Mailvox: the other side

MW is moved to defend the homemakers:

I’ve never done this before, but VR’s comments caught my attention. You see, I’ve cleaned many toilets in my time and have “popped” ten babies so far. I have many aspirations, but they center around the vision my husband and I have for our family. We are trying to build a foundation that will stand for generations. This is a task that requires a mother who is focused and dedicated to that vision. This requires that a woman even has the foresight to appreciate the impact her mothering can have on future generations when she is dead and gone. Women today are short-sighted. They will do this for a corporation, but they won’t do it for their own family. The working world pays a woman for these things. A mother at home does it for love. Daycare can’t compare with real time mother love. Women are trading their birthright for a mess of pottage.

It saddens me that Christian women have joined the ranks looking to impact the world by means of a paycheck. Thriving families are a thing of the past because feminists have convinced today’s women that a mom at home is worthless, useless, senseless, and ignorant. I reject that drivel! I revel in the results of my decision every day as I see the happy faces around our dinner table and as I lie next to the man I love each night. Jesus said the greatest among us would be servants and that in losing our life we would find it. That is what real womanhood is all about…

She really sounds like a useless, worthless ignorant doormat, doesn’t she….


A truly wicked woman

Captain D tells a horror story:

My first wife planned her leaving for years, and like an idiot I continued to believe that things would work out if I just stayed for the sake of the children. Then she secretly attended a seminar “How to Leave your Man” at the local women and children’s shelter.

This is how I was almost set up.

One day I arrived home from work to find that the children had been sent to a friend’s place for the night. Nancy (the plotter) greated me with a kiss and a hug and said that she had arranged for us to have the evening alone “like old times”. She was cooking my favorite meal and presented me with a glass of wine and a gift of a new Tom Clancy paperback (Red Storm Rising as I recall).

Like a lamb going to slaughter, I sat happily in the living room – reading the novel and enjoying the wine while my sweetie cooked a “special dinner.” Absorbed in the book, I hardly noticed her walk to the front window of the house and look out as if expecting something.

At just the exact moment, she said, “Oh Honey” – and I looked up to see that she had a brick in her hand. She took the brick and smashed the glass in the grandfather clock and then started screaming and advancing towards me with the obvious intent of hitting me.

The front door burst open and there stood her girlfriend with a video camera… but the timing was off.

I was supposed to be caught in some staged physical confrontation – to facilitate spousal abuse charges. The girls were a little too quick, so all the video would have shown was me sitting in the chair, looking up from my novel in a confused and surprised manner.

I’ll not go on for much longer, but in the end I traded the house and my pension for my children – and Nancy ended up going from man to man looking for a yacht owner. She finally found a sucker in Mexico, and I raised my three children alone. But if their timing had of been a little better, I might have been doing some jail time.

All thanks to an evil woman, and a seminar provided by an institution supported with public tax dollars. If I were 25 years old again, I don’t think I’d ever get married.

I’m just amazed that Nancy darling didn’t end up having someone go AT&T on her. If not on behalf of Captain D, then on behalf of someone else further down the victim chain.


Prognostications

Der Ursprunglich Kunstlichzunder presents a few predictions:

EUROPE: While it’s tempting to look upon Europe as the land of quiche-eating metrosexuals, if you do that you’re forgetting that the continent that gave us vichy water, brie, and Vidkun Quisling also gave us vikings, nazis, and Attila the Hun. Right now Europe is about 20 years overdue for the sort of convulsive mass slaughter that we generally refer to as “history,” and while the Balkan adventures of the 1990s vented the pressure somewhat, we’re still but a few more Theo van Gogh’s away from Götterdämmerung Time. If the E.U. succeeds in uniting it may be able to stall or suppress ethnic and religious tensions for a few decades, in much the same way (and by using much the same methods) as the Soviet Union kept the lid on things from 1945 to 1990, but this will only make the anti-immigrant eruption that much worse when it finally breaks out. The eventual breakup of the E.U. will kill millions.

DOMESTIC TRAVEL: A few days ago the U.S. government announced that American citizens returning from Canada, Mexico, or the Caribbean will henceforth be required to show their passports before reentering the country. Many frequent flyers are already in the habit of carrying their passports whenever they take domestic flights, just because it makes it so much easier to get through airport security. Further, with all the concern over illegal immigration, there is now loud and persistent talk in government circles of creating and mandating the carrying of a national I.D. card.

