Barrel Strength

The Toronto Distrcit School Board’s “Teaching resource for dealing with Controversial or Sensitive Issues” is a must read for all those who are concerned that left wing bias is at the core of our teaching approach.

1. Validation of the homosexualist agenda:

Teachers must ask themselves:

  Do I display a variety of visual images and models that represent and validate all families in a contemporary and non-stereotypical manner? Would all students feel included?

and

 Lead a discussion with students about how different families have different groups of family members, for example, single parents, grandparents, and grandchildren, two moms, two dads, aunts with nieces and nephews, no parents, divorced parents, foster parents, and people with no children.

2. Ecological Activism

 It is essential that students obtain a negative attitude toward chemicals in the environment. To this end, teachers are instructed to cause students to: 

 Research and present legislation and regulations regarding the production and disposal of toxic waste materials. Is the legislation sufficient? Does it create problems? For whom?

 ■ Debate whether herbicides and insecticides should be used in urban lawn care or gardens, or on municipal property.  

Research and analyze historic environmental disasters involving pollution by toxic chemicals/toxic waste (e.g., Love Canal, Chernobyl, Bhopal, Exxon Valdez, or another student-chosen example). 

 3. Expose White racism

This is the discussion of “To Kill a Mockingbird”. 

“First, Mockingbird is written by a White author, it features a White hero, and is narrated from the viewpoint of a naïve, young white girl. Even though the author’s intent is to expose racism, the book provides a very limited perspective on African Americans (“Negroes” in the language of the book).

“Knowledge of the African-American man the hero defends is largely related by the narrator. Rarely too are the opinions and concerns of African Americans voiced in the novel. While their subservience is shown, the ways in which they exercised resistance to racism are under-represented. It is unlikely that the author would have been privy to this information, given African Americans’ need to protect themselves in a white supremacist society.

“Second, just as authors write from differing perspectives, individuals read and respond to texts from differing perspectives, based on their complex social locations (e.g., race, gender, economic status) and experiences. When people have similar reading experiences and interpretations, it is often because they are from the same “reading community” (Fish, 1980). A white middle class reader can identify with Scout and Atticus, and dissociate from the white racist (and underclass) characters in the novel. As a white reader, it is also possible to finish the novel with one’s racial identity relatively intact. At the novel’s conclusion, Atticus has fought injustice, Jem is saved, Bob Ewell dispatched, and the loose ends are all neatly tucked away for the novel’s “sympathetic” White characters. But for an African American, identification with the African-American characters in the novel might be more demoralizing. They are largely seen through white eyes, and at the novel’s end, Tom is dead, and the voices of pain and rage in the African- American community are not heard.

So go to a black-centred novel for comparison. Also, do this, says the Toronto disctrict School Board: 

“Before or after reading the novel, students might read and discuss excerpts from Peggy MacIntosh’s essay, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” (http://www.nymbp.org/reference/WhitePrivilege.pdf) in order to see the many ways in which whiteness grants social mobility.

 While the “Teaching resource” is still dealing with “To Kill a Mockingbird”, observe this insert into the text

“Anticipated student responses to  To Kill a Mockingbird may include the following:

■ hurt that African Americans might be presented in so negative a manner

■ anger that this novel was chosen for study

■ incredulity that the descriptions and opinions of people of African ancestry that are encountered in the novel can still be found today

■ rationalization that the white people in the story behaved as they did out of ignorance

Students should be given opportunities to address in discussion and writing any of these issues, including the question of whether the novel should be taught at all.”

Can you imagine any piece of literature not composed explicitly to satisfy the leftist agenda surviving this test? The Iliad is anti-Trojan and shows the characters as driven by the gods; the Odyssey overemphasizes the hero’s cunning and Penelope’s dependence upon males; the Bible is out in its entirety for racism, sexism, genocide, incest and pro-Judaic tendencies. Nothing whatever of value would survive this intellectual Stalinism.

