Review: Calculating God

I thought this review was particularly timely, coming as it does on top of the WND article discussing the intriguing possibility that the speed of light is declining and the recent discussion here on the Anthropic Principle, (which, as always, devolved into a discussion of evolution). Then, too, the gratuitous slams on Canada bear mention. Dave's review strikes me as overgenerous on the points considering his description, as the characterizations sounded a lot more like a 2/5 instead of 4/5, but then, I haven't read the book.

Keep in mind that it is better if one does not describe the plot in a review. This review structure provides adequate information for someone to determine if they're interested in the book or not without being walked through the events of the story. I'm interested in reviews, not synopses. There is a difference.

Calculating God
Robert J. Sawyer
Rating: 8.5 of 10
Review by: Dave Munger

The theological science fiction novel "Calculating God" could easily get lost in the recent bumper crop of grandiose eschatological epics with authors who have been compared to Arthur C. Clarke and protagonists dying of cancer. You know, that whole Greggory Benford, Steven Baxter sub-genre that one now finds filling the SF book racks in grocery stores, between authorized biographies of Chewbacca and "The Eco-Feminist Elves Of Shanana". This would be a shame, since Robert J. Sawyer has written a book much more worthy of your time than most SF available at grocery stores (that's where I bought it).

"Calculating God" has much to recommend it. I was personally charmed by an extraterrestrial character with religious views superficially similar to my own (God created the universe and life; People do not have immortal souls). This alien, named Hollus, speaks something like the magnificent Dr. Hugh Ross, although the Bible is not taken at all seriously by anyone in this book. There are enough pop-culture references to thoroughly satisfy whatever perverse appetite it is that makes people find this enjoyable, without being gratuitous or grating. Each belongs where it is placed, and furthers the story. Although the phrase "a novel of ideas" is quickly becoming the SF version of the cinematic designation "psychological thriller", here it is quite fitting.

There are problems though, oh are there problems. For one thing, "Calculating God" is unremittingly Canadian throughout, which lends a slightly queasy "For Better or Worse" quality to the whole, and leads to several particularly sickening scenes. The stomach-churningly Episcopalian ethics of our chicken-boiling brethren are trotted out once in awhile and called "morality" (I'm not accusing Canadians of being Episcopalian, it's just that they both sicken me similarly). The hero's physician is incredibly smug about the cheap drugs Canadians have access to as a result of attaching their system lamprey-like to ours and letting our terrible Capitalistic health-care machine absorb all the R&D costs.

The worst flaw in the novel (if one does not consider the title and premise to be heinous blasphemies, that is), is a crappy, bigoted, unnecessary subplot. Ironically, it is the utter irrelevance of this part of the book that keeps it from ruining the whole. It is as if the main body of the story is an entirely separate book, like a beautiful young woman shacked up with a toothless, misogynistic, ass-fiend. You could edit it out yourself with a black magic marker, and significantly improve the storyline.

"Calculating God" has something in it for anyone who enjoyed "A Brief History Of Time" or any science fiction stories. In a period and a field in which Ambrose Bierce's definition of a novel as a short story padded seems particularly apropos, Sawyer has written a novel that could only have been presented in this form. You are expected to purchase it, read it, and discuss it amongst yourselves.

Story: 3.5 of 5. The rating in this category would be much closer to five if it weren’t for The Bad Part. The protagonist does make a fairly wild surmise about the nature of life in the universe, which turns out, incredibly, to be right. It’s quickly accepted as fact, without even being modified. This is probably necessary though, as the novel could have otherwise gone off on an overly realistic tangent, like the first five or so chapters of any novel written by an astronomer, and ended up a third longer. The story really delivers though, especially after the cardboard villains die, and all life in this part of the galaxy is nearly wiped out.

Style: 4.5 of 5. Oddly realistic. Interstellar travel is subject to the constraints of General Relativity, and no laws of physics are bent beyond credulity. The fifth force introduced by the Forhilnors sounds a lot like Einstein’s cosmological constant, or for that matter, something I saw seriously postulated in a popular science magazine other than Popular Science a few months ago. This reader does not know his multiplication tables, and at no place did the science loose me. A much quicker read that the subject matter would seem to indicate.

Characters: 4 of 5. If you like Spock you will like Hollus. If you do not like Spock, you are probably way too picky about characterization of extraterrestrials. If you like any other Star Trek characters, you are obligated to like all fictional characters, period. If you can stand Canadians, you will be able to stand Tom Jericho. There is some question in my mind as to whether or not the most poorly written characters should even count, as they are confined to the part of the book that I have wished into the cornfield. Other than them, there was no one in this book that I wanted to see killed, even though many of them do belong to groups which I’m afraid I will have to have liquidated when I come to power. This indicates that this reader was reached on some real human level that most authors fail to reach me at.

Creativity: 5 of 5. I was tempted to get cute here and give it seven out of five, or something like that. You will never forget this book. You will not ever confuse it with some other novel. You may very well find yourself paraphrasing it in philosophical discussions a decade after you read it. One could easily be moved to wax Levar Burton about how books like this are magical spaceships of imagination that transport you over astonishing rainbows of delight. I am totally unable to describe this book as a cross between two previous books. That’s becoming a rare distinction.

Text sample:

I shook my head in wonder. "I can't think of any reason why evolutionary history should be similar on multiple worlds."

"One reason is obvious," said Hollus. He moved sideways a few steps; perhaps he was getting tired of supporting his own weight, although I couldn't imagine what sort of chair he might use. "It could be that way because God wished it to be so."

For some reason, I was surprised to hear the alien talking like that. Most of the scientists I know are either atheists or keep their religion to themselves — and Hollus had indeed said he was a scientist.

"That's one explanation," I said quietly.

"It is the most sensible. Do humans not subscribe to a principle that says the simplest explanation is the most preferable?"

I nodded. "We call it Occam's razor."

"The explanation that it was God's will posits one cause for all the mass extinctions; that makes it preferable."

"Well, I suppose, if . . ." — dammitall, I know I should have just been polite, just nodded and smiled, the way I do when the occasional religious nut accosts me in the Dinosaur Gallery and demands to know how Noah's flood fits in, but I felt I had to speak up — "... if you believe in God."

Hollus's eyestalks moved to what seemed to be their maximal extent, as if he was regarding me from both sides simultaneously. "Are you the most senior paleontologist at this institution?" he asked.

"I'm the department head, yes."

"There is no paleontologist with more experience?"

I frowned. "Well, there's Jonesy, the senior invertebrate curator. He's damn near as old as some of his specimens."

"Perhaps I should speak with him."

"If you like. But what's wrong?"

"I know from your television that there is much ambivalence about God in this part of your planet, at least among the general public, but I am surprised to hear that someone in your position is not personally convinced of the existence of the creator."

"Well, then, Jonesy's not your man; he's on the board of CSICOP."

"Sky cop?"

"The Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. He definitely doesn't believe in God."

"I am stunned," said Hollus, and his eyes turned away from me, examining the posters on my office wall — a Gurche, a Czerkas, and two Kishes.

"We tend to consider religion a personal matter," I said gently. "The very nature of faith is that one cannot be factually sure about it."

"I do not speak of matters of faith," said Hollus, turning his eyes back toward me. "Rather, I speak of verifiable scientific fact. That we live in a created universe is apparent to anyone with sufficient intelligence and information."

I wasn't really offended, but I was surprised; previously, I'd only heard similar comments from so-called creation scientists. "You'll find many religious people here at the ROM," I said. "Raghubir, whom you met down in the lobby, for instance. But even he wouldn't say that the existence of God is a scientific fact."

"Then it will fall to me to educate you in this," said Hollus.

Oh, joy. "If you think it's necessary."

"It is if you are to help me in my work. My opinion is not a minority one; the existence of God is a fundamental part of the science of both Beta Hydri and Delta Pavonis."

"Many humans believe that such questions are outside the scope of science."

Hollus regarded me again, as if I were failing some test. "Nothing is outside the scope of science," he said firmly — a position I did not, in fact, disagree with. But we rapidly parted company again: "The primary goal of modern science," he continued, "is to discover why God has behaved as he has and to determine his methods. We do not believe — what is the term you use? — we do not believe that he simply waves his hands and wishes things into existence. We live in a universe of physics, and he must have used quantifiable physical processes to accomplish his ends. If he has indeed been guiding the broad strokes of evolution on at least three worlds, then we must ask how? And why? What is he trying to accomplish?"

Comments ()

Of madmen and medications

From Capital Hill Blue:

President George W. Bush is taking powerful anti-depressant drugs to control his erratic behavior, depression and paranoia, Capitol Hill Blue has learned. The prescription drugs, administered by Col. Richard J. Tubb, the White House physician, can impair the President’s mental faculties and decrease both his physical capabilities and his ability to respond to a crisis, administration aides admit privately.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” says one aide. “We can’t have him flying off the handle at the slightest provocation but we also need a President who is alert mentally.”

Tubb prescribed the anti-depressants after a clearly-upset Bush stormed off stage on July 8, refusing to answer reporters' questions about his relationship with indicted Enron executive Kenneth J. Lay. “Keep those motherfuckers away from me,” he screamed at an aide backstage. “If you can’t, I’ll find someone who can.”

Bush’s mental stability has become the topic of Washington whispers in recent months. Capitol Hill Blue first reported on June 4 about increasing concern among White House aides over the President’s wide mood swings and obscene outbursts.

This sounds rather like a piece from The Onion, doesn't it? Even so, I will say that if it is true that the President is on anti-depressants, no one in their right mind should vote for him. As far-fetched as this report sounds, it might explain why the President is waging such a feeble and haphazard reelection campaign. Kerry lobs him one softball after another, and yet he repeatedly fails to swing.

Comments ()

Political porn

The Red Star waxes feverish:

For an hour Thursday night, Sen. John Kerry got to speak directly to the American people, unfiltered by the carping punditocracy, the Republican smear machine and Fox News. From this perspective, what the American people saw was a smart, serious and compassionate man. Kerry came across as a real human being -- a man of integrity who believes deeply in the promise of America and seeks to steer the nation to a more secure, more prosperous future.

But the American people saw something else as well Thursday evening: This is not just about John Kerry; this is about an entire Democratic Party that refuses to be marginalized, refuses to cede the American flag, religious faith and the badge of patriotism to Republicans. They made it clear: They care about this nation, and they intend that their voices be heard and heeded in setting a new American course.

I have the impression that the Star and Sickle's editorial board watched the Democratic Convention with their collective pants down around their ankles. The very idea that the "real human being" is going to be exposed in the fraudulent charade of spin and image-construction that is a political convention is nonsensical; it's utterly absurd.

The only religions that Democrats respect are secular humanism and Islam, they'd rather burn the flag than salute it, and they're far more patriotic about the United Nations than they are about the United States. That new American course they want to set? The nation as a subordinate member state in a sovereign global government.

The bigger problem, of course, is that the Republican leadership has signed onto the same program.

Comments ()

Mailvox: why LP over CP

RK has a familiar question:

It's refreshing to hear a Christian Libertarian's viewpoints. I did not previously think the two could overlap quite so well.You have mentioned your disagreements with the Libertarian Party's stance on abortion and immigration. In past articles and blogs, you mentioned the Constitution Party as another valid alternative to the Republ-ocrat hegemony. My question is: Why have you chosen Libertarian over Constitution (Party)? It seems to me that your social views align more closely with the Constitution Party's. I must disclose that I am a Constitution Party member, but have strong LP leanings. I made my decision to leave the Republican Party around the time I found your articles on WND.

While I respect both parties and enthusiastically endorse both over either of the ruling party's factions, the Libertarian Party is far more to my liking despite its two major flaws. While I disagree with the reasoning that led to anti-libertarian positions on abortion and immigration, I understand it and consider the positions to be both reasonable and honest, if mistaken.

The Constitution Party's position on the War on Drugs, on the other hand, is not only wrong-headed, but completely contradictory to its theoretical raison d'etre. This is the result of an ideological approach based on making a fetish of the Constitution as opposed to an intellectual approach based on limiting the depradations of government. In the long term, I expect the Constitution Party will likely be more amenable to the same compromises and rationalizations that have made a mockery of republican ideals in the Republican Party.

Ideally, I'd like to see a compromise wherein the Libertarians would abjure abortion and the Constitution Party would abandon the War on Drugs and seek a stronger intellectual basis for its constitutionalism.

Comments ()

Clitorectomies for all the girls

I happened to scan a few pages of a chick book the other day. It's called Princess, and it purports to be the true story of a Saudi Arabian princess. I have to say, I was largely left cold by the plight of the poor oppressed rich girls, as with a few exceptions, the most horrific events of the book were the predictable and easily avoidable consequences of the young women's actions. And after the eponymous princess destroyed an Impressionist masterpiece in one of her childish tirades, I found myself rather hoping she'd meet with an end similar to those of her reality-challenged friends.

When in Rome, you don't have to do as the Romans do, but it's generally a good idea to obey Roman law if you aren't prepared to experience the consequences.

But all of this is neither here nor there. What actually caught my attention - and so we finally meander towards the purpose of this post - was the attitude of the Saudi women to what appear to not so much be clitorectomies as removal of the external labia.

For more generations than Nura knew, a large number of the women of our family had been circumcised. Our mother was one of these women. She had been circumcised when she became a woman, a few weeks before she was wed. At age fourteen, when Nura became a woman, Mother followed the only tradition she knew and arranged for Nura's circumcision to be performed in a small village some miles from Riyadh....

To the doctor's surprise, it was my mother who had insisted upono the circumcision of her daughters. She herself had endured the rite... she could imagine no other path for her daughters than the one she herself had trod....

A disgusting practice, to be sure, and defended with an argument similar to that made by public school-educated parents who are planning to subject their children to the same education they experienced. The fact that these parents are as intellectually dead as the Saudi women are sensually crippled means that they are making their decisions on the false grounds of incomplete experience. In both cases, I think those who condemn their children to like fates have much for which to answer, as one's own abuse, physical or intellectual, should inspire one to act to prevent the same from happening to the next generation instead of allowing the vicious cycle to be repeated.

When one understands that the teachers of the NEA are every bit as ignorant and prejudiced as the mutawas of Saudi Arabia, and that they serve much the same societal purpose, one soon discovers in oneself as little inclination to hand one's children over to the former as to the latter.

Comments ()

A belated response

As many of you know, I consider the Libertarian Party's official position on abortion to be deeply flawed and anti-libertarian, if nevertheless superior to the Democratic and Republican realities. (I freely admit that the Republican platform is better, but their failure to pay any heed to their platform is one reason I left the party in the first place.)

A few weeks ago, the Pan-Gargler challenged me to consider my views on immigration in light of the Libertarian Party's support of open borders, which is functionally equivalent to the de facto Democratic and Republican positions. I neither forgot nor backed down from that challenge, I merely required some time to think about a subject to which I had never devoted any substantial thought.

In any case, I have now reached my conclusions, and you can read them on Monday. In light of last week's column, I did not wish for anyone to think that I was, like Brave Sir William, wont to duck a challenge.

Comments ()

Electile dysfunction

I went over the text of Kerry's speech. All it proved, in my opinion, is that if the American people are foolish enough to vote for this man, (or for his primary opponent, for that matter), they will deserve precisely what they get.

John Kerry is an astoundingly dishonest man whose ultimate goal is to be the same sort of symbolic tool that George Bush is by birthright. George Bush at least has the lineage and so has done only what was expected of him, while Kerry has enthusiastically sold his soul to reach the same point of usefulness to the PTBs. Useful enough to be given the reins in November? It is increasingly beginning to look that way.

We always value that which we acquire more than that which comes to us naturally.

Comments ()

The secret of GDP growth

From Elliott Wave International:

For many years, the credit-card industry wanted you to be able to use your plastic to buy your burger and fries at the drive-through. But the fast-food industry always politely said "no way," since its business depends on how quickly their servers get you in and out. Making cashiers punch card numbers and hand you slips of paper to sign is no way to shave seconds off the average wait time per customer.

Yet the card industry was willing to bargain. It offered to waive the signature requirement and even to reduce the transaction fees for fast-food merchants. That's enticing, but if you're wondering why McDonald's Corp. really agreed this past March to accept cards throughout its restaurant chain, you needn't wonder any more:

"McDonald's found the average transaction jumped from $4.50 to $7 when customers used debit and credit cards instead of cash," according to a recent piece in The Wall Street Journal.

I wonder how much of the increase of the C component of GDP can be accounted for by that plastic effect. It's no secret that debt has been funding our GDP expansion - it's almost all G, which is always debt hence the imminent raising of the debt ceiling again - but it's factored into C as well.

These levels of debt have never ended well in the past. I still wonder what is so new and different about computers and Greenspans "productivity miracle" leads adults to think it will be any different this time. I wonder just how low the NASDAQ has to go before people will start to wise up.

Comments ()

Freak like John

The Fraters Libertas pull no punches:

Now take a listen to retired Navy Captain, Charlie Plumly, who had Kerry, "under my command for two or three specific operations before his rapid exit."

Plumly is even less charitable to your new bud than the admiral. His quotes on Kerry's service include these colorful expressions, "Devious, self-absorbing, manipulative, disdain for authority, disruptive."

And then he gives us this little jewel, "But the most common phrase would have been requires constant supervision."

Apparently Plumly must have let him off his leash, as John Francois managed to film his Homeric epic, where, like wrathful Achilles, he descended upon the banks of the River Min-ko to wreak havoc and death upon the multitudinous foe.

Kerry is clearly a creepy self-promoter of the sort to put even Bill O'Reilly to shame, but that being said, I don't doubt that his Vietnamiad made for a better film than Brad Pitt's Troy. I carry no water for Bush, but it astounds me that even a single true-believing, mouth-breathing Democrat would embrace this phony. Howard Dean was a Leftist lunatic, but he was an honest Leftist lunatic. If Kerry had been a Texan, I have no doubt that he'd be a loud and proud Republican.

For Pete's sake, even Doonesbury saw through this guy decades ago. Fortunately, as we learned with Clinton, those who seek power for its own sake seldom have any particular notion of what to do with it. It's those who see it as a means instead of an end, like Lenin or Mao, that you really have to worry about.

Comments ()

Sheer marketing genius

From CNN/SI:

The Charlotte Bobcats and WNBA Sting are entering a partnership with the YMCA of Greater Charlotte to provide a number of promotional and educational initiatives. The Sting also announced that since its name no longer makes sense with the departure of the Hornets to New Orleans, the franchise will be renamed the Charlotte Bites.

Yeah, working closely with the YMCA should help convince everyone that the WNBA isn't a bastion of freakishly tall homosexuals. Maybe they can get the Village People to do their new theme song if the Indigo Girls are busy. If there was ever any doubt that the number of individuals with their wires crossed in the population is nowhere near the 10 percent reported by Kinsley, it is the total failure of the WNBA. The WNBA has been embraced more fervently by lesbians than anything since the invention of the vibrator, but despite their enthusiasm and the nonstop advertisements crammed down a hostile NBA audience's throat, it remains in its own weird little quasi-sporting ghetto with an average attendance less than 60 percent of that of US sporting powerhouse, Major League Soccer.

Comments ()

It's football time

Madden 2004 probably has the best music of any video game ever. Good rock, solid rap, and the one track by Bone Crusher gets you more fired up for an approaching NFL season than anything recorded since the Monday Night Football song. I can't even think about it without starting to tremble with anticipation like my dog when he sees me tearing a strip of fat off the ham while I'm making a sandwich.

Thank God for European soccer, because without it the spring/summer offseason would be unbearable. I usually don't let myself play Madden or think about football until August 1, but one of the guys in our fantasy league is getting married so we had to move our draft up. Last year, after no less than four straight years of finishing first or second in the regular season then getting upset in the first round of the playoffs, the Choker King finally collected the championship that had so long eluded him. The White Buffalo made the playoffs for the first time since his championship-winning year in 1996, so he's hoping it won't be another eight years between postseason appearances. I bounced back from a bottom-dwelling 2002 but failed to make the playoffs for the third straight year myself.

As for the real league, I'll confine myself to considering the NFC North today. The Packers are, as always, dependent upon Brett Favre, who can beat anyone except the Vikings. The Vikings have added some solid defensive players to go with the league's top offense, but as always, the question is if the coaching staff can get them to beat the weak sisters. They would have won the division easily if not for choking against the Giants, Chargers, Raiders and -erk- Cardinals. People are getting way too excited about the Lions - remember, Matt Millen is still running that ongoing train wreck from Pennsylvania - and if they improve by more than two games, I'll be shocked. The Bears won't be as bad as last year now that Mr. Interception is history. What they were thinking, I'll never know. As Big Chilly said: "when even your effeminate, got-to-be-gay waiter in San Francisco is wondering what the Hell is wrong with the Bears GM, you've got to figure it's going to get ugly."

Prediction for the NFC North: Vikings, Packers, Bears, Lions

Comments ()

On books

I don't usually make this sort of email public, but I'm doing so for three reasons. First, MM is a semi-regular here, so I thought some of the regulars might be interested in his opinion and the topic wasn't likely to come up for comments since I don't often post on it. Second, he's not a Christian, and I am always interested in learning how non-Christians view the books. And third, I'm ordering the books this week, so if you'd like to place an order with Digital Cowboy, please feel free to wander over to voxday.net and do so.

I post semi-regularly on your blog. But I just got done reading "The War In Heaven" and I want to congratulate and thank you for writing it. I'm unsaved, but it touched me. I like the warrior aspect of Jesus quite a bit. Your portrayal reminded me of (I think) Jefferson's quote "I tremble when I think the Lord is just." Christopher came off as quite the bastard. I'm looking forward to seeing how you deal with him in the later books....

I also think it's a shame that your book was put only in the Christian section. I love the integration of fantasy into a Christian novel and think it should be done more often. I haven't read any other Christian fiction, but I'm put off from reading it as I'm worried it may be too preachy and clean to be entertaining. Like you said elsewhere, the events don't have to be lily-white to be a Christian work, just written from the viewpoint that Christ is real and should be portrayed as the Savior. I think Hollywood should exploit this. They could do some great things with a screenwriter working with a POV similar to yours. But I won't hold my breath.

I will certainly recommend this novel to anyone that will listen and I wish you great success with the third installment.

I'll be interested to see how the third one does too. It's definitely not like any other book of its type.

Comments ()

The Democratic Convention

In case you're wondering why I'm not commenting on this, that's easy. I haven't watched a moment of it. There's no need to. Political conventions aren't interesting, unless you're there, and even then it's basically like a crowded frat party except the drinks are of a higher quality, as are the women. At a Republican convention, anyhow.

I did think that the gang over at NRO was doing their usual bloviating about the speechifying. I like their stuff, except for the fact that they will inevitable say that George Bush "hit it out of the park" every time he steps behind a microphone, which is ludicrous as he is the worst public speaker I've ever seen as President. Even his father had a certain patrician elegance to his tortured elocution that the current President lacks.

Kerry's pretty bad on the stump too. What a nightmare it would be, to feature a Lincoln-Douglas style debate between the two of them. Of course, since their disagreements tend to be matters of degree instead of substance, they wouldn't even have much to debate. I'd sure like to see one of them forced to take on either Peroutka or Badnarik, but that isn't going to happen, at least not this election cycle. C'est la vie.

Comments ()

Fedora Core 2 vs Windows XP

My new machine arrived today. It's a beast, fast and loaded, if not exactly portable. I've already got Fedora Core 2 installed, in fact, I'm typing this in on Opera running on Fedora. My first impressions of the two operating systems are as follows:

Windows is NOT as easy to get going as I expected. What is this registration nonsense? I can use XP, on sufferance, for 30 days, after which point apparently I am deemed unworthy. Sure, I'll put in completely fictional information, but one's system is still identifiable by Microsoft over said Internet, and presumably the serial number can be tracked back to the original purchaser. I'm wondering how difficult it is to remove XP and replace it with Windows 2000, or if that's even possible.

Fedora is not intrusive, but its strange discomfort with wireless access is annoying too. I popped in my PCMCIA card, got the Internet working on the first try, then, when I rebooted just to check things out, the Internet was no longer working. I had to remove eth0 - a built-in network card - then create a new eth0 (which had been eth1) for the wireless card before it would work again. I rebooted to verify that this fix had taken; sure enough, I'm fully operational.

Now, here's the problem. I can network to the other Windows machines in the house. But for some reason, I can't get SWAT going, JAGS does not show the other Fedora machine, and to copy things from one to the other I have to pass them through one of the Windows machines. This makes no sense. Why is it easier to network to Windows than it is to another Linux machine? Anyone have any suggestions?

Still, even with the headaches, it's well worth it. The tank isn't exactly what I would call under complete control, but at least we're not scaring the livestock anymore.

Comments ()

Suburban Hemingway

Don't know about Wisconsin, but Minnesota regulates deer hunting by dividing the state into zones. Some zones are restricted to archery, handguns, and rifled shotgun slugs (NOT buckshot).

I don't know where some of you are coming from on this. Obviously I know that shotguns can be, and are, used to hunt deer, hence the reference to rifled slugs. However, I also know that shotgun hunters are a small minority compared to rifle, bow and black-powder hunters, so the fact that Kerry mentioned a double-barrel shotgun in coordination with crawling on his belly cast serious doubt on his hunting experience.

I have been hunting far more times than I ever wished, as I am the son of a man who is an excellent marksman and a voracious killer of animals. My brothers and I are all good shots - I once outshot a Force Recon sniper with a .357 Magnum at the range - and my brother impressed the Marines at Quantico with his ability to paint it black at distance there when he was still in high school. We bought Dad a bow for Christmas last year, as he nailed four deer on the first day of the season claimed that the deer have gotten so plentiful that it's too easy. Personally, I suspect he's finally figured out that it's warmer during bow-hunting season.

In fact, when my father was the Scoutmaster, we used to be the only pistol-packing troop in the area. We'd go off into the deep woods in January, without tents or much food, and have to build lean-tos and kill rabbits for food and shelter. I even got my Zero Hero when I was ten, which required being camping out by yourself without much in the way of supplies for 24 hours in below-zero weather up North. I think I had a sleeping bag, a thing of matches, a Swiss Army knife and a pound of raw, frozen hamburger. (I smuggled a pair of books in my sleeping bag, of course.)

So, you see, I know how to survive in the wilderness, I just don't understand the point of subjecting yourself to it unnecessarily.

Comments ()

And they say Bush is stupid?

Mark Steyn observes, with some disbelief:

[Kerry] was in Wisconsin the other day, pretending to be a regular guy, and was asked what kind of hunting he preferred. "I'd have to say deer," said the senator. "I go out with my trusty 12-gauge double-barrel, crawl around on my stomach... That's hunting." This caused huge hilarity among my New Hampshire neighbours. None of us has ever heard of anybody deer hunting by crawling around on his stomach, even in Massachusetts. The trick is to blend in with the woods and, given that John Kerry already looks like a forlorn tree in late fall, it's hard to see why he'd give up his natural advantage in order to hunt horizontally."

First, not many hunters use shotgun slugs to hunt deer. Second, you don't crawl around on your belly, you get up at an ungodly hour in the morning, climb into a tree stand you constructed prior to the season, wrap yourself in a sleeping bag, and then sit there and freeze your extremities.

And my father wonders why I hate hunting. I didn't mind killing the overgrown horned rats, but since we had them all over our backyard, I simply didn't see the point in getting up at 4 AM just to see if you could shed blood before your own froze in its veins. One night, about twenty minutes after Dad and the gang had departed for points north in order to slay some quadrupeds, I nearly ran over three of them wandering down the street about 150 feet from our driveway.

If gutting them wasn't such a painstaking mess, I would have run them over and strung them up, just to see the look on Team Gunga Din's collective face when they returned. Did I mention I was driving a Suburban? Well, I was. Anyhow, if God meant for us to kill our own food, he wouldn't have invented farmers. And restaurants, for that matter. What's the point of civilization if you're not going to use it?

