms to live our lives the way we want, we (liberals/hippies) would have far less incentive to pass "hate speech" laws and the like. To a large extent, we're just trying to protect our own ways of life (and the ways of life of others [e.g., Muslims] whom we naïvely assume to be as harmless and freedom-loving as ourselves), against their intolerant, witch-hunting, conservative conformist tendencies.

To put it another way: Every conservative discriminates in his own way against hair length, skin color, and sexual orientation; but non-conformist, creative free spirits all share a common, deep need to be allowed to live their lives in peace, without having to bend to other people's rules. And so, we naturally support other harassed, minority groups in their desire to be equally free from discrimination, and from having to live by the rules of the majority.

P.S. InfoWars' Paranoid Conspiracy Theory version of the swine flu: Medical Director: Swine Flu Was "Cultured In A Laboratory".

Through no fault of my own, I had a couple of films recommended to me yesterday:

The Obama Deception:

The film highlights the sad "truth" that Obama's "real agenda" is the "complete opposite" of what he promised during the campaign. The film claims Wall Street engineered the financial collapse in order to "repo the country" and that Obama is just a front man used by "the elite" to serve their agenda. It details how Obama has broken his campaign promises by sending more troops to Afghanistan, appointed numerous "finance oligarchs" and lobbyists to high government positions, reauthorized the Patriot Act first enacted by the Bush administration, and wants to create a "civilian national security force" to further militarize the country.

Well, on the face of it, those are by no means the most ridiculous assertions Alex Jones has come up with, though of course the "elite" thing gets right into conspiracy-theory territory. That Obama (the "Teleprompter in Chief") is an empty suit carrying out an agenda which will irreparably harm America is no well-kept secret, regardless of who exactly is setting that agenda.

And, Zeitgeist. Debunked in eSkeptic.

Also discovered three books I hadn't previously known about:

Secret Origins of the Bible

Gospel Fictions

The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark

P.S. Response to Darleen Click and the Protein Wisdom commenters, grrrr....

Some quotes [supporting global cooling] from the first Earth Day (1970)....

And an interesting fact from the conservative-libertarian skeptic and professionally competent scientist Steven Dutch:

"Some of the leading climate change skeptics [today] were high profile advocates of the notion of global cooling in the 1970s...."

Plus:

"In a long paragraph quoting press sources from the 1970s, [George F.] Will suggested that widespread scientific agreement existed at the time that the world faced potentially catastrophic cooling. Today, most climate scientists and climate journalists consider this a timeworn myth. Just last year, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society published a peer-reviewed study examining media coverage at the time and the contemporary scientific literature. While some media accounts did hype a cooling scare, others suggested more reasons to be concerned about warming. As for the published science? Reviewing studies between 1965 and 1979, the authors found that 'emphasis on greenhouse warming dominated the scientific literature even then.'"

Nothing there about Monckton claiming the moonlanding never happened.

He doesn't need to: He's gotten just about everything else wrong. Observe:

"Arthur Smith, long-time member at the APS Forum, has identified 125 errors, irrelevancies, and contradictions in [Monckton's July 2008 APS] article."

Yeah, but at least he never claimed that the moon landing (#126) never happened....

"Monckton played a key role in a legal challenge heard in the High Court of Justice in October 2007 in a bid to prevent An Inconvenient Truth from being shown in English schools. In an interview with the conservative American talk radio host Glenn Beck, Monckton stated that he had prompted an unnamed friend to fund the case 'to fight back against this tide of unscientific freedom-destroying nonsense' and had played a direct role in the litigation against the British government."

Hey, here's an idea for global-warming skeptics: How about supporting the showing of AIT in science classes, as an example of what good science isn't? You know, just like any open-minded teacher would welcome having Intelligent Design taught in the same classes, to clarify what a scientific theory isn't. What's all this anti-intellectual kerfuffle about court cases to prevent our children from being exposed to controversial ideas, when showing that film could only enhance the students' education?

Couldn't it? Wouldn't it? Shouldn't it?

On the off-chance that anyone here is actually interested in approaching the AGW issue with rationality and scientific literacy, Steven Dutch has written a fine introductory article: The Science and Pseudoscience of Global Warming. Also consider this, from among his other half-dozen pieces (scroll down, to near the bottom of the page) on the subject:

"There are lots of legitimate and serious questions about climate change that all researchers in the field readily admit. What convinces me of the reality of climate change, despite the uncertainties, is that the comments put out by climate change denialists are absolute, unmitigated garbage. We find distortion and misuse of credentials, publication of counterfeit papers, and scientific illiteracy of all sorts. This junk is on a par with the creationism of Michael Behe and Darwin's Black Box...."

Likewise, the libertarian skeptics Penn and Teller have researched the AGW issue competently, and come to the conclusion that they just don't know whether AGW is real. (Teller is actually a fellow of the Cato Institute.) That's the most that any scientifically literate and competent person can reasonably say against AGW. (For a fine example of the breathtaking scientific illiteracy which fuels so much of confident global-warming denial, see here ... from a site by a woman who's a big fan of Protein Wisdom, no less, and has actually been quoted in the blurbs, here.)

You may also wish to check out the links in the Skepdic's Dictionary entry on Climate Skeptics.

Take heart, though: God created this planet for us to do whatever we want with it ... and if we really screw things up, He'll magically fix it ... or expedite the Second Coming ... right? Plus, Jesus still loves you and watches over you.

Of course, so does Zeus, to exactly the same degree. Which is to say, not at all.

Children believe such fairy tales.

For extra credit: Historical Jesus Theories.

I keep seeing this argument being made (on Protein Wisdom, etc.):

[C]onservatives hold a[n] individualist philosophy and therefore don't organize. The collectivist left on the other hand is fabulously well-organized and on so many, many fronts.

The subtext there, which I've seen explicitly stated elsewhere, is the notion that conservatives are more non-comformist and tolerant of disagreement among their ranks than liberals are ... which is of course complete nonsense.

If you're "conservative" you're resisting change, right? What is that potential change being judged against? Obviously, against the "old ways" of doing things. So you're a de facto member of the Old Ways in-group.

Who do you think the ones trying to change society (for better, or for worse) are? By definition, it's not the conservatives! And could that change-focused, avant-garde group really be more conformist than the ones who fearfully group together in their resistance to change? No: conservatism and conformity go hand-in-hand.

What these people are doing is privileging their in-group over the (liberal) out-group. And since individuality is something "good," of course they must have more of it than the "conformist" liberals do ... even though they really don't.

The most telling point is that these same "non-conformist" braggarts are also typically dead-set against gay marriage, abortion, etc. Why? Ultimately, most often simply because it's against their religion—the rational arguments are just a convenient veneer, which they'd abandon as soon as they don't serve their purposes. And that, of course, is the same religion that they're so conforming to that they can't even realize it's just an overgrown Mesopotamian cult with a fairy-tale, agrarian-magical belief system.

