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Sunday, 4 March 2012
Saturday, 3 March 2012
Friday, 2 March 2012
It'll be wicker men next, mark my words
One eye firmly on the camera
It's hard to pull off this sort of self-conscious moral vanity without a decent director to give you notes.
"That was wonderful, Tracy. I really felt your eco-consciousness there. But you really need to keep the energy down at first or you don't have anywhere to go. Levels, people; levels."
This is why I have absolutely no compunction about satirising worshipers of Blessed Gaia. Every time I think I'm going over the top, they jam the bar another notch higher.
Murder by ethics
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| Morally irrelevant? |
First off, any time an "ethicist" opens his mouth I know that what ever follows will boil down to either, "Do what thou wilt shall be the only law" or "That which is not forbidden is compulsory". The idea that you can turn ethics into a science is farcical. You can become just as much an expert, and probably more so, by running a pub or sweeping floors. An "ethicist" is an academic mountebank at best and a charlatan at worst.
In this case, what has happened is the logical extension when you remove the idea that human life is sacred. I don't mean that metaphorically, I mean literally sacred. It's why in a proper morality killing is only sanctioned in extermis, such as in accordance to the rules of war or as ordinate punishment under the law for treason or other foul crimes. It's why we don't deal with tramps by organising hunts. It's why five men will die trying to save one. It's why slavery is so vile.
It's even the main reason why we don't practice cannibalism or necrophilia. Such practices are more than profane or disgusting, they are sacrilegious. From a Judeo-Christian point of view, it is to defile the image of God.
Now, I don't want to get into the whole abortion debate. I tend not to touch on it because it's the sort of topic that generates far more heat than light and I prefer productive discussions to ones that end with a pair of armed camps glaring at one another. The logic of the Catholic Church, which I subscribe to (the logic, that is), is that only a human fetus can develop into a human being that will possess an immortal soul. We do not know where along the line from fertilised ovum to infant that this happens, but it does and it is therefore logical to err on the side of caution. Hence the prohibitions that Catholic doctrine demand.
With the "ethicists," on the other hand, they have rejected the sanctity of human life and have determined that when it is permissible to kill someone is based largely upon what is most convenient and what the killer can get away with at the time. Their definition that they give of personhood is as tenuous as it is ungrammatical:
Their definition of a person was "an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her."This sort of personhood is about as protective as a G-string. Any third-rate sophist could twist this to justify disposing of anyone at any time. For that matter, what gives the ethicists any authority to establish this as a definition or to declare it set in stone? Once the practice is accepted, the definition can change to fit whomever is next for being declared an unperson. It is, to coin a phrase, a licence to kill.
If we accept their argument even in the tiniest degree, we are staring into the abyss. Why stop with infants? Why not the very ill? The deformed? The old? The homeless? Class enemies? The politically incorrect? Or anyone else the Party decides is undesirable? Why not? Once you've swallowed the camel of infanticide, why strain at the gnat of genocide? And the truly appalling thing is that our world has slid so far that the infanticide isn't enough to show the true evil of this idea. I have to bring up genocide.
If I were a homosexual, for example, I would be denouncing our ethical comrades very loudly indeed. At the moment, the sexually deviant are riding high because they are very popular with the political class. But, as the Jews can tell you, that can change very quickly and when that happens, you don't want to be living in a world where being inconvenient is a capital offence.
One columnist recently pointed out that with this as the moral standard, you could make a nice living breeding babies in quantity to be lobotomised and sold as slaves. Why not? They're "morally irrelevant", after all and once their frontal lobes are detached, they're sure to remain so.
How to deal with these ethicists? I've been reading postings that say that they've been receiving death threats and that there have been plots to murder them. These have, of course, been quite rightly denounced as wrong. I can't think of a blunter word to describe such things. However, what I would say to the ethicists is this: Using your own logic, there cannot be anyone less "morally relevant" than a man who advocates such an abomination of an idea. If anyone deserves to be the recipient of the reward for such irrelevance, it is such vermin.
Perhaps, we should tell them, it is time to revive the old practice of outlawry and declare them beyond the protection of the law and fit for any man to do with them as they will. Think of it as the ethical version of what happens when you live by the sword.
Or perhaps we should, as always in a free society, acknowledge their right to say such vile things, but then use our right to refute them and call them what they are: Evil.
Thursday, 1 March 2012
UNIT might want to hear about this
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| And here's some we made earlier |
Russian Mogul’s Plan: Plant Our Brains in Robots, Keep Them Alive ForeverWhat could possibly be wrong with that?
Wednesday, 29 February 2012
BMW Concept M135i brings the entry level 1 Series into the M performance class
BMW puts a lot of stock into its 1 Series motor cars. As its entry level line, the 1 Series was meant to both eradicate the memory of the failed BMW Compact and to lead first-time BMW owners toward more prestigious performance models, such as the M class. The BMW Concept M135i, which is slated to be put before the public at the 2012 Geneva International Motor Show on March 7, 2012, is BMW’s latest attempt to create a hot hatchback that combines and expands on both the 1 Series and the M lines... Continue Reading BMW Concept M135i brings the entry level 1 Series into the M performance class
Bill and the volcano
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| Personally, I prefer a more traditional approach |
Across the world, as sea levels climb remorselessly, the load-related bending of the crust around the margins of the ocean basins might – in time – act to sufficiently “unclamp” coastal faults such as California’s San Andreas, allowing them to move more easily; at the same time acting to squeeze magma out of susceptible volcanoes that are primed and ready to blow.Global warming causes volcanoes. Even by climate alarmist standards this is so silly on the most basic of grounds that it makes about as much sense as claiming that petting cats causes lightning storms. This lot are so superstitious that they'll be amending the Kyoto treaty to include something about tossing the occasional virgin into Mauna Loa just to be on the safe side.