But I digress. Kerry isn't just a sleazeball, he's a phony sleazeball. Fortunately for him, his core crowd is too ignorant to see how full of it he is. If the president was even marginally competent, he'd have this thing sewn up by now. I'm starting to suspect that both of them know that Wave 3 is going to hit with a vengeance in the next term and neither one wants anything to do with it

Comments ()

The Devil's Own

Some people have complained that the blogroll is pushed to the bottom of the screen. Others have lamented that the text at voxday.net is too small, and still others are agog at the green-on-black text in the archives there. I regret the unpleasantries.

But interestingly enough, only those running Microsoft Internet Explorer are experiencing these difficulties. I run Opera on Fedora Linux, Space Bunny runs Opera on Windows, and I also check things out on Mozilla and Firebird. Everything looks and runs fine, and not only that, but I have little control over how this blog relates to Inferior Explorer, since it's all Blogger code and external Javascript.

The problem is that Microsoft pays no heed to the HTML standards. There are two options. One, we can kowtow to Microsoft's arrogance, put up with their ridiculous refusal to block pop-up ads - and you don't realize just how annoying they are until you never see them anymore - and change to suit them. I prefer to make my quixotic stand on the HTML standards and politely suggest that those of you experiencing browser difficulties consider meandering over to opera.com and downloading Opera 7.53 for Windows.

It's not hard, honestly, it's free, it has an imitation Explorer skin if you want familiarity and you can even import your old bookmarks with little difficulty. There may be many things in this life that one must grin and bear, but a lousy browser isn't one of them.

Comments ()

Closing the border

IMMIGRATION OFFICERS are having to pore through naked pictures of hundreds of exotic dancers to keep impostors out of Canada. Foreign strippers planning to table dance in clubs here must now provide photos of themselves with no clothes on to qualify for a visa for Canada, immigration officials say. "Stage photos during performances are required," said Sergio Mercado, of the Canadian Embassy in Mexico.

MEMO TO VISA OFFICERS

In a memo to fellow visa officers around the world, Mercado said if a dancer passes the no-clothes test, they may then require a police certificate or medical examination. The memo was obtained from access to information documents obtained by the Sun.

The potential dancers have to prove they can dance in the nude, immigration lawyer Mendel Green said yesterday. "They can't be partially nude," he said. "If they don't have pictures in the nude, they are not going to wiggle their bottoms in Canada."

Brilliant! I imagine the next step will be to ensure that high-price Norwegian call girls are properly qualified to provide their services as well. It's good to know that Canada's Finest are willing to put their eyes on the line for their country. At least we know that they're not wasting their time as jihadists pour across the borders into their country.

Comments ()

Reverse socionomics

It's odd, but the NFL theory of market performance could turn out to be another factor here. I never subscribed to it; I thought that the NFC champion Buccaneers would put paid to the idea that an NFC Super Bowl winner meant a positive year for the markets. But, I was manifestly wrong. And since the AFC Patriots won this year, that supposedly suggests a down year, which has certainly been the case so far.

Socionomics considers the markets a measure of mass societal emotion. As the challenger is ahead - however slightly - going into the convention, conventional political theory has it that the sitting president will be defeated. If we reverse the socionomics interpretation that states a negative mood as indicated by a down market favors challengers, then we should assume that the markets will be continuing on their downtrend instead of trending up into the election as is generally assumed.

I have other, more technical reasons for my opinion on where the markets are going, but it's an interesting thought. I still don't see how the conference affiliation of a sports team could have anything to do with mass emotions, though.

Comments ()

No tears for Ann

Some folks are attempting to summon outrage for Ann Coulter's unceremonious dumping by USA Today. I don't see why, as our beloved Miss Coulter did take the opportunity to leap straight over the top in a rather unlikely forum. Sure, the comments by the USA Today editor were stupid - one hopes he was being disingenuous - but USA Today is for people who want happy silly news in info-nuggets, not snarling contempt, however deserved.

Jonah Goldberg, who is a little more ideologically squishy than Ann and has that safe hail-fellow-well-met sense of humor ala Tucker Carlson that allows liberals to pretend that maybe he's just kidding about all that conservative nonsense, would have been a better choice from the start. The mainstream media tilts heavily left, and the sooner one stops expecting it to be even-keeled, the better. Ann is wonderful, but she is for the red-meat lovers, not vegetarians who might nibble at a little piece of tofu.

There's a place for running roughshod over left-liberal idiocies, but one of the foremost left-liberal newspapers probably isn't one of them. And besides, who on Earth would want to go to the Democratic Convention anyhow?

Comments ()

Mailvox: Seething hatred

MW is close to tears:

I do not agree with your editorial regarding Bill O Reilly. I can see your hatred for him is so visible, if what you say has the slightest bit of true to it, it would be discounted because of your seething hatred.

Maybe if she knew that I was crying on the inside, thanks to the massive jealousy that another O'Reilly fan asserted I have for Brave Sir Bill, she'd feel differently.

JS, meanwhile, only managed to confuse me:

I understand what you mean by OReilly setting up straw men, and not standing solidly on the principles he espouses. I have been frustrated with his stand on many issues that seem to contradict his values. I however disagree with your assessment of his selling himself and having a hazy grip of political reality. I think he does stretch his views in an attempt to seem fair and moderate which comes across to me as weak and wishy-washy, but I think his grip is relatively solid and he aims his guns at real and important enemies. Three examples are France, the ACLU, and Rap Music.

JS had me at hello, but he lost me with that last bit. But who could disagree that without Brave Sir William standing in between us and the raw all-devouring lethality that is Rap Music, our civilization would have already collapsed into chaos, carnage and cannibalism. Someone please, please tell me that Mr. O'Reilly has uttered the words "Rap is crap!" No, that would just be too perfect, it's probably too much to wish for.

So, Brave Sir William is all for the Patriot Act, abortion and homogamy, but he stands firmly against Foxy Brown and Public Enemy. Hoo-raa! The phrase "fiddling while Rome burns" springs to mind.

I got a letter from the Factor
The other day
I opened and read it
It said they were suckers.
They wanted me for their show or whatever
Picture me giving a damn
I said never.

Comments ()

Mailvox: It's the ONSVRWC

RK muses cynically:

So why is Day attacking him? Could it be to draw a reaction and publicity
for himself? Akin to one Mr. Franken? Perhaps O'Reilly suspects just this. Shame on you Vox for sinking to Franken's level.

Actually, I'm just following the Libertarian talking points laid out for me by the Other, Not-So-Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. Somehow, I suspect RK missed the discussion here last week when I explained my lack of interest in playing the talking head game.

What would I do with the publicity anyhow? The irony of being accused of being secretive one week and self-promoting is rather acute.

Comments ()

The Ballad of Brave Sir William

Bravely bold Sir William strode forth from Studio B.
He did not fear to debate, O brave Sir William!
He was not at all afraid to be humbled in nasty ways,
Brave, brave, brave, brave O'Reilly!

He was not in the least bit scared to be mashed into a pulp,
Or to have his lies exposed and his logic broken;
To have his infinitives split, and his assertions blown away;
And his facts all hacked and mangled, brave Sir William!

His case smashed in and its heart cut out
And his proofs disproved, his polemic unplugged
And his talking points raped, and his claims disembowled
And his [what one can only assume is a very small] penis....

Brave Sir William ran away.
He bravely ran away, away!
When danger reared its ugly head,
He bravely turned his tail and fled.
Yes, brave Sir Bill, he turned about
And gallantly he chickened out.
Bravely taking to his feet
He beat a very brave retreat,
Bravest of the brave, O'Reilly!

Comments ()

Mailvox: I don't think he reads this blog

BM writes:

I am still rankled over that episode with the GOA owner, who I have forgotten his name. Bill O'Reilly just ramrodded him. Mr. O'Reilly just popped off on some standard stuff. I don't think he had any knowledge on the subject. Then in an episode the next day he claimed to be acting facetiously when he referred to bazookas. I think what happened is the next day he did a little "after the fact" research and discovered that the AWB has nothing to do with machine guns. As for me, if the AWB expires I'm going to buy an AK-47! I got my eye on that!

P.S. - I enjoy your articles. You make your point but you never resort to nihilism or vulgarity.

Apparently he missed The Ballad of Sir William. In my defense - as I've already pointed out to one emailer - the reference to male genitalia is in the original. Not that I ever considered passing up the chance to add what Dark Window cheerfully describes as "a few quick kicks in the groin" for a second.

Comments ()

Mailvox: Yeah, that'll happen

DS waxes enthusiastic:

I just recently read your article on Mr. O'Reilly's "Fraud Factor," and happen to be in total agreement with you...so, I forwarded a copy of your article to him and requested that he invite you. P.S. I also sent a note along with it telling him that I happen to agree with every word you said! Now let's wait by the phone.

I wouldn't hold your breath. If O'Reilly is afraid to have Badnarik on his show, he'd have to be completely insane to throw down with me. He doesn't have the principles, the education, the ideological knowledge or the intelligence to survive, and he's smart enough to know it.

Look, the guy's no dummy. He's sharp enough to position himself as a conservative, which beautifully differentiates him from all his competitors even though he isn't one. If nothing else, he has a solid handle on the iron Law of Supply and Demand. I don't despise the man; I rather think his astute salesmanship deserves respect and I have no doubt that he'll continue to be successful as long as conservatives buy into his act. But I doubt he'll take the risk of allowing anyone on who is likely to puncture the illusion.

Comments ()

Mailvox: Defending brave Sir Bill

RC writes:

I believe the Factor is doing much more good than harm by being on the air. Sure, you may be able to find some isolated cases when Bill should have zigged instead of zagged. However, we are living in a dangerous world at the moment. And please do not quote the founders regarding choosing between security and freedom. Everyone knows why the 2nd amendment exists. I do not believe it will ever be lost to us.

Precisely how is The Factor doing more good? How will boycotting France prove the answer to the continued loss of American liberties? O'Reilly is at best totally irrelevant, at worst, he is yet another cheerleader for the expansion of strong central government, the advocation of which a true conservative, PJ O'Rourke, once described as "treason to the human race".

And if Mr. O'Reilly knows why the Second Amendment exists, then why did he suggest that one must be a nut to believe that private citizens should be able to own bazookas and machine guns? Is he aware that the Founders not only owned, but used, private artillery historically equivalent to modern large-bore howitzers and rockets? Is it ever better for the government to hold a monopoly on the use of lethal force? To again quote the immortal O'Rourke, this country was founded by religious nuts with guns. As the First Amendment has clearly been lost with McCain-Feingold, I think RC's stated belief as to the positive prospects of the Second are naive. And of course he would rather I did not quote Ben Franklin, who might otherwise remind him that those who trade freedom for security will have neither.

I believe Bill's point regarding harm caused by the Patriot Act has more to do with large numbers. In other words, is the Patriot Act a reasonable piece of legislation for our current national security situation? My view is that, on balance, it is reasonable--but you may find singular or isolated cases where the Act falls short at the expense of the citizen. Given the present climate, what else can reasonably be done?

Defenders of the Patriot Act invariably ask to know how it has been abused already. That is to miss the point. As the legal gymnastics of the Supreme Court and the Executive branch have proved with work-arounds such as Echelon - where the British listen to US phone calls and send the transcripts to the NSA so that the US government can honestly claim that it is not eavesdropping - and outright fictions such as the emanations and penumbras in which the right to abortion was discovered, the correct question is: can this Act be used by future US governments to abuse its citizens. And there, the answer is clearly affirmative.

What else can be done? There are many possibilities. The government can stop interfering with private airline security measures. It can stop granting visas to dead terrorists and their live cousins. The US government is part of the problem, not the solution, and giving it more power via stinking excretions like the Patriot Act will only create more problems in the future.

Comments ()

Freedom, Iraqi style

BAGHDAD - It was 10.30 in the morning, almost four months ago, and the children were getting ready for church.

Aziz Raad Azzo, five, was drinking his milk; his 14-year-old sister Raneen was putting on her new clothes. When they heard a car pull up, Raneen, thinking her father was home, ran to the window and flung open the shutters. Four men shot her and her little brother in the head, scattering their blood and bones across the family's living room.

The children's crime: Their father, a Christian storekeeper, had sold alcohol.

Before the murders, the family had received a photocopied death threat. 'We are warning you, the enemies of God and Islam, from selling alcohol again, and unless you stop we will kill you and send you to hell where a worse fate awaits you,' read the warning signed by Harakat Ansar al-Islam, the Partisans of Islam Movement.

These murders made possible in part by the freedom-fighting, nation-building forces of the Coalition against the Axis of Evil. I can't wait until free elections are held, I'm sure the Iraqi people, with their centuries of tolerant and democratic culture, couldn't possibly elect anyone like the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front.

Comments ()

Societal lifespans

Athenian Democracy
185 years (507-322)

Roman Republic
402 years (509-107)

Royal England (Common Law)
427 years (1215-1642)

Imperial Parliamentary United Kingdom
259 years (1688-1947)

First French Republic
7 years (1792-1799)

Second French Republic
4 years (1848-1852)

Weimar Republic
14 years (1919-1933)

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
72 years (1917-1989)

United States of America (voluntary)
73 years (1789-1861)

United States of America (involuntary)
139+ years (1865-2004)

I'm not saying that the world will come to an end when the US system of government changes and/or collapses. My best guess is that it will become an integral part of an North-Central American superstate in the mode of the European Union, which will eventually be a state in the federal world government. And, as in many of these previous cases, most people may not even notice the change; indeed, future historians may well decide that the Constitutional USA ended long before 2004, perhaps as early as 1865 when the Union ceased to be voluntary. (I don't want another Civil War discussion; causes aside, the result is not debatable.)

Modern England is a decent place to live, after all, but it's not the center of world power it once was under the Imperial Parliament. And one could even argue that for the average sybarite, Imperial Rome was a more entertaining place to live than its Republican predecessor. But then, there's always a few crazy Old Republicans who have no desire to live under the rule of Augustus Caesar.

Comments ()

Copyright run amok

Mass-market publishers are not certain the used-book phenomenon is a problem worth addressing, but others in the industry have already made up their minds. "We think it's not good for the industry and it has an effect, but we can't measure it," said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, a trade group. "There has always been used-book sales, but it's always been a background noise sort of thing. Now it's right there next to the new book on Amazon."

Lorraine Shanley, a principal at Market Partners International, a publishing consultant, said that the industry was just starting to appreciate the dimensions of the problem. "Used books are to consumer books as Napster was to the music industry," she said. "The question becomes, 'How does the book industry address its used-book problem?' There aren't any easy answers, especially as no one is breaking any laws here."

Anyone else doubt that if someone invents a technology that will allow someone to read a book once before it sets itself on fire and burns to ashes, the publishers of the world will beat a path to their door? William Gibson was just ahead of his time with Agrippa.

While I have a very amicable relationship with my publisher, in general I have little sympathy for them. Copyright was originally conceived as a way to protect authors from publishers, now it's devolved into de facto protection for the publishers.

Comments ()

Could Kerry be the first Gay President?

Bob Novak writes of John Kerry:

After disappointing organized labor by picking Sen. John Edwards as his running mate, Sen. Kerry has pleased union leaders in coming out in opposition to secret ballots by workers in deciding whether to accept union representation. Organized labor wants to do away with secret balloting and instead use the "card check," in which a union gains accreditation as a company's bargaining agent by soliciting union cards from members. Critics say that method results in coercion of workers by union organizers.

Both Kerry and Edwards have joined Sen. Edward M. Kennedy in urging the National Labor Relations Board to adopt card check instead of secret ballots.

I wonder if America's First Gay Couple will also call for a card check instead of secret ballots in the national elections. Let's face it, John Kerry is every bit as gay as Bill Clinton was black.

Comments ()

The party of national extinction

In the national survey of more than 75 percent of the Democratic delegates, two out of three of those expressing a position on gay marriages said they favored them. But among the delegates from a dozen Southeastern states, a slight majority was opposed.

No other issue reveals that wide of a regional divide among the party's delegates. On another major social issue - abortion, 92 percent of the Southern delegates said they supported abortion rights, identical to the national average.

"They're reflecting the views of Southern Democrats," said Emory University political scientist Merle Black. "Most Southern Democrats would be in favor of choice on the abortion issue but most would be against gay marriage, especially in the rural and small-town South." Most Southern Democrats opposed to abortion rights have already left the party, but there's a "different distribution" when it comes to gay marriage, he said.

Edwards delegate Robert Sanders, an attorney from Covington, Ky., says he "couldn't care if you marry a fireplug." Others, such as Mary Brown, an environmental administrator from Vicksburg, Miss., used strong language to express their opposition to the concept of abortion but said they still favor the right. "I am for a woman's right to murder her child if she wants to," Brown said.

When Massachusetts' Supreme Court first dictated homogamy, I thought the election was in Bush's bag. Unfortunately for the Republicans, Bush proved himself to be as inept at political strategery as he is at military strategy. When your opponent hands you a club, BEAT HIM OVER THE HEAD WITH IT! This is rocket science?

I think the primary difference between Democrats and Republicans now is that Democrats want to actively depopulate the nation, while Republicans would prefer to see it collapse into chaos. Perhaps that's not what they ideally want, but it sure appears to be the logical extension of their policies.

It's not that I'm pessimistic, it's just that it's amazing to look at the historical lifespan of societies and then watch as the same pattern of decline plays out in your own society. It's truly astounding, especially listening to others explain why these changes are positive developments. Nothing lasts forever, and we've already witnessed the collapse of one global superpower. I don't understand how it's possible for anyone to deny at least the possibility of the USA's following suit.

Comments ()

Internet flyover country

Eight years after Microsoft launched an online magazine in a groundbreaking attempt at cyber-hipness, Slate may be sold. More than half a dozen media companies have expressed interest in buying the Internet publication, and the leading contenders are the New York Times and The Washington Post, a source familiar with the discussions said today....

Slate drew 4.6 million unique visitors last month, in part because it is part of the Microsoft Network, and the computer company would like to keep it there, even under a new owner, as a draw.

WorldNetDaily reportedly has something like 5 million unique visitors a month, without the benefit of being pushed by Microsoft on MSN and MSNBC, yet doesn't get anywhere near the media attention that Slate normally does. I suppose this is the Internet equivalent of how Chicago, Dallas and Houston rate merely a modicum of the attention given to New York, Los Angeles and Miami.

Comments ()

Gold don't look so good

As with the equity markets, gold is looking unhealthy. The difference being that gold's downdraft should be countertrend, while I have little doubt that the long term trend for the equity markets is down. Fundamentals are always deceiving, as the dollarr will ultimately go the way of all paper, but markets never move in straight lines.

Using the same logic as before, if Wave 1 was 433 down to 370 in 86 trading days, Wave 2 looks to have peaked at 411, a 65 percent retracement in 46 days. The next buying opportunity should be somewhere in the vicinity of 348, perhaps somewhat lower, if Wave 3 is bigger than Wave 1, presumably sometime in November if the pattern holds. (These waves are an order of magnitude lower than the equity market waves I previously discussed, hence the shorter time frames.)

This is of no concern at all if you're holding long-term bullion, but last week probably would have been a good time to move out of your trading positions preparatory to picking it up. You still might want to consider doing so if the price drops below 389 next week, as chances are that you'll be able to buy at a 12 percent discount in the near future.

I'm still not completely sold on Elliott Waves, especially on the timing calls, but if they're correct on the dollar hitting the high 90's, well, that will be truly impressive indeed. I can't think of one economist or financial analyst who thinks the fundamentals call for anything but a dropping dollar. But markets never move in a straight line, and if you think about it, plunging equity markets would move a lot of people into cash....

Comments ()

More on government and murder

One thing that was bothering me about my previous democide/homicide calculation is that it didn't account for the changing world population over the century, which went from 1.65 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000. Also, one or two people objected to my assertion that the USA has one of the highest homicide rates in the world - it seldom leaps to the very top, as South Africa has replaced Colombia, but it is always in the top 5-10.

First, I used a spreadsheet to work out that the average world population over the course of the 20th century was 3.82 billion. This is an estimate, of course, but much closer than assuming it was always 6 billion. As to the global homicide rate, what worked out to 1.6/100k did seem too low, so I decided on a different method.

Taking the most four populous "countries" - China, India, the USA and the EU - (using France, Germany, the UK, Spain and Italy for the EU) - provided homicide rates of 1.3, 3.74, 5.64, and 1.79 respectively, resulting in an average 3.12 murders per 100,000. 3.82 billion divided by 100,000 and multiplied by 3.12 gives 119,184 annual homicides. (This means that with 4.83 percent of the global population, the US accounts for 7.84 percent of the global murders, which sounds about right.)

Over the course of the century, that's 11.9 million murders by individual criminals, which is horrific, but still only 6.43 percent of the 185 million bodycount racked up by governments the world over from 1900 to 2000. This method of calculation thus concludes that government is 15.55 times more lethal than crime.

Comments ()

Bane is beautiful

Just when you think he can't possibly top himself - after the combination of his comments on Miss Spears and the vengeance story - he produces this:

Feh...you people. When it's inevitable, just lay back and enjoy it. You don't hear the frog whining, now do ya?

Perfect. If I was going to rename this blog, I think I'd call it Whining Frog.

Comments ()

Make it smaller by making it bigger?

The assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services responds to Jonah Goldberg:

All good conservatives want smaller government. To achieve that end, we need a plan. Merely wishing it were so is not a plan. The fact is that children (and adults) living in healthy and stable marriages are less in need of government services. By offering marriage-education services — on a purely voluntary basis — to interested couples whereby they can develop the knowledge and skills necessary to form and sustain healthy marriages, we will help reduce the need for more intrusive government interventions later on.

Granted, this is new work. Nobody knows for sure whether it will succeed. But one thing is certain: Unless we can reverse the decline of marriage, demand for an ever-expanding welfare state will continue. The president's Healthy Marriage Initiative is no panacea, but it's a step in the right direction.

Here's a safe prediction: no matter how much money is spent on the Healthy Marriage Initiative, marriage will continue to decline and the welfare state will continue to expand. This initiative is rampant idiocy. Rampant, I tell you! Rampant! You can't cure cancer with cancer, you don't treat a patient with a bullet wound by shooting him in the head, and you can't solve government-created problems with more government!

Comments ()

Drums, drums, in the deep

Charles Krauthammer begins the martial drumbeat... again:

Did we invade the wrong country? One of the lessons now being drawn from the 9/11 report is that Iran was the real threat. It had links to al Qaeda, allowed some of the 9/11 hijackers to transit through, and is today harboring al Qaeda leaders. The Iraq War critics have a new line of attack: We should have done Iran instead of Iraq.

There may be no deus ex machina. If nothing is done, a fanatical terrorist regime openly dedicated to the destruction of the ``Great Satan'' will have both nuclear weapons and the terrorists and missiles to deliver them. All that stands between us and that is either revolution or pre-emptive strike.

Both of which, by the way, are far more likely to succeed with 146,000 American troops and highly sophisticated aircraft standing by just a few miles away -- in Iraq.

Charade. The common wisdom is always a charade. Never forget that. It is looking more and more likely that total war in the region was the plan all along, and that an important part of that plan was to drag the American people into it step by unwilling step. I imagine we will not bother to declare this war, either.

I'm not saying that one can't make a reasonable case for war with Iran, not at all. But the way in which the administration has gone about manipulating the situation from the start makes it clear that these neoconservative Wilsonian imperialists are the very last people who can be trusted to wage it.

Third of a third. (shakes head)

Comments ()

The cure is worse than the disease

Some of you might wonder how I obtained the number indicating that governments kill 22 times more people than individual criminals. First, to obtain a maximum murder bodycount for the world, let's trace the following train of logic.

1. The USA is one of the most violent countries in the world.
2. There were 17,298 murders in the USA in 2000.
3. The USA has 5 percent of the world's population.
4. 20 times 17,298 is 345,960 murders per year.
5. 100 times 345,960 is 34.6 million, our maximum bodycount.

Remember, this assumes that criminals in populous countries such as France, China and Japan, where the murder rates are as low as 8.8 percent of the USA's, are as murderous as in the USA. The 20th century government body count, on the other hand, is estimated to be 185 million. So, governments the world over are at least 5.3 times as likely to commit murder as private individuals.

However, this 34.6 million number is far too high. If we substituted the relatively peaceful Japan for the USA as a stand-in for the world average, we'd have a grand total of 3 million murders for the century, which would make governments 56.4 times more lethal. I haven't spent a lot of time investigating international homicide statistics, but a Google search provides an estimate of 8.4 million global murders for the 20th century, which amounts to a global homicide rate of approximately 1.6 per 100,000 for the century. This is higher than China's 1.3, much less the United Kingdom's 0.9 or Japan's 0.6. Dividing 185 million by 8.4 gives the aforementioned 22/1 ratio.

These are crude approximations, of course, as the number of people on the planet has changed dramatically from 1900 to 2000, Rummel's numbers for the century only go to 1987, and most countries do not have reliable statistics for most of the period in question. But regardless of whether the correct multiple is 22 or 5.3, it should not be hard to see that strong government is worse than crime.

Comments ()

Execute the agents

There is one death penalty I could support. Allowing the government to execute government employees who use the color of the law to commit murder and escape the consequences of their actions. I despise the militarized police, the DEA and the FBI. They are predators far worse than those they claim to be defending Americans against. Law-and-order government cheerleaders tend to be ignorant of the fact that an individual living in the 20th century was 22 times more likely to be murdered by a government employee than by a private criminal. No democidist ever obtained power by promising chaos; they always promise Recht und Ordnung to the foolish and short-sighted.

As soon as DEA agents realized they had killed an innocent Hispanic girl, they began a vigorous damage control effort. They closed the crime scene neighborhood and sent a team of agents to Nelly Villarreal's house....

With the little girl lost and the community in an uproar, the DEA's spin machine kicked into high gear. DEA spin doctors alleged Ashley had driven a darkened car without its headlights on, had accelerated toward agents, then backed up to try to hit them, and that agents shot at the car only in self-defense. Other sources floated ludicrous stories implying that Ashley, Danny, and Nelly were fronts for Joey's alleged coke sales. Pro-DEA sources said Ashley "caused her own death" because she was "driving a car without a driver's license."

The San Antonio Police Department (SAPD) Homicide Unit, Bexar County District Attorney's office, and a team of DEA investigators from Washington, DC, began looking into the incident, but lawyers for the Villarreal family, along with journalists and civil liberties groups, say the investigation is being mishandled and carried out with an unreasonable degree of secrecy.

The DEA refuses to comment on the case, other than to disparage Ashley and her family while staunchly defending its agents' actions.

All in the unholy name of the Drug War. As with Waco, they have to murder the children in order to save them. Since the government always protects its own, however heinous the the crime, it seems that there's no alternative but private vengeance in matters such as these. I certainly won't shed a tear if those DEA agents are hunted down, one by one, and exterminated like the insects they are.

And spare me the forgiveness lectures. Forgiveness is for those who repent, not those who insist that they were justified in their crimes and slur the murdered dead.

Comments ()

A Vox flip-flop

I have been outspoken in the past about my opposition to women in the military. I have, however, decided that my position was completely incorrect due to new details regarding the facts of women's service in the military of which I was previously unaware. I apologize for my inappropriate male insensitivity, and furthermore, would also like to declare my support for a women's draft.

Courtesy of Jonah Goldberg:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. Army has long lured recruits with the slogan "Be All You Can Be," but now soldiers and their families can receive plastic surgery, including breast enlargements, on the taxpayers' dime.

The New Yorker magazine reports in its July 26th edition that members of all four branches of the U.S. military can get face-lifts, breast enlargements, liposuction and nose jobs for free -- something the military says helps surgeons practice their skills.

Comments ()

Mailvox: Spinning science

Ellis writes:

"Besides, the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics completely negates the Anthropic Principle and is currently more accepted by physicists than the Copenhagen Interpretation."

Ah yes, those many worlds, for which there is absolutely no scientific evidence. I love how "scientists" so quickly resort to fantasy in order to escape the logical conclusions of science. Oh, but it's more accepted by physicists, is it? I always understood science to be driven by replicable experiments, not opinion polls.

The significant word, of course, is "currently". The same was true of the once-current state of archeology, which "proved" the Bible wasn't true thanks to the historical absence of the Hittites and Assyrians - both peoples have since been found - and with the advent of Intelligent Design the secular faithful are now desperately cooking up untested theories, (otherwise known as hypotheses, first steps not to be confused with the whole of the method), which are then, ironically, blindly cited by the ignorant as proof of their non-belief. When a physicist demonstrates the existence of another world and his demonstration is replicated by others, I'll take these arguments seriously. Otherwise, it's not science, it's just science fiction.