Taking a moment out of my busy day, I (drive-by) respond:

Now, if one considers polygamy desirable, one should come right out and say so.

Equally, if one's real reasons for opposing gay marriage and abortion are that they conflict with one's religious beliefs—so that one would oppose those "un-Christian" practices regardless of the logic involved—"one should come right out and say so" then, too.

Right?

Nothing ruins a perfectly good classical liberal site like a bunch of God-bothering fools who have use for reason only insofar as it supports their fairy-tale religious beliefs. Which ain't very far.

One thing that spending time with my friend "Bob" over the past few months has brought home to me is how much religious believers will twist reality to fit "logically" into what they "know" to be True.

Bob, for example, objects to gay and lesbian relationships because they're "not using their sex organs for what God made them for." That position is for sure being encouraged by Biblical "inerrancy." (His homophobia isn't just a "yuck" factor thing for anal sex, either, 'cause there's no such "yuck" involved in girl-on-girl action, right? Cor!!) As is his idea that any woman who marries him would have to change her surname: hyphenating their names, or using her surname as a middle name, wouldn't be good enough.

I'm actually fairly convinced that it's not just lesbian sex he's opposed to, it's lesbian singers, too. Or even ones that just have lesbian fans, like Sarah McLachlan.

He also convinced that the Beatles were a "manufactured" group. The only reasons he's given for that view, though, are that their record company made them fire Pete Best, in favor of Ringo Starr; and that George Martin was a genius producer.

When Boston was recording their first album in the mid-'70s, their record company likewise wasn't satisfied with the drummer (Tom Scholz' friend) who had played on the demos, and insisted that they use a different guy. It's been known to happen, and it has nothing at all to do with a group being "manufactured" by the record company.

Not to mention that the Beatles recorded their early albums in a single day each, having repeatedly rehearsed the songs in live gigs before going into the studio. So there wasn't really much for Martin to do on the early albums, as a producer—the songs and arrangements had all been worked out beforehand, by the band members themselves.

Any group that's writing and arranging its own songs is not a "manufactured" one, regardless of where they got their drummer from!

Bob has also claimed that John Lennon got shot for "being a stupid Leftist." Which, however, doesn't really match up with Mark David Chapman being "assessed as delusional and possibly psychotic," etc. (I'll leave open the possibility that Bob thinks that Chapman was just acting on behalf of the Illuminati, and that the [Jewish?] psychiatrists who evaluated Chapman were in on it. I hadn't made the connection before, but the agenda of the real 18th-century Illuminati included the abolition of monarchies ... which I suppose explains the pro-monarchy pamphlet I saw on Bob's parents' coffee table a couple of weeks ago.)

He actually can't stand to listen to John Lennon's song, "Imagine"—maybe 'cause of the "Imagine there's no heaven" line? I dunno.

Oddly, in spite of his own excellent musical skills and generally impressive knowledge, Bob didn't find out until age sixteen that "Octopus's Garden" was a Beatles song. Apparently a Canadian children's entertainer, Mr. Dressup, regularly did a cover version of it, so he thought that's where it originated.

So I don't know whether it's Lennon's politics and atheism, or Harrison's Eastern spirituality, that's bothering him more about the Fab Four. Or maybe he's still sore about Ringo stealing Mr. Dressup's only hit....

You know what group really was manufactured, though? The Sex Pistols. Seriously: "[Manager Malcolm] McLaren has stated that he had planned out the entire path of the Sex Pistols and in the film, The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle he set this plan out." And since all of the other groups McLaren ever managed were indeed demonstrably "manufactured" ones, there's good reason to believe him on that point.

No conspiracy required.

"One of the things about narcissism is that it looks like people who are just proud of themselves and smug, but in fact narcissism is a very brittle and unstable state," [psychiatrist William Anderson] Anderson told me. "People who are deeply invested in narcissism spend an awful lot of energy trying to maintain the illusion they have of themselves as being powerful and good, and they are exquisitely sensitive to anything that might prick that balloon."

Heh, they're actually talking about braindead Tea Party-bashers like Garofalo and Olbermann, but you'll never guess who it made me think of.

Elsewhere, repeating myself, but:

The thing about tolerating the teaching of Intelligent Design in the science classes of public schools is that the proponents of ID have an explicit "thin edge of the wedge" strategy, designed to "reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions." They have also widely pushed for "equal time" for the teaching of their beliefs against neo-Darwinian evolution.

If you let ID into the science classroom, even as an example of what science isn't, the next step will be for the New Agers on the Left to demand equal time for their "higher-state-of-consciousness" explanations of the Force behind evolution. And after a few court cases, they will get what they want: equal time for New Age quacks like Ken Wilber, as for ID. (It really would only be fair, as Wilber, in his "integral" take on evolution, provides just as solid an example of what science isn't, as ID does.)

Of course ID in the classroom isn't the same threat as jihad. But if you don't fight every battle as if it was the most important one, the one thing you can be sure of is that you'll lose it. And ID truly "won't stop at the door," so even if you're not bothered by it being pushed into science class, you probably feel differently about your kids being taught to meditate in class, no? (Studies of the benefits of meditation, too, provide many good examples of how not to do science properly.) Or are you really just as relaxed about the attempts to start Transcendental Meditation clubs in school, as you are about ID?

School meditation clubs, too, are no threat compared to jihad, right?

Just about any left- or right-wingnuttery you could think of is less dangerous to the West than is jihad. So then, what? "Don't worry, be happy," about everything except Islam?

Newsflash: If you let your freedoms erode in that way ... you won't even need to import any Allah-bothering Muslims to create a brutally oppressive society with a theology-based "science," and a theocratic government. Rather, all of that will happen on its own, just from that utter lack of vigilence in preserving secular freedoms which are in no way "God-given."

Not to mention that, with around half of the American population not believing in evolution, the only reason why Creationism isn't widely taught in American schools today is precisely because of the people who have fought against that, tooth-and-nail. To cite that lack of widespread teaching as evidence that "there's nothing to worry about," and so no need for protests against attempts to get Creationism taught in science classrooms, is just plain stupid!

Niggers Burn Five Witches Alive in Rwanda.

It's okay, though: It's their culture.

Not that "good Christian" whites weren't doing the same thing just a few hundred years ago, in their own witch hunts; but geez....

Oh, and science in the U.S. is being "wimminized": Applying Title IX to university science departments.

Guess we can look forward to Canada taking over the world lead in science then over the next few decades, eh? Because as mixed-up and overly PC as the Great White North is, we're not that mixed-up. Not yet, anyway....

On the other hand, you have Penn and Teller, and we don't:

P.S.:

As Canadian publisher Ezra Levant told his "human rights commission" tormenters while under investigation last year for offending Muslims, free speech is a God-given right to be protected even if the intent is to offend.

