Abstinence & Monogamy

As I have stated many times in the past, the ONLY way to prevent HIV/AIDS....    (H/T)

What has shown the potential to stop the epidemic is well known: behaviour change strategies used in Uganda and (less famously) in Zimbabwe. Uganda turned its epidemic around in the early 1990s with its ABC programme focusing on abstinence for the unmarried and “zero grazing” for the rest. This has since been undermined by aid organizations pushing condoms. Zimbabwe in the ten years to 2007 brought its HIV prevalence down from 27 per cent to 16 per cent -- mainly, according to researchers, through reductions in extramarital, commercial, and casual sexual relations”.

Edward Green, the Harvard researcher, who stumbled upon Uganda’s secret in 1993 has been trying ever since to get recognition for behavior change as the most effective means of dealing with the AIDS epidemic. In his recent book, Broken Promises: How the AIDS Establishment has Betrayed the Developing World (2011), he recounts how, at an AIDS conference in Washington in 2004 his presentation received muted applause.

All that stands in the way is hedonism.

But, when a female college student came to the microphone and exclaimed, “I think people should be able to have as much sex as they want, with as many people as they want,” she received a thunderous, standing ovation.

Yes, logic and self-preservation and delayed gratification be damned.

The Apostle Paul: "People will be lovers of themselves... lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God."

Leadership Fail

Ontario's Dalton McGuinty.

Almost no new net power will be generated by all the green-energy projects hastily funded since the bill was passed, but the average residential consumer will see more than $400 a year added to his power bill for a decade to pay for all the bad contracts with and subsidies to eco-friendly power suppliers.

Incredible.

We remember them

They gave all of their tomorrows so we could have our today. Do take time to pause, remember and give thanks to Almighty God for the sacrifices made for our freedom. And if you know a Veteran, shake his or her hand today, show your appreciation and offer sincere thanks.

Timely message for Nova Scotia

It's not too late... yet.

How Unions Hijacked the Ohio Economy.

"The Occupiers are right when they say our system of wealth redistribution is broken"

"But they’re wrong about what broke it."

Margaret Wente (Globe and Mail) hits the ball out of the park and over the parking lot into freeway traffic.

The richest 1 per cent are not exactly starving out the working poor.... The problem is, our system redistributes the wealth from young to old, and from middle-class workers in the private sector to inefficient and expensive unions in the public sector.

Among the biggest beneficiaries of this redistribution is the higher-education industry. In Canada, we subsidize it directly. In the U.S., it’s subsidized by a vast system of student loans, which have allowed colleges to jack up tuition to sky-high levels. U.S. student debt has hit the trillion-dollar mark. Both systems crank out too many sociologists and too few mechanical engineers. These days, even law-school graduates are having trouble finding work. That’s because the supply has increased far faster than the demand.

The voices of Occupy Wall Street, argues Mr. Anderson and others, are the voices of the downwardly mobile who are acutely aware of their threatened social status and need someone to blame. These are people who weren’t interested in just any white-collar work. They wanted to do transformational, world-saving work – which would presumably be underwritten by taxing the rich. They now face the worst job market in a generation. But their predicament is at least in part of their own making. And none of the solutions they propose will address their problem.

Do send Wente's article to all the high school and university students you know, for economic lessons are much too painful to be learned through hindsight alone.

The coming generation(s) of potential workers must be taught the fundamental economic concept of labour value. Not all labour is of equal value, and the value of labour is variable, affected mainly by supply and demand.

The number one priority after high school is not to party and have a good time or to pip off to college or uni to get out from your parents' home. No, the number one priority is to obtain training in skills that are valuable to individuals and businesses -- aka The Market -- thus increasing the odds of finding gainful employment with an income level sufficient for sustaining oneself and (potentially) a family.

Get that single priority mixed up and you will likely wind up highly indebted and working low pay jobs, or worse, not working at all and living in a tent in downtown Toronto or Vancouver illogically complaining about how "the man" has robbed you of your future.

