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This report from John Hawkins may help explain why I’ve always been so amused by those who attempt to dismiss me and other WND writers by claiming we write for a fringe news site that no one actually reads. I don’t know how reliable the Alexa stats are, but I have occasionally been privy to WND’s server stats over the past few years and WND had more daily readers than some major metropolitan newspapers had daily subscribers three or four years ago:

1) Fox News: 260
2) Wall Street Journal: 383
3) The Drudge Report: 748
4) New York Post: 888
5) WorldNetDaily: 2,692
6) Newsmax: 3,264
7) Free Republic: 3,988
8) The Washington Times: 4,717
9) TownHall: 5,986
10) The Rush Limbaugh Show: 7,624

The truth is that one’s media profile doesn’t always reflect the size of one’s actual online audience. Judging by the regular appearances by its contributors on Fox, you would think National Review was massive, but it’s primarily influential in a world of politics that only represents about one percent of the total national audience. It’s also interesting to see that the Mises Institute did so well. Of course, as we saw twenty years ago in the world of talk radio, that which the dominant form of media attempts to marginalize will tend to steal the audience from that media as new technologies provide a means of circumnavigating the gatekeepers.

Speaking of which, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is now defunct, mourned by no one who didn’t receive paychecks from it. Hopefully the demise of the San Francisco Chronicle will soon follow.

“And as the other papers fail into the Web we will hear, again and again, about the Internet, about Craigslist, about The Drudge Report, and a hundred other reasons these papers are dead. What we will never hear is that their editorial policies and news slanting were part and parcel of their demise. We will never hear about the willed insults, slights, and snubbing of fully half of their potential circulation pool. Journalists and editors write a lot about “taking personal responsibility” when it comes to others. You never hear them write that about themselves. There’s no mea culpa among liberal newspaper journalists these days. There’s only “The Internet ate my newspaper.”

Speaking of the Internet, since Blackfive averages twice as many visitors as Vox Popoli I assume this blog would probably rank somewhere in the top 150 right-wing sites. It’s hard to know, though, since so many “big” blogs with lots of links elect to hide their Sitemeter numbers, which I suspect means that their daily readerships aren’t quite as big as their feeds and links would lead you to believe. Another odd thing I noticed is how much longer visitors tend to linger here than they do at other, better-trafficked blogs. For example, the average visit to Pharyngula is 8 seconds. The average visit to Blackfive is 69 seconds. The average visit here is 140 seconds. Having a large audience is great and all, especially if you’re trying to generate ad income, but I much prefer people taking the time to read what I write. And if they happen to have anything interesting to add to the discourse, so much the better.

The Obama administration shows its true colors:

From now on, remanufacturers of military brass will not be able to buy surplus brass from DOD–actually from Government Liquidators, llc.–the corporation that sells surplus materials for the U.S. government. At least, not in any form recognizable as once-fired brass ammunition. Now all brass ammunition will have to be shredded, and sold as scrap. Georgia Arms, who brought this to our attention, is the 5th largest ammunition manufacturer of centerfire pistol and rifle ammunition in the U.S.

Looks like it’s time for the gun defense lobby to start contacting Congress. The politicos are afraid to go directly after guns, so they’re targeting the ammunition. And the ammunition manufacturers should show some courage as well… by refusing to sell to any state or federal agency until the new policy is abandoned.

A trial lawyer at a law firm with ties to Nancy Pelosi is the new head of the NFLPA:

In a year in which sweeping and historic change has come to Washington, D.C. on a national scale, the NFL Players Association followed suit with the trend Sunday night, electing D.C.-based attorney DeMaurice F. Smith, a relative unknown quantity in NFL circles, as the union’s new executive director, SI.com has learned….

Smith is a partner at the law firm Patton Boggs in Washington and has no significant NFL ties. According to union sources, Smith seized control of the favorite’s role for on Saturday in Maui, when he wowed the union’s 32-man board of player representatives with an hourlong presentation, heavy on detail, regarding his plan to lead the union in its upcoming collective bargaining agreement negotiations with the NFL.

