Author: VD

EM can’t make it all the way through:

I enjoy your writings. It is refreshing to have an apparently informed and literate commentator. I would like to make a suggestion. I have noted in your writing, there tends to be a flurry of gbblety-gook toward the end. As in this article, you write of second and fourth circuit imprint, blah, blah, blah.

I hate to admit. I completely lose interest and close the window. I am not advocating you dumb-down your writing. This flourish is just unnecessary and very unreadable. It would be nice to not have to reread to understand your close.

It’s true that most people aren’t familiar with neurosomatic circuit theory, but that expected lack of familiarity doesn’t justify leaving it out. What EM considers to be a flurry of nonsense is actually a summing up, in which I have neither the space nor the inclination to further explain the subject.

Of course, I have to admit that the entire topic today may well be gobbledygook, but it’s INTERESTING gobbledygook, which suffices to justify it. I assumed everyone else would have this week’s theme of Immigration is Bad pretty well covered.

DO concurs:

I saw EM’s comment on your 4/3 blog, and I have to agree. I am a 52-year-old, professional, college-educated lab manager for a tech company with an MBA, and more often than not I give up halfway through your column because I can’t figure out what you’re trying to say.

There’s a difference between “dumbing down” and being clear. You seem to take great pains to emphasize your intellect and education by peppering your writing with nearly incomprehensible, obscure terms. Your general position and topics are usually timely, interesting and relevant. I only wish I could enjoy them more fully.

Don’t be afraid to employ more “common” English. You have a great deal to say. More people will hear it if you speak our language.

To hear some folks tell it, you’d think I was sitting down with a thesaurus to write my columns. The truth is that most of the time I dash them off in 30 minutes on Saturday afternoon, and not only do I not spiff them up with a thesaurus, as the more perceptive of you have noted, I don’t even spell check them.

Today’s column was admittedly on the unusual side, but I’d just finished reading Prometheus Rising the night before, only a day after the lecture, and I was intrigued with the connections I’d discerned between the two. Since I had put off starting the column until Sunday afternoon, this was a case of WND getting stuck with either a) whatever happened to be on my mind, or, b) generic commentary on the news cycle.

In my post-syndication freedom, I have decided that there is no longer any reason to go with (b), so you can safely expect further strangeness to ensue any time I don’t have a specific column topic in mind. Which reminds me, some of you were worried and emailed me to ask me if I was out of favor with WND after Mr. Keyes was featured on the top of the page last week. The commentary editor emailed me this:

Keyes writes for us whenever the spirit moves him, though he used to be a regular feature on Mondays. But he does have a national following, so we promote him strongly when the opportunity arises.

Your writing is unpredictable, interesting, intelligent and cohesive, so why on earth would we want to drop you? Barring a major screw-up on your part — which I regard as highly unlikely — if one of our editors ever got a notion to let you go, you can be sure I would be fighting hard on your behalf to keep you. OK? And just so you know, I’ve argued to acquire, keep and drop a sizable number of our writers over the last five years and I seldom lose — I say that not to brag, but to reassure, since I know I can make a solid case on your behalf if the need arises. So tell your readers to relax.

After today’s column, I imagine the emphasis is likely on the “unpredictable”, but then, I get the feeling this particular editor would rather slit his wrists than edit 10 virtually identical columns on the topic du jour.

Another murder in Minneapolis:

In a burst of violence in a busy area of downtown Minneapolis, a gunman fired into a crowd late Friday night and killed Alan D. Reitter, 31, of Minnetonka, who had been out with a group of friends, authorities said. Police and community leaders said the shooting of Reitter near the Block E entertainment complex was a senseless act, and the death raised questions about safety downtown and led to calls for renewed efforts to stop gun violence in the city….

The Block E scene was especially crowded, with dozens of people on the street Friday night, according to workers and visitors. Many people, including a large number of teens and young adults, were there to see an opening night show of “ATL,” a coming-of-age movie about four teenagers in working-class Atlanta, said Ron Edwards, a member of the Police Community Relations Council (PCRC) and a longtime activist.

