House of Eratosthenes

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The Greatest Betrayal of All

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

Via Kathryn Jean Lopez, via Neo-Neocon, an item that begs to be parodied, but cannot be…since parody demands an assessment of the level of absurdity in the real thing, followed by a nudging-up by a couple notches. Said notches being simply unavailable.

This comes from NOW’s N.Y. chapter and just has to be quoted in full:

“Women have just experienced the ultimate betrayal. Senator Kennedy’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton’s opponent in the Democratic presidential primary campaign has really hit women hard. Women have forgiven Kennedy, stuck up for him, stood by him, hushed the fact that he was late in his support of Title IX, the ERA, the Family Leave and Medical Act to name a few. Women have buried their anger that his support for the compromises in No Child Left Behind and the Medicare bogus drug benefit brought us the passage of these flawed bills. We have thanked him for his ardent support of many civil rights bills, BUT women are always waiting in the wings.

“And now the greatest betrayal! We are repaid with his abandonment! He’s picked the new guy over us. He’s joined the list of progressive white men who can’t or won’t handle the prospect of a woman president who is Hillary Clinton (they will of course say they support a woman president, just not “this” one). ‘They’ are Howard Dean and Jim Dean (Yup! That’s Howard’s brother) who run DFA (that’s the group and list from the Dean campaign that we women helped start and grow). They are Alternet, Progressive Democrats of America, democrats.com, Kucinich lovers and all the other groups that take women’s money, say they’ll do feminist and women’s rights issues one of these days, and conveniently forget to mention women and children when they talk about poverty or human needs or America’s future or whatever.

“This latest move by Kennedy, is so telling about the status of and respect for women’s rights, women’s voices, women’s equality, women’s authority and our ability – indeed, our obligation – to promote and earn and deserve and elect, unabashedly, a President that is the first woman after centuries of men who ‘know what’s best for us.’”

Whining and complaining their way to global domination. Discriminating and hating their way to a discrimination-and-hate-free utopia. Championing choice, and refusing to let anyone anywhere decide anything any differently.

You do know what the etymology is behind the word “utopia,” don’t you? This is why we need NOW. They show us the reason why.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Poisoning Masculinity | 4 Comments »

Canada Abandons Durban

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

The Government of Canada has abandoned the United Nations Durban II anti-racism conference.

That’s not John Bolton…that’s not John Birch…that’s Canada.

The so-called Durban II conference “has gone completely off the rails” and Canada wants no part of it, said Jason Kenney, secretary of state for multiculturalism and Canadian identity.

“Canada is interested in combatting racism, not promoting it,” Mr. Kenney told The Canadian Press. “We’ll attend any conference that is opposed to racism and intolerance, not those that actually promote racism and intolerance.

“Our considered judgment, having participated in the preparatory meetings, was that we were set for a replay of Durban I. And Canada has no intention of lending its good name and resources to such a systematic promotion of hatred and bigotry.”

The 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban turned into “a circus of intolerance,” Mr. Kenney said.

One government official on Wednesday called the conference “a gong show.”

H/T: Boortz.

Posted in Poisoning Western Civilization, World Government | 2 Comments »

Memo For File LII

Monday, January 28th, 2008

Item!

Caroline Kennedy has been looking for a candidate like her father…and by doing so, one would presume, speaking for millions.

OVER the years, I’ve been deeply moved by the people who’ve told me they wished they could feel inspired and hopeful about America the way people did when my father was president. This sense is even more profound today. That is why I am supporting a presidential candidate in the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama.

My reasons are patriotic, political and personal, and the three are intertwined. All my life, people have told me that my father changed their lives, that they got involved in public service or politics because he asked them to. And the generation he inspired has passed that spirit on to its children. I meet young people who were born long after John F. Kennedy was president, yet who ask me how to live out his ideals.

Her reasons are patriotic, political and personal, and all three are intertwined. Hmmmm…

I’m fascinated with this passion for selecting one candidate over another, coupled with a seemingly blissful ignorance and apathy about positions. This editorial is ten paragraphs long, and every single syllable is about mood. Nothing, the all important make-me-happy issue aside, about what this candidate will do that that candidate will not…or what this candidate can do that that candidate cannot.

And that isn’t just my interpretation. Second paragraph from the end, Caroline comes right out and tells us what she wants in a President:

I want a president who understands that his responsibility is to articulate a vision and encourage others to achieve it; who holds himself, and those around him, to the highest ethical standards; who appeals to the hopes of those who still believe in the American Dream, and those around the world who still believe in the American ideal; and who can lift our spirits, and make us believe again that our country needs every one of us to get involved.

A President with the capability of telling us what we want to do.

Fox guarding the henhouse if ever there was one.

Item!

Gerard Van der Leun cites a parallel between Brave New World and the…uh…malaise:

Electile Dysfunction: “The inability to become aroused over any of the choices for president put forth by either party in the 2008 election year.”

Quick, break out the Soma!

“Awful? They don’t find it so. On the contrary, they like it. It’s light, it’s childishly simple. No strain on the mind or the muscles. Seven and a half hours of mild, unexhausting labour, and then the soma ration and games and unrestricted copulation and the feelies. What more can they ask for?” — Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

HT: The Homchick Report

Ah, Huxley. I have another passage to list as my personal favorite:

“And there you are,” Dr. Gaffney concluded.

“Do they read Shakespeare?” asked the Savage as they walked, on their way to the Bio-chemical Laboratories, past the School Library.

“Certainly not,” said the Head Mistress, blushing.

“Our library,” said Dr. Gaffney, “contains only books of reference. If our young people need distraction, they can get it at the feelies. We don’t encourage them to indulge in any solitary amusements.” [emphasis mine]

Item!

Millswood Middle School in Lodi, enforces a strict one-way hallway policy, with detention for violators:

Since the school opened in 2004, Millswood Middle staff has enforced the school’s one-way-only policy inside the main building on campus.

Once inside, students must follow the school’s circular hallways on both floors and on the school’s three staircases. Teachers and staff say the campus’ one-way-only policy cuts down on fights, hallway traffic and general chaos that comes with having 800 middle schoolers in one place.

“If everybody’s going the same direction, you can’t bump shoulders and you can’t give dirt looks, because you’re looking at the back of somebody’s head,” says Principal Sheree Perez.

But…but…but…if kids go through a K-12 curriculum that places such an inordinate weight upon their ability to co-exist and all head in the same direction, just to be herded around more easily…what is to prepare them for an adulthood, in which every now and then they’ll be required to go against the grain? To do the right thing?

Ah, but there’s the rub.

When it comes to preparing children for adulthood, a great deal of talk is made about teaching them how to “do the right thing” — but when’s the last time you ever heard of a child being encouraged to judiciously swim against the crowd? How many years has it been?

How old were most of us, when we finally figured out the frequent fallibility of the majority view? Some unfortunates make it all the way to the crypt never quite figuring it out. And we can’t rely on our schools, it seems — they are now at the point of dishing out punishment, for walking against the crowd. Inconceivable to imagine the school would permit thinking against the crowd…certainly, to imagine it would provide any encouragement for same.

And what of the adults? What is required of us, along the lines of that selective thinking-for-onesself?

It seems we are increasingly being called upon by our leaders…not to do…but to be. Indeed, I’m left struggling to figure out what distresses Caroline Kennedy so much. Umptyfratz presidential candidates have toured our state primaries, debating, advertising, giving speeches — trotting out their respective versions of this dream — adapting to a New America, in which the electorate no longer tells the leaders what to do, but rather, the other way around.

And as these candidates for President have told us what they want us to do, so few active verbs have come out of any of it. Just a couple, really: believe — and — sacrifice.

We’re there. Nobody expects anyone to do…everyone expects everyone to be. To be happy. To be enthused. To be clockwise. It’s gotten so bad, that our political leaders, like ourselves, are expected to be everything, but to do very little, if anything at all. All they are expected to do, is — expect. Expect things out of us. Expect us to be, and not to do.

Brave new world, indeed.

Soma all ’round.

Posted in Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 1 Comment »

I Made a New Word XII

Friday, January 25th, 2008

Bot Market

A market that exists in transaction movement only, producing no wealth.

In a stricter definition, a wealth-neutral market created from government regulation, which the players in that market, then take an active role in creating and refining. A market built around a vicious cycle of lobbying and legislating. A market that exists in a parasitic relationship to the rest of us, as opposed to a symbiotic one.

Human Bot Fly Named after the most horrifying of the beasties on Cracked’s list of the five most horrifying bugs in the world, the Bot Fly, which feeds itself by tunneling through animal flesh. It fits very well…

There are dozens of varieties of Bot Fly, they’re each highly adapted to target a specific animal, they have delightfully descriptive names like Horse Stomach Bot Fly, Sheep Nose Bot Fly and, hey, guess what. One of them is called Human Bot Fly.

And this is inspired, in turn, by a story (about which we learn courtesy of Rick) putting us on notice of a brand new legal specialty: Environmentalism. Try on $700 an hour for size.

Lawyers are becoming some of the best-paid environmentalists. Twenty of the 100 highest-grossing U.S. law firms have started practices advising Companies on climate change, according to a Bloomberg survey of the firms’ Web sites. The attorneys help clients finance clean-energy projects and lobby Congress, typically billing $500 to $700 an hour.

Firms including Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, Heller Ehrman and Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton joined the global warming cause as real-estate and structured-finance attorneys lost jobs to the worst U.S. housing slump in 27 years. The move into climate-change law is gaining traction as Congress considers a mandatory carbon market to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Yeah, George Bush gets blame for the rapidly weakening U.S. dollar. He deserves a great deal of this. You spend money like it’s going out of style…you confront the enemy, at enormous financial cost, as we have been needing to do for a long time, but to buttress your “political capital” you refuse to veto any NEW spending…lemme repeat that, any NEW spending…yes, the dollar will tank.

Yes, a lot of it is Bush’s fault.

But how strong will a market ever become, when it feeds on itself? These lawyers are making money by killing business. No, wait, it’s worse than that — lawyers have been doing that for generations.

These lawyers, though, make the money by talking the businesses into committing suicide.

The world carbon-trading market tripled to about $30 billion between 2005 and 2006, according to the World Bank. Such a market in the U.S. may reach as much as $300 billion by 2020, Peter Orszag, director of the Congressional Budget Office, said in U.S. House testimony last year.

The model proposed by Warner, a Virginia Republican, and Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, is similar to the European Union’s emissions program. Heavy polluters must buy credits to comply, while cleaner Companies can profit by selling them.

How many millions of people do we have in the United States who are “into environmentalism”?

How many of them are purely useful-idiots — making no money from it? People who see it as nothing more than a fashion statement?

How many of them drive big, big cars so they can sit way up high? Even when commuting to work? By themselves? With a lunch box, a badge with which to get in the front door, and nothing else? No kids, no soccer gear, no camping equipment…just a sandwich and an apple and their own ass? Eleven miles a gallon?

How many of them bitch about the gas prices?

How does an oil company pay for carbon credits? Built into the system, right? The system…which is funded by a gas company…which makes money from gas…which is sold to the useful-idiot environmentalist guy in his big ol’ Navigator driving his own ass and nothing else to work.

Waiting for the day George W. Bush leaves office. Just like the lawyer making $700 an hour producing nothing. Except the useful-idiot environmentalist, is looking forward to Bush’s exit because he’s counting on gas prices going down…

We are being SO had.

Update: Went back and checked my notes to figure out how I learned about the dreaded Bot Fly. It was linked in an unusually verbose and action-packed post from Duffy…which has lots and lots of other good stuff.

Posted in ManBearPig, Poisoning Capitalism, Poisoning Western Civilization | 3 Comments »

“Don’t Take It Easy”

Wednesday, January 16th, 2008

I have mixed feelings about this advertising/awareness campaign. Having gone through those “why is my child getting sick so often” years myself, there is certainly a need for more thinking out of the box. And I did have the distinct impression we were treating just the symptoms of something without getting to the underlying cause. Thank goodness it didn’t turn out to be what’s described here.

Nevertheless, I have to ask the following about this advertising campaign. Is this really appropriate? Or beneficial to anybody? I mean, check out those radio spots, especially #4, at the very end. The borderline-frantic mother can tell something is wrong, she can feel it in her bones. But she’s surrounded by the voices of all these clueless dolts, mostly the blissfully ignorant paleochauvinist male sawbones.

As a macho male dad guy, raised somewhat comically in an unnecessarily nineteenth-century environment, and in adulthood growing more and more concerned about this world into which I emerged probably 150 years too late, which in turn even now is becoming more and more pasteurized and sanitized and feminized…I must say I see a connection. It’s become unthinkable to allow kids to do things that kids my age did all the time — the wandering through the neighborhood in bare feet unsupervised, riding bicycles without helmets, and yes, eating dirt. Now, things are clean. Things are micro-clean.

And our kids have allergies and disorders like never before.

Almost as if they were designed to be confronted by little everyday beasties that they no longer have to face down, so that their little bodies aren’t allowed to grow the robustness that used to be commonplace.

He is us Why, the peanut allergy thing seems to substantiate these concerns pretty solidly, all by itself. If you’re my age, 41, how many kids did you know in the third grade who had an allergy to peanuts? In all of K through 12 — how many times did you see that? Or even hear of it? And now…everyone knows someone who knows someone. Anything made with peanut products…anything made with machines that have come into contact with peanut stuff…has to be clearly called-out.

So our kids have all these weaknesses they did not have before. After we have made everything ultra ultra ultra extra safe, nonthreatening, soft, cuddly and — most of all — clean. Oh, so clean.

Hmmmmmm……naw, let’s just ignore that some more.

But getting back to the Jeffrey Modell Foundation. I think what they’re talking about is probably legitimate and there’s probably a genuine need to raise awareness about it. And I don’t doubt for a minute there are some doltish docs neglecting to run tests that they probably ought to think about running.

But these radio spots — especially toward the end of #4. Have any of the people making these spots, ever been parents? No — check that — have they ever been fathers? Fathers raising young children in the presence of borderline-hysterical moms, whose solution to every single malady that comes down the line is to go to the doctor and get a prescription for an antibiotic? Have they ever been in that position where you have to ask yourself “waitaminnit…I can’t remember ever having been put on an antibiotic once…and my kid’s been on six of them in the last two years, and I suspect the last two times were because the Mom messed up the dosage.”

At that point, it becomes a public health issue. Missing dosages of an antibiotic is not a trivial matter. That’s one of the reasons you have to go to a doctor to get put on one in the first place.

This is not a “battle of the sexes” thing. Moms have a lot to worry about. It’s to be expected that they mess up doses of things now and then. That is really the point I am making here — mothers are fallible. Nobody really has a serious thought to the contrary. That’s why these hysterical moms in the radio spots are being shushed up by the blissfully ignorant pleasant condescending male docs. There is logic in this.

And it is somewhat unhelpful when the motherly instinct is presented as a holy yardstick, trumping some universality of realizations dealing with reason, logic and fact. That is not what the motherly instinct is.

But you wouldn’t know it from listening to these. The smooth-talking, time-warped good-ol-boy doc breezily dismisses her concerns, and the mom’s voice fairly warbles “I don’t know — something’s WRONG!!” Chauvinist grandpa doc croaks out, “take it eeeeeaaasssy!” And the much wiser, stern, strong, self-assertive female narrator comes on and intones “DON’T take it easy!”

Sure, I agree in some isolated cases there might be a situation where that is a helpful message to have. But this isn’t really all about a message, it’s about an attitude. And I can promise you, that’s not a helpful attitude. When you’re in that chapter of life, the mom has about a hundred concerns every damn day, and she’s already not inclined to “take it easy” on any one of them. We dads do not need some mass-produced radio spot instructing the mom to get MORE hyped-out about these everyday things, steamrolling over anybody and everybody who might have justifiable reasons for urging calm. It’s just not needed.

