Author: VD

Congratulations to the fifteen women who comprise the Right Wing News’s list of “The 15 Hottest Conservative Women In The New Media.” I may have my differences with a few of the nominees, but in important matters such as female attractiveness, I am capable of complete objectivity.

Because, after all, it’s what’s on the outside that counts.

Voxiversity III kicks off

During the eight years I have written this column for WND, I have received numerous requests for reading recommendations. And in eight years of receiving critical e-mails and blog comments, I have also discovered how poorly read most people who consider themselves to be informed and well-educated actually are. It seems that at some point, “education” became confused with “formal schooling” in the popular vernacular, which is a little bizarre when one considers that more than a few of man’s best-educated, most accomplished intellectuals spent very little time in anything that would be recognizable today as a school.

As well as being liberal fascists… quotes from the Democratic Underground:

I just ordered a TV-B-Gone, for FOX News quarantine enforcement…. It’s a simple device, which looks sort of like a car’s keyless entry remote, with a single button that causes it to emit the infrared “Power off” codes for every brand and model of TV it knows about, which is to say about 95%+ of TVs in existence.

Yeah, it’s time to get aggressive when it comes to people playing FOX News in businesses, doctor’s offices and other public places.

Reading the comments there makes one wonder if it might not be well past time to put Prozac in the the water supplies of certain Democratic states. Democrats have control of the White House, the House of Representatives, the Senate, the ABCNNBCBS cabal, and the New York Times, but the mere sight of Fox News in a public place is enough to send them around the bend.

And speaking of insane liberal fascists:

“I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”
–Barack Obama

That’s in the Constitution, right?

VDH offers an allegorical explanation for why Obama’s Chamberlainesque chatterbox approach is likely to cause more international problems than Bush’s bomb-and-occupy method:

One small example of my late coming of age. A rather brutal neighbor (now dead and not to be mentioned by name (de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est)), an immigrant from an impoverished country, a self-made man, veteran of infamous fights and various bullying, shared a communal ditch. We talked and exchanged pleasantries–at first–at the standpipe gate. He lamented how rude my late grandfather had been to him, and even had made unfounded accusations that he was less than honest (he was also sort of playing the race card, remarking about the prejudicial nature of California agrarian culture).

I was shocked to hear that, and assured him that there would be no such incitements on my part on the new age of the Davis farm. No more ‘me first’, no more disdain for newcomers and upstarts. And then after about 3 months of sizing me up (at 26, I confess looking back I was not 1/8th the man my grandfather was at 86) he began stealing water in insidious ways: taking an extra day on his turn, cutting in a day early on mine, siphoning off water at night, destroying my pressure settings, watering his vineyards on days that were on my allotment. Stealing no less! And in 1980!

Here’s how I rushed into action. First, I gave a great Obama speech on communal sharing and why the ditch would not work if everyone did what he did. Farmers simply would perish if they did not come together, and see their common shared interests. He nodded and smiled-and stole more the next week.

I don’t know why, but over the years I have seen how it is extremely hard for normal people to understand how blatantly some individuals can lie to your face. I suspect that only those who have had the benefit of long-term proximity to one of these shameless and habitual liars can understand how completely meaningless words can be in the mouths of some individuals. I’m not afraid to rely upon vverbal assurances, but once it’s become clear that there is a reliable gap between what an individual says and what he does, I simply apply that gap to future pronouncements. But, in the rare case of the sociopaths, whose statements bear no recognizable similarity to their actions, I pay no attention whatsoever to their words.

As for the international policy implications, I believe the best strategy for dealing with Afghanistan would have been John Derbyshire’s shock-and-exit idea. The biggest problem with the Bush approach was that it revealed the practical limits of America’s ability to project force, which has probably encouraged the country’s enemies every bit as much as Obama’s feckless chattercentric strategy will.

An anonymous emailer shares his thoughts:

Only in Hollywood could accidentally strangling yourself while choking the chicken be considered *not* a stupid and embarrassing way to die, but rather an occasion requiring heartfelt expressions of admiration for the deceased and condolence to the family.

