The science of cuckoldry

I don't mean to suggest that women are not biologically programmed to be ruthlessly deceptive cheating machines who only manage to surmount their programming by rigid self-control, religious dedication, or cliterectomies and the threat of stoning, but I think the scientistry on display in this video is less than entirely convincing. Seriously, what can reasonably be concluded from a woman who is self-consciously attempting to gyrate in front of a blue screen and an elderly German scientist armed with a camera? And there is a serious self-selection bias as well, given that the great majority of women who were not choosing to go out on the town were excluded from it. It hardly seems surprising that attached women who go out clubbing sans mate are more inclined to cheat than the average single woman... no doubt science will next tell us that recently divorced women are more readily available than the norm too.

Anyhow, it would be a rather more informative metric to combine the skin display percentage with observations of which women a) got physical with someone in public and b) left the club with a man rather than their friends. The observed connection between skin display and ovulation/attachment is potentially significant, but it's incorrect to assume that skin display is necessarily tantamount to an increased interest in sex.

Perhaps it is a sign of the science fetish that pervades modern society, but the thing that too many men and women alike tend to forget is that we are not at the mercy of our biology. It can be a powerful influence, yes, of course. But the more we intellectually understand these various biomechanical influences, the more we can reduce their ability to dictate our behavior. Or, alternatively, make use of them to manipulate other people.

Courtesy: Biology Department, The Chateau

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The Home of the Banks

It will be interesting to see how the White House and the Congress intervene to keep their masters in business and out of prison:

"The Massachusetts Supreme Court just dealt a negative ruling to the banks in the closely-followed Ibanez case, which challenged securitization standards. It's pretty straightforward: The banks didn't have the proper parwork to foreclose, says the court. Hence, no legitimate foreclosure."

Oh oh. That's exactly what I argued at the time.

If the details look like what this appears to be, the banks are totally ****ed on their securitized paper. This decision is from the State Supreme Court and thus is final within the State, and makes it likely that MBS holders will now sue en-masse for the sale of fraudulently-constituted securities (that is, there are no mortgages in the MBS they were sold!)

It's perfectly clear that the mortgage banks and sellers of "mortgage-backed" securities that were not, in fact, backed by actual mortgages have committed the second-biggest financial fraud in American history. The amount of money that they have stolen from investors and the IRS absolutely dwarfs the amounts that are enough to imprison smaller fish for more than a decade.

Needless to say, it is highly unlikely that a single banker will ever do any prison time despite the fact that they are absolutely and provably guilty of massive criminal fraud and tax evasion because the USA is now an aristocracy with democratic trappings. The financial elite are, quite literally, above the law. If you steal $100 from a convenience store, there is no question that you will be punished much more severely than a banker who steals billions of dollars.

It is hard to escape the observation that America has become the Land of the Frauds and the Home of the Banks. But in the meantime, Zerohedge has more details on the Massachusetts bank-slapping.

“Plaintiffs’ claims that the Land Court’s ruling will cause widespread confusion or significant cost to innocent parties are greatly exaggerated, and such reasoning does not warrant ignoring the plain requirements of the law designed to protect Massachusetts consumers. Indeed, it is the foreclosing entities themselves who will bear the greatest cost of clearing titled from their invalid foreclosures. Having profited greatly from practices regarding the assignment and securitization of mortgages not grounded in the law, it is reasonable for them to bear the cost of failing to ensure that such practices conformed to Massachusetts law.”

Cue the Commerce Clause....

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Disarm the police!

Clearly this is evidence that police guns are too dangerous to be permitted to the police:

Robert Butler Jr. walked into Millard South High School Wednesday just before 1 p.m. and signed in to speak to Assistant Principal Vicki Kaspar. It was his second visit to Kaspar's office that day. The first hadn't been a pleasant one, the 17-year-old senior slapped with a 19-day suspension for taking part in a Jan. 1 incident where a car was driven across a school football field and track at the school. But on this four-minute visit, Butler had a gun. It was a Glock .40, believed to be the service weapon of his father, an Omaha police officer. Butler shot the 58-year-old Kaspar, mortally wounding her, and then fired on Principal Curtis Case. He fired seven shots in all, the last a missed shot at a school custodian, before fleeing the school by car.

