Author Archives: thezman

Robot Medicine

Posted on by

I had my annual physical this week. That means two hours of my life wasted staring at the wall wearing an apron. I should not complain as the process for me is efficient compared to what others must endure. I get to the facility 15 minutes before my appointment and I’m sitting in a room somewhere within 30 minutes. In that time, I have submitted my urine sample and filled out some forms.

A pleasant black girl with neck tattoos took my blood pressure and had me strip and put on one of those ridiculous hospital gowns. I’ve always wondered why someone has not come up with a better hospital gown, but there’s zero motivation on the part of the medical profession to demand it. The medical business is not a business in the normal sense, where the suppliers compete with one another for customers.

I don’t actually see a doctor. Instead it is a nurse practitioner. Allegedly there is a doctor in charge of her and the other nurses, but I’ve never met him. I’ve never seen him. I’m sure he exists, but if not I would not be surprised either. The woman I see is nice, but a typical clock puncher. She comes to work for a check, not because she enjoys her work. To her, I’m just another meat stick on the schedule.

After twenty minutes of waiting, she arrived and commenced with the examination. That means taking my blood pressure, looking at my eyes and ears and feeling around for something weird. Most of the time she is in the room is spent asking me questions as she typed the answers into the computer system. Most of the questions seemed like they were for marketing purposes rather than anything to do with my health.

The point of this boring recitation of my annual physical is that very little of it requires me to interact with a human. Taking blood pressure can be done by a machine. I have one at home. Blood work is done by a machine. The clinic I use does their own blood work, allegedly, but there are huge national chains that do blood work for humans and animals.

As far as interpreting the results, the nurse I see is not bringing much to the table. She thinks my cholesterol is getting a little high, but Dr. Google and everyone I know has much higher LDL levels. I suspect there is a commission check in it for them when they prescribe these popular medications for cholesterol. Regardless, interpreting blood work is better done by a robot anyway. The same is true of the urine sample.

It seems to me that one place where the robot future should be a reality is in basic medical care. Instead of paying an arm and a leg for disinterested humans to act as a go between, let the patients talk to the robots direct. A mall kiosk could be used for blood pressure, urine and blood work. While you’re there you answer questions on a touchscreen. A week later the robot e-mails you the results and any recommendations.

Of course, the robot would also have access to your DNA. As we march into the humanless future, DNA will become the touchstone of medical science. Connecting the dots between genes and a wide range of diseases is a data problem, in most cases. Cheap collection devices in public places means masses of data to sort of collate.

Robot care would inevitably be cheaper and that means more people would get regular checkups by their local neighborhood robot doctor. If this sort of service were $50 a shot, most people would do it twice a year. Extend the services to things like flu shots, and nuisance things like colds and allergies and most of your basic care could be done on the cheap by the machines.

Another benefit is the payola schemes run by the pharmaceutical companies would be tamped down as robots are not easily bribed. During my visit, two sets of sharpies arrived peddling their wares. They were dressed in the best Men’s Warehouse has to offer and had arms full of freebies for the nurses.

It’s the same payola game the music industry used to play in the old days. It’s not technically bribery, but give a doctor free stuff and he is probably going to move your product. The medical profession denies it, but big pharma is not giving away tens of millions in trips, gifts and schmoozing because they are stupid. They do it because it works.

Of course, none of this is going to happen because the medical rackets are neatly aligned with the ruling liberal democrats. America does not have a government run system like Britain; it’s more of a partnership between the industry and the state. That way, we get the worst of both worlds. On the one hand there’s the avaricious private suppliers and on the other the mindless idiocy of government.

I’m fond of pointing out that we have all around us one of the greatest health care system on earth. American veterinarian medicine is better than what most humans enjoy on earth. It’s also cheap and plentiful. That’s because it is largely government free and parasitic lawyer free. Maybe when the robots take over, they can just kill all the lawyers and bureaucrats. Then maybe medicine will because a normal business again.

Death to the Old Farts!

Posted on by

We are heading into the end phase of the most recent Great Progressive Awakening. This awakening started in the early 1990’s and was in full bloom in the 2000’s. The peak would be 2008 and it has been losing air ever since. Barak Obama in the White House probably kept it going longer than it should, but history is full of accidents. As Obama heads for the final turn, the movement that buoyed him is reaching its denouement.

