Category: Uncategorized

Speaking of Nazis

Ever vigilant on behalf of the forces of political correctness, ConWebWatch is keeping a close eye on my WorldNetDaily column:

See if you can catch all the Nazi references Vox Day has dumped into his Jan. 29 WorldNetDaily column…. Day also describes German chancellor Angela Merkel as “Bundeskanzlerin,” which, it turns out, is not a Nazi reference; it just sounds like one.

No, it’s her actual title, as it happens. And I’m hardly the only one to notice the similarities between the German-dominated EU and their historical counterparts. In any event, I wrote Terry to request a correction.

Hello Terry,

I am writing to correct your January 31st blog post. This is not, by any standard, a Nazi reference: “In Europe and in the United States alike, the heyday of the banks is rapidly coming to a close. The looming revolution is not a battle between capitalism and socialism, or a class war between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, but between the corrupt bank-government axis and the alliance of pretty much everyone else. “

It is, rather, a Marxist reference.

However, I must congratulate you, as you were absolutely correct to not include the reference to “Das Lied der Deutschen” in the title as a Nazi reference; although it is often considered to be one by the insufficiently historically informed, it is actually connected to the Weimar Republic that preceded National Socialist rule.

With regards,
Vox

The end of the Euro

I’ve been predicting this since it was forced upon the people of Europe. Now, the first material signs of its demise have appeared:

Are quasi-drachmas being issued?

These financial instruments are bonds, and have all the characteristics of Hellenic Republic Bonds: they bear international securities identification numbers (ISINs); they are negotiable on the Athens Exchange and they rank pari passu with other Greek debt. The government, in one of its press releases, notes that “bondholders who choose to discount these bonds at the banks will crystallise a 19% discount versus their original claim.”

We would argue, however, that they are more than just another bond issued by the Greek government. To be specific, they seem to us very akin to what economists call quasi-monies. These quasi-monies have appeared in a number of cases, usually put in place by government to find an escape valve out of nominal fiscal rigidities in the face of a financing issue. This especially happens in a case of a government of a monetary union that cannot print money to fund its deficit….

If a country issues a bond as repayment, even temporarily, for a supplier, then there is no withdrawal of money from the private sector as no-one purchases the bond with cash. It is a form of barter in which the vendor provides a good to the administration and receives a financial instrument created ex nihilo from the same government.

There have already been possibly apocryphal reports of Italians using lira and Spaniards using pesetas. But this is the first time that an EU government is printing a new monetary instrument that can be used in exchange for goods and services.

Richard Dawkins, sans pants

This is absolutely and utterly hilarious. In case you still don’t believe that Richard Dawkins is a cretinous ex-scientist long past his sell-by date, I suspect this will suffice to convince you:

If you were trying to come up with a definition of misplaced intellectual arrogance, you could not do better than having the planet’s most famous atheist issuing diktats on who does and doesn’t count as a proper Christian. Prof Dawkins then announced, triumphantly, that an “astonishing number [of Christians] couldn’t identify the first book in the New Testament”.

The transcript of the next minute or so only hints at how cringingly, embarrassingly bad it was for Dawkins.

Fraser: Richard, if I said to you what is the full title of The Origin Of Species, I’m sure you could tell me that.

Dawkins: Yes I could.

Fraser: Go on then.

Dawkins: On the Origin of Species…Uh…With, oh, God, On the Origin of Species. There is a sub-title with respect to the preservation of favoured races in the fight… in the struggle for life.

Fraser: If you asked people who believed in evolution what that question, and then you came back and said two percent got it right, it would be terribly easy for me to go they don’t really believe it after all. It’s just not fair to ask people these questions.

It was a golden minute of radio. But as well as being hilarious, it was hugely symbolic.

As I have said repeatedly, Richard Dawkins is a huge intellectual fraud, and perhaps those who previously expressed incredulity at the idea that I would quite easily trounce the old charlatan in a debate will find it just a bit more credible now. This behavior isn’t an outlier or a momentary lapse of memory, it is entirely characteristic. The man quite frequently pretends to knowledge that he patently does not possess and assumes he knows things that he obviously does not, which is why he avoids debate with those who are aware of his intellectual pretensions and are capable of exposing them.

It’s bad enough that Dawkins couldn’t come up with the name of what he considers to be the most important book ever written immediately after claiming he could do so, but in addition to stumbling a little on the subtitle, he even forgot the rather important part of the title that refers to the actual mechanism supposedly responsible! And furthermore, I am very, very skeptical of the assertion that 64 percent of self-identified Christians were not able to identify Matthew as the first book of the New Testament in a multiple choice question with four answers. I’d quite like to see what the other options were, as my guess is that most of the people who got it wrong didn’t pay sufficient attention to the question and reflexively answered “Genesis”.

Just in case Richard is reading this, the correct answer is: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

UPDATE: Here is the audio recording. It’s actually even better than the excerpt of the transcript provided, which I have updated accordingly.