And here I thought it was the religious nuts who were supposed to be into baseless superstition. As of today, there is more evidence for God than there is for "many worlds". And as for me, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that both exist outside our space-time continuum.

Remember how "scientists" such as Freud once convinced several generations that religion was unhealthy? Decades later, actual scientific studies demonstrated that quite the opposite was true. Christianity has nothing to fear from science, only those addicted to their dogma need worry. And that holds true for the atheist as well the Christian.

Comments ()

The innocence of Mr. Joseph Farah

Mr. Farah writes:

In a way I would never have imagined possible, the news media have allowed themselves to be led by the Democrats' disinformation campaign to the point where they have forgotten the story.

Pardon me, but the story remains Sandy Berger's inexplicable actions. Why did he do it? Which papers did he pilfer? What was he trying to conceal? Whom was he trying to protect?

I hope the Justice Department is focused on these questions like a laser beam, but I sincerely doubt it. It's been nine months and no FBI agent has even interviewed Berger yet. What's that about? He should have been indicted, tried and convicted by now.

Sandy Berger is a lowly member of the bi-factional ruling party. Nothing will come of this, any more than one of the king's courtiers would be punished for raping a peasant lass back in the day. There is no Law, there are only legal weapons wielded against the masses to keep them in their place.

I don't know how anyone who pays any attention to the political process can think that there's a genuine conflict between the heavy hitters of the Democratic-Republican Party. The Michigan-Ohio State rivalry is far more convincing. Of course, it has the advantage of being genuine.

Comments ()

Next week's column

Okay, I just turned it in and I'm still laughing. I have the feeling that I'm going to be receiving some seriously irate emails on Monday. Any big fans of The Factor here?

I'm just curious... no reason....

Comments ()

What needs to be done

Flight crews and air marshals say Middle Eastern men are staking out airports, probing security measures and conducting test runs aboard airplanes for a terrorist attack. At least two midflight incidents have involved numerous men of Middle Eastern descent behaving in what one pilot called "stereotypical" behavior of an organized attempt to attack a plane. "No doubt these are dry runs for a terrorist attack," an air marshal said. Pilots and air marshals who asked to remain anonymous told The Washington Times that surveillance by terrorists is rampant, using different probing methods.

"It's happening, and it's a sad state of affairs," a pilot said. A June 29 incident aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles is similar to a Feb. 15 incident on American Airlines Flight 1732 from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to New York's John F. Kennedy Airport.

Not that I'll be flying anytime soon, but here's what I would recommend. If a group of Middle Eastern men start playing the bathroom game, round up a few weightlifters, ex-jocks and any other guys who look as if they can handle themselves. Then simply block off the bathrooms in precisely the same manner that the Arabs were. If a flight attendant complains, tell her that you understand that she may not be able to discriminate, but not being an employee, you and the boys are not bound by airline policy, and since she's already demonstrated that the crew obviously has no intention of enforcing a no-loitering rules, you're not going to pay attention to it either.

Better to get a lecture at your destination than never make it there. Is that discrimination? Sure it is. Deal with it. When blue-eyed Swedish blondes start committing terrorist acts around the world, we'll hassle them too.

Comments ()

Strategy vs Tactics

When it comes to investing, I've learned that I'm a strategist, not a tactician. My inability to pull the trigger and cut my losses when a trade loses 20 percent in the first two days means that even though some 75 percent of my short-term trades are positive, I lose overall.

Strategically, on the other hand, I've done quite well. I just sold off a two-year position in an equity that, in combination with currency appreciation, turned in a very nice 236 percent return. Its sister position, despite a nominal decline, still managed a 22.4 percent return. Not bad at all. And going into gold at 270 didn't hurt either. So, let's talk strategy.

The conventional wisdom has it that this is just another summer swoon, and that the markets will rise into the election. That's possible, to be sure, as I am no prognosticator. My errant predictions of 15 months ago should suffice to prove otherwise. But, as there seems to be a certain amount of interest, I thought I'd share some of my thoughts on the current situation.

What I got wrong, I think, was partially due to my failure to think the Elliott Wave concept all the way through. The people at EWI tend to look closer at the charts than at the calendar, and I never stopped to consider the following basic point: If Intermediate Wave (1) took 640 trading days from March 2000 to October 2002, how could anyone expect Wave (2) to be complete in March 2003. That's six months, about 125 trading days, far too short to be a reasonable countertrend to a 640-day wave. It is, in fact, close to the MINIMUM possible time-relationship at 19 percent. Based on the historical averages, projecting a 1280-day countertrend wave would have been as reasonable.

Is it possible that we have now seen the top of Wave (2)? The March 5th high for the S&P 500 this year marks 402 trading days from the end of Wave (1), or 62.8 percent of the time. In those 402 days, it rebounded back up to 75 percent of its peak. The QQQ hit its high earlier, on January 20th, marking 322 days of rally, which means that it rebounded to 32 percent (from 16 percent) in half of Wave (1)'s time.

We are told that Wave (3) is usually the big one, but for the sake of conservative argument, let's assume that it is identical in length and performance to Wave (1). This would bring us to expect a bottom at the end of July 2006, with the S&P 500 at 580, the Dow at 6800 and the QQQ at 6.50. Sound impossible? I don't think anyone expected to see the Cubes under twenty only two-and-a-half years after it hit 120 either.

If we did see the crest of Wave (2) a few months back, then we can compare how the decline so far compares to our expected down wave. In the case of the S&P 500, it's declined 9.4 percent in 14.5 percent of our projected 640 days. The QQQ has declined 13.3 percent in 20 percent of the time. This could indicate a) nothing if I'm off-base, or, if I'm strategically correct, b) the speed of the decline is going to pick up pace at some point in the relatively near future.

The SPX/VIX ratio tends to support the latter theory. Small crashes of 20 percent in a month have tended to take place when this ratio is in excess of 80. Yesterday, when the morning rally peaked, that ratio hit 80.24 for the third time since June 23rd. Technicians will have no doubt noted that the three major equity markets have all now broken through the support of their 200-day moving averages for the first time since April 14, 2003.

In any case, time will tell.

Comments ()

Bad news for the anti-anthropic crowd

"I want to report that I think I have solved a major problem in theoretical physics," announced [Stephen] Hawking as he described his solution to the black hole information paradox.

This paradox, ironically, stems from Hawking’s own work. In the 1970s he proved that black holes lose mass by emitting radiation and eventually evaporate altogether. But this conflicted with the laws of quantum physics, which state that information about what fell into the black hole can never be completely wiped out. Hawking previously argued that the intense gravitational fields inside the black hole were unravelling the laws of quantum mechanics, possibly sending the information shooting off into other universes. Now he thinks the information simply leaks out back into our own Universe.

Hawking explains the implications. "I’m sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved, there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes.

And, incidentally, there's no reason to believe those other universes exist, as much as those made uncomfortable by the Anthropic Principle might wish them to. This isn't to say that they don't, only that there's less scientific evidence for other universes than there is for intelligent design.

Speaking of science fiction, here's one of my reader's peeves. A new principle is no sooner discovered/conceived when the intrepid hero can suddenly use it to leap around all space and time, or create a weapon from it. When has the move from the conceptual to the practical ever taken place in time measured in months, much less minutes?

Comments ()

Release the video

Hey, if we can rent Pam and Tommy's wedding night nuptials at Blockbuster, why shouldn't we be able to watch the hidden video of Mr. Sandy Berger "sloppily" sneaking out documents from the National Archives. It's a publicly owned camera and public property, after all. That video should immediately settle the question of whether Mr. Berger was actually stuffing papers down his pants or not.

Of course, being a protege of Bill Clinton, Berger will probably insist that he was doinig nothing more than innocently trying to impress a secretary at the front desk with the bulge of his oversized genitalia.

Joe Lockhart, Clinton's former spokesman, says Berger "categorically denies that he ever took documents and stuffed them in his socks," according to CNN.

"That is absurd," said Lockhart, who is now advising Berger. "And anyone who says that is interested in something other than the truth."

Former Clinton aide Lanny Davis wants the official who leveled the sock-stuffing allegation to come forward and make the claim publicly.

"I suggest that person is lying," the news channel quotes him as saying. "And if that person has the guts, let's see who it is who made the comment that Sandy Berger stuffed something into his socks."

These old Clinton lieutenants obviously still think we're suckers. If they're getting huffy about how the papers weren't in his socks, we'll probably find out that they were in his shoes and his underwear.


UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg writes: Byron York has an excellent piece on Berger. He says that the documents Berger took were said to be 15-30 pages. So, if the Post is right, Berger took somewhere between a minimum of 75 and a maximum of 180 pages worth of the same document, in five to six drafts, over two separate occasions... inadvertantly. That is, he took them from a secure room, in a leather portfolio, all the while sneaking notes out "knowingly."

Sadly, York's piece states that there were no cameras, it was a sting setup by the National Archives people. I guess we're stuck with Pam, Tommy and Paris.

Comments ()

Anybody got some rope?

From WND:

Undaunted by Kofi Annan's rejection of a plan for United Nations monitoring of the U.S. presidential elections this fall, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-TX, is taking her case to Secretary of State Colin Powell. Johnson has urgently asked Powell to make an official request that the U.N. provide observers for the Nov. 2 elections in the United States to "ensure free and fair elections."

Thirteen Democratic congressmen, led by Johnson, sent a letter July 8 to the U.N. general secretary requesting the presence of U.N. representatives in every county of the country during the voting process and any vote recount afterwards.

The U.N. immediately responded that such a request could not be accepted unless if came from the U.S. government. Otherwise, a spokesman said, it could be considered "intervention in a country’s sovereignty."

The U.N. response confirms that Rep. Johnson and her treasonous compatriots are actively working to subvert US national sovereignty. I'm no Republican, but I'd certainly support giving these Democrats a fair trial, then hanging them. Well, I would, if I didn't think it was a horrible idea to give the State the power of life and death, I should probably say.

Fine, in this case, we can make do with exiling them. I don't think they'll enjoy it quite as much as the immortal expatriate, Fred.

Comments ()

Don't look, don't think

From WND

The New York Times, which yesterday buried the story about a former national security adviser caught shoving highly classified documents in his pants, today suggested in a news story the scandal of the missing documents might hurt his chances of becoming secretary of state.

Sandy Berger, national security adviser during the Clinton administration, is facing a Justice Department investigation for rifling through files in the National Archives in preparation for the 911 Commission hearings.

He admits taking papers home and now has no explanation as to where several are.

I'm just curious to know why anyone believes what the government was saying about Waco, OK City and TWA 800 considering that we now have proof that a top administration official of that era is manifestly willing to destroy documentary evidence. Furthermore, what reason do we have to believe that the current administration's officials are any different with regards to the events that happened on its watch?

As Bob Schultz has discovered, all the documents related to the discussion of the 1913 income tax, and, I would guess, the Federal Reserve as well, are now missing from the National Archives. But missing documents and officials sticking papers down their pants is all innocent, I'm sure. Nothing to hide, don't look, don't think, just believe what they say and do as you're told....

Comments ()

So sprach Mogambo

So how severe will the bust be? Worse than anything you can imagine, as the degree of monetary laxity under the horrid Alan Greenspan is worse than anything anyone could possibly have imagined, sort of like when you were young and you were wondering what it will be like to be married, and never once did you interrupt the carnal daydreams and idyllic visions of staying up as late as you wanted and eating cake for dinner to consider that it would end up being an unending hell, where you spend your waking moments praying for death to deliver your from getting any more of what you so richly deserve for being such a moron and having such a loose grip on reality.

The Aden sisters, who have also been around this economic biz long enough to see the writing on the wall, write that "Inflation is headed higher," although they qualify their assessment with the soothing qualifier, "It may not become as extreme as it did in the 1970s." Well, they have their opinion and I have mine, which that it will be worse, much, much worse, than it was in the 1970's, only because the outrageous level of money created and the sheer size and expense of the government makes the 1970's look like a day at the beach in comparison.

They then give a little snapshot of how prices are acting lately. "Last month import prices soared at an annual rate of 19.2%. Consumer prices had their biggest jump in 14 years this year with the latest rise at 7.2% annualized. This included a 55% surge in energy prices and a nearly 11% gain in food prices (both annualized). Excluding these, the popular core rate was obviously less. But since we all eat and drive, the core rate is actually meaningless."

"Producer prices reinforced the other inflation figures. They too have soared the most in 14 years over the past year with the latest up at an annual rate of nearly 10%. Energy and food prices surged over 19% and 18% annualized, respectively. So who says there's no inflation? There is, and it's soaring."

Richard Russell "The fact (which few seem to realize) is that the Fed is still fighting the dragon of deflation. For the year-to-date (the last 25 weeks), M-3, the broad money supply, is up $430 billion or an annualized rate of 10.1%. This is double last year's rate, so it seems clear that Alan Greenspan still believes it's necessary to fight deflation."

And what is this deflation that Greenspan is so worried about? The prices of stocks and bonds and houses.

Austrian theory is calling it. Elliott Wave is calling it. The debt levels, trade deficits and conventional history is all ominous. But Alan Greenspan says it's okay, so I'm sure it's fine.

Comments ()

Mailvox: context, volk

Rhone is irked:

" Even though I understand that people read for confirmation, not information...". You consistently underestimate your readership: Franken, Alterman, Iran post,Syrian TImes, Al Quiada websites [translated] as well as the usual: WND [damn i'm as tired of hearing their crap about how terrible the Dems are as i am the other side-verbage is almost interchangable] and the rest of the 'conservative'[sic] stuff: even read the stock guys, to see what they're saying about metals and to hear them lie about the market. If you only read what you agree with, how can you ever know your enemy, or how he/she thinks, plans, reacts? Besides, one actually 'learns' from these disparate views...just like listening to Keynsians, contrasted with Austrian School. Your arrogance in these regards is unbecoming and unwarrented. No one's got a 'corner' on the truth: not ann coulter, al franken, or vox day.

Methinks you took the statement too far. I would be a massive hypocrite were I to advocate not reading viewpoints opposed to one's own. I not only read the American Left, I also read the European Left as well as the original source material. I was speaking only of the mass preference to read for confirmation, as any analysis of non-fiction bestsellers will show. A woman who buys the Lizard Queen's book is not reading for information, she is reading it to confirm her opinion of Hillary's sainthood. A conservative who buys Ben Shapiro's book is not reading for information, he is reading it to confirm what he already knows from his own experience: that academics are liberal.

I would submit that while I do not have a corner on the truth, I do have hold of a much larger portion of it than darling Alice.

Comments ()

Mailvox: When the short answer isn't enough

Craig is alarmed:

What drives you? If you are "just doing this for fun" I kind of feel betrayed. I first heard about this site from a friend who told me some guy is challenging AL Franken to a fight which to me was freaking awesome. There is nothing better than a bright fearless Christian that is tuned in to pop culture. The mainstream media could really use someone like you. Too bad "that is not what you want" There is a battle going on between good and evil and it has many fronts, media being a huge front. Sometimes it sounds like you want in on this battle, other times you seem to just want to thumb your nose at the battle and talk about how amusing it all is to you.

Two things. First, "for fun" was simply shorthand for explaining that I am not a journalist, have no interest in being a journalist and have no serious desire to pursue a media career. I've twice been asked to apply for the editorship of magazines, once a magazine that I truly love, and both times turned it down. I don't have any burning desire to see myself on TV, to listen to my sibilant "s" on the radio or to see my name on a masthead. I just don't. In running my own business, I've earned more money in a year than any ego-driven camera-hungry media whore except the biggest of the big dogs, the Limbaughs, O'Reillys and Coulters.

I'm a libertarian. While I see little difference between the sale of principle required to be embraced by the mainstream media and the sale of one's body, I fully support an individual's legal (not moral) right to do either. But I have known call girls for whom I have more respect and regard than many a talking head.

The media battle does call to me at times, Craig, but the problem is that the battle, for the most part, is a fraud. For example, the studio will feature two talking heads, one "conservative" and one "liberal" arguing about the administration's proper policy response to an unexpectedly high CPI number. Meanwhile, I know: a) the CPI number is completely fake, since it is manipulated to exclude inflationary elements and overcount deflationary elements, b) the cause of the real, higher inflation, and c) that inflation is necessarily an inherent part of the current system. This is only one of dozens of possible examples.

Most people don't know that I could have been writing columns for WND three years before I started. Mr. Farah and I discussed it, but I didn't feel as if I had enough to say to write two columns a week. Now, of course, I'm blogging daily, so in retrospect that wasn't a problem. It's possible to think that things might have been different if I had established myself sooner. But any student of economics understands opportunity cost, and now the cost of throwing myself into what I know to be a largely superficial conflict is much too high.

Potentially more significant is the apparent fact that the media does not appear to want much to do with me. My column is out there, every single week, and this blog is updated every single day. I can't force the newspapers to run my column any more than I can force people to read my blog. 1,600 daily hits here compared to 61,000 at Wonkette would seem to indicte that people have a strong preference for snappy one-liners about anal sex over what I have on offer. Does it annoy me when so much column space goes to inferior thinkers who repeatedly demonstrate their cluelessness? Of course! But it doesn't surprise me at all; the market for mediocrity has always been a large one. Money and fame is not the only measure of quality, if they are, Britney Spears and Jenna Jameson rate more highly than Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin.

I am always open-minded with regards to the future. But unlike most, I have seen up close the costs of both fame and great fortune, and so I am considerably more ambivalent about such things than most. And I think, Craig, that perhaps you failed to consider one possibility. Sometimes one laughs because the only alternative is to scream.

Comments ()

Be a good little serf

U.S. Citizen, Elena Sassower, respectfully waited through two hours of speeches in favor of the nominee until Chairman Senator Saxby Chambliss adjourned the May 22, 2003 U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Judicial Confirmation, a Public Hearing without asking if anyone else present wished to be heard.

Elena Sassower, then said: “Mr. Chairman, there’s citizen opposition to Judge Wesley based on his documented corruption as a New York Court of Appeals judge. May I testify?”

Elena Sassower, within seconds, was removed by the D.C. Capitol Police from the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing Room, hands cuffed behind her back, arrested and incarcerated for 21 hours.

Elena Sassower, was prosecuted by the U.S. Attorneys’ Office and on April 20, 2004 was found ‘guilty of Disruption of Congress’ after a week-long trial before Superior Court Judge Brian F. Holeman at 500 Indiana Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C.

I know nothing about the particulars of this case, but somehow, it doesn't lead me to think that our elected officials are likely to pay much legitimate attention to We The People's exercise of their Constitutional right to petition. I suspect the only thing that keeps the Federal staatspolizei from locking them up is that the arrest of 14,592 people who've done nothing but sign a formal Petition of Redress would explode the matrix construct once and for all.

In tangential news, I doubt anyone will be surprised to hear this:

After several hours of legal wrestling related to findings and recommendations included in [Dick] Simkanin's pre-sentencing report, USDC Judge John McBryde imposed the sentence that is approximately double what was indicated by the “point system” criteria utilized in the federal sentencing guidelines. During the day, McBryde also sentenced two other individuals on federal charges including a bank robber and a wife-beating firearms dealer. Their combined sentences were less than half that [84 months] received by Simkanin....

The most telling proofs of judicial manipulation were McBryde's improper directed findings of critical facts to the jury, ruling that Simkanin could not enter a single piece of paper as defense evidence and McBryde's repeated quashing of testimony when he (Simkanin) attempted to put on a defense by explaining the content of the Constitution’s taxing clauses and the content of federal tax law and how he relied on the words of the law to determine his actions.

Seven years. I imagine that it won't be long before businessmen who are interested in operating under a government that actually obeys its own laws will begin to want their businesses headquartered and staffed outside the United States. Not all outsourcing and offshore moves are to countries with low-cost labor, after all. Once a government ceases to respond to its citizens and begins to hold show trials meant to intimidate its productive classes, it's all downhill from there.

Comments ()

A viral meme

White Lightning Axiom: Redux is mesmerized:

Vox is evil, but an odd, seductive evil that is irrefutable.

Very flattering, to be sure, but the interesting thing was the single comment inspired by this post. "Hi. Hope I'm doing this correctly, am unfamiliar with this blog site. Just wanted to say thanks for being a reader. I took your advice and manually pollenated my pumpkin and zuchini. Keeping my fingers crossed. Growing my own Jack-o-lantern would be amazingly cool."

Though my sins be many, manually pollinating vegetables is not numbered among them. So, just who is in league with darkness here, Mr. Republican National Convention?

Comments ()

Mailvox: I care, but not that much

William is, he tells us, in a quandary:

I am in a quandry - I read both you and Michelle and when I read your original post it had the tone of sour grapes to me wrapped in a "this doesn't make sense to me" wrapper. Then I read your latest with its "That's obviously not the case, as if I had the desire to be a media whore and maximize my exposure by running back and forth between CNN and Fox" where sour grapes in disguise are so obvious despite all your protestations--not to mention a few cheap shots under the guise of satirical irony.

I have read you for some time and was happy to see your blog (though your website is unreadable - literally, the text is too small and not adjustable) but I must say I was disappointed by the original post on this topic and the follow-up only reinforces my concerns. I have just come to expect more from you. Maybe if I didn't like Michelle I wouldn't have reacted this way, but that says more about me than you...

William, as hard as it may be to believe, there are actually some people who have lives outside of Media World and no desire for a career in it. I happen to be one f them. I have no media career, this is something I do... "for fun" is the short answer.

It might help you to understand that I once started a band that had record and publishing contracts with TVT Records, singles hitting the charts, music in soundtracks of movies like Mortal Kombat, was beating out Prince for local music awards, and we refused to play live or go on tour. It was an absolute must if we wanted to make it big - it took TVT three years of touring NIN to break Trent - but we absolutely refused. Were we stupid? No, because that wasn't what we wanted. The other founder is happily married, doing exactly what he wants at Microsoft, and I'm doing... other things. I can't even imagine going the other route now.

I will be the first to admit that the success of others occasionally boggles my mind. After turning down two of my proposals - which they'd requested - a publisher published what turned out to be a successful book based on the shocking premise that professors are left-liberal. (Insert advertisement for my forthcoming work "Oxygen" here.) Even though I understand that people read for confirmation, not information, I still found this remarkable. But I'm not envious of this success, because I don't want to do what they do. Do you honestly think I can't write an article expressing outrage about airline security?

Of course I can! But why should I, when twenty other columnists inevitably will? I am quite aware that I'm limiting my audience by writing about Tolstoy instead of terror, and Elliott Waves instead of Wilson. I can run neck and neck with Queen Ann for top WND readership anytime I choose; all I have to do is lambast Kerry and the Clintons every week, taking one week off every month to take the obligatory shot at the liberal coverage of the issue du jour. How entertaining - I think I'd rather write bad fiction imitating Mercedes Lackey instead.

I have nothing at all against Michelle Malkin. She's cute. She writes well. But she clearly wants a media career whereas I don't. Seriously. Now, I'm glad that you, William, and a few others happen to enjoy my columns and whatnot. But I was writing before anyone was reading my stuff, and even now, with five novels and almost three years of columns under my belt, a good part of what I write goes unread. This isn't my career, in fact, this isn't even my primary hobby. If I ever get tired of it, I'll walk away as cheerfully as I walked away from the record company.

Life is too precious to worry about a career. No one ever lay on their deathbed and said: "thank God I was on CNN!"

Comments ()

My low, low standards

Puzzled thinks we're looking for perfection:

maybe it is the ability to count, and an understanding of the electoral system, which the ideologues don't seem to begin to understand.... Mrs. Schaeffer used to tell us in studies when she was still here that one of her late husband's favorite phrases was "In a Fallen world, if you demand perfection or nothing, you will always get nothing."

I'm afraid it's you who repeatedly fail to understand. Yes, we understand how to count. Yes, I understand the electoral system. I simply don't believe it makes one bloody bit of difference if Faction A (international socialists) or Faction B (corporatist socialists) is in power. And the facts of the matter are clearly on my side, as I've previously illustrated the many, many similarities between Bush and Kerry.

Puzzled, like all Republican cheerleaders, can't think past tomorrow. Like every conservative Republican since Barry Goldwater was the Promised Land, he's hoping for a miracle as the country further rots. Since the serious putrification began so long ago, the speed with which it proceeds is totally unimportant except in the shortest term.

I am not demanding perfection. Not even close. I simply hope and pray for a government that will somehow manage to avoid killing its own citizens. If my standards for women were as low as my standards for government, I'd be cheerfully dating a 65 year-old crack addict with no teeth and a bad case of syphilis.

Comments ()

Vengeance!

The Sports Guy has come up with a Vengeance Scale:

8.0 -- Justin Timberlake's "Cry Me A River" video.

(Note: The most underrated example of vengeance on this list. After Britney cheated on him, not only did he dump her, he put out a best-selling album fueled by a song about their breakup in which he basically destroys her with the lyrics. Just an unbelievable piece of work. It's devastating. I can't even imagine what she did when she first heard it. And if that wasn't enough, he made a well-received video about the song, starring a Britney look-alike. And if THAT wasn't enough, he immediately started going out with Cameron Diaz. By the time he was done, Britney's career was in the tank -- she was chain-smoking and hanging out with backup dancers and white trash guys from her hometown. Now that, my friends, is vengeance. Bravo, Justin. Bravo.)

Well said. But uncharacteristically, The Sports Guy fails to note the added bonus that the girl in the video, (not the Britney stand-in, the brunette), is approximately 4.75 times hotter than Justin's dumpee.

Also, given that VENGEANCE is the theme of every martial arts movie ever filmed, I felt that the genre was not adequately represented by Daniel-san, Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude van Damme.

Comments ()

OO bleg

Anyone know if there's an invert macro for OpenOffice Calc and where it can be found? I know there's a Transpose function, but that only turns a vertical column into a horizontal row. I want to take the cells in a single column and reverse the order so that:

A
B
C

becomes

C
B
A

I have the macro running in Excel, of course, but I don't want to reboot into Windows just to flip a column.

Comments ()

Arrivederci, baby

J is bereft:

Whatever happened to Cox & Forkum? I was a fan of their work since back in the old school, and I was hella stoked when you put them on your faves list. Now they've disappeared. What gives?

What happened? I got bored. They're talented and amusing, to be sure, but after a few weeks it got to the point that I knew what the cartoon would be before I clicked on the page. And so, the axe fell. Hello Cthulhu is more my style anyhow.

Nothing bores me more than predictability. If you notice, I don't tend to write a lot of "Isn't America Great" columns on July 4th, and it actually causes me physical discomfort when I write about a dead horse which I know every other columnist will be enthusiastically flogging. There's no need for me to write about Joe Wilson's lies; NRO has been writing about little else. I usually make an exception to this rule on Christmas and Easter, when I do like to write about matters spiritual,

Meanwhile, the stock market takes a dive, which if it is the onset of Wave 3 will probably do far more to threaten the re-election of the president than Abu Ghraib, "Bush Lied" and [fill in your conservative cause-of-the-week here] combined, and not a one of those Townhall and NRO columnists championing the president even notices except for Larry Kudlow, who, as is his custom, can't see a dip without shouting BUY, BUY, BUY!

Back to a previous subject - success isn't terribly difficult if you're willing to trash your principles. I know how to make ridiculous sums of money - an acquaintance of mine is a major European porn king - but what price the world? On a smaller scale, I have no doubt that UPS would have more success selling my column if I would toe the line and champion the Republican Party, but if I ever decide to sacrifice my principles and sell out, I'll do so in a manner far more cynical, lucrative and spectacular than that. This is not to say that most of the Republican cheerleaders are trashing their principles, because it's painfully clear that most of them very much believe what they are saying.

Their constant bewilderment at the actions of their so-called leaders testifies to this. Of course, they also have plenty of incentive to stay within the Pale, as the conservative establishment's treatment of former stalwarts such as Joseph Sobran, Paul Craig Roberts and even, to a certain extent, Ann Coulter shows.

