Author: VD

The combination of unreasonable love for the game and the ability to extricate gems like this from the forgotten mists of sports history is possibly the main reason that I love The Sports Guy.

And if I’m wrong, then Steve Smith can inexplicably beat the crap out of me during the next wide receiver meeting when I’m not looking.

And then there’s those timely current events references too: (And we haven’t even gotten to Koren Robinson and Shaun Alexander yet — they were the John Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo of fantasy football this year. Let’s save them for another time.)

Truer words were never spoken. Who was Hasselbeck throwing all those TDs to anyhow? Itula Tualo or whomever? This season was just brutal. I had Hasselbeck and Manning, and was profitably playing a matchups strategy until deciding to go with the hot hand and ride my big hoss – Manning – into the playoffs since I had Stephen Davis and Domanick Davis, plus Marshall Faulk coming back healthy. I dealt Hasselbeck for Reggie Wayne, acquired Chad Johnson and thought I was good to go, right?

Wrong! Oh, so painfully wrong! Somehow, I managed to run into the worst possible combination of matchups, lose four straight and finish well short of the playoffs while simultaneously amassing the highest point total in the league! I was regularly outscoring the entire point total of two teams combined and losing. But no, I’m not bitter.

Mogambo writes: I look at Required Reserves, $41.64 billion, and divide that by Savings/other Deposits of $4084.8 billion. And what happens when you do that? Well, if you are like me, and you have my powerful skills with calculators, then you get some weird series of answers because you did something wrong with all those confusing buttons and then, in desperation, you finally ask someone who is just walking by to please use come over here and figure this damn thing out for me, then we get the surprising answer of 0.01.

This means that for every dollar of deposits , they actually have only one cent of reserves in case people come looking for their money. Okay. Now, taking a look at Total Assets of the US banking system, we find roughly $4,381 billion. And when we compare that to the reserves of $41 billion, it is, likewise, one puny cent of reserves against a dollar’s worth of some of those loans going bad. So that one cent in reserves, that one measly penny, is backing up both a growing contingency of souring loans going bad, AND people wanting their money!

As Mogambo points out, every textbook talks about 10 percent reserves. The Bush administration is working feverishly to stimulate the economy – ala Keynes – with the desperate participation of the Federal Reserve, and they have managed to reinflate the Bubble. But if you thought 2000 to 2002 was bad, just wait for the payback on this mini-boom. I was wrong about a decline this spring, mostly because I didn’t dream that the powers-that-be would be so stupid as to go into inflation mode in order to try something that never ever works except in the short term. I know, I know, never underestimate the potential for human idiocy. I should have known better, especially when the Fed started talking about deflation and printing presses.

This does have the potential to get ugly. I’ve been assuming all along that the destruction of the dollar is part of some plan to move the USA to a global currency, maybe even a gold-backed one, but I’m starting to think that for once the incompetence theorists may be right.

“Paper money eventually goes down to its intrinsic value – zero.”

– Voltaire, 1729

This quote from VDH’s column today on the current war is profound, and not solely relevant to the war. It also applies, I suspect, to the IRS-court cabal and probably to Microsoft as well.

One final observation: Very rarely in history do any of the belligerents quite realize what stage of the war they are actually in. The slugfest at Zama still followed Hannibal’s escape to Carthage. After Gettysburg there was the terrible summer of 1864 to come. The Battle of the Bulge followed both Normandy Beach and Stalingrad. And for much of the 1980s the world was sure that Soviet divisions were going to crush Polish steelworkers as a crumbling empire went out with a bang rather than a whimper.

Cappucino made inadvertantly from baby formula. Not so good.

Priests seek optional celibacy. I don’t understand Catholics who want to be Catholic, but disregard the Pope and make their own decisions about everything. You’re a Protestant already. Deal with it.

Democracy is overrated anyhow. It certainly doesn’t belong in the church, let alone the Church. And before everybody gets all hissy, keep in mind that almost no one actually believes in democracy. They only think they do.

By the way, where the hell is this much-vaunted blogosphere? If three freshman congressmen from Wisconsin hinted that they wanted to regulate the use of umlauts on the internet in honor of Leif Ericson’s birthday, bloggers would be on the steps of Congress up-ending cans of gasoline on themselves in protest at such an infringement on free speech. But here we have all three branches of the government severely restricting independent speech outside of the dinosaurs of Old Media and the relative silence — minus a few noble exceptions (The Volokh conspiracy, Instapundit) — is deafening.