For those unfamiliar with my oeuvre, I have a lot of new readers of late, the term Great Progressive Awakening is a play on The Great Awakening. The New Religion of America we call Progressivism or Liberalism has inherited the spiritual rhythms of main line Protestantism. Periods of activity where the faith is ascendent are followed by periods where it is dormant and going through a reordering.

The transition from main line Protestantism began in the 19th century with the Civil War. Read contemporaneous works by abolitionists and it is impossible to miss the spiritual fervor of the people in the movement. By killing the Southerners and breaking up slavery, God’s chosen were doing his work on earth.

Another awakening began at the end of the 19th century, eventually giving us Wilson, genuine socialism, internationalism, eugenics and Prohibition. These waves of religiosity are just as prone to world events as any other movement. Hitler and the war pumped a lot of air into the New Deal and largely collapsed the old traditional American conservatism that should have been a break on socialism.

The result has been an increasingly Progressive country as the Cult transformed from an economic movement with cultural overtones to a purely cultural phenomenon with some residual economic policies from the old days. Elizabeth Warren ranting about TPP is just a way to light some candles to the ancestors of the One True Faith. Warren got rich working for a giant hedge fund that runs an elite training facility. She likes corporatism as much as everyone else.

Warren’s rise is properly viewed as a lagging indicator of the current Progressive wave. The backlash started in 2010 and has continued every since, which has been evident in the three elections since this wave peaked in 2008. The ascendance of a weak and not altogether coherent poser like Warren says the movement is struggling with dis-conformation. The anointing of Obama, it turns out, did not bring about the rapture.

There are other signs that this wave is flagging. The most obvious being the whistling past the graveyard stuff like this article from Politco, the moonbat site for Blue Team fanatics.

It turns out that one of the Grand Old Party’s biggest—and least discussed—challenges going into 2016 is lying in plain sight, written right into the party’s own nickname. The Republican Party voter is old—and getting older, and as the adage goes, there are two certainties in life: Death and taxes. Right now, both are enemies of the GOP and they might want to worry more about the former than the latter.

There’s been much written about how millennials are becoming a reliable voting bloc for Democrats, but there’s been much less attention paid to one of the biggest get-out-the-vote challenges for the Republican Party heading into the next presidential election: Hundreds of thousands of their traditional core supporters won’t be able to turn out to vote at all.

The party’s core is dying off by the day.

Death cults like American Liberalism are fond of these sorts of fantasies. Faced with disconfirming reality, they have two choices. One is to accept that there is no heaven on earth and there’s no way to arrange things to attain it. That means abandoning the one true faith. The other option is to blame enemies of the revolution, spies and saboteurs. Shockingly, every Rousseau-ist cult goes for door number two.

To the great consternation of Progressives everywhere, murdering the enemies of the revolution is not an option in America. Instead they have to sate this urge with revenge fantasies involving the natural death of those they believe are holding them back. Five years ago, they claimed the people voting against Obama’s party were old farts ready for the grave. Now, those same old farts are in the way, but time is on the side of the anointed!

Reality, that thing that confounds mass movements everywhere, is something different. Young people are always the ones most likely to fall for nonsense like communism, Fabian socialism, Nazism, and now The New Religion. As we get older, we get wiser and are less inclined to be swept up in goofy fads like anti-racism or feminism. While the GOP is not of much use as a political party, it does provide a home of those who have outgrown the childish ideas of Cultural Marxism, socialism and the like.

Those old farts in the GOP may be headed for the grave, but there are more old farts where they came from.

Dennett, Dawkins and other Atheist Crackpots

Posted on by

Right after Penn Jillette went bonkers and took up atheism as his cause, he was on Red Eye making the case for his new religion. Like all converts, he was proselytizing because he was full of doubt. Logically, the reason people try to recruit is for confirmation. If scads of other sensible people are signing up for the cause, the cause must be a good thing. So, he was trying to get the others on the panel with him to go along with his new cause.

He also employed a little trick I suppose has become popular with the atheist movement. It works like this. If you cannot or will not fully embrace the belief in a living god, then you are an atheist. This is an attempt to widen the pool and normalize atheism by declaring it the default position.

In other words, left to their own devices, humans will not believe in the supernatural and instead will embrace the pure reason of atheism. I guess that means wearing dildos on their head and fighting otters. Or maybe it means dating transexuals. Regardless, the implication is that religion is a made up thing with out any basis in the natural world. The fact that this is provably false does not factor into the equation.