What does this mean in reality? It means you need to consider studying fields like mathematics, business, engineering, medicine and computer science, or pursuing specialization is particular trades, such as plumbing, construction, electrical, welding, etc. so that you have a footing of knowledge and skill that lines up with demand today and is more likely to line up with demand for the foreseeable future. It means putting educational dollars to work today to increase the odds generating income so that, should you choose to do so, you can finance a feel-good period of study that does not generate income later in life... AFTER you are earning income.

The lie at the heart of higher education is that you will be paid for effort alone, that you will earn big money because you did the work of completing a degree. The world just doesn't work that way. The world pays those whose knowledge and expertise bring value to the consumer and enable them to make money more efficiently.

H/T 

Update 15:30: "And if you have any intention of building up a political case for bailing out your bad decisions, you might start with taking even one percent responsibility for them." Burn.

How's that Arab Spring working for you?

Egypt is experiencing the new found "freedom" of sharia.

Arab Spring, Egyptian edition: a 17 year old Christian in a high school in Mallawi was ordered by his teacher to cover up a tattoo of a cross on his wrist. True to his faith, he refused to do so and instead exposed a crucifix that he wore around his neck. He was then beaten to death by his teacher and two Muslim students....

"Scientific heresy"

To whet your appetite:

The [IPCC's] glacier claim was not peer reviewed; nor was the alteration to the sensitivity function Lewis spotted. The journalist Donna Laframboise got volunteers all over the world to help her count the times the IPCC used non-peer reviewed literature. Her conclusion is that*: “Of the 18,531 references in the 2007 Climate Bible we found 5,587 - a full 30% - to be non peer-reviewed.”

Yet even to say things like this is to commit heresy. To stand up and say, within a university or within the BBC, that you do not think global warming is dangerous gets you the sort of reaction that standing up in the Vatican and saying you don’t think God is good would get. Believe me, I have tried it.

Does it matter? Suppose I am right that much of what passes for mainstream climate science is now infested with pseudoscience, buttressed by a bad case of confirmation bias, reliant on wishful thinking, given a free pass by biased reporting and dogmatically intolerant of dissent. So what?

After all there’s pseudoscience and confirmation bias among the climate heretics too.

Well here’s why it matters. The alarmists have been handed power over our lives; the heretics have not. Remember Britain’s unilateral climate act is officially expected to cost the hard-pressed UK economy £18.3 billion a year for the next 39 years and achieve an unmeasurably small change in carbon dioxide levels.

At least* sceptics do not cover the hills of Scotland with useless, expensive, duke-subsidising wind turbines whose manufacture causes pollution in Inner Mongolia and which kill rare raptors such as this griffon vulture.

At least crop circle believers cannot almost double your electricity bills and increase fuel poverty while driving jobs to Asia, to support their fetish.

At least creationists have not persuaded the BBC that balanced reporting is no longer necessary.

At least homeopaths have not made expensive condensing boilers, which shut down in cold weather, compulsory, as John Prescott did in 2005.

At least astrologers have not driven millions of people into real hunger, perhaps killing 192,000 last year according to one conservative estimate, by diverting 5% of the world’s grain crop into motor fuel*.

That’s why it matters. We’ve been asked to take some very painful cures. So we need to be sure the patient has a brain tumour rather than a nosebleed.

Handing the reins of power to pseudoscience has an unhappy history. Remember eugenics. Around 1910 the vast majority of scientists and other intellectuals agreed that nationalizing reproductive decisions so as to stop poor, disabled and stupid people from having babies was not just a practical but a moral imperative of great urgency.

“There is now no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact,” said George Bernard Shaw*, “that nothing but a eugenics religion can save our civilization from the fate that has overtaken all previous civilizations.’’ By the skin of its teeth, mainly because of a brave Liberal MP called Josiah Wedgwood, Britain never handed legal power to the eugenics movement. Germany did.

Or remember Trofim Lysenko*, a pseudoscientific crank with a strange idea that crops could be trained to do what you wanted and that Mendelian genetics was bunk. His ideas became the official scientific religion of the Soviet Union and killed millions; his critics, such as the geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, ended up dead in prison.

Am I going too far in making these comparisons? I don’t think so. James Hansen of NASA says oil firm executives should be tried for crimes against humanity. (Remember this is the man who is in charge of one of the supposedly impartial data sets about global temperatures.) John Beddington, Britain's chief scientific adviser, said this year that just as we are "grossly intolerant of racism", so we should also be "grossly intolerant of pseudoscience", in which he included all forms of climate-change scepticism.

