Author: VD

The resident NFL conspiracy theorist announces this week’s results prior to kickoff:

Okay, so far they’re staying right on script. My guess is that this was Favre’s big farewell performance for the home-town fans, and that next week he’s going to choke big time and the Packers will get stomped in Dallas. BUT….I could be wrong, this may *not* have been Favre’s farewell performance tonight, in which case the Colts and Giants win tomorrow, the Packers beat the Giants in a squeaker in Lambeau next week, and Favre goes out in a blaze of glory in a rematch of Superbowl XXXI, as the Packers fight tooth and claw to pull a come-from-behind victory over the Patriots. For further explication, go watch the James Caan version of “Rollerball.”

Bread and circuses, chum. Bread and circuses…

New England should win handily tonight. It’s too early for them to
suffer the humiliating defeat that will end their season. That
happens in the Superbowl. (Remember your own principles. Everyone
loves a winner, but everyone hates a winner who make it look too easy, and watching a hero win is nowhere near as gratifying as watching a hero fall. The most powerful human emotion is schadenfreude.)

[And later, after post-game exchange of email about the New England win and the Redemption of Ryan Grant theme.]

PS: Even [omitted] picked up on the Redemption of Ryan Grant sub-plot, though, possibly because the AP wire service story used the word “redemption” in the headline and at least twice again in the body. I think Grant did his job admirably, considering that the Packers needed to spot the Seahawks 14 points just to keep it from looking like a lopsided blowout. Maybe Favre was getting tired of throwing strategic interceptions.

The Grant sub-plot settles it. Since he came to the Packers after a few years as a benchwarmer for the Giants, this means the Giants beat Dallas today, so that not only do we get the Average Joes Triumph Over The Smug All-Stars story today, but next week’s game at Lambeau becomes Grant’s Revenge.

In light of this elucidation, I couldn’t help but notice that the broadcasters actually had a little video piece prepared that began with the words “this week’s theme is REVENGE”. It was like something straight out of the WWF.

And yes, this is your Divisional Playoff discussion post.

The Right-Wing News surveys the blogs:

Right Wing News emailed more than 240 right-of-center bloggers and asked them to answer 10 questions. The following 55 blogs responded:

The Absurd Report, The American Princess, AtlanticBlog, Baldilocks, Barking Moonbat Early Warning System, BitsBlog, (John) BitsBlog, BizzyBlog, Blonde Sagacity, Bluey Blog, Bookworm Room, Lorie Byrd, Cold Fury, Dr. Melissa Clouthier, The Conservative Reader, Conservative Grapevine, Damian Penny, Election Projection, Musings, Flopping Aces, Freeman Hunt, GOPUSA Northeast, GOPUSA Northeast (Hank), Guardian Watchblog, Dr. Helen, Jeff Gannon – A Voice of the New Media, Inside Larry’s Head, Keith Burgess-Jackson, JackLewis, (Brian) Liberty Pundit, Likelihood of Success, Moonbattery, Neocon News, Newsbeat1, Newsbusters, Nosiy Room, No Oil For Pacifists, The Nose On Your Face, Outside The Beltway, PrestoPundit, Pundit Guy, QandO, (Alexham) Redstate, Reformed Chicks Blabbing, Right Wing Rocker, Say Anything, Sister Toldjah, Slobokan’s Site Of Schtuff, Knowledge Is Power, Stolen Thunder, The Sundries Shack, dcthornton.com, Trying To Grok, Vox Popoli, WILLisms,

The bloggers were asked to select answers to the following questions (because some bloggers skipped particular questions, gave answers that weren’t listed, or gave answers that were difficult to categorize, there are not 55 responses to each question.)

1) Which candidate would you like to see as the Republican Party’s nominee out of this group?

A) Rudy Giuliani: 4 — 7%
B) Mike Huckabee: 2 — 4%
C) Duncan Hunter: 9 — 17%
D) John McCain: 3 — 6%
E) Ron Paul: 1 — 2%
F) Mitt Romney: 4 — 7%
G) Fred Thompson: 31 — 57%

It’s interesting to see how little support Giuliani and Romney have these days. There are certainly worse options than the Tennessee Toad out there, I would certainly have no objection to a do-nothing presidency if a do-nothing campaign had any hope of surviving Team Clinton. And I’m sure it’s nearly impossible to guess which of these 55 blogs cast the lone vote for Ron Paul.

