NEWS YOU CAN USE: Meat-Love: You May Have Pork, Too. Eating More Lean Chicken, Beef & Pork Builds 3.6kg of Lean Mass + Cuts Abdominal Obesity by 7% in Obese Australians.
COME NOW, BE SMART: Should you marry someone who promises you that “there will be no divorce”?
I asked him whether he thought it was enough that this woman told him that “three will be no divorce”. He said yes. This woman had experienced the divorce of her own parents and she was resolved (by act of will) never to let that happen to her. He found that acceptable, but I didn’t because I know the numbers on this, and I know that children of divorced parents are more likely to divorce themselves. So the pain of divorce is no deterrent here.
So should we believe that people can avoid a divorce just by saying they will? I told him no. And for an example, I offered a thought experiment. I said to imagine two runners on a track who are charged with completing 10 laps. One runner is a Navy SEAL like Mike Murphy, who has been trained to run miles and miles carrying a 60 pound load. In the mountains. The other is a 300-lb couch potato whose idea of exercise is reaching for the TV remote control. Suppose I ask both runners: do you intend to finish the 10 laps? Should I believe them if they both say yes?
P VALUES, the ‘gold standard’ of statistical validity, are not as reliable as many scientists assume.
But then reality intervened. Sensitive to controversies over reproducibility, Motyl and his adviser, Brian Nosek, decided to replicate the study. With extra data, the Pvalue came out as 0.59 — not even close to the conventional level of significance, 0.05. The effect had disappeared, and with it, Motyl’s dreams of youthful fame.
It turned out that the problem was not in the data or in Motyl’s analyses. It lay in the surprisingly slippery nature of the P value, which is neither as reliable nor as objective as most scientists assume. “P values are not doing their job, because they can’t,” says Stephen Ziliak, an economist at Roosevelt University in Chicago, Illinois, and a frequent critic of the way statistics are used. . . .
When UK statistician Ronald Fisher introduced the P value in the 1920s, he did not mean it to be a definitive test. He intended it simply as an informal way to judge whether evidence was significant in the old-fashioned sense: worthy of a second look.
BOOK REVIEW: GDP: A Brief But Affectionate History, by Diane Coyle.
As Coyle points out, an increase in the variety of goods also produces gains in welfare that are not included in GDP. Again, think about this from the standpoint of consumer surplus. If you and I go to a food court with many restaurants, then I will choose the meal that gives me the most consumer surplus, and you will choose the meal that gives you the most consumer surplus. Each of us will get more consumer surplus than if we had been forced to get food from the same restaurant.
Overall, one arrives at a mixed verdict on GDP. On the one hand, it is the best way that we have to measure economic capability. On the other hand, because it fails to account for consumer surplus, GDP statistics lead us to take an overly pessimistic view of the economy. There is no Great Stagnation. There is only a widening gap between the rate of economic improvement and our ability to measure that improvement.
JILLIAN KAY MELCHIOR: EBT for pot in Colorado.
At least 64 times, public-assistance benefits were accessed at businesses selling marijuana. A total of $5,475 in public benefits was withdrawn at ATMs in establishments that sell pot. This figure includes medicinal dispensaries, recreational stores, and at least one place that combines the two. Some of these establishments sell groceries as well as pot, so there is no way to know exactly how much welfare money was spent on marijuana. . . .
Colorado lawmakers recently failed to pass legislation that would have prohibited EBT withdrawals at retail marijuana shops, medical-marijuana dispensaries, and strip clubs.
ROBERT OSCAR LOPEZ: Gay writer in Slate: I can’t live without being marked as a perpetual victim!
Think of how much potential there is in saying that we’re all human, and we can have experiences or temptations or urges from day to day without having to subsume our whole essence and identity into them? That sounds liberating to me.
To this Slate writer, it’s “the new homophobia.” To say we’re all human and not divisible into airtight categories is anti-gay. Why? Because “Gay” as an identity has become entirely predicated on being hated and dissimilar from others. Stern screams out: “Don’t take away my claim that I am defined by what I do with my genitals, because without that claim, I won’t get any more special treatment!” He’s afraid that once people don’t view gayness as an intrinsic trait like blackness or femaleness, people won’t feel pressured to extend special protections to “gays” as a class. It’s also true that they wouldn’t discriminate against “gays” since they wouldn’t distinguish them from other people. And Stern would have to learn how to live in a world where he’s neither a special elite nor a downtrodden victim.
He would just be …. himself. I guess that scares some people. It’s a pity.