He went to a 5 p.m. showing of the movie. “It wasn’t the movie” that led to the night’s violence, Edwards said, noting that the movie had a positive message about resisting the temptations of the streets.

I always enjoy how the media is careful to let you know the race of the parties involved without informing you directly. A movie about the ATL, I wonder what color the teenagers interested in that could possibly be?

I’ve been out and about in downtown Minneapolis exactly once in the last four years. (I’m not counting when you drive to the Hilton, park in the parking ramp, have dinner at Manny’s and then go home.) That was last July, when Spacebunny, The Perfect Aryan Male and I hit one of the posh We Wish We Were in New York restaurants that was so desperate to convince you it was somewhere that wasn’t Minneapolis that all of the windows were covered.

After dinner, we walked outside and saw that apparently the restaurateurs had gotten their wish and Block E had been magically transported to Atlanta. Now, keep in mind that I spent many an evening in downtown Minneapolis and the Warehouse District, in fact, that’s where I first met Spacebunny. The difference was striking, as a downtown crowd that had once been 98 percent white was now 60 percent black.

I gave TPAM a commiserating pat on the shoulder – he owns a downtown condo – and hoped that he would enjoy his declining property values. I also asked him if they’d seen a big jump in crime yet, he shook his head, but as we walked past the skinny, exuberant would-be thugz and overfed, underdressed would-be hoz, he admitted that he didn’t think it would be long before the inevitable crime wave got rolling. We stopped in for a drink at the place where Spacebunny and I met, it caters to twenty and thirty-something professionals and needless to say, it was all but empty.

And while neither the summer nor the expected crime wave is yet upon us, it wouldn’t surprise me if we soon began to see a revival of the Murderopolis headlines that featured so prominently in the Star & Sickle back in the mid-eighties. The DFL can embrace diversity all it likes, but if it wants to fight suburban sprawl and urban decay, turning the downtown entertainment district into an Atlanta ghetto strikes me as a particularly backwards way of going about it.

As economist Stephen Levitt shows in Freakonomics, aborting black children has proven to be the best defense against crime. I am, as every reader knows, opposed to all abortion for any reason, (except, of course, the termination of half-human demon babies of the sort seen in the Belgariad), but it serves no one, least of all the black community, to pretend that the fatherlessness and other social pathologies of that community do not exist or affect anyone else. Blacks themselves know it very well; the first thing the black upper middle class does is attempt to disassociate itself geographically from their socially dysfunctional relatives.

The right to free association, in other words, discriminate on the basis of color or anything else you may happen to choose, is guaranteed in the Constitution. Congress has no power to dicatate who you will hire, fire or live next to, regardless of what illegitimate chest-beating in which it may engage. Until Americans reclaim that right, diversity will be used as a wedge to divide and conquer them.

I don’t have an answer, except to maximize individual freedom with the goal of keeping ghetto pathologies in the ghetto. Money is no solution, as forty-plus years of the failed Great Society has proved. Public education is a bad joke. Open carry laws are good, but there’s no defense against a social sickness that isn’t seeking anything except a buzz from random violence. Since segregation is preferred in every human culture, merely removing the structures of forced desegregation may suffice to bring about a more harmonious and peaceful co-existence.

Despite its best efforts, the media fails to pull one over on (the vast majority of) men:

At last count Cargo had 373,727 subscribers, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which does not break down numbers on how many are metrosexuals. Introduced by Condé Nast in March 2004 as the men’s equivalent of Lucky, Cargo seemed to be an instant hit with consumers. It was a ready source of validation for any number of articles about trends in men’s grooming and luxury products.

“More guys flash jewelry,” wrote The Denver Post, citing Cargo. “Shaving pits latest trend for today’s manly men,” trumpeted The Kamloops Daily News in British Columbia, also invoking the magazine. Articles about the “return of the dandy” in The San Antonio Express-News and about how “men enjoy pampering too” in The Triangle Business Journal of Raleigh, N.C., relied on the magazine. And last week an article by this reporter in The New York Times about men with beards cited as evidence two editors of Cargo.

