Putting out fires preemptively

Robert Novak writes: George W. Bush's campaign planners intend to shorten debate on the party platform at the Republican National Convention in New York in order to limit conservative opposition to the president's policies. In the past, platform committee members have arrived in the convention city early Sunday the week before the GOP convention begins. This time, however, several delegates have been alerted that there is no need to get to New York before Monday, with platform meetings not scheduled to begin until Tuesday. That would leave only two and one-half days of platform committee sessions during which conservatives could push their positions on prescription drug subsidies, education and immigration.

That's an interestingly open admission of the president's anti-conservativism. Perhaps one of these days conservatives will wake up and realize that he has more in common with John Kerry than he has with them. You'd think the fact that his operatives are actively planning and working against them would serve as some sort of notice that he is not on their side and never was.

The wrinkled whores

The entire S&P price action in the Futures is being controlled by one counter party. All the guys strongly hate them: their CME clearing number is 990N and they clear through Gelber trading. That one account is solely responsible for the current level of the S&P.

They are the ones that are throwing the S&P up overnight. Then they are the ones that are sitting on the bid all day long, supporting the market action. The S&P pits have been decimated, absolutely ruined. There is no volatility, so all the traders have left. Now the hot pit is the Eurodollar pit. Go figure, that used to be like watching paint dry. All the traders I have talked to view the market as being rigged. They keep waiting for the price action to break loose, but it never does.

They are stunned by the lack of volatility. And furious. Time after time after time 990 just sits there on the bid. Don't they ever go away. They just absorb the entire market and then push the price wherever they want it to go. "Gee, I wonder who that counter party is." They are all terrified of shorting, because every time they do, they get drilled. I thought it was just my systems that weren't working that well, but they are far more dispirited than I. Intervention at its finest, your tax dollars at work, providing the ultimate tax to us all.

We have watched 2000 contract market orders on the Bid at key down levels of - 50 and - 100 on those rare days when 990N decides the program trading will revert to a well-defined pattern of "allowable" retracements. The Mini's are being rigged in order to provide "support" for swollen price levels. They have to be for now, as without the daily rigging, "Price" would revert to its inherent "Value", a disturbing proposition to those benefiting from the financial economy's adolescent denials.

Counterparties provide an important function in any exchange, liquidity. Given the incessant "intervention" by 990N, there is very little liquidity beneath these markets to provide real support. I am actually writing you to alert you to this complete market manipulation and to see if you had any pull to get the word out to different traders and the media. I am one of the biggest S&P traders in the world as far as volume per day in that I average over 40,000 round turns per day on the screen in the e-mini. I tell you this because that is how I know one house is completely manipulating the market everyday because of all the trades I do with this guy. I know it sounds hard to believe that one person can control a world market but trust me: this is occurring. He works for the firm Gelber, which is house 990.

This is the basic premise for his game. He waits until the market is relatively slow, around 9:30 to 10:00 everyday, usually when the "paper trade" starts to subside then he begins a theme, mostly always long and he begins to buy. He is always looking for confirmation of his theme with what other people are doing. When the market stops trading in his direction he then drops in a offer of 300 to 700 which he sees if anyone is interested in buying it. If there is no interest he then buys the order from himself, with the order actually trading. He does this enough times until he attracts other buyers which then hits price points and the market runs violently in his direction.

I am sure I do not have to tell you that this is completely illegal to do. He started doing this with 300 lots back in November, now he has made so much money doing it that he is up to 2000 lots. He is completely in control of the market (illegally) the majority of the time. My firm and I have contacted the Merc on three different occasions with video proof that I recorded of my trading. It shows blatantly this guy crossing his orders thousands of times a day. The first person we talked to in compliance admitted that he saw something there when they reviewed the video of the trades I taped of him. He was mysteriously fired the next day.

We then came up with more examples for them to review and in the beginning they claimed he wasn't doing it. We called them a third time, this time talking to the head of compliance and he finally admitted that they had the guy under investigation because they saw something, but in the meantime he is still allowed to trade and make millions until their "investigation" is concluded.