What do you want to bet that we don't see the usual "guns must be banned" blather after this school shooting? The thing that is so stupid about gun control is that the decades of failure of the drug war make it perfectly apparent that all gun bans are going to do is create a very profitable illegal trade in them... and a lot of them are going to be purchased or stolen from the police and the military.

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Perhaps you could try not being a wimp

I have zero sympathy for this loser:

Haywood was trying to transfer to the Yellow Line around 7:15 p.m. when the assault happened. He was headed home to Fort Totten after working out at Results on Capitol Hill, a gym bag slung over his shoulder and a book in his hands. As he read with his back to the station wall, “all of a sudden someone whacked me on the back of the head really hard,” he recalls.

Haywood turned around. The boy looked to be about 11 or 12 years old. Baffled, Haywood asked, “What the fuck are you doing?” The boy stood there laughing. Then someone else cracked Haywood from the other side. He turned around again. This time it was the girl in the video above. She didn’t stop swinging for more than a full minute, chasing Haywood around the platform as other kids egged her on.

As seen in the video, Haywood repeatedly asked the girl why she was attacking him, pleading with her to end it. “Stop it! Stop it! Goddamn it! You stop this shit right now! I did nothing to you!”

No wonder the nation is swirling down the drain. Little bastards like this wouldn't be attacking strangers for kicks if they knew that they'd get their faces shattered in immediate response. Can you imagine Chuck Liddell or any MMA fighter begging a 12-year old boy or girl to stop hitting him? If you're a man, you simply do not take that from anyone, let alone a child.

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Republican frauds

Karl Denninger notes that it took all of six hours for Republicans to abandon their self-proclaimed and much-ballyhooed goals:

The very so-called "Tea Party" and "Conservative" members of Congress could not even agree to cite a specific clause in The Constitution that enabled legislation to be brought to the floor.

Oh, it gets better. The actual proposed rule would not have prevented passing something that nobody could manage to find a clause in The Constitution that enabled the bill. It in fact only required that a point of order be raised if the language was not present, allowing a gigantic and overwhelming 20 minutes of debate (10 each side) before a simple majority could vote to table the objection and move forward anyway - Constitution be damned.

The Committee rejected that watered-down milquetoast rule!

That would be enough to call the Tea Party and so-called "Conservatives" we sent to Washington a failure on the day they took their oaths of office all by itself.

But no, that wasn't enough for them. They had to make damn sure that I could get out the megaphone and holler from the rafters that every single thing we were sold by these clowns during the campaign - the entire Palin thing, the entire "we're gonna take back Washington!" screed was an out-and-out fraud from the very first breath that passed their lips.

Remember, the claim by the Republicans (including but not limited to The Tea Party) was that they would cut the budget by $100 billion? Which, I might remind you, would have been less than five percent of the deficit this year. Well, it turns out that was a lie too.

I think it's a little too soon to condemn the Tea Party for these failures, however. They are a mere subset of the Republican legislators and there aren't enough of them to force these sorts of things through over the objections of their fellow Republicans. But, it certainly does underline the complete lack of commitment to either the Constitution or reducing government spending on the part of the newly elected Republicans.

And unfortunately, it looks like Rand Paul has already sold out too. He's willing to raise the debt ceiling... just this one time. Again. How quickly they grow once they get into office.

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Camtastic!

I have to say that Camtasia Studio has gone well beyond my expectations and even some of my hopes. I'm still learning my way around it, but this test of the picture-in-picture feature shows how versatile it is. The video embedded below is just a test of that feature, which I thought might be a useful way to show what the mouse is doing when the onscreen action is taking place. The result, crude as it is, turns out to be a remarkable and ironic testimony to the ergonomic advantage of the decidedly unergonomically-shaped device; even after having used it for months, I was surprised to see how it virtually eliminated wrist movement as well as the keyboard commands.

Anyhow, now that I know Camtasia works so well, I'm going to set about producing a series of higher-quality videos that will show how the mouse works with a wide range of various games and applications. But first, of course, I'll wrap up that third inflation video for which Nate is so patiently waiting. I should be able to finish and upload it this weekend.