“I don’t think the idea of a shopping magazine for men is wrong,” said Joe Zee, its former editor, who now works on special projects for the company. “It all just happened too much too fast. The idea of metrosexuals was something created by Madison Avenue for advertising reasons. It was such a gimmick that, of course, it was going to fall flat at some point.”

Given that I have my suits and shirts custom made, I devote conscious thought to my footware loyalties – currently Adidas (soccer, gym) and Geox (dress) – and that Spacebunny receives invitations to shows by Milanese designers, you’d think that I’m a pretty fashion-conscious man, of the sort that the media glorified in proclaiming a metrosexual trend.

I’m pleased to say that not only did I never read the aforementioned Cargo, but I’d never actually been cognizant of its name. (I had read somewhere that there were two magazines, the existence of which proved the metrosexual trend, but that was all.) Nor did I buy into the mythical “trend”. What magazines do I follow? Sports Illustrated, the Economist, New Scientist and Computer Gaming World.

The truth is that men of style ignore fashion. Fashion is female and ephemeral. It changes from year to year. Boys can be trendy if they want, after all, there has to be a way for one generation to signal its differences from its predecessors and once the girls of an age collectively decide what they want, the boys have to follow suit if they wish female favors to be conferred upon them.

A man, on the other hand, simply dresses as he does. Regardless of whether you habitually wear a suit made by Armani Collezione, a swim suit and suntan lotion or a cowboy hat and wife beater, true male style is to go with what is most natural to your personality, the occasion and your occupation.

As for those three hundred thousand would-be trendfollowers, well, those that were nominally of the male sex should be ashamed of themselves. You might as well go all the way and subscribe to The Advocate, or better yet, grow up and learn that dressing according to a magazine is little more than advanced Geranimals.

From the SFWA:

The 13th annual RITA Awards will be announced on July 29, 2006 at the Romance Writers of America’s 26th National Conference, which will be held in Atlanta, Georgia. The award catagories include Best Paranormal (Science Fiction and Fantasy) Romance.

Best Paranormal (Science Fiction and Fantasy) Romance Finalists:
The Misted Cliffs by Catherine Asaro
Ghost Walk by Heather Graham
My Shadow Warrior by Jen Holling
Spirited Away by Pamela Labud
A Taste of Crimson by Marjorie Liu
After Midnight by Teresa Medeiros
Gabriel’s Ghost by Linnea Sinclair
Dark Lover by J. R. Ward

The frightening thing is that Asaro actually won the Nebula award a few years ago. Fortunately, it was just a popularity contest that year – she also won the Presidency – but it’s not a good sign for the future that publishers – and readers – have so enthusiastically embraced the romance novelization of the genre.

Speaking of real science fiction, I’m sorry to learn that David Feintuch has died. While I did not know him well, I met him at my first book signing; we sat next to each other all day and he was kind enough to give me signed copies of four of his books. As others have described him, he was a big, gentle man and a decent human being. His Nicholas Seafort books are worth checking out if you haven’t read them yet, a sort of Aubrey-Maturin in space, albeit minus the Maturin.

From the Star & Sickle:

A mumps vaccine was introduced in 1967. Iowa law requires schoolchildren to be vaccinated against measles and rubella, and the mumps vaccine is included in the same shot. The state’s last major outbreak was in 1987, when 476 people were infected.

Of the 245 patients this year, at least 66 percent had had the recommended two-shot vaccination, while 14 percent had received one dose, the Public Health Department said.

“The vaccine is working,” Quinlisk said. “The vaccine certainly was made to cover this particular strain, because it’s a fairly common strain of mumps.” Quinlisk said the vaccine overall is considered about 95 percent effective.

So, the question is this: if the vaccine, not improved hygiene or some other factor, is primarily responsible for preventing transmission of the disease it is supposed to prevent, how is it possible that 80 percent of the infected in this latest outbreak are at least partially vaccinated against it?