CHALLENGING THE BINARY: The evidence shows that most “unsure” adolescents become exclusively heterosexual.
In 2013 California and New Jersey passed laws that ban licensed mental health providers from offering sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE) to minors. Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, Minnesota and Maryland are considering similar legislation. Recently, however, this legislation died in the Virginia House, and a stay was imposed in California pending review by the Supreme Court of the United States.
To be clear, the present debate concerns banning voluntary (not coerced) SOCE by professionals for minors who are distressed by their unwanted homosexual feelings. Support for this ban is based upon four claims. First, that sexual orientation is a fixed, inborn trait. Secondly, that homosexual attractions experienced during adolescence are enduring. Thirdly, that homosexual behavior carries no increased health risks as compared to heterosexual behavior, and finally, that scientific research proves SOCE is universally harmful. None of these claims, however, is based in science. . . .
If homosexuality were genetic like race or determined by pre-natal hormones alone, then identical twins would have the same sexual orientation 100 percent of the time. Instead, at most, identical twins are both homosexual only 20 percent of the time. . . .
Seventy-five percent of adolescents who had some initial homosexual attraction between the ages of 17-21 changed to experience heterosexual attraction only. . . .
According to the CDC, from 2006-2009, young men who have sex with men aged 13-24 years had the greatest percentage increase in diagnosed HIV infections of all age groups. Among all adolescent males aged 13-24 years, approximately 91 percent of all diagnosed HIV infections were from male-to-male sexual contact. This is because receptive anal intercourse is 20 times more risky than receptive vaginal intercourse. . . .
No therapy is free from harm. Regarding all forms of psychotherapy for any given condition a surprisingly high 14-24 percent of children deteriorate during psychotherapy. There is not one study demonstrating that SOCE causes harm greater than or even equal to this baseline level.
Footnotes at the link.
THEY STOLE HER HEART: Woman has sex with underage teens, accuses them of robbery.
But when the boys spoke to police, they had a different story. They told police they did not take anything from Augustine, in fact, they had consensual sex with her behind the clothing store, police said.
One of the teens showed police a video on his cell phone of Augustine having sex with all three of them.
WHOOPS: Name mix-up in sexual battery case sends wrong Clay County teen to jail for 35 days.
When Hawkins, who interviewed the victim, thought Cody Lee Williams was the suspect, he failed to show her his photo to confirm he had the right person, according to an internal report on Hawkins’ investigation. . . .
It wasn’t until Williams went to court in early October and was given documents with the details of the charges against him that he put the pieces together. He called his mother from jail and told her he believed police were actually seeking someone else named Cody Williams.
Maybe they should hire Cody Lee Williams as an investigator. It sounds like he can actually do the job.
Three officers have received formal counseling for their role in the wrongful arrest and another officer faces a 10-day unpaid suspension and a transfer from investigations to patrol. . . .
Sheriff Rick Beseler said his department has policies in place intended to prevent these types of wrongful arrests.
“If those policies had been followed then this wouldn’t have happened,” he said. “This is not a routine problem. That’s why the supervisors are even being held accountable. We take this stuff very seriously.”
Seriously, indeed: a ten-day suspension for shirking official procedures and imprisoning an innocent young man for over a month.
RATIONAL MEN, Irrational Women.
What if some of them aren’t flocking to universities or sticking it out if they attend because they don’t want take on debt to gain the credentials for a nonexistent job? If instead they take up carpentry then . . . they are positioned well–much like women were in the ’60s when their surge into higher education coincided with an increasing supply of compatible jobs.
Camille Paglia has hammered home in two recent articles — “It’s a Man’s World and Always Will Be” and “Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues” — that feminists have been too quick to pronounce the irrelevance of men. . . .
The higher education bubble will (or has) burst, and women who relied upon school success will be hardest hit. For unlike men, women do not see and, if they did, would not likely adapt to a skilled labor economy.
MIKE ROWE responds to a hit piece.
“Shill for the Oppressors!” Is that not fantastic? I should make new business cards. I’m sure Matt’s a swell guy, but unfortunately, he’s so eager to report on a story that doesn’t exist he’s resorted to a career in fiction. Matt believes that my recent work with Walmart drove The Ford Motor Company to fire me after seven years of service. He sees some sort of conspiracy at work in a recent Ad Age article, where according to him, every one played just “a little too nice.”
Sorry Matt – here are the facts. Ford didn’t “drop” me. We had serious discussions about another extension but decided not to proceed for reasons completely benign. We parted amicably long before the Walmart ad came along. A simple phone call to Ford would have confirmed that. Or, you could have done some really deep digging, and called me. People do it all the time, especially when they’re interested in getting the facts.