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In search of the missing certificate

Joseph Farah takes a pre-victory lap:

Have you noticed how much better informed the major news media have become about the missing birth certificate since Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie entered the picture? It wasn't that long ago that most of the TV talking heads and alleged news reporters were telling the American people that Barack Obama had released his birth certificate. They seemed incapable of comprehending the difference between the digital short-form certification of live birth offered up by the Obama campaign in 2008 and a standard, long-form birth certificate we're all familiar with.

How many of you recall Bill O'Reilly and Chris Matthews waiving copies of the certification of live birth in front of the camera, telling the American people they had the actual birth certificate?

How many times do you recall them viciously attacking those who persisted in demanding the absolute minimal documentation needed to ensure Obama was indeed constitutionally eligible to serve as president – without ever giving any of those conscientious, principled, rational advocates of the rule of law and openness in government the opportunity to answer their ad hominem insults?

How many times have you heard them characterize "birthers" as a fringe group of crackpots and conspiracy nuts?

Now, all of a sudden, as polls continue to show Americans increasingly skeptical about Obama's birth narrative despite the media's stonewalling and obfuscating, along comes the new socialist governor of Hawaii who admits the possibility that the release of some actual evidence might indeed quell what is turning into widespread public distrust of both the government and what Rush Limbaugh astutely calls "the state-sponsored media."

He says he would like to release the birth certificate – though I doubt he ever will. But that leaves O'Reilly, Matthews and the rest of the Big Media in a dilemma. After all, they have been pretending for years that the birth certificate has already been released.

I have to admit, the silence of all the Obamorons who insisted that Mr. Soetero/Soebarkah had already released his birth certificate - willfully failing to grasp the difference between the certification and the certificate - is amusing now that it has been proven that a) no certificates were actually destroyed, and b) the Hawaiian authorities are openly admitting that the relevant information has not been released to anyone.

If, at this point, you still genuinely believe that Obama is eligible for the office he is presently occupying, you simply haven't been paying attention. He isn't merely hiding something, he's hiding practically everything, including a relatively low IQ. He isn't doing this in order to "embarrass his critics" either since the only people who have been embarrassed throughout this process are his hapless defenders in the media. Now, I don't know about you, but I wasn't the least bit surprised when the swearing-in ceremony went awry.

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Free speech for me and not for thee

Apparently only colored people, blacks, Afro-Americans, African-Americans, people of color are permitted to use the word "nigger". Because everyone is equal, you know?

Burlington, who is white, was fired after using the "n" word during a June 2007 staff meeting at which reporters and producers were discussing reporter Robin Taylor's story about the symbolic burial of the word by the Philadelphia Youth Council of the NAACP.

Burlington, who began work at the station in 2004 and is now working as a real estate agent, was suspended within days and fired after an account of the incident was published in the Philadelphia Daily News. He alleges that he "was discriminated against because of his race," according to court documents. He claims in his lawsuit that at least two African American employees at Fox29 had used the word in the workplace and were not disciplined.

The dispute began after Taylor, who is white, used the phrase the "n" word during the 2007 staff meeting. She said participants at the burial had said the full word "at least a hundred times or more," according to court records.

"Does this mean we can finally say the word n-?" Burlington asked colleagues, according to depositions. Nicole Wolfe, a producer and one of the three African American employees among the nine people at the meeting, exclaimed: "I can't believe you just said that!"

The speech police are in judicial favor, so it will be interesting what emanations and penumbras will be required in order to justify certain words being legal for some people and illegal for others. But I particularly enjoyed the way in which this "news" article wraps itself into contortions in order to avoid reporting the actual news. Panicked avoidance of the word nigger is particularly amusing when seen from a European perspective, where white people use the word without thinking about it because they see and hear black Americans in the entertainment world using it on a regular basis.

Burlington's big mistake was not appealing to the one-drop rule, thus granting him permission to use the noun of his choice in reference to his people. The funny thing is that so few people realize that this sort of speech-controlling behavior is an indication of weakness, not strength. Anytime someone tries to pull the "I can't believe you just said that" card for whatever reason, the optimal response is to immediately crush them. It's just a test; clearly Burlington failed his.

I always find it amusing when people get upset over a clearly understood label, whether it is flattering or not. If you're getting upset because someone calls you by a label that describes what you are, then you quite clearly regard yourself as inferior. And if you think someone else regards you as an inferior, you should probably be at least open to the possibility they are doing so because you are.

