Stones Cry Out

This is one reason why SSM is not, objectively, marriage. As a rule*, marriage is a culturally and societally managed institution which, through natural processes, results in the next generation being produced. The protection and perpetuation of the next generation is something which society (whether tribal or governmental) has historically been deeply interested in. Rest assured that there is no natural way in which an SSM couple can contribute to producing the next generation. While virtually any relationship between two or more humans can be recognized and, therefore, named “marriage”, “marriage plus surrogate”, “grouping”, “shacking-up”, “brotherhood”, “sisterhood”, or whatever, only a relationship minimally limited to a male – female arrangement can in and of itself produce the next generation (I know, that last part is pretty obvious). As such, marriage between a man and a woman should be recognized as an institution which, as a rule and by design provides for the perpetuation of society; and not as, for example, an arrangement which provides one with governmental benefits.

* By “as a rule” I’m referring to an anomaly free, unencumbered, and properly functioning system. (thanks to Stand to Reason for pretty much everything I just said)

And nonsense.

1. Heh. A history lesson of sorts.
2. The sooner people figure out that human value is uncorrelated with salary, the better.
3. Conservative vs Liberal Supreme Courts (by a paint by numbers metric) measure with respect to freedom of religion.
4. Seems I grew up in a transition period. I think A grades are exceptional, but that as well, Failing means you were also exceptionally unexceptional.
5. Church and men.
6. Snipers and public perception.
7. Heh.
8. Security and Progressive. In a word, yikes.
9. If Picketty is right (capital trumps salary) then gosh, you’d think the President would be proposing policies that encourage investment in markets. Not the reverse, ah, our moron-in-chief.
10. Great muscular strength helps sometimes.

Links?

1. Ms Warren (is probably not running).
2. Macular degeneration and a possible cause.
3. Bake your own energy bars, with some help.
4. State solvency and some suggestions for the basket case states. (earlier post here)
5. Snail poisons.
6. Almost sounds like the “cafeteria Christianity” heresy is enshrined in American common law.
7. Damned lies and statistics.
8. So. We all try to empathize and understand those on the other side of the aisle (or we should). But I completely strike out here. I have no idea why anyone in their right mind would utter the phrase “That is irrelevant”. Because, no. It! Is! Not! I fail to understand any circumstance in which that would not be the only relevant factor.
9. Somebody else here mistakenly assumes the result of the Habermas/Ratzinger debate. Uhm, the argument isn’t as cut and dried as you pretend.
10. Bang for beginners. (if you have bucks)
11. Backwoods epicurean delight?
12. And .. I bought the book. Haven’t read it yet though.

So, what do we find?

1. Consider the hypothetical …
2. Innocence and loss.
3. Snow.
4. Yikes!
5. Where accuracy is king.
6. Your administration, restricting liberty every which way it can.
7. Of income and nation.
8. Camouflage.
9. It looks like a case of overhype. In which “Potentially leading to a solution” actually means potentially maybe leading to something, but … maybe not.
10. The response by Ferguson police examined.

So.

1. Socialism, the goal of the American left is not what it is cracked up to be. (HT)
2. Also on the left, an odd remark. Let’s see, Picketty recently wrote a book offering that investment trumps salary. The left loved it, but seems to fail to notice that SS is salary, not investment, based. Odd that.
3. Economics for our times.
4. An Advertising suggestion.
5. Apparently the right defends Charlie Hebdo, the left does less so. This is strange for a very left wing satirical mag, the actual publication it is unclear why anyone would buy a copy for any reason with attitudes like this.
6. And the American left, trying to distance themselves from freedom of expression, succeeds.
7. Legal PED? Tylenol?
8. On military service.
9. Here’s a stupid idea fronted by Mr Obama.
10. Here is a less stupid idea that Mr Obama might have said, but didn’t.
11. Hmm. So which study is more worthless this one or this one? Kinda seems a wash to me.

So.

1. Hitting the nail with the noetic hammer.
2. We would be guessing alcohol was involved.
3. Energy weapons, … although the writer misses that one suggestion is that energy weapons are used in space because of the small momentum transfer (low recoil).
4. But those duecedly odd and uncouth chemical weapons can join the “Interwebs of things”. Reprising, I guess, Richard Stallman’s notion that every program grows until it can send email to, every houshold appliance gains intelligence until it can serve a web page.
5. So, Wooly mammoth got the flu?
6. I realize my very smart dietitian once said “cheese isn’t food, it’s a condiment” and that advice is very good for my cholesterol levels, but … cheese!!!! (grommit).
7. Ouch evolved.
8. Now, just apply that indemnity from suit to medicine, nuclear power, and other desirable technologies and we’d have more useful progress in other fields.

