Author: VD

As awful as it sounds, the guy calling himself Mystery knows exactly what he’s talking about when it comes to picking up attractive women. It may, in fact, be one of the strongest indictments of the sickness of our culture that in order to date desirable women, you often must first make yourself interesting by destroying them psychologically.

I discovered the concept of what Mystery calls “the neg” inadvertantly. I was in a tiny bar in Tokyo talking to someone, and another girl kept interrupting me from behind. I was rather short in telling her to take a hike without bothering to turn around, which caused her to become even more intent on attracting my attention. I was quite surprised when I finally did turn around to get rid of this annoying little pest and discovered I was blowing off an international model. Of course, the fact that I was an arrogant jerk in those days probably didn’t hurt either.

The reason, I think, that nice guys lose almost every single time is that they’re just not interesting. Seriously, The Perfect Aryan Male is possibly the world’s nicest guy and about as major a catch as it gets, and he practically needs a construction crane to pick up a woman that isn’t already throwing herself at him. Do you have any idea how many times a beautiful girl has heard someone tell her that she’s really pretty? Figure ten times a day from the age of two – that’s almost 60,000 boring repetitions. No wonder she’s ready to throw herself at the first person who doesn’t immediately begin fawning all over her. Nobody is really comfortable with respect that they haven’t earned, even if they come to expect it over time.



Vox’s Rules for Guys

1. Know your league. You can reasonably date one up or one down.

2. Girls like: Power, Fame, Money, Looks, in that order.

3. You can’t be a nice guy and expect to get a phone number.

4. You can’t be a jerk and expect to keep a girlfriend.

5. No one can see character in the first two weeks, let alone the first two hours.

6. If you’re out to pick up chix, take a pretty girl with you.

7. Don’t even think about using a line. Even the guys nearby are cringing.

8. Vague civility bordering on disinterest is like catnip for most women, but you can’t fake it.

9. Never lie. Men and women alike find brutal honesty laced with irony to be interesting. Answering the question “what do you do?” with “I design computer games” sends the subtextual message “I’m a dork and you will hate yourself for continuing this conversation.” Answering it with “Well, today I was trying to decide which sound was more appropriate for an axe striking human flesh before blowing off the rest of the day by killing hundreds of innocent aliens with a shotgun” will either get you a date or a look of complete horror. Either result is amusing. And if you get the latter, don’t forget to punctuate the encounter with a burst of laughter that’s just slightly too loud.

The ironic thing is that I never had the chance to use any of my finely tuned pickup skillz with Space Bunny. She happened to find the mohawk interesting – it was freshly shaven – and asked if she could touch it. I turned around, saw this slender, gorgeous blonde, and figured, yeah, sure. The next thing I know, I’m calling the Old Fox asking him to hook me up with his international diamond connections.

JD writes: Since the only Linux news I’ve heard from you is the problem with random slides in Open Office, I assume all is well on the Linux front, which is good news.

Yes and no. I gave up trying to solve the problem of getting my wireless PCMCIA card to work in Fedora Core 1 because the motherboard on that Dell laptop is failing and I don’t dare turn it off since it takes up to 20 tries to get it to successfully into either Fedora or Windows. I leave it in Windows since the USB connection broke on my other Dell laptop (which is successfully running Fedora Core 1 and the same wireless card) and I need it to transfer ebooks and documents to my Dana. I also haven’t been able to get Samba running on that other Dell – my work machine – but that doesn’t matter now until I get another computer, as I can access the Windows Dell without any problem from Nautilus.

Hardware-wise, it was a horrific 2003. The motherboard on my HP Pavilion 850 went out, although I always hated that poorly-designed kludge of a machine so it wasn’t much of a loss. Then the motherboard started failing on this Dell, and was replaced under warranty before the USB connection broke post-warranty and then the second Dell motherboard started dying. Three motherboards toast in one year, and I’ve never had a single one go out on me since my first Apple IIe. So, I’m not real impressed with the hardware designers these days.

So, the columns are written in OpenOffice 1.1, email is Evolution 4.5.1 and I’m blogging in Mozilla. There’s still some minor irritants – I can’t get the nice anti-aliased fonts to work in Mozilla 6 so I’m still working with Mozilla 4 despite two whacks at it, the Samba thing and Impress slide shows are less easy to construct than Powerpoint, but on the other hand, I’m not crashing four times a day either. And most importantly, I’m fully functional and 95 percent MS-free.

If anyone has any good recommendations on desktops shipping with Linux, particularly Firewire-friendly with DVD-burning support, let me know.

Despite an increased willingness by elected officials to consider ways to build stadiums for the Twins and Vikings, most Minnesotans don’t think the two pro sports teams need new facilities and nearly two-thirds oppose paying for them with their taxes, the latest Star Tribune Minnesota Poll shows.