Some find it lonely at the top, I just enjoy the solitude.

Brent Rasmussen and I have widely divergent opinions about God, life, the universes and everything. What we share, however, is a basic understanding of why it is unwise to embrace government oppression of your political or religious foes:

Dawn Sherman, the 14 year old student in Buffalo Grove High School in Illinois who is fighting a mandatory moment of silence law, is getting hammered by the incredibly intolerant, misinformed, “persecuted” Christians who are willing to throw away their civil rights because they happen to be in the majority at this moment.

From my perspective, it’s even worse than that. Forget “civil rights”, which are held at the whim of the granting authority. They are throwing away their unalienable God-given rights. Now, there is some legitimate room for discussion here, as a school is not Congress and a school policy is not a law. The concept of separation of Church and State has certainly been stretched to encompass absurd applications. But since that’s not the level upon which this debate is normally held, it’s really not relevant here.

Unlike far too many atheists and Christians alike, Brent understands that once government possesses a certain power, the only question that remains is who will be targeted by that power. Use government to oppress today and you may very well be among the oppressed tomorrow. Moreover, you will deserve it.

This is not rocket science. What is merely a mandated moment of silence can easily be transformed into the mandated worship of Caesar’s image.

It’s not always wise to put your money where your mouth is:

Pregnancy robs a teenager of her girlhood. This stark fact is one reason girls used to be so carefully guarded and protected — in a system that at once limited their horizons and safeguarded them from devastating consequences. The feminist historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg has written that “however prudish and ‘uptight’ the Victorians were, our ancestors had a deep commitment to girls.”

We, too, have a deep commitment to girls, and ours centers not on protecting their chastity, but on supporting their ability to compete with boys, to be free — perhaps for the first time in history — from the restraints that kept women from achieving on the same level.

When described this way, feminism sounds almost noble and it’s not hard to understand its emotional appeal, not just to women but fair-minded men as well. The problem is that it’s completely based on a lie that has been repeatedly disproven by the historical, logical and scientific evidence. The modern commitment to girls has amounted to little more than an effort to turn them into inferior androgynous evolutionary dead-ends. Fortunately for Mankind, the effort fails much more often than not.

Women simply cannot compete with men without being artificially and externally advantaged by government. This is as true in the boardroom as on the basketball court. It is biology, not bias, and explains why in that a time when women are better educated than men, they still can’t manage achieve anything even remotely as significant as men regularly do. A female Steve Jobs or Bill Gates may have been unlikely, given their historical time frame, although such a beast was still theoretically quite possible. But these days, the absence of a female Niklas Zennstrom, Janus Friis, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page or Sergey Brin in a time of statistical female advantage among the educational elite is downright damning.

Although, one must note that the evidence shows the connection between what passes for education and finanancial or intellectual success to be nearly as spurious as the idea that feminism’s commitment to girls is beneficial to them.

The good news is that the police are spending far less time in doughnut shops than people think. The bad news is that the reason is that they’re spending quite a bit of it with prossies:

University of Chicago professor and “Freakonomics” author Steven D. Levitt and sociology professor Sudhir Venkatesh of Columbia University are the authors of the two-year study of street-level prostitution in Chicago’s Roseland, Washington Park and Pullman neighborhoods….

Prostitutes taking part in the study — who were paid $150 a week — reported that about 3 percent of the sex acts they performed were “freebies” given to Chicago police officers to avoid arrest. Police spokeswoman Monique Bond did not respond to requests for comment on the study’s finding. The study found full-time prostitutes made on average less than $20,000 a year.

But, you know, I’m sure protecting you from criminals is still the first thing on their minds when they’re getting a hummer in the squad car. It kind of makes you wonder what other shakedowns they’re involved with, doesn’t it?

I note that the study also tends to generally support the conclusions of my ground-breaking theoretical work in calculating the average sexual value of a woman to be around $1,350.00 annually. This is, no doubt, why so many police prefer the street hos.

Today, you have to go with the Packers and Patriots. But considering the two underdogs, I’d be less surprised by a Jacksonville upset.