Comments ()

Pattern blindness

I was reading some of the emails to WND this morning, and I was struck by the short-sighted consistency of the conventional Republican position. Everything is always about the next election, upon which the fate of the nation is always hanging.

The fact that the election of a Democrat does not significantly worsen things and that the election of a Republican does not significantly improve them as the nation continues its slow death-spiral never seems to enter into this short-term equation.

If, on the contrary, one steps back and sees precisely how the seeds of the future destruction were planted in 1861, in 1913 and in 1933, long before either of the present bi-factional candidates were born, one realizes that it makes no difference whatsoever if Bush or Kerry are elected, as neither of them have any intention in chopping down what have grown into trees towering over the rights and liberties of Americans, killing the national birthright in their oppressive shade.

Who is wiser? I have seldom heard that it is best to listen to the advice of those who look no further than tomorrow.

Comments ()

Weird grumblings?

Michelle Malkin writes:

In response to some weird grumblings that a reader alerted me to, I note for the record that I took Sitemeter off my site about three weeks ago because it was publishing traffic numbers phonier than Enron's. I think it wiped out about a week's worth of visits for some reason. I e-mailed Sitemeter for help and they never wrote me back. So I took it off the blog.

Ms Malkin seems to be under the vague impression that I begrudge her her links or her readership. That's obviously not the case, as if I had the desire to be a media whore and maximize my exposure by running back and forth between CNN and Fox I would have long ago moved to NYC or Los Angeles instead of living in what the Original Cyberpunk describes as my cave in the snow-covered Andes.

As all the regulars know, I don't take the SiteMeter statistics seriously. Some of you were even openly disappointed when I explained that the number of people visiting here had to be rather lower than reported as SiteMeter tends to overcount hits. But, since that's what the Truth Laid Bear uses for the TLB Ecosphere, that's what we use here. If everyone overcounts using the same method, it may be useful for comparative purposes, after all.

The point was not to slam Ms Malkin - although her apparent inability to grasp the point is amusing - but instead to highlight the human tendency to butter up those we regard as our superiors in some way. (Wonkette, another relatively new and much-linked blog would have served as well, I simply happened to have more data on Ms Malkin thanks to her WND connection.) Many people who link to me are readers and regulars here, and I'm pleased to link to them in return. However, it's clear from visiting some other blogs that link here and subsequently request addition to the blogroll that they are only interested in what is rather distastefully known as "link-love" in order to widen their own exposure.

Is there anything wrong with that? No more than there is anything wrong with butt-kissing in general. I despise it, some people, on the other hand, clearly crave it. Your mileage may vary. To me, the purpose of a blogroll is not to demonstrate how well-connected one is, but to offer new and perhaps unexpected alternatives wherein people may find something of interest. For example, I frequently visit Yahoo! Finance, but you'll never see it on my Faves. I want people to visit Mogambo and Charles Stross, I want visitors to know where the regulars' blogs can be found. But I see no point whatsoever in trying to present an inflated image of me or my blog.

The truth is what it is.

Comments ()

Mailvox: caveat emptor

DS has reasonable doubts:

Having subscribed to Elliot in the past I find that it may be useful for investing (not trading) but only in the largest view one can take. They have been so wrong so many times on even what I would call the year view, much less month, week, day or intraday. They were wrong throughout the 90's waiting for the top of V that to have followed them meant financial disaster if you shorted and very low returns if you sat on the sidelines. I lost alot shorting on their advice last year when they called over and over and over for the start to wave III down. My feeling is that like most of us they are way too soon in their calls but have to say something to their subscribers. They will eventually be right but in the mean time I learned the hard way not to trade in any time frame on their advice.

There's no question that the current state of Elliott Wave understanding leaves much to be desired. I, too, was anticipating a decline last spring at the start of the war for other reasons thanks to a flawed system of my own development, so I'm hardly one to cast stones on this subject. But timeframes are clearly a major weakness in the current level of analysis, although I don't think there's any nefarious need to feed the subscribers that's involved - accuracy is far more saleable than action here - instead, I suspect it's simply the age-old problem of human impatience coloring the wavecounts.

For example, the idea that Intermediate Wave 3 was about to begin in early 2003 appears almost absurd in retrospect. Why? Because Wave 1 took about 640 trading days from March 27, 2000, to October 10, 2002. (The precise figure depends on the specific market, of course.) Now, if it's true that we saw the peak of Wave 2 in March 2004, that's only 319 days, pretty close to 50 percent of the time-length of Wave 1. So, far from this countertrend wave being exceptionally long, as many would have it, it's pretty close to the minimum that one would reasonably expect even if one knew nothing of Elliott Waves. A counterwave may be longer or shorter, but it's not reasonable to EXPECT it to be one-tenth the time of the preceding wave.

As the S&P 500 is the largest of the three indexes, it is the least easily manipulated. Assuming the Intermediate wavecounts are correct, the countertrend response of Wave 2 was a 50.83 percent retracement of the Wave 1 decline over almost precisely 50 percent of the trading days. The Nasdaq-100 featured only a 19.54 percent retracement, while the Dow did best in reclaiming 85 percent of its losses. As 50 percent is a reasonable amount of time, the Dow is unlikely to re-establish new highs and there are a plethora of other factors indicating near-term continued decline (after the expected mini-rally over the next week), I don't expect a need to redo the Intermediate wave counts.

Time decay is fatal. I think products like RYVNX are probably much better for those with a bearish outlook, as it significantly reduces the danger of impatience. In any case, I don't believe that Elliott Waves are definitive, I only think that they may prove to be the tip of the iceberg that is our understanding of the way in which mass forces operate over time.

Comments ()

Mailvox: Rip away

I wonder if anyone will review one of VD's novels. I'm not certain if that would qualify as brave, or foolish.

I daresay that I am probably more inclined to rip apart my novels than the average fiction reader here. Some writers are very defensive; I seem to be of the sort that loathes their past work and sees only its shortcomings. To be honest, I'm of the opinion that my fiction has, to date, fallen markedly short of what the average person here probably believes my potential to be. It certainly hasn't lived up to my expectations thus far. I'm not being humble - perish the thought - that's just a fact. The vision is there, but the articulation is not. Not yet, anyhow.

Still, the last book was not embarrassing and the one I just turned in may be a little better, (certainly it is stranger), but I'm starting to feel somewhat handicapped by my subject matter and my protagonists. On the one hand, I want to cut loose and reveal the depth of my vision, on the other hand, the tamest of my books has already proven to be "too intense" [their words, not mine] for at least one Christian chain.

Also, I'm not a natural writer; I don't have that gift for beautiful words that some writers have by instinct. Fortunately, I have enough firepower to fake it, to an extent, but compared to the real thing it always falls pathetically short. In summary, I'm a Salieri who must envy the Mozarts and trod along the pedestrian paths as they effortlessly soar the heights. Bastards.

My hope, and I'm perfectly aware that I may be kidding myself, is that I have sufficient upstairs wattage to create something great by sheer force, in which case it is only a matter of discipline which has hitherto been lacking. But as I am told my books continue to improve - at least I know I'm no Johnny One-book, or perhaps I should say, Jay, I remain optimistic.

Comments ()

Mailvox: the sarahcentric universe

Sarah is overcome with the vision in the mirror:

everything *is* about me!! After all, how can anybody not love me? It would be a travesty! So, you know, if I do write a review - and my review is at least half about me, well, you can't begrudge me that! I am doing it for all of you. To behold my magnificence and splendour: it is a gift! That I would deign to do so in your presence should be deemed a privilege! It is all of course for your benefits.

How on Earth did you miss becoming a stripper?

Anyhow, as to book reviews, if people would like to start emailing me fiction reviews in the following format: http://voxday.blogspot.com/2004_07_01_voxday_archive.html#108948029239882361, I will post one of them here each week and save the others for when the web site is ready. Try to stick to the format and be sure to include what you feel to be a representative text sample.

Don't feel any need to stick to the classics or the intellectually impressive, but feel free to review them if you like. This isn't a contest, just something that might make for interesting discussions from time to time.

Comments ()

Tolstoy, Elliott and Iraq

Debka reports on the Iraqi situation

A. Baathist guerrillas have instructed cell leaders to continue their insurrection but hold back from a death blow against the new government - which is why their planned mega-operation did not materialize on sovereignty day. Guerrilla leaders have come to accept that toppling the government could lead to the exit of US forces from the country and create a vacuum that would invite its oldest enemy, Iran, to step into the breach.

B. The same insurgent underground while keeping up its attacks on Iraqi and US targets is keeping a weather eye open for chances to forge local truces on the lines of the Fallujah ceasefire that ended the month-long US Marine siege by handing security over to former Baathist generals.

C. The insurgents would exploit such local truces to seize one Iraqi town after another, pushing the Americans aside and restoring Baathist dominance to most urban areas of Iraq. Government and American forces would keep control only of intercity regions and connecting routes. This carve-up would suit the insurgent movements because they do not have enough manpower to take over every inch of the country.

D. The Baath leadership is making a point of stressing to its fighting elements that the Allawi government in Baghdad is the target of a political, but certainly not a religious, war. This guideline makes it clear that the Baathists do not share the war objectives of al Qaeda and the foreign Arab fighters fighting alongside them.

E. The Baath have called off guerilla attacks in the Shiite regions of Iraq including Baghdad’s Sadr City hoping to bring back the Shiite Baath cadres who deserted after Saddam Hussein’s downfall.

What's intriguing to me is how little this has to do with US goals or pre-war US expectations for post-war Iraq. And how is the situation significantly different than if American forces had toppled Hussein and then left? It's clear that US troops are increasingly starting to be seen as irrelevant, as the Baathist/Jihadist coalition appears to be splitting apart preparatory to the coming four-way fight over the spoils. Five, actually, if one counts the Kurdish irredentists.

It's interesting, too, to see how the equations have changed. Having been hurled out of power by American troops, the Baathists now fear them leaving too soon, before they can adequately prepare an alliance strong enough to fend off Iran. Oh, I'd love to see the look on the various neocons' faces as they begin to realize the folly of their arrogance in attempting to not only control, but dictate events of this magnitude. A huge boulder thrown into a stream will make a big splash and may even redirect the stream's course, but it will not stop the water, which in time will simply flow over, around and through the obstacle.

If we accept Tolstoy's view for the nonce, then the USA appears to have simply been the tool required by history's ineffable forces to smash the dam of Hussein's power. Having done so, it is no longer needed and will be returned to its toolbox as the situation sorts itself out. I reached the somewhat the same conclusion as Debka - the most likely outcome is an alliance between Allawi and the Baathists focused against the non-Iraqi jihadists, who would then be expected to either align themselves with Iran in an attempt to take power in Iraq, or, as is more likely, focus their attentions on the richer and easier target that is Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia has no US troops, no Baathist-Allawi alliance and is extremely disliked by the jihadists for the same reason that the heretic is more despised than the pagan. Furthermore, it fits with the Law of Unintended Consequences which states that for every major government action, there is an unforseen and disastrous reaction. If the third of a third is just getting rolling, we haven't even begun to see anything yet.

Comments ()

Mailvox: Hollywood posers

BG has a legitimate gripe:

What is it with mass media moguls needing to revamp beloved stories, thinking that they'll sell? The makers of Troy urinated all over Homer's epics, Bruckhiemer felt the King Arthur story needed a rehash so Lady Guenevere could throw down for a few rounds, but neither is as horrifying as what the makers of the next Superman plan to do.

The script calls for: A gay Jimmy Olsen(cause everybody's got to be gay these days, right?);"Player" Superman deciding not to save some people so he can hook up with Lois; Superman's powers come from his suit (ala The Greatest American Hero television show) and many other less serious abominations. Why can't Hollywood mentally defecate on the masses with some miserable offering of its own conception and leave our classic stories alone?

Why not? Because Hollywood has no genuinely creative minds. Even its most original products, such as Star Wars - totally revolutionary for its time - was primarily a synthesis of Flash Gordon space opera and the Kurasawa movie Hidden Fortress. There's nothing wrong with creativity via synthesis, as it is the best that all but the most truly creative can do, but Hollywood can't even manage X*Y=Z most of the time, settling instead for 1/2(X) + (cliches galore) = pure drek.

The two archetypical directors can be considered Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings) and Paul Verhoeven (Starship Troopers). The former was scrupulously accurate in his attempts to hold to Tolkein's book as much as reasonably possible, whereas the latter famously claimed never to have even read Heinlein's classic. Jackson's success might lead one to hope that directors will learn that the author's vision must always trump their egotistic urge to stamp their own identity on the story; the massive ego required to become a director in Hollywood does not bode well for the wide acceptance of this lesson.

I find it telling, too, how Hollywood repeatedly returns to the old standbys - do we really need yet another Superman movie? - instead of drawing on the wealth of storytelling that has been created over the last 50 years. If I could select five books that I'd like to see on the big screen, they would be:

1. The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper
2. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
3. Dragonsong, Ann McCaffrey
4. The Fencing Master, Arturo Perez-Reverte
5. Goblin Moon, Theresa Edgerton

I've never understood why Dick is so popular among the movie-making set, while Heinlein goes almost ignored. He has so many short, juvenile books that would be so easily translated into movies that it amazes me they aren't a filmic franchise of sorts. I suspect it's because Dick, like other sloppy novelists for whom I have even less regard, such as Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Robbins and Philip Roth, is considered very clever by the intellectually dense.

Comments ()

Mailvox: help for a would-be homeschooler

SK has a request:

Our eldest daughter is the mother of our beloved X who is four-years-old. Her mother is certain that she cannot do an adequate job teaching her daughter, her husband has resented that she has stayed home with her so far by working as both a housekeeper and a home day care mother. She is a capable business manager and able to earn a substantial salary, but does NOT want to raise her daughter in childcare. It is clear that her husband is insistent on public school ASAP. My daughter did not attend public school past the fifth grade, and was unable to read when we took her out.

I recently talked to my daughter about K-12 sex ed, which indoctrinates children into the belief that homosexuality is acceptable. She was absolutely certain that it couldn't be so. I need the "low-down" on California Public Schools... I need information that will be persuasive with her parents, especially when her dad did not finish the eighth grade, and believes that public school is just great, that private school is elitist and that the idea of home school is outrageous....

Please feel free to pass my request on: creative52x@earthlink.net

As I have no more information on the particulars of the California public school system than I have on ritual human sacrifice - actually less, come to think of it - I thought I'd pass this on to you all. If anyone has specific information, (no generalities or theoretical arguments), please email it to the above address.

As an aside, it's always interesting to me how people can be certain of this or that when they freely admit that they have no information on the matter. And speaking of human sacrifice, I suspect that many parents couldn't care less what is or isn't going on with their children's "education" and won't give up their cherished free K-12 day care until the so-called teachers of the NEA actually start sacrificing children to whatever dark god is is they worship.

Comments ()

Let the waves come

Rod Dreher writes:

...a personal essay from today's NYT Magazine about a Manhattan woman living with her boyfriend, who got pregnant with triplets. Stricken by the possibility that having three children at once would force her to move to Staten Island and start shopping at Costco, she decides to have a doctor pierce the beating hearts -- she and her lover saw the hearts throbbing on the ultrasound -- of two of the babies in her womb, and kill them. All so she could maintain her Manhattan lifestyle. The mind reels...

Tell me that equine excrement again about how the USA is uniquely blessed. As Flavor Flav would say: "You're blind from the facts on who ya are cos ya watching that garbage."

Alexis de Tocqueville once famously wrote that: "America is great because America is good. When America ceases to be good she will no longer be great." America is no longer great nor is it good, it is, as I wrote last week, entirely dead. What is left is a corpse, and one that reeks of blood and evil at that.

We're not only on the cusp a third of a third down, as a nation we deserve to plunge into the Abyss. I don't know about you, but I suspect I'll be watching the next 9/11 with dry eyes. "All so she could maintain her Manhattan lifestyle." Reading that makes me wish they'd sunk the whole damned island.

Comments ()

Fear is the mind-killer

Sarah ruminates:

I like the idea of writing reviews. I changed my mind about it, though. How can I possibly write a decent review in the face of everyone else who goes to Vox Popoli. I can't compete with that. I won't even try. It'll probably suck. And what if I give a positive review on something, somebody reads it, and then they say that the book sucked! What if it's not just one person but a whole bunch of people. I can't deal with that sense of failure.

First, it will be a little while before Digital Cowboy and I get the CGI forms going and work out the HTML design for people to contribute book reviews to voxday.net. But what Sarah needs to understand is that one cannot improve without doing. Sure, her first reviews might well be unintentionally amusing - if they weren't at least half about her instead of the book, I'd be shocked - but she will learn from both the rightful and the unreasonable scorn.

Sarah, consider how your ability to articulate an argument has been refined since you first started posting here. Now, it's not important for you to write book reviews - it's certainly not a way to make a living - but it's important for you to learn how to face down your fear. Fear of failure is not only unreasonable, it's pernicious since it guarantees failure without learning. It's much better to try and fail 100 times than to never try and always fail, because each failure provides information that may increase the odds of success the next time around.

So, write a review or two on your blog. If you use the model I used in reviewing The Atrocity Archive, you'll at least have a structure and ensure that you address all the significant points, which will put you ahead of 85 percent of all book reviews ever written right there.

Frank Herbert was right. Fear is a mind-killer. So, instead of seeing fear as something to be avoided, look at it as a test. Do it precisely because you're afraid of it.

Comments ()

A testament to human nature

Inbound Links: 786
Inbound Unique: 709
Current Rank: #38
Current Status: Playful Primate

This is interesting. A reasonably major syndicated columnist, who shall remain nameless, is often on TV. Everyone in Blogworld knows who they are, and so when he/she/it began a blog, everyone jumped on the bandwagon in a hurry to link to it. Presumably because they just love reading it, right? Just to put everything in perspective, Vox Popoli's rank is as follows:

Inbound Links: 238
Inbound Unique: 189
Current Rank: #322
Current Status: Large Mammal

I think that's respectable in an Blogosphere of some 3800 blogs. I'm happy with it, anyhow. Now, as this nameless columnist also appears on WND, I happen to know that my WND readership is, on average over a three-month period, about 25 percent larger. However, this is perhaps not a fair comparison as the other individual's column is much more widely syndicated than mine, so it's quite po many WND readers skip it on WND since they've already read it elsewhere.

This discrepancy, however, is a little more difficult to explain:

Average Daily Visits: 182
(data from SiteMeter)
Average Daily Visits: 1,669
(data from SiteMeter)

In other words, 709 bloggers are linking to what they think is a big name blog, but it's obvious that most of them aren't even bothering to check it out on a regular basis. Now, perhaps this will change over time or perhaps the SiteMeter data is bad, but if it is correct then it would appear to reveal both: a) the embarrassing limits of human reason, and b) the unattractive human tendency to kiss tush.

Comments ()

Mailvox: virgins and volcanoes

jr considers the fate of Miss Spears:

The whole thing resembles nothing so much as the pagan virgin sacrifices of old, where the admittedly (at least on the surface) willing victim is showered and adorned with the riches of the village on her way to being consumed in the belly of Moloch. And the crowd cheers.

Magumba hey
Magumba ho... ungowa

Magumba hey
Magumba ho... ungowa

Magumba hey
Magumba ho... UNGOWA!

Still the young man sits there on the beach.
He's staring misty-eyed out into space.
He's thinking about his girlfriend, (the late deceased).
At least her death had purpose,
His life is a waste!

Let's face it, songs about tribal virgin sacrifice rule. Leilani don't go to the volcano....

Comments ()

Mailvox: contradictions... or not

Char gets pensive:

Interesting -- the construct "free will" here and in the Tolstoy story above, the opposite or lack of free will. The contrast makes some food for thought. I enjoy your web site and thanks for allowing visitors.

I don't see that Tolstoy is NECESSARILY anti-free will in the quotidian details of life - shall I have yogurt or cereal for breakfast - so much as he is intent on puncturing the illusion of free will with regards to the individuals who stand at the cusp of great events. True, if one had to pin him down to one camp or the other, I suspect he would likely side with the omniderigents, but that's largely irrelevant with regards to the matter with which he is concerned. Tolstoy is clearly wrestling with the What, not the How much less the Why.

Comments ()

Tomorrow's column

J did well, although it shouldn't have been very difficult to ascertain where I am going tomorrow as both Tolstoy and Elliott Waves were both mentioned recently on the sidebar of the blog.

There is appearently some connection between EWT which holds that markets are not moved by individual events but mass psychology, and Tolstoy who believed that history/sociology is not moved by individual actions but by the sum of countless forces acting upon mass society.

There is indeed such a connection, although I'll leave the matter for tomorrow's discussion. But I was quite surprised by Gary's comment, as he picked up on an insight that I, too, had reached.

"War and Peace", for example, is not a novel. It's an arguement presented in the guise of a novel. It was the only way Tolstoy could present characters thoughts prior to actions and show how they often contradict, thus how no one is in ultimate control of himself but move through "unconscience action".

Comments ()

The lesson of Britney Spears

The depths of truth can be illustrated at times by the most unlikely sources. Consider the case of the recently divorced and currently affianced Miss Spears. Here is a young woman more attractive than the norm - not significantly so, but that is part of her appeal to the masses - who has amassed a remarkable amount of fame and fortune in her short time on the planet. Even what would, to the casual observer such as myself, appear to be a complete lack of talent beyond the choreographed rump-shaking that your average pole dancer could approximate with ease, has not prevented her from becoming a top-tier star.

A few weeks ago, Matt Drudge brought our attention to the sad story of Miss Spears' first husband, a childhood friend, who, despite being handicapped by an apparent intelligence barely on the north side of a rock, appears to be a genuinely decent human being. According to his telling - and we have no reason to disbelieve him - it was not his wife who wished to end the marriage but her parents, advisors, employees and assorted hangers-on, all of whom are financially dependent upon the Britney Spears industry. Obviously, they felt that at 22, the industry would be more profitable were it not distracted by the blessed state of matrimony.

There is a saying: be careful what you wish for, you just might get it. The Spears' profiteers succeeded in breaking up the marriage, as the humble Mr. Alexander was not about to stand in the way of his old friend's business. But Miss Spears has that sort of youthfully lush figure which not only indicates today a woman who will likely endure a long battle against caloric intake, but in days of yore was seen as a woman ready to breed.

As Miss Spears was no sooner wrested from the large, but harmless clutches of her ex-husband than she managed to fall "in love" with a useless male specimen of the sort known as a "dancer", it would seem that the industry was indeed more interested in her natural instinct to find a mate and propagate the species than maximizing her future profit potential. The biological imperative trumps the financial mandate, it seems. One imagines that Britney Spears Incorporated is not only ruefully wishing that it had been wise enough to leave the industry to its own devices in matters romantic, but is collectively wincing as it calculates what it will eventually cost to remove this parasitical gigolo. If the parasite is as ruthlessly self-seeking as it appears to be - it takes a stone cold squid to abandon not one, but two children, and their mother - it will require some expensive financial surgery indeed.

I found it amusing that on the very same day that Britney Spears Inc. was threatening to sue the New York Post for claiming that she had been drinking whiskey in a picture it published a few weeks ago, (for the same reason that CourtneyLove is not often used to endorse teen products), the U.K. Sun published several photos of her publicly groping the aforementioned useless specimen in an R-rated manner. One wonders if B.S.I. will soon release a press release explaining that Miss Spears was only attempting to determine what brand of underwear her fiance was wearing, and that in her innocence of male intimates, she did not realize that the tag generally goes in the back.

Let me assure the gentle reader, there is indeed a point to this vaguely salacious pop cultural gossip. For if a young woman cannot be controlled by her parents and those closest to her, even when her financial best interest manifestly depends on her accession to such control, no human can be reliably controlled by anyone, much less the decrees of a distant government. Humans cannot be controlled! Not in their best interest, not in their long-term interests, and certainly not in the interests of their self-anointed masters. Not for long, anyhow.

This is the great tragedy of the Platonists. Regardless of what current ideological excuse is currently justifying their mastery, the Platonist will always end up betraying it, as, in frustration, he turns lethal force on those he once thought only to guide and help. For all the empty-eyed, gum-chewing, udder-engorged resemblance that the average teen mall rat bears to domesticated ungulates, she cannot be herded! What God has given to even the least of those created in His image - free will - no mere mortal may hope to take away.

Comments ()

Another correlations quiz

Here's another one for the precognitive-minded. Next week's column conflates the work of a Russian novelist and a contrarian form of technical analysis. No one managed to score last week - a few hapless post-column assertions notwithstanding - so I'm curious to see if anyone can do better this week.

Comments ()

Someone skipped logic class

Kyle Williams writes on WND:

Yet, for some conservatives, choosing a candidate isn't limited to George W. Bush and John Kerry. Because President Bush has betrayed conservatives on various social and fiscal issues, the conservative base is divided and hasn't rallied around Bush like it did four years ago. This leaves some conservatives wondering whether or not they should jump ship for a third-party candidate like Constitution Party nominee Michael Peroutka or even the Libertarian, Michael Badnarik. Meanwhile, the rest of the conservative/Republican camp is griping that a vote for a third-party candidate will do nothing but help John Kerry.

In reality, they're right. A vote for a third-party candidate may be a stand for ideals, and it may send a message to the GOP, but it won't do much good. There aren't enough conservatives who will vote third party to scare GOP officials, but there are just enough third-party voters that it may help John Kerry. Yes, a vote for Michael Peroutka is a wasted vote. It's hard to say whether a third-party candidate will ever be viable, but it's obvious that no third-party nominee has a shot at the presidency in this election cycle.

Therefore, conservatives need to look at the priorities. What's important? If we truly care about appointing conservative judges, then we can't have John Kerry in office. If we truly care about the economy, then we can't have Kerry in office. If we care about the War on Terrorism, then we can't have Kerry in office. If we truly care about cutting taxes, then we can't have Kerry in office.

The only viable alternative is President Bush. He's not a conservative, true. He has betrayed conservative principles and has taken actions that would make a liberal proud, but he's the man when it comes to the economy, taxes, war on terrorism and, most importantly, the judicial branch.

This column could be cited as a persuasive argument against homeschool, if only the public schools still taught logic. But in an case, let's follow young Mr. William's advice to look at the priorities:

1) "If we truly care about appointing conservative judges...." George Bush hasn't managed to get any conservative judges through a Republican House and Senate. Perhaps if conservatives are satisfied with mere appointments, one could construct a case on this basis for Bush. But, as conservatives are more likely concerned with seating conservative judges, not merely seeing them appointed and rejected, Bush's first term should suffice to demonstrate that this is not an adequate reason to vote for him. Whether he truly wishes to seat such judges or not is unimportant, the fact of the matter is that he hasn't and he won't. Still, the president's work to retain Arlen Spectre as the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee suggests that he does not truly wish to see conservative judges on the bench.

2) "If we truly care about the economy...." George Bush has engaged in unrestrained Keynesian expansion, using tax cuts and increased government spending in combination with massively easy monetary policy in order to postpone the inevitable post-boom bust. This never works long and only exacerbates the eventual bust, the next (third) wave of which has already begun. It's no secret that George Bush is an economic illiterate, but so are his economic advisors, who are using outdated economic models repeatedly proven to be disastrous failures.

3) "If we care about the War on Terrorism...." Right, undeclared and extra-Constitutional war on method and a Commander-in-chief who's afraid to name the enemy or attack his strongholds. No thanks.

4) "If we truly care about cutting taxes...." This is the one viable point. If you're a one-issue voter, by all means, vote for George Bush on this basis. But it may be wise to keep in mind, he's not doing it on principle, he's doing it because he's desperately trying to increase liquidity and get you spending in order to bring up the C component of GDP... and his concomitant inflationary fiscal policy in collaboration with Greenspan's inflationary monetary policy has the net result of lowering your discretionary buying power even as more money goes into your pocket. 2 percent more money doesn't buy 18 percent more gold, or 40 percent more gasoline.

And then, there's the open admission that George Bush is no conservative. So, why should conservatives support a non-conservative? Right, because he's the lesser of two evils. I should point out that as a Christian libertarian, I believe in free will, so I fully expect people to decide to support evil on a regular basis, using a wide variety of rationalizations. All I ask is that conservatives remember that this is indeed a choice they are making, that no one is forcing them to knowingly support that which they believe to be wrong.