As David Mamet wrote in the National Post about a class of students he was attempting to teach playwriting to, the entire thought process of the young people he tried to teach was characterized by their profound sense of entitlement to indict all literature with racism, sexism and homophobia. They had nothing more to say, they had no capacity to think further, deeper or otherwise. Discussion would be stopped by the first bully to reach for the unanswerable racism card.

“But here was my question: On leaving the university, what would these young Stalinists do? Who would pay them for the ability to bravely proclaim, “That’s not funny?” In what society could they live?

“They were and are the children of privilege -in some, the privilege is inherited, and the cost of college meaningless, in some the cost is huge, and families suffer; but in all cases the privilege taught, learned, and imbibed, in a “liberal arts education” is the privilege to indict. These children have, in the main, never worked, learned to obey, command, construct, amend or complete -to actually contribute to the society. They have learned to be shrill, and that their indictment, on the economy, on sex, on race, on the environment, though based on no experience other than hearsay, must trump any discourse, let alone opposition.”

Do you wonder why?

The times, the morals! When I contemplate the frivolous idiocy of the following items, and when I contemplate them together, I realize there is more folly in the world than I will ever have time to correct, and Steven Harper cannot correct either. Vast forces of idiocy and malice keep the conservative blogosphere at work incessantly.

• Young boys in England admonished not to make pistols with their fingers
• Supreme Court of Canada fails to correct definition of sexual consent; keeps radical feminist (dyke) interpretation of sexual consent
• Subsidized daycare in Quebec forbids telling of religious stories
• Dandelions triumph over 2-4-D on false evidence
• Conrad Black still not free; US prosecutorial intransigence continues

On the other hand, truth may be winning against that outrageous mountebank, David Suzuki. Lord knows what happens when evidence based science confronts the Suzuki foundation. Vivian Krause, who is doing great work investigating the links between leftist US foundations and west-coast politics, scores against the Suzuki Foundation’s claims that farmed salmon spread sea lice to wild ones.

Mrs. Seeker After Truth indeed!

Jodi Foster’s The Beaver is a profound and funny film, which deals with depression: how it runs in families, how things do not always turn out for the best, and which manages to be extremely funny thanks to the artistry of Mel Gibson, who, as his character, is bleakly hopelessly depressed, and who, through his alter ego, the beaver puppet, manages to come alive again.

If you have ever known anyone afflicted with depression, including perhaps the person whose face you see in the mirror, you cannot miss this film. For the rest of us who are blessed with happiness, this movie is a hugely entertaining enlightenment.

It appears that the Supreme Dictator of linguistic theory has been shown wrong about – wait for it – linguistic theory.

The entire study of the evolution of languages has been delayed for thirty years by this dogmatic fathead. He is the most dreadful human being: arrogant, intolerant, narrow-minded leftist bigot. And now his theory of language is wrong.

“Leading linguistic thinkers (Chomsky and his acolytes – ed.) have argued that our brains are hard-wired for languages to follow certain sets of rules. But a team of scientists is challenging that premise in a study published online Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The team used biological tools to construct evolutionary trees for four language families and found that each of the families followed its own idiosyncratic structural rules, a sign that humans’ language choices are driven by culture rather than innate preferences.

The authors say their findings run contrary to the idea of Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar, which says the brain has hard and fast ordering rules for language. They also contradict the “universal rules” of Joseph H. Greenberg, who said languages tended to choose certain patterns over others.

“Culture trumps the innate structure of the human mind,” said study coauthor Russell Gray, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. “We need to take much more seriously the role of cultural factors in changing language diversity.”

I do not believe that the issue at stake here is settled by any means, nor need it be. What it does signal, however, is  a large crack in Chomsky’s iconic status within linguistics, and the enlargement of the possibility of debate, which Chomsky has been loathe to tolerate.

I was saddened to learn of the death of Owsley Stanley III on Monday. He was a great benefactor of mankind, both as the dispenser of LSD in San Francisco at a crucial period in the 1960s, and as a sound engineer who revolutionized how rock bands were heard.

