Post-parody

Barack Obama may not have turned out to be post-racial after all, but he is staking a claim to be the first post-parodic presidential candidate. It's very hard to distinguish this parody piece from the Onion on the sheer wonderfulness of Senator Obama from all the straight-faced ones in the mainstream media.

Hailed by media critics as the fluffiest, most toothless, and softest-hitting coverage of the presidential candidate to date, a story in this week's Time magazine is being called the definitive Barack Obama puff piece.

"No news publication has dared to barely scratch the surface like this before," columnist and campaign reporter Michael King wrote in The Washington Post Tuesday. "This profile sets a benchmark for mindless filler by which all other features about Sen. Obama will now be judged.

I'm truly beginning to hope that Obama wins. I can't wait to see the reaction when he does for the nation what other dynamic, young black leaders have done for large American cities like Detroit. Combined with the inevitable African invasions - my guess is Zimbabwe, but Congo and Kenya aren't out of the realm of possibility - I think an Obama presidency is probably the best hope for triggering a powerful conservative reaction capable of sweeping the neocons and Brooksian slow liberals to the side.

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Secular encyclicals

One of the more amusing things about this brief shining moment for secular society is the way in which its organs often ape the institutions of religious society. The latest encyclical from the American Physical Society is a case in point:

The American Physical Society reaffirms the following position on climate change, adopted by its governing body, the APS Council, on November 18, 2007:

"Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate."

Now, don't forget to say your Hail Gores today, o ye sinners against Gaia! My favorite part of the papalAPS statement is this: "The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.".

Icontrovertible! Except, you know, for the last ten years.

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A European atheist's perspective

Paholaisen Asianajaja reviews TIA:

This is one of those books that has gotten polarized reviews. Some of those reviews are based one the first three chapters (in some case only pages), and nothing more. The reason for these not-so-indepth reviews is the tone in which Vox Day, a pseudonym, obviously, starts describing the Unholy Trinity. Calling names and hurling alphabetical excrement is never a good way to draw in the reader. Even if one's opponent – The Dreaded Unholy Trinity – does it, there's no need stoop to the same level. Of course, some will find it extremely entertaining....

To the great shock of many who have not read Day's book, it must be said [that] he does make valid points. That is, Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens have made baseless assertions in their books.

I've noticed that the European atheists tend to be much more relaxed about TIA and accepting of its attacks on the New Atheists than their American counterparts. This may be because they don't feel so completely outnumbered, but having lived in Europe for a long time myself, I suspect it has more to do with a less fundamentally innocent approach to life. Americans say they think politicians are crooks and liars, but most of them don't really believe it; if they did, they wouldn't have been viewing George Bush as the second coming of Ronald Reagan or be swooning over the magical negritude of Barack Obama. Europeans literally don't divide into teams the way Americans do, which allows a European atheist to view a polemic like TIA for what it is rather than seeing it through the lens of a personal attack from the start.

As for his criticisms, I'd simply direct his attention to Chapter XIII, which explains how the atheism of the leader is a significant contributing factor to government slaughter; it is not and cannot be the sole causal factor for the very logical reason that there is no sole causal factor. The common defenses of atheist crimes can be applied just as easily to Communism; while PA is surely correct, it's also not as if any of the atheist leaders listed in the appendix woke up and said "Gosh, the value of an object is derived from the stored human labor required to produce that object from which the surplus value is appropriated from the bourgeoisie. Let's kill loads of people.” And I have constructed no caricatures; Richard Dawkins really did take the position he did on childhood sexual abuse and only the most blindly loyal Dawkinsians even attempt to defend him on this point any more.

But regardless, it is a pleasure to read calm and straightforward criticisms from atheists who have actually read and understood the purpose of the book, rather than the usual overwrought fiction produced by those fearful of having their beliefs called into question.

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This sums it up nicely

Sometimes, I am very proud to be a member of the game industry.

Texas Governor Rick Perry delivered his E3 keynote speech to a drastically lower than expected number of attendees. Shortly before Perry began his speech, the room's 1000 seats remained largely empty with an audience numbering in the single digits which slowly grew to a maximum of just over two dozen, according to Gamespot.

