Author: VD

The Elders of Zion finally call it a career:

The Elders of Zion, the venerable and shadowy Jewish organization that controls the international banking industry, news media and Hollywood, has announced that it is disbanding so that members can retire to Florida and live out their golden years on the golf course.

“We had a good run,” said one senior Elder, reminiscing over old photographs of world leaders in his musty, wood-paneled office at an undisclosed location. “Maybe we ran the world for just a little too long. Anyway, now it’s Obama’s problem.”

After a humiliating year left most of its financial holdings, as well as the entire civilized world, on the verge of collapse, the organization has re-defined its mission in terms of bridge games and making it to restaurants for the Early Bird Special.

If Tim GeithnerLarry Summer and Ben Bernanke are really the best that the current generation of Jews can offer, I think we’d be better off trying to lure the Elders out of retirement. At least Hyman Roth always made money for his partners.

Mainstream economists keep pushing back the date of the expected recovery:

The economists, many of whom have been continually surprised by the depth of the downturn, also pushed back yet again their forecasts for when a recovery would begin. On average, they expect the downturn to end in October. Last month, they said the bottom would arrive in August. They estimate that U.S. gross domestic product will continue to contract in the first half of this year, with slow growth returning in the third quarter…. Amid all the gloom, there is a bright spot: Four-fifths of the economists said now is a good time to buy equities, especially if the investor has a long-term view.

It’s going to be years, not months, gentlemen. And next year is when everyone finally begins to realize it. The concept of economic gravity really isn’t that difficult. The economic contraction will be roughly equivalent to the economic expansion. Since the economic expansion was considerable, so too will the contraction be a sizeable one.

I don’t even see any need to score another point versus the so-called experts on their newly revised forecasts since they were so obviously wrong in the first place. There will be a bounce back in the markets sooner than later, but don’t get taken in by all the calls of a bottom. It’s merely going to be an extended bear rally; 400-point up days are indicative of an ongoing bear market, not the end of one. It is probably a good time to buy stocks… as long as you’re planning to sell them in the fall.

But all you need to know that the mainstream economists are going to be hopelessly wrong can be summarized in this single sentence: “More than 85% of the economists agreed that the central bank’s proliferating lending programs are well-designed, well-executed and helping the economy.”

The Other Nate points out a basic problem in combat education:

“And now we’ve reached rock bottom of our insultingly incapable heroes. This is a pretty cruel trick society played on the little girls of the world who saw these cartoons and played with the toys. While boys were taught that evil giant transforming robots could only be defeated with other giant transforming robots, girls were taught that evil could be defeated with the power of rainbows and flamboyant song and dance. Which one better prepared their audience for the real world? If you’d like to find out, go perform a choreographed song-and-dance number in the middle of the highway while a semi bears down on you. In your final moments of consciousness, imagine how much more terrifying this would all be if that semi was sentient.”

Anyway, something I wanted clarification on your take on women & combat:

1) Is the believability of the “warrior woman” motif for you dependent on the context? So, for instance, do you find Trinity of the Matrix series believable since most of her fighting is in a program where you’re only limited by your
mind?

2) What about pressure points & weak spots which any self-defense class should teach?

3) Follow up to #2. Is that then your problem with “fighting women” in current fiction – that they don’t fight “properly” for their size, weight class etc and instead fight like a 200+ pound linebacker?

1) Yes, completely. In fact, in my original post at the Black Gate, I specifically stated that if one wishes to utilize a kick-ass female character, there are any number of perfectly reasonable justifications, especially in fantasy. Making her a demigoddess, giving her a magical sword, or enchanting her with a spell are all eminently viable. But simply saying that she was really well trained is no more credible than a college linebacker who shows up with an additional 50 pounds of muscle gained over the summer and claims that it was the result of an intensive weightlifting program. Forget sex, would anyone have found Achilles’s near-complete imperviousness to blades convincing had Homer not taken the trouble to explain that his mother dipped him in the River Styx? Trinity is an excellent example of credible female kickassery.

