On Disability

All
these pro-disability people are a fucking joke. They're right about one
thing, it's not a good thing to mock disabled people, but they're wrong
about everything else.

Why shouldn't we look for a cure for
blindness or deafness or crippleness? Why should we celebrate disibility
like it were a real accomplishment? It is wrong for the exact same
reason as chastising disibility. In trying to combat
hate or disaproval or "discrimination" or whatever they want to call
it, the pro-disability crowd goes off the deep end in the other
direction, becoming just as fanatical about celebrating what, in
reality, is nothing to celebrate.

That's one of the biggest
gripes I have, that it only makes sense to celebrate or take pride in
accoplishments, not accidents. Why should I be proud of my height, or
race, or the number of fingers and toes I have? I had NOTHING to do with
any of that. It took ZERO effort on my part to achieve any of that. In
what sense, then, should I be proud of what ammounts to chance and
circumstance? If I had nothing to do with it, if I had no choice, didn't
set out to do something and then did it, what does it have to do with
my greatness (or lack thereof)? Nothing.

Everyone is all on the
pride bandwagon. No accomplishments? Didn't succeed at anything in your
entire life? Can't win worth a damn? No problem. You too can be a
champion! Just pick some random aspect of your person, it doesn't really
matter, and claim in a confident voice "I won the genetic lottery!"
It's the ultimate self-esteem booster for losers and lazy people, like
"Everyone Gets A Trophy Day".

There's accomidating disability
(which is what humans do really well, as evient from all those seriously
injured cro magnon skeletons that indicated they lived long lives being
cared for by others), then there's treating it like it's better than
ability, which it's not. Being blind does not make one better than a
sighted person. People with proper hearing shouldn't ALL learn sign
language, doctors should look for a cure for deafness and blindness.
There's a reason we don't have "Polio Pride" or "National Measles Day,"
because people recognise that fatal diseases are nothing to celebrate.
Unfortunately, in this hyper-sensitive society we live in, people DO
celebrate non-fatal diseases*.

I think, but am not certain, the
problem is a faulty association in the pro-disability people the
proposition that |in society it is accepted that the word "disease" =
"moral failure of the individual," or, otherwise, that the word
"disease" is associated with "moral failure of the individual.| I have pointed out before, many times, that being diseased is not a moral
failure. One does not need to feel ashamed to admit one is diseased. One
is not immoral because one is diseased. That is true. However, I think
the pro-disability people are as guilty of perpetuating this faulty
association as the anti-disability people. A scab indicates that a wound
is healing. If you pick the scab it will never heal. It's the same
problem with race baiters, who sabotage healthy race relations just as
much, if not worse, than extreme outspoken racists.

I'm never
going to run a four minute mile, I'll never be able to box like Mike
Tyson, or write music like Mozart, or see properly without mechanical
aid. That doesn't make me immoral, that doesn't make me bad, but I'm not
going to celebrate being slow, or frail, or musically disinclined, or
having poor eyesight. Those are not accomplishments, and I refuse to be
proud of them.

*Disease
noun
A disordered or
incorrectly functioning organ, part, structure, or system of the body
resulting from the effect of genetic or developmental errors, infection,
poisons, nutritional deficiency or imbalance, toxicity, or unfavorable
environmental factors; illness; sickness; ailment.

If a body part, or mental function, or whatever, isn't working properly it is diseased.

Eternal Day

A lovely short program (22 minutes) on the Super Specialty Hospitals founded by Sai Baba. This is in celebration of the 22nd anniversay of the hospitals, which opened in 1991. Tragically, Swami cannot be here in person to witness this event, but he is ever present, even if we cannot see his body.


The lovely ideal of selfless service (seva) is exemplified in this pair of free hospitals which have thus far helped 2.3 million patients.







This is the ideal. This is totally different from universal healthcare/ socialised medicine/ single payer. When people give of themselves of their own will selflessly that is the highest virtue. When a government steals money from people and redistributes it as it sees fit that is worse than thievery. A government cannot mandate morality, or else the value is totally removed. One cannot be moral or virtuous if one is compelled to act in such a way. It is only through one's own will that one may be virtuous.

