Category: Uncategorized

As most of us with functioning brains assumed, the story about Palin not knowing that Africa is a continent wasappears to be false. Actually, it appears to have been part of a larger media hoax:

It was among the juicier post-election recriminations: Fox News Channel quoted an unnamed McCain campaign figure as saying that Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent.

Who would say such a thing? On Monday the answer popped up on a blog and popped out of the mouth of David Shuster, an MSNBC anchor. “Turns out it was Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, who has come forward today to identify himself as the source of the leaks,” Mr. Shuster said.

Trouble is, Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist.

How totally unsurprising. And note that the hoaxers correctly assumed that the news media wouldn’t think to question such a revelation about a Republican.

You know, perhaps the Republican Party should have paid closer attention to John Hawkins’s Right Wing News poll last year. One can’t help but notice that John McCain been in the top 3 of the least popular national figures on the Right with the right-wing blogosphere since the poll first began in 2005:

10) Arnold Schwarzenegger (12)
7) Mike Huckabee, Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul (13)
6) Chuck Hagel (14)
5) Arlen Specter (15)
4) Colin Powell (17)
3) Peggy Noonan (18)
2) Ted Stevens (19)
1) John McCain (25)

I couldn’t help but notice one rather significant name missing from the 25 on the list. Not only that, but Peggy Noonan makes a surprise appearance as the third most-unpopular; she wasn’t even on last year’s list. Don’t you suspect that perhaps this just might have something to do with the extreme popularity of the individual that Noonan rather publicly dissed on several occasions? I think the poll is a very strong indication that despite the best efforts of the McCain staffers and the Republican squish“reform” faction, Gov. Palin will remain far more popular and influential with the conservative base than will her detractors in the media.

UPDATE – John Hawkins his own bad self emails with additional information: Not only did Palin not make the list, she didn’t receive a single vote.

Anne Barbeau Gardiner of the John Jay College reviews The Irrational Atheist for New Oxford Review:

What makes Day’s book entertaining is his exuberant language — the rhetorical fireworks with which he takes on the new atheists. High spirits and clever phrasing provoke continual chuckles, as for example when he remarks that not since the craze for Marx and Freud “has there been so much enthusiasm about the non-existence of God,” and that this new evangelism is directed at “atheists whose lack of faith is weak.” He employs mock praise, too, as in, “Hitchens and Dawkins became atheists after long and exhaustive rational inquiries into the existence of God, both at the age of nine.” Yet the humor doesn’t get in the way of subtle analysis, for he lays bare Dawkins’s “incessant shell games,” Harris’s “exercises in self-parody,” and Hitchens’s “epic feat of intellectual self-evisceration.”…

Although Day is an evangelical, he is remarkably sympathetic to Catholics, who are usually the chief targets of atheists. Day scoffs at the way Dawkins, in the space of a couple of pages, dismisses the 3,000-page Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas: He says that Dawkins waved “a dead chicken over the keyboard” and tried to make readers believe he had “seriously considered” the Sum­ma and found it “wanting.”

I have to confess that the latter bit was, in my considered opinion, probably the most intellectually disgusting thing about The God Delusion, as well as the most revealing of Richard Dawkins’s fundamentally anti-intellectual character. It certainly demonstrated what a tawdry little charlatan Dawkins is. As Summa Elvetica should suffice to indicate, I have a much stronger understanding of Aquinan logic than does Dawkins so I am by no means unaware of its intrinsic structural flaw or a number of the more questionable leaps of logic made by the saint. Summa Elvetica may be a parody of the Summa Theologica on several levels, but it is a very respectful, even affectionate, parody because Thomas Aquinas’s masterpiece is a remarkable intellectual achievement that demands the regard of any thinking man; Dawkins should be deeply embarrassed about his shameless attempt to dismiss one of Man’s great philosophical works without the courage to offer any substantive criticism of his own.

There are errors in every great philosophical classic. I have myself pointed out several of them in the dialogues of Socrates; imagine what TIA readers would have thought if I had similarly dismissed Euthyphro as “wanting” without bothering to point out any of the specific flaws in the argument. Richard Dawkins’s criticism of Thomas Aquinas is no more serious or legitimate than The Princess Bride’s take on Plato, Aristotle and Socrates.

I had to laugh when I reached the end of the review, as it appears the Divine String-puller has arranged things in such a manner as to warm the Responsible Puppet’s heart:

One caveat: At the end, Day touches briefly on theology and tries to solve the mystery of suffering by limiting God’s omnipotence and omniscience. This amounts to reducing a great mystery to a problem.

I tend to think that limiting omniscience to voliscience is not only Biblically correct but also resolves a number of logical objections, so I’m quite curious to know what sort of new problem it might introduce. But I have no objection whatsoever to this sort of criticism, and am quite pleased to learn that Dr. Gardiner found the book to be worth her while.

Wrath of the Lich King is live. This is good. Lord British has announced his departure from NCSoft in terms that suggest he is essentially retiring from game development. This is devastating. I’ve been acquainted with him for years and when we spoke last summer, I was impressed to see how he was one of the few designers in the MMO space who was really trying to break out of the hardware cycle and expand the nature of the fundamental gameplay instead. Tabula Rasa was a failure for a number of reasons that I won’t go into here, but I suspect will prove to be a more influential game in terms of design concepts than much more successful MMOs like Warhammer.

Instead of beginning the long march to level 80 tonight, I think I shall go old school instead and fire up Akalabeth on the Apple II emulator.