"God-given"? Huh??? "God-given"??!!! What the holy fucking nigger Jesus are these God-botherers thinking, anyway? It's in spite of them and their infantile beliefs that we have free speech, not because of their psychological retardation, sexism, homophobia ... and not-so-long-ago penchant for literally burning people (from witches to astronomers) whose ideas they don't like.

Fucking Christian morons.

Gak!:

Alan Greenspan was part of the inner circle of Ayn Rand's cult well into his forties (going so far as to sign the notoriously loony Stalin-like manifesto denouncing Rand's ex-boyfriend Nathaniel Branden when he was 42).

Yes, that Alan Greenspan:

During the 1950s, Greenspan was one of the members of Ayn Rand's inner circle, the Ayn Rand Collective, who read Atlas Shrugged while it was being written. Rand nicknamed Greenspan "the undertaker" because of his penchant for dark clothing and reserved demeanor.

Unrelated:

Black children from the wealthiest families have mean SAT scores lower than white children from families below the poverty line.... Black children of parents with graduate degrees have lower SAT scores than white children of parents with a high-school diploma or less.

P.S. Added links for 9/11.

Also, found this link to a study (from 1997) for the supposed negative effects of a low-fat diet on mood:

The effects on mood of reducing dietary fat while keeping the energy constant were examined in ten male and ten female healthy volunteers aged between 20 and 37 years. Each volunteer consumed a diet containing 41% energy as fat for 1 month. For the second month half of the subjects changed to a low-fat diet (25% energy from fat) and the remainder continued to eat the diet containing 41% energy from fat. Changes in mood and blood lipid concentrations were assessed before, during and at the end of the study. Profile of mood states (POMS) ratings of anger–hostility significantly increased in the intervention group after 1 month on the low-fat diet, while during the same period there was a slight decline in anger–hostility in the control subjects (group F 6.72; df 1,14; P = 0.021). Tension–anxiety ratings declined in the control group consuming the higher fat diet but did not change in the group consuming the low-fat diet (group F 6.34; df 1,14; P = 0.025). There was a decline in fasting concentrations of HDL-cholesterol after the low-fat diet and a small increase in subjects consuming the medium-fat diet (group F 4.96; df 1,12; P = 0.046), but no significant changes in concentrations of total serum cholesterol, LDL-cholesterol or triacylglycerol were observed. The results suggest that a change in dietary fat content from 41 to 25% energy may have adverse effects on mood. The alterations in mood appear to be unrelated to changes in fasting plasma cholesterol concentrations.

That study wasn't randomized or double-blinded. (With all the low-fat foods today which, thanks to the judicious use of certain chemicals which pass through the body without being metabolized, taste just like high-fat foods, you could certainly incorporate the double-blind principle into such a study.) And the transition from a high-fat to a medium-fat diet (25% is not really low-fat; 20% would be low-fat) is effectively going "cold turkey" off of fatty/junk foods. Have you ever noticed a negative change in your mood, and increase in anger/irritability, when trying to kick a bad food habit, in favor of a healthier way of living? Do you really think that's simply a product of the nutritional content of the healthier foods?

It's almost like the study above was intentionally designed to test the withdrawal effects of going cold-turkey (and disingenuously present those as being the result of low fat), rather than of the amount of dietary fat per se. (Compare a study in which the subjects took heroin or cocaine for a month, then went off it for a month. Would the withdrawal symptoms experienced in the latter month be an inherent characteristic of a "low-cocaine" diet? Or would it just be telling you about the addictive nature of the substance? Well, then how about withdrawing from fatty foods or "sugar shock"?) Indeed, other studies, carried out over four months of low-fat diet rather than merely one, have found exactly the opposite effects on mood, measuring decreased depression, anger and sadness on a low (20%) fat diet.

Plus, you really need to distinguish between beneficial and harmful fats in such studies.

Maybe the people who designed the above study were heavy meat-eaters, whose thought-processes were addled by that consumption of fat? Heh....

Not to mention that if you stop stuffing your face with garbage for awhile, you might even find that a "whole-wheat baguette with lean tuna, olive oil, and pepper" is actually quite tasty, while eating a "toasted blue-corn tortilla with a stack of pastrami or pepperoni, a heap of cole slaw, and melted cheese" is just going to make you feel sluggish and overdone afterwards. It just requires a bit of refinement in your palate, is all.

Frankly, I'd still trust John Robbins on diet (even though he's a well-meaning idiot when it comes to race) far more than any of these meat-eaters with a self-serving agenda to push as an excuse for their own salivation over high-fat foods, and their obvious wish to find medical justification for that, i.e., that the way they're eating is exactly the most-beneficial way for humans to eat.

It is, indeed, the case that when men cease to believe in God they'll believe in anything.

—Mark Steyn, America Alone

I've been spending a lot of time recently with a friend of mine. Let's call him "Bob."

Oh, who am I kidding? I only have one real friend in the whole wide world.

Let's call him "Bob."

Bob is a Christian, a global-warming denier, and a 9/11 "Truther," i.e., he believes the WTC tragedy was an "inside job," perpetrated by the American government.

Bob is also, not at all coincidentally, a huge fan of Alex Jones and his infowars.com website.

In the past few weeks, I have learned from "Bob" that:

• Many of the contrails left by jet planes are in fact toxic "chemtrails"

• If a stonemason were vegetarian, he would die, in that meat-free diets do not provide the heavy fuel needed to do labor-intensive work

• Scientific studies done at MIT have shown that vegetarian diets produce (unspecified) changes in brain chemistry and in one's psychology, e.g., (I suppose) making it easier for cults to brainwash their members if they insist on the latter keeping to a vegetarian diet

• Global warming is a myth

• The frequently Bible-alluding Bob Dylan is a Satan-worshiper, and may well have made a literal "deal with the Devil," the reward for which has been his global musical success. You haven't heard about that simply because the people who are in-the-know "aren't allowed to talk about it"

Where do you start? I mean, where the holy hell do you start?

Well, I had a couple of "spare" hours early this morning, so I did a bit of research.

For chemtrails, you first search the InfoWars site for "chemtrails," finding there a wide range of evil-government conspiracy theories being propounded, re: said trails. Such as this chunk of wild paranoia:

Contrails are the exhaust of an air craft, it leaves a trail in the sky and the trail rapidly dissipates. With chemtrails, they initially look identical to contrails, but rather than the trail dissipating, the trail expands and then starts to look like a cloud. Over the Silicon Valley where I live, I daily witness these chemtrails starting and stopping from airplanes. In other words, the plane has control over the chemicals it is releasing.

Then you amble your tired atheist ass over to the Skepdic's Dictionary:

The most reasonable explanation for the abundance of contrails in so many shapes and sizes is that (1) there has been an increase in commercial air traffic and (2) global warming [which doesn't necessarily imply that humans are causing the warming] is a reality. It does not follow from those facts—if they are facts—that there have not been government or military experiments that have involved airplanes spewing chemicals in the atmosphere.... But, it is a long way from that fact—if it is a fact—to supporting the notion that governments or pharmaceutical firms are systematically releasing chemicals into the atmosphere to make us sick as part of some twisted government plot.

