Speaking of which, why does no one even bother to mention that Hillary’s senior thesis was on Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. Once upon a time unavailable. Now, it is hardly worth a mention; it is, if anything, a feature and not anything she needs to hide. She has the same genealogy as Obama. If you are interested, you can read it here. You won’t find anything you don’t already know, which is in itself a large part of the problem.
There are some cults you spot right away, such as the Hari Krishnas who are found on the footpath everywhere. And then there are the cults that spring up in the most surprising places, like the cult of global warming. This is a guest post at Watt’s Up with That: The ‘Cult’ of Climate Change (née Global Warming). There are lots of such cults which are forms of supposedly settled science whose only value is that they provide a carte blanche to government cronyism. They also provide for their adherents a feeling that they are in the know, and even when they are a majority, a belief that they have special insight into the actual way things are unavailable to others. There is not a subject area in which they are not found. The article gives you a means to spot them when they are associated with climate absolutism. This is how the article begins:
This is the opinion of Nobel Prize Winning Physicist Dr. Ivar Giaever , Prof. Richard Lindzen, and many others. Climate change alarmism has a surprising number of attributes of a medieval or even ancient religion. Nevertheless, real religions have some pre-requisites, like a tradition spanning at least few generations. So the proper name for climate alarmism is a cult. And these are the telltale attributes.
Now go read the rest.
It is Psalm 137 in reggae. This is where it was sung and why.
The Jewish rapper/reggae artist known as Matisyahu demonstrated an unusual degree of courage yesterday when he performed at a Spanish music festival in front of a sea of Palestinian flags and hecklers from the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement.
Previously, Matisyahu had been disinvited to the festival because he refused to take part in a pro-Palestinian video and did not respond to questions about whether he believed in a Palestinian state. But the Spanish foreign minister along with the American and Israeli embassies lobbied the festival organizers and the artist was reinvited.
What happened when he mounted the stage should be made into a Hollywood movie:
Far from boycotting the reggae artist’s gig, the “hate Israel” crowd showed up en masse. And they came bearing flags, immense Palestinian flags, which they waved with gusto from every corner of the 20,000-strong crowd.
As Matisyahu took the mike and looked out to the audience, he was presented with an unmistakably hostile message. It was clear that those who sought to have him banished stood before him in protest. Then the catcalls started, with some chanting, “out, out.” It might easily have been unnerving, disorienting.
But then he began to sing about Jerusalem.
“Jerusalem, if I forget you, fire not gonna come from me tongue. Jerusalem, if I forget you, let my right hand forget what it’s supposed to do.”
And then, as he bounced and twirled around the stage, the most defiant lyrics of all: “3, 000 years with no place to be, and they want me to give up my milk and honey.”
“Tonight was difficult but special,” he later posted on Facebook, along with a clip of the performance.
What courage. Not to be intimidated when the concert organizers demanded he pacify the BDSers, and then to return to the festival’s schedule in defiance of the opposition, and chant Jerusalem on stage with such gusto.
What courage.
Republicans Say They Are Happier With Their Marriages.
The researchers acknowledge that the gap could stem from people’s attitudes toward life — and survey questions — rather than from the quality of their marriages. “Perhaps Republicans are more optimistic, more charitable or more inclined to look at their marriages through rose-colored glasses,” they write in the article, which was published by the Institute for Family Studies. But it also seems possible that the more respect and even reverence for the idea of marriage in conservative communities affects people’s behavior and attitudes toward their marriage.
The differences aren’t that large, and the majority say they are very happy on all sides. Let’s face it. A happy marriage is God’s greatest blessing.
This was the original question posed on the History of Economics discussion thread:
I am researching the debates over the Ten Hours Bill in 1844. One of the disputants observed 5 mills, spinning
“No. 14, 15, 30, 38, and 40 yarn”
These numbers are calculated by measuring the length per unit of weight of the cotton spun. I can’t find what unit of length and what unit of weight was employed (the larger the number. the finer the yarn). Any ideas?