– Jonah Goldberg, NRO

Jonah, some of us are speaking out. If you don’t hear it, well, that’s too bad. The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act is absolutely an unconstitional abomination, but then, it is only the latest among many Supreme Court abominations. It may suit the professional punditocracy to shout and point fingers to no avail – yes, I probably count as one in a technical sense, but I’m in no way an NYC/Beltway columnist – but we’re truly at the beating-a-dead-horse point where the Supreme Court is concerned. From a Constitutional perspective, there is a giant fork sticking out of the back of every justice except Thomas and Scalia. They are done.

So, the issue is a larger one. All three branches of the Federal government have demonstrated in the last three years that they have no respect or regard for the Constitution. WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT THIS? Especially considering that champions of the current administration, including Jonah himself, are unwilling to see or hear any evil of it. Republicans gave us this unconstitutional law, and a mostly Republican-appointed Supreme Court upheld it. So we should vote for more Republicans? I don’t think so.

The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act demonstrates, sopratutto, that we need a new party. If you want to oppose it, Jonah, then make the leap. Go Libertarian. You are a conservative, true, but the Republican party is leaving you. As for these terrible laws themselves, civil disobedience is the only answer until we can change them.

And we hear again from Sugar, who is apparently not only ignorant of history, but also irony. Ladies and gentlemen, once more, the irrational atheist.

Vox Day employs the usual tactic of religious apologists in trying to distract people by attacking atheists for their alleged crimes so people won’t focus on the crimes of religion. The fact is, Vox, religion is responsible for most of the wars since the founding of Christianity. (Fascism and Communism are also religions except they worship people on Earth instead of fictitious people in the sky.) And, yes, scholars have estimated that those good Christians killed about 500,000 people during the witch hunts.

Think how many tens of millions had to die and hundreds of millions had to suffer because of Stalin’s religious education. Spare me from the dogmatic mind (are you dogmatic, Vox Day or are you a freethinker?)! By the way, Vox, many of the wars the U.S. engaged in has a religious cast, particularly the wars against the Native Americans, the Spanish, the Mexicans and the Germans (World War I only). American presidents like Bush weren’t the first to realize that religion is a great way to dull the minds of the people, to whip of a war frenzy, and to hold out the mythical promise of an afterlife for those so stupid as to sacrifice their lives (Bush, Cheney, Pearle, and Wolfowicz were too smart to do that during the Vietnam War).

The Dark Ages, the blood of millions of murdered people (men, women, children) and the destruction of billions of lives is on the bloody hands of your religion, Vox. I hope you can bear up under the strain (and the flaming pit awaits you for promoting the lie of Christianity). May you rest in peace!

“We seek a free flow of information…we are not afraid to entrust the American people with the unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to judge the truth and falsehood of its people in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”

– JFK

I noticed this quote while perusing the DMN Daily blog, and I imagine it might have something to do with why neither the IRS nor anyone in the Congress will touch the petition of We The People with a ten-foot pole. It also explains why even the simplest questions either go unanswered, or are met with SWAT-style raids. Most Americans are afraid of the IRS and the Federal government; clearly, the feeling is mutual.

You always know that an atheist has run out of arguments when they start complaining that you’re showing insufficient Christian love by methodically destroying their assertions and conclusions. But what does one party’s failure to lead a perfect Christian life have to do with the strength or weakness of a third party’s intellectual position?

The Right Reverend AtheiStar complains: “The brotherly Christian love you bathed [Sugar] in was spectacular and made me feel warm and fuzzy all over. I’m glad to see that you love your neighbor as you would yourself.”

In the very same email, the Right Reverend also complains that I have not responded to his little sophistry on the definition of faith. Yet, I accused Sugar of nothing except historical ignorance – which he had already demonstrated – and pointed out that his chosen examples indicated that he was more interested in haphazardly attacking Christianity than defending his godlessness. Not only did I grant him the benefit of the doubt with regards to his two best examples, but I even protected his privacy, which the Right Reverend did not bother to do. The truth is that I treated Sugar more gently than I would treat my brother or my friends were they to make a similarly shaky argument, and far more kindly then I ever expect to be treated myself.

Condescension is not love. If you want my intellectual respect, then you’d better be ready to earn it through a ruthless willingness to have your assumptions challenged, questioned and even ridiculed. Can anyone seriously argue that I am not willing to undergo the same treatment myself?

More on this soon, but it’s interesting to see how the Supreme Court has erased the 1st Amendment rights of Americans not long after affirming by abdication the erasure of our 2nd Amendment rights. One wonders how long it will be before Americans have to turn to exercising (2) again in order to restore (1).

I am increasingly doubtful that this Constitution will see its 300th birthday. Mr. President, honor your oath of office. Throw these judicial charlatans in jail for treason against the American people.