TIME TO GET PREGNANT: Survey: Less than 10 percent of Army women want to join combat units.
TUTHMOSIS: We Are Silencing Men By Calling Them Misogynists.
Girls talk about a dude’s height, job, even penis size, and other superficial traits in the company of their friends as a matter of routine. Somehow only men are “shallow” and misogynist for this kind of talk, while women are given a pass in the name of “empowerment.”
The charge of misogyny is even more epidemic in the online world. Sites devoted to plain-and-simple men’s issues are increasingly attacked by a powerful lobby dead-set on censoring, if not outright, criminalizing male spaces. Facebook repeatedly bans men’s interest blogs. Internet filters in public places block men’s sites (such as my home site, Return of Kings) as offensive, while permitting access to its equally scandalous female counterparts (like Jezebel).
The only men’s sites deemed permissible, it seems, are those that broker in sterilized, milquetoast content that merely repeat useless platitudes to guys. . . .
What activist women—and their effeminized male enablers—don’t realize is that, apart from the rank double standard, guy talk is essential to creating the kind of get-shit-done men that women want to date and that men want to hang out with. The art of being a (real) man is honed through sometimes-ugly, sometimes-funny, but always-interesting conversations without politically correct redactions enforced by a mob of the fragile and easily “triggered.” . . .
Top-shelf men are made. And one of the key ingredients is guy talk. Men like me aren’t “misogynist” for engaging in it.
UK: The ‘right’ to sleep with children was one ‘civil liberty’ that NCCL [National Council for Civil Liberties] supported. “The Seventies was an era of sudden sexual emancipation. To some on the Left, sex with children was just another boundary to be swept away.”
In 1980, O’Carroll and the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) – a body founded to openly lobby for child sex – were part of NCCL, now Liberty, Britain’s foremost mainstream civil rights organisation.
In 1975, NCCL had granted PIE official “affiliate” status. It put O’Carroll on one of its working groups, it made him a platform speaker at an NCCL conference in spring 1977, and it strongly defended paedophiles against “hysterical and inaccurate” newspaper attacks.
There was, to be fair, internal opposition to this. . . .
But such voices were a minority; for most of the Seventies and early Eighties, the “right” to sleep with children was one of the “civil liberties” that NCCL supported and the policy differences with PIE were ones only of degree. PIE favoured lowering the age of sexual consent broadly to four (as they generously allowed, a baby below that would “lack the verbal skill to communicate its consent”). The comparative moderates of NCCL backed a reduction merely to 10, so long as it could be demonstrated that consent “was genuinely given”.
NCCL vigorously opposed new cornerstone child abuse legislation. In a letter to the Home Office in April 1978, it argued fiercely that child pornography should not be banned as “indecent” unless it could be shown that the child depicted had been harmed. The NCCL official who wrote this letter was its legal officer, Harriet Harman.
Ms Harman is now, of course, deputy leader of the Labour Party.
AUSTRALIA: Former Biggest Loser contestant Andrew ‘Cosi’ Costello reveals the truth about the weight loss show.
Have you ever wondered how the contestants manage to lose a staggering 12 kilos in a single week? We don’t. In my series a weekly weigh-in was NEVER filmed after just one week of working out. In fact the longest gap from one weigh-in to the next was three and a half weeks. That’s 25 days between weigh-ins, not seven. That “week” I lost more than nine kilos. I had to stand on the scales and was asked to say the line, “wow, it’s a great result, I’ve worked really hard this week”. The producers made sure that we never gave this secret away, because if we did, it created a nightmare for them in the editing suite. The shortest gap from weigh-in to weigh-in during our series was 16 days. That’s a fact. The thing is, overweight people get inspired by watching the Biggest Loser. They get off the couch and they hit the gym. But after a week in the real world, some people might only lose 1kg so they feel like they’ve failed and they give up. . . .
I would say that about 75 per cent of the contestants from my series in 2008 are back to their starting weight. About 25 per cent had had gastric banding or surgery. I sit in the middle somewhere.
STEVE SAILER: NYT: Time to get back to WWT.
GARY TAUBES: Why Nutrition Is So Confusing. “One lesson of science, though, is that if the best you can do isn’t good enough to establish reliable knowledge, first acknowledge it — relentless honesty about what can and cannot be extrapolated from data is another core principle of science — and then do more, or do something else. As it is, we have a field of sort-of-science in which hypotheses are treated as facts because they’re too hard or expensive to test, and there are so many hypotheses that what journalists like to call ‘leading authorities’ disagree with one another daily.”
