Category: Uncategorized

89 Valders Valkyries (4-0-0)
87 Winston Reverends (0-4-0)

70 Alamo City Spartans (4-0-0)
53 Burns Redbeards (2-2-0)

68 Greenfield Grizzlies (2-1-1)
51 Black Mouth Curs (0-4-0

64 Silver Spooners (1-1-2)
48 Judean Peoples Front (2-2-0)

54 Mounds View Meerkats (2-2-0)
38 Masonville Marauders (1-2-1)

It’s getting to that part of the season when one has to actually manage the bye weeks and injuries. Needless to say, Winston is cursing its luck right now, putting up 87 points in a loss to the Valkyries.

He emails to explain that Al Gore has it wrong and that it’s not a green revolution that will solve the liquidity problem:

Actually, the solution to the financial crisis is pixie traps. All the money is getting taken away by these noxious little pixies that creep out in the banks at night and steal all the gold in the vaults!

So what we really need to do is invest in enhanced pixie traps!

We estimate with an investment of only 56 no, *57* mil *BILLION* dollars, we can quickly resolve this damnable pixie problem to our complete and utter satisfaction, and make it an ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY THAT PIXIES WILL NO LONGER CAUSE PROBLEMS WITH THE U.S. FINANCIAL SYSTEM!!!

Yes, indeed — this IS the key to financial solvency in the USA!! More and BETTER PIXIE TRAPS!

I don’t know about you, but I’m convinced. In fact, I’m frightened. If we don’t do something about these awful pixies THIS VERY WEEK, Heimdall very well may blow his horn!

I normally don’t care a bit about food-writing, but this raconteur could make a review of McDonald’s worth reading:

There is a well-founded belief that the “best restaurant in the world” is the one that all sensible, tasteful, relaxed and modest people would avoid like the Costa Brava.

It would undoubtedly be poncy. Poncy little bits of ponced-up ponce, served on poncy plates in a poncified room, by oleaginous ponces to unmitigated superponces. The whole thing would unquestionably be a poncimonious cluster-ponce…. I must admit, I was reluctant to make the trip to Barcelona for an El Ponci dinner, but the Blonde was very keen, and it turned out to be a salutary lesson in nose-amputating cynicism before experience.

He’s my new hero now that my faith in Congress has been shattered.

As you read this, notice the name of one of the individuals intimately involved in triggering one particularly significant element of the credit crisis. Yes, that’s right, it coincidentally happens to be the very same man who just successfully demanded economic dictator status and $810,000,000,000.00 in order to “fix” it:

Many events in Washington, on Wall Street and elsewhere around the country have led to what has been called the most serious financial crisis since the 1930s. But decisions made at a brief meeting on April 28, 2004, explain why the problems could spin out of control. The agency’s failure to follow through on those decisions also explains why Washington regulators did not see what was coming.

On that bright spring afternoon, the five members of the Securities and Exchange Commission met in a basement hearing room to consider an urgent plea by the big investment banks. They wanted an exemption for their brokerage units from an old regulation that limited the amount of debt they could take on. The exemption would unshackle billions of dollars held in reserve as a cushion against losses on their investments. Those funds could then flow up to the parent company, enabling it to invest in the fast-growing but opaque world of mortgage-backed securities; credit derivatives, a form of insurance for bond holders; and other exotic instruments.

The five investment banks led the charge, including Goldman Sachs, which was headed by Henry M. Paulson Jr. Two years later, he left to become Treasury secretary.

A lone dissenter — a software consultant and expert on risk management — weighed in from Indiana with a two-page letter to warn the commission that the move was a grave mistake. He never heard back from Washington. One commissioner, Harvey J. Goldschmid, questioned the staff about the consequences of the proposed exemption. It would only be available for the largest firms, he was reassuringly told — those with assets greater than $5 billion.

“We’ve said these are the big guys,” Mr. Goldschmid said, provoking nervous laughter, “but that means if anything goes wrong, it’s going to be an awfully big mess.”

This also demonstrates the inherent problem with government regulation. Regulation doesn’t actually prevent most of problems it is supposed to prevent, it merely provides everyone with the illusion that they will be prevented. When the push of the politically powerful comes to shoves directed at the government regulator, they are always going to cave.

The big banks wanted the freedom to fail. The regulators acceded to their request. The American people should have let the big banks experience the consequences of their actions; since they have not, they can rest assured that they will suffer worse consequences than those with which they were threatened. It’s not likely, but here’s hoping that enough congressmen will stick to their guns once more and again refuse to roll over and play whore for Wall Street.

I’m never quite sure if I should be more amused or alarmed to discover that so much of Robert Anton Wilson’s bizarre visions have turned out to be far more true than more conventional models of reality.

UPDATE – The House rolled, 263-171. Well, at least one will be able to say that the American people eminently deserve what they’re soon going to be getting. And it should be extremely amusing to listen to all the Republicans and fair-weather conservatives wondering how they could have been hammered so badly in November when they showed such bold leadership by bravely abandoning their professed principles in a time of crisis.

UPDATE II – Rod Dreher saw Ron Paul on CNN:

Rep. Ron Paul, on CNN right now deploring the $700 billion bailout the president has just signed into law. He shook his head, saying that the government is throwing kerosene on the fire by spending more money.

“They’re not dealing with the fact that this country is bankrupt,” he said, of the Congress. “Doing nothing would have been a reasonable alternative.”

