Author: VD

Letter to Vox Day IV

Luke has posted his fourth letter:

Vox,

Holy crap that’s a lot of insults. I tried to count them but couldn’t. I can see that your readership is impressed and excited by your continuous stream of insults, but I come from a different tradition (analytic philosophy) that values clarity, argument, and evidence – not insults.

I agree we should leave the topic of evolution behind. But I’m sure our readers will remember that one of us gave argument and evidence for his views on evolution, and the other did not.

Thank you for finally explaining your view that Satan rules the Earth. But again, to just assume I should understand your views on Satan by way of vague references to children’s literature and a sci-fi novel is, I think, too optimistic. Christian teaching about Satan has a long, complex, and variegated history. I can’t just guess what your theological views are: I need you to tell me what they are.

This was written in response to my third letter to Common Sense Atheism.

The media is awful

Even the sports media has become increasingly dumbed-down to the point of completed retardation these days, and I’m not referring to its tendency to interject politics into sports, I’m talking about the ability of the announcers to simply do their freaking jobs.

Last week, the announcers at the Steeler-Lions game were rambling on interminably about Brett Favre playing in the dark. Brett Favre, you may note, does not play for either the Pittsburgh Steelers or the Detroit Lions. Yesterday, as the Vikings defense was suddenly getting shredded in the fourth quarter and every Vikings fan was wondering what in the sainted name of Bud Grant special teams player Karl Paymah was doing on the field, the announcers couldn’t bother to mention that both Antoine Winfield and Benny Sapp, the Vikings #1 and #3 cornerbacks, were injured in the first half. Winfield was out for the rest of the game and Sapp was less than 100 percent as he was playing with what looked like a concussion.

On the other hand, give credit to Peter King as he is spot on with this comment:

We were stunned at NBC Sunday to see the Vikings — with 2:30 left in the game, trailing Baltimore 31-30, with a third-and-nine at the Ravens’ 17 — to not go aggressively for the first down. “We were a little surprised too,” Peterson said. Peterson ran for a three-yard gain, with the Vikings happy to settle for the field goal. It was a poor call because the Ravens had scored 21 points in the fourth quarter, the Vikes looked gassed on defense, and even if Ryan Longwell made the field goal, Baltimore would have two minutes to win it. Longwell made it, Baltimore drove into field goal range, and Steve Hauschka lined up for a 44-yarder with two seconds left. Wide left. I don’t care if the kick was wide left; if you’ve got a quarterback as hot as Favre (playing nearly mistake-free in his first six games), you give him a chance to get the touchdown before settling for three.

Especially when you’ve got two downs if you play for the first down instead of the field goal. Childress really reminds me of Denny Green, a decent coach who doesn’t understand when to go for it and when not to. The Vikings once scored to put themselves within a point of the heavily-favored Cowboys at the end of the game, Green ordered the PAT team on, and the Cowboys marched straight down the field to win it in overtime. I’m not sure which play had me shouting at the screen more, that handoff on third-and-nine or the idiotic big blitz that Frasier called when the Ravens were just outside of field goal range.

On an unrelated note, yesterday was clearly a sign from the football gods that the Patriots must return to the Pat Patriot look. 59-0! And 85 percent completion percentage… in the snow!

Just one question

Karl Denninger notes that no one in the media seems interested in asking it:

Note that nobody in the mainstream media bothers to bring up “Prompt Corrective Action” and demand from Bair and rest the answer to one simple question: “How does a bank get into a situation where it has a 20, 30, 40, 50% loss on it’s asset base when Prompt Corrective Action and Tier Capital requirements are supposed to cause banks to be seized before ANY loss occurs?”

The present U.S. financial system isn’t merely based on sand, it’s based on the pretense of sand. Meanwhile, Mike Shedlock catalogs a surprisingly long list of stories about the incestuous Goldman-government circle before wondering why so few Americans are upset about the way a few financial interests are exercising their power to monopolize the economy for their own benefit and to the detriment of the nation, the economy, and the public. The post is well worth reading; I’m sure you’ll all be relieved to know that the responsibility for avoiding the regulatory failures of the recent past has been placed in the capable hands of the new COO of the SEC, a 29 year-old Goldman guy.

Unfortunately, since both the Republican and Democratic elite are beholden to the banks rather than to their party’s bases, there is very little chance of this coming to an end in a rational manner. A small percentage of the American people are infuriated already, but most are still fat and happily feasting on junk food regardless of their employment status. If they ever become lean and hungry, they’re not likely to sit idly by watching bankers pay themselves billions for stealing taxpayer money while they fall from the comfortable middle class into poverty.

It’s good to be a bankster now. But keep in mind, there was also a time when it was good to be a French aristocrat.

WND column

End the Fed
by Ron Paul
Rating: 10 of 10

“The Federal Reserve System must be challenged. Ultimately, it needs to be eliminated. The government cannot and should not be trusted with a monopoly on money. No single institution in society should have power this immense. In fact, I believe that freedom itself is at stake in this struggle.”
– Ron Paul, “End the Fed,” p. 11

In 17 years of writing game and book reviews, I can count on two hands the number of times I have ever given out the highest rating. True excellence is to be distinguished from the merely very good, and it is far rarer than the heavy use of superlatives in our everyday language would tend to indicate. End the Fed is more than a timely political polemic, it is also the story of the long and patient campaign by a small group of freedom-loving patriots to restore economic liberty to the American people.

NFL Week 6

This would be your weekly NFL open thread aka Nate’s suicide watch. Jamie’s on duty this weekend, so let’s hope he’s sober for once.