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No one is all bad

Say what you will about violent Mexican drug gangs, but you really can't dispute their very sensible position on clowns.

Two street clowns were found dead in southeastern Mexico.... The clowns were found in bright costumes and makeup on a roadside Sunday in the city of Villahermosa, bearing signs of torture....

Speaking of clowns, both David Frum and Thomas Sowell have concluded that massive illegal drug-related violence with a body count in the tens of thousands in Mexico alone is not an argument for legalizing drugs, but rather intensifying anti-drug efforts and making use of the U.S. military. Masters of logic, they are.

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Genocide is for blacks

I would say African-Americans, of course, only as one of my Nigerian sprinter friends had to point out more than once to one of our relentlessly PC acquaintances, they're not Americans. Anyhow, Brendan O'Neill notices that African nations apparently do not engage in wars any more than the United States does. Except, instead of engaging in "police actions" and "global struggles against violent extremism", they apparently just wage "genocide".

When does war become genocide? When the protagonists are black people. That is the only conclusion one can draw from the unhinged claims that the Ivory Coast is on “the brink of genocide” following the disputed presidential elections and the stand-off between the incumbent president Laurent Gbagbo and president-elect Alassane Ouattara....

These discussions reveal rather more about the warped Western imagination than they do about realities on the ground. Seemingly incapable of making sense of contemporary political conflict, observers reach for sensationalist, one-size-fits-all explanations instead. These conflicts are like pornography for Western misanthropes who see in every African stand-off the potential for Holocaust-style horrors. It’s a PC rehabilitation of the idea that there is a divide between the civilised West and uncivilised Africa – only today we use the more acceptable-sounding terminology of “genocide preventers” (us) and “genocidaires” (them) to establish our superiority over the dark-skinned barbarians.

A pertinent observation on how even the most fervent equalitarians cannot successfully hide their own fundamental lack of belief in human equality. On a tangential note, I can't help but note that many of the same people who are so concerned about overpopulation and global warming are also deeply concerned about preventing genocide and starvation. How, one wonders, do they think that what they believe to be the excessive human population is going to be reduced? Relying on material wealth, feminism and irreligious ennui to sap the reproductive instinct strikes me as having no effect on at least three-quarters of the human population, which leaves genocide, famine, and mass forced sterilization as the available options.

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Adieu, Northern Alliance

Alas, the noble radio show has gone the way of the Afghan warlords' union:

As John Hinderaker reported earlier on Power Line, the six year run of our volunteer participation at The Patriot has come to an end. I won't go into all of the details behind the move, John does a good job of that in his summary. I will say that it did come as a surprise when we were informed earlier this week that our time slot was going to be immediately turned over to more, shall we say, revenue generating friendly programming.

It's too bad sufficient revenue couldn't have been raised from our program alone. From my perspective as a radio listener, it was at least the equal of what the competing talk stations were putting up during that time. In terms of the quality of national guests and commentary featured, no shows on other local stations came close to providing it.

I enjoyed my phoned-in visits to the show, although I think the Fraters guys tended to view my libertarian extremism with far more delight than the Powerline guys did. (I'm not sure the latter ever got over my brutal depantsing of Michelle Malkin in their own house.) But I appreciated their willingness to host my non-debate with PZ Myers and I always considered it to be a very entertaining and intelligent show that routinely operated at a much higher level than most of the superficial chatter that passes for talk radio these days. Of course, it was the way in which they took politics seriously that ultimately deprived them of a sufficiently large audience since most Minnesotans want to hear about sports and celebrities, not politics and world events. But it was a solid six-year run, and I congratulate Brian, Chad, JB, King, Mitch, Ed, John, and Scott for their impressive accomplishment.

And let's face it, NARN without Chad the Elder was like the United Front without Massoud.

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There is no law in America anymore

Karl Denninger notes what is fast becoming apparent to everyone:

"The 50 state attorneys general probing U.S. foreclosure practices will first settle with the five largest loan servicers, including Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co., Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller said."

Oh, so 150,000+ bogus affidavits - each an alleged count of perjury (and perhaps forgery) will lead to a felony criminal charge, right?

