The Movie "Alien" (1979) Presaged By "It! The Terror from Beyond Space" (!958)
If you are a fan of "Alien" you really should watch "It! The Terror From Beyond Space". The plot elements are remarkably similar.
"Political Correctness Is Communist Propaganda Writ Small"
FP: You make the shrewd observation of how political correctness engenders evil because of “the violence that it does to people’s souls by forcing them to say or imply what they do not believe, but must not question.” Can you talk about this a bit?
Dalrymple: Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.
Emphasis mine. Via FrontPage Magazine - Our Culture, What’s Left Of It.
What The Nice Guy Means By "Nice" -- Hint: It's Not "I'm Entitled To Sex"
I had a patient, let’s call him ‘Henry’, who came to hospital after being picked up for police for beating up his fifth wife.
“And why, exactly, were you beating your wife this time?” I asked.
“She was yelling at me, because I was cheating on her with one of my exes.”
“With your ex-wife? One of the ones you beat up?”
“Yeah.”
“So you beat up your wife, she left you, you married someone else, and then she came back and had an affair on the side with you?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” said Henry.
* * *
When I was younger – and I mean from teeanger hood all the way until about three years ago – I was a nice guy. In fact, I’m still a nice guy at heart, I just happen to mysteriously have picked up girlfriends. And I said the same thing as every other nice guy, which is “I am a nice guy, how come girls don’t like me?”
There seems to be some confusion about this, so let me explain what it means, to everyone, for all time.
It does not mean “I am nice in some important cosmic sense, therefore I am entitled to sex with whomever I want.”
It means: “I am a nicer guy than Henry.”
I didn’t think I deserved to have the prettiest girl in school prostrate herself at my feet. But I did think I deserved to not be doing worse than Henry.
(Edited for succinctness.)
Bad news, nice guys: what women (especially feminists) *say* they want, is very different from what they *actually* respond to. Don't listen to their words; instead, observe their actions, then organize your life accordingly.
You Don't Love Science. You Don't Even Know What It Means.
So let me explain what science actually is. Science is the process through which we derive reliable predictive rules through controlled experimentation. That's the science that gives us airplanes and flu vaccines and the Internet. But what almost everyone means when he or she says "science" is something different.
To most people, capital-S Science is the pursuit of capital-T Truth. It is a thing engaged in by people wearing lab coats and/or doing fancy math that nobody else understands. The reason capital-S Science gives us airplanes and flu vaccines is not because it is an incremental engineering process but because scientists are really smart people.
In other words -- and this is the key thing -- when people say "science", what they really mean is magic or truth.
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What we now know as the "scientific revolution" was a repudiation of Aristotle: science, not as knowledge of the ultimate causes of things but as the production of reliable predictive rules through controlled experimentation.
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If you ask most people what science is, they will give you an answer that looks a lot like Aristotelian "science" -- i.e., the exact opposite of what modern science actually is. Capital-S Science is the pursuit of capital-T Truth. And science is something that cannot possibly be understood by mere mortals. It delivers wonders. It has high priests. It has an ideology that must be obeyed.
This leads us astray.
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This is how you get the phenomenon of philistines like Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne thinking science has made God irrelevant, even though, by definition, religion concerns the ultimate causes of things and, again, by definition, science cannot tell you about them.
You might think of science advocate, cultural illiterate, mendacious anti-Catholic propagandist, and possible serial fabulist Neil DeGrasse Tyson and anti-vaccine looney-toon Jenny McCarthy as polar opposites on a pro-science/anti-science spectrum, but in reality they are the two sides of the same coin. Both of them think science is like magic, except one of them is part of the religion and the other isn't.
What you probably mean when you say "I love science" is "I love my tribe." Via How our botched understanding of 'science' ruins everything - The Week.
Judge, prosecutor who let Ray Rice walk toss book at single mom
A 27-year-old Philadelphia mother who says she mistakenly entered New Jersey with a handgun legally registered in her state, was not accepted into a pre-trial intervention program, unlike the former Baltimore Ravens running back who was caught on an elevator surveillance camera punching his then-fiancée and current wife. The disparate decisions, made by the same prosecutor and approved by the same judge, leave Allen facing more than three years in prison and Rice free, though disgraced.
via Uneven playing field? Judge, prosecutor who let Ray Rice walk toss book at single mom.