The discussion then revolved around something I recall from my youth, which is the “denier”, pronounced, as I also recall, “den-yair”. Which led to this post, since I hadn’t even noticed the alternative current meaning as the discussion wandered along.
I remember now — hosiery ads (and maybe bed-linen ads?) used to say “21 denier” and I had no idea what that meant.
No idea how to pronounce it, either. One on-line dictionary says to pronounce it DENN-yer.
I put the word into Google Ngram Viewer and after a century of noise, the graph suddenly leaps up after 1940, to a peak in 1950 three times higher than the secular background level. Then it falls back to the secular level by 1960. I would guess that this reflects the use in hosiery ads (etc.).
More recently we have “global warming denier” and the like. I don’t suppose the ngram viewer can distinguish that meaning, if we search for only the one word and not some contextual phrase. But by default the viewer stops at the year 2000.
But what I found fascinating was that the original poster finally explained what the numbers had meant, which had nothing to do with “denier” in the measurement sense:
Thanks for all of the helpful suggestions. It turns out that this is not a “denier system” That is a direct-management system where the smaller the number, the finer the thread. Instead, Manchester employed an “Indirect System”. The numbers are sizes, that is the length of yarn (in yards) needed to reach a weight of one pound. Thus the higher the number — 14, 15, 30, 38, 40 — the finer the yarn or thread.
Scholarship at its best.
This is a Canadian thing with perhaps some universal relevance. Ezra Levant – think Mark Steyn for comparison purposes – has been hauled up before the Alberta Human Rights Commission for calling it “crazy”. Kate McMillan, of Small Dead Animals, has written a note, Dear Alberta Human Rights Commission, which I thought might be of interest.
I’m informed that your Commission (via your proxy) considers the word “crazy” an insult.
I thought of sending a simple “fuck you”, but I’ve thought better of it. I take it back: unfuck you.
You swine. You vulgar little maggot. You worthless bag of filth. As they say in Texas, you couldn’t pour water out of a boot with instructions printed on the heel. You are a canker, an open wound. I would rather kiss the Law Society of Alberta than be seen with you.
You’re a putrescent mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, and a weasel. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon.
God created houseflies, cockroaches, maggots, mosquitos, fleas, ticks, slugs, leeches, and intestinal parasites, then he lowered his standards and made you. I take it back; God didn’t make you. You are Satan’s spawn. You are Evil beyond comprehension, half-living in the slough of despair. You are the entropy which will claim us all. You are a green-nostriled, crossed eyed, hairy-livered, goisher kopf, inbred trout-defiler. You make Ebola look good.
It is hard to believe how incredibly stupid you are. Stupid as a stone that the other stones make fun of. So stupid that you have traveled far beyond stupid as we know it and into a new dimension of stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid cubed. Trans-stupid stupid. Stupid collapsed to a singularity where even the stupons have collapsed into stuponium. Stupid so dense that no intelligence can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot midday sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one minute than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. It cannot be possible that anything in our universe can really be this stupid. This is a primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. A pure extract of stupid with absolute stupid purity. Stupid beyond the laws of nature.
I began this note with the intent of writing something original, but I changed my mind. Originality should not be sacrificed to such a worthless cause. You’re unworthy of the effort to string words together in a novel arrangement. In fact, I’m not convinced you’re worthy of this obvious plagiarism. Plagiarism is too good for you, certainly plagiarism of material of this quality is too good for you, so I’ve butchered it badly. Writing this in steaming cat piss on a hot summer sidewalk would be too good for you. Writing this in the writhing bodies of one million wingless flies glued to a barn door with cow shit is too good for you. (OK, that part was original. I’m not without generosity.)
In closing, I hope this finds you unwell.
As Ezra notes, the prosecution in the punishment, and expects it will cost him $25,000 to defend. Freedom of Speech is under assault everywhere by various Orwellian-named agencies of government. And finally, the “obvious plagiarism” in the original post directs you to this site: THE INSULT FILE VERSION 6.13 which might be kept on hand for future reference.
