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  stupidity and intelligence, socialism and thought

People exaggerate the short-term power of intelligence and under-estimate the super abundance of stupidity available in the world. The stupidity and selfishness of most dressed-up monkeys should never be forgotten.

Dishonesty, shortsightedness and foolishness rule the herds.

The herds bleat for a free lunch, while most farmers measure their stature in the sizes of their bank accounts. The farmers then infect the sheep with their vanities.

Most people can never reach outside their skins, they believe that their own skins demarcate the bounds of the universe.

Most people build their ‘beliefs’ around whatever justifies to their own vacuity and vanity.

They grab onto fashions no differently than teens follow pop groups. They don’t go green on the basis of data and reasoning. They go green out of opportunism, and wear it like a new coat until they can find another newer fad.

Socialism is, as Keynes put it:

“Marxian Socialism must always remain a portent to the historians of Opinion - how a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men, and, through them, the events of history.”

With such a destructive emptiness in the head, why would you suppose its adherents have any time or place for independent thought? Opportunism and fashion is all that is left once you have pithed the spine.

Socialists have been at it for at least 40 years. The socialist watermelons spent great efforts fighting nuclear power and put the world in the position of fire-fighting climate change in the first place. It’s they who undermined American will in Vietnam when the military battle was already won. It is they who tried to keep socialist Madsam in power in Iraq.

And many of the rest are now expending much of their life’s effort in paying out for the parasites.

Thought requires what most see as unnecessary effort.

the web address for the article above is
https://www.abelard.org/news/behaviour0711.php#intelligence_stupidity_241207

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the amazing wealth of the west - the auroran sunset

“Multi-bird roasts, where different types of bird are stuffed inside a larger one, have become the thing to carve this year - and the more birds involved the better. One of the top-sellers is the Waitrose four-bird roast: guinea fowl, duck and turkey breast stuffed inside a goose. Demand has soared 50 per cent this year - even though each roast costs an eyewatering £200 [about $400 USD].

The bird ingredients for a 12-bird multi-bird roast. The birds are 1. Turkey, 2. Goose, 3. Barbary duck, 4. Guinea fowl, 5. Mallard, 6. Poussin, 7. Quail, 8. Partridge, 9. Pigeon squab, 10. Pheasant, 11. Chicken, 12. Aylesbury duck. Credit: dailymail.co.uk

“The surge in popularity may have something to do with TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's creation of a ten-bird roast on his show two years ago. He stuffed an 18lb turkey with a goose, duck, mallard, guinea fowl, chicken, pheasant, partridge, pigeon and woodcock - producing a remarkable Russian doll-like dish. But now his effort, inspired by recipes dating from Tudor times, has been dwarfed by a behemoth containing no fewer than 48 birds of 12 different species. This massive roast, the proud creation of Devon farmer Anne Petch, weighs almost four stone (more than most airlines' baggage allowance), costs £665, and has enough meat to serve 125 people.”

This item was found at Samizdata, which includes some amusingly silly comments left by readers at the original Daily Mail page, together with the silly comment left by the blog author - a comment that is now deleted from the DM page.

the web address for the article above is
https://www.abelard.org/news/behaviour0711.php#stuffed_turkey_231207

precipitate drop in uk reading scores despite constant lies and money wasting by ‘new’ labour [114-page .pdf]

England’s score drops by 13 in 5 years, and its rank drops by sixteen places.

In 2001, England was in third place after Sweden and the Netherlands. Had England maintained its 2001 score, it would have appeared in fourth place rather than nineteenth place in the table.

The countries are in rank order of score changes. The first number to the right is the change in score over 5 years.

New countries have been included, which is driving some positions down.

This report suggests some other worrying trends, such as a rapid reduction in younger teachers entering the system and less reading and less enjoyment of reading reported outside of schools.

Not only is ‘New’ Labour failing in the international arena, it is also not enthusing children to read.

I haven’t read the report in comprehensive detail, paragraph by paragraph and table by table.

the web address for the article above is
https://www.abelard.org/news/behaviour0711.php#uk_reading_281107

the mind of the internet business tiger [3-page article] - xavier

How do the highly successful businesses on the Internet develop, the businesses that exist on the Internet, that have become an integral part of on-line life?

A fair few of these successes come from a handful of young men who think unconventionally.

“Levchin had an idea for a company, and Thiel wanted to invest. In short order Thiel joined as a co-founder, and together they set out to "create the new world currency."

“Their brainchild would change the course of the Internet. They'd bring on several hundred employees to what would become PayPal. They'd sign up more than 20 million users and burn $180 million in funding before breaking even and selling out to eBay (Charts, Fortune 500) for $1.5 billion.

“And then things got interesting. The eBay deal, remarkable only because it happened in the bleakness of 2002, wasn't so much an exit as an explosion. Most of PayPal's key employees left eBay, but they stayed in touch. They even have a name for themselves: the PayPal mafia. And the mafiosi have been busy.