GET BENT: Domestic violence group urges man to drop defamation lawsuit against alleged false rape accuser. “Even if Ms. Faircloth was not truthful, vilifying discussion of sexual assault by filing such a lawsuit only adds to the problem of under-reporting that enables sexual assault to proliferate at alarming rates.” In other words, it’s okay to villify an innocent man but not for him to seek compensation for it.
Just a few weeks into the relationship, he was doing her banking for her and had charge of her bank cards. . . .
‘Once he had my card, the sex stopped. There was always an excuse — oh, I’m so tired, I’ve got a headache, I’ve got to be up early, I’ve had too much to drink. Oh, I want to watch this on TV.’
Funny. When this happens the other way around, it’s unremarkable.
‘I knew nothing about him as an individual. But I felt passion for this guy,’ says Christine. ‘His character, his charisma — his whole look. My stomach used to turn over when I saw him. I thought: “This is the one.’’’
No use being “intelligent” if you’re governed by feelings.
IT’S COME TO THIS: “The Ontario government has launched a project to open up promotion possibilities for its employees — but only those who ‘self-identify as a black female’ need apply.”
The Ontario government has a controversial history with employment equity programs which favour one group in society over another.
In 1993, the government of NDP premier Bob Rae issued a job advertisement that explicitly stated white males were prohibited from applying, but bowed to public outrage and withdrew the posting.
The Statistics Canada Labour Force Survey released last week revealed that men lost four jobs for every one lost by a woman in Ontario last month.
“Employment equity programs which favour one group in society over another.” You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
TOM JAMES: The maternal preference in the 20th century.
In all states, it was a firmly established rule of law throughout most of the twentieth century that the mother was entitled to custody of the children in a divorce or separation unless she was proven to be unfit to parent. . . .
Courts construed the concept of parental unfitness very narrowly when considering the fitness of a mother to parent, though. The double standard they had developed in this respect in the nineteenth century continued into the twentieth. . . .
In most states, the fact that the mother was the one who was at fault for the divorce did not prevent the court from awarding her custody of the children, no matter how egregious her behavior had been. In Crabtree v. Crabtree the wife had cut a five-inch slit in her husband’s throat with a razor blade, intending to kill him, and then chased him down and stabbed him again as he was running away. Upon his release from the hospital, he petitioned for divorce on the grounds of extreme cruelty. The court found that the wife’s attempt to kill him was not justified, her only reason having been her displeasure with his “sullen” attitude, and her anger at him for trying to get away from her. The court found that he had not been guilty of any wrongdoing, so he was indeed entitled to a divorce on the grounds of extreme cruelty, and then proceeded to award custody of the children to the wife because she was their mother.
Earlier: The Maternal Preference in 19th Century American Law.
WARNING WOMEN about being thin and not about being fat. “This isn’t actually about health, this is about acceptance of one thing to the point of fostering prejudices towards another. Fit Shaming, anyone? How about ‘real women have curves’, ‘real men want meat, not bones’, etc?”
Related: Fit shaming vs. encouraging obesity, juxtaposed.
Do your fellow man a favor: compliment fit women. They need the encouragement, and they’re not getting much of it from other women.
Earlier: Women are heavily influenced by men’s opinions. “When men are not expressing outloud any opinion about women’s looks or behavior, that allows other women to be the opinion-expressers about what men like. And that allows women to sabotage each other quite easily because men aren’t providing the reality check.”
“STRONG INDEPENDENT WOMEN” Are So Darn Weak.
So what is up with all of these Strong Independent Women needing to come and complain to strangers about their men? If they are so strong and independent can’t they handle their own? And why is a little bit of scrutiny so damaging to them? “Don’t say that! You can only be supportive!” Well then, I can tell you are super firm in your beliefs and life choices. /sarcasm
Over and over we are told we submissive/traditional women are doormats unable to think for ourselves. Over and over we are told women that “need” men are weak and dependent. But look at these women! Look at how they can’t handle being talked to the way they talk to or about their men, how they can’t handle being told “I don’t find people that look like you sexually appealing” without having to start a body acceptance “revolution” that aims to shout down anyone who would dare have a different preference. I know this has been talked about time and time again and far better than what I am saying here but it never ceases to amaze me how weak people will forever and always try and make what makes them weak the new definition of “strong”.