I saw this at Tim Blair the other day which I found quite depressing, even though he wrote it up in a kind of upbeat way: We’re Number One! We’re Number One!. And sure enough, there we are at the top, as reported by the SMH: Australia tops the world for climate change denial: study. So far so good, right? Alas, it’s when you get to the detail that you see just how much we are the best of a very bad lot. This is the same excerpt as taken by Tim:
Nearly one in five Australians do not believe in climate change, making the country the worst in the world for climate sceptics, a study of almost 20,000 people has found.
The research by the University of Tasmania found 17 per cent of Australians thought climate change was not real, compared with 15 per cent of people in Norway, 13 per cent of New Zealanders and 12 per cent of Americans …
“Despite the findings of climate scientists, the proportions of climate sceptics appear to be increasing in many countries,” the study said.
That means that 83% think not just that the climate is changing, which it always does, but that humans are responsible and we need to stop doing whatever, or change something or other, as a matter of urgency, to make it stop changing. And the story finished with this:
Highly educated people and those who lived in a large city were also less likely to be climate sceptics.
The kind of people, that is, who write news stories for the press, and see our 17% as “the worst in the world”. Absolutely unconscious on the part of the writer, this highly educated inner-city university grad. So what facts are these judgements based on? We here all know that global temperatures haven’t risen in almost twenty years, and then this just arrived this morning in my inbox:
Just one cool summer caused the much-worried-about Arctic icepack to swell by no less than a third in 2013 and it has grown even more since – more than making good its losses during the previous few years. Meanwhile of course, the southern sea ice around Antarctica has continued to spread out and cover bigger areas all the time, a circumstance which has frankly stumped climate scientists as their models cannot account for it. Antarctic ice hit a new all-time record last year, in fact.
Whether the climate is changing or not, it is the 83% who will determine who gets to govern this country. It is SH-Y who may better represent average opinion in Australia than anyone else around.
My son has sent me this on INTP parenting.
INTPs as Parents
“You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth…
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.” — Kahlil GibranINTPs love and respect Knowledge, and want to pass their jewels of thought down to their children. Their greatest goal and satisfaction as a parent is seeing their children grow into independent, rational adults.
INTP parents are likely to encourage their children to grow as individuals, rather than attempt to fit them into a preconceived mold. They will stress autonomy through the children’s growth. They’re likely to respect their children’s opinions and wishes, and allow their children to have a voice and presence in the family.
The INTP parents are likely to be pretty laid-back and flexible with their children, sometimes to the point of being relatively “hands-off” with regards to the day-to-day issues. They’re likely to count on their spouse for providing structure and schedules. Since the INTP themself does not live in an overly structured or organized manner, they’re not likely to expect or create this environment for their children. If their spouse is not someone with the “J” preference, their children may suffer from a lack of boundaries. This is something the INTP should pay special attention to. Growing children don’t know Right from Wrong, and so benefit from having their parents define these boundaries for them.
In spite of their relatively unstructured approach to parenting, INTPs take their role as parent very seriously, and are likely to put forth much effort into doing what they feel will be most effective in helping their children grow into independent, wise adults. INTPs enjoy parenting, and get a lot of fun out of their children. They’re also likely to be very proud and loyal parents.
INTPs may have a problem meeting the emotional needs of their children. Although they generally are deeply caring and supportive individuals, the INTP does not always pick up on emotional clues. A troubled child of an unaware INTP parent may have to result to drastic “attention-getting” tactics to get their parent to understand their emotional difficulties. If you find yourself in this situation, you may find that expressing some of your own emotions will do wonders for your child, yourself, and your relationship. Although it may not be possible for you to suddenly be “tuned in” on what your children are feeling, at least you can let them know that you care.
Children of INTP parents generally remember them respectfully and affectionately as loyal, fair, and tolerant parents, who care for them a great deal, although they don’t often show it.
He thinks I was like that, and I cannot imagine any other way of parenting, but I guess there really are many other ways. He recognises me in that description, and if it is accurate, I am very happy to find that this is so.