Comments ()

Mailvox: in defense of tribunals

Bill defends the President:

Vox, the military tribunal thing was and is tricky. The people we're holding are not prisoners of war (no uniform, no command structure, and they target civilians) so according to the Geneva convention (which they didn't sign) we could just shoot them after a proper military trial. However, Bush and co. realized that this would be a PR nightmare.

And after the Lynn Stewart incident (the mother of the Patriot Act), we realize we couldn't give them a regular trial either. So they came up with the military tribunal thing. What other option did Bush have, turn them over to the Syrians for a trial? This is pretty far outside regular jurisprudence. Clintoons infamous Executive Orders were obviously self-serving, it wasn't like he was simply trying to solve a problem and protect America's interests.

This defense is illustrative. Bill suggests that the administration had two legal choices. Shoot them or turn them over to someone else. First, handing them over to a third party can't be equated to releasing them, as implied here. Neither the Northern Alliance nor the Iraqi allies are reported to be squeamish about rough justice for their enemies.

Second, even this defense demonsrates that the president is more concerned about PR than he is about the law. So, his advisors cook up a stupid and legally questionable scheme, then try to defend it as if their motives are not tawdry politics, but a matter of national defense. Of course, if it was that serious, they'd have been executed in accordance with the Geneva Convention already; the real problem is that it's difficult to take prisoners once no quarter has been declared. And, it threatens to turn into a PR disaster anyhow. You would think that some day, the Republicans will learn that since the press is not on their side anyhow, they might as well do the right thing and get roasted for it instead of doing the wrong and more dangeous thing and getting roasted for that.

Although others may have done so, I have never stated that Bush is worse than Clinton in his repeated attempts to abuse the legal system, only that his actions are opening the door for the next Clinton to be worse. Bill sounds like a typical leftist here, arguing that it is the intentions behind the attempted abuse that are relevant, whereas it is truly only the precedents being set that matter. The ignoble nature of the present administration was clear in its use of Guantanamo Bay, which, like Echelon, is a shining example of how the Federal government always attempts to circumvent the laws designed expressly to hobble the exercise of its power.

Republican defenders of the president will no doubt continue to excuse his every action, however indefensible, under the guise of "we are at war". This is nothing new, it has been done on behalf of every wartime administration of either party. But I will have little sympathy when those same Republicans shriek in outrage when the next Democratic president abuses these new techniques for circumventing the limits on executive branch power, conveniently forgetting their own role in creating the monster.

Comments ()

Like a Moonbat out of Hell

INDC: The primitive paranormal beliefs of moonbats are quite interesting; most seem to have the unshakeable belief that they can channel the will of genocidal dictators. Very strange.

Jeff Goldstein: Um, Hitler would've made you into a lampshade, you Gypsy treehumper.

INDC: Commissar, where are you going? Commissar? Commissar?

The Commissar: Must ask why she neglects Stalin.

INDC: Alright, then. At least he'll blend in.

Ah, yeah. Nothing like watching the freaks come out in daylight. I think my favorite was the apocryphal message of the quote from a classic science fiction novel. It's inspired me to attend to the Democratic convention wearing a white robe and holding up a sign that says: "Grok the fullness". If that don't larn 'em, nothing will.

Comments ()

Alas, Alice, we hardly knew ye

LIMBAUGH 4.8 SHARE [WABC] SMASHES 'AIR AMERICA' 1.7 SHARE [WLIB] IN ALL LISTENERS [12+]... 'AIR AMERICA' FADES MONTH TO MONTH: 2.2 SHARE APRIL DEBUT, 1.7 SHARE IN MAY, 1.2 SHARE IN JUNE...

I'd take more pleasure in watching this ongoing car crash if I hadn't known it was inevitable from the start. It must kill Al Franken inside to know that he's getting his head handed to him by someone he regards as his inferior. The iron law of supply and demand dictates that all liberal media will be brutally raped in the media every time there is a head-to-head competition. We've seen it on a large scale with Fox vs. CNN, we've seen it on a small scale with WND vs. Salon and now we're seeing it play out on the airwaves.

As the Sports Guy says, it's too bad you can't bet on these things.

Comments ()

Outrageous antics

From Inside the Beltway:

The White House cracked down on a popular pair of Los Angeles radio hosts who grew irritated with Homeland Security Undersecretary Asa Hutchison for not cracking down on illegal aliens who've flooded southern California.

"John and Ken," heard over radio station KFI, initially applauded U.S. Border Patrol sweeps in and around Los Angeles that rounded up more than 400 of the estimated 2 million illegal immigrants who cost California taxpayers billions of dollars. But after Mr. Hutchison recently scaled down the sweep — posting the agents closer to the Mexican border — the radio pair broadcasted and posted his telephone number in Washington, causing the White House phone system to be jammed by thousands of calls. The White House has now contacted the duo and demanded they cease and desist such antics.

Antics... such as facilitating the public's ability to contact the appointed official directly responsible for a policy of which it does not approve. Yes, this is certainly an administration that believes in government by, of, and for the people, isn't it.

You would think that the fact that thousands of people disapprove of Mr. Hutchison's change in policy might be taken into account. But the masters always hate it when they can't rule over their serfs in peace and quiet.

Comments ()

Perhaps of interest only to me

I should also mention that the Zodiac is a Scott Summit design. To see more of his work, visit www.summitid.com. His other PDA credits include the AlphaSmart Dana and 2000, the Stowaway XT keyboard, and the never-released Palm Pilot Razor design that preceded the Palm V.

I'm not in the market for an ebook reader myself, since I need the Dana's keyboard, but the Zodiac Tapwave would have to be it, if I were. I find it interesting to know that the same guy who designed the excellent Alphasmart Dana also designed the Tapwave. Like the Dana, it has two SD slots, which would allow you to pack in more than 4,000 Palm-format ebooks without touching the device's system RAM. Now, if they ported the original Wing Commander to it, or MAME, well, I might have to reconsider... it is a gaming platform, after all.

Nice work, Mr. Summit.

Comments ()

Why I'm not flying anytime soon

On June 29, 2004, at 12:28 p.m., I flew on Northwest Airlines flight #327 from Detroit to Los Angeles with my husband and our young son. Also on our flight were 14 Middle Eastern men between the ages of approximately 20 and 50 years old. What I experienced during that flight has caused me to question whether the United States of America can realistically uphold the civil liberties of every individual, even non-citizens, and protect its citizens from terrorist threats....

As we sat waiting for the plane to finish boarding, we noticed another large group of Middle Eastern men boarding. The first man wore a dark suit and sunglasses. He sat in first class in seat 1A, the seat second-closet to the cockpit door. The other seven men walked into the coach cabin. As aware Americans, my husband and I exchanged glances, and then continued to get comfortable. I noticed some of the other passengers paying attention to the situation as well. As boarding continued, we watched as, one by one, most of the Middle Eastern men made eye contact with each other. They continued to look at each other and nod, as if they were all in agreement about something. I could tell that my husband was beginning to feel anxious.

The take-off was uneventful. But once we were in the air and the seatbelt sign was turned off, the unusual activity began. The man in the yellow T-shirt got out of his seat and went to the lavatory at the front of coach -- taking his full McDonald's bag with him. When he came out of the lavatory he still had the McDonald's bag, but it was now almost empty. He walked down the aisle to the back of the plane, still holding the bag. When he passed two of the men sitting mid-cabin, he gave a thumbs-up sign. When he returned to his seat, he no longer had the McDonald's bag.

Then another man from the group stood up and took something from his carry-on in the overhead bin. It was about a foot long and was rolled in cloth. He headed toward the back of the cabin with the object. Five minutes later, several more of the Middle Eastern men began using the forward lavatory consecutively. In the back, several of the men stood up and used the back lavatory consecutively as well.

For the next hour, the men congregated in groups of two and three at the back of the plane for varying periods of time. Meanwhile, in the first class cabin, just a foot or so from the cockpit door, the man with the dark suit - still wearing sunglasses - was also standing. Not one of the flight crew members suggested that any of these men take their seats.

The problem isn't that the government isn't going to be able to stop this. The government can never be relied upon to stop anything, except perhaps an amphibious invasion by another nation's military. The problem is that the Federal government is actively working to prevent the airlines from being able to address the situation themselves.

If we still had free association in the United States, an airline could choose to deny flying anyone it believed posed a risk or even made its passengers feel unsafe. This would certainly be discrimination, and, horror of horrors, I say to you now that there is nothing wrong with discrimination. If the business of Syrians, blacks, homosexuals or Christians is of no interest to one in a free society, free association means that one has the right to decline it. (The injustice of segregation was that it was publicly enforced law, which is another matter altogether.)

This discrimination can be financially suicidal, or it can be absolutely necessary if you want to stay in business. The airlines are already teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, the next series of explosions bringing down several on the same day will finish them off unless they are allowed to do as they see fit in protecting their equipment, their employees, and most importantly, their paying customers.

Ironically, as with 9/11, people will look to the Federal government to solve a problem that its policies will be proven to have created.

UPDATE: An NRO reader writes in:

"Either there is something REALLY bad going on or that article is an urban legend. I just read a very similar story a couple of weeks ago (linked from Instapundit or AndrewSullivan or Boortz, I can't remember) written by a man travelling with his wife and son. The story wasn't quite as dramatic as this one but it involved suspicious arab passengers that were "wisked" away by who boarded the plane upon arrival. I can't remember the exact details of the story but it seems to have all of the ear marks of urban legend-om."

I don't know "Annie Jacobsen", so I can't testify to the versimilitude of the article, but if it's a hoax, the details are uncharacteristically accurate. True, she claims that the flight left at 12:28, not 12:22, but I don't think a six-minute discrepancy casts the entire article in doubt. From NWA.com:

Northwest Airlines 327
Fri, Jul 23
4hr 39min
12:22pm Depart Detroit (DTW)
2:01pm Arrive Los Angeles (LAX)

Comments ()

Convention conspiracy

NRO is madly buzzing about how Kerry's apparent dismissal of the Lizard Queen is nothing but a stunt designed to create more excitement when she makes a "surprise" speech at the convention. I'm hoping that she'll tear off her human skin, hiss at the camera and strangle Kerry with her tri-forked tongue before devouring both him and John Edwards live in front of a horrified nation.

The terrified Republicans will have no choice but to send a delegation via submarine to a small island in the Antarctic, where they will perform a shoggoth designed to awake the Deep One who sleeps beneath the ice. When Cthulhu rises, Dick Cheney will be sacrificed to appease the Great Tentacled One and New York City will be demolished by the subsequent epic battle between the demon lizard-bitch and the Elder God.

Why vote for the lesser of two evils? Cthulhu 2004!

Comments ()

More on "More Cowbell"

I was just thinking, who is the greatest guest host in the history of SNL? Not in terms of who did the best overall show, or which show you would have liked to have been present in the audience - Pamela Anderson, obviously - or who had the best intro bit, but who produced the most memorable quotes that you and your friends still drop on each other today?

I'd say it has to be Christopher Walken. You've got "more cowbell", you've got "a degree from the University of Bei-jing", you've got "I got a passport to Florida", you've got "no, don' go", and to top it all off, you've got the phrase that spawned the worst published poem in history, "my little wide-eyed, white-tailed doe". I can't even remember most of them from the census-taker, I was laughing so hard.

You realize that I'm snorting and chuckling helplessly as I'm writing this, of course.

Comments ()

Mailvox: laying down the hickory

The Gargler gargles:

Vox.. you're pretty fond of a little saying. "Tell it to the whigs!". Ah what a battle cry! It summons up images of the possibility of rebellion within the politcal world... Sadly its inaccurate. The Whigs were never anything to be feared, and calling them well organized is simply ignoring history. We're talking about a party that lasted an astounding 16 years, from 1834 to 1850. That's the official story anyway, though the initial party coalition actually started in 1824, when some boys got together to try to whip Andy Jackson (Tennessean by the way). I suppose we could give them credit for 26 years then huh?

Nate would have somewhat of a point, if one were so myopic as to reduce world history to American history. I use "tell it to the Whigs" to illustrate the shallow thinking involved in assuming that a two-party system is eternal. First, the very fact of the American Whigs relatively brief political lifespan supports my point, second, the British Whig party was one of the first modern political parties and was part of a now-defunct two-party system with the Tories, or Conservative Party. The remnants of was variously known as the Country, Whig and Liberal Party now survive in the Liberal Democratic Party, but the Liberals were replaced as the primary British opposition by Labour around 1925.

Comments ()

Bitch slap

The former chairwoman of the New York State Democratic Party on Wednesday called it "a total outrage" and "very stupid" that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has not been offered a prominent speaking role at the Democratic National Convention.

"It's a slap in the face, not personally for Hillary Clinton, but for every woman in the Democratic Party and every woman in America," said Judith Hope, a major party fund-raiser.

I could almost kiss John Kerry. Sure, he's a loathesome, treasonous socialist creep, but no one who uses his moment in the sun to publicly bitchslap the Lizard Queen can be ALL bad.

Comments ()

Sports Guy on the Shaq trade

And then there's Angry Shaq. He needed this to happen. Honestly, he hasn't given a crap about basketball for four years, since they won that second title and crushed the Sixers. After that happened, Satiated Shaq stuck around and kept playing, knowing that he could accomplish more on cruise control than just about every other player in the league. I don't think it was a malicious act on his part. It was his version of MJ scurrying off to hit baseballs for two years.

Maybe we were insulted as basketball fans, but this was also the one quality that made him stand out over everyone else: This is a good guy. He takes care of his family, looks out for his friends, never stops having fun. He dabbles in movies, music, TV, even comedy roasts. He figured out how to handle the media early in his career -- mumble through your answers, use intimidation when necessary; and eventually, everyone will leave you alone. I think he's one of the smartest athletes in any sport. Seriously. Who leads a better life than him? What team athlete makes more money than him? Who balanced the characters of Public Superstar and Private Superstar more brilliantly than him? We don't know ANYTHING about him, yet we feel like we do. And he likes it that way.

Which made it especially ironic that, for years and years, Shaq wore the "black hat" and Kobe wore the "white hat" on the Lakers. To the general public, Shaq was just a big mumbling monster, a physical freak with no discernible basketball skills, someone who couldn't even make a damn free throw. Casual fans (and Lakers fans, which is basically the same thing) gravitated towards Kobe, partly because he reminded them of a young MJ, partly because he seemed like such a decent guy. Nobody realized that Kobe was an impossible prima donna behind the scenes, a brooding loner consumed with basketball and nothing else, someone lacking the requisite social skills to get along with teammates on even a rudimentary level.

I'm no NBA fan, but I always enjoy the Sports Guy's analyses, as he throws himself into them with complete abandon. Unlike almost every other sportswriter in the business, he has no fear of stating his opinion, even when it leads an entire city to regard him with utter loathing. But I didn't like Houston either.

And besides, how can you not love a column called "More Cowbell". Because I got a fever, and the only thing that's going to cure it is, more cow-bell. It seems ESPN is more flexible than WND - I wanted to call my column "Defending the Mike" but that got ixnayed. I suppose "More Cowbell" is marginally less obscure, but still....

Comments ()

And here I thought they wanted the Jews out!

The preacher placed before a World Muslim Brotherhood conference a working document drawn up at “a secret meeting of the movement” somewhere in the Middle East, calling on all brethren in the Muslim world to rise up and foil Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and, most of all, to combat any potential Egyptian or Jordanian role in its implementation. The Brotherhood was exhorted to resort “to all means available.”

Comments ()

McCain can't count

Sen. John McCain of Arizona broke forcefully with President Bush and the Senate GOP leadership Tuesday evening over the issue, taking to the Senate floor to call such a constitutional amendment unnecessary -- and un-Republican.

"The constitutional amendment we're debating today strikes me as antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans," McCain said. "It usurps from the states a fundamental authority they have always possessed and imposes a federal remedy for a problem that most states do not believe confronts them."

38: States with explicit Defense of Marriage acts
05: States with similar statutory language
43: Total States with Defense of Marriage laws
50: Number of States in the Union

Apparently Sen. John McCain is operating under the assumption that 14 percent is somehow equivalent to "most". Edwards may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but McCain's mathematical genius may be why Kerry elected to pass on him as a running mate.

And we let this joker vote on the budget?

Comments ()

Mailvox: pin the tail on the Libertarian

Jayuf asks:

What do you believe is the one significant flaw with the LP platform? Is it their stance on abortion or their stance on immigration?

The LP position on immigration will keep me from voting for Badnarik. It does not seem rational in this day and age to grant amnesty to illegals who have originated from states supporting militant Islam.

Good question. I'd actually been giving this matter a little thought of late, and I believe that it is the abortion plank that is the significant flaw. (I should mention that amnesty is a position of the Bush administration, not the Libertarian Party, wherein there is no such thing as an "illegal" immigrant.) Immigration is problematic, but very few people will refuse to vote Libertarian on the issue, as neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are the least bit interested in closing the border either.

The Libertarian Party's position on abortion is a priori reasonable. An individual has a property right to their own body, ergo, the government has no ability to violate that property right. This was a logically sound conclusion in 1971, when it was first articulated. The problem is that it is now scientifically outdated. The unborn child is now proven to have different DNA, therefore, it is a distinct individual with its own property right to its own body as well as a concomitant right to life. The fact that it cannot survive on its own is irrelevant; neither can a newborn and as birthing technology improves, even the mother is becoming increasingly unnecessary as a host.

For example, when a woman has her eggs fertilized in-vitro and implanted in another woman, does the surrogate mother have a right to abort the unborn child? It's her body, after all. The fundamental wrongness of the property right claim to the unborn child becomes all the more obvious when one considers the question of an artificial machine womb. If the child is no longer even in the woman's body, how can she possibly claim the right to kill it without consequence?

More on this and immigration later.

Comments ()

A cordial salute

Okay, this made me laugh. I came across it courtesy of le petit Dark Window. I'm not sure which I appreciated most, the innovative group protest - wouldn't want to participate in that one myself - the president's response, or the guy's reaction to the response. It's all good, except for the reminder that free speech and protest are no longer legal in the USA. And that goes doubly for the last sixty days before an election.

At the front of this second bus was The W himself, waving cheerily at his supporters on the other side of the highway. Adam, Brendan, and I rose our banner (the More Trees, Less Bush one) and he turned to wave to our side of the road. His smile faded, and he raised his left arm in our direction. And then, George W. Bush, the 43rd president of the United States of America, extended his middle finger.

Read that last sentence again. I got flipped off by George W. Bush.

A ponytailed man standing next to us confirmed the event, saying, "I do believe the President of the U.S. just gave you boys the finger." We laughed probably for the next half hour, and promptly told everyone we knew.

I love the American spirit, especially when it resides in those with acorn-sized intellects.

Comments ()

Conspiracy theory

Could Microsoft be behind a smear campaign aimed at Linux? If not Microsoft, then who? Let's look at the continued attacks against Linux. The media is peppered with them. When one starts to die down, another one crops up. While every single one of these assertions is laughable, the never-ending barrage of anti-Linux propaganda has got to take its toll on potential users. Here are a few of the accusations you might find in articles planted here and there in the media:

Linux is not at all secure and poses a major security risk.

Linux is not cheap. Despite being free, it actually costs more to implement and maintain.

Linux is prone to hackers and viruses, because the code is easily available.

Linus Torvalds didn't write Linux; it is in fact a compendium of old code that was cobbled together.

Linux is next to impossible to support, because no one company is responsible for it.

As there are no profits to be made from distributing or supporting Linux, it must die from eventual neglect.

Much of Linux is stolen proprietary code, and you could be liable if you use it. Furthermore, SCO will sue you if you use it.

Clearly, Mr. Dvorak is a paranoid wearer of tinfoil hats. I find it interesting that people are so willing to believe in the evil intent of Microsoft - not that I disagree, being a quasi-religious Fedora/Opera/OpenOffice non-user of Microsoft products - but are, on the other hand, always eager to absolve the Federal government of any like prediliction for the Dark Side of the Force.

This strikes me as being more than a bit backward.

Comments ()

Flawed Libertarian logic

A libertarian posts at Michael Badnarik's blog:

Something Vox doesn't necessarily point out is that while Mr. Badnarik is *personally* pro-life, he recognizes that there is significant controversy surrounding when "life" begins (at conception? at birth? at some point in between?), so the state can not legislate against abortion, since a fetus is not unarguably a "human life".

Who doesn't recognize that "there is significant controversy when 'life' begins". I mean, if it could be proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that life began at 3 days, 18 minutes after conception, I wouldn't have any problem with abortions performed before then. But that's not the case, and is unlikely to ever be the case.

This libertarian's sloppy thinking has it exactly backward. The states not only CAN legislate against abortion, they MUST legislate against abortion since a "fetus", or unborn child, is ARGUABLY a human life. The Libertarian Party's platform is simply outdated on this issue, reflecting the reasonable but inappropriate application of its anti-government intervention philosophy made around the time of the party's founding in 1971.

One reason I appreciate Michael Badnarik is that he has reached his pro-life position through the genuine application of libertarian logic. This promises well for his leadership, not of the country, most likely, but of helping the Libertarian Party find its way to the proper libertarian position on abortion as well as leading the party to a position of greater intellectual influence in the nation.

In any case, even with its outdated pro-choice platform, the Libertarian Party is committed to returning the issue to the States, where it belongs, and will end federal funding for the abominable practice, which is more than the supposedly pro-life Republicans have done.

Comments ()

Holy religious conservatives, Batman!

You know George Bush is in serious trouble when lifetime Republican stalwarts are beginning to turn their back on him. Joseph Farah is a genuine independent. Ilana Mercer and I are outspoken libertarians. We didn't vote for Bush in 2000 or his father before him. But Tom Ambrose, the Commentary Editor at WorldNetDaily, has always been a strong Republican. That makes these words all the more incredible:

Let's be real: There is no longer any substantial difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. The GOP now even actively supports pro-homosexual and pro-abortion politicians. Enough is enough!

Religious conservatives comprise some 30 to 40 percent of the Republican Party. Rather than supporting spineless, highly compromised GOP phonies, why not work for something worthwhile such as the Constitution Party's political platform?

For me, the bottom line is this: I do not want to stand before God one day and tell Him I enabled evil to continue unchecked because I was afraid to do the right thing and, consequently, caved in to what was expedient. No matter what happens, God is still sovereign, but at least I can say I stood against the evil now engulfing the United States. Will you be able to say that?

Much respect, Tom, much respect. I have a feeling that the Libertarian and Constitution Party's vote totals are going to surprise everyone this fall. This assumes, of course, that there IS going to be an election.

Comments ()

Bitten in the buttocks

People often ask me why I am a libertarian, not a conservative, and why I prefer the Libertarian Party, despite the one significant flaw in its platform, over the Constitution Party. The answer is simple. Government is a two-edged sword, and attempting to use it for good purpose always backfires in the end. Only the Libertarian Party has the proper distrust and distaste for the dangerous and often deadly institution.

Conservatives are rightly alarmed about homogamy, or "gay marriage". But as they are stupidly wont to do, they have again turned to a government solution, which is ironic as it is only government involvement in marriage - often regarding things that conservatives laud as supporting marriage - that has allowed this situation to come about. I don't actually mind the concept of a Defense of Marriage Amendment, I simply consider it useless; since the courts freely ignore most of the other amendments there is no reason to believe they wouldn't simply contort the language to ignore this proposed amendment too.

Now, James Dobson is without question a wise man when it comes to children and relationships, but he is a short-sighted and clueless observer of government. For, as he states in support of the rapidly dissolving Amendment:

Dobson says another "phony excuse" is that marriage is a state issue. "Every legislator must surely know, however, that it would create chaos to have 50 different definitions of marriage in the United States," Dobson wrote in his letter.

Experienced observers of American politics will recognize this as the same argument that is used to justify every expansion of central state power. It has been used to justify every intrusion on State sovereignty. Indeed, it has been used to force most of the cultural policies that Dobson rightly deplores down American throats.

I like and respect James Dobson. But as a wiser man than Dobson once said: "those who live by the sword will die by the sword. If conservatives wish to preserve marriage, they will have to take a libertarian approach and remove government entirely from the sanctioning, licensing and recognizing of the institution.

Comments ()

I'm with N.W.A.

A Denver police officer likely mistook a soda can for a weapon before shooting and killing a 63-year-old man in his bed, Police Chief Gerry Whitman said Monday.... The shooting comes weeks after the city and police announced reforms to the department's use-of-force policy in the wake of controversy surrounding police shootings.

I'm sure they'll announce some more reforms soon. Here's a suggestion: how about not shooting anyone in freaking bed!

I trust the general public with guns a lot more than I trust the police with guns. An armed citizenry is more effective against crime and furthermore, there has never, in the history of firearms, been a police state without an armed police.

Comments ()

No sell-out

I spoke with the Elliott Wave people about how I could add some more economic content to this blog, and they were kind enough to allow me access to their affiliate content. As those of you who actually read the economic columns know, I think Elliott Waves are a potentially useful method of understanding the patterns of the markets, and perhaps even history as well.

Just to make things clear, I have no relationship with Elliott Wave International, I do not have any financial interest in the products they are selling nor am I interested in accepting blog ads at this point in time. However, I think you'll find that they do have an intriguing take on the financial and currency markets at what is proving to be an all-too-interesting moment in history.

Read if it interests you. Ignore it if you don't. And, as always, caveat emptor.

Comments ()

Mailvox: I'm so jealous

Dreadpiratesnuggles shows off his math:

That's 290 years... Ok, my bad, closer to 300 years vs. 800... So I was off by a measly 500 years! Relatively speaking, what's the difference?

Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that there's an executive at CNBC barking at his secretary: "Get this guy on the phone! We need to give him a show now!"

Comments ()

Mailvox: when the moniker fits

Puzzled wonders:

It must be that you don't understand our electoral system. Unless Petrouka gets -more- electoral votes than either Kerry or Bush, he will not be elected. Drawing votes away from Bush only add's to Kerry's margin.

I find it incomprehensible that anyone would think that Kerry would be a better pro-life vote, when powerful figures in his party are calling pro-lifers terrorists, and Christians a greater threat than Al-Qaeda.

Who said Kerry would be a better pro-life vote? It's quite clear that Bush=Kerry when it comes to abortion. Neither of them will end it, neither of them will return the issue to the states, neither of them will restrict it. Even if one takes the unprincipled pragmatic approach, it makes absolutely no difference if you vote for Bush or Kerry with regards to this particular issue. Bush has a Republican House, a Republican Senate and a Republican-nominated Supreme Court... if he has not acted, then he will not act.

Oh, sure, Bush affects to feel bad about abortion... wait a minute, so does Kerry. Okay, Kerry will allow money to go directly to fund foreign abortions, while Bush will require it to go through the United Nations first. There IS a difference!

Even a pro-abortion Libertarian would be a better pro-life vote than George Bush, as he would be willing to return the issue to the States, where it belongs.

Comments ()

Mailvox: Is America safer?

Bill responds:

1) We've stopped one of the major terrorist sponsoring states in the region, and rounded up several leaders of terrorist organizations.

2) We've killed thousands of militant islamo-wackos, a small start, but a start. If we'd pulled out as soon as the Iraqi government had toppled Iraq would definitely be another Ashcanistan.

3) We now have a major military base in the mid-east that ain't in Saudi.

4) We've removed the principal sponsor of Palestinian terrorists. Saddam was a powerful symbol for them, and provided money and training as well.

5) Just the reforms that have happened to date are putting serious pressure on Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. If things continue to improve the pressure on them builds.

1) No, we haven't. Iraq was number five, at most, behind Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria and Egypt. Iraq wasn't funding anyone except the Palestinian Authority. Of course, so was he United States.

2) Afghanistan turned into Afghanistan after a decade of Soviet occupation. What makes you think Iraq won't regardless of how long we stay there? It is estimated that 10 percent of the global Muslim population is sympathetic to the jihad. Since the Soviet butchery in Afghanistan and Chechnya hasn't exactly proved dissuasive to this point, I don't think a few thousand more can be considered as amounting to much.

