Author: VD

Since Christmas is approaching and some of you read this stuff two weeks ago, I attempted to make this one a bit less challenging than usual. If you’ve been struggling, this may be your week! For next week, read Chapter 8. It’s only 30 pages, so you should be able to knock it down in between the eggnog and the hot buttered rum.

The OC points out that once again, I am ahead of my time:

Overcapacity has been something generally acknowledged across the writing industry for at least 10 years. In a 2002 essay in The New York Times, the onetime best-selling novelist and story writer Ann Beattie mourned the situation of the modern writer, living in a world where people are more interested in “being a writer” than in writing itself. “There are too many of us, and M.F.A. programs graduate more every year, causing publishers to suffer snow-blindness, which has resulted in everyone getting lost,” she lamented. That Ann Beattie must now compete on Amazon with a self-published author named Ann Rothrock Beattie is proof of how enormous the blizzard has become.

So how would my big St. Bernard of a bailout dig the publishers out of their drifts? According to the industry tracker Bowker, about 275,000 new titles and editions are published in the United States each year. Let’s say we want to eliminate half of them. Assuming it takes about two years to write your average book, we would offer book writers two years of salary at the writers’ average annual income of $38,000 a year. Add it all up and you get a paltry $10.5 billion to dramatically reduce the book overcapacity.

I scorn. I scoff. I’ve been getting paid to not write books for YEARS now. In fact, my professional non-writing oeuvre is precisely half the size of my published output.

I find myself in agreement with a Paul Krugman column:

Yet surely I’m not the only person to ask the obvious question: How different, really, is Mr. Madoff’s tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole?

The financial services industry has claimed an ever-growing share of the nation’s income over the past generation, making the people who run the industry incredibly rich. Yet, at this point, it looks as if much of the industry has been destroying value, not creating it. And it’s not just a matter of money: the vast riches achieved by those who managed other people’s money have had a corrupting effect on our society as a whole.

One of the bigger lies in America is the idea that the stock market has anything to do with either capitalism or the free market. It’s not. It’s a complex institution designed to intercept the money that would otherwise go to successful and productive entrepeneurs and reroute it to the bankers.

Think about it. If an entrepeneur has an idea, or a technology, why shouldn’t he be able to seek investment and sell shares directly to interested parties via the Internet? Entrepeneurs appear to be figuring out that Wall Street is little more than a gang of bandits, as they’re increasingly preferring to pursue acquisitions rather than going public.

This guy does for the infantilisation of Western culture. And he’s basically correct:

Seriously though, there is an increasing dearth of actual intellectual or moral seriousness in much of American Christianity, even in professing Evangelicalism. The churches are following the same trend of infantilisation as is society at large. No longer is this religion God-centred, dedicated to His glory, and seeking to serve Him acceptably. Now it is man-centred, feebly mewling because somebody offended it by disagreeing with it on doctrine. And that right there is another symptom of this childishness in society – this notion that we shouldn’t talk about things that might “offend” or “create a stir”.

A certain man once said this: “Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division: For from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three. The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother; the mother in law against her daughter in law, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.”

If you ever hear a pastor babbling on about peace and unity through religion, or worrying about offending the precious sensitivities of others, you can be quite confident that there’s little point in listening to him. Whatever he’s teaching, it isn’t the Bible, which is filled with metaphor after metaphor referring to division, separation, and even winnowing.

While I understand Joseph Farah’s annoyance with Wikipedia, I’m not that concerned about it. Anyone who actually uses the online encyclopedia knows that it’s not reliable when it comes to the discussion of any controversial figure, especially anyone whose views aren’t in accordance with the idiot college lefties who defensively squat on every entry of interest to them.

There’s no shortage of errors in the entry about me, but I think the most egregious may be the recent modification which states I am “supposedly a libertarian“.

Now, consider the facts. I oppose the drug war, support the legalization of all drugs, support legal prostitution, assert the right to absolute self-title, and repeatedly write about the evils of central government and advocate stringent limitations on its power. The only two formal positions of the Libertarian Party with which I take issue are abortion and open immigration, both of which can be very well justified on pure libertarian grounds, (the former), and practical libertarian grounds, (the latter). In my pragmatic preference for universal democracy over limited representative democracy, I’m more genuinely democratic than most despite my skepticism about the societal viability of women’s, children’s and foreigner’s suffrage. I am demonstrably more of a pure libertarian than most of the quasi-Republicans and libertine Democrats who attempt to appropriate the name.