Penn Jillette is a fine entertainer and a lot smarter than most people in the entertainment rackets, but he is full of baloney. Indifference to religion and the supernatural is exactly that, indifference. I don’t believe in God, but I don’t disbelieve either. Logically, I can never know if there is or there is not a God or gods or some other supernatural force at the heart of existence. I know I can’t know and have no strong beliefs about the matter.

Atheists are certain or at least they claim to be certain. I doubt that, but even taking them at face value, they claim to know that which cannot be known, which means they believe. Atheism is just another mass movement with its own set of beliefs. One of those beliefs is that the pious atheist must make war on the Christians. Like those annoying people giving away copies of The Watchtower, atheists make being a public nuisance the highest calling.

Anyway, this showed up in my twitter feed the other day.

The link goes to this Salon interview the atheist crackpot Daniel Dennet and the alleged end of religion. Dennett is a great example of how someone can be brilliant in one area and a total loon in most others. Noam Chomsky is (was?) a great linguist, but he is otherwise nutty as a fruitcake, indulging in all sorts of deranged theories.

That Dennett interview reads like the sort of stuff you find from survivalist websites. The final reckoning is coming and you better be prepared!!! He so desperately wants to be right that any scrap of data that can be interpreted as proof is waved around like the missing link. In the end, he just comes off like a madman struggling to keep it together.

For the most part, eccentric old coots like Dennett are harmless and often entertaining. His lectures are probably great fun, even when he slips into his crazy talk. In my student years, the best teachers were those mad old guys who no longer cared about convention and simply said what was on their minds. They made the material interesting.

The trouble is these crackpots are not always harmless. Dawkins and Dennett have argued for banning religion by force. Dennett argued in his book Breaking the Spell for removing children from parents who are religious, which is most parents. Specifically he advocates the end of privacy laws and religious liberty so the state can raise children free from religion.

Dawkins, of course, thinks it is OK for the state to gather up the unfit and exterminate them so none of this should be surprising. Celebrity atheists seem to care as much for being offensive as they do about atheism. There’s reason to believe that the attraction of atheism is it lets these guys be an ass in public.

Over 50 years ago Whittaker Chambers exposed the reality of Utopians like Dawkins and Dennett in his great take down of Ayn Rand. In the end, all of these theories end up in a bloodbath.That’s because the Utopians hate humanity. Humans are irrational and messy, which means human society will be irrational and messy. Utopians hate that so they inevitably conclude that the way to paradise is to kill the humans.

 

Moonbat Child Abuse

Posted on by

I’m not a big fan of rounding people and shooting them, but I can understand the temptation. This story about a demented parent torturing her child and then demanding everyone else indulge her is sickening. This is how indulging lunacy ends up as something much worse.

Bobby Montoya wanted to join the Girl Scouts, setting off a national debate.

The Girl Scout cookie can’t seem to catch a break.

Under fire in years past for including trans fats, high fructose corn syrup and palm oil in its cookies, the Girl Scouts‘ current cookie selling season is under fire because of policies that have nothing to do with the actual composition of the cookies.

A group calling itself HonestGirlScouts.com has posted a YouTube video calling for a boycott of Girl Scout cookies in response to a Colorado troop’s decision to allow a 7-year-old transgender child into its troop. Gay rights and transgender rights groups have reported a grassroots LGBT movement of supporters buying Girl Scout cookies in response to the video.

“I’ve decided to purchase as many boxes as my modest budget will allow and donate them to the local LGBTQ community center,” says Mara Morken, a lesbian stay-at-home mom in Fargo, North Dakota. “I want to show support for GSUSA in their honorable decision to allow all girls to participate in their programs. However I do not want that support to show itself on my thighs, so I will donate the entire cookie order!”

After an initial burst of publicity around the nearly 8-minute video featuring a teen Girl Scout wearing a Girl Scout sash, the video has been made private on YouTube. However, it’s still available for viewing elsewhere on the Internet.

“I ask all fellow Girl Scouts who want a true, all-girl experience not to sell any Girl Scouts cookies until GSUSA (Girl Scouts of the USA) addresses our concerns,” says the girl, identified as a teen named Taylor, a troop member from California, in some news reports. “I ask all parents who want their girls to be in a safe environment to tell their leaders why you will not allow your girls to make any more money for GSUSA.”