3) As you note, we already had plenty of bases in the Middle East. Why did we need to leave our bases in Saudi Arabia? Why will the new Iraqi government, or the next Iraqi government, prove to be any more cooperative regarding our bases there? How are the new bases indicative of more protection than the old ones?

4) Total nonsense. We are personally guaranteeing the safety of the most powerful symbol of the Palestinian terrorists. We are also helping pay his salary.

5) This has nothing to do with America being safer now than five years ago.

I note that none of these addresses my point that none of our actions in Iraq has made America one iota safer from terrorist attack than before. Simply refusing to provide visas to terrorist-sponsoring countries would have accomplished more. This is neither a defensive war against the global jihad nor preparation for it, instead, the administration has weakened the national resolve for any such future conflict.

But then, I don't expect anything but incompetence and unintended consequences from the Federal government anyhow, so I'm not exactly surprised. Tolstoy addresses this rather nicely in his section on administrators. More on that later.

Comments ()

Another whitewash

That noted liberal Democrat, Paul Craig Roberts of the Creators Syndicate, is apparently less than impressed by the Senate's ability to report on the administration's misdeeds:

The only open question is whether President Bush was an active participant in the disinformation or was deceived like the American public. If he knowingly participated in the deception, he must be impeached. If he was deceived by his own appointees, why hasn't he fired them? Bush's reelection would signify that the American people lack the competence or character for self-rule.

The report from the Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence proves once again that government lacks the moral integrity to conduct an investigation. The senators did not bring responsibility to any individuals for a gratuitous invasion that has generated hatred of, and insecurity for, Americans for decades to come. Instead, the senators' report held accountable that which cannot be held accountable: "the process."

We were told that 9/11 was due to the failures of flawed procedures. So, too, was the incorrect intelligence on Iraq, according to the Senate Select Committee. In neither case are any individuals to be held responsible. Nothing, it seems, bears any significance except for the increasingly fictional economic statistics and the bureaucratic machinery. Ideologies aside, Washington appears to be evolving into something more weirdly Soviet by the week.

As to those who are still convinced that the Iraqi occupation is making Americans safer, I have a simple question: how? If I had millions of dollars in Saudi money, a cadre of fanatical followers and connections into Russia via Chechnya and China via Ningxia Hu, the fate of Saddam Hussein and his Ba'athist regime, for good or for ill, would have absolutely no effect whatsoever on my ability to send a few young men to flight school or to plant a black market explosive device in a shipping container bound for Boston Harbor.

Think, people. Think.

Comments ()

Lenin, inflation and the destruction of capitalism

John Maynard Keynes on Lenin and inflation:

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, Governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity (or fairness) of the existing distribution of wealth.

As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of Society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

Bill Fleckenstein, the market analyst and hedge fund owner who continues to hammer away at the disaster that Alan Greenspan and the politicians of both parties are creating for us, quoted this in the context of the inflation that the CPI charade no longer hides. He also adds that he is concerned about the likelihood of a medium-term market crash:

My gut feeling -- though there is no way for me to quantify it -- is that probability of a crash at some point in the next six months to a year is far higher now than in 1987. One subjective reason is that I just don't think it's possible for all the thousands of hedge funds and hundreds of thousands or millions of people who think they're talented enough to outwit the stock market -- and who believe they can play this game of speculating in an overvalued, dangerous stock market -- to get out whole....

Personally, as I often note, I am short stocks (mostly tech stocks), own gold and silver (as well as gold and silver mining stocks) and foreign currencies.

I haven't gone short yet - I'm waiting until the next mini-bounce plays out, but that otherwise describes my essential positions as well. This is NOT the time to be long stocks, as it does not look as if the Fed can extend the Wave 2 countertrend any longer. I learned my lesson from last time - don't fight the Fed, but instead wait until they throw in the towel. The Fed can't defeat the market, but it can delay the inevitable for a while.

Comments ()

Why Bush is a poor pro-life vote

Many conservatives have tried to overlook President Bush’s liberal tendencies in hopes that at the least G. W. Bush will appoint a pro-lifer to the Supreme Court, and in so doing, help overturn Roe v. Wade. Their hope is not only without evidence, it is plainly contrary to evidence. In his prime-time television debates with Gore, George Bush flatly denied that he had a pro-life litmus test for Court appointees.... His record as Governor of Texas shows that he does indeed appoint pro-abortion judges, so we should not be surprised if President Bush were to appoint pro-abortion judges to the Supreme Court.

Frequently displayed as evidence of President Bush’s pro-life views is his signing of legislation when he was Texas’ Governor that forbade underage girls from getting abortions without parental consent. The pro-life community roared their approval: a 13-year-old girl can’t get an aspirin without parental consent, why should she be allowed to undergo a surgical or chemical abortion without parental consent?! That’s sound pro-life legislation, right? George Bush must be pro-life, huh? Wrong! Did you realize that this piece of legislation was nullified by a Texas Supreme Court decision that ruled 6-3 that an unexceptional 17-year-old could get an abortion without telling her parents? The New York Times reported, "It was, after all, appointees of Gov. George W. Bush who took the lead on the issue…" You see, it was G.W. Bush who appointed or approved of four of the court’s nine justices and has been a political patron for a fifth, Harriet O’Neill, who wrote the majority opinion in the parental notification case. If this is what President Bush means by "strict constructionists," then any hope that he will appoint a pro-lifer to the Federal bench is baseless.

This abundantly-footnoted article, written by the founder of a pro-life physicians group, should suffice to explode the last principled reason to vote for the Republican candidate. (Anyone who believes a Democrat won't leap at the chance to use the war on method as an excuse to continue strengthening central state power is ignorant of both US military history and dialectic.) Bush has already shown that he is unwilling to face down the Democrats despite having a majority in both House and Senate; if elected to a second term he will surely cave to the minority, as is his wont, and give us more Supreme Court judges in the mode of David Souter.

I assert that both Michael Peroutka of the Constitution Party and Michael Badnarik of the Libertarian Party are demonstrably better than Bush on abortion, despite the Libertarian Party platform's pro-choice policy. (Badnarik, by the way, is openly pro-life on the grounds that the unborn child has a same right to life as any other individual.) Returning the question of abortion to the states, as the Libertarians demand, would end 1000x the abortions that the Partial-Birth Abortion ban has, and as the PBA ban is all that the Republican President, House, Senate and Supreme Court have been willing to do in four years of power, it is safe to assume that this is all that they will do.

If you're not voting for Bush because you believe in him, but simply because "he can win", then you might as well stop paying attention to the campaign and go cheer for the Yankees this summer. This is not principle, it is simply bandwagon-hopping. And, as I have previously demonstrated, political pragmatism is nothing more than long-term self-immolation.

Comments ()

Things I wish I'd thought of first

Mark Steyn helpfully points out that Palestinian official Saeb Erekat is of course, "democratically elected", being presently in the ninth year of a five-year term. And in like manner, if Yasser Arafat was elected President of the Palestinian Authority in 1996, shouldn't there have been another election by now?

Or is this just the sort of complicated subject that we can't expect the mainstream media to address? After all, it does have more pressing matters of interest to cover, such as the soda preferences of the Democratic presidential candidates.

Comments ()

Mailvox: the gorilla can read Nietzsche...

RB writes:

America is dead. If it is, what a lively corpse it is! The old bad old Abraham is asserted again- The good Framers and the clear and understandable language of the Constituion is asserted again- Instead of rehashing all of this, let;s just remind you of one small thing, to set the assertions you made into the ground-as in six feet under!

Thomas Jefferson, who is held up by you and yours as the American philosopher of small republics and limited goernemt, went and did what he, Jefferson, called an illegal act, and destroyed the Constituion-his words, not mine. What was that act? Why the Louisiana Purchase! First off, the national government had no powers to purchase the land, and Jefferson himself pointed that out! Yet he defended the action saying that if left to the States, the opportunity to expand the nation, which was necessary, according to him, would have slipped away! Oh yes, you'll want a source-see Jefferson's letter to Beveridge, in late 1803. It's in the collections of Jefferson's papers, which you can read at any library- To continue-Who got the money from the purchase? Why Napoleon Bonaparte, who used the money to finance his military conquest of Europe! and you and the rest have accused Clinton of selling out to China, of Bush's deals with the bin Laden family(see Moore's film) or Reagan's arms for hostages etc etc ad nauseum. Again, What was the effect of the Purchase? to increase the size of the nation by double, and that Purchase area was Federal terriroty, not States, not in 1803! So the national government had increased its own land size to be larger than the combuned States!

What does this prove, except that the founding fathers knew whereof they spoke with regards to the temptations of State power? The fact that Jefferson was tempted and gave into corruption says nothing about the fact that today's government is neither small nor limited as it was conceived to be. And every act of illicit government expansion is defended as being necessary. The public is not generally known to welcome dictatorship, after all, unless they have been sufficiently alarmed by the presumed alternatives.

And here's the next problem. the French thinker Montesque, argued that the bigger a nation becomes the more the power is centralized and the more tyrannical it becomes--gee, what if he was right? Then Jefferson went from the small republic limiited government man to the Hamiltonian tyrant in one fell swoop- According to Lew Rockwell, when I pointed this out, Jefferson was a good political thinker but a bad President-so what else is new? And Jefferons was one of the Framers, one of the Founders, indeed, he was at least the assistant head coash after Washington, he was the main architect, with Madison of the Founding documents-If he can go wrong, then it is all up! and was all up then- But what if he was right, and what if the Framers, ressurected today, would nod approvingly at what has happened? I am quite sure that Hamilton would!

So am I. So is L. Neil Smith, the libertarian, which is why his sci-fi villains are called "Hamiltonians". But the rest would almost certainly not. The fact that it is difficult to keep a Republic is why Franklin famously said: "if you can keep it." Any sober analysis will suffice to demonstrate that we have not.

Among Libertarians and libertarians, I have found, after all of the rhe rhetoric about the Constituion and Declaration has died down, they will admit that they prefer the Articles of Confederation, that the Articles have the provisions for that "voluntary association" which the Constituion doesn't. that the Articles say that States are sovereign, which the Constituion doesn't and that the many word and phrases, such as "absoltelu" in the Articles "elastic clause" do not appear in the Contituion-which gives the new independnent executive, judiciary and Vongress great latitutes for expansion of powers. recall that there was no independent executive in the Articles! So, in your column, you have again, failed American histroy, American Constitional law, and American politics. and America isn't anywhere near dead-you sound like the Carter administration people when they campaigned against Reagan!

Sure, many libertarians would prefer the Articles to the Constitution. But they would also prefer Constitutional government to what we have now. The Constitution certainly allows some latitude, but nowhere near so much as is being claimed by the three branches of the federal government. RB may have failed to understand the difference between America the nation-state and America the concept, he has clearly failed to disprove my assertions, as well, one is forced to assume, fifth-grade spelling, but at least he has succeeded in proving that one can read American history without being burdened by the heavy weight of understanding it.

Comments ()

Mailvox: it's different now

DVH writes:

America is very different now than it was in the days of the founding fathers; such has to be taken into account when thinking about what is ideal government in the US today. In the old days you had lots of small independent farmers; nowadays you have huge numbers of people all working for corporations owned by a few people. Need I list all the technological changes since the days of the founding fathers?

I think Count Tolstoy already addressed this argument: "- mentioning "our days" as people of limited intelligence are fond of doing, imagining that they have discovered and appraised the peculiarities of "our days" and that human characteristics change with the times -"

Apparently DVH doesn't see that most of the significant changes have nothing to do with technological change. What technology was involved in the creation of the corporation and granting it legal personhood? What technological imperative required a shift from Congressionally-issued metal money to privately-issued paper notes? The founding fathers understood that while the world will change, human nature doesn't. Their vision was conceived to limit the depredations of the latter, and is every bit as relevant today as it was 230 years ago.

Comments ()

A one-time mistake

Ridge's department last week asked the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel to analyze what legal steps would be needed to permit the postponement of the election were an attack to take place. Justice was specifically asked to review a recent letter to Ridge from DeForest B. Soaries Jr., chairman of the newly created U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Soaries noted that, while a primary election in New York on September 11, 2001, was quickly suspended by that state's Board of Elections after the attacks that morning, "the federal government has no agency that has the statutory authority to cancel and reschedule a federal election." Soaries, a Bush appointee who two years ago was an unsuccessful GOP candidate for Congress, wants Ridge to seek emergency legislation from Congress empowering his agency to make such a call.

There haven't been any major terrorist attacks in the USA since 9/11. That cynical voice inside my head says that providing this "statutory authority" to the federal government will all but assure that we'll have one soon after it is provided.

Comments ()

Culture and hope

Adam Gopnik writes in Paris to the Moon

The performance of Les Trois Petits Cochons, for instance, uses, with slight variations, many of the devices, not to mention the music of the Disney version of the story from the thirties. There are French touches, though. The catastrophe, or climax, comes when the wolf pretends to be a minor official comes to read the water meter. The pigs have to let him into the one remaining house; the French little pigs have to open the door to administration, even when it has an immense jaw and sixty white paper-mache teeth.

This is why there will never be a European Waco or Ruby Ridge. Perhaps in Switzerland, or New Europe, where decades of totalitarian rule have hardened the population's attitudes about government. But certainly not in France.

America is rather different. We have no long tradition of obedience. We are born rebellious, with the unruly expectation that individual liberty is our natural birthright. We must be educated, confused, fooled and propagandized non-stop in order to even become manageable. Rage Against the Machine is a good example of this significant cultural difference; despite being left-wing pop icons, ideologically pledged to the expansion of central government power, they once notably preached: "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me," and, just in case one happened to somehow escape the message, repeated it 26 times before punctuating it with one last exclamatory "motherfucker!"

This is not exactly the ideal open-the-door-to-the-government-wolf spirit.

America the idea may be dead, for now. But the recalcitrant individuality that gave her birth still lives, and we can hope that as long as this stubborn fire still burns in American hearts, we may find her again.

Comments ()

Mogambo on debt

Imagine my surprise when I find it is Bill Buckler calling me! And he tells me that my wife says that I would love it, just love it, if he would call me up and finish talking about the increase in debt. I look at the doctor. I think about what he said. I look at the phone. And then I say to Bill, "Sure! I'd love to hear about it!" And so he goes on to say, "Since the beginning of 1998, total US borrowings have climbed from about 255% of US GDP to 302%!"

302% of GDP! My puny little brain is kicked into action, as I think to myself "This is a new record!" Amazingly, I think I know why he ended the sentence with an exclamation point! And look! I'm doing it, too!

And since there must be some reason why those exclamation points are suddenly everywhere, I will remark that this is higher than the 260% of GDP recorded at the height of the market in 1929, and we all know how well THAT turned out!

It's probably worth pointing out that cumulative US mortgage debt is now $9.618 trillion, which represents 99.298 percent of cumulative US personal income, at $9.686 trillion. I don't know if the banks can manage to push this number up beyond 100 percent, but considering that the government is deeply underwater itself, it's pretty clear that the nation is essentially bankrupt.

"But we owe it to ourselves!" some might protest. Except that we don't. We owe it to China, Japan, and the private bank that is the Federal Reserve. The question is this: who is worse off when the debt gets can no longer be sustained by continued borrowing or quiet inflation, the foreign investors, the bank or the indebted public?

It's hard to disagree with Buckler's conclusion:

As I am too busy wailing and cramming boxes of ammunition into a backpack to continue right now, I will leave it to the clever Mr. Buckley to come up with a simile to beautifully sum it all up. Rising to the challenge, he writes, "There is no 'solution' to this dilemma, just as there is no 'solution' for a man who finds himself in a barrel on the lip of Niagara Falls."

Enjoy the silence....

Comments ()

M3 inflation

Percent change at seasonally adjusted annual rates
03 Months from Feb 2004 TO May 2004: 11.3
06 Months from Nov 2003 TO May 2004: 08.2
12 Months from May 2003 TO May 2004: 05.4

Considering that the stock market is basically flat for the year with this sort of monetary stimulus, the picture is not a pretty one.

UPDATE - had two copy and paste errors in the original post. We apologize to anyone alarmed at the thought that perhaps Mr. Stross's transdimensional mathematics had seized control of this blog. M3's pace continues to further increase, by the way, according to the latest reports:

M-3 was up a whopping 31.7 billion for the latest reporting week on a seasonally adjusted basis. It is now up 61.2 billion over the past 3 weeks, and $204 billion over the past ten weeks, rising at an annualized clip of 11.7 percent.

Comments ()

Hijacking comment threads

Look, I don't mind if a thread is hijacked by what turns out to be a more interesting conversation for those involved. But please do not intrude on other threads because you think something unrelated is particularly exciting or important - barring a stock market collapse or another 9/11, in either of those cases, please interrupt away. There's enough nonsense and spam floating around via email; we don't need to add to it here, at least not unfiltered.

Had the latest offender, (who shall go unnamed since it was done in innocence), bothered to email me first, I could have told him that he was getting worked up about an old Internet hoax. This was quite obvious in the early versions as they cited bills that did not exist.

Comments ()

Mailvox: seeing no evil

Bill writes of the so-called "smart" missiles:

Yeah, what we should have done was say "Hey Saddam, we have a few hundred special ops folks hiding in Baghdad and other major cities, hide-and-seek starts.... Now!"

It seems to escape Bill that this is an admission on his part that a) the government does lie; and b) uses the mainstream media to disseminate its propaganda. The point is not that the government should have endangered its troops by telling the truth about how it was bombing Baghdad - of course they shouldn't have, although I don't see why any explanation was required in the first place - but that the US government is perfectly willing to lie and use the media to propagate its lies when it sees fit to do so.

This logically should logically lead Bill to the next two questions: (1) What else are they lying about? (2) What is their justification for doing so?

Finally, I find it hard to believe that anyone would believe that Saddam didn't know perfectly well that our special ops were crawling all over Iraq both the first and second time around, smart missiles or no smart missiles. The frightening thing about special ops is that the target knows they're out there, he just doesn't know where, or how to find them.

Comments ()

Review: The Atrocity Archives

The Atrocity Archives
Charles Stross
Golden Gryphon Press

Rating: 8 of 10

There are those books where the cleverness of the author is irksome, where one cannot escape the vague impression that the reader is expected to stop and applaud the literary gymnastics at the end of every chapter. In The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross does not engage in pyrotechnic wordsmithery, but his cleverness is unmistakable.

Stross, (we dearly hope), has conjured up The Laundry from the bowels of his imagination, an esoteric department devoted to cleaning up those nasty messes that result when dimensions collide. The occultic Laundry is one part NSA, one part MI5 and two parts bureaucratic nightmare, as even the most awe-inspiring eldritch horrors are somehow reduced to matters of paperwork and departmental infighting. It is as if 007 was fired for sexual harassment and replaced by 013, a Dilbert in uneasy possession of Lord Voldemort's powers. The complex synthesis is a most unlikely one, and yet Stross pulls it off with effortless expertise.

A longtime technology columnist for Computer Shopper, Stross presents a world in which modern science and mathematical theory have been used to harness occult power from... elsewhere. The Cold War, it seems, was even more grim and cold than anyone imagined, as the arms race involved far more than the comparatively prosaic threat of nuclear weapons. An insignificant pawn for a minor player in the Great Game, Bob Howard has recently traded the boredom of a desk job for what he hopes will prove a more exciting position in the field. But in this environment, one can never tell when things squamous and rugose will unexpectedly liven up a tedious day at the office with a moment of sheer horror.

Story: 4 of 5. Surely one of the strangest thrillers ever written, the fantastic and science fiction elements only add to the tension. Yes, there are girls that must be rescued and worlds that must be saved, but the unique nature of the threats involved, both wordly and otherwordly, keep the pages ever-turning. There are actually several stories contained within one meta-story, as a related novella, The Concrete Jungle, follows the Archives proper.

Style: 4 of 5. The text is gripping and entertaining throughout, as the juxtaposition of everyman's office life with the omnipresent possibility of sudden and horrible death is quite amusing. Stross uses his jargon judiciously, piling it on for maximum effect at times, but never allowing it to slow the story down. Like Umberto Eco and Dan Brown, he manages the neat trick of making the reader feel smarter for having immersed himself in his book.

Characters: 3 of 5. Stross's Howard - an homage to a genre legend - is an amusing protagonist. He is not at all the cliched reluctant hero, but his self-deprecating nature makes his occasional self-doubt all the more real. Stross, for all that he is manifestly an vision writer, still manages to draw his characters with precision and more than a little wry humor.

Creativity: 4.5 of 5. Yes, this is a synthetic creation. His influences - Lovecraft, Stephenson, Fleming, Adams - are obvious, and yet the wizard's melting pot prduces something new, different and even stylish in a technocratic manner. Stross is perhaps the best "new" writer the science fiction genre has produced since Neal Stephenson; he is certainly the most interesting.

Text Sample:

The fact of the matter is that most traditional magic doesn't work. In fact, it would all be irrelevant, were it not for the Turing theorem - named after Alan Turing, who you'll have heard of if you know anything about computers.

That kind of magic works. Unfortunately....

The theorem is a hack on discrete number theory that simultaneously disproves the Church-Turing hypothesis (wave if you understand that) and worse, permits NP-complete problems to be converted into P-complete ones. This has several consequences, starting with screwing over most cryptography algorithms - translation: all your bank account are belong to us - and ending with the ability to computationally generate a Dho-Nha geometry curve in real time.

This latter item is just slightly less dangerous than allowing nerds with laptops to wave a magic wand and turn them into hydrogen bombs at will. Because, you see, everything you know about the way this universe works is correct - except for the little problem that this isn't the only universe we have to worry about. Information can leak between one universe and another. And in a vanishingly small number of the other universes there are things that listen, and talk back - see Al-Hazred, Nietszche, Lovecraft, Poe, etcetera. The many-angled ones, as they say, live at the bottom of the Mandlebrot mathematics, except when a suitable incantation in the platonic realm of mathematics - computerised or otherwise - draws them forth.

(And you thought running that fractal screensaver was good for your computer?)

Comments ()

Book reviews

Nate has a little Pan-Galactic book club aborning at his site, which made me wonder if it might be interesting to put together a community book review collection over at voxday.net. I have a distinct review form in mind, and I'm thinking that if Digital Cowboy and I designed the forms for automated entry, the reasonably well-read collection of people here would be able to put together a fairly solid selection of book reviews that might be of use to people in short order.

Is anyone amenable to the suggestion? Let me know if you:
a) like the idea and would like to contribute reviews;
b) like the idea and would like to read reviews;
c) think it's a dumb idea as one can find plenty of reviews at Amazon.

Basically, I like to see reviews hitting the four distinct aspects of a novel: Story, Style, Characters and Creativity. For example, I would rate Tanith Lee very high on style, somewhat high on creativity, and much lower on story and characters, whereas Rowlins would tend to score much higher on characters and story than on style.

Comments ()

The election is moot?

We spend a lot of time discussing the merits of third party voting here, but as I've now run across a fourth distinct source that believes that the election will be canceled in between now and November, I thought that I'd at least bring one of the more interestingly paranoid theories to your attention. Is any of this real? I couldn't possibly say. The only thing of which I am sure is that there are real unanswered questions about the events of 9/11, that there a number of what appear to be logical holes in the official story, and that history suggests that there is more of a power struggle going on beneath the surface than the average person following the national media would be likely to understand.

As a tangential example, I happen to know from a direct source that the story about smart missiles hitting Baghdad was false. The missiles weren't that smart, instead, there were spotters who had infiltrated into Baghdad who were using lasers to guide the missiles into their targets. A minor inaccuracy, sure, but a blatant misrepresentation of the facts by the government nonetheless. As to the assertion that Israel tested out some of its tactical - if tactical is the word for something that can strike from 600 miles away - nukes in Iraq, I can't say except that the radiation reported does seem far too high for it to be nothing but expended rounds of depleted uranium.

Conspiracy theory is the most accurate theory of history, the problem with using it to understand what is happening is that one seldom has any idea of which conspiracy is real and likely to be successful until it is all over. Lenin's takeover of Russia was a conspiracy after all; how many attempts to take over the USA have been made, attempts of which we have never heard? Given Roman history, it stands to reason that more than one individual would very much like to take control of the most powerful military and wealthiest economy in the world.

AJ: Do you think the globalists are going to have the will to carry out another massive attack here in the U.S. to try to get control back over the population and get their agenda back on track? Or do you think they've calculated, computed as you said, that that will blow up in their face because so many people now know who the real terrorists are?

DGP: That's a two-prong question, Alex. I think it deserves a studied answer. The only thing I can say is I'm not sure how it will turn out. But it is very dangerous.

AJ: From watching the globalists, I think they had a plan, they are still following a plan but I think they are shook-up. I think, from the evidence, in fact I know from the evidence, that a lot of things they planned haven't gone according to schedule and so they don't know what to do right now.

DGP: This is correct. I think it's personified in the persona of the Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. They almost got him in Baghdad when they fired the salvo, one night, of weaponry and they scared Paul Wolfowitz off. He's ready to resign or get the hell out.

AJ: You think that was U.S. forces doing that?

DGP: I believe it. It was very well planned again and ..

AJ: Yeah, only U.S. forces would know that he would be there. Yeah.

DGP: That is correct. And the precision of those weapons that came into the hotel. There were eleven rounds in all and I can speak from authenticity that they scared the hell out of Paul Wolfowitz.

I have to admit, I did wonder about that mysterious attempted hit on Wolfowitz, as the modus operandi was very distinct from the usual suicide vehicle, RPG ambush or gang of gunmen. It may a priori be a frightening thing to think that there may be elements in the military now in the midst of planning a coupe-de-etat, but then, it's not necessarily the case that they are the bad guys either. Perhaps, if they are serious about their oaths to the Constitution, we might even see a return to Constitutional government. In these profoundly interesting times, the only thing of which we can be certain is that we do not have it now.

Could this simply be Y2K-style fearmongering writ large? Definitely. But as with Y2K, we'll find out soon enough.

Comments ()

It's a Massachusetts thing, you wouldn't understand

From the Borowitz Report:

EDWARDS ASKS KERRY TO STOP GRABBING HIS ASS

Public Displays of Affection ‘Distracting,’ Says Kerry’s No. 2

After a mere two days on the campaign trail, the first signs of tension between John Kerry and running mate John Edwards emerged today as Sen. Edwards requested, firmly and unequivocally, that Mr. Kerry stop grabbing his ass. “I think Sen. Kerry has made it very clear in our joint appearances that he is happy to have me on the ticket,” Mr. Edwards told reporters. “He really doesn’t have to prove it by repeatedly grabbing my ass.”

At a campaign stop in Pennsylvania today, Mr. Edwards was in the middle of a speech when he emitted a high-pitched yelp, apparently in response to yet another unexpected display of affection from Sen. Kerry. “Jesus, John,” a visibly annoyed Mr. Edwards said to Mr. Kerry, who merely stood behind him smiling mischievously.

In a sign that Mr. Kerry’s unwanted embraces may be taking their toll on the newly-minted vice-presidential candidate, Mr. Edwards departed from his prepared remarks, telling hs audience, “There are two Americas – one that gets to grab ass, and one that gets its ass grabbed.”

Intriguingly, a source confirmed that Mr. Kerry’s penchant for ass-grabbing was the principal reason Rep. Dick Gephardt (D-Missouri) did not make the Democratic ticket: “The whole idea of it grossed Dick out.”

Elsewhere, indicted former Enron CEO Ken Lay today announced that he would seek amnesty by applying for a position as an Iraqi insurgent.

And in Washington, Attorney General John Ashcroft told all Americans to be on the lookout for a terror suspect disguised as an obese man wearing glasses and a baseball cap, accompanied by a documentary film crew.

If they have the Comunards play the convention, we'll know it's a serious relationship.

Comments ()

Hoops and hubris

I remember shooting some hoops with my neighbor back in eighth grade. He was a junior, and a star shooting guard on one of the best basketball teams in the state. One afternoon in his driveway, he rapidly fired five shots from distance, in each case hitting nothing but net. He looked at me and said: "Damn, I'm good!"

I was feeling that after turning in next week's column today. It's not everyone who can draw a direct analogy between the Dalai Lama and the state of the nation. Ten points for anyone who can correctly ascertain the fundamental point of the column from that hint.