The hidden history of acid (lysergic acid monohydrate) is like the hidden history of the Masons: enormously influential, out of sight and yet whose results are right in front of your face. Without acid, the sixties would have been creative, as so many were then young; with acid, the sixties denoted a period of transformative creativity, not without considerable damage to social institutions, and yet the step children of the sixties are the computers and networks which have changed our lives. I am given to believe that the transformations of ordinary experience that were first experienced under the influence of pschoactive chemicals led to the creation of personal comouters and the Internet. I cannot prove it, but acid and personal computers all came out of a cultural milieu heaviliy influenced by Owsley Stanley, and the possibilities made evident once the doors of perception were cleansed.

Conservatives and other sensible people will be divided by this issue, as they should be. There are strong arguments for “just say no to drugs”. I would have more respect for that opinion if people who said it would go off their meds, their coffees, and their wine for six months. I suspect however, that a significant proportion of conservatives know what I am talking about, and agree. Your path to enlightenment may have started with a little orange square of cardboard with a darker orange owl in the middle.

Besides which, iand on a lesser note, it appears he lived on a meat and dairy diet, having declared that vegetables were poison. He attributed throat cancer to the broccoli his mother made him eat as a child. Already I can hear some of you hang-’em high conservatves wavering.

Owsley Stanley was a benefactor of mankind. His essays are found here. I think that a recollection of your best trip would be an appropriate thank you.

Some authors make you change how you think about something highly important, such as Darwin on the subject of evolution. Some, like Adam Smith or David Hume, make you change how you think about human nature, and consequently their manner of thinking seeps into all departments of your mind. Nicholas Taleb makes you change how you think about what you know, and thus makes you change your mind more fundamentally than all of them.

You have probably heard of “The Black Swan”, a book by a Lebanese-born New York market trader and philosopher of knowledge named Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Maybe you have not had time to read him yet. Let me help you to make the decision to do so.

A black swan, in Taleb’s definition, is an event which has three characteristics:

• it is an outlier, “as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility.”
• it carries extreme impact;
• despite its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

Taleb, who is an Orthodox Christian from Lebanon’s elite, is at war with a vast category of higher-order fools, particularly in the area of finance. They are higher-order fools because they are measuring risk by means of intellectual tools that, by their very operation, rule out black swans.

Think of the most dramatic recent example: the attacks on the twin towers on September 11, 2001. I think most of you who witnessed it would have felt like me: this isn’t happening, this can’t be happening, O Lord, we are in a science-fiction universe! (It also illustrates that a black swan to the rest of us is not a black swan to the people who planned it).

Taleb is NOT saying that better predictive abilities will rule out black swans. He is arguing that, in a world far more affected by black swans than we care to believe, it is imperative that our mental tools accommodate their reality. And this, he says, is precisely what business schools and most statistical methods taught in universities fail to do.

The world, he says, is divided into events that come from Mediocristan, and those that come from Extremistan. In Mediocristan, the domain of the Gaussian bell curve of probability, outliers can have very little impact on the statistical norm. Put a hundred people in a line-up and weigh them. Measure their height. Measure their life-spans. Average height, weight and life-span will not depart significantly, that is to say, by orders of magnitude, from some average, even if you compare lard-asses to Laotian hill people, or smokers to alpine hill-dwellers. Even if you compare the average intelligence of 100 people to the average intelligence of Nobel-prize winners.

Then take wealth. Put Bill Gates in a line-up with 100 other people. The combined wealth of the other 99 will hardly be more than Bill Gates’ interest income in a day. Wealth distribution partakes of Extremistan. So does most of the forces and things that make the world as it is.

Taleb is not talking about the kind of risk that occurs inside casinos (the ludic fallacy, he calls it). Nothing that happens inside of a casino partakes of Black Swan-ness, else casinos would go broke as often as Lehman Brothers, Barings, and Wall Street crashes.