Well, I suppose there’s some consolation to be found in the thought that he died doing what he loved. Although, as Spacebunny said, is autoerotic asphyxiation really the best one can do in BANGKOK, of all places?

It’s interesting to see the various ways that women make use of their physical assets to scam men out of their financial assets. In Western divorce culture, alimony is the vehicle of choice. In Chinese male surplus culture, it’s pre-marital bride prices that serve the purpose:

With no eligible women in his village, Zhou Pin, 27 years old, thought he was lucky to find a pretty bride whom he met and married within a week, following the custom in rural China. Ten days later, Cai Niucuo vanished, leaving behind her clothes and identity papers. She did not, however, leave behind her bride price: 38,000 yuan, or about $5,500, which Mr. Zhou and his family had scrimped and borrowed to put together.

When Mr. Zhou reported his missing spouse to authorities, he found his situation wasn’t unique. In the first two months of this year, Hanzhong town saw a record number of scams designed to extract high bride prices in a region with an oversupply of bachelors.

Obviously, not all women view marriage as a cash cow. But enough women do, in enough disparate cultures, that it should serve as a warning to men to choose their wives on a far more careful basis than they usually do.

Stratfor reports on Latvia’s failed bond auction:

On June 3, the Latvian government failed to auction any of its 50 million lati ($100.7 million) of bonds, managing to sell only about 2.75 million lati ($5.5 million) worth of 30-day bonds the following day, which is raising fears that European emerging markets will have to struggle to raise capital for their rising debt…. The Latvian economy is, to put it bluntly, in shambles. Gross domestic product (GDP) is forecast to decline by over 13 percent in 2009.

The conventional wisdom has it that Europe is belatedly being hit by the financial turmoil that struck the States last fall and that the USA has seen the worst. I suspect that what we’re seeing is more akin to water sloshing back and forth in an increasingly turbulent manner, in which case the relative calm in American markets is only temporary. And by “over 13 percent”, Stratfor actually means 18 percent.

Martin Blume protests too much in his review of Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific Worldby Eugenie Samuel Reich:

Reich does an excellent job of dealing with the facts of the Schön case, but less well with their interpretation. She tends to describe issues in black-and-white terms and uses strident language unnecessarily. An acerbic tone creeps into judgements of the individuals involved, such as one editor being “opinionated”, and this distracts from her central points. More important is Reich’s conclusion that the self-correction process of science failed in this case and should not be trusted: “It seems like little more than blind faith to insist that all activity carried out in the name of science will always be self-correcting.” Yet Reich doesn’t say where this assumption comes from. No scientist who has thought about how science works would “insist” on this; nor can it “always” be true.

Blume’s criticism of Reich’s failure to defend her assertion is downright humorous, considering that no scientist ever offers any actual scientific evidence for this supposedly self-correcting nature. In fact, the only evidence I’ve ever seen on the matter indicates that 14 percent of scientists admit their colleagues falsify data and 72 percent admit that their colleagues engage in other questionable practices. And it’s hilarious to see how Blume damns pretty much every science blogger and science fetishist who has ever addressed the issue of science’s self-correcting nature; most of them exhibit a belief in it far blinder than any religious faith. The pedantic quibble over an obvious rhetorical flourish is almost embarrassing as the point Reich has made, and which Blume is trying desperately to evade, is that there is little, if any, evidence that science is any more self-correcting than any other human endeavor; I daresay it’s far less self-correcting than computer programming or race car driving, just to give two examples.

Blume would have done better to put Schön’s fraud into proper statistical perspective rather than attempting to claim it as a case of the system working. No number of arrests can prove the city is crime-free. After attempting to minimize the force of Reich’s criticism through declaring that no scientist believes science is always self-correcting, he then does a 180 and attempts to defend the current self-correction process. He’s surely correct that the probability of detecting data fabrication can be increased, but I am deeply skeptical that an exhortation to remain vigilant and encourage alertness will have any effect at all. And his iconoclastic suggestion that important results should be replicated will surely confuse the innocent who genuinely believes that repetition is an integral part of the scientific process.

Blume’s defense of scientific integrity is little more than fluff, and leads me to conclude that Reich will likely be provided the opportunity to write more books of this sort.