Category: Uncategorized

I do hope he’s lying

I don’t understand why Rick Spielman would assure Christian Ponder, and the rest of the NFL, that the Vikings are not going to draft a quarterback with the third pick in the NFL draft. Now, perhaps they want to prevent teams from feeling the need to trade for the #2 pick, which belongs to St. Louis, who are unlikely to draft RGIII, assuming the Colts draft Andrew Luck, since they have Sam Bradford. In which case, we can hope that they are simply lying in the interest of misdirection.

While it’s true that the Vikings need serious help on the offensive line and USC OT Kalil would be the obvious choice, the most valuable asset in the NFL is a first-rate quarterback. By all the significant metrics, RGIII has much higher potential upside than Christian Ponder, who isn’t bad, but appears unlikely to ever be more than a solid, non-elite starter. That’s quite acceptable, considering recent past history, but given that the jury is still out on whether Ponder can even reach the middle ranks of the NFL quarterbacking fraternity, while RGIII looks as if Vick-level performance is probably his floor, combined with the fact that it’s no longer necessary to mortgage the franchise in order to sign a high first-rounder, why not select RGIII, then start picking offensive linemen, and presumably, defensive backs?

RGIII needs time to learn the NFL game, so he can sit for a year behind Ponder. If Ponder unexpectedly shows signs of reaching elite status, the Carson Palmer trade and Matt Flynn interest shows that RGIII can be dealt for draft value. And if Ponder ends up being mediocre, or as his rookie season suggests, injury-prone, the Vikings can give a very promising, hard-working, and intelligent young quarterback his shot.

Anyhow, if the publicly announced retention of Christian Ponder as the undisputed Vikings starting quarterback is genuinely the first move of the true Spielman era, this doesn’t bode well for its long term results. The Vikings blew it by not picking up Drew Brees when he was available, as I recommended at the time, and I’m hoping that the prospective passing on RGIII doesn’t turn out to be a similarly epic catastrophe.

Hope and Change: Republican style

Mitt Romney’s top ten campaign contributors:

Goldman Sachs
Credit Suisse Group
Morgan Stanley
HIG Capital
Barclays
Kirkland & Ellis
Bank of America
PriceWaterhouseCoopers
EMC Corp
JPMorgan Chase & Co

At least Obama had the decency to lie to America and pretend that he wasn’t going to hold her down while the bankers took turns raping her. If the Republicans are foolish enough to nominate Mitt Romney and he wins the general election, he is going to permit the pillaging of the American economy in a manner that hasn’t been seen since the Roman legions pillaged Carthage.

The evil of denominations

The Church is the people, not the buildings and property. But as these former Episcopalians are learning to their chagrin, and as other churches that made the mistake of joining a denomination have learned, the wolves in sheep’s clothing who presently run the dying denominations don’t hesitate to steal anything of value on which they can legally place their rapacious paws:

Tuesday night, the Fairfax Circuit Court issued its ruling in favor of the Diocese of Virginia and the Episcopal Church in litigation seeking to recover Episcopal church property, according to a report from the Diocese of Virginia. “Our goal throughout this litigation has been to return faithful Episcopalians to their church homes and Episcopal properties to the mission of the Church,” said the Rt. Rev. Shannon S. Johnston, bishop of Virginia.

The court ruled that the Episcopal Church and the Diocese of Virginia have “a contractual and proprietary interest” in each of the properties subject to the litigation. The court ordered that all property subject to its ruling be turned over to the Diocese.

The problem is the “accession language” in the contracts through which a church joins a denomination, which means that a denomination which hasn’t contributed a single dime towards the acquisition of a property or the building of a church claims complete ownership of both, contra the interests of the church members whose contributions paid for them and who actually attend the church on a regular basis. This is why no church should ever join a denomination – perhaps demonination would be a more precise term – simply because its theological principles happen to be more or less in line with those presently professed by the denomination.

This isn’t the reason that I describe myself as a Christian, not as anything else. Like every other earthly institution, church denominations are susceptible to corruption, infiltration, and the eventual abandonment of the professed mission. The Episcopal, Lutheran, and Methodist denominations not only don’t appear to be Christian anymore, they can’t even be reasonably described as “churches” in any reasonable manner.

Romney underperforms

39% Romney
23% Paul
17% Huntsman
10% Gingrich
9% Santorum

Lost in the inevitable media hype about Romney winning New Hampshire and Iowa is the fact that he actually performed rather poorly in light of his supposed inevitability. Here are the winning percentages of the last three meaningful New Hampshire primaries:

1996: 27% (Buchanan)
2000: 49% (McCain)
2008: 37% (McCain)
2012: 39% (Romney)

The fascinating thing is that Romney only got 7% more votes in 2012 than he did four years ago, assuming that the present numbers hold up, despite campaigning there ever since the last primary. And he performed about as expected; the two final polls had him at 37%. This is pretty bad for a candidate who is supposed to have the nomination sewn up already, in fact, it indicates that most Republicans simply don’t want to vote for him. The Huntsman vote is probably the largest collection of pure anti-Romney votes, as there is no reason to see them as anything but a protest given the ideological similarities between the two Mormons.