Nothing that you know will be the source of a Black Swan. Take for example, the elm tree that hovered over my country house. It started to die, so that progressively larger branches were falling off it. I had it cut down, to avoid the disaster of a 150-year old elm crushing my house. No Black Swan there. The course of events was foreseen and prevented. Most of what you insure against partakes of Mediocristan. Indeed, excluding risks coming from Extremistan is precisely what insurers try to do.

The essence of the Black Swan is that no recurrence of events, no matter for how long, rules out the catastrophe.  Put a few dots in a line.  Put as many dots as you like and make a projection through their mean.  If the dots derive from data subject to the rules of Mediocristan, you may have a valid trend. But if the dots derive from data obeying the mathematics of Extremistan, no matter for how long the data is derived, the trend line is just so much bullshit and self-deception. If a turkey lives a thousand days, it has every reason to believe its kindly feeder will feed it on day 1001. But on day thousand and one, it is killed. For the turkey (but not for us), its slaughter is an event from Extremistan.

Or as he says, you cannot foresee the event, but you can make yourself more robust against the consequences of unforeseen events. Society can stop putting blind people in charge of driving school buses.

Taleb frustrates those who want easy answers because his book asserts that the unpredictable lies in a domain of ignorance so deep that it cannot be computed, ever. It lies beyond the bell curves of Gauss, or even the mathematics of his friend, the late, the regretted Benoit Mandelbrot, whose mathematics inform us that Grey Swans are possible. (Mandelbrot has also written that the stock market obeys rules of risk that are far from those of the bell curve).

He writes:

“I am going to be blunt. Before The Black Swan (and associated papers) most of the epistemology and decision theory was, to an actor in the real world, just sterile mind games and foreplay. Almost all the history of thought is about what we know,or think we know. The Black Swan is the very first attempt (that I know of) in the history of thought to provide a map of where we get hurt by what we don’t know, to set systematic limits to the fragility of knowledge – and to provide exact locations where these maps no longer work.”

I have not conveyed the pleasure of reading Taleb. He is deeply and vastly well-read. He cites thinkers I had never heard of, as well as plenty that I have. He demolishes the reputations of learned fools with elegance and total intellectual clarity. His attacks on economists and finance professors for their systemic blindness to Black Swan phenomena are fierce, joyous, merciless.

“Research shows that academics are overrepresented in the systematizing, Black-Swan-blind category….I haven’t seen any formal direct test of Black Swan foolishness and the systematizing mind, except for a calculation George Martin and I made in 1998, in which we found evidence that all the finance and quantitative economics professors from major universities whom we tracked and who got involved in hedge fund trading ended up making bets against Black Swans, exposing themselves to blow-ups. The best-known such academics were, once again, the “Nobel”-crowned Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton, whom God created so that I could illustrate my point about Black Swan blindness”.

“Normally, such people exit the gene pool; academic tenure holds them a bit longer.”

Most of all, he confirms you in the conviction that we are living in a Black Swan universe. Why does the stock market crash every eight or ten years on average, rather than the 780  odd years predicted by Gaussian bell curve distributions? Why do small bands of outliers create world-shaking religions? Seize states and plunge us into world wars? Invent devices that destroy previous industrial empires?

Taleb is the foe of the tidy-minded. He is the enemy of hubris. Reading his book will change how you think. It will compactify everything you know into a small quadrant, everything you might know into another, and keep your mind open to the need to fortify yourself against the consequences of things going badly wrong. A large amount of  debt , for example, is not a Black Swan except to the turkeys who hold it.

Ages ago, in another universe, I read a beautiful illustration of what Taleb was talking about in, of all places, Carlos Castaneda. You may recall from your distant hippie past that Carlos Castaneda claimed to have been under the personal tutelage of a Mexican Indian shaman, who was called Don Juan Matus. Castaneda’s teachings are to Don Juan as Plato was to Socrates; he writes as the foolish scribe who never understood what the Master was talking about. 