Funeral Fiasco!

Millions (I guess) attended the funeral of South Africa's most famous native son Nelson Mandela. It was meant to be a solemn occasion, admiring how a radical communist terrorist turned his life around while in prison and adopted love instead of revenge. Instead it was a circus of horrors.



The sign language guy at the
funeral had a schizophrenic episode and made meaningless hand gestures
instead of real sign language. He also has a history of violence and
they let him get within three feet of the President Oblahblah. Guess the
Secret Service was drunk that day - very drunk.



Speaking of Oblahblah, he took a selfie next to Mandela's dead body. He then gave a speech in which he talked entirely
about himself, not mentioning Mandela once. In total he used the words
"I," "Me," "My," and other first person pronouns 5,724 times. His wife
was disgusted. The photographer who took the picture of Oblahblah's wife
being disgusted at Oblahblah's behaviour apologised and then committed
suicide for shaming his one true god. Oh, yeah, Oblahblah also Frenched some blonde.

Nuclear News You DIDN'T Hear

Have you heard the one about the deal between
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan regarding nuclear weapons? No? Maybe the news
was too busy focusing on what inanimate object Miley Cyrus was having
sex with this week.



Stolen Cobalt-60



A truck delivering 40 grams of cobalt-60 pellets, material used in radiotherapy, was hijacked last week in central Mexico. The truck and the cargo was recovered near Hueypoxtla, and the hijackers are believed to have received a fatal dose of radiation.



This was another narrow miss. There is an increasing number of nuclear incidents in the world today. Cobalt-60 is particularly deadly and persistent isotope that was proposed in use for area denial weapons. An area exposed to the fallout of a cobalt bomb would be uninhabitable for 100 years due to lethal levels of radiation. Had this stolen material been placed in a truck bomb like the kind that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, it could contaminate an area of four square miles[1]. If set off at Wall Street the plume of radioactive debris would probably reach the Empire State Building.



Iranian Nukes



"Saudi King Abdullah and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu were
not won over by President Barack Obama's pledges in personal phone calls
to the two Middle East leaders last week not to allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon. Their skepticism only grew."



He probably said something along the lines of "if you like your nuclear program, you can keep it*"



*"Program" does not include "programs Oblahblah does not like," or "programs that do not include abortion on demand until three years after birth." "Like" is a subjective term, subject to verification by Oblahblah and his bureaucrats.



This is exactly what the mullahs wanted. Oblahblah is eating out of their hands. After stalling for time "negotiating," they managed to get Oblahblah to back down and give them everything they wanted and more. Experts estimate that Iran  has enough material to make four nukes already.



Leaders in Saudi Arabia have made clear that if Iran gets a nuke then they will be forced to get one as well, since they may well be the primary target of attack, before Israel even, due to the fierce hatred between rival Muslim factions. Saudi Arabia funded Pakistan's nuclear program, and if push comes to shove they claim to have an agreement whereby Pakistan will deliver weapons to them as compensation.



Both Iran and Saudi Arabia are ticking time bombs in the region. Both are ruled by horrible, knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing, prehistoric, amoral, psychopathic monsters. The war in Syria is, in part, a proxy war between these two repressive regimes that threatens to suck the entire world in with it. If either one gets their hands on a nuke it would be a disaster for every freedom loving, moral human being on the planet.



Iran will not negotiate at all with Israel, and probably won't negotiate with Saudi Arabia either. In the world of inter-tribal warfare the aim is always extermination, and both proto-nuclear nations most definitely are run by tribal strongmen.







Notes

1. "Here the lethal combination of glass and a bomb projected shards at high
speed causing 5 per cent of the deaths and 69 per cent of the injuries
outside the buildings for a radius of over 10 blocks from the blast
centre."



10 blocks, as seen on a map, is about one mile. A circle with a radius of 1 mile has an area of exactly pi square miles. I rounded up to 4 to be safe.