From another link there, you further find:

[C]ontrails hang and expand in a humid area and evaporate outside that area.

Hmm, do you suppose, then, that if a jet were to pass through regions of differing humidity—where one region was humid enough to preserve/expand the contrail, while another was so dry that the trail simply evaporated/disappeared, and so on—that that might give the appearance of the chemtrail "starting and stopping"? (Hint: see the photo halfway down that page, just below the above-quoted text.)

Could, maybe, any reasonably intelligent and scientifically literate high-school student have figured that much out, within five minutes of understanding that condensation forms more readily in humid areas than in dry ones? (I know next to nothing about meteorology, but that's all the time it took me to make that connection.)

Next, it's trivially easy to find lists of professional athletes, from basketball players to iron-man triathletes, who are vegetarian. These people are exerting themselves physically in ways which no stonemason could even imagine. And they're doing it on a vegetarian diet.

Upon reflection, it could well be that vegetarian diets cause differences in brain chemistry and behavior versus meat-heavy ones. In that case, what do you want to bet that those changes in the vegetarian brains would be beneficial ones? After all, the physical health benefits of a vegetarian diet are well-documented; do you really think it would have negative mental health effects, when our brains are just as physical as the rest of our bodies are? What kind of evolutionary selection pressures could possibly have led to that? (Yes, there are situations where the organism will privilege the body over the brain, if it's not receiving enough nourishment, in the process permanently damaging the brain. But that's when it's trying desperately to keep the body going, not already measurably benefiting the body.)

In fact, since "eating takes significant supply away from the brain while the gut does the more important digestion thing," a lighter diet would return that energy more quickly to the brain (for not needing it so long for digesting heavy meals), wouldn't it? And that should result in clearer thinking on average, shouldn't it? At the very least, you'd have to control for that "digestion effect" in your studies....

On global warming, an astonishing percentage of persons who are certain that human-caused global warming is a myth are breathtakingly scientifically illiterate. Jones and his colleagues, with their idiot-understanding of how jets turn their (*cough*) toxic chemtrails "on" and "off," are obviously in exactly the same league.

The best primer I've seen on global warming is on Steven Dutch's website—scroll down almost to the bottom, to "Global Warming: A Swim in the Skeptic Tank." The single best article is his The Science and Pseudoscience of Global Warming.

Penn and Teller have likewise investigated the issue more thoroughly than I personally have the time or interest to do, and come to the conclusion that they just don't know whether Anthropogenic Global Warming is real. That's the most any climate-change "skeptic" can be "certain" that they've got right. From the other side of the issue, consider Steven Dutch:

There are lots of legitimate and serious questions about climate change that all researchers in the field readily admit. What convinces me of the reality of climate change, despite the uncertainties, is that the comments put out by climate change denialists are absolute, unmitigated garbage. We find distortion and misuse of credentials, publication of counterfeit papers, and scientific illiteracy of all sorts. This junk is on a par with the creationism of Michael Behe and Darwin's Black Box....

Some of the leading climate change skeptics were high profile advocates of the notion of global cooling in the 1970s....

Say what you will about Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth. You may see an excess of hype and overdramatization on the global warming side. You do not see believers in global warming mass mailing specious documents designed to look like legitimate scientific journal articles. That ought to tell you something. It tells me something....

Pseudoscience just has a distinctive tone and structure. If this were a debate about something I know nothing at all about, like the metrical structure of Tang Dynasty Chinese poetry, I'd be able to tell in ten minutes who were the real scholars and who were the charlatans. Real scholars look at the totality of the data; charlatans rely on anecdotal evidence and isolated anomalies. Real scholars know what constitutes being an expert, and rely on the findings of experts. Charlatans cite people with irrelevant credentials, or marginal credentials (master's degrees, even graduate students) as if they were on a par with the real experts on the other side. Charlatans pile on accusations that they were being unfairly treated and complain that important questions are not being addressed when even a cursory examination of the scholarly literature shows that they are.

There are times when the absence of solid data points can tell you as much as their presence—the "dog that doesn't bark at night on the moors," etc. The widespread, egregious scientific incompetence of global-warming deniers in making their case is one such instance.

Finally, "Bob" Dylan has long been involved with the Chabad Lubavitch group, which believes its late leader was the Messiah. But do you really think he'd be dumb enough to make a literal deal with the (imaginary) Devil?

The answer, my friend....

Oh, and on 9/11:

• Nutty 9-11 Physics

• Really Nutty 9-11 Physics

• Vaporizing the World Trade Center

• Nanoparticles at the World Trade Center

• 9/11 Conspiracy Theories: The 9/11 Truth Movement in Perspective

• Screw Loose Change: Exposing the Lies, Distortions and Myths of the 9-11 "Truthers"

• Debunking the 9/11 Myths: Special Report

Lot of references on InfoWars to the Illuminati, too. Predictably debunked at the Skeptic's Dictionary. But then, that's small potatoes compared to Bob's father's notion that the advances in computer technology over the past three decades must have been "received" (from aliens? God?)—there has simply been too much progress made there for it to all have been the product of human ingenuity and effort, right? (Given that the guy is actually a ham radio operator, and thus not entirely ignorant of how electronic things work, it's all the more amazing that he goes rushing for conspiracy-like theories even to account for faster computers! But then, as they say, "any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic" to people who aren't familiar with how it works.)

I belong to a mailing list that was recently invaded by a [Alex] Jones disciple, and his behavior was extraordinary. He considered himself a champion of skepticism and derided us for lacking "true skepticism" because we didn't believe his PCT [i.e., Paranoid Conspiracy Theory] claims unquestioningly. "True skepticism" is only that which is directed toward government claims; claims in opposition to the official story are worthy of belief simply because they are in opposition.

This is the thing: Such people think they're being "skeptical" about the world around them, but in fact they're setting new standards for naked gullibility and raging scientific illiteracy. It's not that they're stupid; it's more that "If you can believe that Jesus Christ was the sole Son of God, sent to this one insignificant planet that we might not perish in eternal hellfire-and-brimstone but have everlasting life," you can believe anything. (I am serious: the belief in government conspiracies and "inside jobs" is at least capable, in theory, of having rational and evidential support; but if you've accepted that your eternal well-being depends on the fact that someone you never knew [and who probably never even lived] was the Son of God and died a couple of thousand years ago, you've already proved that you don't need rational reasons to believe anything ... and, conversely, that you won't be swayed by reason when it's stacked against you. That is, you've proved that you will truly believe [or disbelieve, e.g., in global warming] anything, if it suits/comforts you to do so.)