I've never encountered a smarter group of people or a more instinctively individualistic group, regardless of their political ideology. Seriously, what other industry would completely blow off a governor? It reminds me of the time that the news of federal building being bombed in Oklahoma City first broke and inspired a loud cheer and round of drink-buying at the CGDC bar.

I'm only surprised that the handful of people there didn't get up and leave. They were probably all media.

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The need for knife control

But at least they're only stabbing each other to death! It could be worse, what if they were doing it with guns!

The British Crime Survey (BCS) - released today - showed nearly 130,000 offences involving knives took place last year – and the total does even not include crimes involving under-16s. The new figures also disclosed that more than 22,000 serious offences involved a knife last year, including 231 attempted murders, nearly 14,000 robberies and more than 8,000 woundings....

A 3 per cent rise in the number of homicides, up from 759 in 2006/07 to 784 last year

It's interesting to note that as recently as 1996, there were fewer than 600 annual homicides in Britain. Once more, and in direct contrast to the assertions of the gun control crowd, it is demonstrated that fewer legal guns indicates more crime. In this case, 30 percent more lethal crime. Britain would have done much better to keep its guns and ban the migration from the third world.

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The joys of a vibrant community

Liberal Minnesotans often used to bemoan the monochromatic culture of the Twin Cities when I was growing up there. So, I'm sure they're delighted by the vibrancy that the new multiculturalism is bringing to the area. It's more than a little amusing to note the delicate way that the Strib avoided mentioning any descriptive details about the assailants yesterday - the text was nearly identical to today's - which was very strange considering the mention of the hunt for the missing eighth assailant. Today, that delicacy was rendered somewhat less than pointless by the pictures that now accompany the story.

A woman whose husband was severely beaten trying to protect his daughter from being molested as the family left Valleyfair said Tuesday they remain traumatized and are still healing from bruises and injuries. Eight young men are accused of taking turns stomping on and kicking the head of the 41-year-old man, who was knocked unconscious as his wife and three daughters tried to help him. Prosecutors say more serious charges could be brought against the men if the man's injuries are permanent.... Police arrested seven of the suspects in the Valleyfair parking lot that night and the eighth escaped. Police did not have a good description of that suspect but would like help finding him.

It's Shakopee. The population demographics strongly suggest that he's probably between 5'10 and 6'2", with blond hair, blue eyes and a last name ending in -sen or -son.

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The Third Cult

Even the Darwinists want to get rid of Darwinism now... at least in the titular sense. This is a reasonable suggestion because the concept of evolution has been modified so greatly that Darwin's contributions were arguably less important to the latest revision than Mendel's, Wallace's, and now, perhaps, Lamarck. However, there also appears to be an amount of distaste for the idea of Darwin being included with the two fallen secular giants of the nineteenth century, Freud and Marx:

Definitely agree - the only people who use the term “Darwinism” are creationists. And they only do it to tar it with the same brush as “Marxism”, and “Freudianism” - i.e. they want to hint that it’s an outdated and cult-like semi-religious system.

It’s not, we are evolutionary biologists, not “Darwinists”.

First, it's worth noting the admission that Marxism and Freudianism are outdated and cult-like, although I think "semi-religious system" is an exaggeration in both cases. But the more interesting and revealing assertion is the final one. There are two possible ways to reasonable interpret the statement:

1. The commenter is a professional scientist and is correctly pointing out that he should be described as an evolutionary biologist. How he refers to his profession is really up to him and his peers, of course, but it leaves nameless the much larger group of non-evolutionary biologists who nevertheless believe in Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.

2. The commenter is a non-scientist who believes in Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection and is attempting to replace the term "Darwinist" by applying "evolutionary biologist" to describe everyone who believes in the theory even if they are not studying or working in the field of biology and have never read works by Darwin, Gould, Dawkins, Wilson or any other evolutionist.

The first option leaves things incomplete, the second is the sort of logical howler that one has come to expect of science fetishists in general and, ironically enough, biologists in particular. "Darwinist" is and will remain a perfectly apt description of those who subscribe to the theory of evolution by natural selection, especially considering that most of those who do have never read Darwin or any other scientist writing about evolution and yet place unquestioning faith in that of which they know nothing. Darwinism in its most recently modified form is not yet outdated, and it is not a worldview or a religion, but it certainly has a few distinct hallmarks of being an intellectual cult.