And for the reasons stated above — it’s not so extravagant to suppose this kind of attitude might be the cause of these problems in the first place.

One other thing occurs to me. I have to ask, what kind of medical system do we have going on here when the best way to raise awareness about some previously-unrealized malady, is through the moms? I don’t pretend to know all about how that works. Maybe this really is the right approach. But think about the awful ramifications of that for a minute…why can’t this medical information be disseminated through the doctors, the way we expect it to be? If that’s ineffective, why do we even have doctors in the first place?

Posted in About Me and My Blog, Phony Egghead Studies, Poisoning Masculinity | No Comments »

Salvage’s Frosting Diet

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

Salvage is Canadian, but I’d like to make it clear at this time that there are other Canadians who are not like him. He’s been hanging around Rick’s blog ever since Zossima dropped out of it…which is interesting…giving us an almost-daily education about sarcasm. How it is open to abuse. How pure sarcasm, can be used to prop up just about any silly statement. Convincingly. Somewhat convincingly when coming from salvage…perhaps more convincingly when manipulated by someone more capable.

It’s worth keeping in mind, I think. Some folks are known to use sarcasm to decide anything and everything. They are strangers to genuine exchanges of ideas. They are the “Daily Show” generation — those who were brought up under the belief that when they were watching certain entertainment programs, they were watching “news.” Who is to blame them for thinking any idea worth pondering, should fit onto a bumper sticker or within a single lungful of air?

Sarcasm has its place. But in my view, that place is as a garnish. Or cake frosting. We got a lot of young people walking around, I see, who substitute that frosting in place of the cake, the sherbet, the Hors D’Oeuvres, the vegetables, and the entree.

Their “diet” is as far away from healthy as you can get. And at Brutally Honest, we get a reminder of this every time we watch salvage do his “dining.”

Well, yesterday salvage took a break from the bucket o’ frosting and compromised with his mommy to chow down on a hunk of muffin…or sugar cookie…or something…with lots of sarcastic frosting spread all over it, of course. Can’t take a break from it, you know — in no other context, can his absurd ideas enjoy even the appearance of legitimacy. At issue was the case of Ezra Levant’s case before the Human Rights Commission.

A complaint has been filed with Canada’s HRC, which has lately become notorious. The point of the complaint is a selection of those horribly offensive cartoons about the prophet Muhammed, of which Levant is the publisher.

Van der Leun put up the YouTube clips from Levant, and then Rick linked to Van der Leun. Rick wondered aloud how it could be justified that this story is ignored, by the very same folks who “want to trumpet the loss of civil rights at the hands of Bushitler and his co-chimp Cheney and other ‘neocons’.”

…and salvage jumped in to provide an answer to that.

Yes, the elimination of habeas corpus and the indefinite detention certainly compares to the undemocratic hell that is a Human Rights Commission hearing and there is no doubt that Ezra Levant will be sentenced to life in the Maple Syrup mines.

Actually the Human Rights Commission is just following their mandate, someone made a complaint and now they’re investigating it. Sometimes people make stupid complaints but they still have to be followed up.

And yes, this is a stupid one you can tell because it’s gotten you wingnuts all worked up which is always fun to watch.

So keep it up, and when the Commission finds there isn’t any grounds and it ends? I’m sure you and your wingnut buddies will talk about that with equal enthusiasm.

Nah, just kidding, you’ll just find another molehill to shriek your fear and loathing at.

It’s clear to me that salvage didn’t watch the clips — that, or if he did, the point went whistling at Mach 1 right over what passes for his noggin.

See, when the argument is made about President Bush’s “elimination of habeas corpus and the indefinite detention,” this actually resonates with fair-minded moderate folks such as myself, even if it doesn’t completely convince us, because that says what we have is a decision we are accustomed to having made in the public spotlight, with transparency, publicity, and oversight, suddenly made in what might be thought of as a “black box.” We find the argument compelling, even if we don’t find it altogether convincing for a number of reasons. Some of the problems have to do with the nature of military operations. We have “detainees” captured on the field of battle…should the detainees be released to our court system? Can it not be said that the rights of the detainees have been violated, if this does not come to pass?

The argument isn’t dismissed lightly. Folks like salvage, gorging themselves on the frosting of sarcasm, think it is — because it does not triumph. The grownups, who understand things like roughage and protein and vitamins, and therefore do not dine on frosting alone, have other things to consider…

…like, for example, what laws have these “detainees” broken? The most-liberal guy where I work came up with an interesting point: He’s opposed to releasing detainees into the legal system, because regardless of his feelings about pre-emptive military strikes, he certainly doesn’t want America to be empowered to go around the world arresting people. On that, he and I agree. And then there’s the matter of what a legal system does with prisoners, who are found to have not violated any laws (or, more to the point, cannot be proven to have violated any laws).

Those prisoners have to be released, right?

It just doesn’t seem to fit the situation. It would appear we have found the reason why some things are treated as legal issues, and other things aren’t. The legal process is all about “rights,” whereas in thousands of years of war, nobody with a respected viewpoint on the matter ever declared the day-to-day business of war to have much to do with rights.

Saying so, doesn’t make you a right-winger or a Bush-bot. It makes you a grownup. But as salvage helps to remind us, lot of the folks talking about this stuff now aren’t really grownups.

But getting back to the back-room nature of how the Bush administration has been dealing with the detainees. I think we can all agree, at the grownup dining table at least, that the detainees do have some rights — and that whatever these rights are, they ought to fall short of the rights needed to run wild & free and make trouble. And so even though we don’t bow to the wisdom of the frosting-kids, as reasonable adults we are bothered by the idea that people in authority are deciding things and their decisions are not open ones.

Salvage and the rest of the frosting-kids, fresh off of making that argument, and festering in their disappointment that this one argument didn’t determine the outcome…then indulge in the unbelievable, which I’m pretty sure is the point Rick was making. They look upon the closed-door proceedings of the HRC — not the hearings we are able to browse on YouTube, thanks to the uploading by the defendant himself, but the process by which these decisions are handed down — they understand the rubber is going to meet the road in whatever way it’s gonna. And this raises no red flags with them.

To state it a little more succinctly. It is in the nature of a military tribunal that oversight is limited — that’s supposed to be an awful thing. Oversight seems to be missing altogether from what the HRC does…it’s not immediately obvious how the HRC finds it necessary to function without it, but it’s missing anyway…and that’s perfectly alright?

It should be noted the care involved in choosing the word “limited.” It does not mean “non-existent.” Far from it. At least, that is the case where the military tribunals are concerned.

President George W. Bush has ordered that certain detainees imprisoned at the Naval base at Guantanamo Bay were to be tried by military commissions. This decision sparked controversy and litigation. On June 29, 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court limited the power of the Bush administration to conduct military tribunals to suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay.

In December of 2006, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 was passed and authorized the establishment of military commissions subject to certain requirements and with a designated system of appealing those decisions. A military commission system addressing objections identified by the U.S. Supreme Court was then established by the Department of Defense. Litigation concerning the establishment of this system is ongoing. As of June 13, 2007, the appellate body in this military commission system had not yet been constituted.

Three cases had been commenced in the new system, as of June 13, 2007. One detainee, David Matthew Hicks plea bargained and was sent to Australia to serve a nine month sentence. Two case were dismissed without prejudice because the tribunal believed that the men charged had not been properly determined to be persons within the commission’s jurisdiction on June 4, 2007, and the military prosecutors asked the commission to reconsider that decision on June 8, 2007. One of the dismissed cases involved Omar Ahmed Khadr, who was captured at age 15 in Afghanistan after having killed a U.S. soldier with a grenade. The other dismissed case involved Salim Ahmed Hamdan who is alleged to have been Osama bin Laden’s driver and is the lead plaintiff in a key series of cases challenging the military commission system. The system is in limbo until the jurisdictional issues addressed in the early cases are resolved.

This has always bothered me about the “eliminating habeas corpus” argument. I remember all the crowing and champagne-glass-clinking when the Supreme Court decision was handed down. Oooh, we’re so wonderful and Bush sucks so much, because the Supreme Court showed him what-for. And then the process is reformed to accommodate the decision…and then is challenged anew…and heard in court some more.

That’s oversight. It’s there, or it isn’t. If you’re victorious in getting it installed, or using it, or exploiting it, and you want to shout from the highest hilltops that you had your victory against the Imperial Galactic Bush Administration and bask in your wonderful-ness — seems to me, the option to grumble about lack of that openness and oversight at some later time, has been jettisoned. You can’t have it both ways.

Okay now if the issue is comparing the military tribunal situation to the Human Rights Commission hearings…and it seems to be, because if I’m reading it right, Rick laid down a challenge and then cupcake-frosting-boy went and picked it up…it’s fair to ask: Does the HRC have as much transparency and oversight as this military tribunal process — which I’m told has none, but clearly does have plenty?

We’re not off to a good start here. I would cite as Exhibit A, Levant’s seventh clip, “What Was Your Intent?”

LEVANT: Why is that a relevant question?

MCGOVERN: Under section 31a, it talks about the intention…purpose…we like to get some background, as well.

LEVANT: Is it, you’d like to get some background? Or does this determine anything? We publish what we publish. The words speak for themselves. Are you saying that one answer is wrong and one answer is right? Is a certain answer contrary to law?

MCGOVERN: No.

LEVANT: So if I were to say — hypothetically — that the purpose was to instill hatred, incite hatred, and to cause offense, are you saying that’s an acceptable answer?

MCGOVERN: I have to look at it in the context of all the information, and determine if it was indeed.

You have to admire the way Levant is handling this. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say he is Henry Rearden sprung to life, leaping straight out of the pages of Atlas Shrugged:

“I do not recognise this court’s right to try me.”

“What?”

“I do not recognise this court’s right to try me.”

“But, Mr. Rearden, this is the legally appointed court to try this particular category of crime.”

“I do not recognise my action as a crime.”

“But you have admitted that you have broken our regulations controlling the sale of your Metal.”

“I do not recognise your right to control the sale of my Metal.”

“Is it necessary for me to point out that your recognition was not required?”

“No. I am fully aware of it and I am acting accordingly.”

He noted the stillness of the room. By the rules of the complicated pretence which all those people played for one another’s benefit, they should have considered his stand as incomprehensible folly; there should have been rustles of astonishment and derision; there were none; they sat still; they understood.

“Do you mean that you are refusing to obey the law?” asked the judge.

“No. I am complying with the law – to the letter. Your law holds that my life, my work and my property may be disposed of without my consent. Very well, you may now dispose of me without my participation in the matter. I will not play the part of defending myself, where no defence is possible, and I will not simulate the illusion of dealing with a tribunal of justice.”

“But, Mr. Rearden, the law provides specifically that you are to be given an opportunity to present your side of the case and to defend yourself.”

“A prisoner brought to trial can defend himself only if there is an objective principle of justice recognised by his judges, a principle upholding his rights, which they may not violate and which he can invoke. The law, by which you are trying me, holds that there are no principles, that I have no rights and that you may do with me whatever you please. Very well. Do it.”

“Mr. Rearden, the law which you are denouncing is based on the highest principle – the principle of the public good.”

“Who is the public? What does it hold as its good? There was a time when men believed that ‘the good’ was a concept to be defined by a code of moral values and that no man had the right to seek his good through the violation of the rights of another. If it is now believed that my fellow men may sacrifice me in any manner they please for the sake of whatever they deem to e their own good, if they believe that they may seize my property simply because they need it – well, so does any burglar. There is only this difference: the burglar does not ask me to sanction his act.”

A group of seats at the side of the courtroom was reserved for the prominent visitors who had come from New York to witness the trial. Dagny sat motionless and her face showed nothing but a solemn attention, the attention of listening with the knowledge that the flow of his words would determine the course of her life. Eddie Willers sat beside her. James Taggart had not come. Paul Larkin sat hunched forward, his face thrust out, pointed like an animal’s muzzle, sharpened by a look of fear now turning into malicious hatred. Mr. Mowen, who sat beside him, was a man of greater innocence and smaller understanding; his fear was of a simpler nature; he listened in bewildered indignation and he whispered to Larkin, “Good God, now he’s done it! Now he’ll convince the whole country that all businessmen are enemies of the public good!”

“Are we to understand,” asked the judge, “that you hold your own interests above the interests of the public?”

“I hold that such a question can never arise except in a society of cannibals.”

“What … do you mean?”

“I hold that there is no clash of interests among men who do not demand the unearned and do not practice human sacrifices.”

“Are we to understand that if the public deems it necessary to curtail your profits, you do not recognise its right to do so?”

“Why, yes, I do. The public may curtail my profits any time it wishes – by refusing to buy my product.”

“We are speaking of … other methods.”

“Any other method of curtailing profits is the method of looters – and I recognise it as such.”

“Mr. Rearden, this is hardly the way to defend yourself.”

“I said that I would not defend myself.”

“But this is unheard of! Do you realise the gravity of the charge against you?”

“I do not care to consider it.”

“Do you realise the possible consequences of your stand?”

“Fully.”

“It is the opinion of this court that the facts presented by the prosecution seem to warrant no leniency. The penalty which this court has the power to impose on you is extremely severe.”

“Go ahead.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Impose it.”

The three judges looked at one another. Then their spokesman turned back to Rearden. “This is unprecedented,” he said.

“It is completely irregular,” said the second judge. “The law requires you submit to a plea in your own defence. Your only alternative is to state for the record that you throw yourself upon the mercy of the court.”

“I do not.”

“But you have to.”

“Do you mean that what you expect from me is some sort of voluntary action?”

“Yes.”

“I volunteer nothing.”

“But the law demands that the defendant’s side be represented on the record.”

“Do you mean that you need my help to make this procedure legal?”

“Well, no … yes … that is, to complete the form.”

“I will not help you.”

The third and youngest judge, who had acted as prosecutor snapped impatiently, “This is ridiculous and unfair! Do you want to let it look as if a man of your prominence had been railroaded without a –” He cut himself off short. Somebody at the back of the courtroom emitted a long whistle.

“I want,” said Rearden gravely, “to let the nature of this procedure appear exactly for what it is. If you need my help to disguise it – I will not help you.”

“But we are giving you a chance to defend yourself – and it is you who are rejecting it.”

“I will not help you to pretend that I have a chance. I will not help you to preserve an appearance of righteousness where rights are not recognised. I will not help you to preserve an appearance of rationality by entering a debate in which a gun is the final argument. I will not help you to pretend that you are administering justice.”

“But the law compels you to volunteer a defence!”

There was laughter at the back of the courtroom.

“That is the flaw in your theory, gentlemen,” said Rearden gravely, “and I will not help you out of it. If you choose to deal with men by means of compulsion, do so. But you will discover that you need the voluntary co-operation of your victims, in many more ways than you can see at present. And your victims should discover that it is their own volition – which you cannot force – that makes you possible. I choose to be consistent and I will obey you in the manner you demand. Whatever you wish me to do, I will do it at the point of a gun. If you sentence me to jail, you will have to send armed men to carry me there – I will not volunteer to move. If you fine me, you will have to seize my property to collect the fine – I will not volunteer to pay it. If you believe that you have the right to force me – use your guns openly. I will not help you to disguise the nature of your action.”

I did a quick check at the Fallaci award nominee page to see if Levine was nominated, as I was. Negatori. He should’ve been, at least next year if not this one. I’ll make a point to see what I can do about that next cycle.