They obviously love the volume the guy is putting up and how it makes the emini S&P look from a standpoint of a liquid market. But if the public had knowledge of what this guy was doing I don't think they would be too impressed with the liquidity. There is obviously some kind of cover-up. Do any of the pit traders you know have knowledge this is happening? And do you have any advice on how I can anonymously get the word out with what this guy is doing? I know you are not a true tick by tick "scalper," but this is getting to the point where it is starting to effect everyone in the marketplace.

I have no way of knowing if this is true or not, but both the VIX as well as Adam Hamilton's analysis demonstrate that volatility has been at a historically low level for an incredibly long period of time, which is anecdotal support for what this trader is asserting. I have no doubt the markets are manipulated - they are regulated, after all, which is nothing but open manipulation, and one has to presume that the Working Group of Financial Markets was created for a reason.

You might think that we have a free market in this country, but a few minutes reflection about the myriad of regulatory agencies and their actions will soon convince you otherwise.

On the radio

I'll be making my monthly appearance on the Northern Alliance radio show on the Patriot 1280 AM at 2 PM central today - some of the gentlemen are out and about so it looks as if we'll be postponing our cage match showdown on the Iraqi occupation until next month - but in the meantime we'll probably be discussing the implications of Iraq on the president's bid for a second term, Air America's financial shenanigans and how the soccer gods paid back France for its perfidy in Iraq and at the United Nations.

In somewhat related news, the Fraters Libertas are lamenting the fact that their favorite 20-something lesbian blogger turned out to be a 30-something man. This is news? I always thought the first rule of intersexual relations and the Internet is this: if a girl is on the Internet and you have no direct evidence of her sex, she's a guy.

By the way, no Northern Alliance web streaming yet, but I'm told there will be next month.

A broken clock

Most Americans now say that sending U.S. troops to Iraq was a mistake, a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll finds. For the first time, a majority also says that the war there has made the nation less safe from terrorism. The survey taken Monday through Wednesday shows a turnaround in views toward the war in less than a month. Continued violence in Iraq and questions about the war's justification apparently are eroding support even as the U.S. moves to turn over sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government next week.

It is the first time since Vietnam that a majority of Americans has called a major deployment of U.S. forces a mistake. When the war in Iraq began last year, the public by three-to-one said sending troops wasn't a mistake. Just three weeks ago, 58% still held that view. Now, 54% say it was a mistake.

I'm not the least bit surprised. The Iraqi War has been over for some time now and the return of the troops is long overdue. Military force should be used wisely, judiciously and only for the purposes for which they are created. The armed forces went in, took out Hussein, captured him and so accomplished their mission. At that point they should have either been given a new military mission or brought home. Nation-building is a foolish and doomed enterprise in which we should never have engaged. The administration's decision to engage in it will have the net effect of severely weakening the war on method and is unlikely to help the coming war against the jihad.

Umberto Eco on the end of democracy

Big Chilly once told me that he greatly respected how I often use my public platform for mysterious and seemingly nonsensical purposes. In that light, it gives me great pleasure to present more of that for which no one is asking, a translation of an article by Umberto Eco which appeared on June 25th in L'espresso: Apparire piu come essere.  

To appear more than to be

Sixty-four years before Christ, Marcus Tullius Cicero, already a celebrated orator but the epitome of a New Man, estranged from the nobility, decided to declare himself a candidate for Consul. His brother, Quintus Tullius, wrote for him a manual in which he was instructed how to make an impression. In the front of the current Italian edition, (Manuele del candidato – Istruzioni per vincere le elezioni, editore Manni, 8 euros), are comments by Luca Canali, in which he lucidly describes the histoical circumstances and the personalities of that campaign. Furio Colombo writes the introduction, with a reflective essay on the First Republic.