A Harvard psychologist reaches essentially the same conclusion I have about morality and its universal applicability:

Here is the worry. The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world. The qualitative difference between red and green, the tastiness of fruit and foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights and prettiness of flowers are design features of our common nervous system, and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or if we were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other way. Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?

I can only marvel at the way my various atheist critics get tremendously upset when I point out the very same conclusion that secular scientists are reaching. If God does not exist, then no objective and universal morality exists either. This is really not up for debate among anyone who is sufficiently educated and capable of basic logic.

And furthermore, this is precisely why the secular position gravitates so readily and reliably towards totalitarianism, because in the absence of any objective and universal morality, one must be created and imposed.

I note, however, that Pinker is incorrect about Plato somehow disproving the idea that God can define morality. He’s implicitly referring to Euthyphro here, which no one has successfully disputed that I have conclusively refuted.

It’s another of those rare occasions wherein I completely agree with Andrew Sullivan:

And, yes, thank God for Ron Paul.

No one else, except McCain, copped to the GOP’s rank betrayal of fiscal conservatism, limited government, prudent foreign policy and civil liberties. When he was asked to disown the 9/11 Truthers, he gave a revealing answer, and one that reflects on the newsletters issue. It just isn’t in his nature to adopt other people’s views, or to tell anyone else what to believe or what to say. He doesn’t just believe in libertarianism; he lives it. This means that he doesn’t have the instinct to police anyone else’s views or actions within the law or the Constitution.

John Derbyshire, too, hasn’t backed down one iota from his support of Ron Paul. Neither have I. The very fact that a portion of the supposedly conservative commentariat seriously believes that one individual is responsible for another individual’s words, let alone thinks that anyone who values human freedom or the U.S. Constitution might abandon his support for the only candidate supporting both in the race, only goes to demonstrate how far what now passess for conservatism has fallen from the real thing.

Since when do real conservatives believe words speak louder than actions anyhow? (And since when do real conservatives think Martin Luther King is a sacred icon, for that matter? Given all the drama-queening reactions, you would have thought Paul was accused of insulting Ronald Reagan, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher.) First the liars of the Left stole “liberal”, now we are witnessing the theft of “conservative” before our very eyes.

People often try to blame me for comments that are made here. This is an intellectually shabby tactic, as there are literally hundreds of thousands of my own words from which to choose, and yet they still have to try to put words in my mouth in order to attack me. But like Ron Paul, I am a practicing libertarian; a failure to respond to a comment is as likely to mean that I think it is completely insane as it is to indicate that I agree with it. (Most likely, it means I think it’s obvious, idiotic or irrelevant, but then, I AM a superintelligence.) As Derb says of Paul, if you’re crazy, I’m fine with it.

Today’s “conservatives”, being every bit as PC and prone to playing thought police as their “liberal” ideological kin, simply can’t seem to understand that your thoughts are not my responsibility.

Alex Koppelman of Salon does an excellent job questioning Jonah Goldberg about Liberal Fascism. It was interesting to see the difference between my interview with Jonah and this one, in which the interviewer is obviously more familiar with the outmoded ideological interpretation of Fascism. Even the title of the piece demonstrates that Koppelman at least understood the book, even if he didn’t entirely agree with it. I thought his question about the seeming dichotomy between progressive passivism and fascist militarism was very good, as was Goldberg’s explanation:

What appealed to the Progressives about militarism was what William James calls this moral equivalent of war. It was that war brought out the best in society, as James put it, that it was the best tool then known for mobilization … That is what is fascistic about militarism, its utility as a mechanism for galvanizing society to join together, to drop their partisan differences, to move beyond ideology and get with the program. And liberalism today is, strictly speaking, pretty pacifistic. They’re not the ones who want to go to war all that much. But they’re still deeply enamored with this concept of the moral equivalent of war, that we should unite around common purposes.

Goldberg also does a brilliant job of slamming his more intransigent critics, who not only haven’t read the book – and probably aren’t capable of understanding it even if they tried to – but are seriously attempting to ignore the entire text on the basis of the cover image.

“I’m perfectly glad to concede that people who do judge books by their covers or think it’s more important to read a title rather than read a book will be confused and jump to conclusions. But these are people that I don’t generally respect…. And if you can’t get past the cover and the title, then you’re not a serious book reader and you’re not really a serious person.”