It seems to me, at the very least, what we have here is a “black box” process for producing an outcome. I think even McGovern would agree with that — and with that, what we have is a breakdown in the ability to ensure consistency across the cases that come up before the Human Rights Commission.

McGovern is being deliberately evasive on the matter of how intent factors into the decision. She’s being asked about this directly. She has no answer. This is as valid a delineation as any other, in my mind at least, between free and un-free societies. The authorities are going to meet in a back room someplace and decide what’s what. Will they do that with any kind of consistency? With “equal protection,” as we call it down here?

Who knows? Who cares?

With nothing to hold the authorities to consistency and the provision of equal protection, they can show whatever favoritism they want to. What is to stop them? What oversight? Nevermind oversight…what opportunity to inspect, to criticize?

But of course this is not Guantanamo. These are full-fledged citizens of the country within whose government the HRC functions — not unlawful combatants.

Rick has issued the challenge, and frosting-boy salvage has failed in trying to accept it. He has no answer. His competence in following the facts and forming reasoned opinions about them, has been called into question. That has failed, or else his impartiality has failed. Maybe both.

Let’s pause for a minute or two to ponder how many people just like this are walking around — as free as you & me — spouting their nonsense, with “undecideds” listening to them, taking them seriously. It’s not a pretty picture. We have a multi-national conglomerate of folks who worry, ostentatiously, about things that are supposed to be described by words like “liberty” and “freedom.” But they have no understanding, or very little, about what those words really mean. And so when freedom is subject to genuine abuse, it can take place right in front of their eyes. And they can’t see it.

The frosting that is sarcasm is simply a poor diet. It makes for an imbalanced diet. To consume it, and nothing else, remains a bad idea, even if a lot of other folks are doing it. And if your diet of thinking is imbalanced, you can’t think straight…which is a problem for real lovers of freedom, because freedom is maintained only by means of rigorous, healthy, balanced, critical thinking. Here endeth the lesson.

Posted in My Blogger Friends, Overlawyered, Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Poisoning Western Civilization, The Muslim Question | 1 Comment »

The Deafening Silence of Feminists

Saturday, January 12th, 2008

Becky Makes Sense Today Becky is on a tear about the National Organization of Women and their bitching about toys instead of…oh, I dunno…Becky suggests saying a few words about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto? Seems like a reasonable idea to us. But NOW disagrees, apparently…

‘Tis the season for abundant toy advertising and shopping, so naturally the NOW office has been abuzz about the ubiquitous “Rose Petal Cottage” TV commercials. If you haven’t seen these ads, count yourself lucky. Honestly, if I didn’t know better, I would think they were beamed in from 1955, via some lost satellite in space. Or maybe it’s a deeply subversive parody that a clever (and rich) band of feminists snuck onto the airwaves in heavy rotation.

According to the makers at Playskool, the Rose Petal Cottage is “a place where her dreams have room to grow.” And what might those dreams be? Well, baking muffins, arranging furniture and doing the dishes. The voiceover even declares that the toy house will “entertain her imagination” just before the little girl opens the miniature washing machine and says – I kid you not – “Let’s do laundry!”

Now, I’m not knocking the important work of housekeeping, but this commercial is aimed solely at females (there are two versions — one designed to entice little girls and one targeting their moms). Products like the Rose Petal Cottage and the marketing campaigns that accompany them perpetuate the notion that cooking and cleaning are women’s work, and girls might as well start getting used to that fact at an early age. C’mon Susie, this scrubbing and ironing look like fun!

Of course the message of the Rose Petal Cottage would not be complete without its flip side . . . the Tonka 3-in-1 Scoot n’ Scoop truck. This commercial states its theory right up front: “Boys. What can you say? They’re just built different!”

Why yes, National Organization of Hags, yes indeed they are! You’re just figuring this out? Well, sounds like you have aways to go before you’re convinced…forty years so far…maybe someday you’ll wake up.

But MEANWHILE.

Wow, when Becky makes sense, she really does make a lot of sense. A female former Prime Minister was assassinated by a band of weird crazy bearded men who are opposed to women doing…….ANYTHING. You know, in a sane world, you’d think that would get NOW’s attention.

Well, they’re on the other side of the fence on this question. Becky and I agree. I respectfully yield to the Girl in Short Shorts Talking About Whatever in the effort to figure out the NOW mind, because I’ve kind of given up on it.

Becky…love it when you make sense, doll. At least sixty percent of the time.

Posted in Flogs, Is It Really a Man's World?, Poisoning Masculinity | 1 Comment »

On Snooping

Thursday, January 10th, 2008

I got this weird thing going on with my attitude toward the Constitution. I see it as a document built for the purpose of being cited; it’s got all them articles and sections and clauses and what-not, y’know? And so people say something shouldn’t be done because it creates problems with the Constitution — more often than not, I end up either watching this argument pass neatly over my little empty head, or else some kind of conflict ensues. Because I want to see the citation.

I see the document as dealing with a boundary…much like the boundary you draw around a baseball diamond or a tennis court. Those lines are just barely wide enough to be seen. Two or three inches wide, or so. That is how I see the Constitution. Its purpose is for knuckle-rapping. This is in-bounds…that is not in-bounds. If something is done that cannot be reconciled with the rules, then it ought to at least be possible to define where, in the rules, the transgression has occurred.

Is this asking too much?

In the last few years since you-know-what (hint: two odd numbers, the first number just below ten, the second number just above), it does seem to be asking way too much. And that is a great pity, because I’ll bet I’ve heard the word “Constitution” used ten or twenty times as numerously in the six years since that event, as I did in all the years before. If I were entirely unfamiliar with the document, judging it only by the jibber-jabber I’ve heard about it, I would imagine it to be a simple one-liner that could easily be printed on a small chewing-gum wrapper. Something to the effect that if you have to gather some facts in order to prosecute a crime, the crime shouldn’t count.

And even worse, listening to the mumbling in this handful of years, has left me with the impression that we have a lot of folks going through exactly that thought process. This guy on the radio…that friend at work…Keith Olbermann…they all seem so concerned about the “Constitution,” so surely they must have our interests at heart right? So you want to agree with them — and it takes so much effort to, y’know, actually open up the document and see what it says. So let’s just assume it says exactly that. Therefore, if this thing over here is against the Constitution, that thing over there must also be against it.

And so our prevailing sensibility ends up being that if you do something against the law, you have to do it right in front of a cop or else everyone is honor-bound to pretend you didn’t do it.

That seems awfully silly, so much so that nobody’s said it out loud just yet, and nobody is likely to say it out loud. But I think my specification is as good a predictor that someone is bound to jump up and say “that’s against the Constitution” as anything else. It certainly is more accurate than…say…the stuff that is actually written into the Constitution.

I was given cause to think about this when Jodi at Webloggin handed out the Mother of the Year award.

Jane Hambleton was snooping in her 19 year old son’s car when she found a bottle of booze under the front seat, promptly took the keys away, and put his car up for sale. Sounds great, right? That isn’t the best part. When she put the car up for sale she made a conscience decision to tell the potential buyers why they were selling the car; here is what the ad said:

OLDS 1999 Intrigue. Totally uncool parents who obviously don’t love teenage son, selling his car. Only driven for three weeks before snoopy mom who needs to get a life found booze under front seat. $3,700/offer. Call meanest mom on the planet.”

She not only received phone calls from people who were interested in the car but also from people who wanted to congratulate her. According to Hambleton, she has received over 70 phone calls from people saying what a super mom she is.

Unfortunately, in today’s world snooping parents are hard to come by. I have found that many parents have the “we can’t snoop” philosophy; citing that snooping “is an invasion of their children’s privacy”. I find it very refreshing to read about a mother who does have that attitude and has the attitude that she will do whatever it takes to keep her son safe.

Hats off to Jane Hambleton!

The article linked goes on to say the son is unhappy with the ad, partly because he’s got an alibi…the booze was left behind by a passenger. This doesn’t hold any sway with Mom, since two of the rules laid down when the car was first purchased were that there was to be no booze, and the car should always be locked.

I’m taking notes because these little episodes are ahead of me, beginning in about five years. I’ve been putting some serious thought into “no passengers.” Right now, I don’t see the social fabric as contributory to my son’s future car accidents…although, it should be noted, I imagine that is how those episodes start (oooh, now that li’l bubbins has a car, he can finally make some friends). Instead, I am most worried about his lack of comprehension of moving objects in the space around him.

Kids-n-kars is the one problem in our society that we have not been able to solve, or to even make any incremental effort at solving. The time comes for that first learner’s permit and then, God forbid, an actual driver’s license, and the parents and society must endure about two or three years of real danger. Curious that so little mitigation takes place over the generations, in an overly-pasteurized culture incandescently intolerant of the slightest residual danger from anything else.

We chalk it up to the need for the kids to learn responsibility. Simply upping the driving age would atrophy our youngest in their abilities to take on responsibility. That’s a pretty good argument, and I agree; my beef is that we seldom follow-up on it.

One car is used by a little tyke to learn responsibility, nine more cars are used by little tykes to turbocharge their social engines.

Which means — a bunch of things, none of ’em good. A passenger plus two or three in the back seat, nobody over age seventeen. Booze. Cell phones. Parties.

But getting back to the subject at hand…this complaint among “normal” parents, that snooping is an “invasion of privacy.” Let’s just leave alone the discussion over whether that’s a sensible opinion to have, or not, and simply accept the fact that it’s there. You know, there are a lot more parents practicing this, than not…which means there are a lot of crumb-crunchers growing up accustomed to the idea that they have this “privacy” and that it is — of course — unconditional. Our grown-ups, most of them by a large margin, think crimes must take place within eyesight of an actual cop, or else, said crimes must never have happened. Otherwise, it would be an invasion of this “privacy.”

So in childhood we think we can do anything we want, as long as nobody sees. We grow up with this expectation, we hang out with LOUD grown-ups who have the same expectation.

Does this sound to you like a society getting ready to come undone? Let’s postpone the argument about what privacy is, because I concede we should have some and I do think that’s a worthy discussion to have. But just concentrate on the matter at hand: What is the law, exactly? We’ve got this definition going where it doesn’t count for anything except in razor-thin circumstances. Crimes can’t be reconstructed from available evidence, they can’t be recorded, they can’t be intercepted electronically, they can’t be witnessed by anybody but a cop.

And even then, if the cop goes looking for X and he sees Y, both X and Y are illegal…if it isn’t X, again, it doesn’t count.

I’m actually glad we’re somewhat concerned about snooping. It just seems to me that our thinking about it is so sloppy and disorganized, what we’re actually engaged in here is a campaign to jettison laws of any kind — while pretending to be doing something else. Let’s face it, our definition of “privacy” has become so incredibly cockeyed that only complete anarchy will fulfill the expectations that truly prevail over the angriest and loudest of “privacy defenders.”

Is that not at least a worthy concern? I think so.

And if one accepts that it is, and wonders aloud what remedy we have for it, it’s a very simple one. Stop using “The Constitution” as a figure of speech. If something is supposed to have intruded into it, then let’s have a rational discussion about it — after someone has taken the time to cite book, chapter and verse. Otherwise, it’s just so much anarchist twaddle. And sorry, simply saying so doesn’t make me an advocate for Orwellian totalitarianism. Knowing your Constitution is a good thing.

Posted in Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Poisoning Western Civilization | 4 Comments »

The Amazing Dennis Kucinich

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

I’ll post it, most of it, in total because sometimes even one mouse-click is too much to ask of people.

Read it today on Neal’s Nuze page, if you don’t read another thing. Because some of the “class envy” politicians, unlike Kucee, actually have a shot…and I don’t think they know any more than he does…

Kucinich has a long history in congress of trying to shift the tax burden away from low and middle income Americans onto the backs of the high-achievers. In 2003 he sponsored a law that would give a “refundable” tax credit to protect low and middle income people from having to pay Social Security or Payroll taxes. Kucinich, who is chairman of the “Progressive” (that means liberal) Caucus also proposed something he called a “tax dividend” for every man, woman and child. Well, almost every man, woman and child. He wanted to limit the dividends paid to the top 1% of income earners to only 1% of the total tax cut.

Well, there’s our clue. Kucinich doesn’t have any idea in the world how much of the total taxes are paid by the top one percent of income earners … so I asked him two questions:

1. What percentage of total income is earned by the top 1% of income earners?
2. What percentage of total federal income taxes are paid by the top 1% of income earners.

The answers were astounding. Congressman Dennis Kucinich thinks that the top 1% of income earners earns about 60% of all income, and he thinks that they pay about 15% of all income taxes. The fact is that the top 1% of all income earners pull in about 18% of all income and pay 38.8% of all income taxes.

This is an astounding level of ignorance on such an important statistic. You can excuse a mother of three loading up on Happy Meals for her porky little kids at a McDonalds for not knowing this .. .but a member of the Congress?

Posted in Eat The Rich, Elections, Poisoning Capitalism | 1 Comment »

We Don’t Communicate

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

My mood’s been dark the last week or so, and about an hour ago I was grousing away about this phony resolve the nation has been showing about being unified. The substance of my complaint is that the words used, do not describe the intent. Tradition is a poor lodestar here — it says when we unite on something, we agree on a plan. In the 2007-2008 election cycle, though, being united has something to do with all of us feeling the same stuff. Being jovial, morose, amused, suicidal — it is a state of one emotion being decided-upon with pinpoint accuracy, and everybody feels whatever it is all at the same time.

Which inspires a very low quality of leadership in our leaders, or so says my recent concern. We unite in some meaningless emotion, our “leaders” articulate that for us, and then they go off and do whatever they want. Not a recipe for success or freedom in my book.

But that’s the kind of trouble we bring down upon ourselves, when we go through the motions of communicating without actually doing it.

I was given cause to think about this on Sunday. It all started when my lady went to work that morning and forgot to take her lunch with her. Being her Knight in Shining Armor, I volunteered to bring her some. So I grabbed the kid, loaded up the car and scrambled off to the restaurant to pick up some chow.

Tight timeline. But my gal’s food order was precise, and the reputation for service is above average. So in we go, and…uh oh. Language barrier. Not a trivial one. A big, thick, intimidating one.

I can handle language barriers, usually, but this one really got in the way for two reasons.

One: Whenever I was forced to ask the gentleman to repeat himself, he would do so. LOUDER. As if I had a hearing problem; that is all he would do. He would not enunciate. He would not s-l-o-w – d-o-w-n. This is not good. It sends the message that your motives are to make sure if there’s a screw-up, you the service-person cannot be blamed because you’re not the one who did it. You aren’t really trying to connect.

Two: It seemed to me as if there were a great many questions for a relatively simple dish that I’d ordered before. I wondered if I wasn’t on the wrong track. But after the third question that had to be repeated three times, I had begun to just say “yeah, that sounds like a great idea” without having the foggiest notion of what I was doing. Hey, it’s food. Yeah, it’s for my special lady and everything, but her expectations have been lowered in this department. Anyway, I figured my chances for getting everything p-e-r-f-e-c-t were already scuttled.

While this more-complicated-than-need-be order was being filled, the boss saw things weren’t going well and took over. Good business decision. But why was it necessary? And did I get that guy in trouble? I hope not. I was really trying to have a smooth conversation with him, but throughout most if it I had no idea what he was trying to ask me…and he acted like he just didn’t care.

There were another seventeen miles to go between the restaurant and the place where my girlfriend works. En route, the boy’s mother called. The day before she was emphatic that, due to the weather problems we had and the things she had to do, sorry but she had no idea what time she’d be able to pick him up. So she was calling to firm up on a time.

She had a bad cell. A bad one…or I did…or she wasn’t paying enough to have real cell phone service…or I wasn’t. Here it is ten minutes later — and again, I’m finding myself neck-deep in this swamp of “Huh”s and “What”s and “You’re Cutting Out”s.