The demographic countdown:

There is no question that Obama owes a debt to the Kennedys – but it may be far greater than he or they realize. Yes, Senator Edward M. Kennedy offered a crucial early endorsement, comparing the Obama of 2008 to the Jack Kennedy of 1960. And certainly Caroline and others in the Kennedy family worked hard on the campaign trail. But the greatest Kennedy legacy to Obama isn’t Ted or Caroline or Bobby Jr., but rather the Immigration Act of 1965, which created the diverse country that is already being called Obama’s America.

That act is rarely mentioned when recounting the high points of 1960s liberalism, but its impact arguably rivals the Voting Rights Act, the creation of Medicare, or other legislative landmarks of the era. It transformed a nation 85 percent white in 1965 into one that’s one-third minority today, and on track for a nonwhite majority by 2042.

Before the act, immigration visas were apportioned based on the demographic breakdown that existed at the time of the 1920 Census – meaning that there were few if any limits on immigrants from Western and Northern Europe, but strict quotas on those from elsewhere.

I understand that many, if not most, Americans believe that people are simply people, all scientific knowledge and even evolutionary biology notwithstanding. But, it’s amazing that so many of them are perfectly willing to gamble not only their country, but their children’s future, on this assumption without even a shred of scientific support except for an obvious intra-species ability to breed.

So, here’s the obvious question. What if this assumption is, in fact, wrong? What if it is determined that there are, in fact, qualitative differences between different human populations? And wouldn’t it have been a good idea to see a non-European culture demonstrate a proven capacity for Western civilization and Western societal norms before permitting the unlimited migration of its members? It’s true that Japan has demonstrated a genuine capacity for Western civilization, but then, Japan is not Somalia, Mexico, or Pakistan and the migration into America is not primarily made up of Japanese.

And if Somalis, Mexicans, and Pakistanis can’t manage Western civilization in their own countries, what is the basis for the belief that they can do so in Western countries? This is a particularly important question given the known consequences of historical migrations in addition to the empirical evidence of modern Londonistan, the Parisian banlieus, and Washington DC.

Democrats are not yet a permanent majority, but they appear to be only two generations away from becoming one prior to splitting into a new bifactional ruling party. In this sense, the Republican squish faction is correct to push for a Republican makeover in the Democrat Lite mode; if current trends prevail, there will be two major parties in the USA, the Democratic Socialists and the Social Democrats. One thing that immigration observers often miss is that two of the three major Mexican parties – the Institutional Revolutionary Party and the Party of the Democratic Revolution – are to the left of the Democratic party, being members of the Socialist International.

If they had any economic sense at all, the American and European central banks would have been raising rates sooner rather than later:

Russia lifts rates to 12pc to save rouble as crisis deepens

Russia’s central bank has raised interest rates a full percentage point to 12pc to prevent a collapse of the rouble following a day of mayhem on the Moscow markets, prompting concerns that the financial crisis may be spiralling out of control. The surprise move last night came after the authorities had spent $7bn of foreign reserves in a matter of hours trying to defend the currency, at a lower level. The central bank has now spent $84bn of its reserves over the last month…. Expecting trouble, the Kremlin has mobilised the police to crush dissent.

It seems there are two models for the American future, the Russian one and the Japanese one. Neither looks particularly appealing, but they’re both to be preferred to the Weimar Republic’s hyperinflation.

The OC emails with a thought-provoking question:

The question was posed: what will El Presidente Big Daddy Obama’s proposed Civilian National Security Force be able to do that the existing National Guard cannot already do?

The answer is, being a “civilian” agency, anything the National Guard and other established military forces are forbidden to do within the borders of our country by the 1876 Posse Comitatus Act.

Well, isn’t THAT a happy little thought now! I shall have to ponder my own expectations of the new president-elect.

First of all, I sincerely thank everyone who participated and bought a book. The surge was hugely successful, as according to Marcher Lord, 172 copies of Summa Elvetica were purchased during those twelve hours. What was especially great about this was that it pushed SE over Marcher Lord’s breakeven point, which significantly increases the possibility that there will be a sequel. In fact, they have already informed me that they would like me to write a second novel in the setting, pending approval of the synopsis.

So thank you, again, for making it possible. I hope you will all enjoy the books when they arrive, and that a few of you will see fit to post your reviews of it on Amazon. Also, if you write a review on your blog, let me know and I’ll be sure to link to it here.

UPDATE – It sounds as if people are beginning to receive their books today.

Barack Obama begins with the first ritual betrayal of his base:

President-elect Barack Obama is unlikely to radically overhaul controversial Bush administration intelligence policies, advisers say, an approach that is almost certain to create tension within the Democratic Party.

The appointment of Rahm Emmanuel as Chief of Staff wasn’t an actual stab-in-the-back, it only suggested – albeit strongly – that a whole series of betrayals was coming. No libertarian will be the least bit surprised to learn that Obama has no intention of giving up any of the police state powers that President Bush inveigled from the Congress or manufactured ex nihilo by executive order. But there will surely be many civil rights enthusiasts who will be as horrified by this as conservatives were appalled by Bush’s creation of a prescription drug entitlement.

And I look forward to mercilessly reminding conservatives of their idiotic support for the Patriot Acts when Obama begins to find novel uses for them.

106 Mounds View Meerkats (7-3-0)
61 Burns Redbeards (6-4-0)

76 Silver Spooners (5-3-2)
41 Greenfield Grizzlies (4-5-1)

87 Valders Valkyries (5-5-0)
58 Masonville Marauders (3-6-1)

113 Black Mouth Curs (3-7-0)
67 Judean Peoples Front (4-6-0)

73 Winston Reverends (3-7-0)
46 Alamo City Spartans (8-2-0)

What a great weekend of football! The NFL in HD, the Vikings beat the Packers, and last but not least, the Meerkats slap around Burns like a red-bearded stepchild.