What Idiots Actually Believe About George Zimmerman

THIS IS WHAT IDIOTS ACTUALLY BELIEVE

ADHD As A Difference In Cognition, Not A Disorder

Goes well with the Sufficiently Alien Hypothesis.

Dreams of Foreign Suns

Walking around yesterday I thought about my second great love (my first being freedom), and one of the three original goals I set for my life: space travel. I got to thinking about all those books I loved reading and how the future is almost certainly not going to be like that. The future will not be like The Stars My Destination, Harvest the Fire, Starship Troopers, or The Zero Stone. The future will not be like Star Trek (except maybe Deep Space 9 which was boring and grim and I never watched more than a few episodes) or Firefly.



It has to do with a phenomenon called Dunbar's Number, and a disturbing trend seen with the rapid advancement in technology and the social order.



John Stringfellow in 1848 built a steam-powered flying machine that was the absolute apogee of steam technology. While it did fly it was not powerful enough to carry a person. On 17 December 1903 the Wright brothers made what is recognised as the first piloted powered flight in a heavier-than-air vehicle.



NASA became operational 1 October 1958. 20 February 1962, a little over three years later, John Glenn got into orbit. 12 September 1966, eight years later, Gemini 11 completed the farthest ever orbit of the earth, never to be exceeded, and successfully created artificial gravity with the Agena Target Vehicle. 20 July 1969, ten and a half years later, Apollo 11 lands on the Moon for the first time. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin finally demonstrated that that light in the sky is a real place, and people can go there. 11 December 1972, Apollo 17 spent the most time on the Moon. Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent three days there, and when they left they became the last men ever to land on another celestial body, and the last to leave low Earth orbit.



The past 41 years have been spent doing high school science experiments at 200 km above sea level (and the Russians tried to see if they could kill people by keeping Valeri Polyakov in space for over 400 days. I think he was crippled for about a year after he returned).



Also in 1969 plans were drawn up for Big Gemini, which was superior to the Space Shuttle in every way, but they were scrapped. In 1972 Pioneer 10 was launched. Along with Pioneer 11, and later Voyager 1 and 2 - launched in 1977 - they demonstrated the possibility of sending unmanned spacecraft outside the solar system (as of August 2012 Voyager 1 became the first, and so far only, manmade object to leave the solar system).



NASA had plans for a Mars mission set for 1986 with a colossal football field sized NERVA nuclear rocket, that was successfully tested on the ground (they were buried underground with just the tail spouting highly radioactive jets into the air. At least two men died and had to be buried in salt mines in multi-tonne lead coffins.). The mars mission was scrapped when Congress decided killing Vietnamese people was a better allocation of the $10 billion necessary to build and launch the full size NERVA rocket. There were plans to send manned missions to the moons of Jupiter by the 1990s and Proxima Centauri by the early 2000s using nuclear rockets that were built and successfully tested in the 1960s and 70s. These too were scrapped.



The technology to go to the stars existed 40 years ago and has never been used for political reasons. Yesterday I had the feeling that, like freedom, once the initiative for space travel is lost it can never be gotten back. We will probably never land escape Earth orbit again. (Although the Chinese have plans for a colony on the Moon, let's face it, China is over. The Chinese economy is a house of cards built in mid-air waiting for a stiff breeze and some common sense to knock it over. Without the hundreds of billions in government spending, building ghost cities in the middle of nowhere, the Chinese economy will collapse and then the hundred million surplus men will become the largest demonstration of pure anarchy in history, as, like the man who castrated himself this past week, they have nothing else to live for. It is impossible to build a civilisation on population control and sex-selective abortion that produces 9 males for every 1 female. Sure, the military may crack some skulls and force its way to the Moon, like pretty much everything the Soviets ever did, but the Chinese dreams of empire and space travel are made of gossamer and the dreams of children.)