Comments ()

A big fat slow pitch floating over home plate

"I've been covering Washington and politics for 30 years [said one wire-service photographer]. I can say I've never seen this much touching between two men, publicly." Indeed, editors determined to preserve the appearance of a little presidential dignity and campaign decorum on "the trail" are frustrated in their search for photographs suitable for a respectable mainstream newspaper. The photographers, keen competitors for the most startling shot of the day, naturally love it.

Karl Rove was a fool not to take my advice to pin John Kerry's ears to the wall over homogamy a few months ago. Now that the sweet-lovin' hugbuddies are getting so very personal in public, he'd have to be a complete idiot should he fail to take that ball, run with it up the field and spike the hootenanny out of that sucker under the goalposts.

I hope someone has the foresight to play "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" at their next joint press event, should they decide to get a little less frisky.

Comments ()

You get what you deserve

Candie believes she can get what she wants:

I think it's time you jump into the time machine and return to 2004. I don't think that just because I'm a woman I have to choose between a nice job or a nice husband. I'm not going to just lay down and play the 'I'm a woman so I'm going to be submissive and silent' game. If I want a college education and a doctorate, I'll get it. If I want a husband and a family, I'll get that too. But I'm not going to sacrifice one or the other just because I don't have the same equipment you do.

Candie's comment immediately brought to mind War and Peace, in which Tolstoy mocked those who believe that basic human realities change over time: "- mentioning "our days" as people of limited intelligence are fond of doing, imagining that they have discovered and appraised the peculiarities of "our days" and that human characteristics change with the times -"

There's a huge gap between "submissive and silent" and "tyrannical bitch that never shuts up and brooks no disagreement"; what is frightening about these so-called "strong" women who are so emotionally fragile that they can neither bear nor defend themselves against criticism is that they can't see it. They are so terrified of being viewed as outdated by those they've chosen as their peers - the Sisterhood - that they don't even dare look at the situation with their eyes open and judge the facts for themselves.

It sounds to me as if Candie will likely not only get what she wants, she'll get even more. A degree, a career, a husband, a divorce. Perhaps it she'll marry a man who will one day realize that he doesn't want to be married to a woman who is a bad wife and a worse mother, more likely, she'll grow bored and discontent with the spineless jellyfish that is the sort of man these women tend to marry.

If you want to have it all, you'll likely end up with far less than you could have had.

Comments ()

Why there is hope

Here's why I believe that there's no reason to despair when America is again presented with a choice between Tweedle-corporatist and Tweedle-socialist this November. Consider the following facts:

1. John Kerry feels the need to lie about when life begins.
2. John Kerry feels the need to disguise his arch-liberal voting record.
3. John Kerry feels the need to pose for pictures killing birds with guns.
4. George Bush is unwilling to openly support the assault weapons ban.
5. George Bush is afraid to openly declare his support for LOST.

There is still some chance that the American vision can be reborn without a journey into chaos as long as those most dedicated to destroying it feel the need to conceal their true intentions. Sure, the masses are stupid and easily fooled, and the chances are very high that things will have to fall apart under the weight of the central State before the vision can be renewed. But there is hope.

Comments ()

Mailvox: strong, scary women

Dian flexes her muscles and writes:

Actually the friends in my circle are all highly intelligent college graduates and/or self-made women (read: VPs, Tech Writers in Silicon Valley, Managers, etc.). This happens to scare the bejesus out of most men.

As a result, my circle of friends have married men who are either weaker in intelligence, education, or accomplishments than the males whom Vox proposes that most women marry "up" to. That is not to say we do not adore our husbands, who are construction workers, drivers, and techs.

Now, first, there's absolutely nothing wrong in marrying "down". But for a "highly intelligent college graduate" to say that female intelligence can "scare the bejesus out of most men" is absolutely risible. First, such females' peers aren't the least bit intimidated, as they've been using such females for at least four solid years before graduating from college, and another two to three years before grad school is done. That cures most of the intelligent males of any desire to waste any more time on what is surely the most conflict-prone, high maintenance group of people on the planet.

It's entirely possible that smart women scare less intelligent men - I wouldn't know - but it's interesting to see how even smart, successful women attempt to evade responsibility for their failures. "It's not that I'm an unpleasant bitch that no one wants to be around, it's just that I'm so smart and strong and pretty that everyone is afraid. And in the place of the Dark Lord, there will be a Dark Queen! All shall love me and despair!"

I have news for Dian and everyone else prone to swallowing the Myth of the Strong Woman. Most men don't fear women. Not at all. While some men may be appear to be afraid of their wives or girlfriends, their actual fear is that if they behave the "wrong" way, their wives won't have sex with them. Those are two entirely different concepts. Fear of the strong woman" is nothing more than projection that reveals the inherent fear that the physically weaker sex naturally has of the stronger.

Now, Camille Paglia would argue that all men have an instinctive psycho-sexual fear of the cthonic Dionysian Great Mother, thus accounting for the rival Apollonian neuroses of homosexuality and the Church, but this is far outside the scope of Dian's assertion as it applies to all women, not merely the educated, intelligent and financially successful.

Comments ()

The Terrible Twosome take Broadway

I just thought that the following exchange from the Gargler's blog deserved a re-airing:

NATE: Acceptable Man Behavior...

3) If your daddy, or grand-daddy dies, you get to cry.
4) Crying at any other time for any other reason is unacceptable....

BANE: I'll cry any damn time I want to. I am very sensitive. I will probably cry while I am whipping your invincible ass. I cry where appropriate in movies. And then I blow my nose in the hair of the girl in front of me, and cry while I whip her boyfriend's un-understanding ass. Your post makes me sniffle a little. God gave yuh tear ducts for more than clearing gunsmoke from your bloodshot eyes. Dammit.

NATE: Great. This is what I have to look forward to. When the shit hits the fan.. No doubt I'll end up stuck in a foxhole with Bane... I'll be cold... tired... and sittin' there listenin' to him cry. ***NOTE TO SELF*** Add suicide pill to Bug-out-bag.

Ah, yes, if Shakespeare had only been a crotchety, paranoid Southron, he would have dreamed of writing dialogue like this.

Comments ()

Unfaithful women

Everyone knows men who refuse to grow up. Most of them have the good sense to avoid marriage and children like the plague, knowing full well that they are unsuited for it. But this Newsweek article appears to demonstrate that some women, too, are developmentally challenged, and what is pehaps worse, are capable of becoming wives and mothers without either state propelling them beyond a child's self-centered and superficial grasp of the world and how it operates.

In retrospect, Nadine understands what pushed her mother to be unfaithful. Beautiful and intelligent, her mother was stifled by her life's low horizons, and her father, a stand-up guy, was probably a little bit boring. The new man promised travel, wealth and adventure; her father was the kind of guy who'd say, "Why go around the world? You'll get plane-sick."

I find the notion that boredom is an understandable reason to be unfaithful to be somewhat strange, especially in light of the fact that women tend to marry "up" in terms of intelligence. Who do you think is more likely to be bored with the other? Furthermore, I know far more married couples wherein it is the woman, with her nesting instinct, who refuses to contemplate gallivanting around the world, and yet I've never heard any of these men consider it a reasonable rationalization for unfaithfulness.

Strangest of all is the idea that "Sex in the City" should have any influence on one's behavior. If a man began acting like James Bond because he was a fan of the films, one would think he was insane. Morality aside, any woman whose behavior and life philosophy is seriously affected by a television show should probably be committed to a mental institution on grounds of terminal shallowness.

Comments ()

The absurdity of fantasy

From Slashdot:

Q: Is LoTR really based on Christian Mythology?
A: Yes. Tolkien wanted to demonstrate that even the mentally and physically challenged were capable of success and that therefore we should love everyone, regardless of their defects.

Q: So who represents the mentally and physically challenged?
A: Well obviously the hobbits are the physically challenged ones here, but the central mentally challenged figure is Gandalf, responsible for the most horrible attack plan in literature.

Q: What's so horrible about a poorly armed team of two hobbits infiltrating Mordor?
A: Well, basically it ignores the fundamental strengths of the forces of light. Anyone who's played C&C or Warcraft knows that if you have an advantage in air units, you have to use it. Remember that elves can ride eagles, and that elven archers are incredibly potent - early on, Gimli [I think he means Legolas] dismounts a Nazgul with a single shot! With about a thousand eagles (given elven archers on each one), the forces of good would have matched up pretty well in the air against Mordor's air units: all nine of them. While the leader of the Nazgul cannot be killed by any living man, this does not prevent a team of twenty eagles from tearing him to little shreds, especially if Gandalf rode along for help. So basically an air battle would have been brief unmitigated slaughter of the Nazgul as about a thousand eagle-mounted elves blew them out of the sky in a hail of arrows.

Q: But I thought that there was some other book that said that the eagles wouldn't help?
A: We're not talking about some other stupid book here, we're talking about the Lord of the Rings. And in this book, the eagles most definitely help out, first by flying Gandalf off the tower and secondly by pitching into the Final Battle in full force, attacking ground units (stupid!) at great risk to themselves. So obviously they would have been content to take part in a brief airborne slaughter of the Nazgul.

Q: Ok so you defeat all Mordor's air units... then what?
A: Well with air superiority, you command the skies. Which means that you can fly right over Mount Doom and drop anything you want right in there... like a ring. Mordor only had nine airborne units, and with them out of the way Mordor has absolutely no way to prevent anyone from flying anywhere.

I love fantasy literature and I read it voraciously, but this sort of thing does amuse me to no end. Rare indeed is the author who can think through all the alternative possibilities, although ofttimes the illogic is truly ridiculous. So, we have a divine right of kings sans any religious divinity, the bizarre concept of Balance that is more reflective of an author's political moderation than any known historical religion and a plethora of poorly-reconstituted quasi-European principalities. And, as the Slashdot poster demonstrates, even the great ones slip up from time to time.

Of course, this flaw could have been easily addressed by showing an Eagle getting blown out of the sky by Sauron once it crossed into Mordor, but that's neither here nor there.

Comments ()

My favorite gay columnist

As you may know, I can't stand Andrew Sullivan. But while he doesn't know jack about anything outside matters homosexual and political intrigue, I do like Michelangelo Signorile's fearless approach to writing. Sen. Barbara Mikulski is the first to be outed in the approach to the Defense of Marriage Amendment showdown; it will be interesting to see how many others are booted out of the closet.

As the July 12 date nears for a vote on the federal marriage amendment, an outing panic has gripped Washington's political and media circles. Some gay activists have vowed to expose those closeted members of Congress who are supporting the amendment, as well as the closeted gay staffers of any member backing it. And it's not only right-wing Republicans who should be on notice. After initially indicating that she would vote against the constitutional amendment that would make gays and lesbians into second-class citizens, Sen. Barbara Mikulski's opposition to the amendment appears to have gone into the closet: Now that a vote is near, the Maryland Democrat—who is up for reelection in November—is suddenly not returning reporters' phone calls seeking her intentions on the vote, nor is she issuing any statements on the matter.

Mikulski's position on same-sex marriage isn't the only thing in her closet: The sexual orientation of the forever-unmarried 67-year-old has been an open secret for many years. But Mikulski has apparently always worried about what her working-class Democratic base in Maryland might think of her sexual orientation, making her irrationally petrified of ever discussing it (except to make heterosexual allusions)

Comments ()

Occam's Razor

The lineup of primetime speakers at the Republican Convention predictably reflects its New York location by giving prominent spots to the hosts, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor George Pataki. But those enjoying the coveted spotlight also pay tribute to New York's former Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Joining the hosts will be other mavericks and dissidents who represent a minority in Ronald Reagan's GOP. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Arizona's Senator John McCain, and California's Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger will all be at the primetime podium. The only announced speaker who actually agrees with President Bush on major issues is Democratic Senator Zell Miller of Georigia.

The decision to showcase rogue elephants as representatives of the modern Republican party is not the mark of a self-confident party establishment. If the lineup is intended to make an overwhelmingly conservative party attractive to swing voters, it does so by pretending to be something it's not. The Republican party seems to habitually internalize the criticisms of its opponents. When the only Reagan Republican to enjoy a prominent supporting role at the party's convention is a Democrat, the GOP has a serious identity problem. The Kerry-Edwards ticket is liberal. The Boston convention will not be featuring Louisiana senator John Breaux in an attempt to pretend otherwise.

Or perhaps they're not so roguish after all. Perhaps the party is electing to present itself as it truly is, the faction of strong interventionist government with a corporatist, nationalist edge. I do not agree with those who constantly find innocence in incompetence and apparent stupidity. Perhaps I've spent too much time around Italians, who are molto furbo in using one's assumption of their incompetence in order to get away with doing exactly as they please.

Comments ()

False assumptions

A former public school teacher writes:

Picture "advanced placement" 4th, 7th, or even 8th graders who do not know their addition tables, or the names (much less the sounds) of the vowels.

I not so long ago looked into some federal funds for pre-school reading programs under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. I was initially optimistic, as I had had excellent recent success getting three and four-year-olds reading fluidly (as high as the upper middle school level, in terms of proficiency). On inspection of the grant offer materials, I found I did not qualify - for the simple reason that the government "absolutely" did not encourage the teaching of actual reading to pre-schoolers. Recognition of the letters of the alphabet was the maximum acceptable.

If you are considering sending your kids to government schools (or have some there already), be advised that the above account accurately describes such schools. The only variance pertains to the "chatted, argued, screamed..." passage. That state of affairs, you see, exists only in those classrooms whose misguided adult patrons attempt to actually be teachers. Administrators take care of such infidels in short order - by making it crystal clear to these poor souls' pupils that they (the administrators) do not support them (the poor souls). By now, most classroom managers are compliant in their expected roles as social directors, abdicating these roles just long enough to cover the pretentious, perfunctory pablum required on today's standardized tests. Such classrooms are uniformly harmonious most of the time.

You do not have to accept that there is an organized conspiracy to keep our kids ignorant to get the picture. As long as you realize that things are exactly as they would be if there were such a conspiracy, that will suffice.

There are a number of assumptions that a parent foolish enough to put his child into the government schools must make in order to do so:

1) I turned out okay, therefore my child will be fine. This is based on the assumption that nothing in the school system has changed significantly in the quarter-century since you were in first grade. This is false.

2) The purpose of a school is to teach reading, writing and math. This, too, is false. Not only do the actions of most educational institutions belie this assumption, but often their charters, slogans and policies state outright that this is not the case.

3) My child's teachers care about my child's education. Of course they pretend to care, but does one really expect a teacher to publicly proclaim his true indifference? The average teacher doesn't care any more about how much the children in his class learn than the average office worker cares about his job. I don't know about you, but based on my office experience, that's a pretty high level of apathy. The testimony of this teacher and other former teachers like John Gatto certainly appears to support this line of reasoning.

Comments ()

A confession

While I must state that I have never experienced anything like the incident to which I alluded earlier. I am not without some experience of the martial homoerotism that is the sport of Rugby. After my 100 meter career ended with a series of blown hamstrings, I played a season of wingback for one of the top collegiate teams in the country.

I never really figured out all the rules, since as a wing, my only responsibility was to a) tackle the other wing if he had the ball, and b) run to touch and try to avoid the other wing if I had the ball. Simple enough.

However, I achieved some measure of distinction in my brief career as a rugger by being kicked out of my first game. I was quite shocked, having been led to believe that all was fair in love, war and rugby. What happened was that our fullback punted the ball high and deep, giving me about a forty-yard run at the Penn State winger, so I was at full-speed when I hit him shoulder-to-chest just as the ball arrived. I was about 75 percent sure I'd killed him and the crowd was going wild as our scrum had managed to come up with the ball, so I did a few repetitions of the shovel-of-dirt-over the shoulder thing, followed by firing off a few rounds in the air from a pair of imaginary six-shooters. And yes, I was prancing.

The crowd went completely berserk - we were playing at home - and the referee promptly threw me out of the game for excessive celebration. It was probably just as well, as I'm pretty sure the Nittany Lions were gunning for me after that. And on the plus side, it did cement my place on the team, which had been pretty iffy up to that point.

Comments ()

Mailvox: mind your sources

Waterboy proves to be a sucker for NFL propaganda:

Were the France-England numbers worldwide? The quote for the Super Bowl number indicates they were for the US only; do you have the worldwide estimate? Besides ex-pats and military, there is a growing following in Europe.

From the NFL: "Super Bowl XXXVII TV audience: Last year's game was the most watched program ever with 138.9 million viewers. The 10 most-watched programs in TV history are all Super Bowls." The NFL-Europe estimate for World Bowl XII: "World Bowl XII will reach an estimated worldwide television audience of 200 million in more than 150 [countries]."

France-England was also one of the bigger marquee games. What were the numbers for the final?

First, to correct a few misconceptions. The France-England game only featured one marquee team in TV terms, as contrary to what I would have imagined, England, Germany and Portugal were the the biggest TV draws in Euro 2004. The source for the 118 million watching the England-Portugal game was Initiative, a Nielsen-type company which tracks 52 markets. This is probably NOT a worldwide number, as UEFA has 50 members and Latvia was mentioned as one of the markets tracked. The numbers for the final are not yet available, but based on the quarterfinal numbers, Initiative predicted it would hit 150 million.

The NFL numbers are downright laughable, as I doubt that even two million people watched the World Bowl. You'll note that the NFL says the broadcast "would reach" 200 million, which is more than the global viewers it claims for the Super Bowl. Even this latter number is questionable, as Nielson reports the following:

In 2003, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers beat the Oakland Raiders for their first Super Bowl victory averaging a 40.7 rating with 88.6 million viewers in the U.S. Worldwide the game averaged more than 97 million viewers in 22 countries.

That's eight million more viewers with the addition of 21 countries, presumably the biggest and most important additional audiences since Nielsen is bothering to track them. That's 380,000 viewers per additional country. And we're supposed to believe that the other 178 countries in which the game is being televised, which aren't important enough to be tracked, are averaging the minimum of 236,000 viewers necessary to bring the total to the claimed 139 million?

In direct country-by-country comparison, it's easy to see that Euro 2004 games - not including the final - commanded much larger percentage of viewers in the countries involved. Furthermore, neutral viewership tended to run about half of those in the two countries involved. This is significant since the EU - which, keep in mind, is smaller than UEFA, has 380 million people to the USA's 293.

Euro 2004
Britain: ENGLAND v PORTUGAL 24.7M/59.8M = 41.3 percent
Holland: HOLLAND v LATVIA 7.6M/15.9M = 47.8 percent
USA: NEW ENGLAND vs CAROLINA 89.6M/293M = 30.6 percent

This shows that not only the quarterfinals, but even group stage games involving minor countries were of serious interest. In 2004, viewership was up 14 percent overall, compared to the increase of 1.3 percent from the 2000 to 2004 Super Bowls. In both 2000 and 2004, neutral viewership was somewhat more than half that of the two nations involved, but still extraordinarily high.

Euro 2000 final (France v Italy)
France 21.4M/ 59.3M = 36.1 percent
Italy 21.3M / 57.7M = 36.9 percent
Germany 18.4M / 83.2M = 22.1 percent

So, one can safely conclude that EU-wide, (which does not count large extra-EU UEFA countries such as Russia and the Ukraine), the average Euro game has viewership comparable to the Super Bowl even if one leaves out the larger-than-average viewership contributed by the two nations involved. As for the big games like the semis and final, there is simply no comparison. Taking the tournament as a whole, it's impossible to escape the conclusion that the Super Bowl and the NFL playoffs are relatively small fish by comparison.

Comments ()

A pox on both houses

118 million people tuned in to the first-round France-England match, which was decided in the final minutes. That figure trounces the 89 million-person American audience for the Super Bowl last year, which was the biggest television event of 2003; and the 90 million for the Super Bowl this year, according to figures from Nielsen Media Research.

Not only is the Euro 2004 tournament bigger than the Super Bowl, but nearly every game of the 31 involved blows it away in the ratings. In Holland, for example, the semifinal match with Portugal scored a 50 share - half of all televisions in the country were tuned to the game. Unlike American sports, there's no need to schedule around things, instead, everything else is scheduled around it.

Now, there are no bigger fans of the NFL than me. I'm such an old school purist that I'm still irritated about the 16-game schedule since it messed up all the old records. (Although, I admit, it's hard to deny that a longer season = more football, which is an obviously good thing.) But to be honest, the disdain that some football fans show for the Beautiful Game strikes me as a weird combination of ignorance and insecurity.

To a connoisseur of both sports, the two are perfectly complimentary. The latter half of the league seasons and the international tournaments are in the NFL offseason, and whereas the NFL is the ultimate game of pre-plotted cerebral strategy, soccer is the pinnacle of impromptu creativity. I simply laugh when I hear Philistines of either continent dismissing the other continent's favorite sport; such poorly founded contempt reveals nothing but the ironic snobbery of the ill-informed parochial. For every American sneering about low scores and Nancy boys, there is a European scoffing at martial homoeroticism and interminable breaks in the action.

A pox, I say, a pox on both houses.

Comments ()

Ding dong, the witch is dead

I can't say I'm terribly surprised to hear that it's Edwards. Why? Because John Kerry likes a mate with money. Heck, if Theresa goes bust in the upcoming bear market, we may well see John ditch her in favor of a Massachusetts Matrimonial with John-Boy.

The best news is that this should finish off any real threat of the Lizard Queen running for President. If Bush wins, Edwards will become the presumptive Democratic nominee. And if Kerry wins, well, Hillary's potential presidency is deader than a twice-staked vampire.

Finishing off Hillary, hmmmm, that alone might be reason to vote for Kerry... oh, relax, will you? I'm kidding!

Comments ()

The Original Cyberpunk strikes back

The OC writes:

This morning's P_Press carried another editorial decrying the small-mindedness of those who refuse to see Fahrenheit 9/11. Since I have the fullest confidence that they will ignore my rebuttal, I'm copying you on it.

Dear Sirs/Ms,

I already know that I hate okra, therefore I feel no need to go to a restaurant and spend $8 on some new okra dish just to see if it tastes different this time. Likewise, having seen Michael Moore's earlier films, I have every reason to expect that "Fahrenheit 9/11" will be just another revolting load of dishonest leftist agitprop.

The genius of film is that it is a highly emotive medium with a very fast information decay rate. A skilled filmmaker can use emotion, energy, and rapid non-sequitur cuts to leap over yawning chasms in logic and sense that would, if presented in print, cause the reader to stop short, sit up, and say, "What the hell is this idiot trying to say?"

Moore has already demonstrated that he is a highly skilled filmmaker, on the order of Leni Reifenstahl. But surely, by now, Moore and his distributors have recouped the cost of producing and distributing this film. If Moore is genuinely interested in promoting public discussion of the charges he makes in it, then let him donate the broadcast rights to PBS so that we can all see it for free and make up our own minds.

Until he does so, though, I feel no need to spend $8 from my entertainment budget to watch Michael "Barnum" Moore's latest carnival geek act.

Comments ()

Fedora Fix

One of the biggest headaches with Fedora Core 1 and Fedora Core 2 is the cretinous way it handles PCMCIA wireless cards. I managed to get this machine working somehow, but never quite got the other one going despite numerous attempts... until finally the thing died thanks to Dell's quality motherboards.

So, I can't test this fix out, at least not until I get my next machine, but based on the responses on the Fedora forum it appears to finally have done the trick.

Open /etc/init.d/pcmcia
Change the line

# chkconfig: 2345 24 96

to

# chkconfig: 2345 09 96

Yes, it’s in a comment, but it seems it has meaning to the chkconfig command (chkconfig --level 2345 pcmcia reset)

What the fix appears to do is to load PCMCIA before the network instead of after it, as Fedora stupidly insists on doing by default. Obviously, the network cannot work if the drivers for the hardware upon which it rests is not yet loaded. This would seem to indicate that no one on the development team has a laptop with wireless PCMCIA, or Fedora would never have shipped the first time with this problem, let alone the second. Well, that's the hazard of using an Open Source OS; the good news is that now that the problem has finally been identified, it will be addressed in the next OS release.

Comments ()

Spiderflaws

Factual error: When Spider-man is fighting with Doc Ock and Doc Ock throws Spider-man through the overhead pedestrian bridge, Doc Ock throws Spider-man in the direction of travel of the train, and when passing through the bridge, Spider-man doesn't touch anything. When Spider-man comes out the other side, he is 'behind' Doc Ock (in terms of the direction of train travel). This implies that Spider-man has slowed down in the air - fair enough due to wind resistance - and so is traveling slower. However, Spider-man then hits Doc Ock, which implies he is now traveling faster. A physical impossibility (since the horizontal speed doesn't increase and decrease when thrown, only the vertical speed).

I have to confess, I'm one of those people who gets extremely annoyed when there are obvious plot holes. As one SF writer once said, any story that depends on someone being completely stupid shouldn't even be considered a story. This doesn't apply to the new Spiderman movie, necessarily, but this particular error makes me wonder if minor physics errors are one of the reasons that CGI action scenes often look noticeably wrong, even to those of us who couldn't work out the proper physics with a gun to our head.

Seeing Enemy at the Gates with a Force Recon sniper was a riot. He was physically squirming in his chair with the effort to keep his mouth shut during the movie. Afterwards, we went out for pizza and the girls did their best to ignore us while he went on a 30-minute rampage of the film's collection of absurdities. Good humor.

Comments ()

Mailvox: il problema cola vittoria greca

Vittorio writes:

Purtroppo, il popolo ha sempre giudicato dalle apparenze; lo fece anche Adamo quando mangiò la mela. D'altronde, qualcuno, credo Rivarol, disse che una dittatura si afferma non per merito proprio ma per gli errori della democrazia. A proposito, visto Portogallo-Grecia? Indubbiamente i Portoghesi hanno commessogravi errori, ma i Greci, che catenaccio!

Certainly the essay of Quintus Tullius suggests that people have always been prone to judge by appearances, although this may have briefly been less of a factor in the days when politics were no longer local but prior to television. And regardless of what a dictatorship affirms about democracy, there can be little question that, based on historical precedent, it is what inevitably follows. This will be true of the American Republic as well, the only question is when and in what form.

And of course, I did see the game. Portugal blundered by their determination to probe and search for nonexistent cracks in the Greek defense instead of trying to break through it by main force. Typical of most midfield-driven teams, they wasted chance after chance by holding the ball too long and allowing the defense to get set.

Greece's victory is a great Cinderella story - Mississippi State had better odds to win the NCAA basketball tournament prior to the start of the season - but Rehhagel's revival of il catenaccio may not be a great development for the game. I much prefer the wide-open attacking play of Arsenal and Real Madrid; it would certainly be more entertaining to see teams imitating the Czech Republic instead of the Greeks in the coming years.

Then again, Trappatoni's use of the Blue Chain backfired badly on Italy and the Greeks were as disciplined in attack as they were in defense, so perhaps we won't see an unwanted return to the tactics of the past.

Comments ()

There is no law

I've never paid much attention to the oft-cited "it's the law" argument. As the Gargler pointed out recently, that point is only raised when it's deemed in the interest of the politicians and bureaucrats to do something that people don't want them to do or when they wish to compel unthinking obedience. Jaywalking is almost never prosecuted, although "it's the law", and businesses freely do business on Sundays in many states in open and accepted defiance the blue laws still on the books.

As the Constitution is now a dead letter in the eyes of the government and the law no longer stands as written but is superceded by judge-declared case law - otherwise known as the Rule of Man that the Rule of Law was supposed to supplant - it's clear that there is no law. Although few realize it yet, we now live in a Maughamite environment of "do what thou wilt with due regard for the policeman around the corner" and should expect the concomitant results in the near term.

People tend to forget that no one relies so heavily on "it's the law" as a corrupt political leadership:

China's state-controlled media have not reported Jiang's detention, which began June 1. In response to questions submitted by The Washington Post, the government said in a brief statement: "Jiang Yanyong, as a soldier, recently violated the relevant discipline of the military. Based on relevant regulations, the military has been helping and educating him." Though Chinese police routinely jail dissidents, the decision to detain Jiang appears to have been made by the Central Military Commission, the nation's supreme military body, with the consent of the party's most senior leaders, including President Hu Jintao and his influential predecessor, Jiang Zemin, according to a source familiar with the decision-making process.