Say What One More Time Finally I screamed into the earpiece. Perhaps that wasn’t a good thing to do. But God damn, it felt good…and hey, we were able to figure out where she needed to pull off the road to really talk on her phone. I know — it was just plain rude. Shouldn’t do it. Well, it was that or run the car off the road. I’d reached my saturation point. I simply couldn’t handle hearing that dreadful word “What?” one more m—f—ing time. I am SO sick of that word “What?”

From that, and from this phony Obama phenoma, I have come to realize something.

I think it is vitally important to the future of our society, that we come to an abrupt stop in this thing we do. You know what I’m talking about, by now: Pretending to communicate. I think we should stop doing it.

I think when we fail to communicate, usually by communicating all half-assed, we should simply admit we aren’t getting it done.

Stop trying.

To pretend to communicate, and not do it, injures us in all kinds of ways…ways in which we are left relatively intact, if we just abstain from the whole pointless exercise.

This kind of fits in to my complaint about technology lately. What is technology in the 21st century? Apart from this music-listening fad that’s going on, it’s pretty much all cell phones. Now, really: A generation ago you left work, maybe hit the store on the way home, and until you showed up on the doorstep ready to kiss your sweetie hello and ask each other how the day was, you had no way to get ahold of each other.

Did you survive?

Yes, you did.

Today, we cannot. Oh horror of horrors, you might forget to go to the store. Or she might have needed six things, and told you to pick up only five. Or maybe you don’t know where to find it. It seems so vital and important now, even though deep down we all know it is not.

Is this constant faux-communication then, some sort of comfort to us, if not a necessity? Again, it does not appear so. The weekend comes, and you leave the house to do A. Your cell phone rings. It’s the boss. Now you have to do B. Maybe your sweetie calls and you need to do C, D and E. Here it is 2008…and you stand an excellent chance, better-than-even odds, of failing to get A done — and by the time it’s dark, you’re probably still going to be out there trying to get all this other stuff done. Thirty years ago you would have simply left the house, gotten A done, and come home again.

And the “Can You Here Me Now” stuff? It has become the stuff of comedy. But it’s not funny, in a way, because in this information age communicating with each other has become synonymous with getting things done. It’s pretty much a given, now, that if we cannot pass ideas off to each other, we will accomplish little…and we’re laughing at ourselves because we can’t do that. Not with any reliability. And it seems, from my point of view, as if the comedy has become less the “good natured chuckle” thing, and more the “don’t know whether to laugh or cry” thing.

Phil gave me props for recommending this movie. That very same day, my brother copied me on an e-mail, a frustrated reply he was sending to the customer service department of his wireless provider. He mentioned the movie too — his way of sending me the same thanks for the same recommendation. One of the things that happens in the movie in question: In the five hundred years that begin more-or-less now, the English language is destroyed, replaced by a muttering dialect that is a hodge-podge of valley-girl slang and rap-music outbursts.

I think we’re there, or nearly there. You go to do some business at some place that has a “service counter” — do you expect to get service? No, not really. We seem to be universally frustrated with the fact that very few people, anymore, care to express themselves in such a way that they’re truly understood, or understand what is told to them in a way that they truly get it. The problem long ago passed the point where it had begun to interfere with everyday business, and nowadays, we’re practically paralyzed from it. Ordering a plate of hot food has become a more challenging ordeal, with more questionable prospects for consistent success, than building a new fence around a pasture, digging a new well, or putting a new roof on a barn. It’s a simple task made artificially complicated, along with a bunch of other tasks that should be equally simple.

Our cultural ability to get things done is now in a steep nosedive. And until we start communicating — or at least, stop going through the motions of doing it without actually doing it — I don’t think we’re ever going to get out of this nosedive.

Posted in Everyday Dimwits, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 1 Comment »

Let’s Stay Divided

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

Well, it would appear Iowa and New Hampshire don’t agree on very much.

But I think this shaking-up of candidates on both the Republican side and on the donk side has been good for the country because it’s got us talking about things. And from all that talking about things, even at this late date, I’ve been learning a lot. This dosey-doh between Hillary and Obama, for example, has taught me a lot about what it means when someone says “only (blank) can unite the country“…(blank) being the candidate of choice.

Mood icons Recent events have educated me about that verb. “Unite.” It doesn’t mean what a lot of people think it means. I’ve talked to too many people who are giddy about Obama, for example…vociferously opposed to my objections that Obama’s positions on the issues, while perhaps defined to some cursory extent, remain so pliable as to be meaningless.

They start out “educating” me about where Obama stands on this-or-that…

…and before they get too far, end up babbling some jibber-jabber about “charisma.”

It is not my intent to single out Obama here, for I think this is where the country has gone in general. And it’s a recent thing. Four years ago I would have similar objections to a John Kerry, and a Kerry fan would “educate” me with those four wonderful magic words: “Go to his website.” Missing the point entirely that it’s one thing to articulate a position, and a different thing entirely to commit onesself to that position.

It’s kind of like the story about the pig, the chicken, and the ham-and-egg breakfast. The chicken was involved with the breakfast, the pig was committed.

But four years ago, if I lowered myself to hitting a candidate’s website to learn about his position, at least I’d probably find one there. It might change the very next day — that was the point of using websites, although nobody said so out loud.

Nowadays, it’s even worse. “Positions” are things that are stated as vaguely as possible. Not in such a way as to involve any kind of a plan…not a plan you’d implement for your own private matters, anyhow. If you wanted to win at them.

In this way, Obama left himself open for a good skewering lately by John Gibson:

Obama was talking about the Iraq war — which he opposed — and the surge — which he opposed — and he said Democrats deserve credit for the reduction of violence in Iraq and he said:

“…Much of the violence has been reduced because there was an agreement with tribes in Anbar Province… Sunni tribes… who started to see after the Democrats were elected in ’06… you know that, the Americans may be leaving soon, and we’re going to be left very vulnerable to the Shias. We should start negotiating now.”

Obama is going to argue in a debate that the Dems who wanted to quit immediately, surrender now, were the ones who won the war?

I would be anxious to hear John McCain or Rudy Giuliani reply to that assertion. Obama’s line appears to be: We win wars by refusing to fight them.

I keep hearing about how we need a candidate that will “unite the country.” My point is, I think we’re not really communicating with each other when we say this. Unite the country, according to tradition, has something to do with coming up with a plan that will draw widespread support. Obama comes out and says: “We should start negotiating now.” Is that the plan?

It isn’t one that will draw widespread support. It will draw DailyKOS support, sure, but I don’t think that is what most people mean when they talk about uniting the country.

Blogger friend Phil made some good points about Obama’s evasiveness lately, and I think his words echo some doubts a lot of people might have about things, even though the message itself has yet to find resonance. But he really nailed it, I think.

In the paper the other day I saw a picture of Bara[c]k Obama with his campaign slogan on the podium in front of him. It was also plastered all over supporter’s signs behind him. It said:

Change We Can Believe In

I hate to state the obvious, but that doesn’t mean anything. Worse, it means nothing on purpose.

The candidates and pudits alike are all talking about “change” as if it means something. Something even semi-specific.

It means whatever the listener wants it to mean. That’s why they use it. It’s calculated ambiguity. Triangulation. Whatever you want to call it. [emphasis mine]

It bears repeating: Calculated ambiguity. Uniting the country…through calculated ambiguity.

As I said, it is not my intent to single-out the Senator from Illinois. Across the board, mostly with donks but lately I notice with Republicans as well…in 2008, I see the candidates who attract the greatest hope for “uniting the country,” are the ones who have left themselves the greatest latitude for changing positions later without shattering covenants, be they explicitly stated or implied. They are the candidates who address roomfuls of people, and in so doing, exert control over the mood in those roomfuls of people. The “charisma” candidates. The candidates who achieve unity by means other than by stating a position.

I’m left to arrive at one conclusion, and only one.

I think “unite” has something to do with dictating a mood, now. It has less to do with actually forming a plan, than it ever did before. You do what we call “uniting” in 2008, and what you do is set a current mood. You make the current mood “happy,” for example, and anybody who would just as soon feel sad or sober, simply doesn’t count. Or vice-versa.

That is what unity means today, I’m afraid. And it has its place. People who are given to communicating by articulating what “everybody feels,” by dishing out one baritone proclamation after another of the bullying, coercive, “Am I The Only One Who” variety…don’t like to wrestle with the thorny issue of the individual…that irritating guy off in the corner who might not be so easy to bundle up into some overly-simplistic statement about what “the room” is thinking.

They like all persons in the immediate vicinity to be united. To feel all energized at the same time, or all disappointed at the same time. So that our leaders — and our not-leaders as well, the ineffectual middle-management suck-ups, the bootlickers, the show-offs, the guys who simply laugh louder than everybody else — can easily figure out where the parade is going, and run to the front of it.

In short, I’ve come to the conclusion that most of the time when the word “unite” is used, that is what it means. Don’t unite the priorities. Or the plan. Or the concerns. Just unite the mood, and the rest will follow.

The problem I see with it, is that the rest won’t follow. Uniting a mood is not solving a problem.

So looking for reasons to be encouraged by the primaries, that is the one that I find. A bunch of sycophants want Iowa and New Hampshire to agree on things, and the two states have agreed on precisely nothing. This frustrates many, I think, and I’m glad for that if for nothing else.

Posted in Elections, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 1 Comment »

Best Sentence XXI

Sunday, January 6th, 2008

Contrary to conventional medical wisdom, the cause of autism is not primarily genetic, but is a complex combination of genetics and environment. Genetics, so to speak, load the gun, and environment pulls the trigger.

Healing the New Childhood Epidemics: Autism, ADHD, Asthma, and Allergies. The Groundbreaking Program for the 4-A Disorders, Kenneth Bock, M.D., and Cameron Stauth, ISBN: 978-0-345-49450-4, p. 17.

I think that right there is one of two big ways we are screwing up with our children, particularly our male children. We think it has to be all-environmental or all-natural. All-nature or all-nurture. One or t’other. How these little idiosyncrasies can be any kind of blend, is something we adults tend to forget. Easily. Even the intellectual giants among us.

The other mistake we’re making, is in assessing what is “busted” in the first place. Things that used to be synonymous with plain ol’ masculinity are — nowadays — thought to be indicative of some kind of disease. Not good…not good at all.

Especially when, all the stuff that we use nowadays that supposedly makes life worth living, we have thanks to the contributions of people like Nikolai Tesla and Thomas Edison and Isaac Newton. People who would surely have been diagnosed with this-thing or that-thing, if they were children nowadays in our ultra-pure and ultra-pasteurized world…

Posted in Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Poisoning Masculinity, Poisoning Science | 3 Comments »

Houseflies

Friday, January 4th, 2008

We started the New Year on a decidedly low note. By “we,” I mean in the office. A wonderful friend is now gone, his departure an unexpected one, and we’ve been struggling with a problem as old as death itself: How do we keep our thoughts properly trained on a future without him, when the past burns so brightly?

Good times. Working together, playing together, mutual appreciation for valuable talents that made money, and equally valuable talents that did not. Things he said that might’ve had hidden meaning — or might not have. Things we could’ve done to lighten a heavy load — or maybe we couldn’t have, or maybe if we could have, would not have so lightened.

His flame was extinguished quietly, while we clinked glasses and renewed our annual pledge to live together in brotherly love. Candle

We’re left in shock, to ponder the meaning of this little holiday pledge we made, and to look at old pictures. “Team” pictures. And wonder how much time is left behind each one of those other faces.

So…Iowa has “happened” now, and I’m supposed to have an opinion, is that it? Sorry, I don’t much have it in me. I do seem to notice an overall trend where candidates from this party or that party, lag behind for no explainable reason if they value life too much. If they think it’s too worthy of a solid defense. Their counterparts, the candidates who find new and creative ways to cheapen life, to say it is a casually exchanged thing, a fungible thing — they surge ahead and nobody can explain why.

I think I can explain why.

Houseflies are not burdened with philosophy. By that I mean, they don’t wrestle with the meaning of life. They aren’t equipped for it and there would be little point to it. This spares the housefly from pain and discomfort which visits itself upon we, the humans. When life is, by design, a quick and casual thing then thinking is unnecessary. You do what is expected of you until it’s time to clock out.

And so it seems to me Iowa has been won by “phenomenon” candidates, those candidates who spent energy that convention earmarks for defining issues, to instead buttress their positions as “rock stars.” The surnames of those candidates have become names of fads and fashions.

We’re running a twenty-one-month election. It doesn’t seem to have been anybody’s idea. Nobody thinks it’s a step in the right direction, but we’re doing it. And ironically, by running an election longer than any election that has ever come before it, we’re doing a greater job than we have ever done before, of living for the moment. Just for today. Like houseflies.

The nation is swept by this “craze” that says we are no longer entitled to any kind of break from election campaigns. Maybe houseflies aren’t deserving of such breaks. And I suppose it just makes sense that when one man lives like a housefly, he wants all other men to live that way. Meanwhile, I’m reminded of how precious life is, and that if it somehow isn’t, it is personally important to each one of us to make it that way.

Vicious crazy men around the planet want to kill innocent people to make political statements. It seems that if there is one popularly-supported remedy to this problem, it is to make health care universal and affordable, and maybe to increase the minimum wage. Those things would make life more comfortable. But they wouldn’t make it precious. To the contrary: Even a housefly values life more than a “kept” man, whose every necessity in life is provided on a guarantee. There are flyswatters and cobwebs to be avoided.

And so by worshipping rock stars instead of electing presidents, by living our every moment in this election cycle or that one, and by responding to deliberate murderous threats by ignoring the problem and providing more guarantees to ourselves, we’re on the brink of discovering a brand new species. And becoming it.

Any other time I’d courteously disagree with this course, but sympathize nevertheless. Now, I’m having a tough time even sympathizing. How does this seem like a good idea to anybody?

Posted in About Me and My Blog, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 1 Comment »

The Latest Assault on Capitalism

Monday, December 31st, 2007

…involves replacing an iPod, right out of its box, with a note.

If you thought the war on capitalism died with the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, you’d be wrong. Agitators are still hard at work at bringing down capitalism, but now they have a new weapon, the Apple iPod.

When a little girl in Maryland recently opened her Christmas presents, she thought she’d received exactly what she’d been hoping for, an iPod. Unfortunately, when she actually opened the box, instead of an iPod, she received a very strange note instead:

RECLAIM YOUR MIND FROM THE MEDIA SHACKLES. READ A BOOK AND RESURRECT YOURSELF.

TO CLAIM YOUR CAPITALISTIC GARBAGE GO TO YOUR NEAREST APPLE STORE.

The girl’s father, Joe Ellis, returned the box and note to the Walmart store where he had originally purchased it. According to Fox 5, he was not the only customer to have had his iPod switched for anti-capitalist propaganda.

I really wasn’t aware until now there was some kind of inimical relationship going on between our free-market way of life, and PEOPLE WHO USE CAPITAL LETTERS ALL THE DAMN TIME. I’m going to update my “reasons to support capitalism” file accordingly.

Posted in Poisoning Capitalism | No Comments »

Worship of the Zero

Saturday, December 22nd, 2007

Mike over at Mike’s Eyes came across that silly book about what the world would be like without humans. Mike is a decent Ayn Rand fan, so he was appropriately horrified.

It’s all about the fear of responsibility. I reach that conclusion by the method of durable thinking that is a method of last resort, the process of elimination. Something makes this appealing to a large selection of people. Not just acceptable. Appealing. How can you have some genuine passion for this, when the point isn’t that your existence is genuinely toxic, it’s simply that you aren’t getting anything worthwhile done and lack even the distant potential to make the world a better place. How do you nurture passion for pointlessness? Fear of responsibility is the only thing that makes sense.