Smith, whose law firm is extremely plugged in to the political landscape of Washington, D.C., and has ties to the Obama administration, told the players that he would be able to prompt Congressional pressure on the NFL to bargain in good faith. Smith mentioned to the players that he felt some of that bargaining pressure could be created through Congress challenging the league’s tax exempt status, as well as its long-held anti-trust exemption.

I think we can safely conclude that the effective partnership aproach to the relationship between the Upshaw-led NFLPA and the NFL owners just came to an abrupt halt. Contrary to some of the sports media reports, Patton Boggs is actually closer to Congress and Pelosi than the White House and Obama, although I don’t know if that can really be considered an improvement. The fact that Smith based his campaign on his ability to “win [against the NFL]” indicates that he’s not likely to rein in the natural tendency of a players’ union to adopt a short-sighted and self-destructive approach to negotiations. But, on the positive side, Smith cannot possibly be worse than the idiotic Troy Vincent would have been, given that Vincent – quite seriously – thought that threatening the owners with a player’s league in 2011 was a viable approach.

The first sign that Smith isn’t going to be a disaster will be if instead of beginning by hammering the greedy owners, he starts talking about addressing the rookie salary situation, which harms the owners, the veteran players, and the league’s competitive balance in the interest of less than a dozen powerful agents.

UPDATE – Okay, so it doesn’t look so good. In his first call to reporters, Smith said: ““There isn’t a day where I don’t hope for peace, but at the same time there isn’t a day where we don’t prepare for war.”

Don’t Believe the Hope

Four days. Just four days. That’s how long it took for the panglossian pundits to declare that the economic destruction that has seen trillions of dollars evaporate in a mushroom cloud of debt and derivatives is rapidly coming to an end. Last week, the S&P 500 rose 10.7 percent, recovering less than 13 percent of its total decline from 1255 in September. This sharp, but very short-term rise already has long-time permabulls such as Larry Kudlow suggesting that instead of pushing back their predictions of economic recovery from mid-2009 to the end of the year, economists should be considering the possibility of GDP growth in the second quarter.

Hope springs eternal in the mouth of the financial whore whose income is derived from market churn.

How many times does the “education” model have to fail before people give it up as a bad cause? It never works.

At least 3 percent of District residents have HIV or AIDS, a total that far surpasses the 1 percent threshold that constitutes a “generalized and severe” epidemic, according to a report scheduled to be released by health officials tomorrow. That translates into 2,984 residents per every 100,000 over the age of 12 — or 15,120 — according to the 2008 epidemiology report by the District’s HIV/AIDS office.

“Our rates are higher than West Africa,” said Shannon L. Hader, director of the District’s HIV/AIDS Administration, who once led the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s work in Zimbabwe. “They’re on par with Uganda and some parts of Kenya.”

The ridiculous thing about this news is that there’s almost nothing easier to avoid than HIV/AIDS. If quarantine had been put into practice 25 years ago, as was historically the case with most communicable diseases, the disease would probably be a complete non-issue by now. I really fail to see how encouraging gays to freely infect each other should be considered in any way supportive of the gay community. And given that gays only make up about two percent of the general population, it’s obvious that Washington is significantly gayer than the average city.

Now, as a libertarian, I couldn’t care less if they all want to party until they off themselves. That’s their right. But if the taxpayers are expected to foot the bill for this, the taxpayers should also be able to decide how the problem is handled. Especially when every single adult under the age of thirty has been repeatedly informed how HIV/AIDS is transmitted throughout the course of their schooling.

I’m not a big fan of popular Italian music since it tends to be too saccharine and show-biz, but every now and then you hear a song on the radio that reminds you that opera, with all its violence and passion, was an Italian invention. And while I absolutely love Rammstein’s sadistic spin on the Snow White fairy tale, only Italians would take it and turn it into a smoldering, darkly sensual pop duet with a great hook.

Without you, without you, without you
Where shall I go, my love?
I swear you will never regret
The paradise I am…
I am the real witch that you want,
The wonderful witch that you want.