You know you’re old school when you have old Adrian Peterson throwback jerseys around the house… because they date back to Ahmad Rashad. Skol Vikes!

Practice makes perfect

Before they go on to lose wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Obama figures his administration could use some practice losing one on the home front:

“We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, said in an interview with The New York Times. “As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”

Ah, but pretending has traditionally been a valuable part of the presidential playbook. Smiling and wearing beige even under the most withering news media assault is not only good manners, but also has generally been good politics. While there is undoubtedly a visceral thrill in finally setting out after your antagonists, the history of administrations that have successfully taken on the media and won is shorter than this sentence.

I’m not a fan of Fox News, but the thing that is so ridiculous about this is that Fox is more balanced – and has been objectively confirmed to be more balanced – than the other cable news networks and the mainstream media in general. Even liberals who doubted this couldn’t credibly do so any longer once CNN took it upon itself to fact-check an SNL skit for the crime of being insufficiently reverential.

Anyhow, the article reports that Fox’s ratings are up 20 percent. Obama’s, on the other hand, are down 38 percent since Inaugural Day. It increasingly appears that strategically besting Hilary Clinton and her team in claiming the Democratic nomination was less Julius Caesar defeating Boadicea and more the equivalent of beating Miss South Carolina at chess.

Photoshop/GIMP request

If you’re a power user of either of these programs, I would very much like to know what you believe to be the 30 most important application commands, in order of how often you use them. Is it Dodge, Burn, Paste Special, Line, or something to do with Layers? If you are able to tell me the hotkey that triggers the function as well, that would be ideal. Thanks very much.

Liberal integrity

Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk desperately tries to cover his backside after the St. Louis Post-Dispatch admitted that it has no evidence that Rush Limbaugh ever made the “divisive” comments that caused him to be dropped from the ownership group bidding for the Rams.

“When posting on the matter on Monday, we made it clear that Limbaugh contends he never said the words.”

That’s Florio’s story now. But that’s also a very misleading characterization of his earlier post on the matter, to say nothing of the intervening posts made in the five days between Monday and Saturday:

During his Monday show, Limbaugh broadly claimed that 15 hours per week of radio programming covering 21 years had been reviewed. (It’s a job that would take more than 16,000 hours, so he apparently has a bunch of employees.) Said Limbaugh, “There is not even an inkling that any words in this quote are accurate.”

But here’s the key — he never directly denied saying the precise words that Burwell assigned to him. Sure, Limbaugh made vague claims of libel and slander, but there should be no ambiguity here. If Burwell attributed a concocted, made up quote to Limbaugh, Limbaugh’s lawyers should be demanding a retraction and a large bag of cash.

Though I’ve got no idea whether Limbaugh said it, Burwell says that Limbaugh said it. And if Limbaugh didn’t say it, he’s got an open-and-shut defamation claim against Burwell, the Post-Dispatch, and anyone else who has attributed that quote to Limbaugh….

Look, either he said it or he didn’t. And in referring to an item from the Post-Dispatch that troubled him because it suggested that he supports slavery, all Limbaugh had to do was read the quote that Bryan Burwell attributed to Limbaugh and say, “Folks, here are the words they say that I said. And I swear to you that I never uttered these words.”

The fact that Limbaugh didn’t do that makes us think that maybe he said it. And we’ll continue to think that maybe Limbaugh said it until Limbaugh either specifically and categorically denies making the remark or successfully sues Burwell and the Post-Dispatch for falsely claiming that Limbaugh made a statement that any fair-minded person would regard as incredibly and patently racist.

I like Pro Football Talk. It’s a good NFL-related site. But, like many of its readers, its ludicrously biased coverage of the affaire Limbaugh has forced me to concur with many other PFT readers who have concluded that its proprietor appears to have the integrity of a player’s agent and the spine of a sea slug. Everyone who knew anything about Limbaugh and the way the left obsessively tracks his show knew there was no chance that he had said anything even remotely similar to what was falsely attributed to him. Read the comments, as it’s obvious that a lot of PFT readers are not inclined to let Florio skate by on this one.

The man owes Limbaugh an unmitigated apology as does the NFL commissioner, Smith from the NFLPA, and a whole host of other media lefties who mindlessly leaped to the attack and in doing so shredded their false claims to objectivity. I rather hope Rush does as Florio originally suggested and follows through in suing those who slandered him.

Rush is right

It’s not actually about the NFL:

As I explained on my radio show, this spectacle is bigger than I am on several levels. There is a contempt in the news business, including the sportswriter community, for conservatives that reflects the blind hatred espoused by Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson. “Racism” is too often their sledgehammer. And it is being used to try to keep citizens who don’t share the left’s agenda from participating in the full array of opportunities this nation otherwise affords each of us. It was on display many years ago in an effort to smear Clarence Thomas with racist stereotypes and keep him off the Supreme Court. More recently, it was employed against patriotic citizens who attended town-hall meetings and tea-party protests.

These intimidation tactics are working and spreading, and they are a cancer on our society.

In the last two years I’ve been subjected to one successful and one unsuccessful attempt to bar me from an opportunity based solely upon my ideological beliefs, which is ironic considering that I am more often in the gatekeeper’s position than I am in the position of one attempting to pass through the gate. As an occasional acquisitions consultant for two publishers, I’ve shot down 10x more book proposals in the last three years than I ever proposed in the entire course of my writing career, let alone had rejected.

My question to those who think it is correct to bar the likes of Rush Limbaugh or me from various opportunities on the basis of our ideological beliefs is this: is it correct for us to bar those who possess ideological beliefs with which we disagree from opportunities that we control? Because if those are the new rules, I don’t have any problem playing that game.