Well, it’s more than process of elimination that points to that. Some diligent thinking about what kind of folks we’re dealing with here, will also point in the same direction. These can’t exactly be shakers-and-movers can they? The go-get-em type? If that were the case, they wouldn’t be here. We don’t need to ponder suicide directly in order to think on that awhile. You sit around on your ass and say “the world would be much nicer if…” and no matter what comes after the word “if,” when all you do about it is just talk about it a lot more and buy or sell books that talk about it some more, it can be safely concluded that you’re something of a slug. A carping whining little nancy-bitch. So with that kind of character defined, fear-of-responsibility, you see, just kind of naturally falls into place.

In 2007, it’s safe to say, it is much tougher to die off from lack of ambition than it ever has been in the history of the human race. And with Christmas right around the corner, your bookstores are brimming over with treatises about atheism, which is essentially the randomness of life on earth, especially mankind; global warming, which is the next step, a study about how earth’s ecosystem is glorious, sacred and pristine — except for us. And, thinly disguised dysgenics movements, such as Les U. Knight’s crackpot group and this strange “world without us” item.

Yes, we’re up to our eyeballs in it lately. But it’s not a conspiracy, it’s a sequence of natural consequences.

Western civilization lacks predators. Visible ones, anyway. There are no day-to-day threats. You just avoid traffic accidents until you get to your little cube farm, stay there for eight hours, and avoid traffic accidents until you get home — that’s about it. Just as houseflies are a lot easier to swat in climates that are lacking in frogs and spiders, through our lack of everyday survival challenge we have become fat and lazy and dumb. So it just stands to reason we have fat, lazy dumb books to read. The dumb books tell us everything is pointless, there is no good and there are no evil acts, save one, and that one evil act is standing up for yourself and defending your property, and those who are depending on you.

After thousands of years of natural culling of the apathetic from the herd, suddenly nihilism is affordable. The gene pool suffers.

Posted in Ayn Rand Spins, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 1 Comment »

Computer Generated Ad Cluster Mishaps

Thursday, December 20th, 2007

Well, this morning’s “MSN Today” page was an interesting entry into the annals of “When did Microsoft decide I’m a woman?” Except today they seem a little undecided on that score.

Hmmm…now why would today’s males be nervous about approaching potential dates…I wonder…I wonder…

Posted in Glad I Learned About This, Poisoning Masculinity | No Comments »

War on God

Tuesday, December 18th, 2007

They aren’t even bothering with facts anymore. Tony Snow says there is a “War on God,” and our leftists just ritually denounce it as a big bunch of empty ravings as if Snow simply imagined the whole thing.

Well, Snow didn’t imagine the whole thing. We have become quite brittle and inflexible about the completeness of our secularism. Last year, for example, a valedictorian was unplugged during a graduation ceremony — for mentioning God.

Clark County School District officials and a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union say administrators followed federal law when they cut the microphone on Foothill High School valedictorian Brittany McComb as she began deviating from a pre-approved speech and reading from a version that mentioned God and contained biblical references.

“There should be no controversy here,” ACLU lawyer Allen Lichtenstein said. “It’s important for people to understand that a student was given a school-sponsored forum by a school and therefore, in essence, it was a school-sponsored speech.”

I find the ThinkProgress write-up interesting because it is sufficiently brazen to just come out and tell people what to think, with no foundation whatsoever…while accusing Tony Snow of doing exactly that. And the MSNBC write-up is interesting because it pretends something might be in violation of “federal law,” when it’s impossible to logically sustain that this is the case. That is, assuming the “federal law” is the First Amendment to the Constitution. The only specific rule of any kind mentioned by the article is a “policy” (which seems to have required that Ms. McComb be allowed to continue speaking).

To deny there is a War on God is, in my view, just plain silly. I think everyone with an attention span that exceeds any pre-existing agenda, would have to concede the word “God,” or any statement supportive of any monotheistic faith, has become a real hot-button item in any public forum whether “state-sponsored” or not. I think most of us have a lot of concerns about how distantly a non-religion-neutral thing can be related to state sponsorship, and still manage to generate this friction over church-state intermingling. Look how hard that school voucher thing was fought. You say I wanna take my kid out of public school, the district gives you a voucher for two or three thousand bucks, you use it to pay the tuition at a parochial school — oh dear oh dear, we have an establishment-clause issue. Yeah, the Supreme Court injected reason into it, and perhaps cemented it in, but why did the issue ever get that far?

Whoever is willing to be reasonable about this, would further have to concede this is a modern-day event with organized effort behind it. It’s not about original intent with regard to the Establishment Clause. Gosh & golly, if that were the case, let’s inspect Mr. “Wall of Separation” himself, Thomas Jefferson. Just dig up any of his correspondence. Choose some at random. Written while he was President, before, after, during his service as Secretary of State…anything you want. Pluck out the “Wall” letter to Nehemiah Dodge and the Danbury Baptists, if you want. See how he signs off. God, God, God, God, God, God, Heavenly Father, Father of Man, blah blah blah…this wasn’t a guy who thought we should sanitize our society, even our government sponsored society, from mention of a deity.

Nor did anyone of any importance imagine such an unyielding interpretation of the Establishent Clause for the next, oh, century and a half. The Day of Infamy speech, President Roosevelt says “with the unbounding determination of our people – we will gain the inevitable triumph – so help us God.” [emphasis mine]

A generation later, give or take, something happened. This is undeniable. You can’t make a speech like that now. Not without a lot of bellyaching and grousing sure to follow.

If that isn’t a “War on God,” then what do you call it?

Update: Roger Simon, coming across a transcript of the Hugh Hewitt show with West Wing writer Lawrence O’Donnell as guest, makes some interesting points about this. It seems, perhaps, the War on God not only exists — but exists because it is a War of Least Resistance.

HH: Okay. And do you believe, would you say the same things about Mohammed as you just said about Joseph Smith?

LO’D: Oh, well, I’m afraid of what the…that’s where I’m really afraid. I would like to criticize Islam much more than I do publicly, but I’m afraid for my life if I do.

HH: Well, that’s candid.

LO’D: Mormons are the nicest people in the world. They’re not going to ever…

HH: So you can be bigoted towards Mormons, because they’ll just send you a strudel.

LO’D: They’ll never take a shot at me. Those other people, I’m not going to say a word about them.

HH: They’ll send you a strudel. The Mormons will bake you a cake and be nice to you.

LO’D: I agree.

HH: Lawrence O’Donnell, I appreciate your candor.

I appreciate O’Donnell’s candor too, but perhaps not in the way that Hugh meant. In fact, when I first read those statements, my mouth dropped open.

They are particularly disturbing if you compare the estimated number of Muslims in the world (1.5 billion) to the number of Mormons (12 million) and the likelihood of either group being responsible for, say, a bombing in the New York subway. Of course, O’Donnell is clearly aware of this – all too clearly. And he has decided to opt out.

This means he has opted out as well of a whole series of the most important questions of our time, such as are there moderate Muslims, can Islam be reformed, what is the relationship between religious doctrine and violence, what is jihad, what is dhimmitude, can true democracy exist under Islam, is it terminally expansionist in its ideology, can women and homosexuals achieve their rights under Sharia law, what happens when Sharia expands into Western society, etc.

Huh. And they call us chickenhawks.

Posted in Poisoning Christianity | No Comments »

All-Ethnic TV

Monday, December 17th, 2007

I think I finally figured out what bothered me about this. It’s not that it is a negative thinly disguised as a positive — although it is exactly that. When you say a thing is “all-(blank),” you are saying something that is oppositional to (blank) has been declared an undesirable agent, and providing reassurances that the thing has been cleansed of that corrupting agent. In this case, the corrupting agent is people…

But no, what really bothers me is the substance. It’s been hard for me to define what’s distressing about it, because the substance is left undefined. That this is an asset to Sacramento, is just sort of…implied. On how the asset actually is an asset, the article is silent. We’re talking about “KBTV, Sacramento’s all-ethnic TV station.” What — exactly — is the point to this channel? Can the mission statement be presented in plain terms, using active-voice, without straying into something nasty?

Ben Reyes, a Sacramento graphic designer, spent a recent Saturday night curled up in front of “Star In My Heart,” a Korean soap opera dubbed in Spanish.

“Star In My Heart” can be seen weekends on KBTV, Sacramento’s all-ethnic TV station.

“It’s a good family drama, the way American soaps used to be,” said Reyes, 45, who’s of Mexican, Greek, Seminole, Jamaican and Arabic descent.

Like Reyes, KBTV Global Television reflects the Central Valley’s many flavors with programs in Russian, Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Spanish, Hindi-Punjabi and Hmong.

“We are the face of California – it does not have a color,” said advertising director Edgar Calderon, a Nicaraguan immigrant. “We are a bridge between different communities – we are the community.”

Unlike other ethnic stations available to Sacramento viewers, KBTV mixes locally produced shows with nationally and internationally syndicated programming. Some local shows are produced by station staff; others are by local producers who buy airtime and sell their own advertising.

Calderon, who says he watches “Star In My Heart” for “the good-looking señoritas,” said KBTV’s viewers range from teens who tune in for music to “older folks who are great fans of news and cultural events.”

The station was born in 2005 when former newspaper executive Frank Washington and a group of investors bought the station for $1.5 million.

“I was inspired to do this when I found out there was this huge Russian-speaking community here I didn’t know about,” Washington said. “This is a way to open conversation and provide some understanding of who these people are and what they’re about.”

I just don’t understand how a huge Russian-speaking community is assisted by a resource dealing in Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Spanish, Hindi-Punjabi and Hmong — nor will the article explain it to me. Seems to me some kind of line has been crossed; there’s an agenda dealing more with exclusion than inclusion.

The headline to this story, as it appears in the Sacramento Bee front page, is “ALL-ETHNIC TV HAS GLOBAL VOICE.” Sorry…speaking as a six-foot straight white guy with ten fingers and ten toes — maybe my opinion isn’t wanted here — my initial impression is that a global voice would be truly inclusive. Something that facilitates easy communication amongst a variety of cultures, both now and in the future. If an immigrant family comes here, some of their members need some individual counseling in order to learn English faster and they receive this assistance…THAT would be in keeping with a “global voice,” to me.

The glimmerings I get from this story are that “ethnic” is some kind of polished diplomatic slang for “Not English-Speaking and White.” And it’s tough for me to see how you can bring such a product to market and find consumers who are demanding it, without involving negativity and prejudice somehow. If I’m here in Sacramento and I’m Russian and I speak Russian, and I’m too lazy to learn the native language of the country…I want Russian. Right? Same goes for Mandarin, and everything else on the list. Some fruit-salad of “all ethnic” isn’t going to do me a whole lot of good.

Not unless my problem has more to do with personal likes & dislikes, than with language barriers. As in, those darn English-speaking American white people, I just want to get away from them when I watch TV in my own home.

I dunno. Maybe I’m reading too much into it. Maybe “all ethnic” stuff is the pathway to racial harmony after all.

But if that’s the case, then can someone please explain to me the thread (of nine comments, as of this writing) that appears under the story on Sac Bee’s website? I’ll save you some time: It’s a whole lot of finger pointing about who is & isn’t being a racist. You know, I didn’t make it that way. I didn’t even participate. But I honestly don’t know how a different result can come from a story like this. It contains zip, zero, zilch, nada definition for the word “ethnic” and it’s up to the reader to presume the E-word is a reference to all cultures present in the Sacramento area SAVE ONE.

I don’t know for sure that that is the intended meaning. But one thing I do know for sure, is that the story promotes the use of lots of different languages in a community as a good thing.

You know, the last time I recall the use of Sacramento’s zillion languages being promoted as a good thing, was the occasion of that goofy Time Magazine article that conferred a “most diverse” award on us.

70 Languages, One System
Three weeks ago, Yun Qian (Cindy) Zhong, a sixth-grader assigned to Randy Helms’ homeroom, walked into William Land Elementary School for the first time. She had all the gifts of a model student—intelligence, friendliness and an eagerness to learn. There was just one problem: Zhong, an immigrant from Canton, China, didn’t speak a word of English.

Helms didn’t panic. His students and their parents hail from as far away as Vietnam, Mexico, Germany, Portugal, Panama and, fortunately, China. By the end of Zhong’s second week, Helms, with help from the Cantonese-speaking students in his class, had taught Zhong to count past 10 as well as to answer yes and no to questions translated for her.

A William Land education doesn’t come easy. The school is located in a poor community downtown (90% of Land’s kids qualify for free lunch), the classes are big (Helms alone teaches 32 students) and language barriers are routine (many kids’ parents speak no English). Kids are tested for English proficiency within 30 days of enrolling; most score from 1 to 5 out of a maximum of 10. Across Sacramento, educators face similar challenges. How does a school district of 53,400 students communicate with a parent group that speaks more than 70 languages? And perhaps even more pressing, how much do cultural differences contribute to the fact that Latino and African-American children do not perform as well on standardized tests as white and Asian kids in the city’s integrated schools?

The whole article read like that. When the time came to fixate on the advantages and challenges of such a diverse community, the facts rained in heavy on the challenges and very light, to be charitable about it, on any advantages. With the investment of a great amount of effort, a girl might be brought up-to-speed on a very utilitarian use of English, and it was already time to hand out the applause and cigars. With much hard work still ahead.

And you know, I’m sure the applause is deserved. But this is not the story of a strength, it’s quite the opposite. It’s a handicap. It’s an overburdened public resource with too many languages in it. To celebrate this, is just bizarre. It’s like a recovering alcoholic throwing a house party to celebrate, not the fact that he’s been clean for a year, but that he became an alcoholic in the first place. Or a cancer patient throwing a bash not to celebrate that she’s still among the living, but the anniversary of discovering her first tumor.

When Armstrong & Getty pursued exactly that train of thought, our illustrious mayor sought to engage a letter-writing campaign to invite the FCC to clamp down on them. One of the things I remember them saying, was something I thought was pretty reasonable — you are “nuts” if you think it is a good thing, or any kind of “progress,” to have seventy languages in one school. Apparently, that was enough for Heather Fargo to try to get ’em off the air. Huh, that’s funny. This was about a year after the September 11 attacks. Ever since that time, I keep hearing how “dissent is patriotism” and that the War on Terror is responsible for the death of freedom of speech, and a whole mess of other constitutional liberties that are supposed to be in peril.

It doesn’t look that way from where I sit. I’m seeing the biggest shot of Orwellian nonsense coming in from the P.C. side of things, and in late 2007 I perceive it to be rounding a corner. Exclusion is inclusion, fragmentation is cohesion, umptyfratz-many languages is wonderful intra-community communication, and “ethnic” is double-plus good.

But most of all, I worry about this message that hatred is love. Half the stuff I read in the paper, it seems at times, if you were to simply take all the skin colors mentioned and reverse them it would be noxious bigotry of the kind no reasonable mind could possibly deny. I’m still trying to keep an open mind. But it looks like the folks who make the decisions about what kind of messages are to be put out about this stuff, and how much of a boost the messages get as they travel far & wide — they don’t seem to want the “common people” to share thoughts and ideas easily. They seem to want to be leaders of masses that are fractured, living in distantly different communities, unable to reach across the boundaries, prone to confusion and language barriers as thick as can possibly be managed. It’s like our municipal, county and state leaders have something to hide, and they know a “diverse” electorate that speaks a hundred different languages, will have a tough time catching on to whatever shell game is being played.