No wonder James Delingpole has stopped being polite to them.
Max, call your service
Wyoming is preparing for the worst and drawing up plans for if the federal government collapses and the state must survive on its own.
It looks fairly promising until you get to the bit about how civil disputes will be resolved by "Two men enter, one man leaves".
She's got a ticket to park
Yanko Design (The DREADCO of the design world) does it again with their car park meter machine that prints out a map with your assigned parking spot right on your ticket. Imagine the convenience. Imagine the reassurance. Imagine the blistering fury when you discover that some plonker is parked half in your space.
The most entertaining thing will be watching the entire scheme go south as one unusable space leads to the usurping of a second, which turns into a cascade effect that brings it all crashing to a halt.
Tuesday, 28 February 2012
Ingsoc airways
A vintage scene from behind the Iron Curtain:
An elderly couple hears that there will be a delivery of meat at a local store. The husband hurries off to the store. After he has waited on line in the freezing cold for several hours, an official car pulls up and some KGB men get out. They tell the people on line that the meat delivery has been canceled, and that everyone should go home.
This is too much for the old boy. "Is this why we fought and suffered in the Great Patriotic War?" he calls out in exasperation. "Is this all we have to show for sixty years of socialism?"Why this old Cold War joke? Because the KGB man's attitude is still alive and well as this BBC item demonstrates:
One of the KGB men comes over to him. "Pipe down, Grandad," he says. "That's subversive talk. You're old enough to know what would have happened if you'd spoken like that in Stalin's time." The KGB man makes his hand into a gun shape and points it at his head. "Go on home now and stop making trouble."
The old boy goes home. Seeing him empty-handed, his wife says: "Oh no! Don't tell me they've run out of meat again!"
"It's worse than that," says the old boy. "Now they've run out of bullets!"
Former fireman Mr Jones, 67, was on his way to Faro in the Algarve, where he now lives.And here's the kicker (emphasis added):
He was asked to place his belongings, including his scarf, into a tray to pass through the scanner.
However, as he did so, he spotted the woman pass through the area without showing her face.
Speaking to Radio 4's Today programme, he recalled how he said to officials: "I wonder what would happen if I covered my face with my scarf.
"It was a quip. And I expected the guy to say: 'Yeah, I know what you mean mate' but when I got to the end and was putting all my stuff back on, I was bagged by a security guard."
Mr Jones said he was told: "You've made a remark which someone finds offensive. Come with me."
He denied making an offensive remark, saying it was "an observation, nothing more", but he was told he should apologise to a Muslim security guard who was nearby when the comment was made.
Imagine such a scene occurring in 1943 with a German who somehow getting a job running a security post in England. I would have thought that a Muslim security guard working at an airport where he is employed thanks to the heightened security measures due to terrorist attacks by Muslim Jihadists that we are at war with would be a bit more circumspect about what he takes offence at.
This is not what one expects to find in a free society. This sort of petty tyranny is what one expects from the Gestapo or the Stasi, not in Britain. Never mind the farcical, totalitarian idea that a man can be detained because he said something that someone finds offensive, no matter how unreasonably. The appalling notion that a security guard can demand an apology from a member of the public for what offended him is ghastly and everyone involved in this incident and their immediate superiors should be sacked and publicly shamed.
These airport guards, like the police, are public servants and they should conduct themselves accordingly. I've never called a policeman "sir" in my life and the idea that I should is laughable. And I certainly wouldn't do so to a rent-a-cop who is only slightly higher on the evolutionary scale than a traffic warden. It's one thing to haul a man in for insulting a constable to his face in a manner liable to cause a breach of the peace. It's another thing to think that a freeborn Englishman has to tiptoe around some jumped up little Himmler in an ill-fitting uniform and latex gloves whose job it is to molest the travelling public as part of farcical and ineffective screening process. It is monstrous and should not be allowed to stand.
There are only two positive things I took away from this incident. The first is that Mr Jones is consulting with his solicitor about taking legal action and the second is that I thank Heaven that it didn't happen to me. The moment the apology was demanded, I'd have ended up in chokey after letting rip such a bellowing verbal outrage that it would have set off every car alarm between Brighton and Croydon.
Monday, 27 February 2012
An oily home
The idea of living in a converted oil tank is intriguing. At the least, it would look very cool. However, I can't decide which is the worst about this particular proposal:
- All the silly "green" touches.
- The ludicrous, upside down, inside-out layout that has the master bathroom opening on the living room rather than the bedroom.
- The fact that the architect intends to have the tank completely dismantled, taken off site, almost entirely rebuilt and then reassembled at another site.
AIRE mask
Now you can charge up your iPod just by breathing.
Or you may have notice that thing in the wall that the charger plugs into. Apparently, the designer is unaware of it.
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