Don Juan insisted upon the division of the world into the tonal, and the nagual, which we would pronounce “nahual”. The tonal is the domain of the known and the knowable, and the nagual, the unknowable. One day, stirred by his students’ incessant questioning on this point, Don Juan organizes his apprentices to go on a picnic. They gather everything for this journey: plates, cutlery, baskets, even chairs and table. They drive for hours and then begin a hike up into the beautiful arid mountains of the Sierra Nevada, through the chapparal. They climb for hours and eventually find themselves on a flat look-out facing another, equally beautiful range of parallel mountains many miles away across the plain. The range is lit by the rosy afternoon glow of the sun. The view is magnificent: the space, the sky, the silence, the distant eagles, the clouds beginning to be lit from underneath by the setting sun. The table is set, as if it were at a banquet, knives forks and spoons in order, the tablecloth below, the chairs arranged. The scene is perfect in every way.

Then Don Juan says: “You have asked me about the tonal and the nagual: the known, the unknown and the unknowable. This, he says, pointing to the nicely arranged table, is the tonal, the domain of the known. And underneath the table is also the tonal, the domain of the unknown. And this, he says, with a gesture embracing all that surrounds them, the sky, mountains, the earth: this is the nagual.”

We owe to Nassim Taleb the first mathematical and philosophic discussion of the limits of the tonal , the knowable,  in the western tradition. For that we can be grateful. His book is a deeply personal  pleasure. Read it for that reason, if for no other. And do not be distracted by my likening its lesson to an anecdote in Castaneda. Taleb has produced a serious, learned, and delightful mind-changer. He dwells in the world of finance, and has brought deep learning to the problem of risk (the known unknowns) and uncertainty (the unknown unknowns). Mainly, he would say, it is the consequences of the latter which we need to fortify against, and we cannot do this until we acknowledge that this domain is powerful and ever-present.

On page 5 of the Financial Post today were four articles, every one of which was concerned with the vital issues of competitiveness, freedom of speech and innovation, and economic growth :

a) Apple Shuts Book on Sony’s i-Phone App

b) Telus accuses bell of hoarding content

c) Ban on user-based Internet fees risks telecom investment,by Terence Corcoran

d) time for businesses to step up, Bank of Canada says (text of speech here)

What is the link among them?

a) Apple wants to maintain the old AT&T model of closed endpoints, (”walled gardens”) so that the owner of the network can monetize the value of all transactions within it. Vertical integration.

b) Bell the telephone/satellite carrier wants content, supplied by CTV,  to drive users to its own proprietary content, and possibly to disadvantage the content supplied by others. Vertical intergation plus possible unjust discrimination against its duties as a common carrier.

c) Corcoran is right insofar as usage-based billing (UBB) has some theoretical justification. However, the bit caps and usage fees imposed by the carriers are entirely out of line with the costs of provision, and are seen as attempts to save the closed model of cable and telephony from the open Internet-based model of content delivery. They achieve this by making Internet-based delivery of content artificially expensive vis-a-vis cable and satellite. So count this as vertical integration (content and carriage) with definite aspects of anti-competitive pricing against competitive models.

d) The Bank of Canada is telling us to find “new, more efficient ways of organizing and executing production”, now that government has done its part to make Canada tax-competitive. If this is to be done, it will necessarily involve using the Internet more effectively. Hence the net result of usage-based billing – not in theory, but as it has been imposed by the carriers with the participation of the CRTC – is to diminish the utility and affordability of  the Internet.

The CRTC has got itself on the wrong side of this UBB issue. But an impetus for this policy approach has been the unbalanced policy directive it received from government a few years ago, which had the effect of reducing the commission’s ability to concern itself with common carriage – the public responsibilities of the carriers, and of focussing on competition as the panacea for all problems in communications markets.

It is worth considering the words of Tim Wu in his brilliant and comprehensive review of the rise and fall of information empires, The Master Switch.

“Among the great questions of our time is whether our approach to the power of information should be informed by a sense of that power’s political consequences, subject to our ingrained habit of balancing and checking any great power. Or should we follow our approach to economic power in general, in which we tolerate,  and even reward, aggrandizement? 