And isn’t it at least somewhat doubt-inspiring that the health authorities continue to insist that the vaccine is working in the face of direct evidence that, at least in some cases, it is not?

New Scientist magazine interviews Leonard Susskind, professor of theoretical physics at Stanford:

“If we do not accept the landscape idea are we stuck with intelligent design?”

“I doubt that physicists will see it that way. If, for some unforeseen reason, the landscape turns out to be inconsistent – maybe for mathematical reasons, or because it disagrees with observation – I am pretty sure that physicists will go on searching for natural explanations of the world. But I have to say that if that happens, as things stand now, we will be in a very awkward position. Without any explanation of nature’s fine-tunings we will be hard pressed to answer the ID critics. One might argue that the hope that a mathematically unique solution will emerge is as faith-based as ID.”

One of the reasons that I think so little of Darwin’s more outspoken defenders is that most of them are not genuine scientists, they are at best third-rate academics. I do not subscribe to either ID or evolutionary theory, (being firmly agnostic on the question of both origins and methods*), but I have to say that the behavior of the evolutionists over the past few years has me leaning towards the ID camp, mostly because they don’t behave as if they have something to hide.

It is interesting that the genuine scientists are much more open to the concept of design and sometimes even God, probably because they actually understand the issues involved and are more aware of the many failures of past scientific dogma. On a tangential note, I should mention that quoting Richard Dawkins has negatively impressed me ever since I read his incoherent response to the 9/11 attacks; anyone who can misconstrue basic history and make such incredible leaps of logic is definitely not someone I want on my side. I know next to nothing about biology or chemistry and I’d still feel pretty comfortable walking into a debate with the guy on something in his field without even bothering to prepare.

Someone who is a sloppy thinker in one area is usually a sloppy thinker across the board. Experience and education help, but they are no substitute for precision and logic.

The true scientist is open-minded and requires proof that things are so or are not so. It is tremendously ironic that so many devotees of science now rely on the same sort of ontological arguments that their philosophically inclined predecessors criticized in the medieval theologians. The fact that you can imagine a landscape of 10(500) universes does not mean that it therefore exists. Leonard Susskind understands this; it is a pity that so many who hold his work in such high regard do not.

*Saying “God did it” is not at all the same as explaining precisely how God did it. If I tell you that I ate breakfast this morning, you may correctly infer that I made my own breakfast this morning, but you would not be able to explain how I made it or even tell what I ate. I don’t know how things came about, ergo my agnosticism on the subject. I strongly suspect that you don’t know either, regardless of how strongly you believe in God or Darwin’s theory.

From the BBC:

A doctor in India and his assistant have been sentenced to two years in jail for revealing the sex of a female foetus and then agreeing to abort it. This is the first time medical professionals have been jailed in such a case. Under Indian laws, ultrasound tests on a pregnant woman to determine the gender of the foetus are illegal.

I shall eagerly await hearing how feminists will defend the jailing of abortionists… apparently it’s okay to kill a child as long as you don’t know the sex. I assume this means it’s okay to shoot up a school in India, but only if you’re blindfolded.

Someone I’ve never heard of writes about the latest idiots’ campaign for NRO:

Others at the hearing might make the argument that there is a clear correlation between violent games and destructive social behavior. But that’s another myth, as no such correlation has been proven.

Indeed almost every important social indicator has been improving in recent years even as video-game use among youths has increased. Juvenile murder, rape, robbery, and assault are all down significantly over the past decade. Aggregate violent crime by juveniles fell 43 percent between 1995 and 2004. Meanwhile, fewer kids today are carrying weapons to school or are victims of violence in schools than in the past. Alcohol and drug abuse, teen birth rates, high-school dropout rates, and teenage suicide rates have all dropped dramatically as well. These results do not conclusively rule out a link between exposure to games and violent acts or promiscuous sexual behavior, but they should at least call into question the “world-is-going-to-hell” sort of generalizations made by proponents of increased regulation.

