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C O L O U R K E 'Y

Any human observer would expect that the inability to learn would result in the quick eliminations of socialists from the gene pool. But as we see, some of them manage to dress themselves and even to manage at local feeding stations (known widely as ‘supermarkets’).

Thus, some socialists have been known to out-live even Republicans.

“It takes just 15 generations under these conditions for the flies to become genetically programmed to learn better. At the beginning of the experiment, the flies take many hours to learn the difference between the normal and quinine-spiked jellies. The fast-learning strain of flies needs less than an hour.

“But the flies pay a price for fast learning. Kawecki and his colleagues pitted smart fly larvae against a different strain of flies, mixing the insects and giving them a meager supply of yeast to see who would survive. The scientists then ran the same experiment, but with the ordinary relatives of the smart flies competing against the new strain. About half the smart flies survived; 80 percent of the ordinary flies did.”

“Intelligent people tend to over-value intelligence”.

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the web address for the article above is
http://www.abelard.org/news/behaviour0804.php#fruit_fly_socialists_110508

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both the usa and france are now promoting the rescue of the people of burma/myanmar without reference to the junta

It is good news that the West is increasingly moving towards ignoring the dictators club at the UN. It is long past time to put ethical policy ahead of appeasing lunatic dictators who are running slave states.

The three tests for (a just) war suggested by Aquinas are

1. Just cause;
2. Competent authority;
3. Right intention.

The foolish, sloppy-minded relativism of the Left has no place in a civilised world. As the slogan says:

War never solved anything, except for ending slavery, fascism, nazism and communism.

Dictatorships like socialist Madsam in Irak, the Burmese junta, socialist Mugabe and socialist Kim Jong Il are not legitimate states. To treat them as legitimate rulers is madness.

Treating the criminal rulers of these slave states as if they are representatives of legitimate nations, condemns millions to interminable poverty, fear and oppression. These people and the regimes they run are clearly criminal and, wherever possible, they should be treated accordingly.

To allow such criminals and primitives access to modern weaponry is the politics of the madhouse.

“World leaders expressed growing frustration over Myanmar's reluctance to open the country wide to aid after Saturday's cyclone, which a U.S. diplomat said may result in more than 100,000 deaths.

“France's foreign minister called on the United Nations to consider forcing Myanmar's military rulers to accept relief shipments. "This is not a matter of politics; this is a matter of a humanitarian crisis," said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.” [Quoted from moneyweb.co.za]

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the web address for the article above is
http://www.abelard.org/news/behaviour0804.php#burma_usa_france_090508

getting hitched and game theory

Article summary: Women may be scared of being ‘left on the shelf’, but “more attractive” females often delay choosing their life-long mate because they wait for the right man - the most attractive one. Unfortunately, the most attractive men are often grabbed by less attractive women, who do not dither while looking endlessly for someone exactly right.

There is a secondary weakness in waiting. As attractive men become taken, the remaining pool of available men has a higher proportion of less attractive men. Thus, pickety women have a lower chance of finding an attractive man according to their criteria.

The inability to make decisions is a constant weakness in so-called intellectuals, the constant seeking of more information in order to seek more information. An inability to act is an intellectual weakness, a form of cowardice.

The analysis in the article suggests a scenario where the term “more attractive” is being applied to females who show a distinct intellectual weakness and a lack of courage. Perhaps, this becomes a rather narrow definition of “more attractive”.

It seems that these ‘researchers’ are valuing bimbo-ness [physical attractiveness combined with low thinking ability] more highly than evolution values that isolated quality.

[Link from P.J. O’Donovan]

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the web address for the article above is
http://www.abelard.org/news/behaviour0804.php#eligible_bachelor_200408

euler - a great mathematician, have you heard of him?

Interesting light reading - a ‘pot-boiler’ history of mathematics, featuring a mathematician whose discoveries most have met and have used.

“Leonhard Euler (1707–83), one of the great yet little-known figures from Europe’s Age of Enlightenment. Euler’s discoveries continue to influence such disparate fields as computer networking, harmonics, and statistical analysis, and they did nothing less than transform pure mathematics. Children still learn Euler’s lessons in school. It was Euler, for instance, who gave the name i to the square root of –1.”

Euler is responsible for the naming of the symbol π, the creation of two others - e and i, and creation of Euler’s constant, γ . There are also the Euler Numbers: E₀, E₂, E₄, E₆, ... (the odd-numbered are all zero).

“Most mathematicians would die happy knowing a single theorem had been named after them. To have numbers associated with your name is an honor bestowed on very few.”

And what abelard finds interesting is the social background and history. For instance:

“With the improvement in his finances that came with the mathematics professorship, Euler could afford to marry, and he took as his wife Katharina Gsell, the daughter of a Swiss painter whom Peter the Great had invited to his court. He and Katharina had 13 children in their 40 years together. Although only five of those children survived to adulthood, they managed to produce a large number of grandchildren—26 were alive at the time of Euler’s death. Family life seems to have suited the great mathematician. Euler boasted that he could write mathematical papers with an infant on his ­knee—­a claim that would be impressive even for a writer who traded only in words.”