"The group isn’t pursuing a criminal investigation, Miller said. “Our focus is to reform the servicing process and that’s inherently civil, not criminal,” he said."

I see. So the standard is that if you're a bank, you can break the law.... This is sorta like how it wasn't criminal to launder drug money - if you're a bank, or wire money to a prohibited nation (for alleged terrorist uses) - if you're a bank, or to be involved in a massive bribery and other associated events scheme over a sewer system - if you're a bank, or to rig bids in the municipal debt markets - again, if you're a bank.

Well, it seems to me that if this is the standard for a bank, then the people are well within their rights to decide that the precise same standard shall apply to conduct directed at a bank.

So Crowley was right and do what thou wilt is now the whole of the law. And you wonder why I am so convinced that America is on the verge of collapse. The present US combines the worst of the aristocratic system with the worst of the democratic one. All that it really lacks is the worst of monarchical system. I have little doubt that will come along soon enough. It didn't take long for the American financial aristocrats to exempt themselves from the law, after all.

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A dearth of progress

Be patient, please. CoComment has gone down again and I've been looking at going with another solution. Unfortunately, most comment systems don't support Classic Blogger templates of the sort I've been using, so this will require some experimentation. Hence the dynamic mutations. Think of it as evolution in action... if it's too much of a pain, I'll just go back to the old template and use Blogger comments. I'm also not sure that the added functionality is worth giving up the extra width that the old template permitted. This is already cranked up to the maximum width and still wastes a lot of screen real estate at 1920.

UPDATE: I guess not. IntenseDebate completely sucked; I correctly installed it three times in two different ways and the comments never showed up despite the fact that it said it was installed successfully. So, I suppose we'll go with Blogger comments for now as I'm not inclined to waste more time on this. It's a little amazing how horrific these comment systems are; it's not rocket science, they're dealing with known standards, and they still can't do something as simple as get text from one place to another in a reliable manner.

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Dynamic government, mutating law

It's ultimately a fool's game to put any trust in a government program because the law, especially when created and enforced by an interventionist government, is necessarily dynamic. That means that you can't count on the rules which presently influence your decisions remaining static since the rulemakers will change them any time they believe it will benefit them to do so:

People’s retirement savings are a convenient source of revenue for governments that don’t want to reduce spending or make privatizations. As most pension schemes in Europe are organised by the state, European ministers of finance have a facilitated access to the savings accumulated there, and it is only logical that they try to get a hold of this money for their own ends. In recent weeks I have noted five such attempts: Three situations concern private personal savings; two others refer to national funds.

The most striking example is Hungary, where last month the government made the citizens an offer they could not refuse. They could either remit their individual retirement savings to the state, or lose the right to the basic state pension (but still have an obligation to pay contributions for it). In this extortionate way, the government wants to gain control over $14bn of individual retirement savings.

The Bulgarian government has come up with a similar idea. $300m of private early retirement savings was supposed to be transferred to the state pension scheme. The government gave way after trade unions protested and finally only about 20% of the original plans were implemented.

A slightly less drastic situation is developing in Poland. The government wants to transfer of 1/3 of future contributions from individual retirement accounts to the state-run social security system. Since this system does not back its liabilities with stocks or even bonds, the money taken away from the savers will go directly to the state treasury and savers will lose about $2.3bn a year. The Polish government is more generous than the Hungarian one, but only because it wants to seize just 1/3 of the future savings and also allows the citizens to keep the money accumulated so far.

The fourth example is Ireland. In 2001, the National Pension Reserve Fund was brought into existence for the purpose of supporting pensions of the Irish people in the years 2025-2050. The scheme was also supposed to provide for the pensions of some public sector employees (mainly university staff). However, in March 2009, the Irish government earmarked €4bn from this fund for rescuing banks. In November 2010, the remaining savings of €2.5bn was seized to support the bailout of the rest of the country.

The final example is France. In November, the French parliament decided to earmark €33bn from the national reserve pension fund FRR to reduce the short-term pension scheme deficit. In this way, the retirement savings intended for the years 2020-2040 will be used earlier, that is in the years 2011-2024, and the government will spend the saved up resources on other purposes.