I know, I shouldn’t think stuff like that. But I just can’t shake the thought out of my head. If I had a magic wand, and I waved it, and tomorrow morning everybody would wake up wearing exactly the same skin color they already have…but suddenly speaking ALL THE SAME LANGUAGE — would this cause a panic? Would someone possessing great amounts of power have a lot to lose from such a thing happening? I dunno. I’ve had the feeling that that is the case, before; I have it still, after reading this “story”; after living in this city for a decade and a half, it seems I should have been able to shake it by now — were there nothing to it. But in the meantime, I read about this local push to drop academic standards so that the kids in these schools can graduate, with anemic grasps on things like…language and reading comprehension.

I’m afraid we’ve all been feasting on something very nasty and toxic for a very long time, in large doses. And we’re just getting sicker and sicker on this steady diet of whatever it is. I know it doesn’t have a lot to do with “color-blindness”; that’s a pretty easy thing to define, and it is certainly not what I see in front of me here.

Posted in Poisoning Western Civilization | No Comments »

Common Ground Between Atheists and Christians

Sunday, December 16th, 2007

Atheism This is a list of ten things upon which atheists and believers agree, or on which they ought to agree. Supposedly.

I agree with every single item on the list.

Except the ones that deal in some way with my supposed fallibility, of course…since I am perfick.

And Number 9. Number 9 is pretty much crap. Well…it’s half-right, half-crap.

Atheists do so much whining lately. Not all of them, but most of them. A bunch of douchebag whiners. You can’t be much more of a big droopy pathetic whining bitch than filing lawsuits to get everything into line to comport with your personal viewpoint of the universe and just keep on filing ’em year after year after year until you get your way…like a little brother whining to his mommy about losing his stash because he landed on Park Place with a hotel on it.

But I should add, as a disclaimer, there are some cool atheists out there. Some. A few. Okay…end of disclaimer.

Oh, and Number One. I really do super-agree with Number One. Great point. One that should be remembered more often. I agree with that preamble point about people dying, even more. Nails it shut.

Posted in Poisoning Christianity | No Comments »

Suddenly Susan

Sunday, December 16th, 2007

America's Hat We were following a trackback and we stumbled across this thread on Moorewatch.

I’ve already been scolded elsewhere for using the word “canuck” — some people feel it’s on par with the n-word. Well, this dimbulb woman is certainly a silly canuck.

Canadians are like citizens of any other country — they’re individuals. Kinda. Sorta. Actually, that sort of runs into some problems…you round up a thousand Canucks, and ask them about Michael Moore, you won’t really get back a thousand different opinions. To the extent that these problems do exist, in my mind this is just evidence of the damage that socialism inflicts on the individual.

That just goes to show what a kick-ass place America is. For now. Until the damn dirty socialists can make some inroads on this place. But for now, for some real bonehead statements, I mean for a reliable supply, we’ll have to rely on that idjit canuck Susan.

Oh and by the way — can we all agree that the definition of treason is undergoing a change, given that we can’t lock Michael Moore up for anything? I mean, let’s all just decide our separate ways whether or not this is a good thing. But I think everyone paying the slightest bit of attention to what’s going on would have to agree that if Michael Moore can walk around as free as you and me, there’s a change going on. All these dirty foreigners are typing their smarmy crap into these forums on the innernets, with these smug smirks on their faces because they’ve been watching these phony-baloney “documentaries” put together by Michael Moore…an American citizen…enjoying American protections, including constitutional freedoms and protection by the United States military.

A couple generations ago, he’d have had the life expectancy of a July snowball fight. And we’ve made him into a gazillionaire.

Let’s just file that one under “America ain’t perfect.” Hey, humility is a good thing sometimes…even when it gets a little tough to hang on to some of it.

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Man Argues About Evolution and Removes Himself From It

Sunday, December 16th, 2007

Okay now this leads to, in fact I would say makes absolutely compulsory, a fascinating train of thought…

English backpacker Alexander Christian York, 33, was on Friday sentenced to a maximum of five years jail for the manslaughter of Scotsman Rudi Boa in January last year.

Mr Boa, 28, died on January 27 after being stabbed by York at the Blowering Holiday Park, near Tumut.
:
The Scottish couple and York, neighbours at the caravan park, were becoming friends and spent the night of January 27 drinking at the Star Hotel in Tumut.

However, towards the end of the night, an argument between York and the pair about creationism versus evolution escalated into a shouting match at the pub.

The couple, both biomedical scientists, had been arguing the case of evolution, while York had taken a more biblical view of history.

The creationist stabbed the evolutionist in a crime of passion.

Now, let’s figure out what this means based on the things we have good reasons to think. Yesterday, remember, we came across a clip by the late Dr. Carl Sagan that gave us occasion to discuss what we are and how we think things out that we want think out…inspired by an ancient experiment to calculate the size of the earth, we think what we have reason to think here. Not what we want to think, or what others want us to think. We evaluate the evidence and give it our best shot in terms of pondering what’s really going on.

So these guys are becoming fast buddies but the “molded from clay or grown from slime” argument put a fast stop to things, with a manslaughter charge. What happened?

Well, I see the Dawkins disciples are coming out of the woodwork, and the consensus among them seems to be “I checked the article to make sure it was the bible-thumper who lost his temper, and I was right. I’m not surprised.” The obvious implication is that the evolutionist guy tried to use reason and common sense, whereupon the fundamentalist zealot lost his cool, raised his voice, flung spittle around the room, and eventually pulled a sharp weapon and made a martyr out of his opposition.

Problem: I don’t have the luxury of being told by others how these things go down, and just believing it. I’ve seen them first-hand too many times.

I’ve yet to see such an exchange in which all the childish desperation, all that voice-raising and all that adrenaline, is reserved for the faithful, while a reasonable, dispassionate evolutionist tries to talk sense into him. Oh, I hear things encapsulated that way for a re-telling quite often. I’ve yet to see it.

What I see in such dialogs, is derision and plain ol’ snottiness. It emerges on the evolutionary side. It seldom fails. The evolutionist, after all, comes to his conclusion by awarding benefit-of-doubt to a certain place. He engages in the dialog not to persuade by means of reason and fact, but by means of an instruction that all others should award benefit-of-doubt the way he does. If others present fail to heed his counsel, sarcasm is about the only place he can go, from there. He can’t go anywhere else.

The problem is that he arrived at the argument with a lack of evidence, rather than with an abundance of it. God is not supported with evidence, therefore I don’t believe in Him and you shouldn’t either.

I’ve grown weary of such exchanges and have participated in, maybe, ten or twenty percent of all the ones I’ve personally seen. Of the ones I’ve seen, I’d say the phrase “sky fairy” has been used in, oh, maybe two-thirds or three-quarters of ’em. In what context — well, just take a guess. In fact, looking back over all of them, it seems to me the evolutionist understands fully at the very outset that this is a dialog in which nothing can be proven or rebuked, indeed, nothing can be logically attacked or substantiated. With the benefit of the knowledge I’ve gained by watching these exchanges, I see them as exercises in aggravation and nothing more. One-sided aggravation. Like poking a dog with a stick. Or “cat fishing” with a ball of yarn, or a laser-pen. Sorry, but to envision it as anything else, would be to forget the things I’ve seen.

And so I see these discussion, taking place in a bar, or a family kitchen, or on the Internet, as nothing more than exercises in kind of a sick game. It’s a rather simple parlor trick. The result is supposed to be that the religious zealot does more yelling and ends up looking wild-eyed and crazy. Confronted with this, some among the faithful can rise above it. Not everyone can. And so we drink a toast to the memory of the late Mister Boa. But we’ll not participate in this charade that things are proven, scrutinized, revealed or debunked in such exchanges. Nobody ever promised such a thing.

Which means — every now and then, arguing evolutionary theory with one of us wild-eyed religious zealots can end up being a deadly thing. The question with which we are left, therefore, is not how such an insane thing might have happened, but why it doesn’t happen a lot more often. After all, they’re English & Scottish. Alcohol was involved. Do the math.

Now at this point we could engage in a debate about who is more homicidal, the creationists or the evolutionists. We could go at it from that point-of-view…hauling out evidence that indicates Christians are here to protect people and anti-Christians are here to inflict harm. But a higher calling beckons so let’s instead proceed from this point according to the evolutionary theory. Because that is the mark of a well-balanced, sane mind. Being able to view things through the lens of your opposition.

Mr. Boa did some arguing about gene pools, and ended up removing himself from one. The implications are profound.

According to what we call “evolution” in 2007, micro- and macro- are necessarily intermixed because the ultimate goal is not to surmise new & interesting things about biology and zoology, but to disprove the existence of God. Therefore, all of evolutionary theory is intertwined with unified common descent. You have the one-celled creatures, and all of us vertebrates and invertebrates, warm-blooded animals and cold-blooded animals, are descended from the amoeba.

This is done by means of, every now and then, a specimen from one species or another will acquire a trait by means of random mutation. If the trait assists is the competition for food and other resources, all of which are limited, and/or with the activity of reproduction, he trait will make this specimen stronger. Presuming the trait can be inherited by the next generation, therefore, we will over time surely see the trait become more commonplace and eventually it will achieve complete saturation within that species.

On the other hand, if the trait interferes with this acquisition of finite resources or with the process of breeding, all specimens among this species sharing this trait will surely die off and the trait will be relegated to the cruel dustbin of evolutionary history.

Well, it seems Rudi Boa had a trait of arguing about evolution with creationist-types. Probably, according to track-record, using choices-of-words, mannerisms and tactics calculated to be infuriating. Mr. Boa ended up demonstrating the weakness of this trait in the process of propagation of the species.

According to evolutionary theory, therefore, we should not be seeing any more of this behavior. But…thanks to the publication of an entire miniature-library of atheist books in a relatively short time, we’re rather up to our armpits in it for the moment.

The poor Scotsman seems to have dealt a blow to modern evolutionary theory.

How to explain it? Well, one would have to conclude the process of evolution is not yet complete. One would have to further conclude that the gene pool is, therefore, still polluted. With weaker genomes, due for an appointment with Darwin’s Ghost, due to be plucked out from the shallow end, having not yet arrived for the meeting.

No, I’m not advocating violence any more than any other evolutionist guy who says the same sort of stuff. Like any good little Darwinist, all I’m calling for is the identification of weaker specimens, those unfortunates whose time in the evolutionary ecosystem is limited. You can spot them taunting the faithful with words deliberately chose to taunt and to aggravate, like the above-mentioned “sky fairy.” They drive around in cars that have Darwin-fishies on the back bumper with little feet growing out from under them.

They don’t belong here, by their own logic. They are the weaker link.

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I Made a New Word X

Friday, December 14th, 2007

Inspired by this news story about steroids in baseball, I came up with a brand new word. Actually, I came up with two new words. I came up with these words because the steroids-in-baseball thing — you know, we have been hearing about this for a long, long, LONG time.

Making Progress? My son was asking what the deal was with steroids in baseball. And I told him the truth.

I said baseball was essentially a contest to see who could play the game the best, and steroids were like medicine that helped you play better, except there were rules against taking them. So the authorities in charge said, that’s a no-no. That means when someone takes steroids, they have an advantage over everybody else, but they have to make sure they don’t get caught. And so this makes baseball into a contest to see who can hide things the best and who can lie the most convincingly. We don’t like to admit that’s what baseball has become, and so we go through the motions of “getting rid of steroids” without really doing it.

Un∙solve (v.)
1. To toil away at a problem, without making any progress toward solving it.
2. To give the appearance of trying to solve a problem without really trying to solve it.
3. To present onesself as engaged in an effort to solve a problem, while engaged in activity irreconcilable with the supposed intent to solve the problem, or any serious supposition that the problem really is a problem.
4. To form alliances with people under phony pretenses by feigning readiness, willingness and/or ability to solve a problem that concerns them, or is expected to be of concern to them.
5. To present a phony problem as a problem more serious than it really might be, for political purposes.
6. To present a former problem as that has already been solved in relative terms, so that it can be regarded as not-yet-solved, for political purposes.

Un∙prob∙lem (n.)
1. A boogeyman.
2. A real or imagined problem that is presented in exaggerated proportion for political purposes.
3. Anything that highly visible officers or candidates discuss, in great exuberance and with great frequency, as a problem they are engaged in fighting, but with the passage of time and with minimal change in rhetoric, is revealed as a problem that is not actually being fought.

When one makes a study of all our various unproblems, one is exposed rather harshly to the realization that more & faster communication is not necessarily a good thing. Since mass communication has become rapid, efficient and cheap, we’ve been buried in unproblems. Problems we are told to think are very serious, and that this-guyy and that-guy are working very hard to solve — but the status of such worthy endeavors, never seems to change. Ever.

Prior to the information revolution, history presents us with very few examples of unproblems. Politicians that presented us with problems, and themselves as noble warrios engaged in battle against those problems, in the days of old had to actually solve them. Or, at least, achieve some incremental and demonstrable results in fighting the stated problem.

One notable exception to this is FDR and his phony efforts to battle the Great Depression. Roosevelt was the founder of America as a capitalist/socialist hybrid enclave, and the onset of dilatory and lackluster cognitive thinking is quick in a socialist enclave. So in that way, it could be said that Roosevelt doesn’t really count. Is there another example prior to, say, 1960? I really can’t think of one.

Nowadays, we’re so buried in unproblems that we’ve become accustomed to them. Politician says “I’m going to fight such-and-such a problem…” and two years later, deep down we all expect to hear the same rhetoric, about the same boogeyman, with the boogeyman exactly in the same position he’s in now. We don’t think it will be different — ever. Not anymore. Not in our heart-of-hearts.

A few of the unproblems we have in 2007…and these are just off the top of my head…

1. Shoring up Social Security
2. Global Warming
3. Drunk Driving
4. Steroids in Baseball
5. Money in Politics
6. California’s Budget
7. The Energy Crisis
8. Women and Minorities Being Oppressed — C.A.L.W.W.N.T.Y.
9. A.I.D.S. and Cancer
10. World Hunger

You can’t get elected to anything anymore without promising to do battle against all these dragons. Or most of them, anyway. And yet, we simply accept that year after year, not a single one of these battles will be lost, won, or even changed so much as one iota from exactly where they are now.

Solving any one of these unproblems, and more as-yet-unlisted here, has become just an empty ritual. No wonder it isn’t being done. It’s our fault, not the fault of the people we elect. We just don’t know what achievement looks like anymore.

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Never Enough Diversity

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

John Leo says “Diversity is a restless quasi-religion whose missionaries are ever on the move.” Now why, I have to ask, must a movement designed to get rid of something rather than to create more of something, be restless and ever on the move?

Yale already has an impressively vast diversity bureaucracy headed by Nydia Gonzalez, the new chief diversity officer. She is working on a long-term plan, “Diversity Yale 2010 and Beyond.” Each school has its own system of diversity apparatchiks. There’s even a Yale library diversity council with 10 to 16 members and a three-year diversity program. Now Yale’s Coalition for Campus Unity (CCU) is encouraging the residential colleges to create “some kind of diversity-awareness position or board.” A board of, say, ten members in each college would add 120 new officials – another diversity gusher. Last February, Yale continued its long-term program to segment the student body into ever smaller ethnic and sexual groups. It hired a new assistant dean for Native American affairs. Can anyone say that a provost for the transgendered is somehow out of the question?

Why does Yale, or any university, need to keep creating more diversicrats? Undergraduate Robert Sanchez says his group, CCU, “thought most Yale students lacked sufficient cultural awareness,” i.e. a high enough degree of enthusiasm for the diversity movement. Sanchez, according to the Yale Daily News, seems distressed that “when we have these forums and panels we are preaching to the choir because only a certain demographic of students attend the event.”