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the web address for the article above is
http://www.abelard.org/news/behaviour0804.php#euler_120408

uk social breakdown is caused by.....

“Family breakdown is a "cancer" behind almost every evil affecting the country, a senior judge will declare today.”
—
“Children from single-parent families are far more likely to do badly at school, suffer poor health, fall into crime, drug abuse, heavy drinking and teenage pregnancy.”

A great deal of the problem is the interminable meddling by socialist governments. Most societies have managed with low rates of ‘marriage’ with extended families and neighbours contributing to child rearing - essentially a local tribe. Yet this foolish ‘judge’ wants still more government ‘action’/interference.

As Hillary [Clinton] correctly says, it takes a village, yet the present UK society makes useful relationships fraught and dangerous. Try to set up your own schooling or other community-based cooperation, and the local busybodies will be down your neck in a trice.

Now ‘judges’ interfere, planning ‘laws’ interfere, police stop anyone who defends themselves, as the state grabs and centralises ever more power.

A major problem is that the courts where idiots like this ‘judge’ sit in isolation and empty pomposity, to act in secret. No society can learn from mistakes if its problems are swept under the carpet, hidden behind a veil of secrecy.

Further, no society can fix its problems while it seeks to apportion ‘blame’. These human tragedies are deliberately hidden from public view. There, the problems fester while the people concerned are frightened to ask for help. Why? Because ignorant ‘social’ ‘workers’ can snatch ‘their’ children and make and enable arbitrary and stupid ‘orders’, backed by ‘judges’.

Social breakdown is, in part, caused by ‘judges’ and their cronies, not by the lack of some romantic, mythical notion of a traditional family.

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the web address for the article above is
http://www.abelard.org/news/behaviour0804.php#family_breakdown_060408

on running out of oil and other resources

It will come that oil will no longer provide the resource that it did. To all intents and purposes, from the point of view of humans, oil will have ‘run out’.

Naive theory and ‘hope’ that a useful replacement will be available cannot be fulfilled until that replacement is established.

The fact that America and several other places appeared to absorb surplus populations does not mean that a similar Shangri-la will magically appear once the pressures go beyond the present holding capacity of the land.

Several civilisations have run out of resources and disappeared/collapsed. The current Western civilisation has no special dispensation.

It becomes a matter of which critical resource runs out first. It doesn’t have to be food, or water, or energy, or living space.

Animals fight over diminishing resources. To stop the worst frictions, it is sane that any need/demand for resources is kept well within limits.

Many peoples in the world want what the West has got. That leads to desertification and rapidly growing pollution, which spread around the world. On a smaller scale, it leads to a Rwanda, as the land is ever more sub-divided to the point there is not enough land to support the population.

Some rail at Malthus. There is no solid reason to claim his understanding was ‘wrong’, though humans are now more dependent (this year) on energy than on food.

Clinging to theory in preference to reality is, in technical speak, ‘nuts’.

‘Running out’ in a human context does not mean every last water molecule disappears. It also doesn’t mean people only have water if they have sufficient ‘money’ to pay for it. As an aside, look at the inflation rate in Zimbabwe, sufficient ‘money’ is meaningless in that circumstance. It is force, not ‘money’, that keeps socialist Mugabe in place.

What ‘running out’ of water means is, there is not enough clean water for humans to survive. Now, that is already the case in many parts of the planet. The empiric data for that is millions are dying each year from contaminated water. Those people have indeed ‘run out’ of water or, if we have to satisfy any pedants, they have ‘run out’ of water to the extent that the water available to them has become insufficient to sustain life.

Of course, what happens in one area can spread to other areas as populations and pollution increase. If the expected melting occurs, vast tracks of land go under the seas.

Denialists can play Mister Micawber, always expecting, or hoping, ‘for something to turn up’, but sane humans, unlike the lilies of the field, use their intelligence in the hope of evading disaster or radical population collapse.

Sane humans even store grain in the good years. The world reserves of grain have now been falling for several years - are they ‘good years’ or ‘bad years’? After all, people are still eating OK so far.

Of course, we can all become vegetarians, but currently the trend is the reverse. We can always hope for another America on the moon.

But people cannot be both sane and be Mister Micawber.

Without filthy fossil fuels, people cannot even run SUVs unless vastly more energy is produced.

The ultimate ‘running out’ relative to humans and human life is you die. Whistling a happy tune is not a sufficient remedy for sane people.

Definition: economic fundamantalist, economic fundamentalism

A magical belief or theory that ‘the market’ will solve all problems without applied human thought, or any political action. A form of fundamentalism (or extremism) that is often suggested as an equally foolish contrast with socialism or ‘Marxism’.

related material
tragedy of the commons

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the web address for the article above is
http://www.abelard.org/news/behaviour0804.php#diminishing_resources_050408

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