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It's not fair

And the sooner you deal with that and move on, the better off you'll be:

Whatever gave you the idea that life was fair? People can be fair, from time to time, in individual cases, and you should always strive to be, but the creative life is a crap-shoot, and Fame is not merely a fickle bitch-goddess, she is an idiot bitch-goddess. (And here I am talking about Paris Hilton again.) The process by which She picks winners and losers in the Great Lottery only makes sense in retrospect, and then only with a certain amount of tap-dancing and hand-waving, and time spent courting Her favor is time wasted that you could have spent creating something. Worrying about whether you will receive the blessings of Fame is the sort of thing that causes writers to seize up with writer's block, which should more accurately described as literary constipation, or worse, to one day throw down your pen and declare, "Screw this! I'm gonna write books about an overweight Southern lesbian vampire detective who solves crimes with the aid of her psychic cat!"

I don't worry much about fairness. I didn't when life seemed to be outrageously unfair in my favor, and I didn't when things appeared to be swinging the other way for a while. I strongly suspect that God isn't fair either; it's not hard to understand why He might have chosen David over Saul, but why should He have favored David over Jonathan? I'm sure He had his reasons, just as we have our own nonsensical reasons for preferring one individual to another. Who am I to question Him? Who, for that matter, are you?

Life is more than what we make of it, but one cannot hope to do more than make the best of the hand one is dealt. In some senses, I tend to feel as if I've badly misplayed the full house I received in the first hand, but I'm still at the table and I have a few useful cards. I am content, even if there are times such as today, when I stare nervously at the coming economic storm and marvel upon discovering that, in this time of incipient chaos, the local news du jour should happen to be... my family.

C'est incroyable!

It's not unfair, mind you. Absurd, absolutely, but hardly unfair. I think I shall leave the lesbian vampires and the psychic cats to the OC, though. His take will be far more amusing, and anyhow, I have more dastardly literary deeds to inflict upon an unsuspecting public.

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Britain fights back

Sort of:

Home owners and “have-a go-heroes” have for the first time been given the legal right to defend themselves against burglars and muggers free from fear of prosecution.... They will be able to use force against criminals who break into their homes or attack them in the street without worrying that "heat of the moment” misjudgements could see them brought before the courts.

The good news: Brits can use force to defend themselves. The bad news: They still won't be allowed to own weapons permitting them to do so effectively. But at least if Granny Wivelscombe does manage to kill a hulking 19-year old hoodie named Jamal by stabbing him in the eye with her knitting needles, she probably won't be prosecuted for it.

Meanwhile, we can expect to see Rowan Williams tearfully beheading himself any day now, leaving behind a long-winded note apologizing at length to the British Muslim community for any trouble they might experience in disposing of his headless corpse.

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You request, we occasionally notice

DanG has a suggestion:

It would be useful if this whole Vox/Kelly exchange were assembled into a single site so that the rest of the world could easily compare the reviews and responses.

So mote it be. Fiat dictus! There's also a link on the side.

Speaking of exchanges with atheists, the Reverend Jeremiah demonstrates that characteristic and always amusing atheist combination of near-complete ignorance with blind self-assurance:

So you are saying that Religion (i.e. Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism to name a few) are RELIABLY correlated with mental health? Are you SERIOUS?!Have you seen what the Islamics and Christians and Hindus and Jews do? Not only to them selves, but to each other as well? Are you suggesting the protestant/catholic war in Ireland to be mentally healthy? People killing people over whos imaginary friend is better is mentally healthy? Sitting in fron of a wall all day and rocking back and forth is mentally healthy? Belief in imaginary friends in your adult life is mentally healthy? I have friends who were abused during their entire childhood because of strong Christian beliefs, and you consider this mentally healthy?

Short answer, yes. As is so often the case, this supposed devotee of science and reason ironically turns to rootless logic and personal anecdote in order to combat the settled scientific consensus on the matter. Religious people live longer, are happier, are healthier, are more likely to marry, less likely to divorce, have more children, are less likely to commit suicide, are less likely to be addicted to drugs etc etc. This isn't news. And before some half-informed idiot attempts to quibble with the divorce aspect, remember, one has to get married before one can get divorced. The divorce rates of the minority of the irreligious who ever get married is higher than the divorce rates of the majority of religious people who do. Simply comparing divorce rates of the overall populations as percentages of the total populations will lead to error due to the much lower marriage rate of the irreligious population.