In fact, there are many similarities between our Second Republic and this Roman Republic, in the virtues, (very small), as well as the defects. The example of Rome, over the course of more than two millenia, has continued to hold much influence on many successive visions of the State. As Colombo records, the antique model of the Roman Republic inspired the authors of the Federalist Papers, which delineated the fundamental lines of the American Constitution. They saw in Rome, more than in Athens, the example of what was truly a democracy of the people. In their pragmatic realism, the neocons around Bush were inspired by the image of imperial Rome and many of their actual political discussions gave recourse to the idea of an empire, that of a “Pax Americana” which makes explicit reference to the ideology of the “Pax Romana”.

I must note that the image of electoral competition that emerges in the 20 pages of Quintus is of extremely small virtue compared to that which had inspired the federalists of the 18th century. Quintus does not seem to even consider the possibility of a political man who boldly confronts the electorate in the face of dissent with a courageous project, with the hope of conquering the voters on the powerful strength of a utopian idea. As Canali also notes, totally absent from these pages is any notion of debating ideas; instead, there is recommendation to never expose oneself on any political issue, so as to avoid making enemies. The candidate envisioned by Quintus must only be sure to appear fascinating, doing favors and other self-promotion, never saying no to anyone but leaving everyone with the impression he will do what they want. The memory of the electorate is short, and before long they will forget old promises....

At the end of the letter we ask: but is democracy truly only this, a form of conquering the public favor that is founded on nothing but appearances and a strategy of deceit? It is certainly so, and it cannot be differently if this system, (which, as Churchill said, is imperfect, but is less imperfect than all the others), allows one to arrive at power only through consensus and not through force and violence. But we must not forget that these instructions for a political campaign were written at moment when Roman democracy was already in crisis.

It was not long after when Caesar definitively took power with the assistance of his legions, and with his life Marcus Tullius paid the passage from a regime founded on consensus to a regime founded on the fist of the State. But one cannot avoid the thought that Roman democracy had begun to die when its politicians understood that they no longer had to be serious about their policies but had only to engineer the obtaining of the sympathies of those we might well call television viewers.

This demonstrates that there is truly nothing new under the sun. In our modern arrogance, we believe that we are different, that our pseudo-democracy, (as false in every way to the democratic ideal as was its Roman predecessor), is a light illuminating all mankind. Quintus Tullius might easily have been Dick Morris or Karl Rove, advising hollow-suited frauds such as Bill Clinton and George Bush.

The laws of history are not as easily discerned as the laws of physics, but they are every bit as inexorable. Eco gives us one more reason to believe that we are living in the last days of the American Republic.

Is it the blonde or the liberal?

Now, I actually agree with the basic position Blondesense is attempting to articulate here. But a particular paragraph leaped out at me, as I happened to have translated Benito Mussolini's Manifesto of the Fascist Struggle only an hour before.

Well, hell no, Mr. Smith. It's still up to the parental units to decide what their kids watch and if it's questionable, don't bring the stuff into the house or turn on the TV if they are not sure if a program is appropriate. If the government wants to do something about the media, how about rolling back all the fascist deregulation of the media and allow independent companies to own some of it thus allowing democracy to flourish, duh.

Fascist deregulation. A fascinating phrase! Not only were the Fascists not exactly known for deregulating things, but to the contrary they demanded regulation - and often outright nationalization - of almost everything in Italy. In addition to demanding a National Council of experts from a variety of fields and creating a General Commission with cabinet-level power, they sought a national policy of furthering Italian culture, a sort of National Endowment for the Arts combined with the FCC and the US Olympic Committee. Mussolini famously declared: "Tutto nello Stato... nulla contro lo Stato." Everything in the State, nothing against the State. And by "the State" he meant the government.

Now, it certainly would be desirable for more independent companies to own elements of the media. And what prevents this? Primarily government ownership and regulation of the airwaves, as well as the many government restrictions relating to investment and the management of capital. The only answer is more deregulation, not less, still less the government seizure and control advocated by the historical Fascists and their modern descendants. National Public Radio is the epitome of a modern facist institution; the giant media corporations are only quasi-fascist by comparison, their Third Way corporatism notwithstanding.