But there's something bigger than that. A new direction society has taken that threatens the very idea of space travel. As I said earlier:



There is the interesting side question of modern Western society, indeed any extremely affluent society, as to whether it does, in fact, represent a diseased PBC and not merely an alien one. All extremely affluent societies throughout history have been plagued by extreme narcissism and apathy, which is displayed in declining fertility rate. Some societies, such as Japan, are so affluent that they are literally on the fast track to extinction because they simply stop breeding. A PBC that cannot[3] produce children above replacement rate (2.1 births/woman) has no survival value and would, by the above criterion, represent a disease. After the inevitable collapse whatever society that arises to fill the void would be made of individuals who possess viable PBCs. As I mentioned in "Affluence and Apathy", there is a healthy form of affluence, though it has never seemed common enough to prevent an entire affluent society from collapsing. It would be possible for healthy affluent to form a viable society, and so I would classify healthy affluent as alien, though it has never happened before and probably never will.



The United States is the most affluent society ever. One third of the population is obese, including poor people. And along with affluence comes extreme narcissism and apathy, but there is something more. Something that was engineered by the power elite during the Apollo program. The creation of the welfare state coincided with a fundamental shift in the perception of sex in society. Both happened together because the government was setting itself up to become the new parent. No-fault divorce, ever expanding welfare programs, and the shift away from sex for procreation to sex for fun changed the way people viewed their place in society (to be sure, people had sex for fun since the beginning, but men always wanted sons as a matter of pride and women always wanted men around to provide for their children, and in the 1970s there was a shift away from that to "we'll hold off having kids until we're 40, if ever, and just enjoy our permanent adolescence now!"). Now, with the redefinition of marriage away from providing for children to some vague conception of love/lust, the coup d'état is now complete.



The US Department of Education was created in 1979. Before that all schools were run locally, with education tailored to the needs of individual students. Since there has been a shift in a one-size-fits-all education policy, with "no child left behind." The DoE is a gigantic indoctrination program, and they're not even covert about it. Common Core is demonstrably indoctrination. School officials in Memphis provide breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner to kids, and admit that if they had rooms for beds the kids would sleep there permanently. The government sees the only role of parents to be breeding. Once the children are born, they belong to the state.



How did this all begin? Urbanisation. Cities are a statist's best friend. It has to do with a fundamental limitation of the human brain. The human brain seems to be able to hold detailed interpersonal information on at most 150-200 people. There appears to be a correlation between the size of the neocortex of primates and the maximum number of individuals a primate can keep track of and maintain social relationships with. This is Dunbar's number. This is what kept population size limited during almost all of prehistory. (If humans have been around at least 200,000 years, and writing was invented only 5,000 years before present, then prehistory makes up 97.5% of humanity's entire time on the Earth. The earliest cities appear 12,000 years before present, 7,000 years before the start of written history, so cities make up 3.59% of the duration of prehistory. 94% of the time humans have been here was before the first city was built.)







When people live in small communities people care about one another because people can keep track of everyone living in the community. In a city of hundreds of thousands or millions of people this is impossible. People stop caring about the other denizens of the city, and the social structures that keeps a community together never form. The vacuum left over by the lack of a stable community is filled by the government. Private charity gives way to the welfare state, and education becomes indoctrination.



Technology isn't helping either. In 1980 the average person had 3 close friends. In 2011 the average person had 0 close friends. The advent of smart phones, social media, and people taking pictures of their sandwiches and posting them online has served to destroy human interpersonal communication faster than urbanisation ever could. People, for the most part, and especially the Millennials (the first generation to grow up totally under government indoctrination),  are not connected to anyone anymore except the government.



Human sociality is necessary for space travel. Big giant space projects like the colonisation of planets require thousands of people working together, billions of dollars, and the support of entire societies. People stopped caring about space travel, and space programs died in the 1970s. Without all three elements of properly sociable, funded, and motivated people, then landing on Mars or going to the stars is impossible. We appear to have topped out: humans have developed to a certain point, but there is a definite limit to that development, and we're right about there.



Humans appear doomed to low Earth orbit. The future in space I dreamed of as a child seems like it may have evapourated along with the sex and welfare revolutions.