How many more places does this have to happen before Americans begin to realize that the same thing is absolutely going to happen with their local, state, and federal pensions, as well as their entitlement programs. The fact that government officials often refer to pensions and entitlements as "sacred obligations" doesn't mean that they won't eliminate the payouts or grab the funds, in fact, the need to place a legally meaningless adjective in front of the noun underlines the fact that they do not consider the legal obligations to bind them in any way.

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Make that 5 of 8

Or, if you prefer to leave the non-economic prediction out of the equation, 4 of 7. In my review of my 2010 predictions, I noted that there were still two weeks left, the trend was down, and adjusted TOTLL was only $13 billion above my prediction of $6.3 trillion. In the December 22nd report, published today, TOTLL fell another $19.9 billion, ($22.1 billion from the revised 12/15 report).

That brings adjusted TOTLL down to $6.293 trillion, just enough to render the prediction correct if you are willing to remove the one-time $452 billion anomaly for which I have yet to see an explanation.

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Book review: The Fuller Memorandum

The Fuller Memorandum, by Charles Stross
Ace (320 pages, $24.95, July 2010)

Charles Stross is the technocratic heir to H.P. Lovecraft. While he is probably best-known for his Singularity-inspired science fiction and has been known to dabble in committing the occasional fantastic indiscretion with his Merchant Princes series, Stross is unequivocally at his best when he combines his techno-savvy competence with unadulterated occultic horror. The Fuller Memorandum is the third of his Laundry series, which centers around the deeds of a British agent named, significantly enough, Bob Howard, who works for a branch of the English Secret Service in confronting evils that are much more dark and dangerous than anything James Bond ever had to face.

Having triumphed over die-hard trans-dimensional Nazis and grandiose villains with master plans, Bob and his wife Mo are forced to confront an evil, world-threatening plan to awake and unleash the demonic Eater of Souls in The Fuller Memorandum. The plot is convoluted and the squamous horror is amped up to eleven, as the strain of being forced to deal with the implacable darkness beyond the borders of our universe as well as the soul-crushing bureaucracy of the agency are beginning to wear heavily on both of them.

Read the rest at Black Gate.

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WND column

The Fourth Government

In his dialogue "De re publica," Marcus Tullius Cicero explained, though the fictionalized voice of Scipio Africanus, that there are three basic types of government. The first is the monarchy, in which the king rules. The second is the aristocracy, in which a select class of privileged delegates rules. The third is the democracy, in which the people rule themselves. Each type of government has its strengths and weaknesses, and through those weaknesses, a cyclical process occurs in which one type of government devolves into the next.

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VPFL Champions 2010

60 MS Swamp Spartans
47 Bane Sidhe

Congratulations to Clay and the Swamp Spartans, who continued in the time-honored VPFL tradition of knocking off the regular-season leader in the championship game in a surprisingly low-scoring finale. As a prize for winning the league, they will be back to play again next year. Third place was claimed by Greenfield with an 89-60 defeat of the Quixotes.

On the NFL side, if Frazier starts Favre after last week's performance against the Eagles by Webb, I wouldn't even think about converting his interim label.

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Don't be impressed by credentials

Even very good grades to go with the requisite university degree don't indicate anything more than the possession of a pulse and a large student loan. And the problem isn't limited to the United States:

The universities awarding the highest proportion of firsts or 2:1s last year were Exeter, where 82 per cent of graduates received the top degrees compared with just 29 per cent in 1970, and St Andrews – Scotland's oldest university, where Prince William met fiancée Kate Middleton – where the figure was also 82 per cent compared with just 25 per cent in 1970. Imperial College London and Warwick both granted 80 per cent firsts or 2:1s last year, compared with 49 per cent and 39 per cent respectively in 1970. At Bath University the figure was 76 per cent last year compared with just 35 per cent in 1970.

I'm not saying that credentials aren't important in practice if you're concerned with getting past the HR gatekeepers. But the important thing is to understand that you're not purchasing an education any longer, you're just buying an employment ticket. So, your object should be to figure out the fastest, least expensive way to buy the ticket that will get you where you want to go. That may mean a conventional 4-year degree at a private university, but it may not now that more and more quality schools are offering degrees online. The important thing is to approach the process with open eyes and an open mind.