It may not rock as much as Rammstein – what does – but it’s a great pop song… and I really like the woman’s voice. Every now and then you hear a song, and before it even gets to the second chorus, you find yourself thinking, wow, they sure hit that one out of the park. I’d be shocked if it doesn’t hit the top of the Italian charts.

Obviously, the religious nature of the Islamic Republic is crippling scientific development there:

Iran put its first communications satellite, Omid (Hope), into a near-Earth orbit on February 2. The research satellite was carried into orbit by a home-made launch vehicle, Safir (Messenger). Iranian Communications Minister Mohammad Soleimani earlier said that the country’s scientists were working on the creation of four new satellites to be placed into near-Earth orbit.

On a tangential note, my favorite thing about the faux concern so often expressed about science education is that the gap between the knowledge of science that science fetishists believe is vital and the actual knowledge of science in any nation on earth is both deep and wide. Of course, if one looks closely enough at the arguments, they boil down to nothing more than a special interest group begging for more government money to pay their salaries.

But scientific development is not synonymous with government spending on scientists. In fact, too much of the latter will tend to inhibit the former. I don’t think there’s too many people who believe that government spending on the arts has improved the quality of art in the USA at all.

The transcript of the much-discussed Cramer vs Stewart dialogue:

STEWART: I gotta tell you. I understand that you want to make finance entertaining, but it’s not a f–ing game. When I watch that I get, I can’t tell you how angry it makes me, because it says to me, you all know. You all know what’s going on. You can draw a straight line from those shenanigans to the stuff that was being pulled at Bear and at AIG and all this derivative market stuff that is this weird Wall Street side bet.

CRAMER: But Jon, don’t you want guys like me that have been in it to show the shenanigans? What else can I do? I mean, last night’s show–

STEWART: No, no, no, no, no. I want desperately for that, but I feel like that’s not what we’re getting. What we’re getting is… Listen, you knew what the banks were doing and yet were touting it for months and months. The entire network was and so now to pretend that this was some sort of crazy, once-in-a-lifetime tsunami that nobody could have seen coming is disingenuous at best and criminal at worst…. But it’s very easy to get on this after the fact. The measure of the network, and the measure of the mess… CNBC could act as-No one is asking them to be a regulatory agency, but can’t-but whose side are they on? It feels like they have to reconcile as their audience the Wall Street traders that are doing this for constant profit on a day-to-day for short term. These guys’ companies were on a Sherman’s March through their companies, financed by our 401ks, and all the incentives of their companies were for short term profit. And they burned the f–ing house down with our money and walked away rich as hell, and you guys knew that that was going on.

I don’t watch The Daily Show myself, although I rather like Jon Stewart’s approach to skewering those who insist on shish-kebabing themselves on their own words caught on camera. I’m very much on Stewart’s side with regards to the financial media’s complete corruption; longtime readers are very familiar with my complete contempt for the Wall Street cheerleader set. (Who, as predicted, are already claiming that an obvious four-day bear market rally should be confused with a long-term “bottom”. Listen to them at your peril.) The fact that Stewart is a overt liberal who is in the bag for Obama doesn’t make him any less funny or his criticism of financial frauds such as CNBC any less pertinent. Stewart has no mandate to be an equal opportunity critic and if he wishes to continue overlook the rich panoply of comedic content in the inept Obama administration, that will be his loss.

It is a bit cowardly that Stewart likes to take serious shots, then hide behind his comedian’s hat. But so what? There isn’t a single major public figure of left, right or center that I can think of who is willing to publicly take on those who challenge their opinions in anything but cable news soundbite-fest. In fact, John Derbyshire, Dinesh D’Souza, and I are about the only minor-league commentators who have demonstrated a consistent willingness to do so… Derb and I proposed an atheism debate on NRO a few months ago, but the editors shot it down because apparently National Review readers are much more interested in reading articles about women hyphenating their names and considering whether Rush Limbaugh is the leader of the Repbulican Party or not.