In the end I don’t know whether it will be in the name of homeland security, immigration control, or energy and transportation policy, but I figure we have at least 10 and at most 15 years left before it will no longer be possible for American citizens to move freely around their own country without government permission. “Show us your papers, comrade!” But more on this in a future column.

Hint: Your own car will be the snitch that rats you out.

My only thought is that empires usually begin to die when they reach too far. With that in mind, the event that might bring about the violent implosion of the EU would be an attempt to swallow an unwilling Switzerland.


The contemptible media

The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof doesn’t like what he sees:

Since 1973, the National Opinion Research Center has measured public confidence in 13 institutions, including the press. All of the other institutions have generally retained a good measure of public respect, but confidence in the press has fallen sharply since 1990.

Those of us in the press tend to get defensive about our dwindling credibility. We protest that we’ve been made scapegoats by partisan demagogues, particularly on the right, and I think that’s true. But distrust for the news media, even if it’s unfair, is the new reality – and we will have to work much, much harder to win back our credibility with the public.

In any case, it’s not just right-wingers who distrust the media these days. The Pew Research Center found that while only 14 percent of Republicans believe all or most of what they read in The New York Times, even among Democrats the figure is only 31 percent. Other major news organizations face the same challenge. The Fox News Channel is considered credible by fewer than one-third of the Republicans – and an even smaller number of Democrats. Indeed, it’s a rare news organization that is trusted by more than one-third of the people in either party: the one thing Democrats and Republicans agree on is that the news media are not trustworthy.

The main reason is that they’re not. The news media is largely a bunch of undereducated pseudointellectuals who regularly confuse having heard of something with expertise in it. Being educated in journalism instead of an actual discipline, they tend to have a very small smattering of general knowledge and no depth of knowledge in anything.

Internet technology is the curse of the legacy media in more ways than one, because the men and women behind the curtain are now so easily revealed as the intellectual frauds they have usually been.

For example, when concealed carry laws were first passed, the newspapers in Florida and later Texas predicted bloodbaths soon to follow. But the significant fact was not that these newspapers were completely wrong, (although they were), but that newspapers in Minnesota and other states REPEATED EXACTLY THE SAME INACCURATE PREDICTIONS when similar carry laws were being debated ten years later. The same thing applies for the inability to recognize the farce of static revenue models when reporting on the expected impact of changes in tax rates.

It used to take a good memory and a newspaper addiction to notice this sort of thing. Now, even a casual news junkie may well read ten or twelve different papers online by the time he finishes his morning coffee, and should he notice something suspicious, he can check it out in seconds.

The blog phenomenon has merely magnified this new ability of the public to fact-check newspapers and other media, and since many journalists know very little about anything specific, it’s no surprise that their fraudulent credibility has finally been exploded.


Mailvox: strike first and strike hard

TW shares some real world experience:

As a Christian having just gone through a unilateral divorce initiated by my wife I can honestly say I had no idea how corrupt the system was, people just really have no idea what kind of mess they can get into with a divorce.

When I found out my wife was cheating it was devastating, when she filed for divorce it was heart breaking, then the court ordered me to pay her boyfriend’s rent ( we have no children, and she works ) … I cannot begin to describe the negative emotions and anger it generated, it’s as if the court was trying to get me to go postal.

$65,000 in legal fee’s later, financially ruined and more than a little bitter I learned a lesson that all men in the United States need to understand: The family court is nothing more and nothing less than a social engineering laboratory where every crackpot liberal idea that would never see the light of day if voted on by the people is carried out AGAINST the laws of the state and country.

There is too much money in this as an industry for the Government to ever let it go. The liberals love the dictatorial powers, the lawyers love the money, and the Judges love the power and the money. In WA state you are forced to use a mediator (after 1 year of legal battling) before you go to “Trial” to “help you settle out of court, that costs $600 per hour which is paid to retired judges (what a surprise) and if no agreement is reached then off to “Trial” for another 10K you go.

It seems to me that if a man is to have any chance of financially surviving a situation like this, he has to file for a fault-based divorce immediately. You can always forgive her and reconcile later, but you won’t get the opportunity to pin the blame on her cheating once she files for no-fault.

