Author: VD

In case anyone happens to be interested, Elliott Wave International is going to be giving free access to its specialty services next week. These are the daily updates, ten or twelve per day, offering higher detail wave analysis while the markets are open. I’ve used one of their currency services to good effect over the last month, and if you’re into one of the markets they cover, I’d encourage you to have a look at it, especially if you’re skeptical.

It’s an art, not a science, but I believe it has a more rational basis than the conventional financial analysis and commentary, much of which is demonstrably absurd. It’s not magic nor does it work flawlessly, but I have found it to be a useful tool. I’ll post a link to the free access signup on the day it starts.

Full disclosure: I do not accept any money from EWI, but commissions from sales derived from this blog’s participation in their affiliate program have gone and will continue to go to charity and towards access to their various services.

Drudge is reporting that Pope John Paul II has died. Like many Protestants, I regarded the man with some degree of admiration and his office with some degree of skepticism. But all theological differences aside, he was a man of rare courage and forthright conviction who stood firmly for what he believed to be right. The Roman Catholic Church will be fortunate indeed if its cardinals are able to find a man of similar caliber to serve as his successor.

UPDATE – The Pope was reported as saying to Italian TV reporters: “I’m not dead yet!”

UPDATE II – Requiscat in pace….

From the Washington Post:

As many as 20 teenagers may have known ahead of time about plans for the shooting spree that resulted in the deaths of 10 people on the Indian reservation here March 21, tribal and federal officials said Friday.

Capt. Dewayne Dow of the tribal police told a group of parents, teachers and staff at a three-hour school board meeting that authorities believe as many as 20 students were involved.

I don’t see why this should be a problem for anyone. These kids have been learning that nothing is anyone’s fault and that there is no such thing as good or evil for at least nine years. Why should they do anything simply because one loser was planning to express himself and share his feelings in public? How can they be held responsible for doing something that they have been taught does not exist?

They know very well that they’re nothing but mammals and young Mr. Weise was simply doing what they do on the Hollywood channels. On what grounds would they possibly condemn him?

I just received a copy of the first anthology to which I contributed, which was surprisingly exciting for me. It will surprise no one here to know that the Original Cyberpunk contributed one of the best essays of the lot, which are about 75 percent interesting and occasionally insightful takes on THE HITCHHIKERS GUIDE TO THE GALAXY and 25 percent excuses for the writer to talk about her mother, herself, her interests and nearly everything but Douglas Adams or his work. Jacqueline Carey’s self-parodying piece on assuring the reader how she, an American, nevertheless “gets” British humor may be the most amusing essay for all that its comedy is inadvertant; it has to be read to be believed. Seriously, it’s entitled “Yes, I Got It.” Well, good for you, lady.

As for me, I contributed a number of run-on sentences, if you can believe that, as well as a take that is so entirely different from everyone else’s both in terms of substance and style as to cause the reader to conclude that I crashed the party. And yet, Don DeBrandt not only managed to top my a priori outrageous interpretation of the text, but did in a way that is surprisingly convincing until you put the book down and say to yourself: wait, that can’t possibly be right.

Anyhow, here’s the editor’s intro to my essay, THE SUBVERSIVE DISMAL SCIENTIST: DOUGLAS ADAMS AND THE RULE OF UNREASON
It’s a little known fact that Douglas Adams was close friends with Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, whom he met while obtaining his doctorate in economics at the University of Chicago. An advisor and confidant to Margaret Thatcher, he was responsible for much of Thatcher’s economic platform and was instrumental in her rise to power. Actually no. None of that was true. But it could have been….

THE ANTHOLOGY AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE
BenBella Books
240 pages
$14.95

Back in 1997, I read a very freaky masterpiece of paranoia and prophecy entitled APOCALYPSO. It was extremely entertaining, combining elements of the prophecies of Nostradamus, St. Malachy, the Bible and astrology. It would have made for a much better novel than the LEFT BEHIND books or THE DAVINCI CODE, and made me think of a religious Umberto Eco writing on acid.

One thing interesting was how it predicted that John Paul II would be followed by a Jewish Pope, namely, Jean-Marie Lustiger, the cardinal and former Archbishop of Paris. The writer viewed this as something intimately related to the end times; one interesting synchronicity that I discovered independently was that a new political leader in a country the writer had identified as being of particular interest, Azerbaijan, had a nickname noted as The Coming Man by the CIA World Fact Book.

Now, I regarded – and regard – this as nothing more than idle speculation. Back in the year 998, many Christians across Italy were terrified that Duke Romantius Crescentius was the Antichrist, and considering that he’d actually chased the Pope from Rome and installed his own creature on the Throne of Peter, they had very good reason to fear him, if not on Biblical grounds. The end is always nigh, and still it has not yet appeared.

But the value of a prophecy is in the accuracy of its predictions. If the conclave names Lustiger, that will be a rather interesting and unexpected turn of events.