THEODORE DALRYMPLE: Wicked, Wicked Heroin: Addiction is a matter of persistence, not fate.
According to the Times, the cunning and charm of heroin is to blame. Heroin “has wormed its way into unsuspecting communities,” wrote Sontag, adding that “statistics [for heroin-related deaths] lag behind heroin’s resurgence.” Wicked, wicked heroin! All the worse because, though bad morally, such drugs are also charming, a little like Svengali. Alysa “was seduced by the potent painkiller” OxyContin before she “moved on” to heroin. Soon she was “in the grip of something beyond her control.” How soon, of course, we are not told, though evidence suggests that the average heroin addict takes heroin intermittently rather than regularly for 18 months before becoming addicted. In other words, becoming a heroin addict is, for most, a matter of persistence and determination rather than of raw, unadulterated fate.
Alysa’s addiction, like Frankenstein’s monster, broke free of its creator and wreaked its revenge: “Her addiction . . . killed her.” Alas, unlike the monster, heroin felt no remorse afterward and did not drift away, never to be heard from again, but rather continued to “worm” its way into other unsuspecting communities. The heroin killed by means of an overdose. This reminded me of when a woman who had drunk bleach was admitted to my hospital and the admitting doctor wrote “Overdose of bleach” in the admission notes. “What is the correct dose of bleach?” I asked him.
CATO: Water in the West: It’s Complicated.
The fundamental problem is that the federal government has been heavily subsidizing Western water for decades, particularly for crop irrigation. Artificially low water prices have encouraged overconsumption and the planting of very dry areas where farming is inefficient and environmentally unsound. Subsidized irrigation farming has created major environmental problems in the San Joaquin Valley, for example.
To make matters worse, federal farm subsidies have boosted demand for irrigation water, which has further encouraged farmers to bring marginal lands into production.
So don’t blame the Delta smelt. Instead, blame antimarket policies going back eight decades in the case of farm subsidies and a century in the case of subsidized water from the federal Bureau of Reclamation.
PAY UP: RapidShare Stops Washington Lobbying Efforts and Regains Pirate Stamp.
While it may be a total coincidence that RapidShare was put back on the list after it pulled its lobbying efforts from Washington, there is something uncanny about the development. And that’s not just because the site is no longer an appealing site for those who are out to share copyrighted material.
The United States Trade Representative (USTR), who compiles the list of notorious sites, does so based on public comments from copyright holders and other interested parties. However, none of the rightsholders who submitted their input for the most recent list mentioned RapidShare . . . All other file-hosting sites on the other hand, were mentioned.
Of course USTR does have the right to add websites based on other sources, but it’s definitely not common, especially not when it concerns a service that has taken such a strong stance against piracy in recent years.
It’s safe to conclude that someone has been pulling some strings behind the scenes to get RapidShare back on the list, but who, will probably remain a mystery.
CLAYTON CRAMER: House of Cards: Profoundly Subversive.
EAT, PRAY, LOVE, DIE. “According to the Daily Mail, Erin White, 35, was a yoga teacher and social worker from New York who went to India and soon met and married an Indian taxi driver. Within five months he stabbed her to death and then blew himself up.”
BREITBART: Five Questions for James O’Keefe.
In a recent Breitbart piece, you said that Battleground is the new ACORN. But you settled a $100,000 lawsuit with ACORN. How can you defend this?
That lawsuit had nothing to do with lying or doctoring footage — it was over an invasion of privacy. Some states have recording statutes that require you to get permission from the person you’re filming. California, where I was, is one of those states. I argued that that statute is unconstitutional.
Oh, and by the way, the liberal media outlet Mother Jones won the prestigious Polk Award for doing the exact same thing to Mitt Romney. They did it in Florida, a two-party consent state just like California. But nobody cared when Mother Jones did it. You have to be consistent — you can’t support undercover journalism in Florida against Mitt Romney but not in California against ACORN. The hypocrisy is laughable.
JOHN DERBYSHIRE: “Racism” (The Word) Becoming Obsolete Because Of Racism—Anti-White, That Is.
After taking off around 1940 the word peaked in 1998. Then over the next ten years, which is as far as Ngram goes, occurrences of “racism” dropped off by 18 percent—nearly a fifth. . . .
The dwindling use of the words “racism” and “racist” anyway means a net increase in honesty…I think. Or at the very least, a net decrease in confusion. That’s because people who used “racism” and “racist” always had to wrestle with a dread possibility: that these words might be applied to nonwhites! . . .