A lost opportunity

I think Michael Medved could have gotten a lot further with his Nazi Boy theme if he’d known that I not only believe Laibach to be the world’s finest Slovenian Nazi-Industrial band, but for a brief while had the distinct and immeasurable honor of being label mates with them at Wax Trax!.

So, in honor of a brief conversation with Spacebunny this morning – I have what must be considered the endearing habit of quoting entire verses of Laibach when certain trigger words are mentioned – I present a true magnum opus. You can keep your Taylor Swift and your Beyonce; this is without question the greatest video of all time.

Actually, I really liked a lot of Wax Trax! music that was being released around that time, particularly Sister Machine Gun. It very much amused me that their main remix of Wired was named the Silicon Satan mix.

Proving the opposite

A professor of mathematics complains that unlike the fortunate Chinese, America does not enjoy the benefit of being ruled by scientists:

For complex historical reasons, Americans have long privately dismissed scientists and mathematicians as impractical and elitist, even while publicly paying lip service to them. One reason is that an abstract, scientific approach to problems and issues often leads to conclusions that are at odds with religious and cultural beliefs and scientists are sometimes tone-deaf to the social environment in which they state their conclusions. A more politically sensitive approach to problems and issues, on the other hand, often leads to positions that simply don’t jibe with the facts, no matter how delicately phrased….

Dinosaurs cavorting with humans, climate scientists cooking up the global warming “hoax,” the health establishment using vaccines to bring about socialism – it’s hard to imagine mainstream leaders in other advanced economies not laughing at such claims.

I always enjoy the left-liberal arguments which revolve around the idea that because someone, somewhere, might be laughing at an idea, it must not be true. And, of course, given that there is no global warming and climate scientists did cook up one of the most colossal scams in human history, the professor manages to explain more cogently than he imagined why Americans, for all their flaws, still aren’t dumb enough to vote for scientists.

The problem isn’t so much that “an abstract, scientific approach to problems and issues often leads to conclusions that are at odds with religious and cultural beliefs”, it is that ideology hidden under a veneer of an abstract, scientific approach to problems and issues often leads to conclusions that are at odds with readily observable reality.

Americans don’t refuse to vote for scientists because they think scientists threaten their beliefs, Americans refuse to vote for them because they conclude, on the basis of considerable evidence, scientists are foolish and stupid.

A wee bit late

I’m not saying National Review’s call for Gingrich to get out of the race is misguided. I’m merely saying it is much later than would have been justified:

At the moment Rick Santorum appears to be overtaking Newt Gingrich as the principal challenger to Mitt Romney. Santorum has won more contests than Gingrich (who has won only one), has more delegates, and leads him in the polls. In at least one poll, he also leads Romney. It isn’t yet a Romney–Santorum contest, but it could be headed that way.

We hope so. Gingrich’s verbal and intellectual talents should make him a resource for any future Republican president. But it would be a grave mistake for the party to make someone with such poor judgment and persistent unpopularity its presidential nominee. It is not clear whether Gingrich remains in the race because he still believes he could become president next year or because he wants to avenge his wounded pride: an ambiguity that suggests the problem with him as a leader. When he led Santorum in the polls, he urged the Pennsylvanian to leave the race. On his own arguments the proper course for him now is to endorse Santorum and exit.

The correct moment to tell Gingrich to leave the race, of course, was the moment he decided to enter it. No one was ever going to vote for the corrupt and thin-skinned little troll. The only purpose he served was to make Santorum and Romney look half-electable by comparison, and they both possess the electability of a Republican candidate in the classic Dole/McCain vein. They’ll lose, but they’ll lose respectably and make it look as if the Republican Establishment actually wanted to win the election.

Which, as is readily apparent, it doesn’t. Obama is obediently bombing who he’s told to bomb and defending the interests of the banks he’s told to defend. So long as his handlers can sufficiently head off his self-destructive political instincts – seriously, he’s picking a fight on healthcare now? – and keep him from quitting the race in a morose tantrum, the Republican Establishment will be perfectly satisfied with a loss to Obama it can blame on the Tea Party.

We have a very strange situation in 2012 where it is the Democratic Establishment that wants Obama out whereas the Republican Establishment is perfectly content with the idea of him serving a second term.

It was only a matter of time

Napolitano’s show is done at Fox:

Judge Andrew Napolitano’s “Freedom Watch” on Fox Business Channel, arguably the most hard-hitting conservative show on TV, is being dropped by the network later this month in a major shakeup of the lineup.

Given the way in which the strong leftward tilt of the mainstream media distorts one’s perceptions, it’s always important to keep in mind that Fox is a centrist, status quo institution. They’re not good per se, but only in relation to the ABCNNBCBS cabal.