And, of course, to pursue an actual education on your own because you're certainly not going to get it at a university. Given what we've learned in looking at the undergraduate and graduate science curriculums, even those with the sort of hard science educations that require university schooling have to admit that pretty much everything they've learned outside their core scientific discipline has been learned outside the academic system.

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Mailvox: one less god and the banana

Lithp wishes to respond to my critique of Stephen Roberts's One Less God argument:

All right. I'm interested in addressing your critique:

"1. No, we are not both atheists.
2. No, you are confusing God with gods. If you simply take the First Commandment into account, you will know that this is incorrect. Few atheists understand that monotheism concerns the worship of one supreme Creator God, not belief in the existence of only one supernatural being that demands worship.
3. Unless an atheist dismisses the Christian God because they believe Him to be an evil supernatural being falsely posing as a deity worthy of worship, he is not doing so for the same reason that Christians dismiss the pagan gods."

On Point 1, the first part is not meant to be taken literally. Of course a monotheist is not an atheist. The point is that disbelieving in deities is not such a novel concept. I can proceed no further unless you clear up a point for me: Are you saying that you DO believe in pagan gods, you just don't think they are what they claim?

"It is so eminently fitting that atheists should rely upon fake quotes to argue in support of their supposed dedication to reality."

I should think the point matters more than who said it.

"Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, and Myers are no more philosophically sophisticated than the teenagers and make pretty much the same arguments."

Okay. You really aren't going to get a more in-depth rebuttal from anyone other than "no they aren't," because you didn't actually demonstrate how this is so. This is especially problematic for someone such as myself, who doesn't really follow any of these people. Additionally, I don't see why you keep using the phrase "teenager" to describe an ignorant person. I'm 19 and I can tell you why Ray Comfort's banana argument is a load of nonsense.

1. I am aware that Roberts's first statement can be viewed as mere rhetorical exaggeration, even though most atheists who quote it do take it literally. That doesn't make it any less false. The fact that he begins with a demonstrable falsehood doesn't bode well for his argument, since it indicates he is more interested in the superficial sound of his argument than its substance. If you're going to pose as a philosophical champion of material fact and reason, shouldn't you really stick to strict factual accuracy?

2. That's a reasonable question. Yes, I do believe in the literal existence of intelligent and supernatural beings that are not the Creator God and may or may not seek human worship. Some of the pagan gods in the written historical record are these creatures whereas others are mere human invention. The Bible describes both kinds. I would put Zeus and Amaterasu in the fictional category and Baal, Wotan, and Damballah Wedo in the non-fiction one based on the behavior of their human worshippers. As I have repeatedly written, atheists like Roberts and even some Christians fail to make the vital distinction between "God" and "gods". There are many gods but only one Creator God who merits our worship and who sent His Son to die on our behalf.

Please note that one needn't believe in the existence of either the Christian God or the pagan gods to understand that the distinction renders Roberts's argument invalid.

3. Again, if you are claiming to be devoted to fact and reason, basing your self-proclaimed most effective argument on a fictitious statement at the very least renders your devotion to fact more than a little suspect. That being said, if the point stands, it stands, though obviously without the benefit of the presumed authority of the erroneously quoted individual who didn't actually supply the quote. It also calls either the knowledge or the intellectual honesty of the individual providing the false quote into question.

4. First, the overlap between the arguments presented by the Reddit "teenagers" and the New Atheists is easily confirmed by comparing them. Second, I have actually demonstrated how the arguments of Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Myers, and others are philosophically unsophisticated and have gone into considerable detail explaining precisely how those arguments are incorrect. Since I have published an entire book on the subject, I don't believe it is either necessary or possible for me to rehash several hundred pages of material every time the subject comes up again. Of course, until someone reads the book, their opinion on the matter is entirely irrelevant.

Moreover, numerous atheists have reached precisely the same conclusion about the lack of philosophical and theological sophistication on the part of the New Atheists as I have. Dawkins and Myers have both openly admitted their own ignorance of philosophy and/or theology; you should note that the Courtier's Reply is a feeble attempt to justify that ignorance. You may also wish to note that only Harris, Dennett, and Onfray even pretend to have any knowledge of philosophy.