This is where men, unaccustomed to viewing women as the enemy, are at a severe disadvantage. Women plot their divorces for months, if not years in advance; you need only check out a few women’s forums to find numerous examples of this preparation. My father once overheard a woman on a plane instructing her married daughter to make nice with her estranged husband in order to get her name added to the house title before filing for divorce. It makes you wonder why these women were so hot and bothered to get married in the first place!

Another option, of course, is to simply ignore the whole process altogether and expatriate. Join Fred and company down in Mexico, drinking margaritas and dating signoritas. Sure, you won’t be rich, but you won’t be paying any alimony either and the chances are you’ll be a good deal happier.

In any event, these are things men need to know before marrying. Go ahead and take the leap if you wish, but know precisely what you are risking before you do so. Men and women do their sons no favors when they hide these bitter possibilities from them prior to marriage.


Mailvox: that’s what I’m talking about

VR vents her bitter spleen:

Nice. So you’re going to find some woman who will shack up with you. It’s a good thing, too, that you’re looking for a woman with no aspirations beyond scrubbing the toilet and popping out kids. It would take someone pretty stupid both to a.) believe shacking up is marriage and b.) to look to you as her leader.

Have you forgotten that if your shacking up arrangement lasts, said woman is going to eventually become your common-law wife who will be legally entitled to half your Star Wars toys? What are you planning to do, Vox? Dump her after six-and-a-half years for an upgrade? Having no job of her own, she’d be hard pressed to get her share of what any emotional support and maid service may have entitled to, let alone custody of the kids. I have to hand it to you. You really laid out a blueprint for any misogynistic “Christian” knucklehead out there who sees protecting his stuff as the most important goal of a marriage.

And I don’t know how to break this to you, but women can have careers and raise kids at the same time. A lot of women today are doing just that. Some of us even make as much or more than our husbands. Go figure, huh? Personally, I like to contribute to the household income. And I appreciate being married to a guy strong and wise enough to trust his own judgement – and me – enough to enter the same legal agreement that you see as a trap.

I don’t know what happened between you and your mother, but it must have been bad. You really seem to hate women. I don’t know if you write the headlines for you column, but in the case of the one on Worldnet Daily, it’s appropriate. You should most definitely stay single, especially if it keeps you from reproducing.

Apparently men and women were doing nothing more than shacking up for six thousand years until the government began issuing marriage certificates 150 years ago. And while a lot of women are having careers and raising kids at the same time, they are demonstrably doing a shoddy job at both. The anger here is particularly interesting because this is clearly a married woman, and yet the mere notion that men might swear off marriage is enough to send her into a hissy fit. I checked out a Canadian forum while preparing to write today’s column and it was very telling how these successful men who date regularly were labled losers by women simply because they stated that they had no intention of getting married. Of course, any man who is dumb enough to get married because he’s afraid of women calling him names deserves precisely what he’s going to get, namely, a woman calling him names.

In my recent contribution to THE ANTHOLOGY AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE, I highlighted how Douglas Adams showed how government interference causes people to behave in otherwise irrational ways. If the law forces men to trade in their women every six years in order to avoid being subject to unjust forfeiture of their property, then that’s precisely what you can expect them to eventually do. Perhaps the government will then propose prosecuting men who show a suspicious pattern of serial monogamy, just as they do with those who regularly withdraw sums of cash from their bank account.

I also enjoy the pop psychology that inevitably surfaces anytime one fails to sufficiently prostrate oneself before female dogma. It seems clear to me that VR is subject to a terrible case of penis envy and her anger is rooted in her sexual frustration with her husband.

UPDATE – It’s interesting, but the BLS actually excludes all mention of married couples wherein the husband works and the wife does not in order to jack up the percentage of wives who make more than their husbands do. But since I am approximately 8x smarter than the average government bureaucrat, I took the liberty of dividing the number of wives who earn more than their husbands – 11,329,000 – by the number of married couples, 56,747,000. This gives a more accurate figure of 19.6 percent instead of the 30.7 percent reported by the BLS.

So this means that there are still 19,883,000 traditional wives who remain outside the labor force, but they are now outnumbered almost two-to-one.