Ron Paul, on the other hand, outperformed. He was supposed to win around 17% of the vote versus 15% for Huntsman. Gallup had him as low as 12%. Instead, he got 23%, which in consideration of Santorum’s very poor performance, puts him in a strong position as the alternative to Romney. So, Perry is done, Huntsman isn’t a player but can pretend to be for a little while, and both Gingrich and Santorum should be done but won’t quit before South Carolina.

We can be confident that Paul did much better than expected in New Hampshire because National Review’s Corner has assiduously, and bizarrely, avoided discussing him in 20 posts about the primary, despite devoting several apiece to Huntsman, Gingrich, and Santorum.

New SEC champions!

Apparently Alabama beat LSU last night in the second SEC championship game of the season or something. I don’t know, because like most of you, I didn’t bother to watch it. But it is certainly amazing to see a conference hold two championship games in a single year; what a pity there was no national championship game because neither Alabama nor LSU proved they could beat the Big 12 or Big 10 champions. Alabama has not proved it could beat the Pac 12 champion. LSU beat Oregon, but that was at the beginning of the season, long before LSU beat Alabama.

Yes, the SEC is the best conference, and yes, both LSU and Alabama are good teams, and perhaps both of them should be able to beat Oklahoma State, Wisconsin, and Oregon. Of course, Pittsburgh was supposed to be able to beat Denver, and a few years ago, Ohio State was supposed to be able to beat Florida. But that’s why you play the games! Now all we know that LSU can beat Alabama and Alabama can beat LSU. In the immortal words of Derrick Coleman, “whoopty damn do”.

About the only good thing about this BCS debacle is that the college football world is so dissatisfied with it that there is little chance they’ll be able to put off a playoff system much longer. And in closing, I quote this Oklahoma State fan:

“What in the hell, people? I bring you many earnest what in the hells. That was it? That was the immovable wall of Technicolor fearsome that Oklahoma State and Stanford had no chance of competing against? That was your big reveal? We are now in the position of crowning a national champion that couldn’t convert the extra point after its solitary touchdown of the game. You’re seriously telling me that our poor little old Big 12/Pac-12 selves didn’t deserve a glance at this business?”

UPDATE: Just to prove that playing a second conference championship game instead of a national championship game was as stupid as I said it would be, here is the empirical evidence:

The nation largely ignored a rematch of SEC foes, giving the BCS national championship its lowest overnight rating ever. The overnight ratings for Monday’s BCS Championship Game are in and they are not good. In fact, they are historically bad, as Alabama’s 21-0 win over SEC-rival LSU drew a 13.8 rating on ESPN (via LA Times). That was the lowest rating championship game in the 14-year history of the BCS.

Intra-conference “national championship” games are a horrendous idea and will clearly harm NCAA football. Historically bad ratings at a time when the NFL is racking up historically high ratings strongly indicates that there is something rotten in the structure of college football. The BCS absolutely should have banned teams that did not win their conference championship.

Mailvox: an interesting confession

RINO wrote:

A lot of conservatives stay home if Ron Paul wins as well, I’m not sure why no one here understands that.

Fascinating. If true, this clearly shows that a lot of conservatives must be lying about how defeating Obama is so very important to them. Now, I understand why a Ron Paul supporter doesn’t care if either Obama or Romney are in office, since both men will continue the foreign interventions, the bank bailouts, the debt-spending, and Obamacare.

But this raises the significant question of why a conservative supporting Romney would prefer Obama to Paul. What is the vital issue that separates Paul from Obama in Obama’s favor in the eyes of these “conservatives”?

The cost of immigration

This should be completely self-evident. And yet, the “free trade” crowd will no doubt ignore this empirical evidence, just as they have ignored the last 200 years of the logic:

A shocking report has shown that 160,000 Britons have missed out on jobs over the past ten years because they were taken by foreign labour. The true scale of the link between migration and the dole was revealed today in an independent study by the Migration Advisory Committee (Mac). There are 23 fewer jobs for British workers for every 100 migrants from outside the EU, the Government’s immigration advisers said.

If American labor is replaced at the same rate, then the 37.5 million immigrants since 1980 rendered approximately 8.6 million Americans jobless as of 2006. However, the situation is actually much worse than reported here because it doesn’t account for foreign immigration from within the EU, which accounts for two-thirds of the immigration into the UK. Factoring that in, we can estimate that approximately 25.8 million Americans are presently unemployed due to foreign immigration.

Therefore, it is both empirically and logically obvious that it is the post-1986 mass migration that is at least partly responsible for the wage stagnation and consistent decrease in the employment-population rate that has been occurring since the late 1990s.