Do send it to your friends and family.

The employee fights back

As I commented previously, the spectacle of irate customers jumping over counters at fast-food chains to assault employees, and/or ransacking the restaurant, will end only when the assailants are met with equal or greater opposing force, which police cannot logically provide because they cannot be everywhere at the same time.

The latest scene: Greenwich Village, NYC. Two punk females thought they could assault an employee, a man we should add, without consequences. Except this time Rayon McIntosh fought back. Remember that name, folks. We need more like him. Videos: 1, 2.

It appeared to have started when two female customers argued and yelled obscenities at the cashier when he questioned a $50 bill they gave him.

One of the female customers then slapped the cashier. A woman is then seen jumping over the counter while the other woman goes behind the register.

That’s when the cashier can be seen on the video disappearing into the back of the fast-food restaurant. He comes back with a metal rod and begins hitting the women.

And they deserved every last blow. They started it, he finished it, well I might add. They are NOT victims.

But, hang on, this is America, and a black man having already been assaulted and now under threat laying a beating on two black women is a problem. Outrageously, Rayon "was arrested and charged with two counts of felony assault and criminal possession of a weapon." Apparently, he should have stopped hitting the two females once they were down, even though the videos show they kept trying to get up.

Worse still:

The owner of that McDonald’s said in a statement that she was "disturbed" by what happened and said the cashier is no longer employed there.

The absolutely wrong message being sent to the public and the remaining employees: Defend the business, defend yourself, and you'll at least get fired, if not arrested.

For utter shame.

McIntosh questioned a counterfeit bill. He was doing his job and protecting his employer. His actions prevented possible assaults on other employees. The incapacitated females certainly weren't going to trash her store. This owner should be selling Rayon McIntosh t-shirts at the front of her shop and hoisting a banner across the front of her store saying "Rayon works here." Yet what does she turn around and do? Fire the man who defended himself from further assault and did his job as an employee.

Alas, for every Rayon there's at least one shortsighted owner who don't seem to understand that each time they buckle in the face of the unruly mob they invite further attacks and financial loss. People like this will get what they deserve, just like the two presumptuous black females who thought they could follow unscathed in the footsteps of those who went on similar rampages before them.

The greedy anti-greedy

"Occupy Wall Street" is going global.

The irony of "anti-greed protestors" demanding that the state use policy to close the gap between the rich and the poor would be amusing, if not downright hilarious, were it not so ill-conceived, short-sighted and dangerous.

Cleansed of Jews

Remember: this is coming from a PLO official, the supposed "good guys,"  as opposed to the terrorists, Hamas.

On the desired WestBank-Gaza Arab state:

The future independent Palestinian state will not include a Jewish minority, a top Palestinian official told USA Today on Wednesday, adding that it was in the best interest of both peoples to "be separated."

One assumes the WestBank-Gaza Arabs no longer have a problem with the "apartheid wall" either, which has definitely proven to be in the best interest of the Jews.

As I've been saying for years....

Climate cycles are driven by that big ball of fire in the sky, not farting cows and long-haul trucking.

The first results from the lab's CLOUD ("Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets") experiment published in Nature today confirm that cosmic rays spur the formation of clouds through ion-induced nucleation. Current thinking posits that half of the Earth's clouds are formed through nucleation. The paper is entitled Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation.

This has significant implications for climate science because water vapour and clouds play a large role in determining global temperatures. Tiny changes in overall cloud cover can result in relatively large temperature changes.

Unsurprisingly, it's a politically sensitive topic, as it provides support for a "heliocentric" rather than "anthropogenic" approach to climate change: the sun plays a large role in modulating the quantity of cosmic rays reaching the upper atmosphere of the Earth.

Well, DUH! (H/T)

First Egypt...

Then Libya.

"Islam is the Religion of the State, and the principal source of legislation is Islamic Jurisprudence (Sharia)"

Funny, how those "moderate" Muslim peoples, if left to their own devices, turn to radical sharia each and every time the ruthless strong man of the region is removed.