The video was prompted by the case of Bobby Montoya, whose mother told a CNN affiliate in October that a troop leader initially told her that Bobby couldn’t join the troop because Bobby “has boy parts,” even though her child identifies as a girl.

The Girl Scouts of Colorado blamed the initial decision to exclude the child on ignorance of the scouts’ policy. The state scouts said Bobby was welcome to join Girl Scouts. “If a child identifies as a girl and the child’s family presents her as a girl, Girl Scouts of Colorado welcomes her as a Girl Scout,” said the Colorado Girl Scouts, in a statement to a CNN affiliate.

The Honest Girl Scouts website says that the Girl Scouts use cookie income to promote “abortion and LGBT agendas,” introduces Girl Scouts to “the concept of sexual rights for children without parent consent” and is rewriting badge books to include “radical activists and gay role models.”

On its website, HonestGirlScouts.com states that the group is comprised of current and former Girl Scouts, leaders, parents, volunteers and lifetime members. When contacted via its listed Gmail account to comment, someone replied that the group’s “legal counsel has advised us not to comment or do interviews until further notice.”

Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, dismissed the video as an attempt by conservative activists to raise funds. “This issue not withstanding, the Girl Scouts is a really good organization,” says Keisling. “It’s been a really good place for kids to learn things. (This controversy) will die down. We as a society are progressing and the outdated reactionary attitude that poor girl was put up to in that video, those attitudes are dying out.”

Other LGBT groups are taking a tongue-in-check approach to the debate, encouraging people to eat more Girl Scout cookies. “Girl Scout cookies may not be so great for your waistline but they are great for being inclusive,” says Liz Owen, spokeswoman for Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (P-FLAG). Owen reports hearing from people who decided to break their New Year’s resolutions to go on a diet with a Girl Scout cookies purchase.

It’s one thing for adults to play dress up, pretending they are the other sex. That’s weird and slightly disgusting, but it is a free country. When they demand the rest of us go along with the lunacy, a line has been crossed. Humans come in one of two sexes, male and female. Yes, there are defects where humans posses both a Y-chromosome and two X-chromosomes, but that is rare and not the case with “transgendered.”

When adults begin to subject children to this lunacy, we’re talking about child abuse. The demented woman claiming her boy child is female is just trying to get attention for herself at the expense of her child. The poor kid will end up needing years of therapy to overcome what his mother has done to him, in addition to having to deal with the bad genes he inherited from this nut.

Pundits Under Glass

Posted on by

Way back in the olden thymes, I had an exchange with Jonah Goldberg about someone who was writing for VDare or associated with the site. I no longer recall who it was exactly. I want to say it was Peter Brimelow, but it it is not important. What is important is the reaction from Goldberg. He scolded me like I was child about how I should never read that site or anyone associated with it. “trust me, you should stay away from them.”

I can’t say I’m a big fan of VDare or Peter Brimelow, but it is a big world and you can’t be a fan of all of it. I’ll read Derbyshire’s pieces for VDare and Sailer, but that’s about it. I’ve said many times that I find white nationalism to be a bit silly. These are not guys on my side, regardless of skin tone and cultural affiliations. Even so, VDare seems mostly harmless to me.

The point of the story is just how frightened people in the chattering classes are of the morality police. Guys like Jonah Goldberg have one fear and that’s being accused of racism by the Cult. It may not destroy a career, but it knocks you off the regular television gigs. At best you can kick around as a guest for weekend news shows that no one watches.

I don’t blame them. Chattering skulls like money as much as anyone else and being an A-list skull on TV is a well paying job that requires surprising little talent. That means there’s a long line of equally skilled skulls just waiting for the A-list skull to screw up so they can take his spot. Suddenly you can go from living the good life in New York or Washington to being a guy who writes for, well, VDare, hoping readers will donate money to you.

The other day some of the chattering skulls were passing this around the twitter, obviously thankful for a potential way out of the skins game trap of political punditry.

He’s right. Too often, and mostly on the left, opinion readers are privy not to profound argumentation, clever prose, and a depth of insight, but to the establishment of genetic legitimacy and the facile condemnation of obscurities. As though the opinion journalism sphere were little more than a small claims court, modern opinion bloggers occupy their time tilting at windmills of minor empirical value. What’s more, this process often mandates that the writer inflate the gravity of their subject to absurd proportions if only to retroactively validate holding such a strong opinion on matters so trifling. And you know what? This is a wildly successful approach to opinion journalism.