Umberto Eco on Jules Verne

Umberto Eco writes of the great science-fiction author on the centenary of his death in an article that was published on 11 April, 2005, in L’Espresso:

VOYAGE TO THE CENTER OF JULES VERNE

When
we were boys, we were divided into two groups: those that held to
Salgari [Italian author Emilio Salgari] and those that held to Verne. I
quickly confess that at that time I held for Salgari, and now History
compels me to revisit my opinions of that time. Salgari, retold, cited
from memory, loved for all the colors it gave one’s infancy, no longer
seduces new generations or – to tell the truth – the elders either.
When they reread him in search of a little ironic nostalgia, the reading
simply makes them tired, and too many of those mangroves and wild pigs
come to be an annoyance.

Instead, in 2005 we are celebrating the
centenary of the death of Jules Verne, and not only in France are there
daily and weekly conventions dedicated to him, searching to demonstrate
the many ways that his fantasies anticipated reality. A look at the
editorial catalogs in our country suggest to me that Verne was
republished far more often than Salgari, to say nothing of France, where
there exists an absolute industry of Vernian antiquities. The old
hardbound Hetzel editions are certainly very beautiful. (In Paris, on
the Left Bank alone, there are at least two stores possessing these
splended volumes laid out in red and gold, offered at a prohibitive
price.)

For all the merits that our Salgari must be remembered,
the father of Sandokan did not have a great sense of humor, (not unlike
the rest of his characters, with the exception of Yanez), while the
romances of Verne were full of humor. It is enough to remember those
splendid pages of “Michele Strogoff” where, after the battle of Kolyvan,
the reporter from the Daily Telegraph, Harry Blount, goes to the
telegraph office and spends thousands of rubles transmitting verses of
the Bible* to his corrispondent in Paris in order to impede his rival,
Alcide Jolivet. But Jolivet succeeds in robbing Blount of his position
at the telegraph and blocks him in turn by transmitting the little songs
of [François] Béranger.

“Hallo!” said Harry Blount.
“Just so,” answered Jolivet.”

And tell me if this is not style!

Another
reason for this fascination is that many futuristic stories, read at a
temporal distance when that future is already known, leaves the reader a
little disappointed, because the things that truly happened, the
inventions that were actually realized, are more marvelous than those
imagined by the books of the previous era. With Verne this is not so,
no atomic submarine will be more technologically wonderful than the
Nautilus and no dirigible or jumbo jet will ever be as fascinating as
the majestic helix ship of Robur the Conquistador….

And if we
do not have the money to buy the old Hetzel editions from antique
bookstores and we are not satisfied with the contemporary re-editions?
You can go on the Internet, to the address http://jv.gilead.org.il/.
There a gentleman by the name of Zvi Har’El, a collector of all the
news of Verne, has a list of the worldwide celebrations, a complete
bibliography, an anthology of sayings, 304 incredible stamps dedicated
to Verne from various countries, translations in Hebrew, and most of
all, a virtual library where you can find integral texts of Verne in
various languages and see the original French editions as well all of
the engravings to save and afterwards enlarge as you like because,
sometimes, we are even more captivated the second time.

One
of the most decent things about writers, a famously indecent lot, is
that they are one of the few disciplines who trouble to remember those
who went before.

*Eco makes an uncharacteristic mistake here,
as “the verses learned in his childhood” do not refer to the Bible, but
rather “the well-known verses of Cowper”, which is to say, William
Cowper, the English poet.


Aiding a national treasure

Those of us who regularly pollute our souls by reading BaneRants are aware that as just recompense for his multitude of evils, a vast list of crimes against humanity exceeded only by Hilary Clinton and various Elder Gods now sleeping (we hope) beneath the Antarctic ice, Bane has been inflicted by various plagues and poxes of the financial variety, mostly due to his fateful decision to pass on his inferior genetics to future generations.

Since he is the most likely vice-presidential nominee for the Cthulhu 2008 campaign, it is of course desirable that the fiscal viability of this probable candidate and potential savior of the nation be maintained. Therefore, I would encourage the regulars to consider doing one of two things:

Visit the Blogathon for Bane site and make a pledge, which is in no way tax-deductible and will in all probability be used to pay for expanding Difster’s already gargantuan collection of lesbian Chinese midget porn, but, like USA For Africa, will make you feel good while achieving absolutely nothing, or simply hit Bane’s tip jar and give the money directly to Amazon.com and increase the value of Jeff Bezos’ stock options.