If I've learned one thing in my time spent debunking the work of the New Age charlatan Ken Wilber, it's that if someone is wildly and confidently wrong about one thing, it's extremely unlikely that that behavior will be confined to only that one thing. So if Alex Jones fucks up chemtrails and AGW so royally, creating elaborate conspiracy-theory scenarios to "explain" the supposed government involvement in simple and easily explicable physical phenomena, you don't even need to read the rest of what he and his colleagues have written to know that it will be complete and utter crap. In fact, like Wilber, you could basically take whatever Jones says, believe its exact opposite instead, and come out remarkably close to the truth.

Alex Jones is not a skeptic. He's scientifically illiterate, gullible as hell, and quite possibly clinically paranoid. (Could he see conspiracies everywhere if he wasn't?) But he is not a competent skeptic in any meaningful sense of the term. Rather, he confuses complete gullibility, in promoting and believing even the wildest anti-establishment claims and world-domination, with skepticism. But just because you doubt the official party line, doesn't mean that what you do believe is any better than documented governmental lies.

To be sure, Jones is a different kind of quack than Ken Wilber, in that while Wilber grossly misrepresents his sources to get support for his ideas, Jones represents his sources accurately (as far as I can tell), but then formulates wild-ass conspiracy-theories to explain simple phenomena and outright coincidences. But they're both equally utter quacks in their own ways, that's for sure. And no one who takes either of them seriously can lay any reasonable claim to being able to intelligently evaluate the validity of the outrageous claims of others.

But, do you think I can tell "Bob" all that, without either irreparably harming our friendship, or at least creating a whole mound of work for myself in debunking everything else he believes which has no basis in reality? (People like Wilber and Jones will always be able to create wrong ideas faster than skeptics can debunk them.)

Including, um, you know, the collection of second-millennium B.C. death-and-resurrection fertility myths called Christianity?

P.S. Human Study Shows Benefits of Caloric Restriction.

Also, when I talk about Alex Jones probably being clinically paranoid, I'm not joking. Compare:

One can only speculate as to why PCTs exist. It is easy to explain their proliferation: modern mass communications has made it possible for anyone to become his or her own press and propaganda machine. But why PCTs in the first place? The only other experience I've had with such thinking was when I had to get involved with some mentally ill people. I am not joking here. A relative had a "psychotic break" and severe paranoia. We (a group of relatives) were all targets of assassination by some unknown evil people. They could be partially identified by their license plate numbers. If the number started with a "5" then they were evil. No amount of logic or reasoning as to the preposterousness of the notion that anyone would want to kill a person of absolutely no political significance was of any use. No amount of reasoning as to how license plate numbers are assigned was of any use. Phone calls could only be made from "secure" lines, which involved either going to the fire department or talking your way up through a series of supervisors until you got a "good one." Through my ill relative I met others who were also afflicted with delusions and incredibly faulty judgment. They did not lose their ability to reason—in fact, my relative seemed even more intelligent in some ways when manic—but their assumptions were taken from sources inaccessible to the ordinary mind. They put vast faith in their intuitions and thought their ideas were brilliant insights when they were little more than the fancies of diseased brains. When I compare reading the literature of the PCTs to entering Bedlam, I mean to be taken literally.

I think it is likely that many PCTs in the West are initiated into their peculiar way of thinking by their religious training, in particular by their study of the Bible. They have been taught or they assume that everything happens for a purpose and that God ultimately has a reason for every event occurring just as it does. As it becomes more and more difficult to see this world as designed for anything, the theories get more and more preposterous to keep the teleological delusion alive. The war on evolution and homosexuality—encouraging the abandonment of science and stimulating murderous assaults—so obviously disproportionate by any rational standard, is difficult to explain without seeing the militant fundamentalists as beyond the last stages of desperation. The intense campaigns to expose possible alien abductions, UFOs, and mind-control is likewise preposterously disproportionate to any rational standard. It is becoming nearly impossible to account for the events on this planet with the assumption of a Divine Creator who has a plan and a rationale for everything. The systems of thought that must be created in order to maintain Divine Providence get more insane by the minute....

It is a very natural trait to try to make sense out of the world. The PCTs are trying desperately to make sense out of a world they can no longer relate to [even with its fast computers, etc.]. The world is too complicated, too mean, too cold, too unsatisfying for them. In the real world, they are considered nothing and despair of ever being anything but on the outside looking in. They see science as telling them they are an accident and their lives are without meaning. In their alternative world, they rule and are hopeful. Everything is in its place or will be put in its place. There is order and meaning. Life is significant.

And again, if you can believe in God and Jesus (or in any religion, for that matter), you can believe anything. Because you've already proved that your beliefs have absolutely nothing to do with anything resembling rationality and evidence, much less with science and cold, hard reality. From there to the Illuminati and chemtrails is just a hop, skip and a jump ... by a non-vegetarian athlete.

[Perth, Ontario] was the site of the last fatal duel in the province. Robert Lyon, a law student, was killed on June 13, 1833 after an argument with a former friend, John Wilson....

In 1893 a 22,000 pound cheese was produced in Perth which was exhibited in Chicago at the World's Columbian Exposition.

Man, a cheese like that could even have competed for attention with ... Vivekananda. One pound for every current member of the Vedanta Society, no less.

The Perth Citizens's Band, still giving concerts in the band stand behind City Hall, is a tradition dating back over 150 years. The band is Canada's oldest active town band. The Perth Citizens Band accompanied the Mammoth Cheese to the Chicago World's Fair in 1893.

Well, yes: You can't send a cheese like that to a foreign city without a chaperone. The cultured ladies would tut-tut to no end.

The Perth Curling Club is one of the oldest curling clubs in the Ottawa Valley. It is best known for the fatal curling incident of 1931. Tony Fournier, a resident of Perth, slipped on a banana peel which was inadvertently dropped on the ice by his wife Lisa. Lisa stood to inherit all of Tony's possessions, making it a famous scandal for the small town.

And you thought stuff like that only happened in the movies!

Brave man:

MP Geert Wilders is to make a follow-up to his 15 minute anti-Islam film Fitna, the leader of the anti-immigration party says in Thursday's Telegraaf [NL - KV].

The new film should be finished next year and will "reflect how far the 'islamisation' [of the west] has progressed," Wilders tells the paper

"It will not be a copy of Fitna. This is the second phase," Wilders said. "I now want to show the consequences of mass immigration from Muslim countries." The film will focus on freedom of speech issues and the strict Islamic legal system known as sharia, he said.

"We have to attack more, go on the offensive," the paper quoted him as saying. "We have to fight back."

Good for him.

Catfights over handbags and tears in the toilets. When this producer launched a women-only TV company she thought she'd kissed goodbye to conflict...:

I can understand why people want to believe that women look out for each other—because with men in power at work and in politics, it makes sense for us to stick together.

In fact, there was a time when I believed in the Sisterhood—but that was before women at war led to my emotional and financial ruin....

I should have learned the lessons of my past—at my mixed secondary school I was bullied by a gang of nasty, name-calling girls, so I knew only too well how nasty groups of women could become.