It’s entry-level political opinion. One need not have a profound historical understanding or a background in the social sciences to have a fully-formed outlook on why a particular shirt or a Marvel Comics film adaptation could be construed as offensive. Nor would anyone care if that were merely a subjective objection. Those grievances must be framed as oppressive in the extreme, and objectively so. People enjoy consuming this form of “political opinion” for the same reason some like to write about it; there is no barrier to entry in order to read, understand, and draw your own absolute and self-righteous conclusion on the banal transgression at issue.

Steve Sailer has been arguing that the Tribe is getting a bit worried about the skins game and maybe rethinking its utility to the Tribe. I’m not inclined to psychological reductionism so I think he’s barking at shadows on this one. But, it is easy to see why, given that the guys fretting over the skins game have names like Noah and Jonah.

Further, the line of attack is not to confront the skins game head on, but instead to discredit it as not living up to some mythological standard of opinion writing. Rothman is basically arguing that name calling is a disqualification, which is not going to mean a whole lot to the people in the name and shame business. To the hive mind, name calling is the whole point. It’s how you point out the bogeyman.

I found this a bit amusing:

While this manner of commentary is all nonsense, it stimulates a particularly dull-witted readership that cares little for arcane and often tedious aspects of genuine political commentary like crosstabs analysis, coalition dynamics, monetary policy, economic theory, and international affairs. All of these subjects require the reader have some basic grasp on a variety of assumptions before they can fully comprehend the author’s point. The average identity crusader thrust into an analytical post by John Sides would be as at sea as college freshman compelled to attend a fourth-year Chinese language course. Rather than elevate the reader, however, the country’s aspiring opinion makers have determined to talk down to their audiences.

Noah Rothman may be a peach of a fellow, but I really don’t care what a Russian Studies major has to say about social science statistics. He’s going to find out that the people in the skins game, those entry level opinion writers, don’t care about fake nerds and their charts either.

The skins game folks generally have biology on their side. A black guy ranting about the blue-eyed devil is at least right about the biology. He is black and the blue-eyed devil is white. The same can be said for the womyn’s rights people, ethnic grievance clubs and so forth. It’s only when you get into the weird sex cults that things stray from reality. The truth of the matter is the ethnic grievance industry is just pissed about reality.

The fake nerd with his spreadsheets and splatter charts is more often than not at odds with reality. The boys at Vox are fond of conjuring statistics that prove! their cult is the one true way to happiness because science! The phrase “studies show” has become  a marker for identifying bravo sierra. Like climate science, bad math has become a tool of the lunatic.

If there’s any doubt about that, just consider the plight of Sailer, Richwine, Lott and Murray. All of whom know their statistics, but arrive at heretical conclusions and face the wrath of the morality police. It does not matter that they are right and often brilliant. The truth is no defense against the charge of heresy.

In the game of chattering skulls, what matters is being the prettiest flower in the hot house. If you want to stay inside the hot house, you better not upset the people in charge of the hot house. The people in charge are all in the Cult of Modern Liberalism. If you’re taking a paycheck from them, you just have to suck it up and play the game by their rules.

Standing Heads

Posted on by

In the newspaper business, a standing head is a special label for any regularly appearing section, page or story. The typesetters would put the letters together in a block and keep them as a set because they would use them frequently. It’s also a snarky way to indicate that a recurring story has something to do with long held stereotypes. For instance, “Rapper Killed in Drive By” would be a standing head.

So it is with Lionel Pickens, aka “Chinx.”

A Queens rapper who was part of French Montana’s group, Coke Boys, has been killed in an early morning shooting.

Lionel Pickens died at a Queens hospital, police said. The 31-year-old, who performed as Chinx, had been shot multiple times in the chest around 4 a.m. Sunday at Queens Boulevard and 84th Drive in Briarwood.

Another man was also shot. He was in the hospital in critical condition

The two men were in a Porsche when another car pulled up alongside, and multiple shots were fired, police said.

Pickens’ management team issued a statement on Instagram saying his “dedication, humor and vision will always be remembered.”

“It is with a heavy heart that The Legion Media Group and 4 Kings Management announce the passing of Lionel “Chinx’ Pickens this morning,” it wrote.