It doesn’t get much dumber than arguing that X is causing an increase in Y when Y is declining, but that’s never stopped the “We know what’s good for you” crowd. Because it’s for the children, after all, never mind that the “child” is more likely to be a 35 year-old married man than a 12 year-old boy. It’s not the kiddies who make Maddens Day a national holiday, after all.

It’s true that video game designers are, by and large, a bit more sociopathic than the norm. I should know, being one myself. I was at the Computer Game Developer’s Conference when news of the OK City bombing broke on CNN and I remember a female reporter from a newspaper – the San Jose Mercury News, if I recall correctly – being visibly shaken when a big cheer went up at the Westin bar on hearing the news that a government building had been blown up. Good times. I suspect that most game designers don’t like reality all that much, for fairly respectable reasons, and prefer to spend time in the worlds they create.

What game critics don’t understand is that the games don’t tend to influence one’s reactions towards the outside world, they tend to make one turn away from it altogether. For those who attempt to make a drug comparison, the desire for more and more doesn’t drive one to look for an external experience, but rather a more immersive and comprehensive internal one. A hard core gamer who takes it to the limit isn’t going to attempt to recreate a Doom III slaughter zone in the real world – as if humans are any substitute for twelve-foot tall horned demons – he’s going to die of dehydration by refusing to come out of the game.

Someone commented yesterday, and I think I agree, that this is may be another facet of the War Against All Things Male. Female sociopathologies are destroying the nation, so naturally Congress is concerned about boys and men blowing things up in a virtual world. Unlike the Girl World of television, where Approved Authority Figures such as cops, judges, lawyers and doctors are the heroes, the Boy World of games lionizes the individual like Duke Nukem, who came here to kick ass and chew gum… and he’s all out of gum.

The Nanny State is almost always the bad guy in Boy World, and the hero never asks permission to violate the gun laws or the speeding limits, let alone those about smoking in a public place. No wonder women like Little Miss Heartbeat and her state-fellating amigas can’t stand to allow the impressionable youth of America to play them.

2 – Arsenal
0 – Juventus

The score doesn’t even begin to tell the tale. The Gunners ran Juve right out of Highbury, with slashing passes carving up the great Italian defense as if it belonged to one of Serie A’s bottom-dwellers instead of a team 8 points clear and headed for a second straight Scudetto.

By the end, the bianconeri were so frustrated that they were committing fouls like mad, ending up with nine men. Three players will miss the return leg, including Patrick Viera, so Arsenal may not even need an away goal to secure the tie.

Thierry Henry’s goal was phenomenal, although it was more of a fantastic finish to a team effort instead of the sort of solo feat that beat Real Madrid. It’s hard to believe that this team is only going to finish fourth in the Premiership, or that they won’t be giving Chelsea a very hard fight for first next year.

Astute readers may have noted that a certain blonde girl was talking a little smack about one of her rivals when she asked if the actual telephone aspect of dear, darling Treo was working. As it happens, it was not, thanks to a very annoying series of foul-ups by the retail outlet and PalmOne, who conspired to provide me with a replacement PDA phone that worked very well, except for the communications bit. The Treo happened to be blocked.

A series of telephone calls to tech support landed me in a vicious circle; by the time I spoke the first person I’d contacted to begin a THIRD CIRCLE, I was contemplating various illegal activities that probably would have landed me afoul of several aspects of the Patriot Act. There was, quite simply, no way I was going to return the Treo again, wait a month and hope that they didn’t manage to replicate their mistake.

Only then did I remember that I was a pirate by nature, intellectually opposed to most intellectual property law with millions of minds at my disposal via the Internet. Fifteen minutes, a five-meg download, two firmware upgrades and a reset, voila! Now I have a completely unblocked phone and I will certainly refrain from renewing my contract with the bureaucratic bastards when it runs out in a few months. I took great pleasure in calling their technical support and telling them precisely how I’d slashed through their Gordian Knot.

“Well, that might void your warranty with us, you know.”

“I know you’re saying you might not fix my phone if something doesn’t work. What I don’t know is how that’s any different from what you’ve been doing for the last two months.”

When the law is a ass, a man has a responsibility to go and kick it.