As far as Marxism goes, you tell me, because you seem to know some of the basics of marxism, what country has ever ran itself directly from marxism? Marx SPECIFICALLY said that his governmental model MUST NOT HAVE A MONETARY SYSTEM. If it has a monetary system, then it is not a true communist system. What government that calls itself communist has no monetary system? Russia? Nope. China? Nope. North Korea? Nope. These are all SOCIALIST systems that you are comparing to Marx's communism. As far as I am concerned, I agree with what the die hard Marxists say on this subject; "Marxism has yet to be applied to civilization." You go ahead, say what you want. Hell, you can even accuse me of being a Marxist, I dont care, but PLEASE get your facts straight before you start rambling off on a political philosophy that is so encompassing that you and me combined could still not grasp its entirety. Respectfully. Please?

RJ simply doesn't know the first thing about Marxism. To even speak about a country running itself from Marxism is to demonstrate a complete failure to understand the essential idea behind scientific socialism, which Marx wrote was the INEVITABLE result of class conflict and the inherent contradictions of capitalism. Therefore, pointing to the presence of money in communist or socialist systems does not defend Marx, but instead damns him utterly. This is only one of the many ways in which Marxism was, over time, eventually proven to be a totally useless economic, political, and societal model. Indeed, this was true nearly from the start, as both the Leninist and Maoist revisions were required to explain the presence of communism in two backwards agrarian societies rather than in the advanced capitalist economies predicted by Marx.

"It's a non-religious faith and the foundation of a worldview more than it is a scientific model." Your sentence proves that you really dont know much about evolution. First off, even though I consider TENS to be a viable and useful theory, I do not have FAITH in it like the way you are using it in that context. I know many people enthralled with TENS, some of them Biologists, and they do not display this sort of "faith" you speak of. Second, TENS is patently NOT a world view.

I don't have much to add when RJ demonstrates that he doesn't even know the difference between a worldview and a foundation of a worldview. I agree, TENS is not a world view, but Renee and other biologists freely admit that TENS is not presently a functioning predictive model, while Dawkins and Dennett, among many others, have written at great length about how Darwin's dangerous idea provided a powerful foundation for the secular worldview.

I am embarrassed by your ignorance Vox.

We are all ignorant of something. But it's not mine that should embarrass you.

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Forza Ronaldinho

Both Ronaldinho and Kaká in the midfield? Yeah, I could see that working rather nicely for the rossoneri. That other team for which occasionally they play together seems to do all right.

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Home and Garden hater

Miss Lucas has an itchy trigger finger:

In the last 2 weeks, I’ve watched maybe a dozen episodes of “House Hunters”, and in at least 10 of those episodes, the following occurred almost verbatim every single time:

Wife: Oh! This is a nice big closet.

Husband: Yeah, I guess it’s big enough for all your stuff.

Wife: HA HA! I get all the closet space! It’s mine! You get one drawer! HA HA HA HA!

This makes me want to kill some bitches.

They are so proud of the fact that they own 50 pairs of shoes and two metric tons of cocktail dresses, and that they’ve shown their husband who’s boss by hogging all the closet space. You can see it in their eyes, every time, how cutely sassy they think they’re being. It is absolutely revolting.

Let me add some male support to that notion. While there are some guys who genuinely think "sassy" and "spunky" is sexy, they are the very same guys who find themselves sitting around praying for death or divorce by the age of 40. They tend to be nice, passive guys who are entirely incapable of standing up to a woman or telling her no. If you cannot tell a woman no without feeling sick to your stomach beforehand and quaking in terror afterwards, you really shouldn't get married. You're not only going to suffer for most of your adult life, you're going to make her miserable as well. Grown up men and women not only have to be able to say no, they also have to be able to hear and accept no.

Read the comments too, as they contain what may well be the most hilarious comment in the history of the blogosphere.

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She's not dead yet!

Apparently Kelly isn't actually done with Chapter IV . Her post did seem uncharacteristically incomplete compared to the previous three, so it's nice to know that it was merely the appetizer.