“Diversity” has an ugly truth to it. It is the one pursuit that, on an intellectual level, is devastated completely — not just intellectually embarrassed, but intellectually devastated — by a simple rhetorical exercise. You supervise a team of ten minorities. Two of them quit. You replace them with two six-foot-tall, right handed, straight white guys. What did you do to the diversity of your team?

The mathematician, or anybody else who works in a formal discipline that has a utilitarian requirement for the d-word…not a political requirement, but a utilitarian one…would have no choice but to answer “you just increased it.” But of course that isn’t the correct answer.

Now, perhaps it’s overstating things to say “diversity” is what we call it when we deal career and economic injury and destruction to straight white guys. Or perhaps that could be called an over-simplification. But the awkward truth of things is that diversity is not race- or gender-neutral. It is a code word to promote the population of, and success of, certain groups of people. Toward other groups of people, it is hostile at worst…apathetic at the very best.

Perhaps the most pernicious canard about the d-word, is that it is costless — a canard left unspoken, although people in positions of great authority are implicitly required to behave as if they think it’s true. The truth is, the d-word cannot be costless. When you are young, you don’t have the opportunity to develop basic aptitudes that involve independence, creativity and resourcefulness, when there are officers occupying high positions for no greater purpose but to ensure that the success of your group against other groups is guaranteed. And enforced. And measured. And…that next year and the year after, there will be more officers working toward exactly that.

Needless to say, your opportunities are similarly denied when you’re a member of the group targeted. It hurts everyone. The thing we’re supposed to be calling “diversity,” on the other hand, really is harmless or ought to be harmless. It’s just this other thing, this quite different thing, to which we’ve started to affix this word. The simple fact that this thing is on a never-ending mission to expand itself, is a red flag the size of a city block all by itself.

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I’m Offended

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

Anyone want to tell me why I shouldn’t be?

A BRITISH children’s author who named a mole Mohammed to promote multiculturalism has renamed it Morgan for fear of offending Muslims. Kes Gray, a former advertising executive, first decided on his gesture of cross-cultural solidarity after meeting Muslims in Egypt.

The character, Mohammed the Mole, appeared in Who’s Poorly Too, an illustrated children’s book, which also included Dipak Dalmatian and Pedro Penguin, in an effort to be “inclusive”. This weekend Gray said he had decided to postpone a reprint and rename the character Morgan the Mole even though there had been no complaints.

Yeah well great, asswipe, the problem is my name happens to be Morgan. So naturally I’m just as offended as hell. Really, really offended. Extra offended. Grrr!!!

Rename it again. Yes, I demands it, I does.

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On the Castle Doctrine, and Race

Tuesday, November 27th, 2007

The radio guys were just talking about Joe Horn’s case, our latest “Castle Doctrine” event.

Link, link, link, link.

Turns out there’s a racial angle to this. The burglars gunned down by Horn, had skin darker than his. Which gives us a lot of stuff about which to think…

Critics of the way the case has been handled say the 911 tape is proof that Horn was predetermined to shoot the men before stepping outside with his gun.

Noting that Horn is white and the suspects were dark-skinned, Quanell X, a Houston activist, has accused the authorities of bias. “Mr. Horn did not have to kill those people,” Quanell X said at a protest on the street where the men were shot. “Mr. Horn became judge, jury and executioner.”

This is just so unbelievably phony. What’s going on here is there are two kinds of people who want to see Horn strung up by his balls. There are the “veal calf state” people who want to get a cultural contract going in which nobody is authorized, or able, to provide for their own defense. With a little bit of diligent reading-of-news day to day, you’ll see this spans a number of issues: We’re supposed to wait helplessly for some state agency to provide our…childrens’ education, our medicine, our next pay raise, our home defense, a retirement plan for our parents — everything. The one thing that doesn’t get nearly as much inspection as it deserves: If the “veal calf state” folks get their way, and we get some gargantual plan going to make sure “everybody gets” whatever goody is being discussed, and you don’t think it’s enough for you and you want to use your own billfold to supplement it…that’s not allowed. This element always seems to be present in all these plans; either already here, or coming soon. I think most rational, middle-of-the-road people, open to the plan but not yet having made up their minds, would deem that worthy of prolonged discussion. But most of the folks who are in business to dish out the stuff we call “news,” tend to gloss right over it.

I can see a good argument for the “thou shalt not supplement with thine own” doctrine in home defense. I don’t sympathize with it, but I can at least see it. I can’t see it with medicine. Or education. But that doctrine is always there. This, it seems to me, ought to make people generally more suspicious than they usually are.

The other group of people who want to see Joe Horn flushed down the tubes, of course, would be the reverse-racists. You know the type. The ones who say it’s not possible to even be a racist, unless you are a caucasian. Nobody will ever admit that burglary is a way of evening up some kind of racial score, of course…but these types will never fail to act that way, when it comes time to discuss what should happen to Mr. Horn.

But here’s what I think is really interesting. In the case of Mr. Horn, these two camps of people are united. Easily and effortlessly. Seamlessly. Obviously, if they were to be divided instead of united, the thing that would bring that about would be — some white guy broke into a black guy’s house, and the black guy pulled out a shotgun and ventilated him. Or…pulled out a crowbar. Or a knife. Used some implement to enforce the Castle Doctrine.

Does this never happen in a country with three hundred million people in it? I find that to be unfathomable. For one thing, a public agency capable of responding to personal emergencies, effectively, reliably, much as a staple as that ought to be, is something more easily acquired by the affluent. And I continue to be told our minorities are generally subjugated to the lower economic strata. This is, I’ve been informed, what led to the Katrina disaster in New Orleans…”George Bush doesn’t care about black people” and all that.

Now, I know exactly where I stand on Joe Horn. I think it’s very important to everybody else, that this guy walk — and if he was black, I’d be saying exactly the same thing. Quanell X, and the people who like to carry Quanell X’s ravings to the airwaves and newspaper pages, may see this as a racial issue; I do not. Nor am I the only one disagreeing with that. Nearly everybody who agrees with me on his situation as it exists now, I daresay, would follow me in staying consistent on the issue if the skin colors were reversed. My viewpoint is simply a desire to return to the old social contract: If you kick in someone’s door to take his stuff, nobody can say what’s about to happen to you and nobody should be able to say what will happen to you, because it’s something you aren’t supposed to do. In other words, in our desire to make things safe, and working with the limited resources to make everything safe, we prioritize appropriately by making life safer for the law-abiding. Black, white, green, purple, paisly I don’t care.

But that other side…the side that favors either reverse-discrimination, to even up “historic wrongs,” or continued propagation of the “veal calf state”…would be deeply split if a story came to light about a white redneck going to the Jailhouse in the Sky when breaking into the house of someone with darker skin. That side would be split. My side would stay unified.

So where’s the story? How come every one of these vigilante episodes that make the news, is a remake of the Bernhard Goetz incident?

To dismiss this casually, you’d have to insist dark-skinned people are committing all the burglaries, and that white people have all the guns. I think we can dismiss those outright. Therefore, this means something.

See, this is strong evidence that our news is being filtered. But it’s also strong evidence of something else: The unity of that other side…this sloppy conglomeration of “payback against white people” activists, and “get rid of every smallest tincture of independence and self-sufficiency” activists…is not being challenged because someone has calculated it would not be able to survive such a challenge. The fissure would be split clean through, and the split would be fatal or near-fatal.

I guess if I’m less cynical, I’m to suppose everyone in journalism wants to win a Pulitzer over the next story that busts the racial divide wide open. And that would explain why, if Joe Horn had darker skin than the two burglars he neutralized, we would not have heard about this. Our reporters are keeping their eyes and ears open for the next Bernhard Goetz or Rodney King incident and they think this might be it.

But if I’m to allow for that, I’m to allow for something else as well. Perhaps there’s something in journalism that makes professionals in that business, sympathize with the veal-calf-state people. It’s always made sense to me that citizens of a veal-calf-state, need the stuff we call “news” a lot more than citizens who take care of themselves. People who are invested in their careers, common sense says, will sacrifice anything to keep those careers going. This theory isn’t so paranoid — it simply says journalists are no different than any other professional. They’ll become activists for whatever political movement will make their commodity more economically viable, and in greater demand from the rest of us.

The racial angle, it seems to me, is simply a powerful engine affixed to this primary agenda, to give it propulsion. It’s really about demolishing the Castle Doctrine. I struggle to remember the last time I heard of a news reporter or editor passing up a chance to show hostility to this doctrine, or any other doctrine that makes people self-sufficient, self-responsible and independent. They just don’t want it. They want a society in which people depend on something external to themselves…because that makes people hungry for this stuff we call “news.”

And so this incident that really has nothing to do with race at all — positions a microphone in front of the mouth of this Quanell character so that we can read a bunch of reverse-racist drivel. Once again, in a world wherein information travels quickly, racial disharmony is to ensue where, if information did not travel so quickly, it would not. A simple situation is about to be made glaringly complicated.

But it isn’t complicated. At all. You don’t want to get shot, don’t take people’s stuff.

Update: I find it to be patently absurd, but sadly somewhat unsurprising, that the Los Angeles Times, or whoever fed this to them, would run a story so casually inserting a quote form Quanell X without delving at least a little bit into his history. How in the world could the quote have been newsworthy and the background not?

Posted in Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Poisoning Masculinity | 1 Comment »

On the War Between Toymakers and Parents

Saturday, November 24th, 2007

“They must hold a contest at the loonie-bin,” said my Dad, “to see who can come up with the craziest idea for a toy.” The year was somewhere between ’72, when we moved from Arizona to Washington State, and ’76 which was our nation’s bicentennial — I can’t pin it down any more exactly than that. The occasion was a commercial advertisement for the toy, or something very much like it, that was and is the Fisher-Price Shake ‘N Go Smashup Speedway. If memory serves, Mom actually sucked in her breath in abject horror. The cars would zip around this figure-eight track, two of them, at slightly different speeds. Sooner or later they would meet at the intersection, and — built to fall apart — both vehicles would send their respective parts flying in all directions, perhaps hundreds of them.

Now, I wanted the toy as much as any other pre-pubescent moppet kid, but I was accustomed to not getting what I wanted. “Puh-LEEZE!?!?!?!?” didn’t work too well in my childhood. And although I would never have admitted it at the time, I could see my mother’s position to a certain point. I had already gone through the heartbreak of rendering many a prized possession useless by losing this-or-that seemingly insignificant part to it. But of course this wasn’t foremost in my mother’s mind, she was worried about the vacuum cleaner.

It’s a generation later.

And I’m just in shock at what I just heard from my son. McDonald’s has this toy they’re distributing with their happy meals, and the toy is this-or-that “Shrek III” character in molded plastic. You take the top half off the bottom half, and there’s a slot in which you put these annoyingly small playing cards. Down under the ass of whatever character it is, there is this red lever, and I had been operating under the assumption that you gently press the lever down to elevate the playing cards so you could take out one at a time.

And I was dead-flatass wrong. It’s a card launcher. The red lever is a “stomp-em” type thing. You give it a good whack, and the “launcher” launches the cards up, toward the ceiling, to float down to the floor God-knows-where.

There’s no use trying to explain this to me. I’m not going to get it.

See, in my world, “cards” are things you play with. You play for fun, you try to win money out of people, you try to get them to take off their clothes. If you really want to push your limits, you use clothespins to pin them against bicycle spokes so that they make funny sounds when you ride your bike.

“Card” and “launcher” don’t have anything to do with each other…in my world. Like my father before me, I’m wondering about contests at the local loonie-bin. You spew these laminated cards up toward the ceiling…for what possible purpose? It’s time to face facts. Someone has to be trying to give someone else a migraine…on purpose.

There is this program called Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends. It has been, for three years at least, one of my son’s favorite shows. It is no longer allowed in my house — because of “Blue.” Blue used to be my favorite of all the imaginary friends. I thought that was so cool — he was so simple. A little blue imaginary friend, presumably dreamed up by a very young child who liked the color blue.

Blue We were watching it one day, and Blue started launching in with — I’ll never forget this — “I’M GOING TO THE ICE CHARADES! I’M GOING TO THE ICE CHARADES! I’M GOING TO THE ICE CHARADES!” And then Blue did the unthinkable: He repeated it…some more…six…more…times.

This was unforgivable. It was explained to me, both by my son and by my girlfriend, that the whole point to the exercise was to show that Blue was becoming annoying to the other imaginary friends. But that didn’t cut it with me. If this was the intended message, Blue could have repeated himself three times. Maybe even just two times. He did it NINE times…which had one, and only one, possible purpose. To give parents headaches.

Playing cards…ultra-miniature playing cards, no larger than the smallest size of Post-It Note…are being launched toward ceilings. This has what to do with what? Once again, our toy-makers seem to be going out of their way to give parents migraines. Giving the children something fun to do, perhaps educating them, giving them a few more angles of perspective from which to perceive the world and broaden their horizons — this is all secondary. Too many of our toy designers and toy makers seem to regard it as a primary mission, to make parents’ hair fall out of their heads.

The war is on.

Where do we go from here? Well, it seems to me that scattering little bits of laminated cardboard around the room is far too random. Not nearly destructive enough.

I have an idea for a robot. As soon as the technology becomes available, the robot should be able to make some educated judgments about how much things cost. This loveseat is worth maybe fifty bucks…that sectional over there is brand-new, retails at $1700. Given that, it should wander over to the sectional and spew raspberry jam, or blue ink, all over the sectional. Then it could waddle out to the garage, walk straight past the $1500 Toyota, over to where the $80 thousand Porsche Targa is parked, and do a number on it with steel wool.

You know, take the randomness out of it.

Another idea I have is for “stink balls.” They’re made with fish guts. About the size of little spitwads, you add water and they’ll start stinking to high heaven forty-eight hours later. You then pack them in a cardboard tube aimed at the ceiling, put an explosive charge in the breach, and you scatter about fifty of these things all over the living room. Under the couch, behind the television set.

Again — take the randomness out of it — the mission is to get parents more stressed-out and maybe get them to drink more. Just stop pretending you’re trying to do anything different.

What is it that separates my ridiculous ideas from reality? Not much, in the Christmas season of 2007. Just a little bit of candor, maybe a touch of technology that isn’t quite here yet. An elimination of randomness, and a willingness to admit that our toymakers and our parents are not allies after all.

Seriously though. Why do we put up with this? Who made this rule that a child’s toy has to be annoying to his parents?

Posted in About Me and My Blog, Poisoning Western Civilization | No Comments »

Being Anti-Human

Friday, November 23rd, 2007

The Christmas season has begun. Christmas is all about Christ, and Christ is all about being pro-human. Tragically, this has come to be the time of year when the arguing really ramps up…which makes absolutely no sense at all, until you stop to consider that Christmas is a pro-human holiday.

Some folks don’t like that…

The video above is linked to VHEMT, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement with the catchy tag-line, “May We Live Long and Die Out.” They promote zero, and negative if possible, population growth. Their philosophy is that humans are harmful to the ecosystem and therefore must go away. In other words, environmentalists that are more straight-talking than most of the others. VHEMT literature seems to like to talk about those among their membership who are parents, and therefore apparently hypocritical. Their explanation is that these people became parents before they became “aware,” and since then have pledged to not have any more.

Blogger friend Rick found out about a crazy woman who really took the initiative. I guess when we’ve multiplied just like those cancer cells and killed off the planet, at least everyone will know it wasn’t her fault! We can spend our dying moments thinking about what a good person she was.