Finally, democracy is not freedom and the two should never be confused. How is a more independent media likely to bring about the near-term demolition of the tri-partite structure of government and the replacement of the constitutional republic with a national referendum-driven system? Unless, of course, by democracy you mean a system of proportionate representation designed expressly to limit democracy, which we already have, in which case it has presumably already been flourishing for, lo, these past 215 years.

As the argument finally stumbles towards its corrrect conclusion that the government has no responsibility to ensure that all visual entertainment is child-friendly, the fact that the resident blonde would never make such asinine and ignorant statements forces me to conclude this is simply another case of attempted thinking while liberal.

A winner for the Gipper

Grant Wahl writes on CNN/SI: Strange but true: Portuguese star Cristiano Ronaldo was named for Ronald Reagan, a favorite of his parents. Wonder what the Gipper would think?

If the Gipper saw him play, he'd love it. I'd rather have C. Ronaldo on my team than his more famous counterpart. He was the most dangerous player on the Portuguese side yesterday, and if Ashley Cole hadn't a) showed incredible stamina and b) played an excellent game, he probably would have scored at least once. The entire game was a battle between the two players but you could tell what tracking Ronaldo was doing taking out of Ashley, as he stopped making his trademark runs up the left side before the end of the first half.

To paraphrase Space Bunny on Ronaldo, "doesn't that kid ever get tired?" Even at the end of the game, he looked ready to play another 90 minutes. I just wish he didn't play for bloody United.

Confused quasi-conservatives

Cliff Kincaid writes of Pat Buchanan: It was shocking news that Patrick J. Buchanan, Ronald Reagan's communications director, is getting $500,000 to write a Bush-bashing book to be titled, Where the Right Went Wrong.... there are disturbing indications that Buchanan, who left the Republican Party in 2000, may even back Ralph Nader for president. Buchanan's American Conservative Magazine featured a front-page article, "Ralph Nader: Conservatively Speaking. The long-time progressive makes a pitch for the disenfranchised Right"....

Yet Buchanan's magazine sounds increasingly like a left-wing publication with its constant talk of America's "empire" around the world. This is a variation of the old Soviet line that the U.S. wants to dominate and control the world. It's disconcerting to see conservatives who played key roles in fighting communism using such noxious terminology.

First, Pat Buchanan is never going to endorse Ralph Nader, who is a neosocialist egomaniac. However, there is a real point of connection between a leftist like Nader, true conservative like Buchanan and a libertarian such as myself. All three of us are diametrically opposed to the sacrifice of national sovereignty embraced by the Democratic Party and the dominant Bush-worshipping faction of the Republican Party.

What Kincaid and many other economically-illiterate Republicans fail to understand is that America does have an empire. It is a shadow empire, to be sure, but it weighs more heavily and is felt more strongly than the Roman or British empires ever were in their dominions. Ironically, the empire of the Imperial Dollar has never been more fragile or more in danger of collapsing than today, and with its inevitable collapse will come the reduction of America's stature on the world stage.

Nader's solutions are likely to prove disastrous than helpful, but unlike Bush and Kerry, he is neither invested in the present system of interlocking globalist institutions nor interested in sacrificing American interests to them. Pat Buchanan realizes this, and in the very fact of the two distinctly different men finding common ground, demonstrates how the most deadly danger to the long-term existence of America lies within.

Mbeki knows best

There is a bitter joke in South Africa: what is the difference between Thabo Mbeki and Robert Mugabe? About ten years. As Mugabe drives Zimbabwe ever deeper into socialist nightmare by murdering the nation's only productive class and confiscating their property in order to turn it over to feckless squatters, Mbeki gives South Africans clear warning of his long-term intentions to transform that country into yet another Left-wing African hellhole.