Stewart is both a comedian and a commentator; the two roles are not mutually exclusive. If an interlocutor is able to force Stewart to retreat into his “hey now, I’m just a comedian, don’t hit me” shell after successfully dealing with the questions Stewart has raised, then he has won that encounter. Sometimes, one simply has to know how to recognize a white flag when it is flown.

And there will never be a Jon Stewart of the right because conservatives and libertarians have no need of making their intellectual cases indirectly, through negative implication. Stewart is a sophisticated individual, but he is forced to communicate through sitcom irony because the greater part of his audience is immature and unsophisticated, for all that it pretends to be educated and informed. One must, after all, be extremely unsophisticated to get very worked up over the shocking idea that a blowhard star of a financial investment show is doing anything but selling advertising for stockbrokers.

NW inquires:

[W]as wondering how much economics in fiction snap your suspension of disbelief? (like we were talking about women warriors) Does You Fail Economics Forever cover it or are there some economic fails that really bother you? What are some of the best econs in fiction you’ve seen/read and what are some of the worst? One more thing: What ruins your enjoyment most about a story? Economics? Computers? Combat? What? Example: I can just go along with almost anything but a major, MAJOR basic biology blunder or Christian theology research failure really take me out of the story.

That’s an interesting question. I think, for the most part, my expectation of authors possessing even a modicum of economics knowledge is so low that their general ignorance of it doesn’t bother me. On the rare occasions that an author bothers to at least explain why he is violating the basic principles of the science – as Charles Stross with his explicit positing of a society that is post-scarcity in Accelerando, for example – I find myself merely nodding in appreciation. The two best takes on economics that I have ever read in genre novels are Terry Pratchett in Making Money and Going Postal. His understanding of money, in particular, is entirely conventional, i.e. incorrect, but it is an educated perspective. And his take on the dot com boom is really well done. However, there’s no question that far and away the best economics reference in fiction is an obscure short story by Charles Stross, entitled “Bear Trap”. It’s found in Toast, in case you’re interested, and it’s a remarkable achievement.

There are two things I find peculiar about religion in genre literature. The first is the very common, and historically inept, attempt to assign a religious cause to their fictional wars. The fact that irreligious writers are seldom able to write convincingly about religion or religious characters only makes this ineptitude all the more noticeable. The second thing is the amusingly stupid way irreligious writers often like to assume that religious individuals don’t know the first thing about their own religion. For example, rather early on in his Old Man’s War, John Scalzi features the irreligious protagonist publicly schooling a cardboard cutoutreligious bigot courtesy of his superior knowledge of the Bible. As with the movies, where the guy with the six-shot pistol always trumps the guy with the full-auto machine gun, the bazooka, and the flamethrower, in science fiction and fantasy, it’s always the non-believer who knows the tenets of a religion better than the individual who actually takes them seriously and attempts to put them into practice. Amusingly, the section of the Bible that is usually supposed to be completely unknown to the believer is the stoning of the adulterous woman… and the authors inevitably leave off the rather important bit about “go forth and sin no more.”

It makes one wonder what these secular authors believe is being studied in all those weekly Bible studies across the country… it’s rather like reading Dawkins where he expects the reader to be shocked by the savagery in the Old Testament, when every kid who’s ever been to Sunday School knows all about Passover, the Red Sea, and the walls of Jericho.

But I find those things more amusing than annoying. Why would one take offense at someone else’s cluelessness? What I actually find extremely irritating is the way that very few writers these days appears to be capable of grasping basic human sexual relations. In the real world, men pursue and women allow themselves to be caught if they are amenable. In the vast majority of fictional worlds, men are wide-eyed innocents who wouldn’t even think to be attracted to a super-hot woman and are dumbfounded when she is inexplicably overcome with immediate lust for them… after which encounter, a long-term relationship immediately ensues. I think this is because most male writers are overweight wallflowers who have never successfully pursued a woman, so they simply don’t have any experience of normal human sexual patterns. Even those who are married often appear to be relationship betas who proposed to the first woman to show interest in them; although I often make fun of wereseal fiction – and with good reason – at least the women who write it appear to be capable of grasping the very simple matter of which sex is chiefly responsible for pursuing the other.