Links with remarks?

1. My, uninformed guess, would be that this liberal disaproves. Alas, he’s only half right. “Hate crime” are apparently committed when you do a criminal act and the jury decides you have ideological motives. Seems to me that a crime against police may very well fit into this category. Alas, after all, turnabout is fair play, which in this case means if the ideology is one you approve it still makes it a “hate crime”. And the scare quotes are intentional, for the real way clear out of this mess is to remove all traces of “hate crime” from the books.
2. So. Are you the kind of person to laugh at the misfortune of someone young, inexperienced and clumsy? I certainly am.
3. The west coast liberal anti-vaccine crowd gets a wonderfully apt acronymic sendoff. (HT)
4. Look, when you read some statistical result you have don’t have to google for opposing studies. The first thing to do is the Fermi test, do a back of the envelope estimation of the numbers and figure out if you think it is a reasonable quantity. 1 in 30 homeless. No freaking way.
5. So with Ferguson, the kerfuffle (I don’t recall names) in New York and the movie Selma, much ado has been made about how nothing has changed and things are still horribly racist and wicked in America. Alas, this isn’t actually true. As this post points out, things in the 50s were very very bad, but guess what?  Things are very very very different now. Why does lying about the current state of affairs help? Everybody actually knows they are lying. How does it help to destroy your credibility on the outset.

And … Ant-man? Is it too late to change the name?

Hey. Weekend is done.

1. Meta-linking (linking of links), and I will say, the point on the “trauma” is spot on.
2. So, Christmas and Islam.
3. Teh noodity meets the Constitution.
4. One of those models looks like it’s still tracking the data, although it does it by predicting very little warming.
5. Powder go bang.
6. Obamacare and a twist.
7. Nicknames and history.
8. Danger! Danger! Danger!(Will Robinson?)
9. Snarf.
10. Click through, it’s worth your while.
11. Oddly enough actual leadership involves people following your lead. Doesn’t matter what you say, if you can’t get people to follow your lead … and in fact they resist and go the other way either your a bad leader (and didn’t realize they’d not follow) or you intended the result that was achieved (the not following).

Last full day in Jersey.

1. Of course, what he misses is that those millions would be captive Democrats.
2. PC from the CP. Succinct.
3. In that same vein.
4. A suit that shouldn’t win.
5. A question asked.
6. Origen would not seen a difficulty and that was in the 2nd century.
7. If anyone doubts modern liberals are clueless when it comes to Christian beliefs, doubt no longer.
8. Tech and art working together.
9. A very non-standard interpretation of Shostakovitch’s 7th.
10. Uhm, some Duh Science. Stress impacts the immune system negatively. That isn’t news, everyone knows that.

Ok. Back to it, after all, I haven’t stopped reading and saving links, just reporting them. So, what’s in the backlog.

1. Here’s a x-mas suggestion for the old-calendar practitioners who haven’t gotten anything yet. (For those who don’t know, much of the Easter Orthodox are still on the Julian calendar 13 days later than the Gregorian until the end of the century. This is why the Orthodox Easter/Pascha is so wildly different from the West, as both are based on the full moon after the spring equinox, but … when that equinox is changes by 13 days).
2. Mr Degrasse’s 8 “books everyone should read“. Yikes.
3. I haven’t a clue whether Mr Schraub disapproves or approves but, geesh, anyone who holds Israel and ISIS as morally equivalent is ethically blind and should be regarded functionally as a psychopath.
4. Here is another equivalence, possibly slightly less morally suspect.
5. Yet again, repeat ad infintum, the argument against torture is not gotten via consequentialism.
6. I’m not up to speed on hate speech and the legal status of same, but as a layperson one would be lead to suspect that “hate speech” should involve in some way, you know, actual hate or even mild dislike.
7. Speaking of which, there are plenty of liberals who clearly hate conservatives. I wonder if their hate-speech microscope will be turned on themselves in this regard?
8. Union labor and why it sucks so often.
9. Very cool.
10. Graft and equalite, liberte, fraternite (and buckets of blood).
11. A gun (which is sort of on my wish-I-had-one list)

One reflection here. For myself, I think a more succinct way to put it is, the meaning of Christmas is Easter and the Resurrection.