Jay Nordlinger finally discovers that the EU isn’t so wonderful:

Begin with a quick word about the EU — about which I am awakening, at last. Years ago, I would hear my British friends — very bright, very balanced — talk about the EU in the most severe terms. They said it was a kind of Soviet Union in the making, and would lead to a host of ills. Frankly, I thought this talk was a little overblown. I thought it could be interpreted as hysterical. But my friends knew far more than I, and I was given pause.

Now I am something like a believer. As David Pryce-Jones tells us in our current issue — his piece is found here (subscription required) — Vladimir Bukovsky and Pavel Stroilov have put out a pamphlet on the EU. It bears the arresting title EUSSR. I wish to quote from the introduction (and bear in mind that Bukovsky was one of the leading Soviet dissidents, a great, clear-eyed man):

For anyone even remotely familiar with the Soviet system, its similarity with the developing structures of the European Union, with its governing philosophy and “democracy deficit,” its endemic corruption and bureaucratic ineptitude, is striking. For anyone who lived under the Soviet tyranny or its equivalents across the world, it is frightening. Once again we observe with growing horror the emergence of a Leviathan that we had hoped was dead and buried, a monster that destroyed scores of nations, impoverished millions, and devastated several generations before finally collapsing. Is it inevitable? Is the human race bent on self-destruction and doomed to repeat the same mistake time and again until it dies in misery? Or is the EU, indeed, simply a clone of the USSR imposed upon reluctant nations of Europe by the same political forces that created the first one?

Look, if Bukovsky talks this way, who am I to scoff? He may not be right — but anyone who ignored him would be a fool.

Hitler used tanks, the EU used banks. But the end result is the same, fascist rule across Europe. It is a mystery to me why it is considered more desirable that one’s totalitarian rulers be faceless bureaucrats instead of ranting lunatics. At least with the ranting lunatics, they’ll tell you what they’re going to do ahead of time.

RIP Terri Schiavo.

The Unborn: check
The Disabled: check

Next Up: The Elderly

Mike Adams writes about intellectually mutilated women:

“I am 23 years old, and I am what a feminist looks like. Ever since I learned to embrace my feminist nature, I found great joy in threatening men’s lives, flicking off frat brothers and plotting the patriarchy’s death. I hate men because they are men, because I see them for what they are: misogynistic, sexist, oppressive and absurdly pathetic beings who only serve to pollute and contaminate this world with war, abuse, oppression and rape.”

Other members of the FAL [Feminist Action League] wore scissors around their necks and sang a song about castration.

The amusing thing is that within seven years, this loser will be lamenting the mysterious fact that no man wants to date her despite an education she no doubt considers impressive. And what do you suppose the chances are that she’s even remotely attractive? 1 in 20? 1 in 50?

Feminism is the last resort of the ugly and unpleasant college girl. Their bitterness colors their view of that about which they know nothing. The attractive and personable women, on the other hand, have enough experience of men to know better, even in the midst of their indoctrination by Women’s Studies professors.

Jonah Goldberg writes on NRO:

Maybe it’s the nitrogen bubbles in my brain or the afterglow of reading Bob Samuelson’s column today, but I finally feel willing to float a trial balloon in the Corner which, I admit, has been launched more times than the Goodyear blimp: Increase gas/oil taxes.

Admittedly, current high oil prices have caused pain for some and are probably a drag on the economy in significant respects (the airline industry, for example), but the negative effects certainly don’t track with the predictions of doom and gloom which typically accompany fuel tax proposals. Clinton’s 4.3 cent a gallon tax elicited howls that the economy would go off the rails, for example. Well, now gas prices are much higher than they were in 1996, though still lower — adjusted for inflation — than they were in the early 80s. And, more to the point, the economy seems to have absorbed high gas prices better than most would have predicted.

They really are taking this strong government Republicanism to new heights, aren’t they? Why not just exhume Nixon in 2008 and prop him up in the White House while you’re at it since the current inhabitant appears to be a walking revenant of FDR.

From WND:

PRESIDENTIAL SPOKESMAN McCLELLAN: In terms of the issue of the Minutemen that you bring up, again, the president spoke to that issue last week. And it’s one thing if people are working along the border, simply to report suspicious activity, and that activity should be reported to the proper authorities — the Department of Homeland Security officials, who are there to enforce our borders. If people are operating outside of the law, that cannot be tolerated. That’s a different —

WND: Well, that’s my point. That’s what they’re doing — they’re neighborhood crime watch.

McCLELLAN: Hang on. Hang on. That’s a different matter. People cannot take things into their own hands. But if they see suspicious activity, they should report that suspicious activity to the proper authorities

And here I thought power in this country derived from the people. Apparently Mr. Bush sees it very differently. This also leaves unanswered what people are to do when the “proper authorities” refuse to act, in complete dereliction of their duty.