“While perhaps not immediately obvious, such questions are in fact at the heart of the ongoing struggle between the armies of open systems and closed, represented…in the battle between Google and Apple but manifest elsewhere as well and destined to outlast that rivalry….

“…The old television-as-toaster thinking that prevailed in the the late twentieth century is no longer feasible. To leave the economy of information, and power over this commodity, subject solely to the traditional ad hoc ways of dealing with concentrations of industrial power – in other words to anti-trust law – is dangerous.

“More subtly, there is the problem of taking an after-the-fact approach to a commodity so vital to our basic liberties: a farmeowrk that has worked well enough for oil and aluminum is ultimately unsuited to an industry whose substrate is speech.”

Keith Olberman of MSNBC quit/resigned/was fired the other day. The coverage of this even at the most left wing and the most right wing blogs that I read each points to the same factor in his departure: the new owners of MSNBC want to drive the cable station to the political centre.

Quoted from View from the Right:

As you may know, Comcast is completing its purchase of NBC from General Electric. The FCC’s fascist chairman, Julius “Seizure” Genachowski, is placing a host of hamstringing conditions for approval, but the deal will be closed soon.
Good friends of the HFR [a reference to Wheeler's "Half-Full Report"] are on the inside of Comcast, who say that the firing of hyper-liberal Jeff Zucker as NBC President/CEO is only the beginning.

What Comcast COO Steve Burke (who will replace Zucker) will do next is fire Keith Olberman, Ed Schultz and Rachel Maddow from MSNBC, realigning it away from the moonbats and towards the right (which Burke will call the “center”).

This realignment will carry through to NBC News and all NBC programming. It’s not that Burke and other Comcast honchos are Tea Partiers. They’re businessmen who think allowing liberal ideology to trump the bottom line is asinine. They also have no intention of allowing Fox to continue eating MSNBC’s lunch. Ergo, say goodnight, Keith, Ed & Rachel.

The same analysis from the left is goiven in Robert Parry’s article of November 2010 after the republican victory at the mid-terms:

The recent suspension and humiliation of MSNBC’s biggest star, Keith Olbermann, for making three personal donations to Democratic candidates without first getting corporate approval, indicates the true pecking order within NBC and GE.

Olbermann and the other liberal hosts are essentially on borrowed time, much the way Phil Donahue was before getting axed in the run-up to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, when MSNBC wanted to position itself as a “patriotic” war booster.

Unlike News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch, who stands solidly behind the right-wing propaganda on Fox News, the corporate owners of MSNBC have no similar commitment to the work of Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz.

For the suits at headquarters, it’s just a balancing act between the ratings that those shows get and the trouble they cause as Republicans reclaim control of Washington.

Because of the magnitude and intensity of the Right’s media, Republicans can confidently sell a wide variety of propaganda themes to the American people. The themes might not make much sense, but they develop a ring of truth because they get repeated so often.

The basic assertion in this article, which is repeated elsewhere on the left,  is that all those middle class white men are failing to vote Democratic because they do not understand their own best interests. Rather like the tomcat who jumps out of the car window as it heads towards the castration clinic, I suppose. He ought to know that its social and moral betters have a plan for prolonging his life.

Demented Nordic pixie Bjork invokes her cruelest weapon to oppose Canadian investment in Iceland:

Icelandic singer Bjork is forcing a Canadian energy company with a business presence in her country to “hear the music” of Icelanders opposed to foreign ownership of their country’s resources.

The eclectic musician launched a three-day karaoke marathon on Thursday in the capital of ReykjavDik as part of her campaign “to win back the country’s natural resources.”

The English teacher Katherine Birbalsingh reflects on the price of waking up as a schoolteacher finding herself agreeing with the conservative idea of education – which is pretty simple actually – namely that students should get one. She was fired for going public with her newfound insights.

The recent Blair-Hitchens debate on the role of religion in the world gives us good cause to reflect upon the decrepit standard of what passes for transcendent thought in our society.

