Author: Jim

war

War with Syria

If crimes committed far away by bad people against other far away bad people are important enough for Americans to go to war over, they are important enough to call Congress back to work early from summer vacation to vote for war or peace. If they are not important enough to interrupt congresscritters summer vacation, …

science

Dysgenics and mutational load

It seems probable that most variation in health, beauty, and IQ is due to genetic load, large numbers of rare genetic variants. About fifteen percent of the human genome is under negative selection, meaning that in about fifteen percent of the human genome, any random change is likely to be harmful, most variants get eliminated …

culture

On Judaism

I have been arguing in the comments with B about Judaism, and in the course of this argument, my position shifted considerably. Judaism was a theocratic national religion, state religion, and ethnic religion, a nation state religion. Just what the doctor ordered, just the kind of thing reactionaries like, just the kind of thing that …

politics

Christians did not build the Cathedral – but Churches did.

The Orthosphere is always apologizing for Christianity, supporting it, and defending it, while I treat as merely markedly less harmful than the belief systems that people are likely to believe when they stop believing in Christianity. And today the Orthosphere publishes a guest post that asserts Christians Did Not Build “The Cathedral” Which tells us: …

culture

Words and meanings

When the ostensive meaning, the nominal meaning, and the nominal ostensive meaning of a word differ, the word is itself a lie, a lie contained in a single word that makes any sentence containing it a lie. A word primarily means what it is used to refer to, its ostensive meaning. During childhood language acquisition, …

economics

On Funding Science

Funding science is not a job that government can do, due to diseconomies of scale, and because government is inherently a religious organization.  It winds up funding pseudo science, thus damaging real science.  The patron has to know and appreciate that field that he is patronizing, and has to personally gain status from the success …