2) Pressure points and “weak spots” are wildly overrated. They cause momentary pain that is easily overcome by an adrenaline rush. Unless you’re actually breaking significant bones, gouging out eyes, crushing windpipes, or knocking someone unconscious, you aren’t truly incapacitating an opponent. I’ve had my nose broken and taken a full-force sidekick to the groin without noticing either injury at the time. A few minutes later, yeah, I noticed a lot. But a few minutes later is too late.

3) No, it’s not just a matter of them not fighting properly, although that is indeed a problem. (Many authors seem to be under the mistaken impression that because women are smaller, they are quicker. They are not.) The main problem is postulating outcomes that are simply ridiculous, involving a slower, smaller, weaker, (and usually less-armored) individual easily defeating an extended series of faster, bigger, stronger, better-armored opponents without providing any reasonable justification for this multiplicity of implausibilities.

It’s about time to see this silly little concept fading away:

The time was 1972, and I was on my first date with a guy named Gary Mathewes. “The woman’s liberation movement is very important to me,” I announced, in my best mess-with-me-and-I’ll-knock-you-down-Bub voice.

“Me too,” he said, to my surprise. We sat idling at a stoplight in his puttering green VW. “In fact,” he went on, “I always thought that if I ever got married, I’d want my wife and I to hyphenate our names. Both of us, I mean.”

Wow, I thought, he just might be the one….

Two years later we stood in the woods grooving on a classic hippie wedding, right down to my unbleached muslin dress and the vegetarian reception under the trees. Soon after we hiked down to City Hall to have our names legally changed: both of us would henceforth be Mathewes-Greens. We didn’t know that the usual custom is for the woman’s name to go first; we chose billing solely for euphony. “Green-Mathewes” sounded clunky, and besides, we joked, we wanted to have kids. Don’t you know that old song, “God Didn’t Make Little Green Mathewes”?

It didn’t work out. Oh, the marriage did; 30 years later, Gary is my sweetheart more than ever. We have been blessed in more ways than we can count. But the name didn’t turn out to be such a great idea.

I always thought hypenated names was an ludicrously stupid practice; like feminism itself it held the inevitable seeds of its own destruction. It never ceases to amaze me how even intelligent and educated people are so seldom capable of projecting the logical consequences of their actions into the future. But, as Mrs. Mathewes-Green points out, the most important thing is the marriage relationship itself, not the trappings.

I do wonder, though, why so many writers at National Review are either former Communists, former Democrats, or former hippies. Perhaps if most of their contributors weren’t former members of the other side, they might be taken a little more seriously by the majority of those who are supposed to be on their side now.

It seems that academics are the last to figure out the fundamental impracticality of hyphenation: “There is a bizarro-world custom being perpetrated by many I know in the academy who get married: that of combining both last names with a hyphen to create one last name to be used by both couples.”

Although, I suppose if you’ve got two aging left-wing professors getting together, they’re not that likely to have kids before they divorce or the she-spouse hits menopause.

Yet another school shooting, this time in Germany:

Police said that the teenager, Tim Kretschmer, killed a total of 16 people, 13 of them at the Albertville technical school in Winnenden, in the suburbs of Stuttgart, before he was himself shot dead. The death toll matches Germany’s worst school shooting, in the eastern city of Erfurt in 2002, which prompted the rewriting of the country’s gun ownership laws.

One of the many ironies at play here is that Germany actively bans the only action that parents can take to protect their children from the risk of being killed at school, homeschooling. Granted, a child’s risk of being shot at school is still statistically low, but if the risk is sufficient to justify passing additional legislative activity, it must also certainly justify keeping your children out of such harm’s way in such a temptingly target-rich environment.

FS finds it hard to believe I really don’t want to ban anything:

Can you conceive of a chemical that you would ban? Just as an exercise. Define it’s attraction and affects and then say, “Nope, we cant go there.” I bet you can. So it all boils down to a question of degree. The chemicals we have today don’t cross the line for you. You call it recreational drug use, maybe not the best thing but a matter of personnel choice. The drugs we have now crossed my line years ago and I call it national suicide. And I’m glad there are laws against suicide.

