UPDATED: Slow! Critters Crossing

Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Ethics

A delightful little opossum graced us with a visit the other day. Opossums are shy, nocturnal creatures, so it was indeed a treat to watch him and snap him drinking from the bird bath. My mother’s was the keen little eye that spied him.

Sadly, while out for a constitutional, I spotted the little guy. “When attacked by predators, opossums ‘play dead’ or ‘play possum’ by collapsing and lying still.” This little critter, however, was dead; roadkill of a careless driver. Probably a speeding kid.

Signs that read “Slow: [bloody, rude] kids crossing” are everywhere around the neighborhood.

These gentle critters deserve the same consideration.

UPDATE: In reply to the Facebook thread:

Fred, I hardly think that these sloth-like, slow and shy Marsupials can by their nature do the damage you describe. Sounds like nonsense on stilts. You must mean racoons; they are aggressive and quick to pounce. The creature that wreaks the most havoc on little critters in the wild is the common household cat: voles, shrews, birds: they don’t stand a chance. I recall once reading a study in Scientific American, I think (but unsure) about the eradication of small species by cats, feral and other.

UPDATE II: Pseudoscience Bolsters Violence-Against-Women Claims

Feminism, Gender, Propaganda, Pseudoscience

“Sub-Science Bolsters Violence-Against-Women Claims” was penned in the late 1990s. It dealt with a subject few questioned at the time: the pseudoscience that undergirds the violence-against-women claims and attendant policy in Canada. You know: the one-in-four women are assaulted rot, etc.

In particular, the column questioned the reliability and validity of the 1993 StatsCan Violence Against Women survey, together with other equally outrageous surveys like the CanPan, which propped up the inflated numbers nobody questioned; the same numbers advocates bandy about and politicians rely on for drafting policy and plumping for resources.

Wendy McElroy schools us on the “statistical myths” that pervade the rape-is-rampant claims, stateside. There’s a lot that goes into skewing data; starting with “deeply biased researchers,” to proceeding from a “false premise or assumption,” to using biased and small samples whose selection is further biased by paying participants, to the general pitfalls of survey methodology (leading questions have always been a big problem; surveys are dodgy on many counts).

Having done years of statistics at a good school (a non-American, South-African-before-“freedom” university), this is all simple, straightforward research methodology.

In the realm of “never admit there is sound contradicting evidence,” this tidbit is particularly interesting:

“Federal data estimate that about one in five women becomes the victim of sexual assault while in college, most of which is committed by assailants known to the victim” (National Center for Injury Prevention and Control 2012).

The 1-in-5 figure has been exhaustively debunked for many months and should be rendered unresurrectable by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) report (12/14) that found the actual rate of rape to be 0.61 percent per year – or 6.1 per 1,000 students.

MORE.

By the way, like their liberal sisters, conservative teletarts also cite these bogus statistics.

UPDATE I (1/26): A must read: “Gender Studies, an Aberrant Ideology” by Steve Moxon, contributor to the great Quarterly Review.

UPDATE II: Gender Studies is not only an aberrant ideology, but I doubt very much that it qualifies as an intellectual discipline, a thing the ancient Greeks thought up. Gender Studies is an intellectual aberration.

State Of Disunion, 2015 (Master of Cliches & Cupidity)

Barack Obama, Economy, Media, Private Property

That TIME calls this State Of Disunion “a new vision” says more about this rag than about the dreadful cur that is Barack Obama.

He began his extravaganza by fudging on the economy, neglecting to mention that the indices he touts as terrific are a function of trickery; of omitting that more people than ever have dropped out of the workforce for good, are not working; are receiving state assistance, and that the bumper crops of ignoramuses graduating from colleges are without the prospect of a job.

Regarding those millions who’ve gained healthcare coverage: how many have lost it? How many like this family are paying exorbitant copays and deductibles?

Onan No. 1 takes credit for economic growth such as it is. The economy grew despite government and because of private sector productivity and industry.

The media should be expressing its collective disgust, as I am, that the same hollow cliches are tumbling from this moron’s mouth this year like years past: everyone “gets their fair shot, everyone does their fair share, everyone plays by the same set of rules.”

One’s so-called “share” of private property is a result of one’s effort to accrue it, or the efforts and abilities of one’s kin, if property is bequeathed.

The same media that won’t scold this insufferable scold for his cretinous cliches won’t roar some truths in response to the many free goods BHO is offering. Those truths are that there is no free lunch. Someone pays, except that someone is invisible (and is certainly not sitting in the First Lady’s Box).

The Cuba comment about “ending the embargo” is fine; a very good thing, at last.

The text of the 2015 State of the Union is here.

From The Pen Of Marine LePen

IMMIGRATION, Islam, Jihad, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Logic, Media

I shared a sneaking suspicion about the media vis-à-vis the Charlies Hebdo horror: The former is running scared. Here: “The malfunctioning Media must have gotten something of a fright at the horrific events unfolding in Paris … Truth tellers who seldom get a hearing on the idiot’s lantern, Fox News included, have been called upon to shed light where media and their cyphers in skirts have shed only darkness.”

My much-missed colleague, Vox Day, concurs. He writes:

Interesting to see the New York Times run an opinion piece written by the leader of France’s Front National, Marine LePen … It would appear that events in Paris have so frightened the editors of the New York Times that they’re actually willing to countenance the discussion of immigration and Islamization. What LePen is suggesting is far from sufficient, obviously, but it is a start.

However, the fact that both the French and German governments have banned anti-Mahometan marches this week tends to indicate that some sort of democratic upheaval will be required before any serious action is taken.

MORE from the pen of LePen, who quotes Albert Camus. Neat. However, while castigating the left for refusing to name names, LePen resorts to similar linguistic trickery, writing that “France … was attacked on its own soil by a totalitarian ideology.”

A concept—“totalitarian ideology”—can attack and kill in the same way that violence hits a country, not at all.

Killers kill. Violent individual attack. … etc.