Truth We Won’t Admit: Drinking Is Healthy
The evidence that abstinence from alcohol is a cause of heart disease and early death is irrefutable--yet this is almost unmentionable in the United States. Even as health bodies like the CDC and Dietary Guidelines for Americans (prepared by Health and Human Services) now recognize the decisive benefits from moderate drinking, each such announcement is met by an onslaught of opposition and criticism, and is always at risk of being reversed.
Noting that even drinking at non-pathological levels above recommended moderate limits gives you a better chance of a longer life than abstaining draws louder protests still. Yet that’s exactly what the evidence tells us.
Via Truth We Won’t Admit: Drinking Is Healthy - Pacific Standard: The Science of Society.
If You Were Outraged Over Spider-Woman's Pose, You Should Feel Dumb After Watching This
Most of the outrage over this is from people who are spring-loaded in the "offended" position. You all need to start exercising some judgment. Or maybe figure out that most feminist outrages are not about what you think they are about (hint: it's not "equality").
New Aura v2 Stable Releases, and More
New v2 releases, and hey, what's this about Aura.Di finally getting auto-resolution of typehinted parameters?
First, we have brand new 2.0.0 stable releases of these v2 packages!
Next, the Aura.Di package just got bumped to 2.0.0-beta2. This package in particular has seen some great new improvements, most notably auto-resolution of typehinted constructor parameters, and a brand-new README. Check it out at https://github.com/auraphp/Aura.Di.
Emphasis not in original; read the whole notice at http://auraphp.com/blog/2014/09/03/new-releases/.
Auto-resolution of typehinted parameters is something I've been against since the beginning of Aura.Di. After having used implicit magical convention for a long time, I have learned to prefer explicit configuration. However, auto-resolution turned out to be relatively simple to add, and the tradeoff of not having to explicitly specify every lazyNew('ClassName') every time on every parameter seems reasonable. (One hopes one does not get burned later for having made this concession.)
Read the Reddit discussion about this post here.
NYTimes: Low Carb Eaters Lose More Fat, Show Better Health
People who avoid carbohydrates and eat more fat, even saturated fat, lose more body fat and have fewer cardiovascular risks than people who follow the low-fat diet that health authorities have favored for decades, a major new study shows.
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The new study was financed by the National Institutes of Health and published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. It included a racially diverse group of 150 men and women -- a rarity in clinical nutrition studies -- who were assigned to follow diets for one year that limited either the amount of carbs or fat that they could eat, but not overall calories.
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By the end of the yearlong trial, people in the low-carbohydrate group had lost about eight pounds more on average than those in the low-fat group. They had significantly greater reductions in body fat than the low-fat group, and improvements in lean muscle mass -- even though neither group changed their levels of physical activity.
While the low-fat group did lose weight, they appeared to lose more muscle than fat.
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By the end of the yearlong trial, people in the low-carbohydrate group had lost about eight pounds more on average than those in the low-fat group. They had significantly greater reductions in body fat than the low-fat group, and improvements in lean muscle mass -- even though neither group changed their levels of physical activity.
While the low-fat group did lose weight, they appeared to lose more muscle than fat.
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In the end, people in the low-carbohydrate group saw markers of inflammation and triglycerides -- a type of fat that circulates in the blood -- plunge. Their HDL, the so-called good cholesterol, rose more sharply than it did for people in the low-fat group.
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Those on the low-carbohydrate diet ultimately did so well that they managed to lower their Framingham risk scores, which calculate the likelihood of a heart attack within the next 10 years. The low-fat group on average had no improvement in their scores.
Score another one for Atkins, Taubes, et al. Note also that this is a direct refutation of the Food Pyramid the Federal government has been shoving down our throats for years. What else have they gotten wrong? Via A Call for a Low-Carb Diet - NYTimes.com.
On This Labor Day: "The Role of Unions", Especially Government Worker Unions
Rhat gave unions their big push in the 1930s was federal legislation allowing them to be the sole bargainer for employees, even for employees who had no wish to join or pay dues. What we do call an organization that is the sole seller? We call it a monopoly. And not the kind of monopoly that some people say Microsoft is or had been. Microsoft always has to compete with other software companies.
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Unions, moreover, have a pretty ugly track record on race relations, which is why two prominent early 20th century black leaders, W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, who agreed on little else, agreed that unions were bad for black workers. When people forcibly prevent you from competing and figure out ways to exclude you from working, you don't feel very good about them.
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Our big challenge with unions nowadays is to rein in unions of government workers who are negotiating high wages and high pensions. That is what is wrecking state and local government budgets all over the United States.
Emphasis mine. Via The Role of Unions, David Henderson | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.