Friday, September 25, 2015

Stick to Theology

If I had unlimited time and money, I would memorize this article.

"Entrepreneurial capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid." With those 10 words, spoken to an audience at Georgetown University in 2013, philanthropist rock star Bono demonstrated a keener understanding of economic reality than the leader of global Catholicism.
The U2 frontman clearly has it right—and Pope Francis is wrong to suggest that poverty is growing, or that capitalism, free markets, and globalization are fueling the (non-existent) problem. In just two decades, extreme poverty has been reduced by more than 50 percent. "In 1990, almost half of the population in developing regions lived on less than $1.25 a day," reads a 2014 report from the United Nations. "This rate dropped to 22 per cent by 2010, reducing the number of people living in extreme poverty by 700 million."

https://reason.com/blog/2015/09/21/if-pope-francis-wants-to-help-the-poor-h

Sunday, September 20, 2015

Complexity of Analysis for Vet Suicide

Beginning in 2005, suicide rates among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans started to climb sharply, and the military and Veterans Affairs created a number of programs to fight the problem. Despite spending hundreds of millions on research, the department and the military still know little about how combat experience affects suicide risk, according to suicide researchers focused on the military.
Many recent studies have focused on whether deployment was a risk factor for suicide, and found that it was not.
The results appeared to show something paradoxical: Those deployed to war were actually less likely to commit suicide. But critics of the studies say most people deployed in war zones do not face enemy fire. The risk for true combat veterans is hidden in the larger results, and has never been properly examined, they assert.
“They may have 10 times the risk, they may have 100 times, and we don’t know, because no one has looked,” said Michael Schoenbaum, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/20/us/marine-battalion-veterans-scarred-by-suicides-turn-to-one-another-for-help.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

Saturday, September 19, 2015

"New" Human?

"What we are seeing is more and more species of creatures that suggests that nature was experimenting with how to evolve humans, thus giving rise to several different types of human-like creatures originating in parallel in different parts of Africa. Only one line eventually survived to give rise to us," he told BBC News.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34192447

Self defense? What a Stupid Idea

In times past, feminists urged self-reliance as a means of fighting rape — through, for example, self-defense classes. In June, The New England Journal of Medicine published a study of a Canadian program that cut the risk of rape by nearly half, and the rate of attempted rape by even more. In four three-hour sessions, the program trained female students on assessing risk among male acquaintances, overcoming obstacles to resisting coercion, practicing verbal and physical resistance and focusing on their own desires and relationship values. ‘‘Effective interventions focusing on men’s behavior are also needed,’’ the authors of the study said. Yet student activists argue that the burden should be almost entirely on men to stop sexually assaulting women, not on women to keep themselves out of danger. ‘‘If someone is so incapacitated they can’t stand up or use their words, then you should not be having sex with that person,’’ said Jessica Fournier, a Harvard junior who belongs to the survivor group Our Harvard Can Do Better. ‘‘That’s where the focus needs to be. That’s much more effective than giving out a list of 5,000 things victims shouldn’t do.’’
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/magazine/the-return-of-the-sex-wars.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=1

This is how jacked up philosophy can become.  If it was your daughter, would you tell her to do whatever she wants to do, no matter the risk?  Of course you would not.  You would teach her how to take care of herself to reduce the risk of suffering injury and pain.  You would explain that no matter how wrong the other party was, that won't make the injury or pain go away.

These people teaching women to love victimhood are brutalizing a generation.

This is spot on:
"To Halley, it’s strange to hear feminists appealing to men to change their behavior while leaving women out of the equation. ‘‘I’m really troubled by this trend in which women are helpless and passive and men are the big responsible protectors,’’ she said. ‘‘That’s the ideology of the gilded cage. It’s astonishing to see feminists reawakening it uncritically. If young people are going to have a robust role in creating the conditions they want to live in, feminists have to call off this ban on discussing the risks and the moral ambiguities that come up with excessive alcohol use.’’"

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

How To Help the Rich by "sticking it to the rich"

We have been having a very strange debate about income inequality in the United States for the past several years, one focused almost exclusively on the status of the hated “1 percent” or super-rich segments within it. From an economic point of view, this is deeply stupid: If Lloyd Blankfein takes a $100,000-a-year pay cut next year, that isn’t going to translate into two $50,000-a-year jobs for dropouts from P.S. 154 in the Bronx. But from a political point of view, concentrating on the 1 percent makes a great deal of sense to progressives: It is not, after all, conservative-dominated institutions run by Republican-affiliated unions that have failed the poor, the black, and the brown in practically every city in the United States.
The Left’s answer to the challenge of targeting our expenditures toward those Americans who most need them is to subsidize another round of loans, which will pass through Little Moonbeam on their way to her $150,000-a-year women’s-studies professor and the university’s $800,000-a-year president. That’ll show those rich people!
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/423937/student-loan-scandal