So, Dr Gruber, not a politician. Ya think? This gets much mileage in the press and the liberal politicians are going distance themselves from him as if he he were scalding acid. Abortion as eugenics, to be applied to minorities, hmm. That’s palatable, albeit Ms Sanger was in the camp too I think. Regarding Mr Gruber, the outrage is confusing. I mean, here is a guy who admits selling Obamacare on falsehoods. But I mean, why is the right acting all put out? Those lies were not believed by the right, but by the left. Why is the left not outraged that they were sold a bill of goods? Politics remains very confusing for me.

Some IQ specialist thinks he has evidence that intelligence is not nuture but nature, which will alas irk the (mostly racist) race theorists no end (see this too). So, if it comes out that intelligence (and therefore success in school) are due to nature not nurture, can we stop with the stupidly high inheritance taxes that the left thinks are necessary to stop the “rich” from having unfair advantages?

I wonder what this sort of graph but instead for the WWII Germany/Soviet Eastern front wars would look like. It would be appalling I think. Appropos of that and in the discussion which mention Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo. But like most of the Western canonical history forget that Russian led armies sacked Paris in 1814. The same poster (rightly) mocks those college students of today who are so so so ignorant of history it seems.

Regarding Ms Feinstein and her “release” of CIA investigations on torture. The left’s thesis (which is badly flawed) is (a suggested thesis of her report) is that torture doesn’t work, ergo we shouldn’t do it. Actually historically it seems very very likely that when done efficiently with an understanding of what you are up to, it works and works very well. See Mr Fernandez excellent book  No Way In (or read about the Gestapo and well, anywhere they operated). Look. Every single time a resistance cell loses a member to the torture using establishment everyone has to find a new safe houses, move and so on. Why? This wouldn’t be so if torture was ineffective. But. It is. The argument against torture is not that it isn’t effective or cost effective but that is immoral. It is wrong. That is the only argument needed or which should be used against it.

Mr Schraub has some silly things to say on the topic, some remarks on that include (below the fold ’cause it’s long): Read the rest of this entry

So, Mr Obama is going to offer his “executive order” on immigration tonight. Constitutional scholars are going to offer their opinions. But I’m going to give you a homework assignment, in two parts no less.

Part 1. Imagine a Democrat held Senate/House and a GOP conservative President. Craft what you might see as an abortion executive order that would elicit the same <em>Constitutional</em> objections regarding balance of powers between Congress and Executive as are debated by, say, the Volokh lawyers in the wake of Obama’s immigration order.

Part 2. If you honestly did the homework of part one, explain why (if GOP) you support the part 1 proposal but object to Mr Obama’s proposal or, if a Democrat why you support Mr Obama but reject the GOP proposal.

(note: if you are “consistent” and oppose/support both, this is probably a sign you didn’t honestly complete part 1).

Ms Althouse has some interesting remarks regarding this kerfuffle (I’m going to assume those readers aren’t hiding under baskets and know the actual subject of this particular kerfuffle, which dealt with particular details on an engineer’s shirt during a press release after the successful landing of a satellite on a comet). Mr Reynolds (Instapundit) points that the landing on a comet by a satellite is more important than what a person wears and the “feminists” (or some feminists) were hijacking this event. Ms Althouse in an attempt to “be provocative” suggests:

And I will be more provocative: In the broad span of human culture, fashion is more important than space travel.

She is in some ways correct, in other ways not. I will return her provocative remark by noting that which is important about fashion, is exactly the same as what is important about “space travel” or landing on comets. What is important about fashion is man’s search for beauty. This is the central search in science, space travel, and much of engineering. The search for a beautiful solution is not far adrift from the cathedral (architectural beauty) or fashion (beatiful people/clothing). Beautiful clothes and in general the quest for beauty is precisely what was achieved in a different field (aerospace engineering) as what is sought (and I’d offer rarely found) on the fashion runway. Fashion is not “more important” than space travel. Landing spacecraft on comets is the height of fashion for those who don’t do color and form, but instead do maths.

And I disagree that wearing that shirt is “an attack on feminism”. Feminism celebrates such displays, witness vagina displays, slut walks &c. I’ll also disagree with Ms Althouse that he intentionally “made a statement” by wearing that shirt. More likely, given the engineering culture, is that is was the top “button down” (read as ‘fancy’) shirt in his drawer or closet.