And here only three weeks ago, they were talking about how things had changed and how people were surprisingly open to funding a new stadium… again. I hated the Metrodome from the beginning, of course, so while I’d like nothing better than to see it nuked and replaced with a decent stadium that is open to the winter elements, the state should not fund it.

It would be simple for the NFL to fund such stadiums, of course, if they would allow teams to go public like the Packers or any ordinary corporation. But the league won’t do that, because they’ll lose the ability to extort communities into building them free facilities by threatening them with losing their team. One benefit of this is that it illustrates very well how big business and big government work hand in hand against the people; any notion of fundamental conflict between them is utterly misguided.

Of course, no sooner do I rip into Maureen Dowd with a vulgar, if eminently well-deserved attack than my blog is listed as one of the noteworthy Evangelical Christian blogs by a religion writer for a newspaper in Illinois.

Oh well. I meant every word that I wrote, and it was a struggle to keep it that tame. I’m quite laid-back about being attacked personally, but mocking entire nations – including one that was truly grief-stricken over the loss of 17 of its sons only a few months ago – in order to score a petty and inaccurate point against the president was not low, it was despicably subterranean.

I don’t think it’s an accident that JRR Tolkein portrayed evil as seeking “one ring to rule them all… one ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.” He was writing at a time when facism was rising – a binding together being part of the etymology of both the word and the concept behind it – and so I suspect that his depiction of evil was no more an accident than the translations of many of his characters’ names.

What is the One Ring of our day, this powerful weapon which, if used, will destroy the wielder? I’m clearly not the only one who sees it as the State.

Wesley Pruden writes in the Washington Times: …the president’s men thought he could safely ignore his conservative base because his best friends wouldn’t have anywhere else to go. Conservatives would reckon they couldn’t even indulge the luxury of staying home on Election Day. The president [Bush the Elder] could chase voters elsewhere…. Even Bill Clinton cut the number of federal employees; George W. added 80,000 new bureaucrats just last year. Every single state recorded an increase.

That pretty much explodes the “a vote for a third party is a vote for a Democrat” defense of the Republican Party, based, as it is, on the idea that a Democrat will make things worse. It is absolutely a fact that George Bush is worse than Bill Clinton when it comes to increasing the size of government and increasing Federal power, and one tax cut based on Keynesian economic justifications doesn’t balance that. Got it, conservatives? Repeat this until it penetrates your brain: George Bush is worse than Bill Clinton. George Bush is worse than Bill Clinton. George Bush is worse than Bill Clinton.

This may seem counterintuitive, but so are many provable truths. A Republican executive combined with a Republican legislature will usually increase government more than a Democratic executive with a Republican legislature. That’s because with nothing to push back against, the legislators feel the need to prove that they’re doing something by passing new laws and creating new initiatives. It’s why Bush wants to go to Mars and the California Republicans will likely give in and raise taxes now that Schwarzenegger is in office when they fought Gray Davis on it tooth-and-nail.

Basic IQ test: when politicians pass new laws, do they tend to:

(A) increase government power

(B) decrease government power.

After all, it’s hard to run on a platform of: “well, we pretty much sat around and drank a lot of cocktails for two years. Vote for me!” It sounds a lot better to be able to say that you spent the term fighting for the children, the elderly and hard-working Americans who deserve a hand.

Pragmatists in politics are always doomed to eventual failure. Only principle will ever win in the end. What is more important to you, your principles or your party? If you believe in party uber alles, then you might as well be the Nazi that your left-liberal friends consider you. Be honest with yourself, are you truly less principled than the natural Democrats who’ve left that party for the Greens? That’s an uncomfortable thought, now, isn’t it.

Your “victory” in the last election brought you a man who is demonstrably worse than Bill Clinton. I submit that in light of this debacle, a new strategy is required.

Maureen Dowd writes: The Philippines. Thailand. Italy. Spain. Poland. Denmark. Bulgaria. Ukraine. Romania. The Netherlands. Norway. El Salvador. Can you believe President Bush is still pushing the cockamamie claim that we went to war in Iraq with a real coalition rather than a gaggle of poodles and lackeys?

I know I can speak for my friend, the Italian tank commander who served in Afghanistan and was stationed until recently at Nassiriyah where he lost a schoolmate, in saying va fanculo, puttana di merde. He and his boys were good enough for the USMC, so they’re good enough for me and they’re bloody well good enough for a clueless old has-been who hasn’t written a single thing worth reading since Monica was getting her kneepads and Dowd was wishing she could. Well, maybe she has written something worthwhile in the intervening years, but I wouldn’t know because I quit reading her trite and boring attempts at wit long ago.

Dowd is a moron, but even her extreme level of vacuity doesn’t excuse this. I’d like to see Maureen and her fat thighs thundering along one of the mountain runs that the Alpini do for training. The Italians may not be the world’s finest fighting force, but here’s some news for her: neither are the bloody French! I notice she just happened to leave the Brits and the Aussies off her list.