"In this climate taxation is depicted as the confiscation of what is properly our own -- an intolerable burden that should be reduced. The social, the collective and the public realm are portrayed as the enemies of prosperity and individual autonomy... and worse are opposed to the moral basis of society grounded as it should be in the absolute responsibility of individuals to shoulder their burdens and exercise their rights alone."

He [Mbeki] noted that [UK columnist Will] Hutton argues that Western democracies had been characterised by "one broad family of ideas that might be called Left -- a belief in the social, reduction in inequality, the provision of public services, the principle that workers should be treated as assets rather than commodities, regulation of enterprise, rehabilitation of criminals, tolerance and respect for minorities -- and another broad family of ideas that might be called Right: An honouring of our inherited institutional fabric, a respect for order, a belief that private property rights and profit are essential to the operation of the market economy, a suspicion of worker rights, faith in the remedial value of punitive justice and distrust of the new."

Mbeki emphasised that there could "be no doubt about where we stand" with regard to this "great divide". It is to pursue the goals contained in what Hutton called ideas "that might be called" Left.

At least Mbeki, unlike the majority of American Democrats who should more properly be termed Democratic Socialists, understands what it is he is rejecting in turning his back on law, order, private property, and age-old institutions. He is the more intelligent form of political evil, whereas the American "liberal" is, by comparison, evil's idiot cousin, always deluding himself that he is honoring the past by defecating on the present and "fighting" to destroy the future.

Why I hate referees, redux

I have long loathed referees. From my childhood, when a zebra cost the Vikings one of their best chances to win a Super Bowl in handing the Dallas Cowboys a victory by allowing not one, but two blatant push-offs by Drew Pearson. Almost thirty years later, I don't think there's a Viking fan who regrets the bottle with which somebody clocked the ref responsible.

Basketball refs are the absolute bottom, as they haven't made a correct travelling call in decades and hardcore NBA fans like the Sports Guy openly joke about the corruption of David Stern's personal referee, Dick Bavetta. Need to get the Knicks or Lakers into the next round? Don't bet against them if Bavetta is on the floor.

Soccer refs run the gamut, from Collino to the pink-clad Brazilian league prancer who has to be seen to be believed. But all of them, from the world-class FIFA level on down to the local high school have a terrible, terrible habit that probably reduces global scoring at least 5 percent. If the ball is loose in the goalie's six-yard box and the referee can't see what is going on, he will always blow the whistle and call a phantom foul on the attacking team.

That's precisely what happened to England this afternoon, as they scored in the 90th minute to go up 2-1 just before the final whistle against Portugal. They hadn't played well and Sven showed his Italian roots by trying to go into a defensive shell for 70 minutes after Wayne Rooney got hurt, but they did score. Except, according to the referee, who was some 20 yards away from the action and in no position to see, John Terry committed a foul on the Portugese keeper as Sol Campbell was heading the ball in.

It was a horrible, horrible call and I wouldn't have blamed Sven if he'd pulled his squad off the field in protest. The linesman, who was standing right there, signaled goal, but was overruled by the idiot referee. One thing soccer refs should learn from basketball refs is to let play go on in the last minute of the game, especially when they can't even see what is happening!

A lot of fans hate penalties, but I quite like them. It's always interesting to see who chokes under pressure. For all that he's possessed of the golden foot, Beckham shouldn't ever be allowed to take penalties as they are primarily about psychology, not skill. He missed, unsurprisingly, as did Rui Costa - another midfielder, for some reason highly skilled midfielders are quite often bad at taking penalties - and then, the almost completely useless Vassell managed to take a lousy one that put England out.

Portugal was the better team once Rooney went out, but it's ridiculous that a stupid Swiss ref should be responsible for knocking England out of the tournament. At this point only the Swedes look like they can play with France, although you can never rule out the headcases from Holland, who can look awful against a weak team and great against a strong one.

A possibly stupid question

I'm working on creating some web forms. I understand the HTML tags, what I'm not sure about is where to call the executable action. Is this something that has to be done by the hosting server, or is it more like Java where you just put out the call and it simply runs? The examples I've seen tend to suggest the latter, but I need to understand this better before I can move on.