WND column

Greedo shot first

“The controversy over who shot first, Greedo or Han Solo, in Episode IV, what I did was try to clean up the confusion, but obviously it upset people because they wanted Solo [who seemed to be the one who shot first in the original] to be a cold-blooded killer, but he actually isn’t. It had been done in all close-ups and it was confusing about who did what to whom. I put a little wider shot in there that made it clear that Greedo is the one who shot first, but everyone wanted to think that Han shot first, because they wanted to think that he actually just gunned him down.”
– George Lucas, The Hollywood Reporter, Feb. 9, 2012

Like most American men of my generation, “Star Wars” was one of the formative events of my childhood. It might have been a long time ago in a galaxy far away, but in some ways, it was much more vivid and real and glorious than the cold cruelty of a real world where it was 20 degrees below zero and the good guys were always defeated by the black-clad bad guys in the Super Bowl.

Umberto Eco on the ever-ending world

Where will we go in the end?

First little thought. We will not speak of the curse of the Mayans, but of certain newspapers, that are always citing Cassandra and day after day announce an ever-darker tomorrow, where the oceans overflow, the seasons end, and, of more immediate concern, the Default. For example, after listening to his parents inform him about the destiny of the world, a ten year-old son of my friends began to cry and asked: “But is there really nothing good in my future?”

To console him, I could cite many extremely dolorous predictions concerning the years to come, as were customarily made throughout the past centuries. Here is an excerpt from Vincenzo di Beauvais in the 13th century: “After the death of the Antichrist… the final judgment will be preceded by many signs that were indicated by the Evangelist…. In the first day the sea will rise forty cubits over the mountains and its surface will rise like a wall. On the second day, it will submerge many who will go unseen. On the third day, the marine monsters appearing on the surface of the sea will roar at the heavens. On the fourth day, the sea and all the waters will catch fire. On the fifth day the grass and the trees will emit a dew of blood. On the sxith day, buildings will collapse. On the seventh day, the stones will crash against each other. On the eighth day, the entire earth will shake. On the ninth day, the earth will be levelled. On the tenth day, the men will come out of their caves and will wander like madmen unable to speak. On the eleventh day, the bones of the dead will rise. On the twelfth day, the stars will fall. On the thirteenth day, the survivors still living will die to rise again with the dead. On the fourteenth day, the heavens and the earth will burn. On the fifteenth day, there will be a new heaven and a new earth and all will rise again.” As you can see, we already have no lack of climactic alterations and tsunamis to threaten us.

Leaping over six centuries of more fatal prophesies, here is Balzac in 1836: “The modern industry, that produces for the masses, is destroying the creations of the antique arts, those works that possessed an individual hallmark for the consumer and the artisan alike. Today we have “products”, we no longer have “works””. Among these “products” that Balzac warned would be deprived of every artistic value, Leopardi was writing The Flower of the Desert in that same year, Manzoni had in hand the second draft of The Betrothed, three years later Chopin composed Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, twenty years later Flaubert published Madame Bovary, and there was still about thirty years before the appearance of the Impressionists and more than forty prior to the publication of The Brothers Karamazov. As you see, in the past they were also overly afraid of the future.

A second thought. Perhaps, if we reconsider, “evil times today” really are here, for as tradition has it, one of the typical signs the end of times is at hand is the fact that the world has gone to ruin. Consider that at one time the rich lived in the center of Rome in luxurious palaces and the poor on the desolate peripheries; today it seems the palaces that face the Colosseum are like prostitutes, with toilets on the balcony that you can enter for four bucks. I imagine the corrupt politicians go to live outside the imperial walls.

Yesterday the poor travelled in trains and only the rich were permitted airplanes; today the airlines cost forty cash, (those with the best price resemble cattle carriers in a time of war), while the trains become ever more expensive and luxurious, with bars reserved only for the hegemonic classes. At one time, the rich went to Riccione, and in the worst case, to Rimini, while in the islands of the Indian Ocean there lived a miserable population as well as those deported there for life imprisonment. Today, it is only politicians of rank who go to the Maldives, and in Rimini, on the other hand, you will find mostly lower-class Russians barely removed from the slavery of the soil.

Where will we go in the end?

I’m more than a bit dubious about the bit concerning the modern palaces, but otherwise it was an unusually easy column to translate. I’m also not sure about the reference to the slavery at the end, as the most literal translation would be “the slavery of the the fleshy spore-bearing inner mass of fungi.”

The long slog

Some of you have wondered why I haven’t gotten around to X yet, for varying values of X. The answer is that I’ve simply been very busy with a number of projects, including writing manuals, assembling legal documents, writing game designs, and working on the first novel in the Arts of Dark and Light series. In other words, in the last 200 days, I have cranked out more than 200,000 words that no one has seen in addition to all of the various blog posts and columns during that time.

I’m about 20 days behind on my original schedule for the novel, so I’ve got to increase my average daily production from 725 to 945 words the rest of the way. That won’t have any impact on the blog, but it does mean that I’m not likely to do much else until I get the first draft done within the one year I allotted for it. This isn’t an apology, I’m simply letting you know that if it’s not related to the novel or the game designs, it probably isn’t getting done in the near future. And if I don’t devote much time to a comment or an email, well, you can probably figure out why.