You won’t get your way but even if you did there would come a day when the magic in the periodic table would force you to change your tune. I think you know that, but hay it’s Monday, you’ve got to get the column out whether or not you’ve got any good ideas. And by the way, I read that Washington was a little embarrassed about the hemp and tried kept it quiet.

I love your column though, Libertarians are awesome. Libertarians are the true ideological descendents of the founders. I think they are the most hopeful, optimistic and idealistic people in the country. They really believe in the “better angels of our nature”. And in that vein I’d rather have Ron Paul as President than Lincoln, he’s more idealistic and purer. I wish we could live in a libertarian world but we’re addicted to the drugs of selfish partisanship and expedient compromise. Don’t you wish they were prohibited?

No, there is no chemical that I believe should be prohibited from personal consumption. While a theoretical case can be made to prohibit a drug that would directly lead to the inevitable harming of others who did not take it, that’s simply not true of even the most dangerous illegal drugs known today. Nor do I wish to ban either “selfish partisanship” or “expedient compromise”. In that desire to control the behavior of other individuals is the seed of every totalitarian nightmare ever created or contemplated.

I appreciate the kind words, but FS simply doesn’t understand that libertarianism is not an optimistic or idealistic perspective, but rather a pessimistic one. It is also the only rational one. If one does not trust the ability of individuals to control themselves, how does it make sense to place one’s trust in individuals with the power to control others?

This little factoid might come in handy when dealing with the average pot-smoking Visualize World Peacenik:

In 1998 the UN General Assembly committed member countries to achieving a “drug-free world” and to “eliminating or significantly reducing” the production of opium, cocaine and cannabis by 2008. That is the kind of promise politicians love to make. It assuages the sense of moral panic that has been the handmaiden of prohibition for a century. It is intended to reassure the parents of teenagers across the world. Yet it is a hugely irresponsible promise, because it cannot be fulfilled.

Interesting to see the Economist come out in favor of legalization.

Catkiller! has his doubts:

Which would you say has caused more death, the war on drugs or abortion? Sure, you’re pro-life, but aren’t most libertarians pro-choice? If conservatives and libertarians are ever going to form any kind of working coalition, we’re each going to have to give up something. As a Russell Kirk traditionalist, I have no problem giving up the war on drugs. Now, are you going to tell me the rank and file libertarians are going to drop their pro-choice stance?

Abortion, obviously. As for the Libertarian party, I doubt they’re going to go firmly pro-life anytime soon; if they had any capability for political compromise they probably wouldn’t be card-carrying Libertarians in the first place. But, it’s absolutely necessary for conservatives to give up the War on Drugs and for libertarians to give up the fictitious “right” to abortion if the greater Right is ever to come together. Long-time readers will recall that I once wrote a column recommending precisely such a trade-off.

However, it’s much too late. The third-worlders are already inside the gates and claimed the Cherry Blossom Throne. I declared Game Over some time ago and I’ve seen nothing to convince me to even begin contemplating changing my mind. I don’t know why people seem to have such a hard time understanding that once the rollercoaster passes a certain point, there is no going back. Now, there’s nothing to do except do one’s best to enjoy the ride.

Surrender Drug Warriors!

Conservatives tend to assume that, unlike dirty, treasonous liberals, they are on the side of truth, justice, liberty and the American way. This is not without reason, as most of the time, they are. However, for nearly 30 years, conservatives have been guilty of one of the greatest abuses of American liberties in American history, and have actively abetted the growth of central government by their thoughtless support for the war on drugs….

NB adds: “The sainted William F. Buckley, Jr. made the identical point in National Review, years ago. Glad to see Buchanan has come around to his point of view. But it’d be nice if you’d give credit where credit is due. The Old Man of the movement was preaching the truth decades before people started listening.”