Back in the saddle again

From the Sun: FORMER President Bill Clinton is having a passionate affair with a wealthy divorcee behind wife Hillary’s back, a US magazine claims. The allegation comes in the wake of the publication of Mr Clinton’s autobiography My Life, in which he talks about his infamous fling with Monica Lewinsky.

But the National Enquirer alleges that Mr Clinton, 57, has been seeing a beautiful blonde for more than a year at a hideaway in Westchester County, New York. The magazine does not name the woman, but says she has several young children and got millions in a divorce settlement a few years ago. She is allegedly the daughter of a wealthy Clinton supporter.

An insider tells the Enquirer: “Bill Clinton has been sneaking off to the home of this woman for late-night trysts after her kids are in bed.”

You just can't keep a bad man down. Or in Bill's case, shut him up. I thought the whole idea was to move on?

The Bible according to Stoner John

Mark 1:10-11

Authorized version: "And straightway coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him. And there came a voice from the heaven saying, Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased."

New: "As he was climbing up the bank again, the sun shone through a gap in the clouds. At the same time a pigeon flew down and perched on him. Jesus took this as a sign that God's spirit was with him. A voice from overhead was heard saying, 'That's my boy! You're doing fine!'"

Matthew 26:69-70

Authorized version: "Now Peter sat without in the palace: and a damsel came unto him, saying, 'Thou also wast with Jesus of Galilee.' But he denied before them all, saying, I know not what thou sayest."

New: "Meanwhile Rocky was still sitting in the courtyard. A woman came up to him and said: 'Haven't I seen you with Jesus, the hero from Galilee?" Rocky shook his head and said: 'I don't know what the hell you're talking about!'"

In keeping with the times, translator Henson deftly translates "demon possession" as "mental illness" and "Son of Man," the expression Jesus frequently used to describe himself, as "the Complete Person." In addition, parables are rendered as "riddles," baptize is to "dip" in water, salvation becomes "healing" or "completeness" and Heaven becomes "the world beyond time and space."

It sounds to me like someone has been hitting the bong very, very hard.

As long as we're on the subject

I've been working on improving my Italian, so I decided to tackle translating some the columns that Umberto Eco, one of my favorite writers, writes regularly for L'Espresso. Please note that this translation is without doubt riddled with errors and that the views expressed do not reflect my own. I'm not finished with this one yet, as there's a few references that are presently beyond me, but as the subject seems timely, I thought I'd post part of it now:

The Passion is a film that wants to rake in lots of money by offering lots of blood and enough violence to make Pulp Fiction look like an animated cartoon. Well, yes, since I was fearing a series of questions, I decided to resolve the affair once and for all and went to see Mel Gibson's Passion....I must quickly say that this film, which was done very well in technical terms, is not an expression of antisemitism or of Christian fundamentalism, but instead of an obsession with the mysticism of a gory sacrifice. It is splatterpunk, a film intended to rake in lots of money by offering oceans of blood and enough violence to make Pulp Fiction look like an animated cartoon for a children's school. Except a cartoon like Tom and Jerry never places the whole object of the lesson in the incidents where the characters are flattened like CDs being crushed by a steamroller, where they are falling from skyscrapers and broken into a million pieces or crushed behind a door. There is so much blood, gallons of it, that it appears to have been harvested by the work of every vampire in Transylvania, and brought to the set by ten tanker-trucks....

Gibson's hatred for the Nazarene must be inexpressable, who can say what ancient repressions he harbors as he pours more and more torture onto the Nazarene's body, and thank God the story does not permit him, otherwise he would have applied electrodes to Christ's testicles and poured gasoline into his wounds. This would give a healthy jolt to the mystery of Salvation.... Gibson leaps at the idea that Jesus had to suffer; like Poe, he thinks that the most moving and romantic thing is the death of a beautiful girl, and he senses that the more profitable 'splatter' will be that in which he puts the Son of God in a meatgrinder. There, he succeeds extremely well and I must say that, when Jesus is finally dead and has finished his suffering, (or enjoyment), when the hurricane is unleashed, the earth shakes and the Temple veil is torn, we find a certain emotion in that moment, we discern a hint of that transcendence that the film does such a disastrous disservice.