Yep, "matriarchy," gotta love it. And not only does "Sisterhood" not exist, minority unity doesn't exist, either ... as the West will discover in a very bad way as soon as "whitey" is no longer in the majority and available to be so easily blamed for supposedly being the source of every whining minority's problems.

It's easy to find common ground with other groups when you have a common enemy to hate. But the only thing really "unifying" white women, gays, misogynistic/homophobic dumbfuck blacks, and West-hating Muslims, is their shared contempt for White Men. When they have no common enemy left to fight against and extract tribute ($) from, where will they turn their hatred? Against each other, of course. And at that point, the Awful White Men Formerly In Power won't be able to save them (or their countries) from themselves anymore.

I always felt sorry for anyone who naively showed off a new purchase in the office, because everyone would coo appreciatively to their face—then harshly criticise them as soon as they were out of earshot. This happened without exception....

Employees considered it acceptable to take time off for beauty treatments—and not out of their holiday allowance. One girl regularly came in late because she was getting her hair coloured, and when I mentioned this she blew up in outrage. Though at least she had a reason; most just turned up late regardless, and huffed "That's the time my train gets in" if I pointed at the clock....

Despite being in charge, [Sarah] was scared at the prospect of being bitched about [from being the "bad cop"]—it was as though, in a women-only environment, staff were unable to keep their defined roles....

At "that time of the month"—which in an office staffed only by women meant someone was always at that point—any bad mood was swiftly passed on to the rest of team as if by osmosis....

The effect a lack of testosterone was having in our office was even more apparent when I temporarily hired two male directors to work on a series (camera operators are usually men because of the heavy equipment). The team suddenly became quieter, more hard-working and less bitchy—partly because they were too busy flirting....

[W]hile I stand by my initial reason for excluding male employees—because they have an easy ride in TV—if I were to do it again, I'd definitely employ men. In fact, I'd probably employ only men.

Making close to half a million in our first year should have meant profit, but this was wiped out by high salaries and accounting errors by staff.

When I was working at a community-owned natural food store in Winnipeg, we had a woman doing our accounting. At one point she has lost track of $10K in debt. And since they spent a lot of money on the assumption that we had made that $10K in profit, and had thus "turned a corner" after being mismanaged into the ground by a male store manager, that was the effective death knell for the company.

Almost as funny:

The Onion: Disney Geneticists Debut New Child Stars.

Media Having Trouble Finding Right Angle On Obama's Double-Homicide.

Boss Gets Into Groove After 3rd Round Of Layoffs.

Empowered Man Murders Controlling Wife In Lifetime For Men Original Movie.

Freedom of Speech means nothing if you can't call someone a nigger, kike, spic, faggot, fatpig, slanteye, slope, beaner, coon, wop, towel head, hymie, jigaboo, jungle bunny, gook, guinea, greaseball, hebe, kraut, porch monkey, raghead, sambo, spade, cracker, dago, gwailo, honkie, nip, spook, macaca or even the culinary insult: Cheese-eating surrender monkey.

If you are so offended by any of these terms that you want to make it a federal crime to utter them, then fuck you....

Interestingly while the left twirled themselves into a tempest worrying that George Bush was personally eavesdropping on their boring, trite conversations, they don't seem to be so worried about the proposed Federal Hate Crimes/Thought Crimes bill: HR 1913....

Any nation with the freedom to insult others is an excellent safe haven for any minority. That's right. Homosexuals are more free in America because the very freedom that allows us to call them faggots also makes them free to practice their particular sexual faith.

Congress resurrecting 'hate crimes' plan?:

Christian organizations are warning constituents of a potential stealth attack on their faith in Congress with the launch of another "hate crimes" law, similar to a previous measure adopted with only minutes' notice.

The earlier plan died when President George W. Bush threatened a veto, describing the idea as unneeded and probably unconstitutional.

But now Barack Obama's White House website affirms his dedication to strengthening "federal hate crimes legislation" and expanding "hate crimes protection."

Well, ain't that just like a limp-wristed, leftist, effete, metrosexual half-nigger....

P.S. I tried including Google AdSense at the top of this page, but they just keep showing generic/public-service ads, which apparently means that they can't categorize what I write, enough to relate specific ads to it. Don't know whether to feel insulted or complimented....

This:

Social democracy is the salient political philosophy of ethnic nation-states: you take care of everybody, because everybody's family. Social democracy encourages spoils-based political economy, with various ethnic tribes jostling for their family's share. Social democracy encourages net tax consumption, so peoples have to be imported to try and keep the Ponzi scheme going. Lather, rinse, repeat.

There are some things you can't even parody. Like this:

I ask Arthur, whose Crown Victoria I hear start every weekday morning at 5:40, when he leaves for work as a machine operator, what the block was like 20 years ago, when he bought his three-story, 1907 home for $45,500.

"It was quiet, calm and peaceful," he says. "It was all black people up in here ... then all of a sudden, all the black families just start moving out, moving out, next thing you know, I said, 'Dang, all these white folks coming back over here?'" He laughs. "Look, how it used to be was, 'How you doing? What's up, man?' Now, you walk down the street, [say to] the white, 'How you doing?' They will walk right past. I hate that."

"I just don't really agree with all these white folks around here now. It seems like we're getting pushed out. To me, I call it ethnic cleaning [sic]. I do. That's the way I feel."

Well, now you know how whites feel, when they see minorities moving into their neighborhoods. Except when they get "ethnically cleansed" and pushed out of the cities they built because it's not safe to walk down the streets anymore, they're "racist" for not welcoming that "cleansing." Or "cleaning." Or Zimbabwae-ing. Or whatever.

And, Government Involvement In The Economy Increases Ethnic Rebellion:

A new study in the journal International Studies Quarterly reveals that ethnic violence is actually much less likely in countries where the free market predominates than it is in countries where the government plays an extensive role in the economy....

The study also shows that economic policies that clearly redistribute income across different ethnic groups are most detrimental to ethnic group relations. Redistributive policies such as price controls, industry regulations, and restrictions on the flow of international investment are strongly associated with ethnic violence. This finding implies that ethnic violence may often be driven by concerns of economic insecurity.

The God Debate. Sam Harris vs. Rick Warren.

Of course, because Harris himself is a "spirituality addict," he can't bring himself to see that the reason atheism isn't more widely embraced in the world is because the world is filled with similar religion/spirituality addicts as himself, who desperately need to have a set of beliefs in which the world "makes sense." (He actually, whether intentionally or not, paraphrases Ken Wilber, about atheism [like parapsychology] supposedly just "not having good P.R."!)

Also, for Warren it comes down to Pascal's Wager, which wasn't a good reason to believe in anything three and a half centuries ago, and sure as hell isn't a good reason today.