So long, Jack

I oppose practically every policy statement of the NDP. But Jack Layton took the party to new heights and served his party and constituents well. For that, he is to be commended. He will be missed.

May he rest in peace.

Supersize Me

It's hard to know what's worse: a woman who thinks morbid obesity is generally attractive to men, or a single mother whose myopic and ironically dwarfed goal will soon render her unable to move and thus participate fully in the lives of her teenage sons, or an unemployed person living on disability income and/or public dole (I presume) who can purposely buy and eat so much food as to reach 1500lbs and beyond. Where else but in the West?

What I do know is the combination of all three is appalling.

Obese model Susanne Eman is saying 'Supersize Me' for real - in her bid to become the fattest woman ever.

The 52-stone bombshell aims to reach a whopping 115 stone, or 1,600lb, by guzzling at least 20,000 calories a day.

Susanne, 32, from Arizona, USA, hopes to pass the half-way milestone of 57 stones by the end of the year.

The libertarian in me wants to say "go ahead, lady, eat what you want, check out of your sons' lives, and die before your time. It's your call. Just do it on your own dime, not mine." (Yes, I know she lives in Arizona, so it's not really my dime. But it is somebody's.)

But then the Dad in me screams in disgust at the selfishness of this single mother, blithely squandering the opportunity to push her sons higher, farther, upward. The picture of the boys on the couch next to their engorged mother is shocking. She's smiling. They aren't. Gee, I wonder why?

Could it be THEY aren't as excited about their mother purposely getting incredibly fat? Could it be that they know perfectly well what their mother's dream means for them through their teen years -- tending on her hand and foot as she becomes immobile, arranging for her cleanings, looking out to themselves for meals, laundry, house cleaning, etc. not to mention watching their mother slowly eat herself to death? Could it be they aren't entirely thrilled with their mother literally eating their college education funds? Could it be they are exhausted from the mercilessly precise taunts of other youths who know their mom is enormous and trying to become gargantuan? Could it be they don't subscribe to the abnormal perspectives of her 'Super Size Big Beautiful Women' fan base and support group?

I suspect it is all these and more. It could very well be they are just numb to the inanity of it all.

What an absolute human tragedy on every angle, or, should I say, curve.

Police can't stop flash mobs

CNN reports:

This week in Germantown, Maryland, it took less than a minute for a flash mob of teenagers to descend on a 7-Eleven, ransack shelves and make off with hundreds of dollars worth of stuff.

It's going to take much longer for police in Montgomery County to figure out how to prevent it from happening again.

They'll be figuring for a long time. Why? Because police cannot prevent flash mobs of the 7-Eleven type. 

Flash mobs exploit the two fundamental weaknesses of reliance on "police protection" -- a) presence and b) response time. The police cannot be everywhere at the same time, and when seconds count they are only minutes away.

The primary reason why flash mobs continue to occur is that the risk is much less than the reward. None of the mob are getting smacked down. None of the mob are being killed. They are virtually unopposed. The critical question is how to change the risk-reward ratio so that the risk outweighs any perceived benefit to the antisocial flash mob types.

The answer is to encourage and promote and support store owners and other private citizens to take enforcement of the law into their own hands, to protect their private property from theft and vandalism. This is the ONLY way to solve the presence and response problem.

The group of teens that attempts to rob a 7-Eleven and is set upon by the owners and law-abiding citizens before being handed over to police will no longer engage in the behaviour. The group of teens that are held at gunpoint and/or shot and wounded or killed for daring to ransack a shop will not engage in the behaviour again. What is more, even the most thick-headed miscreant will begin to understand that the risk is too great to continue such mindless crime.

Flash mobs cannot be reasoned with. They cannot be argued with. Their force must be met with equal or (preferably) overwhelming force. Or, as Ann Coulter succinctly says, flash mobs must be crushed.

The trouble is, police cannot crush flash mobs of the 7-Eleven type. Were they able to organize quickly enough and really put power to the pavement, they might manage to put down a multi-street Philly type of flash mob. But not the individual store type of flash mob. For that to be stopped, the citizens must be empowered, supported and encouraged to defend themselves and their property.

If police are not prepared to do that then all bets are off and we can expect flash mobs to become more numerous, more bold and more sophisticated.