Chip Gibbons writes about parents who beat their children and other troubled individuals.#

Self-defense is an inviolable right of all men. His parents don't understand that, and they resist it in their own child. His parents are miserably unhappy and blame their own child for their unhappiness. He had nothing to do with it. They were miserable human beings before he was born. They had children in the hope that children would make them happy, placing that burden on his life the day he was born. But he didn't make them happy; he is not what they wanted. So now he's bad.

To his parents, the world exists to conform to their needs and wants. They cannot control their own lives, so they seek to control the lives of others. They are very sick people!

I think many people need to realize this about their parents, but it's uncomfortable and they don't want to think that their parents don't really care for them. It's sad.

Chip Gibbons interprets a recent legislation.#

Feinstein's point about the bill potentially undermining legal abortion is well taken, but I see a bigger problem: The fetus' "rights" are conditional and dependent on who harms it.

A fetus has a right to life, except when the mother terminates the fetus and therefore its right to life at the same time.

Somebody could attack the mother and harm the fetus and be charged with the crime of violating the fetus' rights. A month later, the mother could kill the fetus with an abortion, but could not be charged with a crime.

The fetus' rights are conditional on who harms it.

I don't think this is the first instance of this, however. The State is not committing a crime by murdering people on death row, but if I were to kill them, or anyone else provided it was not in war, I would be committing a crime.

Later, Chip more or less acknowledged this idea in response to Trey Givens on life:

At the risk of sounding like a total psychopath here, I don't agree.

I mean, what's so special about being alive? Plants are alive. Bugs are alive. Lots of things are alive.

The state of just being alive generally seems to have value to only one entity: the entity being in possession of the life in question.

I read about this somewhere else, but forget where. But Alex Tabarrok provides a good summary of the business with the IRS and the Church of Scientology.#

According to this NYTimes article, a secret 1993 agreement between the IRS and the Church of Scientology lets Scientologists deduct the cost of a religious education as a charitable gift. The secret ruling appeared to come to light when the Sklar's, who are Jewish, attempted to take a deduction for the religious portion of their children's education at a Hebrew school. The IRS wrote them back asking for receipts from the Church of Scientology! The Sklar's provided receipts from the Hebrew school and the IRS denied the deduction. The Sklar's are now suing on the basis that all religions, or none, should be offered the deduction.

Correction talks about Biblical criticism and its historical accuracy.#

I do not know which of these approaches, if any, is the correct one. I know that the New Testament, taken at face value, is nearly incomprehensible. As A.N. Wilson writes, I think quite correctly, that "anyone so ignorant, or so innocent, as to open the New Testament in the hope of finding a neutral historical source will be knocked back by a hurricane. Open it, and you will find a Pandora's box of personal challenges and ethical commands. By the end, the last thing you are worrying about is whether it is true, because you yourself have become a character in the story."

Here's the thing about the Bible: it is not a history book, as much as we would like it to be one sometimes. The Gospel writers knew nothing of modern historiography, had no access to modern information sources, and had no Englightenment criteria of reason or Newtonian naturalism to fall back on. They lived in a world that was subsumed by the supernatural. That's just how it was back then.

Razib writes about South Asians, Blacks, and Latinos.#

In everday life, people say stupid things. There are many stupid things that are asked and asserted during "question time" on C-SPAN shows. Very often, the speaker will make only the most cursory attempt as politeness before bring to bear the full arsenal of their intellectual blades. But when confronted by a black moron, many white liberals will demur the act of intellectual natural selection that demands to be enacted. This tendency can be extended to many minority groups. One benefit is that we can pop the bubble of political correctness, because many white liberals confuse intellectual rigor with dogma, and when we violate their dogma, we don't get chopped apart as we should, but are engaged in dialogue to "convert" us to the "just" position.

But the sum impact of this double-standard, of the inability to destroy intellectual opponents of color, to treat as equals, is that, for example, that black female teacher might never be corrected, or challenged, and so might transmit her bizarro ideas that only any given group can transmit information about that given group to her students. The modern Western intellectual tradition of empiricism, rationalism and skepticism, requires rigor, confrontation, and takes little account and sensitivities and feelings. The fact that minorities can be excused from this tradition does everyone, but especially the minorities, a disservice.

Moxie links to this amazing video. This is essential viewing, particularly if you are a liberal and/or high-school teacher.#

Richard links to a continuation of the Wolf-Bloom issue from Laura Kipnis in Slate.#

Indeed, the phrase "unwanted sexual advance" smuggles more than a few unexamined assumptions into the social conversation, and not only about sex and class. Even the wording itself is problematic—it seems to imply that the outcome of the advance should be known prior to the outcome occurring. But do we all wear our desires written in neon letters on our foreheads? Do we even know in advance what they are? Surely one is occasionally caught by surprise—unexpectedly propelled from a non-desiring state into a desiring one by something in the moment, or the air, or the wine. Can anyone really be expected to know ahead of time whether an advance is wanted or unwanted, when desire itself is not an entirely stable condition to begin with?

Richy Rich links to Niall Ferguson's lecture on "The End of Europe."#

When we look closely at the way in which the European Union is evolving and try to set its evolution in some kind of historical perspective, I believe it becomes apparent that, far from approaching a kind of parity with the United States, whether in economic and cultural and political or in international terms, in reality the European Union is an entity on the brink of decline and perhaps ultimately even of dissolution.

Now, for the avoidance of doubt, I'm not saying that the European Union will disappear as an institution in our lifetimes. Institutions, in Europe particularly, tend not to disappear. They just decline in their power. Like, for example, today's Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development--once the prototype of a far larger post-Marshall Aid European union, today a harmless agency for gathering data and producing economic reports. And ladies and gentlemen, Europe is littered with such agencies, which once embodied grandiose plans--think, for example, of the Bank for International Settlements or the International Labor Organization. There's scarcely a European capital without the relic of some past plan for great greater European integration.

There's a great deal of interesting discussion about the way that Islam is taking over Europe, both with religious devotion and birth-rates. This is going in hand with the economic problems in Europe. Does this mean Islam is bad for business? Does it mean that a weak economy opens the door to Islam? I'm not sure.