Blackfive calls BS on her, comparing the coalition in Korea to the one in Iraq. Citizen Smash draws a picture that even Dowd should be able to grasp. Don’t you just love how liberal New Yorkers like to pose as being worldly and sophisticated, when truly they’re some of the most insular examples of Americanus Uglicus. I’ll bet she just adores Florence.

Witrack asks: Any chance we’ll see you write/release any books in the steampunk genre? I love that style of sci-fi. The whole idea of advanced technology in the 19th and 18th century. The whole Jules Verne, Wild Wild West, League of Extraordinary genre. Very cool. It’s why I liked the Thief video game series. The hybrid of swords and sorcery and 19th century technology. The game even had 19th century motion detectors, etc. I didn’t know what to call the genre until I heard the recently coined term steampunk.

Thief was good, but you’ll have to hit up the Original Cyberpunk if you’re into steam… heh heh heh. I don’t read much of it, and as one who is neither skilled nor interested in things mechanical, I wouldn’t make much of a writer of it either. I suppose this is as good a time as any to mention that yesterday I was asked to write the text for three comic books in a popular series that has sold about a million copies, which should be an interesting new format for me. I also turned in a novel to my publisher a few months ago that I wrote with another fellow entitled Stalking the Beast; it’s about two centuries-old secret societies that are tracking the development of the Antichrist, one with an eye to “know the season” and the other with an eye to profiting from it. Think of it as pre-apocalyptic Christian fiction.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I will not be writing The Red Hand of Government for WND Books as Joseph Farah previously announced, since one of the execs decided that the premise was ridiculous. Everyone knows, apparently, that governments don’t kill their own people. Right, whatever, Mr. History Expert. As it was the third concept of mine that they rejected, I think I’ll stick with fiction and leave them to publish essays by radio personalities. It’s a formula, and quite clearly it works for them, but since I’m not a talk show host it just doesn’t apply to me. Also, being a novelist, I prefer to delve more deeply into a single subject instead of dancing from one to the next.

The one nonfiction book I thought would be particularly amusing to write was Screwing Themselves: why no one wants to marry 30-something women, based on the Spiting Their Pretty Faces column. The proposal was pretty funny, especially the chapter devoted to line-by-line exegeses of feminist anthems such as You Oughtta Know and Bitch. That didn’t go over particularly well with the Oprah fans on the pub board, believe it or not. I suppose this is what basing your media career on the WWCDD principle gets you: What Would Chuck D Do?

I don’t mind. I write for pleasure, not profit, and with two novels due this year and two next year, I’m already pushing my maximum output level. Novels are more amusing and challenging than nonfiction anyhow.

This is how to celebrate the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade. By challenging it and refusing to recognize it at every opportunity. It is bad law, worse social engineering and makes a total mockery of any claim that America may have once had to being a moral nation.

I understand some libertarians are pro-choice. I have about as much regard for their logic on this particular matter as I would have for anyone who would attempt to use libertarian concepts to justify slavery or the Endlösung. Africans, Jews and the unborn are all human, with the same claim to the unalienable right to life as anyone else.

The “it’s my body” justification is hopeless, both from a legal point of view – there are dozens, if not hundreds of existing laws exploding this notion – or even from a purely hypothetical point of view, considering that the other individual inside has his own distinct DNA.

There you go, Pieter.

A National Review editor writes: “Perhaps we have been a bit soft on the president….”

I don’t think the magazine is intentionally soft on the Bush administration, just misled by the hopes and expectations of its conservatives who have been hoodwinked by the administration. Jonah [Goldberg] was right to be leery of “compassionate conservativism”, for as Hayek once wrote of social justice, any noun that is modified by an adjective is no longer the pure noun. (I’m paraphrasing, of course.)

Personally, I believe that we are witnessing the beginnings of a landmark transformation, comparable to the death of the Whig party more than a century ago. An Italian admiral once pointed out to me that in political terms, the great intellectual battle of history is between the collectivist vision of Plato and the individualist vision of Aristotle, and so the merger of the Republican and Democratic parties into a Platonist big tent will inevitably lead to the birth of a new party championing many of the ideals for which the Republican party once stood – and in which many Republicans still believe.

There is a hoary old excuse that claims as soon as the Republicans achieve power, we’ll see their true colors. This has actually proven to be true. A Republican House, Senate and White House have combined to create the most expansionary central government since LBJ. Just as no honest capitalist would see any need to choose between a Stalinist or a Trotskyite candidate, no supporter of small government and individual freedom should feel any pressure to support the lesser of two evils presented by the two major American parties.

It was not pragmatic to oppose a three percent tax on tea, when the net price was actually cheaper. It was principle George Washington and Ron Paul – whose singular principled support for the US Constitution has rendered him so popular as to be politically unassailable – prove that in the end, principle defeats pragmatism every single time.

If the American people have no principles, pragmatism will only slow, slightly, the national decline into full-blown socialism. And if no one offers them a principled alternative, this decline will be inevitable.