5. Teenagers are, for the most part, almost completely ignorant without realizing it. They have very little experience of the world and the vast majority are badly educated and poorly read. Even the most intelligent seldom have enough information at their intellectual disposal to use that intelligence to any significant effect. However, in this particular case, it was asserted by someone else that the people who were posting quotes in the Reddit thread were mostly teenagers. Not being familiar with that site, I simply accepted his assertion, even though I consider it to be questionable.

As for Ray Comfort's banana, I have no idea to what you are referring. But what little I have read of Comfort does not lead me to conclude that it would take much in the way of either intelligence or experience to successfully address one of his arguments.

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Religious fitness and science education

Ever since I started reading up on the present state of evolutionary theory a few years ago, I have found it rather remarkable to discover how resistant the TEpNS enthusiasts tend to be with regards to concluding what this article in the Scientific American points out is entirely obvious:

Blume’s research also shows quite vividly that secular, nonreligious people are being dramatically out-reproduced by religious people of any faith. Across a broad swath of demographic data relating to religiosity, the godly are gaining traction in offspring produced. For example, there’s a global-level positive correlation between frequency of parental worship attendance and number of offspring. Those who "never" attend religious services bear, on a worldwide average, 1.67 children per lifetime; "once per month," and the average goes up to 2.01 children; "more than once a week," 2.5 children. Those numbers add up—and quickly. Some of the strongest data from Blume’s analyses, however, come from a Swiss Statistic Office poll conducted in the year 2000. These data are especially valuable because nearly the entire Swiss population answered this questionnaire—6,972,244 individuals, amounting to 95.67% of the population—which included a question about religious denomination.

"The results are highly significant," writes Blume: "… women among all denominational categories give birth to far more children than the non-affiliated. And this remains true even among those (Jewish and Christian) communities who combine nearly double as much births with higher percentages of academics and higher income classes as their non-affiliated Swiss contemporaries."

In other words, it’s not just that "educated" or "upper class" people have fewer children and tend also to be less religious, but even when you control for such things statistically, religiosity independently predicts number of offspring born to mothers.

The spandrel explanation for religion has always looked like little more than willful blindness combined with wishful thinking on the part of anti-theists. In the same way that most atheists are reluctant to admit the unavoidably nihilistic conclusion to their material reductionism, (hence the "irrational atheist" appellation), many irreligious evolutionists so dislike religion that they will concoct any number of far-fetched hypotheses to avoid concluding that even from their own godless perspective, religion has great utility and provides a reproductive advantage. As anecdotal evidence, the 12 or so couples who made up our old Bible study in Minnesota and who were all just beginning to have their first children now have between three and six non-adopted children per couple. The average is probably around 3.8; even with the Christmas cards I can never keep them all straight.

But then, as I have repeatedly pointed out, scientists tend to be much worse than one would expect them to be at correctly applying logic. Although I suppose they really should not be expected to do it well; after all, the entire raison d'etre of the proper scientific method is to avoid relying upon logic in favor of reaching conclusions that are based firmly upon experimentation and observation, confirmed by replication. The problem, of course, is that logic is still required with regards to interpreting the significance of the conclusions provided by the scientific method and I have observed that very few scientists, if any, appear to have received any training in logic as part of their professional education.

Now, please feel free to correct me with actual curriculum-related facts if I am wrong about my conclusions here, but based on the many arguments I have seen put forth on various subjects from numerous individuals holding science-related PhDs, I very much doubt that many science majors devote any time to learning either history or logic. A look at the M.I.T. Department of Biology's graduate and undergraduate programs shows no sign of requiring either beyond the standard Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences Requirement for all undergraduate majors. While it is entirely possible that MIT science majors are choosing to study history or philosophy as part of their grand total of eight (8!) elective courses, they could just as easily be taking courses in Comparative Media Studies or Theater Arts. And given the astonishing inability of science majors to anticipate the supply and demand curves for PhDs in their chosen fields, one is forced to conclude that very few of them elect to study economics.

What this suggests is that scientists, on average, are at least as ignorant of history, economics, philosophy, religion, and logic as they believe non-scientists to be of science, and for precisely the same reason. Therefore, barring any convincing individual demonstration to the contrary, their opinions outside their professional discipline are ignorant and should be taken no more seriously than they believe the opinions of non-scientists are to be regarded within their field.

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