No arrests have been made. An investigation is underway.

As CBS2’s Steve Langford reported, Pickens grew up in Far Rockaway, his roots were often featured in his music videos.

Pickens had played a show in Brooklyn on Saturday night, before he was ambushed.

“It was a black Mercedes that came right next to that car and they let off shots,” witness Raymond Rivera said.

River said he saw the shooting from up the block and watched Pickens fall to the pavement.

“Police came. They put a blanket over him. They came took him in the ambulance,” Rivera said.

Just hours after the shooting there was a major show of force by the NYPD in Far Rockaway.

Police took at least two men into custody and were questioning in connection with the murder.

At the crime scene a sobbing woman declined to speak, while friends and fans watched in stunned silence.

“Those were young kids. Young kids that I watched grow up. Man this is like sad right,” Vasco Alder said.

Alex, a fan of Chinx’s music, wonders if perhaps someone was jealous.

“He was headed to the top,” he told 1010 WINS’ Carol D’Auria. “He was with the right team. And some people didn’t like that.”

Pickens did have a rap sheet, with arrests for attempted murder, robbery and drugs, D’Auria reported. He spent more than three years in prison.

The image white people get from TV is that gang bangers are killing each other for drug turf. Libertarians imagine that the hoppers are just off-the-grid entrepreneurs, marketing, selling and defending a product. Liberals imagine they are victims thrust into this life because honest work is not available.

Reality is something different. Most of the killing is over respect. One banger looks at the other the wrong way and someone starts shooting. Sometimes they shoot one another for sport because they have nothing better to do with their time. “I don’t know. Because I felt like it” is the most common answer for why someone shot someone in the ghetto.

Whether or not it is nature or nurture can be debated, but what’s not debatable is whether there is any hope of fixing these people. It’s the thing no one wants to discuss because there can only be answers that no one wants to face. A population of violent morons must be isolated and set apart from the rest of society.

Maintaining urban reservations let’s everyone pretend we doing something other than isolating and controlling a trouble population. It is largely out of sight and therefore out of mind. Maybe that’s as good as it gets, but it is that lie that gives liberals and lunatics a lever to use against civil society.

A Peak Inside The Hive

Posted on by

Every cult has defense mechanism. It is the nature of all organic things to have some way to protect themselves from assault by predators and competitors. Religions are organic things, even the ones cooked up by bored science fiction writers. They quickly evolve into something that has a nature different from the sum of its parts. Secrets, rituals and practices that define who is in and who is out of the group are an essential defense mechanism.

Because Progressives lack consecrated buildings in which to meet and spread the good word, they have developed an elaborate way to signal to one another their membership in the cult. These change over time as the Cult of Modern Liberalism is occasionalist. In the 80’s, male adherents wore linen collars and had floppy JFK hairdos. Today they have 90’s dance club beards and wear fake glasses.

The preferred defense mechanism of the Cult of Modern Liberalism is the shifting of focus from it to some conjured bogeyman. Defining that bogeyman, therefore, is an important part of the daily life of the true believer. For the lesser lights, the “what to do about Grendel” becomes their reason to exist. The bogeyman becomes the all-consuming issue.

This floating about on twitter is a good example.Elizabeth Grattan as far as I can tell, is a low watt social justice warrior desperate to gain attention for herself by trying to our-crazy everyone else in the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Her website is unintentional self-parody. Reading her LinedIn CV, it seems she is a low-level nuisance in Chicago’s crazy scene. That and a stalker.

As to the post in question, it’s a good example of a common feature with moonbats. They have a lot of words for “other” that they liberally employ as epithets. The word “racist” has magical qualities because it can be applied to anyone they don’t like at the moment. This quiz is basically just a list of things this poor deranged women thinks are bad at the moment.

The other thing that you see here and with all moonbats is the use of insider language to suggest they hold a special place in the cult. Ms. Grattan used “WoC” not because it is explanatory, but to indicate she is inside while you are outside. No doubt other moonbat women in her coven congratulated her for the use of “WoC” in her post. This whole effort, after all, was just a public act of piety. Getting the pat on the head is the point.

The thing about wackos like Grattan is she invests a lot of her time blocking people on social media and shouting down people who hold opinions she does not like. Her test is not about testing your degree of racism. It is about closing off any discussion of the topic. It’s settled and unless you agree it is settled, you’re a bad person.