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One free murder

That's how Dr. Helen has described the legal attitude towards murderous women in America. It appears in some circumstances, however, women are afforded as many as four free kills:

Jeff Carstensen was spooked when he learned his grandmother planned to buy him a $100,000 life insurance policy — and name herself the beneficiary.... The 76-year-old Georgia woman sits in a North Carolina jail, accused of hiring a hit man to kill fourth husband Harold Gentry. Authorities are re-examining the deaths of her first child and four of the five men she married, including Gentry.

It is simply not credible to state that men and women are treated in a similar manner by the American legal system. Can you imagine a man racking up a similar body count right out in the open without any suspicion on the part of the authorities?

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The secular giants fall

Back in April, I wrote: "ND-TENS is now little more than a scientific model that is barely related to its Darwinian original; not only does it owe more to Mendel than Darwin, it's even less precise than its dysfunctional counterpart in the Neo-Keynesian economic model. I'm confident that both Neo-Keynesianism and Neo-Darwinism will eventually be thrown out entirely in favor of superior models that reflect the observable empirical evidence much more accurately. I'm not sure what those models will be, but I think the conceptual blend of Austrian economics, socionomics and econometrics points the way towards one potential replacement, while game theory, AI design and evolutionary stable strategies may provide us with a way towards developing the other."

It wasn't the first time I've asserted this notion, one for which I have, unsurprisingly, been criticized by the science fetishists, mostly on the basis of my complete lack of educational credentials in the field of biology. However, educational credentials are a poor substitute for information + intelligence + pattern recognition, science marches on, and according to New Scientist, already appears to be on the verge of humiliating the Darwinian faithful who were foolish enough to insist, against both reason and the history of science, that ND-TENS is a solid and reliable scientific model in its current form:

The realisation that individuals can acquire characteristics through interaction with their environment and then pass these on to their offspring may force us to rethink evolutionary theory. While examples of this "transgenerational epigenetic inheritance" are only just emerging in mammals, there is long-standing and widespread evidence for it in plants and fungi. That may explain why botanists are much more ready to acknowledge and promote the idea that epigenetic inheritance has a significant role in evolution, whereas zoologists are generally reluctant to do so, says Eva Jablonka from Tel Aviv University, Israel....

For Bonduriansky the accumulating evidence calls for a radical rethink of how evolution works. Jablonka, too, believes that "Lamarckian" mechanisms should now be integrated into evolutionary theory, which should focus on mechanisms, rather than units, of inheritance.

Richard Dawkins's reaction has to be read to be believed. He claims, apparently with a straight face, that these scientific developments cast "no doubt whatsoever" on the theory of the selfish gene, except for the small fact that it requires substituting abstract "replicators" for a material series of genomic sequences. Now, if this doesn't suffice to demonstrate the incredibly nebulous nature of what passes for "science" in the field, it's hard to imagine what could.

Watching evolutionists constantly modify their "facts" and radically alter their theories while claiming nothing essential has changed about the conceptual model is rather like watching medieval cosmologists redrawing their geometrical spheres with every new celestial observation. While the evidence for "transgenerational epigenetic inheritance" is unlikely to kill off the evolutionary model by itself even if it turns out to be incontrovertible, the fact that there is a probable need for the articulation of a neo-Neo-Darwinian synthesis incorporating neo-Lamarckism suggests that there is something fundamentally flawed about the basic theory of evolution by natural selection.

Of course, it's entirely possible that, as Scott Hatfield reasonably suggests, "TENS will... not be so much replaced as regarded as a limiting case of a larger model, in the same way that Newtonian mechanics is a limiting case of the present Standard Model in Physics." But the likely question is whether Darwin will ultimately be regarded as more akin to Ptolemy or Newton, and in either case, his theories will almost surely not be revered as the secular scripture and basis for societal revisioning that they have been for the past 140 years.

There were three great secular giants of the nineteenth century upon whom the secular vision of the 20th was constructed. Freud was the first to fall. Marx was the second. Darwin will be the third. This doesn't mean that their ideas were wholly bereft of insight, only that the "scientific" worldview constructed upon their essential concepts is an intrinsically fallacious one unsupported by the scientific evidence.

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