In short, if I’m not actually a libertarian, then who is?

I suppose this bizarre document might explain why he was in such a hurry to move into Blair House:

This is another scandal that just keeps growing. When it first became known that Rezko helped Obama buy his house, Obama himself called the deal “boneheaded”. Now things look much worse, because Rezko‘s lawyer owns the house. His name is William Miceli, and Obama formerly worked for him.

I have no idea if the Assessment Record for Cook County is, in fact, conclusive proof that William Miceli owns the property at 5046 Greenwood. I don’t even know that 5046 Greenwood is Obama’s current address. And I don’t understand how the Obamas could – or would – claim a mortgage deduction on a house they didn’t own.

So, perhaps there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for all this. But there certainly appears to be no shortage of corruption and scandal surrounding the president-elect. Between the birth certificate, the Blago scandal, Rahm “21 calls” Emmanuel, the Rezko ties and now this house thing, one begins to wonder if the guy will even make it to Inaugural Day without getting arrested.

More evidence that Obama may be legally barred from the presidency:

Jorge Baro was hired by WND to investigate issues related to Obama’s birth amid allegations the Democrat does not meet the Constitution’s requirement that a president be a “natural born citizen.” Baro’s affidavit documents an interview his staff conducted with Beatrice Arakaki, who has lived at 6075 Kalanianaole Highway in Honolulu since before Obama was born….

Arakaki told Baro’s investigators she had no recollection of Obama being born or of the family living next door having a black child born to a white mother.

I tend to doubt this will ever come to anything, since both the White House and the Congress have made it quite clear that they consider both the Constitution and federal law to be entirely optional. What I’ve found most interesting about this situation is that since the federal court system and the Supreme Court have resolutely refused to consider the facts concerning Obama’s ability to be sworn in as a lawful president, there’s nothing to prevent Arnold Schwarzenegger or any other foreigner from running for the office in the future. No amount of public knowledge will matter if there isn’t a single party with court-approved standing to question any candidate’s legitimacy.

If this isn’t a harbinger of apocalypse, it’s hard to know what would be:

Tarvaris Jackson’s strong performance in relief of injured starter Gus Frerotte on Sunday earned the Vikings quarterback NFC offensive player of the week honors on Tuesday.

Only Brad Childress would be more pleased than me to see the Tarvaris Jackson Experiment turn out to be a surprise success. And he has had a pair of really nice games, but then, Detroit and Arizona aren’t quite Baltimore and Tennessee.

And speaking of Tennessee, even though Brian Westbrook and the Tennessee DEF failed to rack up their usual points, Green Bay gave me just one more reason to hate them by failing to show up against one of the league’s worst passing defenses. Two first-place finishes in three years, but not a single playoff win. My only consolation is that the turning down the big Manning/Portis trade wouldn’t have made any difference.

So, the VPFL championship game will feature second-place Alamo City against the fourth-place Redbeards. Dammit.

In order to “save” it:

“I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system,” Bush told CNN television, saying he had made the decision “to make sure the economy doesn’t collapse.”

That’s almost as logically coherent as the insistence that temperatures dropping on a global scope is evidence of global warming. I find myself beginning to be astonished, when suddenly I recall that most people truly are idiots. Not one in a hundred individuals, be they godless or religious, collectivist or free market capitalist, ever stops to think about the obvious contradictions they demonstrate every day in their assumptions, beliefs, actions, and statements.

Is there anyone who is seriously surprised by this?

Barack Obama’s newly selected education secretary may need to visit a grammarian before he takes on the American education system. During his introductory remarks in Chicago today, Arne Duncan, the outgoing Chicago public schools chief, mixed up his personal pronouns.

One quite looks forward to Mr. Duncan doing for the rest of America’s public schools what he has done for the excellent public schools of Chicago. It’s been 53 years since Rudolf Fleisch explained Why Johnny Can’t Read. At this rate, in another fifty years, Christian parents are going to be defending their decision to send their children to the local intellectual meat grinder by bragging that their tenth-grader knows his alphabet.

Well, most of it, anyhow.