This video is only a slight parody of that:

Oprah Invites Hundreds Of Lucky Fans To Be Buried With Her In Massive Tomb

An article today in the Washington Times informs us of the following:

• Overall, there were 581,300 gay-couple-headed households in the United States in 2009, the National Center for Marriage & Family Research (NCMFR) said in this month’s Family Profiles report, citing data from the 2009 American Community Survey (ACS).

• Census Bureau data also showed that, when it came to weddings, lesbians significantly outnumbered gay males — 85,847 to 66,274 or 56 percent to 44 percent. But this broad-based number was less dramatic than other studies that have suggested that lesbians marry at twice the rate of gay men.

• The District of Columbia came in No. 1 in the nation, with 31 percent of the city’s unmarried couples identifying themselves as same-sex. This high representation was overwhelmingly due to the men — gay male households make up 26 percent of all unmarried households, compared with 4 percent that were led by lesbians.

• Male same-sex households had the highest average household income of all coupled households, at nearly $117,000. Heterosexual cohabitants had the lowest average household income, $64,000.

• In gay-couple households, both partners were likely to have at least a bachelor’s degree (30 percent), compared with all other households. Among heterosexual married couples, for instance, only 21 percent both had college degrees, while only 10 percent of heterosexual cohabitants both had degrees.

• Heterosexual couples, married or unmarried, were more likely to have children in the home (42 percent and 39 percent), compared with gay couples (17 percent). Of same-sex parents, females outnumbered males 22 percent to 11 percent.

• Regarding homeownership, heterosexual married couples and same-sex couples looked about the same, with more than two-thirds of these couples owning their homes. In contrast, less than half of heterosexual cohabiting couples had a mortgage.

• Top locations for gay couples to live included Massachusetts, New York, Delaware, Maine, Rhode Island and Georgia on the East Coast, and Colorado, Utah, Arizona, California, Oregon and Hawaii in the West. In addition, males and females had their own favored locales: Florida and Virginia were hot spots for gay male couples to settle, while lesbians were especially fond of Vermont, Maryland, Texas and New Mexico.

The Telegraph reported  Saturday on those dreadful Sweden Democrats getting into the Riksdag on an overtly anti-Muslim platform. All the usual bien-pensants are outraged! The same Telegraph, the supposedly conservative newspaper, reacts as follows:
 

“The rise of extremist sentiment has been fuelled by immigration and has been exacerbated by the economic crisis; when unemployment rises, so does anti-immigrant sentiment. Underlying it is an increasingly ugly strand of Islamophobia. What is most worrying, however, is the inability or unwillingness of mainstream political parties across Europe to confront these issues. As we have seen in this country, the refusal of the political establishment over many years to conduct a mature debate on immigration has played into the hands of the British National Party. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy is taking pre-emptive action against a resurgent National Front, which performed strongly in March’s regional elections, with his expulsion of illegal Roma immigrants. However, Europe’s leaders need to develop a more sophisticated approach to the many challenges posed by economic migration if the extremists are not to continue to prosper.”

1. It is not “Islamophobia” – it is the well founded apprehension that Islam is a political/religious/legal/social entity that seeks the destruction of one’s way of life through submission to shari’a – which is a totalitarian political agenda. (refer to Tarek Fatah’s “Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State” or Ayaan Ali Hirsi’s “Nomad” for example).
2. There can be no “mature debate on immigration” because the subject is forbidden by force of law.
   • the white European natives are being deliberately overrun by social-democratic governments which seek high rates of third-world immigration to overcome conservative or native resistance to leftist their social engineering, (see Christopher Caldwell’s “Reflections on the Late Revolution in Europe” or Mark Steyn’s “America Alone” for the demographic and political realities, and
   • the last thing which these elites could tolerate is an actual discussion of racial, ethnic of religious differences. An honest debate would offend the premise that all races, religions and ethnicities are simultaneously equal, but some are more equal than others. The supposition of our social planners is that brown- and black skinned peoples are free of racism, nationalism, sexism and tribalism, and are in any case representatives of the oppressed, so (pick your reason) they deserve to live in a first-world social democracy and vote for the elites that keep subsidizing their welfare dependencies, at the expense of the natives, who need to be colonized anyway.
   • Human Rights Tribunals and Codes are enforced precisely to prevent such discussion.