Well, there are some trends going on that do make that look appealing. But this is exactly what people were thinking a hundred years ago with the “eugenics” movement. It was commonly thought that those among us who were the “lowest” were the ones who were breeding fastest, and something had to be done to proliferate the good strains of people and keep the bad ones in check. It hasn’t looked that appealing anymore since World War II and the purges of Stalinist Russia. You know, there’s a reason for that. This anti-human stuff has been tried before. You want to talk about metastasizing, well, it metastasized. Into something ugly. Many times.

It turns out, you can be pro-human or anti-human, there is really no in-between.

This blogger over here discovered this, and his essay is worth reading.

Beware of extremist green movements. Give them a wide, wide berth. They’re like the aliens in that “It’s A Cookbook” episode.

Update 11/25/07: A link to a profile of Toni Vernelli — living proof that some of our most hardcore environmentalists are, whether they admit it or not, simply opposed to people…being around. Living. Existing. Thanks to her big mouth, a great many more among the rest of us, are starting to wake up and see what it’s all about.

Posted in Poisoning Capitalism, Poisoning Western Civilization, Tree Huggers | 10 Comments »

Bash in Bali

Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

Via Claudia Rosett, via Instapundit, via Rick, we discover that apparently you need a certain amount of global warming before you can talk seriously about global warming.

Really, now. If you wrote this up as fiction, no publisher would accept it. The villains in your story, he’d explain to you, are not nearly subtle enough. Look, you’ve got them as-much-as telling everyone “the world will end if we don’t get your global taxes raised.” You’ve got a scientific “documentary” produced, not by scientists, but by a failed politician and his Hollywood friends…all of whom constantly jet around the globe. You don’t even have them trying to hide this stuff, and you’re saying people are being taken in by it?

Make this into a work of fiction suitable for adults, he’d say. Make the plot a little more complicated…have the bad guys put some effort into hiding what they’re doing. As it is, it’s just too fantastic. The tales being told to people are far too tall, and you’ve got them falling for it too reliably. Anybody should see it would never happen in real life.

And yet here we are.

Posted in ManBearPig, Poisoning Capitalism, Poisoning Western Civilization | No Comments »

Flash Mob

Monday, November 5th, 2007

It sounds pretty stupid, and probably is. You tell a bunch of your friends to meet you at a designated place at a designated time, and then you pretend to beat up on each other or shoot each other with make-believe guns just to get the onlookers to wonder what’s going on.

America's Hat And now it’s led to criminal charges.

An Ottawa teen believes cops were too quick to pull the trigger on a mischief investigation that involved shaping his hand into a gun and yelling bang in a mock gunfight.

Henrick Vierula told the Sun he doesn’t deserve to be charged with multiple criminal offences after participating in a phenomena known as a “flash mob” at the Rideau Centre on Friday.

“The whole thing is ridiculous,” said Vierula, 19.

Vierula and other participants were to shape their hands into a gun, point them at each other, yell “bang” and collapse to the ground.

I didn’t know pointing your finger at someone as if you were holding a make-believe gun, and yelling “bang,” was a criminal offense. But this is Ottawa.

I see a cause and effect going on here. Young men, in Canada as well as elsewhere, seem to be increasingly suffering from a global epidemic of stupids. Well, maybe they should. As any normal grown-up man can tell you, especially if he’s been tasked to help raise small boys into other mature men, masculinity can’t really be stamped out because it is an incompressible liquid hydraulic agent. You can apply pressure to it but for every unit of volume that gives way to cultural forces in one location, an equal volume of it will explode outward elsewhere with equal force.

And where better to observe the consequences of a war against manhood, than Canada?

Poor Henrick is now looking at having a criminal record. Well, I’m not too much opposed to having a criminal record for general stupidity. I figure if you’re a dedicated stupid, it’ll happen sooner or later. But let the punishment fit the crime. Seems to me, this has failed to materialize in the situation at hand, and the reason for that failure is there’s two cultures living in Ottawa that ought not be intermixed. The folks in charge of the rules, want a plaid-paisley society with no reminders of that dreaded knuckle-dragging manly-man anywhere to be seen. But they forgot to ship all the teenage boys out first. Dealing with masculinity by trying to stamp it out. It no workee.

I’m pretty sure that’s the situation. Don’t know it for an absolute fact. But I’ll take my chances.

Speaking of which, for reasons along the same lines, Pokemon has been put on probation in my house. I caught a certain young man failing to show initiative at solving his own problems…I mean, little problems, in ways he used to solve them. So we know it’s not an issue of maturity. Something has been eroding his sense of self-government and leadership — about the same time he got really revved up on Pokemon. Now, a lost pair of socks is an occasion for planting your skinny ass on the couch and waiting for someone to bring them to you. Not good. This, my girl and I have been lecturing him, is how Katrina happened.

What’s Pokemon? Ask the Wiccans at you-know-what…

is a media franchise owned by video game giant Nintendo and created by Satoshi Tajiri around 1995. Originally released as a pair of interlinkable Game Boy role-playing video games, Pokémon has since become the second most successful and lucrative video game-based media franchise in the world, falling only behind Nintendo’s Mario series. Pokémon properties have since been merchandised into anime, manga, trading cards, toys, books, and other media. The franchise celebrated its tenth anniversary on 27 February 2006, and as of 1 December 2006, cumulative sold units of the video games (including home console versions, such as the “Pikachu” Nintendo 64) have reached more than 155 million copies.
:
The concept of the Pokémon universe, in both the video games and the general fictional world of Pokémon, stems from the hobby of insect collecting, a popular pastime which Pokémon executive director Satoshi Tajiri had enjoyed as a child. Players of the games are designated as Pokémon Trainers, and the two general goals (in most Pokémon games) for such Trainers are: to complete the Pokédex by collecting all of the available Pokémon species found in the fictional region where that game takes place; and to train a team of powerful Pokémon from those they have caught to compete against teams owned by other Trainers, and eventually become the strongest Trainer, the Pokémon Master. These themes of collecting, training, and battling are present in almost every version of the Pokémon franchise, including the video games, the anime and manga series, and the Pokémon Trading Card Game.

Now this could all be quite healthy. But I’m not going to assume that it is, just because it has non-caucasian roots, the animals are cute and kids happen to like it.

I see too many parallels that concern me a lot. I see connections with those confused, frustrated — and I’ll bet my bottom dollar, bored — kids in Ottawa. I see connections with the war in Iraq, and the War on Terror. The war is unpopular, I’m told, because no weapons of mass destruction were found. Well, anyone who hasn’t been living in a cave, should be able to see the (economic) necessity of criticizing the war, came first; the Bush administration’s embarrassment over weapons, just dumped a lot of refined fuel onto an open flame that was already present. Even with that, the argument that we should have left well enough alone in Iraq, makes sense only to a mindset that has been somehow inculcated to a predisposition that vexing problems like Saddam Hussein’s despotic regime, are best left ignored.

Conclusion: There is something toxic under the surface of the era in which we now live. Something that says taking the initiative and finding ways to achieve a positive outcome, or to thwart a disaster, is inherently distasteful. Pokemon is both a cause and an effect. It dissuades young people from solving problems the way thinking people are meant to solve them. And it is an agent of something more ancient, something larger. Feminist movement? Maybe that, and some other things.

I’m not venturing too far out on a limb, to guess that this is has a lot to do with why young manly-boys, and tomboys, filled with that good vibrant problem-solving energy the good Lord gave them, are so freakishly bored that they have no better way to channel it than to coordinate “flash mob” nonsense on their MySpace pages. There may or may not be problems to be solved, but finding solutions to them on your own is now frowned-upon.

Well Pokemon came along, according to the Wiccans, in ’95.

Blame Pokemon? Well I dunno ’bout that. Placing all the blame on any one thing, seems childish. But consider what happens in a Pokemon game or cartoon. Consider for just a moment…

…a bunch of semi-adorable, spiky-haired moppet kids with eyeballs the size of dinner plates, get together and talk smack at each other. They challenge each other to fights, and once the fights commence, the moppets don’t do any of the fighting. The fighting is done, instead, by even-more-adorable sickly-sweat animals that look like they came from alternate universes.

The adorable animals, the “pocket monsters,” are very weird looking. It’s clear they are designed to resemble earth species just somewhat, and in some cases, but overall they are supposed to look other-worldly. Not scary, but strange and surreal. They are designed, it’s clear to me, to avoid inspiring too much of a relationship with their human masters, or with the humans in the audience. They, in short, externalize the fighting. Their “masters” give each other a lot of lip, and even if the fight is lost those masters absorb no bruises anywhere except on the ego. All the physical injury is dealt animal-to-animal.

I have never, ever seen a subplot pursued where a defeated animal carries an injury onward into other scences as part of a temporary or permanent maiming. Injuries are forgotten when the battle is ended. It’s kind of like Luke Skywalker getting dragged under the slimy goo by that monster in the garbage compactor, and in the next scene he’s all brushed and blow-dried, like a Bee Gee ready to take the stage. Like that.

The message is unmistakable. Problems, even of your own making, are there to be solved by someone else. There’s just no getting around it.

Pokemon Pokemon will be banned from my house only for a little while, until a certain ten-year-old shows me some of the leadership and intiative I saw in him when he was six. I know he’s got it in him, so this won’t be much of a wait. But what about all the other toe-heads of his generation? Half the time the protagonist’s adorable pocket-monster loses the fight, and so you have to be prepared for disappointment; there is some value in that, I guess. But is it put to any practical use if that protagonist has no concern about anything, other than a miniscule delay as his inevitable victory is positioned at the end of the episode rather than in Act One?

The human receives no injuries. Beasts do the dirty work. You know, when grown men do exactly the same thing with chickens or dogs, in a lot of places that’s a felony. There is a reason for that: There’s just too much cowardice being enshrined and rewarded in such an activity. Well this cartoon seems to make a primary objective out of enshrining and rewarding exactly that, in exactly the same way — and once again, I’m annoyed with the whole thing.

Why am I annoyed? Well, I’ll plagiarize Joe McCarthy: If the Saturday-morning cartoons were merely ignorant of rough-and-tumble, problem-solving creative-resourceful Indiana-Jones masculinity, rather than being determinedly opposed to it, the frequency with which they’d be seen promoting something contradictory to it would be on par with random chance. Somewhere around fifty percent of the time. Take a few steps back from Pokemon and look at all the other stuff our kids watch, and this is higher than fifty percent. Naturally, a guy in a black hat telling Matt Dillon to “draw!”, or anything remotely like that, is nowhere to be seen. This looks more like a deliberate, intense, prolonged and sustained campaign to bypass and usurp parental authority, and do whatever can be done to kill off manhood. To make sure that a dozen years from now, any swimmer caught in an undertow, any child caught on the second floor of a burning house, anyone in trouble who needs a rescuer capable of seeing what needs doing, and doing it…is SCREWED. To make sure a generation of helpless whelps is raised, filling the space just emptied by old-fashioned, can-do American ingenuity.

Once again, I’m pretty sure that’s the situation. Don’t know it for an absolute fact but I’ll take my chances. After all, back in my day Wiley Coyote taught me that I may know the least about what’s going on, when I’m most sure of myself, and I may very well get run over by a truck or smashed by a rock — but that doesn’t mean I should ever stop trying.

Know what? I like that lesson a whole lot better.

Posted in Is It Really a Man's World?, Poisoning Masculinity, Poisoning Western Civilization | 2 Comments »

Burning Cities Americans Won’t Burn

Saturday, November 3rd, 2007

How’s this for an inconvenient truth:

Police have arrested a man in Los Angeles after witnesses say they saw him lighting a fire on a hillside.

Authorities say 41-year-old Catalino Pineda was seen starting a fire in the San Fernando Valley Wednesday and then walking away.

Witnesses alerted authorities and followed the man to a nearby restaurant where police arrested him.

Pineda was booked for investigation of arson. Authorities say the Guatemala native is currently on probation for making excessive false emergency reports to law enforcement.

Police and fire officials could not immediately say whether he might be connected to any of the wildfires in Southern California.

From the L.A. Daily News story that came out roughly the same time…

Prosecutors have charged a 41-year-old Sun Valley man with arson after witnesses spotted him lighting up a hillside in Woodland Hills on Wednesday, officials said this morning.

Catalino Pineda is scheduled to be arraigned some time this morning in Van Nuys Superior Court, said Deputy District Attorney Steven Frankland. He is charged with one count of arson of a structure or forest.

Witnesses allegedly spotted Pineda lighting a fire on a hillside near Del Valle Street and Ponce Avenue about 4:30 p.m. Wednesday and walk away, police said. The fire was quickly extinguished.

Witnesses followed Pineda to a nearby restaurant and notified police, who arrested him. He is being held on $75,000 bail. If convicted, he faces up to six years in state prison.

Pineda is a day laborer and native of Guatemala. He is currently on probation for making excessive false emergency reports to law enforcement, police said.

Anyone with information is asked to call West Valley Area detectives at (818) 374-7730. On weekends and after hours call the 24-hour Detective Information Desk at 1-877-LAW-FULL (529-3855).

Now, you’ve heard that these “undocumented” immigrants actually commit crimes at a rate far lower than people who actually belong in the country. For example…here. But this example, typical of many others, is loaded with half-truths and red herrings. You fall into the trap when you’re lulled into thinking the faux-statistic addresses illegal immigrants…

In 2007, the American Immigration Law Foundation found that, based on U.S. Census data, “immigration is actually associated with lower crime rates” and that “incarceration rates among young men are lowest for immigrants, even those who are least educated.”

Additionally, the report states that foreign-born (including undocumented) men aged 18 to 39 have incarceration rates five times lower than U.S.-born counterparts. Contrary to media portrayals, undocumented immigrants actually commit crimes significantly less often than U.S.-born citizens.

Two differentiations that I personally think are probably important, are being conflated here rather casually. We have “immigrants”; we have “undocumented.” Those groups are overlapping but are far from statistically identical. Earlier in the article, it is stated as fact that 75 percent of immigrants are “with documents.” The statistical comparisons in the two paragraphs above, have to do with the superset, not the subset. The final sentence of the second paragraph summarizes the situation, but incorrectly or in a manner inconsistent with what the cited research supports: “Undocumented immigrants actually commit crimes significantly less often.” Uh, beg your pardon. We don’t know that. We don’t know that from what’s been offered here.

The other distinction to be made, when we’re talking about comparing crime rates among illegal aliens, or at least pretending to be talking about that, is between “incarceration” and “committing crime.” One would presume if you happen to have broken the law by coming into this country and want to continue breaking the law once you’re here, you would have a few tips and tricks for avoiding getting caught right? I mean if you didn’t…you’d be far less likely to have made it in.

It’s very rare that I hear of studies about illegal aliens committing crimes. Whenever a statistical comparison is done, almost always it has to do with incarceration rates. Smells like skullduggery to me, because the question I hear people asking has to do with who’s committing the crime, not who’s getting locked up for it.

Anyway, we seem to be split straight down the middle on this one. Citizens want the border locked down, and our slimy politicians and lazy egghead white coat propeller-beanie-wearing scientists with their phony studies want it busted wide open. What to do, oh, what to do…

Well, that’s a lot of homes. Maybe now we have our answer.

Posted in Illegal Immigration, Phony Crime Solutions, Phony Egghead Studies, Poisoning Western Civilization | 3 Comments »

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“Don’t Take It Easy”

Salvage’s Frosting Diet

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Common Ground Between Atheists and Christians

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Man Argues About Evolution and Removes Himself From It

I Made a New Word X

Never Enough Diversity

I’m Offended

On the Castle Doctrine, and Race

On the War Between Toymakers and Parents

Being Anti-Human

Bash in Bali

Flash Mob

Burning Cities Americans Won’t Burn