Jiang Yanyong, a 72-year old doctor and "soldier" clearly broke the law in alerting the world to the Chinese cover-up of SARS. Is it right or just for him to be locked away and re-educated? After all, "it's the law."

Comments ()

Rating the titular heads of faction

I've selected what I consider to be the ten most important issues in this election for the leader of the Executive Branch, and given both President Bush and Senator Kerry a rating on each using a scale of 1 to 10. The lowest possible score is therefore a 10, the highest is a 100. I would not consider supporting any candidate scoring lower than 66 on this test.

(1) Respect for the Constitution
As the President takes an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, this would seem to be a pretty basic requirement. Unfortunately, both Bush and Kerry have demonstrated precisely zero regard for either their oath or the document itself. Even Bob Dole, the tax collector for the welfare state, at least pretended to care about the 10th Amendment.

01 - (01): Bush
01 - (01): Kerry

(2) Defending gun rights
Kerry, for all that he has been going through the usual political rigamarole of having his picture taken while killing birds, has reliably voted against gun rights. Bush, on the other hand, has stated his willingess to accept the renewal of the "assault weapons" ban, but has not otherwise pushed for gun control.

05 - (06): Bush
02 - (03): Kerry

(3) National Sovereignty
All the Constitutional rights in the world won't do Americans any good if the Constitution is superceded by international treaties and organizations. Both Kerry and Bush support LOST, both are fans of the United Nations and numerous other supranational organizations. Bush is marginally less enthusiastic about giving up sovereignty than Kerry, and was willing to drop his amnesty proposal once the level of opposition became clear.

03 - (09): Bush
01 - (03): Kerry

(4) Supreme Court Appointments
This is the big one for Bush defenders, but considering that five of the seven Republican appointees are liberal judicial activists, it's by no means a slam dunk. I don't think we can assume Bush, who has governed to the Left of every Republican president since Nixon, will show any better judgment than his predecessors. 2/7 = 28.57 percent.

03 - (12): Bush
01 - (04): Kerry

(5) Taxation
Bush has shown no inclination to respond to the petition put forth by We the People, as he is Constitutionally mandated to do. Nor has he investigated the very credible charges laid against the IRS, when even the US District Attorney "denies that the Internal Revenue Service is an agency of the United States government." However, his three tax cuts did amount to 2 percent of the national income, so some credit is due. Kerry has been a reliable vote for higher taxes.

04 - (16): Bush
01 - (05): Kerry

(6) Big Government Growth
Contrary to what one would think, growth in government spending has increased fastest under Republican presidents, the two exceptions being LBJ and Ronald Reagan. George Bush has the worst record of any Republican president, while one cannot assume that John Kerry would necessarily be any worse than Bill Clinton. Just as it takes a Nixon to go to China, it takes a Republican president to unleash the full force of the fire hoses of Federal spending. I expect the rate of growth of government spending would actually slow somewhat under Kerry - Bush has set a difficult pace to match.

01 - (17): Bush
03 - (08): Kerry

(7) Commander-in-Chief

Neither Bush nor Kerry has shown any resolve to meet what every historian with his eyes open knows is the third great wave of Islamic expansion. Neither will even admit that this is happening, for that matter. Nevertheless, George Bush has struck one serious blow to the global jihad (Afghanistan) and one minor blow (Iraq), while Kerry can't even bear to give a straight answer about what has already been done, much less what he would do himself. Bush has surrounded himself with poor strategic advisors and appears to have little notion of history or military strategy, but at least he appears to take the responsibility seriously.

04 - (21): Bush
01 - (09): Kerry

(8) Character
George Bush is by no means the flip-flopper or divorce-prone gigolo that John Kerry is, and he even warned conservatives with his assertion of his "compassionate" perversion of the philosophy. Still, his constant dissembling on the so-called War on Terror and the nature of the threat to the United States and the West is manifestly untruthful. Furthermore, he has not gone public with any of the Clinton administration's lies about TWA 800 or OK City. As with most Democrats, Kerry's entire campaign is built on deceit and on the few occasions that Kerry has allowed his personality to shine through, it is a rather ugly one indeed. That being said, one doubts he is an utter fraud like Clinton.

05 - (26): Bush
03 - (12): Kerry

(9) Party Coattails
Who cares? More Republicans to help Bush spend more money faster? More Democrats to help further destroy the social fabric? It's irrelevant, as Ron Paul, Dr. No, is about the only member of Congress who even pays attention to the law and Constitution anymore.

01 - (27): Bush
01 - (13): Kerry

(10) The Economy
Both men are economically illiterate individuals who surround themselves with Keynesian advisors. Whoever wins will watch helplessly as the Federal Reserve drives the nation off a financial cliff during the next Presidential term.

01 - (28): Bush
01 - (14): Kerry

In summary, I conclude that Bush is twice as good as Kerry and not half as good as he'd have to be in order to win my support. It's only a zero-sum game if you're so short-sighted that you only pay attention to the next election. If you don't believe the political environment can change, well, tell it to the Whigs.

Comments ()

Wasted votes

BLS offers advice:

MikeM, if you live in a state where the election may actually be contested, please reconsider your decision. If a few hundred more Palm Beach County voters had gone for Gore, he'd be President now.... You, MikeM, may actually be able to make a difference. And even Vox has conceded that Bush is better than Kerry. So don't waste a vote that can make a difference, only waste one that can't, like Vox's.

It's time to erase this false concept of a wasted vote. If a wasted vote is a vote for a candidate who has no chance of winning, then this doesn't simply apply to third party candidates. Dole, Dukakis and Mondale were all miserable candidates who had absolutely no chance of winning, and yet strangely one never heard the concept of a wasted vote brought up then. In truth, the concept is nothing more than a propaganda device used to keep people locked into the bifactional one-party system. If the Libertarians double their vote total from 2000, it will soon be demonstrated that the votes weren't wasted as the shock waves carry over into the major party.

I haven't "conceded" that Bush is better than Kerry. That usage carries implications of approval, which I have not granted. I have assumed that Bush is marginally better than Kerry, although I have absolute proof of Bush's executive branch shortcomings whereas I have only my suspicions and assumptions about the likely evils of John Kerry. In any event, the differences are marginal as neither man supports constitutional government and so neither deserves any electoral support from those who value human rights, individual freedom and the US Constitution.

As usual, the pro-Bush defenders fail to understand that anti-Bush conservatives, libertarians and constitutionists truly don't want Bush to win. I don't want Bush to have another term, I don't want John Kerry to have a first one, and I'm not going to be held responsible for either of them doing so. If the rest of America is foolish enough to vote one of them into power, so be it, I can't prevent that. But at least I can know that the slow and systematic destruction of America was done over my protest and without my consent.

If you voted for Bush in 2000, then you are responsible for the gutting of the 1st Amendment in McCain-Feingold. You are responsible for the new Medicare entitlement. You are responsible for the Patriot Act, the sacrifice of US sovereignty in the Law of the Sea Treaty, as well as the revival of big government. Protesting that Al Gore might have been worse doesn't remove any of that responsibility from you. You gave all that to us. Thanks ever so much.

The president had four years to win my vote. He did nothing but confirm the correctness of my decision to refuse to vote for him the first time around.

Comments ()

Restoring the Republic

Paul Jacob has written a fantastic article in which he recommends more democracy as a potential cure for the poisoned republicanism that we now have:

I wish that we lived in a republic as imagined by the best of our founders. But Ben Franklin's great aphorism was a warning as well as a statement. And it is apparent that Americans have not heeded the warning. We have not kept our republic. Not that keeping a republic is easy. Franklin's co-conspirator, Thomas Jefferson, explained: "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground."

...Three democratic reforms provide the first steps to returning our government to its Constitutional, republican roots:

1. Term limits at local, state, and federal levels, for all elected executives and representatives.

2. The right to initiative and referendum by citizens in every state and locality, for Constitutional as well as statutory enactment and repeal.

3. Require a vote of the people for tax increases and borrowing money.

The latter is a particularly good idea and works very well in Switzerland, where the people recently voted down an expensive expansion of the St. Gotthard tunnel that the government had overwhelmingly approved. They have also consistently, (and wisely) voted down member ship in the European Union despite the furious efforts of their politicians. Theory is fine and all, but it is no substitute for hard data and the facts demonstrate that the "mob rule" of referendums in both the USA and abroad works far better than leaving fiscal matters in the hands of a corrupt cabal of long-term office holders.

It should be interesting to see how the American Left, despite its eternal championing of "democracy", will contort itself into pretzels explaining why it won't support this proposed empowering of the will of the People, if Jacob's idea proves to have traction.

Comments ()

Mailvox: a false slam on libertarians

tz wrote:

To the point that when nuremburg.org was fined over 100 million dollars for drawing an X through a dead abortionist, the LP saw not threat to free speech, no problem with web censorship, no problem with thought crime, nor any problem with excessive fines.

and

I note no one has challenged me on their tacit acceptance of the nuremburg.org decision though it was a greater threat to liberty than their contemporary alarmist press releases about bills to curb kiddie porn that would likely not pass or die in committee. If some LP official can explain to me why they were swallowing this particular camel while straining at gnats (And I did write and ask at the time) I would reconsider my position.

I hadn't bothered earlier since it was such an absurd point, but since you bring it up again, I will certainly challenge you on the Libertarian Party's "tacit acceptance" of the Nuremberg Files case. There was never any acceptance, tacit or otherwise, and you have presented absolutely no evidence to suggest there was. First, several leading libertarians wrote critically of the Oregon court decision, both Julian Sanchez, a regular Reason magazine contributor, and Eugene Volokh, the UCLA professor of law and lead blogger at the Volokh Conspiracy.

Second, you'll note that the alarmist press releases refer to legislative matters. Political parties pay far more attention to prospective bills than they do to court cases, since they can influence the former but have no ability to influence the latter. There are a plethora of important court cases, even at the Supreme Court level, on which the Libertarian Party has failed to issue a press release, many of which were far more well-known than Planned Parenthood's civil suit, which in any case was not even directly relevant to the principle of government censorship of free speech. Are you seriously going to attempt to argue that the LP tacitly accepts the verdicts in all of these other court cases too? And has the Libertarian Party ever issued a press release on a civil damages suit?

Since you have presented no grounds for indicating that the Libertarian Party favored, supported or otherwise accepted the Oregon decision or its subsequent upholding on appeal, I suggest that you either find some evidence or reconsider your position.

Comments ()

Mailvox: Constitution or Libertarian

WC seeks information on the two third parties:

I've followed your columns and blogs for roughly the past 6 months; I've enjoyed them and learned so very much. I've recently made the decision to "abandon" the Republican Party and go 3rd party. One question, though, as I've seen you mention the CP and Mr. Peroutka, but mention your support by Badnarik and the Libertarian Party. Now Peroutka is on record against both of them, while Badnarik is both pro-abortion and in favor of any kind of "marriage" (I'm going from the candidate interviews on the Fox Newswebsite). Can you elaborate on the differences between the two candidates/parties and why you're going with Badnarik over Peroutka?

Sure, but first let me correct your statement about Michael Badnarik. He is pro-life and believes that it is properly a state issue, as one should keep in mind is the case with most murder laws. As for marriage, I do not believe that marriage is properly a concern of the Federal or even state government, and I don't believe that a Defense of Marriage Amendment will serve any purpose, seeing how the First and Second Amendments are ignored with regularity. The institution of marriage survived centuries without assistance from the government; it is only in the last 150 years, since governments began tracking it and granting "licenses" that marriage has been in decline.

While I support both third parties in preference to the Democrats and Republicans, the main reason I am a Libertarian instead of a Constitutionalist is that I prefer the Libertarian's first principle approach as opposed to the deified document approach of the Constitution Party. I believe that in the long run, a party dedicated to first principles is more likely to succeed and be able to change appropriately to meet the challenges created by new issues.

Secondly, the Libertarian Party is much more strongly opposed to the exercise and reach of government power, as demonstrated by the Constitution Party's support for the War on Drugs. The War on Drugs, like the War on Poverty and the War on Terror, is more an effective vehicle for the expansion of central state power than it is a useful weapon against that for which it purports to exist. Since I believe that it is absolutely vital to keep central state power in check - if I had a single issue, that would be it - the Libertarian Party is clearly the appropriate party for me.

Comments ()

Empty Doorway, empty mind

Empty Doorway blogs about a post:

For those of us who firmly believe that the direct influence of religion in politics is antithetical to genuine democracy, Bush's highly public Christian invocations, the presence of religious advisers in his administration whose sole purpose is to ensure that U.S. policy conforms to Christian doctrine (in particular, apocolyptic prophecies related to the nation of Israel), and his direct appeals to Catholic, and now Protestant, clergy to aid him in his bid for reelection, are extremely worrisome. Yet this is apparently not enough for some on the Religious Right, who feel that Bush has done too little, too late, to court their vote. Of course, most of them will still vote for Bush, but that's not the point. Bush hasn't done what they apparently thought he would, or at least should do: solidify conservative Christianity's central role in forming national policy.

What does this moron believe democracy is? Apparently the 5.3 percent of the population that is Southern Baptist are supposed to keep their mouths shut and not participate in the process, along with all the Catholics, Baptists, Methodists and assorted non-denominational Evangelical Christians. Even if he is using the term "genuine democracy" incorrectly to refer to the Constitutional American republic, it's a weird argument to insist that the political system formed by Christian men to respect God-given rights should be sterilized of all religion.

He wants genuine democracy? So be it. The only reason that the insignificant secularist minority has any power at all is that it has been successful in using its sympathizers in the courts to use federal power to suppress the will of the majority. Fiat democrasia! Of course, if the Athenian model is any example, we'll also be voting to execute momentarily unpopular generals, but that's a known hazard of rule by mob.

What is truly frightening is not the sentiment expressed in such passages (especially the second one), but that groups whose members share these pernicious opinions have such a strong voice. They know how to make themselves heard, despite composing a relatively small minority of the U.S. population. They have mastered the technique of using appeals to emotion through faith and fear, to manipulate politicians and larger segments of the population into adopting their stances. Yet, it's not enough for them that our president's ear is ever open to their hateful nonsense, or that in decision-making, they are always in his mind. Scary stuff.

The Empty Mind is unsurprisingly more than a little weak on his math. The reason the Christian voices are so well-heard is that the Christian community is so large, a much larger "minority" than blacks, Jews or homosexuals. That's why the Left, for all its mantra of "democracy, democracy", fears the Religious Right and needs combat it through the courts instead of the ballot box. The secular Left is so unpopular and so numerically insignificant that it can't even win in the strictly limited democracy of the American political system and so is forced to have its "democracy" at a third remove, by unelected judges. I'd like to hear what this guy's definition of "genuine democracy" is, because as is clearly the case here, the use of the adjective necessitates a modification of the following noun. I suspect that in his usage, "democracy" has little to do with how historians and dictionaries have defined the term for centuries.

I'd be scared too, if I looked at the world with so little understanding of what was happening around me. And now there's more from the Vacuous One:

If you read his comments, keep in mind that I never implied Christians shouldn't vote based on their faith. Rather, I stated that religion should not have a direct influence on policy. Recognizing the difference is apparently beyond the author's mental grasp. I also recommend that someone buy him a dictionary, so that he can see that "constitutional republic" is a form of democracy. Naturally, I did not mean a "pure democracy," in which each person has one vote on every policy decision.

I'm curious to know how, in a democracy of any sort, religion can fail to have a direct influence on policy if 20 percent (Empty's estimate) of the population votes based on their faith? It's also amusing that he should think I need a dictionary, as he specifically used the term "genuine democracy" which clearly implies some form of distinction from our constitutional republican form of limited democracy. "Genuine" is not to be mistaken for "pure", okay.... And Mr. Webster says: "\Gen"u*ine\, a. [L. genuinus, fr. genere, gignere, to beget, in pass., to be born: cf. F. g['e]nuine. See Gender.] Belonging to, or proceeding from, the original stock; native; hence, not counterfeit, spurious, false, or adulterated; authentic; real; natural; true; pure; as, a genuine text; a genuine production; genuine materials.. I'm the one who needs the dictionary? Look, it's hardly my fault that he can't write with precision.

In addition, the author would surely benefit if someone explained the difference between Christian (general) and conservative Christian or Religious Right, the latter being a fairly small group that, if we use abortion as a rough measure (the author states that outlawing abortion would appeal to this group), comprises less than 20% of the population (we'd also have to subtract most Catholics who are strictly "pro-life" from that number for it to be accurate). At least the author demonstrates the un-Christian-like anger and condescension that characterizes his minority.

I have no conception of the difference between the broader Christian populace and the Religious Right? Oh, so that's what Ralph Reed was trying to explain to me when we were talking twelve years ago - before I was a Christian, by the way! Apparently in Empty's mind, this passes for a difficult concept. And if 20 percent is "fairly small" I wonder why we spend any attention whatsoever to those insignificant black, Jewish and homosexual minorities, which taken in their totality barely amount to 15 percent. I'm not in the least bit angry, but how can I help but condescend to someone who is this ill-equipped to reason or debate?

Comments ()

The truth is out there

Nate posts on TWA 800:

0
The number of ships or subs the Navy claimed were within 185 miles of the disaster.

4
The number of Navy ships or subs the FBI, in its final report, admitted were in "the immediate vicinity" of the disaster.

7
The number of days it allegedly took the Navy to find the black boxes in 130 feet of calm water off the Hamptons.

7
The number of hours it actually took the Navy to find the black boxes of a crashed Turkish airplane in 7,200 feet of water earlier in that year off the Dominican Republic.

4
The number of seconds missing at the end of both the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder.

3
The number of satellites in position to record the disaster.

3
The number of satellites reportedly broken at that very moment.

Since I'm well-versed in history and have learned how often the "official" story is a complete pack of lies, I usually appreciate hearing the government's explanation for an incident, as that eliminates one possibility right there. Interesting, too, that both John Kerry and George Stephanopolous have referred to the "bombing" of TWA 800. Nate's got more listed; check it out.

Comments ()

Mailvox: a first-generation Libertarian

AG writes:

I went over to visit my dad and grandmother last night, because she's in town for a few days and we haven't seen her in a while. Anyway, the two of them are big Republicans, and raised me that way as well. So, of course we got to talking about politics and the "war on terror" and so forth. After complaining about how the media aren't covering the goings on in Iraq very well, such that anything good for Bush is not shown, and anything bad for Bush is shown, I dropped the bombshell: I'm not voting for Bush, I'm voting for Badnarik.

Immediate reaction: well, if you want to throw your vote away, go ahead. Why are you not voting for Bush? Do you want to see Kerry elected?

1. If you want to throw your vote away, go ahead

Thank you. The fundamental point of even limited democracy is that every individual can choose to vote as he or she pleases.

2. Why are you not voting for Bush?

Because after 3.5 years of his presidency, I have learned that I do not support his policies. His policies bear more resemblance to those of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt than Ronald Reagan. I wouldn't vote for them either.

3. Do you want to see Kerry elected?

No, otherwise I would vote for him. However, I don't want to see Bush elected either. Since I don't support either one of them, I'm voting for neither.

I suspect that most Republicans who've never considered a third-party don't realize how similar Bush and Kerry are, as one cannot see this clearly until one takes into account the massive differences between Bush and Badnarik and Bush and Peroutka. The fact that Badnarik and Peroutka appear so similar only highlights this vast gulf that separates both Bush and Kerry from genuinely Constitutional government.

If you support either Bush or Kerry, you do not support the U.S. Constitution. It's that simple, and it makes no difference if we drive towards the cliff of Empire at 80 MPH or 65. (I used to say 55, but Bush has certainly stepped on the gas.) What I'm interested in hearing from pro-administration Republicans is how they believe supporting someone who is actively building larger government is going to lead to smaller government.

The evidence would seem to suggest that they don't support smaller government or constitional govenment at all. Turning things around will not be easy and in fact may not be possible. But surely it's not hard to understand that one will never turn around when one has no desire to do so.

Comments ()

Mailvox: self-righteous libertarians

Laurie writes:

No Child Left Behind Act-Complete failure and will continue to be until there is more funding. The fact is, Bush is a damn idiot and the only way this world is going to change is if each person keeps voting libertarian.

That's three silly statements in a row. 1. No Child Left Behind will continue to be a failure even if spending is increased 10x. See the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs or the very well-funded public school system for examples. 2. Bush is many things, but he is not an idiot. He has a higher IQ than most of the people who enjoy calling him an idiot. And I am manifestly not a fan of the man. 3. The world is going to change regardless of how people vote. How it will change remains a mystery, but change it certainly will and I suspect it will change faster and more dramatically than most people would believe possible.

And I have been doing sort of an experiment the past few months that might seem kind of.... immoral. I've been pretending to be a practicing Christian and what I've learned., is that they seem to be the most brainwashed people in the entire earth, on the opposite end of the spectrum of libertarians. It makes me sad to see so many young people throwing themselves into something just because most of them don't know any better. You tell them that something is in the bible, you could tell them ANYTHING is in the bible, because you can grasp anything in there in any concept just because there is so much random stuff, and tell them it means something... you could make them view anything. Do people think that Christianity will ever become a minority? Just asking.

Libertarianism would not exist were it not for Christianity. The foundational concepts of individual freedom, personal responsibility and human rights can all be traced directly to Biblical Christianity. There is no inherent contradiction between Christianity and libertarianism, indeed, the God of the Bible would appear to be more than a bit of a libertarian in a) promising to set people free, b) allowing individuals to suffer the consequences of their actions, and c) refusing to use His power to force people to obey Him.

Will Christianity ever become a minority? It has always been a minority in what, after all, is a fallen world ruled by an evil being.

Comments ()

The short-sighted secularist

I've been thinking about this today, as to why the godless secularists in our midst continually refer to the Religious Right as some sort of imminent danger when a) a large percentage of the Religious Right is contemptuous of politics; and b) the historical Religious Right showed little inclination to impose its beliefs on anyone.

The key to their thinking can be found in their common comparison of the Christian Right to the Taliban and other Islamic theocracies. There is no question that these Church-State marriages are oppressive, anti-liberty and more than willing to commit violence against the insufficiently obedient citizen. The flaw in the secularist thinking is to place the blame for this on the Church half of the equation, instead of the State.

Consider, if you will, those nations which are/were fervently secular, but where the State wielded the same degree of power as the aforementioned theocracies. Every Socialist country, from Albania to Zimbabwe, has seen more oppression, less liberty and more violence against the people than in even the worst theocratic state with the possible exception of the Sudan. Even if one leaves aside the obvious differences between Christian and Islamic culture, it is clear that it is placing too much power in the hands of the State that is the heart of the problem, not the religion professed by those in whose hands that power is placed.

Christianity, from the beginning, found itself in fundamental opposition to the State. The first Christians were persecuted for their unwillingness to bow before Caesar while the American revolutionaries fought under the slogan "No king but King Jesus." Compromise with the State has always weakened Christianity, as the history of the Papal States and the Anglican Church clearly shows.

Secularists who turn to the State to protect themselves from Christian cultural domination are playing a fool's game similar to that played by Cambodian intellectuals in the early 1970's, who found themselves being executed for the crime of being able to read. Iormungandr is circular; the dialectic always turns around to devour those who give it birth.

Comments ()

Faith of the Founding Fathers

I'm thoroughly sick of the historical revisionism of the secular separationists. Not only is their position manifestly absurd in light of the congressional prayers, inscriptions on the various Federal buildings and the wording of many historical speeches and documents, but they've twisted the concept of "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" wherein "Congress" means "anyone" and "make no law...." means "shall neither speak nor write any word in public relating positively in any way to the Christian faith."

Among their cornucopia of errors, they insist that the Founding Fathers were mostly Deist. That's true, if you cherry-pick from amidst the most famous names and ignore all those men who signed the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and were heavily involved in the Revolution from the start. The known Unitarian/Deists were: Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. The known Christians were: George Washington, Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Patrick Henry, George Mason, Governor Morris and John Jay. And Deist is not atheist anyhow, as the Paris debates between Thomas Paine and French atheists should suffice to show.

In fact, there were more Christian Bible translators signing the Declaration of Independence than there were Deists. Charles Thompson translated the Greek Septuagint into English, Dr. Benjamin Rush founded the first Bible Society and Francis Hopkinson put together the first American hymnbook. The religious affiliation of the Signers was as follows: 34 Anglicans, 13 Congregationalists, 6 Presbyterians, 1 Baptist, 1 Roman Catholic, and 1 Quaker.

Now, the mere fact of church membership is not certain proof of an individual's Christian faith, but as no one but God can judge the heart, it is the only reasonable method of determination available to us. One thing that is absolutely certain, however, is that none of them were godless secularists pledged to moral relativism. On this subject, as always, the Left resorts to the perversion of language in order to attempt to build a weak case from nothing. It is amusing that they should uphold the Deists while simultaneously attempting to strike out all references to the Deity.

I am a Christian and a libertarian. I, too, do not wish to see the State create a Church, but not because I care what it would do to the godless. (Nothing, most likely, considering the English example.) Instead, I fear what has happened in England, where the State has corrupted the Anglican church and sucked nearly all the Christianity out of it. If the Church is to thrive, it must never allow itself to be polluted by compromise with the State. But really, in the long term, the entire debate is almost irrelevant. When the American Republic is as dead and dimly remembered as its Roman predecessor, the Christian faith will still be strong, as implacable, inexorable and ineradicable as ever.

Comments ()

None can stop the Dark from rising

The Original Cyberpunk writes in alarm:

I have some shocking news about the upcoming and final Star Wars movie. Annikin Skywalker does *not* turn to the dark side! Rather, he's *dragged* over to the dark side against his will by the evil, scheming, and power-mad Padme Amidala! Here's the proof! My God, I just realized: maybe Luke and Leia's mother didn't die, and maybe the Emperor is not Senator Palpatine. Maybe Luke's mother *BECOMES THE EMPEROR!*

That certainly would be a more interesting plot angle that what Lucas has got going now...

I've said it before and I will say it again. If you haven't read the OC's Headcrash, you are seriously missing out.

Comments ()

It's a little late, George

President Bush, seeking to mobilize religious conservatives for his reelection campaign, has asked church-going volunteers to turn over church membership directories, campaign officials said on Thursday. In a move sharply criticized both by religious leaders and civil libertarians, the Bush-Cheney campaign has issued a guide listing about two-dozen "duties" and a series of deadlines for organizing support among conservative church congregations.

A copy of the guide obtained by Reuters directs religious volunteers to send church directories to state campaign committees, identify new churches that can be organized by the Bush campaign and talk to clergy about holding voter registration drives. The document, distributed to campaign coordinators across the country earlier this year, also recommends that volunteers distribute voter guides in church and use Sunday service programs for get-out-the-vote drives.

"We expect this election to be potentially as close as 2000, so every vote counts and it's important to reach out to every single supporter of President Bush," campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel said.

If the president had signed an executive order banning abortion, refused to sign the McCain-Feingold act gutting the First Amendment, declined to actively campaign for the liberal Republican who blocked Robert Bork from the Supreme Court, avoided publicly embracing Islam and openly declared his opposition to the fictional equation of any public mention of anything even remotely Christian with the written statement that "Congress shall make no law....", he might have a shot with the Religious Right. But he's done nothing except make the occasional pious statement. Bill Clinton did as much.

Perhaps, too, he should have refrained from criticizing Americans for speaking "in an ill-informed and insulting manner about the Muslim faith." This, after the beheadings of Nick Berg and Paul Johnson. I can't even think of a response to that that is either Christian or printable, so I shall say nothing except to say that I am very pleased to be voting for Michael Badnarik this fall.

I had thought Karl Rove was supposed to be some sort of political genius, instead, the president's campaign lurches randomly about, devoid of principle and pinning its hopes on the self-destruction of its opposition. The president is lucky he's running against a candidate as incompetent as John Kerry, because Bill Clinton would be wiping up the floor with him by now. When Massachusetts created homogamy, I wrongly assumed that Karl Rove and company would be all over the Democrats for pushing the homosexual agenda, but apparently they'd rather be PC than win. You know Lee Atwater would have created an ad showing John Kerry in a dress getting married to Ted Kennedy and blown Kerry out of the water by August.

Comments ()