I should probably add that one of the prizes mentioned by Difster will be a copy of THE ANTHOLOGY AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE signed by two contributors, the Original Cyberpunk and me.


Mailvox: looks like we made it

The Virgin Queen shares a heartwarming educational experience:

I am a 19-year-old female college student in Boston, and last week during one of my constant arguments with my Black Studies professor ( it is a required freshman course), he not only called me a fascist but told me that I was “probably Vox Day in disguise!” as though it were the worst insult he could muster. Never having heard of myself (apparently I write columns for a VERY evil website called WorldNetDaily), I googled the name and have been reading up on you.

I can honestly say that G-d works in mysterious ways because if not for the most dismal educational experience I have ever had, I might never have discovered your stimulating columns.

I MUST send this to my old history prof. He’ll be vastly amused to know that a decade later, I’m still pissing off the leftist parasites of the Academy.

Anyhow, Virgin Queen, you can tell your professor for me that he clearly doesn’t know a damn thing about fascism, as confusing a libertarian for a fascist is roughly equivalent to confusing a La Scala enthusiast for a New York Yankees fan. And that’s speaking as someone who has personally translated the Manifesto of the Fascist Struggle from the original.

Be sure to also tell him that he’s welcome to stop by and get kicked around anytime.


Mailvox: never trust a lawyer

SB, Esquire, isn’t up on the games governments play:

It appears you are at it again. The last time I wrote you, which was a good while ago, you were adopting the fatally flawed arguments of tax protesters regarding the federal income tax. Now, in your latest column, which is generally full of good points, I see this:

“the family “courts” (which are actually fraudulent executive-branch entities that operate in total violation of the constitutional law’s separation of powers)….”

What, exactly, does that mean? For one thing, only state, not federal, courts handle issues of family law like divorce and child custody. My own state of Georgia’s constitution has a provision that the executive, legislative and judicial powers are and shall forever remain separate and distinct. Can you provide an example of a state where this practice is not followed?

Lesson: never trust the so-called experts. Despite the fact that I’ve never even glanced at George law, I’m sure that Georgia, like every other state in the Union and the federal government, completely ignores the separation of powers and uses administrative courts that look, act and feel like judicial courts, but are in fact nothing of the kind.

Give an example? Sure. The Minnesota Tax Court. Or, for that matter, the Minnesota family courts. Both of which are staffed by employees of the relevant state agency, not judges. Need proof? No problem. “271.01 Creation of tax court; jurisdiction. Subdivision 1. Membership, appointment, qualifications. There is hereby created a tax court as an independent agency of the executive branch of the government.“

Furthermore, as the Minnesota Supreme Court stated in its appalling and convoluted decision, (WULFF v.TAX COURT OF APPEALS, 1979), justifying an overt violation of the separation of powers spelled out in its state constitution: “[1] We must note at the outset that nomenclature is not determinative. The names of the various administrative agencies in the state change with regularity, and with respect to its constitutionality, whether the Tax Court is called a court, a board, an agency, or a commission seems to us less important than a critical analysis of its function in conjunction with an examination of the doctrine of separation of powers….As we stated earlier in this opinion, taxation is a peculiar function of the legislature. Solely because of this unique nature and the judicial checks present in this case, we are not disposed to render the Tax Court statute unconstitutional.“

Dante, no doubt, would have those judges burning in one of the lower circles of Hell for that twisted abuse of power, language and reason. The truth is that a law degree doesn’t mean that you know anything about the law. In fact, it’s almost an assurance that you have no idea what is creeping about in its dark corners.

UPDATE – I’m wrong about the Georgia family courts. “No, our Georgia Superior Courts (which handle family law matters, among other things) are not in any sense of the word executive branch entities. While we do have administrative law judges (or hearing officers) for some things, such as initial hearings of workers’ compensation cases, the Superior Courts are delineated in the state constitution as part of the judicial branch, and every county in the state has one.” I am, however, correct about the Minnesota “courts” and the federal immigration “courts”. No word on the Georgia tax courts, or if they even have such beasts.