Yes, at that point the Father makes his voice heard. But the enlightened viewer, (and, I hope, the believer), perceives that at that point, it is with him and Mel Gibson that the Father is pissed off.

Mailvox: You don't define the Truth

Dread Pirate writes of a friend: ...he basically told me that he could not believe in anything that he himself could not understand. He does not believe that anyone should go to hell, or (for that matter) that hell even exist. However, he believes that everyone should go to heaven. It simply not fair that some should go to hell, especially if one is really seeking truth, but rejects God; or any other kind of diety.

That's an interesting approach to life. Does he understand how x-rays work? Does he believe in them? Whatever the example, modern life is so complex that there is not a single person, however intelligent and educated, who understands everything. And yet, we have no problem believing whatever a sufficiently large number of people around us happen to believe.

If your friend doesn't believe in Hell, why does he believe in Heaven? And what does fairness have to do with anything, much less reality? Attempting to ascertain reality through fairness is bizarre - had the situation not been so sad, I would have laughed out loud in the days after a schoolmate died in a car accident and everyone was lamenting the unfairness of it all and wondering why, oh why, did this happen? Well, the girl didn't wear a seatbelt, drove like a maniac, took a corner too fast and rolled the car. Try it 100 times and you'll get pretty much the same result almost every time, cause and effect. No great mystery there. Was it fair that she died? Yes, the laws of physics and biology demanded it.

Now, the Bible and the story of Christianity are either true or they are not. Your friend wants to hang onto the parts he likes, and ignore the parts he doesn't. That's absurd. If he wants to reject the whole thing, that's fine, he should reject it all and indulge himself in wine, women and song for he only has a few short decades before his consciousness is obliterated into nothing. Encourage him to be honest with himself and follow his bliss, so to speak.

Not once does the Christian God claim to be fair. He claims to be just - everyone has sinned and is therefore damned. But He is also merciful - He offers a Way out to all. You don't have to take it, but if you don't, then be prepared to suffer the consequences. The unbeliever accepts this cheerfully because he rejects the totality. It is only the wishy-washy half-believer who suffers mental turmoil, because he cannot commit either way. But what he wants or what he thinks should be is as utterly irrelevant to the question of the existence of Hell as it is to the existence of Toledo.

It always amazes me that people don't understand the parable of the wheat and the chaff. If you can't believe or refuse to bow down before God's Son, then you are essentially worthless in God's eyes, you have failed in the purpose for which you were created and you will be tossed aside as useless trash. Don't think that's fair? So what. Fairness never entered into the equation.

Rabbia per il risultato di Oporto

That's the headline - angry with the result from Oporto. And, here come the conspiracies. Never mind the fact that the Danes and the Swedes were the best two teams in the group and deserved to progress. Italy almost lost to Bulgaria - they would have if Bulgaria's striker had been capable of putting away an excellent one-on-one chance with Buffon. But instead of accepting their own responsibility, they'd rather complain that the other teams were too clever, as the Corriere della Sera writes of the tomatoes they will throw at Denmark for allowing the late tying goal: Chissà come si dice «imbarazzati» in danese, e magari in svedese. "Who knows how you say embarrassed in Danish, and maybe in Swedish."

What's silly is that Italy was losing at the time the Swedes scored and the Azzurri have no one to blame but themselves for not putting away either Denmark or Sweden in the first two games. Italy was dominating Sweden in the first half, they went into their trademark defensive shell in the second and gave the two points away. The Italian press was screaming that Trappatoni was too conservative after the World Cup; it so happens that they were right and he should have been replaced. The Swedes destroyed Bulgaria, the Danes beat them soundly and Italy had to score in the 94th minute to steal the win.