Glenn Beck came to Freedomfest and spoke for an hour, without notes but with a tonne of props. Extraordinarily impressive, he just used a series of artefacts to structure a story about the nature of the American dream. The most interesting part was the story of Washington crossing the Delaware. His back to the wall, only 2000 troops left, he wanted to attack the Hessians on the other side of the river. But these were the best soldiers in the world at the time so it was impossible to think how he could get his men to take them on.
It was then that Thomas Paine wrote about the times that try men’s souls. He described how Paine wrote the text on a drumhead, had it printed and sent to Washington. It was this text that had the men get into those boats and fight the battle that would begin the ascent. And the way Beck began the story was to say that the picture no longer exists because it was bombed into oblivion by the British when bombing Germany in 1945!
The painting, it seems, was by a German admirer of America who hated the left revolutionaries of Europe and painted the painting in homage. The painting had never been housed in America but in Germany. It was painted in admiration of the American way of politics. That same small but important admiration of America in Europe was shared by those in France who commissioned the Statue of Liberty. The assembly of the Statue was itself a different story, since it required the skills of a man who had been railroaded into jail during the Civil War, driven into a self-imposed exile, eventually went to work in Cairo for a French contractor, and when he came back home many years later, because of his experience was uniquely able to understand how to assemble the statue because he knew how to read French industrial drawings.
American exceptionalism remains and the home of the idea of freedom that others to this day wish to share.
A live blog. Hitchens is, of course, dead but d’Souza is very much not.
The Bible is not a book of arguments, but of claims. Hitchens employs the Oxford style of sarcastic debate to use reason to trump revelation. Yet both are together the founding stones of Western civilisation. Athens and Jerusalem is where we are based.
Athens – hated trade and business. Loved blood and spectacle. A very alien society from us. We could not bring this back.
Much better to have a real debate entirely on reason alone as Hitchens would want. Which way would a reasoned debate go? Will look at the issue at life after death. Take the typical arguments to show how unreasonable such ideas are.
Virtually all cultures have had this belief and aspiration. If the belief is irrational why do all cultures have it? Where does such a belief come from? Hitchens argued that it was from wish fulfilment. Our wishful thinking drives this belief.
So let’s test it. But after death, there is not just heaven but also hell. There is no wish fulfilment in that? Why come up with something that is worse than life? Hitchens then conceded, after the debate, to say that there was more to it.
What is the evidence for no life after death? What is the basis for asserting there is nothing on the other side? In fact, neither of us know. The difference between them is that a “believer” (which is not a “knower”). The real difference is that a believer is based on faith, but a non-believer is that he thinks the other view is based on reason.
The scepticism of belief must be posed against the reality of the need for action. But for some things, there must be a leap of faith. Must decide in the present. Even though life after death is unknowable, you have to decide. Nothing we know about the nature of existence rules out life after death.
There seems to be some settling of cosmic accounts. Morality is that strange being inside us that makes claims on us. The voice of right and wrong is a part of us. Morality is not some etherial thing, but is within us. Yet nevertheless seems to be a force. Self interest is the opposite of morality. Where does morality come from? Is it protecting genes or reciprocity? Not really – might explain about a third. There is a tribunal called conscience.
One last thought: it seems that both the believer and the non-believer are on a common quest. Hopeful that this is a dialogue that can be engaged with in a cordial manner.
Q: What must an atheist believe?
A: Intelligent design argument occurs where the evidence is weakest. Evolution is not an argument. The watchmaker evidence is even stronger today than in the time of Paley. The universe has to be as old and as big as it is and to have the properties it has for us to have this conversation. Seems to suggest design. Others have to explain such exact precision and their own answer is the multiverse. So ask for the evidence and there is none at all. To get rid of one invisible God you must postulate an infinity of universes.
Q: Atheism is also a faith-based religion.
A: Don’t agree. Religion requires a belief in the supernatural. An atheist goes beyond the evidence. When it comes to law, why can we have a statue of Voltaire but not of Moses, when all we are debating the evidence of history on religion.
Law of Markets 