The end of the “electability” argument

Republicans cannot honestly argue that Mitt Romney is the only Republican capable of beating Obama in the general election any longer:

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, run neck-and-neck with President Obama in a general-election matchup, according to a new CBS News poll released late on Monday that shows the two front-runners in Tuesday’s New Hampshire GOP primary running stronger against the president than their fellow Republicans. Romney posts a two-point lead over Obama, 47 percent to 45 percent, within the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points. He leads Obama, 45 percent to 39 percent, among independent voters.

Obama’s lead over Paul is just one point, 46 percent to 45 percent, as Paul leads among independents by 7 points.

Factor in the way in which more Republicans and libertarians are likely to stay home rather than vote for Romney, and it is clear that putting forward the more moderate candidate will lead to another Republican loss.

Remember, Reagan and George W. Bush were the more conservative candidates. (Bush ’43 wasn’t really conservative, but he was definitely perceived that way.) Both won two general elections. George H.W. Bush, Dole, and McCain were the less conservative candidates and Bush ’41 won one general election. However, I was at the Republican convention in 1988 and I can testify that he was being pushed as the natural heir to Reagan and billed as a True Conservative. By the end of his first term, everyone knew better.

But even if we include him as a moderate, this means that when Republicans have nominated the more conservative candidate, they have gone four for four. When they have nominated the more moderate candidate, they have gone one for four. Logic therefore dictates that Ron Paul has to be the nominee if the Republicans want to win in 2012. Of course, as I have often pointed out, the Republican establishment would much rather lose a presidential election than see a real conservative in office, much less a libertarian who respects the U.S. Constitution.

We are amused

I thought this was pretty funny exchange. It’s an object lesson in how those who are barely above average intelligence and overrate themselves accordingly have no ability whatsoever to understand how much smarter the highly intelligent are.

Spacebunny: “He’s smarter than literally 95% of the people on the planet for pity’s sake.”

Anklebiter: “I was always suspicious of VD’s Mensa claims, thanks for confirming that he is not qualified.”

It’s pretty clear that this anklebiter couldn’t make any similar claims, given the stellar cognitive capacity on display here. But since this apparently isn’t completely obvious to everyone, I will spell it out. A statement that an individual is more intelligent than X percent of the population in no way implies, let alone confirms, that he is not also more intelligent than X+Y percent of the population. Or 99.999 percent, for that matter.

I’ve noticed that a number of people seem to have a similar problems understanding what Mensa membership signifies. It does not mean that one has an IQ of 132, it means that one has an IQ of at least 132. The oft-seen inability to grasp this simple fact occasionally makes me wonder if such people have similar problems mixing up the floor of their house with its ceiling. Are they often found on a ladder nailing up carpet? Do they install fans and light fixtures on the floor?

Amorality is not a moral position

On the one hand, I’m pleased that people outside the coterie of Black Gate writers are interested in the question of morality and the new nihilism within the SF/F genre. On the other, I’m a little disturbed by the way in which so many people with opinions on the subject appear to have an amount of trouble grasping some of the most basic issues involved. While we can certainly agree to disagree when our opinions on the subject happen to diverge, we can’t even manage to do that when there are fundamental misunderstandings about the issues being discussed. To explain what I mean by this, it is first necessary to quote the German writer Cora Buhlert’s recent post entitled Morality in Fantasy – 2012 Edition.

And even the defenders of morally sound fantasy have often no qualms with a piece of morally questionable fantasy, as long as they enjoy it. Remember Theo, who was involved in last year’s nihilism in epic fantasy debate and felt that morally ambiguous epic fantasy was not just fiction that was not to his taste, but apparently heralded the decline of the western world itself? Turns out he’s still blogging at Black Gate on occasion. What is more, he takes Mur Lafferty to task for not wanting to read supposed genre classics, because the racism and misogyny and the prevalence of violence against women puts her off. So Theo ranting against Joe Abercrombie and The Iron Dragon’s Daughter is a sign of his moral superiority, while Mur Lafferty ranting against The Stars My Destination and The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever is a sign of her lack of education and moral flatness? Sorry, but this doesn’t work. If Theo enjoys Thomas Covenant, more power to him. But that doesn’t change the fact that Thomas Covenant is a rapist and no more moral than the protagonists of the Joe Abercrombie novels he singled out for destroying western civilization. But since Thomas Covenant is really sorry for what he did, spends much of the series wallowing in self-pity and finally apparently redeems himself, at least in the eyes of Theo (I can’t say if it would work for me, since I never got that far), that apparently makes The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant okay. Though I guess what really makes Thomas Covenant okay for Theo but not Joe Abercrombie is that he enjoyed Thomas Covenant but didn’t enjoy Joe Abercrombie. Which is a perfectly acceptable aesthetic judgement, but does not automatically make one book morally superior to the other.

If you’re interested in my response, you can find it at The Black Gate.