And just in time for Easter (NSFW):

The End of White America? In The Atlantic, no less. Clueless about the idiocracy effect, of course, and so offering an unduly positive view of the future. But they couldn't publish it otherwise, could they?

cakesecret.com

P.S. What happens when you give people (even "polite Asians") "victim immunity," allowing them to get away with anything just because of their "oppressed-group" status? They'll completely disregard even common courtesy, simply because when anyone "hits back," it will be that provoked-person's fault. It's exactly how children behave, if they aren't subjected to any discipline, and held responsible for their own actions. Observe:

Fish Rot From the Head Down—A Politically Correct Bedtime Story.

Second, people who think that immigrants who come to First World countries are doing that as a "compliment" to the country, are out of their minds. These fuckers are coming here to undo centuries of colonialism, imperialism, and everything else that whitey has ever done to "ruin" their own shit-hole, savage countries, from Cortez and Columbus on down. Never mind that European colonialism was the best thing that ever happened to Africa, California, Mexico, etc.: If it wasn't for the Christianization of those lands, they'd still be doing human sacrifices, and literally cannibalizing and crucifying each other. Yet, to their inadequate, macho-sexist/racist minds, we're the source of all their problems! Classical liberals who can't wrap their minds around that simple fact are doing more to ruin Western civilization, in practice, than they could ever do to preserve it.

Third, contrary to what I had previously been thinking on the subject, it's actually a good thing that 50% of our shit-eating, shit-colored, shit-retarded immigrant animals are setting in just three cities (Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver). Because when you're dealing with a plague of niggardly sniggers, goat-fuckers, and shit-eating wetback dogs, you'd like to be able to quarantine it. And in the long run, they're doing half of that work for us.

One of the things that becomes obvious as soon as you start to drive across Canada is how overwhelmingly much undeveloped land there is. Really, we've got a few cities and towns, nestled amid near-endless wasteland. (Apparently it's not as wooded anymore as it looks from the highways, as there's been a lot of logging done to within a few hundred yards of the highways. But you'd be clearing those trees if you were going to develop the land anyway.)

Toronto's on Lake Ontario; a city like Winnipeg was founded at the junction of three rivers—each of which has been so polluted by now that you can't even eat the fish out of them, and they have to import their water (through asbestos-lined pipes) from just about the next province. But today, when you can sink a 100-foot well anywhere, and don't need to ship stuff just by sea, there are no reasons why a city like that needs to exist close to (undrinkable, now) bodies of water.

Consider one of Canada's biggest I.T. success stories, Research In Motion—makers of the BlackBerry. They're headquartered in Waterloo—a 100,000-population university town, ~65 miles from Toronto.

A mere 2.3% of the Waterloo population is black or Hispanic.

I'm seriously considering moving there. It sounds delightful. (Though the 2.8% Muslim population is already disturbingly high.) Guelph is a similar option, slightly closer to Toronto (60 miles West). Check out the beautiful demographics: Less than 1.5% Muslim, 1.25% black, and 0.7% Latin American. (Toronto? 6.7% pedophile-worshiping goat-fucker, 8.4% niggardly snigger, and 2.6% wetback, for an MBW [Muslim-Black-Wetback] prejudice-against-whitey index of 17.7, vs. Guelph's idyllic 3.4, or Waterloo's still-tolerable 5.1. [In that first-order index, a single black Muslim is regarded as being as bad as one black, and one Muslim, in terms of racism and violence.])

And yet, "in spite of" (har!) that lack of diversity, "Moneysense magazine ranked Guelph fourth in the country to live in 2007, and was also rated among Canada's ten best places to live by Chatelaine magazine," for its "low crime rates, clean environment and generally high standard of living."

Sounds like a place where a white guy could still walk down the street without being hassled for the color of his skin, doesn't it?

How did that city come to be such a success story? Here's a hint: "Historically, Guelph's population has been principally British in origin, with 92% in 1880 and 87% in 1921."

Well then, pardon me for saying so, but: God Save the Queen.

Enoch Powell's historic "Rivers of Blood" speech, given forty years ago, often gets criticized as being racist. (Eric Clapton waded into the same controversy years later.) But everything he had to say in that speech against immigration, and about the effects of dumbfuck minorities moving into civilized communities, was very perceptive, and spot-on. Because even when the non-Asian minorities who move in are themselves educated, upstanding citizens, and even if their kids are largely in the same mold, the friends of their kids who hang around in the new digs will have regressed far enough toward the averages for their races and cultures that they'll be a blight on the neighborhood. And when they have the numbers/percentages to safely harass whitey—as the minorities in Toronto do—that's precisely and predictably what they'll do. Gettin' all "uppity," as it were.

So in the words of Eric Clapton, "get the foreigners out, get the wogs out, get the coons out."

I'm pretty sure he wasn't talking about raccoons, either:

P.S. The next installment of "Ophelia Benson: Typical Woman." As I posted:

I should add here that, yes, I think other people should like their genitals too much to make such invidious comparisons as well, because when everybody starts making such comparisons then my ability not to have to be ashamed of my and others' genitalia is reduced.... I genuinely think that that's a good reason to refrain from using sexual words as pejorative epithets.

Lost in all this is the derogatory use of the word "asshole."

For, much as we love our genitals, should we not also "like our assholes too much to make such invidious comparisons"?

If not, why not? Do our rectums and anal sphincters not deserve every bit as much love and respect as our "Dicks and Janes"?

I, for one, am not ashamed of my anus! I trust you can say the same, Ad Astra.

More to the point, while both men and women have anal sphincters (so that "asshole" can't be a sexist term) ... how are gay men supposed to feel, when we so callously insult their "portals of ecstasy," turning that delicious source of male intimacy into a term of abuse?

Indeed, suppose that the J&M commenter had called Mo an "asshole" instead of a "pussy." How would that be viewed by the gay "community" and its (non-elected) leaders? Could they not reasonably see it as "meaning gays are stupid, incompetent and detestable people"?

More importantly, would the vigilant Ms Benson have lept, cat-like (as it were), to the defense of that oft-oppressed group?

I trust she would have. Because if I have learned one thing from this discussion, it is that the very least we can do is to avoid using the "a-word" around male homosexuals. At least I, for one, would not wish to reduce their ability not to have to be ashamed of their and others' anuses. Or anii. Or whatever.

Hence my feeling that I should try to convince others not to use such words.

Precisely. To paraphrase, "Are there really assholes in the world? There are rectums and anal sphincters, there are straights and gays we dislike, but are we under any particular obligation to call the latter the names of the former? I'd rather call them something more facially descriptive that doesn't make pointless connections between gay sex and things we don't like."

Also, I, for one, could use a really good enema right now. I think my butt deserves at least that much "love."

Chris S is right: it is "a power struggle over the definition of words, and who gets to define them.... If I cede my ability to use the term pussy to describe weak individuals because someone ancillary might be offended, what other words do I cede as well? Is there some centralized dictionary of words that I can reference that can show me all the 'correct' terms that I am currently allowed to use? Is this dictionary properly localized so that each protected group has their own version of words that are ok?"