Italy and Spain have conclusively proven that you can have all the talent in the world, but if your manager is going to saddle you with a defensive approach that simply hopes individual talent will create something out of nothing, you're going to lose. I'd much rather see the wide-open styles of the Scandinavians going forward anyhow.

PS - the Pan-Gargler blogged that he's getting tired of all the soccer and baseball blogging on the net. To him, I quote the greatest one-line put-down of all time. "You can't spell Citrus without UT."

Historical lies

I'm looking to make a list of ten or fifteen historical lies, things that conventional wisdom holds to be obviously true, but upon research and analysis can be conclusively shown to be false. Four obvious ones are:

1. The Spanish Inquisition was an evil institution comparable to the Final Solution or the Black Death.
2. Abraham Lincoln was dedicated to human liberty and fought the Civil War to free the slaves.
3. Religion is the primary cause of most of the wars in human history.
4. Islam is a religion of peace.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on the matter. No cows are sacred; if there's any examples beloved of the Left, I'd like to hear them too.

Pop goes the weasel

ENCOURAGING preliminary ratings for all-liberal Air America in New York have collapsed along with the fledgling radio network's finances. An unofficial "extrapolation" of Arbitron data released last Friday — which Air America's hosts crowed about last month but virtually ignored yesterday — showed WLIB's ratings dropping back to their lowly levels before the net's April launch.

Arbitron cautions stations and advertisers not to read too much into this interim monthly data — but that didn't stop Air America star Al Franken from boasting last month that he'd beaten WABC's Rush Limbaugh among the 25- to 54-year-old listeners chased by radio advertisers.

Being liberal means never remembering what you said yesterday.

What media bias?

Few studies provide an objective measure of the slant of news, and none has provided a way to link such a measure to ideological measures of other political actors. That is, none of the existing measures can say, for example, whether the New York Times is more liberal than Tom Daschle or whether Fox News is more conservative than Bill Frist. We provide such a measure. Namely, we compute an ADA score for various news outlets, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the Drudge Report, Fox News' Special Report, and all three networks' nightly news shows.

Our results show a very significant liberal bias. All of the news outlets except Fox News' Special Report received a score to the left of the average member of Congress. Moreover, by one of our measures all but three of these media outlets (Special Report, the Drudge Report, and ABC's World News Tonight) were closer to the average Democrat in Congress than to the median member of the House of Representatives. One of our measures found that the Drudge Report is the most centrist of all media outlets in our sample. Our other measure found that Fox News' Special Report is the most centrist. These findings refer strictly to the news stories of the outlets. That is, we omitted editorials, book reviews, and letters to the editor from our sample....


11.2 Republican average
26.4 Fox News' Special Report
40.0 Senate average
44.1 Drudge Report
44.5 House average
54.8 ABC World News
58.4 LA Times
62.5 NBC Nightly News
62.6 USA Today
64.5 CBS Evening News
64.6 New York Times
74.1 Democratic average

Of course, the fact that these are all big corporations trumps everything they are reporting, printing and broadcasting. If you're Eric Alterman, or dumb enough to be mistaken for him, that is.

Your papers, please

From Slashdot: Today the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that anybody can be compelled at any time to identify themselves, if a police officer asks. People who refuse to identify themselves, even if they are not suspected of a crime, will be arrested. Sound Orwellian? The Supreme Court also said people who are suspected of another crime might not be subject to arrest for not revealing their name. On this latter point, someone will have to bring a separate case. And the SCOTUS is at liberty not to hear any case it doesn't like. The case is Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of Nevada.

What did Europe say after 9/11? We are all Americans? I think they had it backwards. Now, thanks to these black-robed defenders of our Constitutional rights, we are all to be good Chermans. It is now a crime to remain silent - so much for that right.

How long will it be before it becomes a crime to give a false name as well? Then, you will obviously be required to provide identification proving you are who you say you are. Thank goodness we can elect a Republican Congress and President to stop these egregious abuses of liberty! Wait a minute....