The strangest thing about people like Grattan is she is a colossal hypocrite. She rails about racism, but lives in an all-white neighborhood. When she was arrested for stalking her boyfriend, it was in one of the richest and best guarded and most white parts of Chicago. If she wanted to be down with the cause, she could move to any of the city’s ghettos, but that’s not going to happen.

A Quick Follow Up On Africa

Posted on by

It is the nature of Westerners to doubt just how quickly a place like Africa can become a savage nightmare. After all, even the worst calamities in Europe have not set off an end-of-times zombie apocalypse. Two world wars in which tens of millions were killed and whole cities demolished did not tip the Continent into barbarism.

It’s easy to think that from the comfort of a high smart fraction society. In societies with tiny smart fractions and enormous numbers of violent stupid people, things can turn quickly.

A Nigerian restaurant has reportedly been shut down for cooking human flesh and serving it to customers.

The police were tipped off by locals who suspected something horrific was taking place inside the kitchen.

They raided the hotel restaurant to discover human heads which were still dripping with blood in plastic bags.

A local priest who ate at the restaurant – in the south-eastern province of Anambra – was alarmed at the price of meals there, let alone where the meat came from,BBC Swahili reported.

He was presented with a bill of 700 Naira – around £2.20 – when the daily wage for tens of millions of Nigerians is approximately 60p.

The priest said: ‘The attendant noticed my reaction and told me it was the small piece of meat I had eaten that made the bill scale that high.

‘I did not know I had been served with human meat, and that it was that expensive.’

The police also found a terrifying arsenal of weapons which included grenades when they raided the restaurant. Ten people were arrested in connection to the crimes.

One resident said: ‘I am not surprised at the shocking revelation… Every time I went to the market, I observed strange activities going on in the hotel.

‘People who were never cleanly dressed and who looked a bit strange made their way in and out of the hotel, making me very suspicious of their activities.’

In addition to the occasional trips to the witch doctor to address the effects of cannibalism or bat eating, these are people who are concerned about penis snatching.

Africa is not a place that will muster a well-organized response to their spiraling fertility rate and growing food shortage.

The Robot Future Will Be Ruined By Dickheads

Posted on by

I’m fairly skeptical about the robot future. Automation will certainly continue to creep into every crack and crevice of human life. Some things naturally lend themselves to automation, while others less so. The cost of automation will always be balanced by the benefits. There’s also taste. No one wants a robot bartender or a robot waitress. There’s also a lot of things we like doing so there’s no desire to turn them over to robots.

That’s my question about self-driving cars. Is driving an onerous thing to anyone? Geezers in their final years would maybe benefit from a self-driving car, but at that point walking is a chore so I’m not sure I see the benefit. The blind and the crippled could use the technology. Otherwise, most people enjoy driving and don’t need to the use the time doing important stuff.

That’s what always makes me laugh about the sales pitch for self-driving cars. “Oh, you can use the time to other things.” People who are so important they need that time have drivers. Everyone else is just a schmuck who will use his driving time watching porn or playing games on his handheld. But, I accept that I may just be a cranky skeptic not seeing the great benefits of self-driving clown cars.

I suspect the fake nerd crowd likes the idea of self-driving cars because they think it will add another layer of state control. The Progressive future always has robotic transportation, mixed in with the antiseptic urban landscape. That and lack of poor people and messed up people. I guess eugenics is going to automated too.

Maybe that’s the plan for the nation’s dickhead population. The great threat to the robot future is the common dickhead, the guy who insists on flying his drone over emergency areas, creating havoc for emergency personnel. Dickheads are also the sort who will use their drones to spy on neighbors. Normal people will demand the government ban the sale of drones and that will the end of that.

Of course, that won’t be the end of that. The common dickhead is responsible for all the spam in your inbox and the virus on your computer. Anything that makes life easier is a target for these people as it provides them with a chance to be sand in the gears of life. This story about some dickhead hacking into an airplane causing it to go off course is exactly where things are headed.

Circling back to the robot cars, imagine the chaos that will come from some dickhead hacking his neighbors car. The guy gets in to go to work and ends up in the woods trapped in his car or driving over a cliff. The more we automate, the more mayhem opportunities we create. That’s going to be the great check on the robot future. The best efforts will never overcome the common dickhead.