And this, from Michael Hoffman's They Were White and They Were Slaves, p. 39-40:

American Indian tribes such as the Cherokee engaged in extensive enslavement of negroes. The Cherokee Indians owned large plantations on which they worked their negro slaves in gangs.

White slaves were actually owned by negroes and Indians in the South to such an extent that the Virginia Assembly passed the following law in 1670: "It is enacted that noe negro or Indian though baptized and enjoyned their owne freedome shall be capable of any such purchase of christians...."

Interesting how to work out the "reparations" for that, no?

Jeff Goldstein posted this at Protein Wisdom (probably largely in response to a post I had done on another thread, quoting Christopher Hitchens on the teaching of ID in the classroom):

After all these years I still can't understand this fear or this need to segment and compartmentalize.

If introducing the field of ID in science class does the work of separating, graphically, science from philosophy and teaching students the scientific method and the difference between "theory" as understood by science and "theory" as understood colloquially, isn't that precisely what we're after?

I guess it's just the teacher in me that can't quite fathom why people are so stubborn on this point—particularly when their stubbornness gives taboo power to the thing theys marginalize.

Just seems a pretty weak and anti-intellectual strategy to me.

So I had to respond:

If introducing the field of ID in science class does the work of separating, graphically, science from philosophy and teaching students the scientific method and the difference between "theory" as understood by science and "theory" as understood colloquially, isn't that precisely what we're after?

Fine; but then what about "equal time" for all other mythologies/theologies which attempt to account for the creation and evolution of life? Because it's obviously Western-centric to privilege ID, there [even just in terms of using them as examples of colloquial "theory" vs. scientific].

So at the very least that would truly be a pyrrhic victory for the Christian Right, when the Left gets ahold of that idea, wins a few court cases, and starts teaching the channelings of Ramtha on evolution ... or the "Theory of Everything" purveyed by Ken Wilber, who can lay just as much claim to an Eros-driven alternative to neo-Darwinian evolution as ID can. (He actually quotes Michael Behe approvingly!)

(BTW, my own book debunking Wilber's ideas [which ideas have influenced Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Jeb Bush] is already slated to be used as a text in both a Science and Religion course, and a Critical Thinking one. Chapter 2 of that text covers kw's take on Eros-driven evolution, while his overall TOE provides many fine examples of colloquial/untested "theory" vs. scientific understandings of the term.)

"If you give them an inch, they'll take a mile" in language and intentionalism, right? So why wouldn't exactly the same thing happen in the science classroom, first from the Right (in demanding equal time for ID against Darwinian evolution, [using the existing presence of it in the classroom as an "in"] and then from the Left (in extending that idea to all the "heathen" alternatives to ID)?

So simply shrugging off the teaching of ID in the science classroom without bothering to see exactly where that teaching will predictably lead is not an option ... whether you're on the Left or the Right, as an atheist (and former New-Ager like myself) or as a "one true religion" believer.

There are many battles to fight in attempting to delay the decay of Enlightenment-based Western civilization. But if you don't fight every battle as if it was the most important one, you can be sure you're going to lose it. And if you lose enough battles, you're going to lose the war.

To summarize, look at it this way: In supporting the teaching of ID in the science classroom, in any context, you're opening the door for Left-skewing New Agers to do exactly the same thing with their "higher-state-of-consciousness" explanations of evolution (which I have spent a good chunk of the past few years of my own life debunking). That is, you'll be giving them additional leverage in indoctrinating your kids not merely with their views on AGW (which I personally, like the "professional skeptics" Penn and Teller, am still agnostic about) and the redistribution of wealth, but with the New Age take on religion (and the "science of meditation") as well.

Is that really what you want? Or do you really think that would "stop at the door"? On the contrary, next thing you know they'll be doing "scientific" Transcendental Meditation in school/class, even as part of their science curriculum—and quite justifiably so, in that context, as it provides many instructive lessons in the testability of hypotheses and the difficulties in running controlled experiments when expectation effects are involved.

If you want to turn Science class into Comparative Religion, that's exactly the way to do it. It's like they've never even heard of the "thin edge of the wedge" strategy. The resistance to that explicit strategy is a subtext in nearly everything which the atheistic community has written against the teaching of ID in the school system. That's not "anti-intellectualism," it's just being aware of what the goals of your "enemies" are, and not walking naïvely into the "trap" they've set.

Of course, Goldstein was never advocating that ID be taught in science classes, as anything more than an example of what scientific theory isn't. And my above post wasn't responding only to him, on that thread, just as the earlier post of mine was directed only at the foolish idea that kids are smart enough to know that ID, astrology, and alchemy are bunk, when even adults aren't generally smart enough to figure that out. (Admittedly, that may not be as obvious as it normally would be, in my writing.) But that's not how Goldstein's position would be taken were it to be implemented, nor would it end with that modest inclusion of ID as a bad example of theory/science, especially when teachers are faced with parents up in arms about how their local science teacher dared to criticize "Christian" ID (as a proxy for the "one true religion") in class, as not being "scientific."

I, of all people, believe in telling both sides of any story, and in letting people prove themselves to be (ID, New Age, etc.) fools by simply allowing them to speak their minds. And I'd love to see high schools across North America require their students to take a mandatory Critical Thinking course before graduating, where they'd cover exactly stuff like learning to think critically about ID, Ramtha, and Wilber, and accumulate the tools for a "skeptic's toolbox" (the application of which my NE actually gives quite a nice and concise introduction to). That is, I'd have no problem with giving "equal time" to both neo-Darwinian evolution and ID (and Wilber's similar take on evolution) in a Critical Thinking course, as opposed to a science course. But when you're up against an explicit "thin edge of the wedge" strategy, where any criticism of ID could put a teacher's job at risk, and the ultimate goal of the people pushing ID into the classroom is not merely equal time but to (if they could) outlaw the teaching of evolution altogether, then helping them along even by using ID as an example of "bad science" is not the way to do it, regardless of how much the idea might seem to make sense at first blush.

And there are, after all, many other ways of teaching the difference between colloquial vs. scientific theory, which don't require one to bring religion into the science classroom.

So again: Have I already learned too much from these classical liberals? Plus, with the Catho-holics Darleen Click and Dan Collins posting regularly at PW (and consistently missing the ball whenever they post on issues which aren't independent of their fairy-tale beliefs), I don't trust that there's not some residual religious motivation behind some of Goldstein's opinions, too. Like, say, on Intelligent Design.

Howard Stern said he has meditated for 37 years, told the crowd that he credits meditation for saving his mother from depression. (more)

You're depressed? Mow the Lawn:

Almost as good as The Best Commercial ever Made.

Subject: Vice President Rainman

April 4, 2009

Also, I am not the Geoffrey Falk who writes voluminously on the topic of circumcision. But after seeing this video, I may have to start:

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