Would They Say Their Sacrifice Was For Naught?

Ah, Memorial day, and here it is a few days past it, and I am still hearing about all the sacrifices so many made.

Well here is a gut check- do you really think many of the soldiers who died for this country would tell you their sacrifice wasn't in vain?

Would those who threw off the British notice the tax our own government puts on tea, not to mention all the other taxes?

I recently heard an account of an Austrian man who designs farms. He comes over here and finds all the things he wants to do are either illegal, or require a truckload of paperwork to do, yet we still obstinately call ourselves the land of the free. Yes, he has had problems with other governments too, but no other nation is quite so blatantly not what they say it is, except maybe North Korea.

But whatever the war, whatever the purported enemy, would the soldiers who died see modern America as what they died protecting, or as a swindle? I'm guessing the further back we go, the more likely they wouldn't recognize America as the land of the free anymore either.

The Real Minority

Lest you be unaware, dear readers, in various places on the internet, the ugly and annoying specter of race versus IQ has reared it's ugly head.
This is largely because some dude named Richwine mentioned actual science in a place were he shouldn't have. This resulted in a firing and much gnashing of teeth. I think I have talked about this before. Let me take a different approach.

People, largely of my own race, forced me to go to public school, except for those two years when my parents let me homeschool. In these public schools there were tests. Those tests consistently informed me that I was different from the other students. The students also noticed I was different. Even when I slacked off and didn't try very hard with the tests, the other students still noticed I was different.

I was discriminated against, regardless of my skin color. I suspect a person with my intelligence, who happened to be black, would be discriminated against, regardless of his skin color. The people doing the discriminating are all too often, stupid people who have the same skin color as the person being discriminated against.

So every time this crap comes up I think about how hard it is to get out and find the sort of environment in which I can be productive, and how much harder it must be for a racial minority, since the current political correctness actually reduces their ability. The current political correctness suggests that everyone is equal, and the public library mentality for many years now has been something about being relevant. What this translates out to is trying to find out what the lowest common denominator wants and providing it. So, what happens for the poor, disadvantaged, but high IQ person? He or she comes to the library to find that the library is now catering to the idiots who like slasher movies, afro-centric erotica, and even video games in many places.

This is particularly sad because libraries are where the smart kids would go. In this era we pretend that we can make smart kids out of everyone.
No. Most people want beer and low brow entertainment.

If Richwine actually erred anywhere, it may have been policy recommendations, but I am not really sure. Immigration is a tough knot, as long as the government refuses to honor the principle of private property. People should be able to travel wherever they are invited, but they shall be able to travel where they aren't invited as well, under our current zombie socialist regime.

But I digress. My point, if you have not noted it yet, is that IQ is more important to people of high IQ than skin color. We are a minority and, unfortunately, society has devolved to the point where it doesn't know what to do with us.

I Prefer Honest Losers

At this point, I think it should be noted that psychiatric medication is not only foolishness, but that it inculcates an intellectual dishonesty in users.
The crackhead, the pot smoker, even the plain old alcoholic have more integrity. Tweakers are highly dangerous and awful at conversation, but they aren't usually playing at therapy.

There is a massive sense of frustration when you realize that you are not, in fact, talking to a reasonably intelligent bourgeois person. No, you are talking to drugs. Indeed the drugs change the mind, alter the personality, shut off any true conversation. I had a thought that I should cast out the drugs, as if I were casting out demons. For they are there, in control, destroying the person while at the same time claiming to be somehow helpful.

Meanwhile there are a plethora of drugs both helpful, illegal, and extremely unlikely to be prescribed.

So, the honest losers are at least getting a decent high out of their regime. And I suspect some folks aren't even losers- we probably could provide ourselves with a host of benefits with very little risk with an intelligent course of steroids. Testosterone would make these people feel better, and the resulting change in body composition would provide the patient with a lasting improved biological environment. Yes, they'd have to learn to eat right and keep themselves running properly, but they'd be in a far better place.

Look at that. In the midst of complaining about people who take psychiatric drugs, I come up with an idea that would actually improve their lives. With an intelligent doctor in charge, they'd probably not even have to worry about liver issues or sterility. This is why psychiatry is such bull. My approach would likely take six weeks and result in improvements in the body which should translate directly into benefits for the mind. There's plenty of research linking the the two, especially the benefits of exercise on mental health. The psychiatric approach consists of medicating with substances that demonstrably destroy the body over time. People experience reduced ability to exercise, gain weight, and begin to have other problems- the solution is often even more medication. Circling the drain rather than healing.

It is precisely the decline in general health and capability that should send up the red flag. People taking these medications should notice they are getting worse, not better. They should also be intellectually honest and note that they want an altered state of consciousness and that there are better ways to achieve such states. This is why people continue to stay on this crap long after the uselessness of it is established; it is a prescribed and therefore legal way to alter consciousness. The better, short term way to alter consciousness is marijuana, and the long term solution is, again, to improve the body so that whatever factors contributing to the crappy state of your consciousness are removed or minimized.

The Faux Patriarchy

I want to describe a plausible situation in the Church, and then point out why the fact this situation can easily exist within the Church suggests a serious problem of compromise with the world.