So why would you permit a mature discussion when your entire goal is to make everything undiscussable? The Telegraph is being idiotic, but so is the rest of the European political elite not actually in the grips of multi-cultist anti-white malware. (If the zampolits do not like the term “white”, they can mentally substitute “European native”. The result is the same).

You can do yourself an enormous favour. Read Matt Ridley’s “The Rational Optimist”. Here is meat and potatoes for your mind, with a fine wine to wash it down. Ridley is the British science writer, author of such illuminating works as Genome and The Origins of Virtue, among others. This time he has gone well beyond his previous range, to great success.

This books achieves two things:

1. It looks athe entire history of our species from wandering bands on the plains of Africa until now as the progressive expansion of trade, as the cause of specialization of production, the elaboration of virtue, the improvement of the species, and the growth of wealth, and

2. a complete debunking of the constant pessimism that pervades society at the moment, and which has pervaded society since conversation was first recorded, according to Ridley: cancer, pesticides, AIDS, global warming, global cooling, genomic engineering, global famine, nuclear war: the list goes on and on of fashionable twaddle about inevitable catastrophes unless we de-industrialize, go back tothe land, and integrate ourselves with nature: the kind of stuff Prince Charles goes on about; the kind of society we existed in after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, called the Dark Ages.

I canot resist his  quote from John Stuart Mill, which prefaces his chapter “Turning Points: Pessimism after 1900″:

I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.

David Suzuki? Al Gore? Paul Ehrlich? Thomas Malthus?

Though I enjoyed his attack on the doomsayers at the end of the book, it is grounded in an interesting take on human social evolution, the core of his argument.

Ridley argues that changing habits, generation by generation, were made possible by exchange,

“the swapping of things and services between individuals. This gave the Species an external, collective intelligence far greater than anything it could hold in its admittedly capacious brain….In this way exchange enouraged specialization, which further increased the number of different habits the species could have, while shrinking the number of things each individual knew how to make.Consumption could grow more diversified, while production could grow more specialized.”

He sees farming, and the burning of fossil fuels especialy, as the further release of energy for the benefit of mankind. His excoriation of starving the poor to grow ”green” fuels rivals anything Jonathan Swift could have written about fashionable nonsense.

Ridley’s book is based on very extensive reading of everything important: Adam Smith, Hayek, information theorists, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, historians, and economists. His vast erudition is painlessly laid out in a compelling narrative.

Buy this book. Read it. Then buy ten copies and give it to anyone, including leftists especially, who might possibly read it. It will comfirm and strengthen you in all your beliefs that things are in fact improving (Islam notwithstanding) and that the doomists are a tired and broken record, perpetually wrong, whose only contribution is bleating and obstruction.

This is a great work and deserves the broadest possible readership.

There you are staring up at the judge, with her red sash, black robes and the awesome moment has come. Judgment will be handed out.

You will be condemned. You are guilty as charged.

At that moment, I want you to think of her in black leather bondage gear, sucking someone’s cock. She knows the pictures have been taken. Her husband and she have a rather exotic sex life. Will she be more merciful knowing that she is a slut? That you are more sexually naive than she? Or will she be more codemning becase she has not yet been caught?

I place my bet on the notion she will be inclined to be more merciful, knowing that she too is human.

Judges are paid to be judgmental. Knowing they are made of the same stuff as the rest of us ought to incline them to be merciful and restrained, and us to be compassionate towards them when they are caught with cocks in their mouths, especially when the husband leaked the photographs against her knowledge.

 Who will stone this woman? Not I.

Judge off bench after sex photos posted online.