“During the past five years they've been furiously building things - investment firms, philanthropies, solar-power companies, an electric-car maker, a firm that aims to colonize Mars, and of course a slew of Internet companies. It's amazing how many hot web properties can trace their ancestries to PayPal.”
—
“They wanted competitive, well-read, multilingual individuals who, above all else, had a proficiency in math.”
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“Thiel and Levchin also wanted workaholics who were not MBAs, consultants, frat boys, or, God forbid, jocks.”
—
“Recruiting underclassmen from the middle of the country assured Levchin that his charges would have few preconceived notions and fewer social distractions.”
—
“When it came time to hire a high-ranking female engineer, she turned out to be bad at Ping-Pong. Levchin took that as a lack of competitive fire but grudgingly hired her anyway. She quit within six months.”
—
“ "The difference between Google and PayPal was that Google wanted to hire Ph.D.s, and PayPal wanted to hire the people who got into Ph.D. programs and dropped out," [...]”

Lead from Limbic.

the web address for the article above is
https://www.abelard.org/news/behaviour0711.php#net_business_minds_171107

improving statistical analysis - pre-conceptions distorting social policy and ‘scientific results’

“ "I wouldn't be focusing on early sexuality . . . to alter rates of delinquency," she said.

“Perhaps most surprising, the Virginia study found that adolescents who had sex at younger ages were less likely to end up delinquent than those who lost their virginity later. Many factors play into a person's readiness for sex, but in at least some cases sexual relationships may offer an alternative to trouble, the researchers say.

“Even then, there are emotional and physical risks. Young adolescents, in particular, are less likely to use condoms and so are vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies.

“But those are risks that other nations have mitigated with education, Harden and Turkheimer said, while U.S. educators wanting a piece of the nation's $200 million "abstinence only" budget must adhere to a curriculum that links sex to delinquency and explicitly precludes discussion of contraception.

“The new study "really calls into question the usefulness of abstinence education for preventing behavior problems," Harden said, "and questions the bigger underlying assumption that all adolescent sex is always bad."

“Similar re-analyses have begun to undermine other conventional notions about health.

“A recent study by Scottish researchers asked whether the higher IQs seen in breast-fed children are the result of the breast milk they got or some other factor. By comparing the IQs of sibling pairs in which one was breast-fed and the other not, it found that breast milk is irrelevant to IQ and that the mother's IQ explains both the decision to breast-feed and her children's IQ.

“In another example, Arline Geronimus, a University of Michigan professor of health behavior who is now a fellow at Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study, knew that babies born to teenagers are more likely to die in their first year of life than those born to older women.

“ "But that is an apples-to-oranges comparison," she said. In New York City, for example, far more teen mothers live in Harlem than on the Upper East Side, she said, and "there are a lot of differences between those groups."

“So Geronimus looked more closely and got a different answer." ”

the web address for the article above is
https://www.abelard.org/news/behaviour0711.php#preconceptions_151107

gibran on children

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

For those who wish to read more and to recover the redundancy I sacrificed to the bit bin in hyperspace, continue at the linked web-site.

the web address for the article above is
https://www.abelard.org/news/behaviour0711.php#gibran_141107

  judge terms rape of prostitute ‘theft of services’

“The prostitute admitted going to a home on Sept. 20 to have paid sex with a customer but said she was instead gang-raped by four men, including the customer, while he fixed a gun on her.”
—
“She consented and she didn't get paid,'' Deni told the Philadelphia Daily News. ''I thought it was a robbery.''

“Deni also told the newspaper that the case ''minimizes true rape cases and demeans women who are really raped.''

“The chancellor of the Philadelphia Bar Association issued a statement Tuesday that questioned Deni's understanding of the state's rape law.

“ ''The victim has been brutalized twice in this case: first by the assailants, and now by the court,'' Chancellor Jane Leslie Dalton wrote. ''We cannot imagine any circumstances more violent or coercive than being forced to have sex with four men at gunpoint.''

“Carol Tracy, executive director of the Women's Law Project in Philadelphia, called Deni's comments, ''a throwback to the Middle Ages, when rape was a crime against property, not against a person.'' ”

Next, murder will be reclassified as property theft.

the web address for the article above is
https://www.abelard.org/news/behaviour0711.php#rape_theft_051107

socialist madsam’s dam threatens to kill 500,000 in iraq

I wonder how the leftist moonbats will manage to blame this on America.

“The largest dam in Iraq is in serious danger of an imminent collapse that could unleash a trillion-gallon wave of water, possibly killing thousands of people and flooding two of the largest cities in the country, according to new assessments by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other U.S. officials.

“Even in a country gripped by daily bloodshed, the possibility of a catastrophic failure of the Mosul Dam has alarmed American officials, who have concluded that it could lead to as many as 500,000 civilian deaths by drowning Mosul under 65 feet of water and parts of Baghdad under 15 feet, said Abdulkhalik Thanoon Ayoub, the dam manager. "The Mosul dam is judged to have an unacceptable annual failure probability," in the dry wording of an Army Corps of Engineers draft report.”

Baghdad’s population is estimated at around 7 million and Mosul (al-Mawsil) is probably approaching 2 million. A 65-foot wave on Mosul would suggest to me greater than 500,000 deaths on a catastrophic collapse.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers refer to the dam as “the most dangerous dam in the world.”

the web address for the article above is
https://www.abelard.org/news/behaviour0711.php#mosul_dam_011107

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