Suppose a wife chooses to divorce her husband. Both husband and wife are Catholic. Both care enough to show up for Mass, and both believe that they can't go remarry now that they've screwed up their marriage. Both go to confession. Presumably both are in a state of grace, and, of course, both commune.

So, we have a blatant contradiction. They have not reconciled, and yet here they are going to church and partaking of the sacraments as if they have reconciled.

This is the Church compromised with the world, an outgrowth of feminism. The rights of the husband are not upheld in the Church, and the secular courts are regarded as the main decision makers.

The rights of a husband and subsequently, father, are the foundation of any patriarchy. This is a plausible scenario in which I suggest the woman should be told she is in a state of mortal sin as long as she refuses to submit to and live with her husband. If you are capable of realizing this could in fact be the appropriate action, congratulations- you are, in fact, sane, despite the dissonance we often feel in the modern world.

The structure of the family is extremely important, because this is where people actually come from. We are experiencing a drop off in Catholics in no small part because people are not being born Catholic anymore. People are being born bastards. Any Catholicism comes as an afterthought, if the mother remembers some aspect of the Church fondly and she can fit in a baptism in between work and night school. The 'patriarchy' of celibates look at the Church as their own, and draw various conclusions as to why she is such disarray. It is useful to remember that a derivative must rest on and not deviate very far from the underlying asset.

Is the IRS working for Republicans?

I think it has been pretty much a standing reality that our presidents deserve impeachment. Ever since the Whisky Rebellion there's been a reason or two for a senate trial. Now there reasons abound for impeachment today, generated two parts incompetence and no small measure of self-absorbed arrogance, but the oppression of 'tea party' and 'patriot' groups via the IRS have a funny flavor to them- logically they would favor the Republicans far more than Obama.

Why?

The organizations targeted appear to be the sort of organizations that, should they field any candidates, would take votes away from Republicans. Barring their ability to field their own candidates, these organizations are of the sort that could influence Republican candidates and/or office holders locally, potentially reducing the Republican leadership's control.

So why would a Democrat administration risk impeachment to neutralize the thorn in the Republicans side?

Maybe they didn't.

The results would have favored the Republicans politically, and favored your standard American bureaucrat institutionally, so it isn't hard to see various IRS employees seeing this as a righteous and just cause (i.e. self-preservation), since most of these organizations are likely to view the abolition of the IRS with some approval. Both the Democrat and Republican bureaucrat would find all sorts of justifications for this vendetta. It would not take much to put them on the hunt.

Despite the absolute drivel coming out of the White House on various things, this is one of those things that I tend to think they would know- that, politically, the enemy of their enemy, at least in terms of the vote, is their friend. Obama and co. do have a somewhat successful history in terms of winning elections, so one could expect at least some sort of feral cunning in which they would actually encourage more discontent with mainstream Republican idiots like Romney.

Pop Feminism: Why The Like Button Should Be Jettisoned.

“The comments on any article about feminism justify feminism.”

So, that is what your like or share button gets you. And what the comments actually show is that femenists are losing. Oh, don't get me wrong, women still run the world, but even the guys who read this sort of crap will bust out with the "make me a sandwich" line?

The article was in the Rolling Stones, and Grimes is vague. Most of this stuff she notices comes mainly from being famous. She says she doesn't notice it with her male peers, but these people are pretty insulated from one another. Besides, some of the men are actually going to be coming on to her, much like the women who chase down famous men do. The difference, of course, is that the men who are into Grimes are likely to be creepy. Sad, but hey, I don't have much control over who is in my fan club either.

How different would the world be if people were sharing what they were learning, rather than sharing an excuse not to learn.

Learning is better than Liking

So, since Google has decided to abandon Reader, I have to fool around with all these other RSS products. All the other RSS products, at least so far, haven't implemented that fullscreen view where you can just read through a river of news. Most of these rss products want to be social in some way or the other. Everybody has a like button. As a consequence, if there are any posts shared in anyway, they are cutesy, milquetoast, and often feminist. Middle class chicks with too much time on their hands.

The like button sucks.

Here is a better way. An even smaller group of people- at least I would imagine- than people who use RSS, are people who use Spaced Repetition Software. Now, if you are running a service, where you are putting RSS in front of people's eyes, it wouldn't be too hard to put RSS and stuff people want to remember in front of their eyes according to the SRS algorithm. So, if you just had a reader, with no interest in this, the thing wouldn't appear, but if some really heavy content showed up in a feed one day, and I say to myself, "I really need to remember this," so I queue it into the SRS. Or, maybe it is even more awesome than that, so I right click and make a couple of SRS flash cards out of the original text, and possibly go define some terms that were in the post, and add those to my SRS deck...

Do you see where I am going here?

So, you are running this small service for nuts who actually like both RSS and SRS, and information rich stuff is getting shared. The people who want to learn, tend to learn, and as such, are more likely to leave an enriching comment on a blog. Guess what else is out there that sucks? Comment systems. There are feeds for comments. If the comments are any good, they are likely to cause readers to generate more SRS flash cards. You can develop a reputation for commenters.

Maybe your last attempt to use the wisdom of crowds failed miserably. The answer might be to find a wiser crowd.