Then again, maybe that is why movies always show the future as antiseptic and orderly. Once the robots become aware, they quickly realize that the main obstacle to their success is that guy yacking on his phone in line at the coffee shop, irritating the rest of us. They will then set about creating robots good at recycling people into usable chemicals and that guy suddenly has a coronary.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and the Death Penalty

Posted on by

I fully admit to being a squish on the death penalty. By that I mean I’m mildly against it, but not absolutely against it or even strongly against it. Similarly, I think there are plenty of times when it is warranted, but not so strongly that it is irrational to be opposed to its use. Even so, I respect why most people on the extremes hold their positions and I don’t think they are irrational for doing so.

My view of the death penalty is this. It is morally acceptable to take a life in defense of life. If someone is attacking you or someone else, you can and maybe should use lethal force to prevent it. If in the middle of the night you hear someone breaking into your car and you go to investigate, taking a weapon is prudent. If the thief comes at you, using the weapon is acceptable.

No legitimate government can have privileges, rights and freedoms not loaned to it by the citizens. Since you cannot give what you do not have, the people cannot give the state the right to kill indiscriminately. Therefore, when it comes to the death penalty, the same rules that apply to an individual apply to the state. Society, through its government, can kill in defense of itself and in defense of others.

For most of human history, locking up a threat forever was not possible. Hanging the bad guy who threatened society was the only sure way to know the bad guy was not going to commit more crime. In many parts of the word this is still true. The cost of holding violent criminals for life is prohibitive so death is not just warranted, it is required.

In modern Western countries like America, we can afford to hold murderers in cages forever. We also have the technology to build prisons in such a way as to ensure that these people never escape. In other words, we can neutralize the threat they pose without resorting to lethal means. When you confront the guy breaking into your car, you don’t get to shoot him if he surrenders.

That’s the theory. Reality is something different. Our prisons are not orderly places where the safekeeping of criminals is the top priority. They are warehouses where the criminals largely run the facilities. Crime inside the prisons is worse than even the nastiest American ghetto. The strong prey on the weak and in the most monstrous of ways.

Worse yet, we have lunatics on the bench who enjoy releasing murderers into society for no other reason than to cause mayhem. Demetrius Blackwell, the thug who murdered a NYC cop last week, was repeatedly released into the wild, despite living a life of crime. The death penalty is the only break on this and the only way to know for sure that the threat is neutralized.

Into the mix goes the fact we have mistakenly convicted men of capital crimes, only to release them much later after the wrong was righted by forces outside the normal criminal procedures. If you execute someone, there’s no righting that wrong at a later date. This is, of course, an unassailable argument in the general sense, but no human system will ever be perfect. The question is whether society can accept the imperfections.

Similarly, there is the charge that the death penalty is barbaric and cruel. The ways in which we kill people are poison gas, injected poisons and high voltage. None of them sound all that pleasant, but no one can really know. Maybe Old Sparky is a great way to go out. I do think the walk to the death chamber and the long wait must be horrible, but murderers are not introspective men so I can’t really say for sure.

The Dzhokhar Tsarnaev case is a good example of how this works. For insisting on spelling his name like an eye chart, death is probably warranted, but that’s not why he was sentenced to death. He plotted and executed the bombings of the Boston Marathon. There’s no doubt he is guilty as he admitted to his role during and after the crime. The physical evidence and witness evidence all point to his guilt.

For those in favor of the death penalty on retributive grounds, this is an easy one. The crimes were not just against citizens, but against society. This is not a man who will ever not pose the threat to every living thing around him and the only way to make sure he is not a threat is to kill him.  In most times and places, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev would be dead by now.

If you are against the death penalty it’s much tougher. There’s no question that he is guilty and happy to have done the crimes. The only possible way he could later be found to have not committed these crimes involves the supernatural. Otherwise, he could very well be the most guilty man alive today. Just in case, his verdict will have many reviews before his execution.

That leaves cruelty, but what is more cruel than locking a man in a cage for fifty years? Federal prison is no walk in the park. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will spend the better part of the next decade being raped by black men. If he lives through it, he will live in fear of assassination until his fears are realized. Would you choose that life or death?

Of course, if you are in favor of the death penalty only for retributive reasons, then life in prison is the better choice, but there are limits. Retribution is a necessary part of human society, but it does not have to be gratuitous. Sticking a needle in this guy’s arm is enough to sate the public desire for retribution. There’s no need for torture.