People who actually used the words “racism” and “racist” in earnest mainly wanted to talk about white people being mean to nonwhites. So the fact that the dictionary definitions leak somewhat was a problem for them. Indeed, some impudent whites, angry at being shut out of jobs or colleges because someone needed to fill a race quota, even used the term “reverse racism” to describe the motive behind their exclusion. Professional anti-racists regard this term as highly pernicious.
“PUT OFF CAREER,” says female PhD.
I am a highly intellectual woman with a successful professional career, and I realize now what a mistake I’ve made by not settling down and having children early. I married 12 years ago, but put off having children in order to finish graduate school and establish my scientific career. Last December, at the age of 42, I had a baby daughter. I realize now that this would’ve been MUCH easier 10 or 20 years ago. It’s not only a struggle to care for a newborn at my age, but making the sudden shift from a woman who has, for decades, been very busy with intellectual pursuits and relatively unencumbered by responsibility to a stay-at-home mom has been unexpectedly difficult.
My own dear departed mother got married at 19 and had me and my brother at 21 and 22 years of age. I look at old photos of her with us as babies, and she looks deliriously happy. She LOVED being a mother. She had that crazy young-person energy you need to raise babies and no established adult life that she felt like she was losing in order to become a mother. Later, when my brother and I were older, she went back to university to finish her degree and enjoyed many happy years as a teacher.
I regret putting off children for so long.
Earlier: Women living life in reverse.
Related: How a Woman Can “Have It All”.
CUT OFF HARVARD to Save America.
The federal government subsidizes this academic aristocracy (made more exclusive by elite highly endowed schools giving admission preferences for children of alumni) in several ways. Big endowments such as Harvard’s probably often reap at least $1 billion annually from capital gains. They pay no income taxes on those gains; individuals pay 23.8 percent. They also pay no income taxes on dividend and interest income. The donations that form the endowments are deductible against donor income taxes, giving rich people the incentive to give to their already rich colleges, which in turn give preferences to alumni children.
I am no liberal and I’m not preoccupied with the consequences of income inequality. But I can’t figure out why the liberal elite that purports to care about inequality isn’t asking these questions: Why do we provide favorable tax treatment that primarily benefits these wealthy schools? Why not at least phase out tax preferences to donors and to schools with more than, say, a $200,000 endowment per student? Why allow schools that show legacy admission preferences the right to claim special tax privileges?
Maybe many of these liberal leaders went to one of these highly endowed schools — and want their children and grandchildren to have the same opportunity.
WHITE GUILT IS HARD: The Unbearable Whiteness of Being White. “Liberalism creates a double-bind for its most sensitive and idealistic adherents: they desire to save the world (eliminate poverty, racism, etc.) with liberalism, yet their efforts in the third world necessarily involve a sort of cultural imperialism that the left abhors. For to provide money, education, materials, construction, or medicine to poor people in another country is to point out the obvious scarcity of those same things in that other country. This shows the objective superiority of the First World country that is giving the aid to the Third World country that is receiving the aid, and this is embarrassing and unacceptable to the sensitive leftist.”
WESLEY J. SMITH: FDA Moving Toward OK for 3-Parent Embryos.
BOOK REVIEW: Living the Good Life: A Beginner’s Thomistic Ethics, by Steven Jensen.
Jensen begins where he finds us: awash in the conflict between our feelings and reason. His assessment is in harmony with that of the sociologist Christian Smith, who has recently identified the common moral stance of young Americans today as a witch’s brew of “G. E. Moore’s antinaturalistic moral emotivism and Richard Rorty’s relativistic moral pragmatism.” In other words, we Americans tend to think—when we think at all—that reason is a less-illuminating beacon than the impulses of our passions. The low-grade hedonism that characterizes our culture in turn shapes our minds. Even good Catholics find it a challenge to believe—much less to articulate—the truth that Jensen affirms with admirable brevity: “Much of the moral life will involve resisting the emotions with their tempting presentation of apparent goods.” . . .
After a deft and serious sifting of claims about emotion, Jensen then tackles the thorny question of acting in accord with our conscience, even should our conscience be misinformed. In the end, what emerges is a persuasive exhortation to pursue reason as our guide: “If we do not use reason to judge our emotions, then we are apt to elevate to the level of ‘natural’ whatever desire seems most pressing at the moment, which will, often as not, lead to our downfall.”
LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Local News Catches de Blasio’s Caravan Speeding, Violating Traffic Laws Days After His Safety Traffic Plan.
PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Steyn countersues Mann for 10 millon dollars. “The legal document reads like a drama.”