Paul also said that we are on the verge of major events in this country. He did not elaborate.

I didn’t bother to watch it, of course, so perhaps those of you who did can fill in the rest of us. From what I’ve read and the polls I’ve seen, it sounds as if it went largely according to my predictions of a moderate Palin victory thanks to Biden being Biden. It’s pretty obvious that the mainstream media has reluctantly concluded that she won, otherwise the debate would be given much more aggressive coverage.

But feel free to differ or otherwise elucidate here.

I’d have provided a link to the full review, except I can’t find it now. When I do, I’ll place it here:

Summa Elvetica takes place in a fantasy world so detailed it might rival Lord of the Rings. Certainly, anyone in love with that trilogy will delight in this book…. Theodore Beale combines philosophy, traditional Christian teaching, demonology, and the paranormal powers of magic in all its forms, to render a story that’s rich with metaphor. The world is a fantasy based on the Roman Empire. The Christians are led by the Sanctiff, similar to the Pope. He has Michealine priests based on the tenets of St. Michael the Archangel – the Defender. Our hero, Marcus Valarius, must journey to the Elvish Kingdom to begin his investigation into the story premise – do elves have souls, and are they created beings of God?

The story is slowed down by the telling of historical tales on the journey to see the Elven High King. It reminded me of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Once there, however, Marcus is rapidly drawn into the controversy. His is a spiritual as well as a physical journey, and his actions and discoveries mirror those many of us have also had in our own quest for a relationship with God.

This book is multi-layered and should be read slowly and carefully to get the fullest experience. I found it rich in its concept, and Beale’s use of humanistic philosophy versus Christian teachings. For those who love their fantasy, as well as Biblical teaching, this book will be a feast.

It’s certainly going rather too far to compare Summa Elvetica to Lord of the Rings, but it is, as Tolkein once described his masterpiece, “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.” Still, it’s nice to hear that readers are enjoying the novel and even nicer to hear that it has inspired some of them to order the actual book.

And no, this doesn’t mean I’ve converted to Catholicism. But since I have vehemently criticized the way in which most modern fantasy authors insist in cramming modern sensibilities into their characters, it would have been bizarre to utilize a post-medieval Protestant perspective myself. Indeed, I probably went inadvertantly further that way than I’d intended.

Here’s the first SE review, in case you missed it.

As the financial elite is discovering, you can fight reality as long as you want, but it’s always going to beat down your illusions in the end:

The Journal of Applied Psychology has just published findings from a University of Florida study based on interviews with more than 12,000 men and women. Between 1979 and 2005, they were questioned regularly about how they viewed male and female roles – whether they believed a woman’s place was in the home, whether employing women led to more juvenile delinquency(!) and whether it was the woman’s job to take care of the home and family.

Sexist men, the scientists found, made an average of $8,500 (£4,600) a year more than men who viewed women as work-place equals. Meanwhile, feminists earned more than their more traditionally minded female colleagues (but not a great deal more – £800 a year, on average). And while there was only a small difference between the pay packets of “egalitarian” men and women, sexist men’s wages outstripped everyone else’s.

Surprised? Me neither. It’s one of those stories that, even without being corroborated by the figures, has the horrible ring of truth about it: we’ve all worked in an office where the sexist monster is (a) very good at his job and (b) gruesomely and guilt-inducingly attractive despite his antediluvian attitudes.

The truth is that “sexism” is merely one of the many excuses that the incompetent use to justify their failures. Nobody gets a fair shake, even those who have massive advantages usually know what it’s like to not get a chance. Does the fact that I was given an expensive education and a nice sports car by my parents mean that I don’t know what it’s like to be excluded from both sides of the mainstream media because I’m of the incorrect ideology and ethnicity? Does this mean it’s fair that most of the leading science fiction and fantasy publishers will never even look at my manuscripts while handing out three-book deals to people whose previous novels sold one-tenth as many as mine?

If you’re a loser of either sex, you complain about how everyone else is responsible for your failures, you come up with a label to justify them, and you wallow in the unfairness of it all. If you’re not, you just shrug, assess the situation, and take your best shot where you can. Life isn’t fair. There probably isn’t a single genuinely fair individual to be found anywhere in the world. So what? That’s the situation – what are you going to do about it? Change the world by force and government fiat? Yeah, that’s worked so very well so often in the past!

Since an amount of indifference to the opinions of others is extraordinarily helpful in successfully dealing with the travails of the world, it should come as no surprise that it is usually the self-centered jerks who do the best job of gritting their teeth, doing what needs to be done, and achieving their objectives. This isn’t just social science; it also has the benefit of being entirely logical. And why, one might well add, shouldn’t women be attracted to that?

Understand two things about the world you live in: 1. There is no equality. 2. Fairness is merely proper etiquette, it is not justice.

Is this bill better than the Paulson plan?
	Yes, Congress should pass it.
	Yes, but Congress shouldn’t pass it.
	No, Congress shouldn’t pass it.
	Who cares, guillotine the bastards!
pollcode.com free polls

As Congressman McCotter rightly pointed out, the bailoutrescue will not work. It isn’t even capable of working:

There are no atheists in the trenches, and no free-marketeers in Congress after a nearly 10% fall in stock prices. A chorus of erstwhile conservative voices led by the likes of Newt Gingrich, the Republican firebrand of the 1990s, now argues that the proposed $700 billion bailout package is flawed, but it is better to enact it than to do nothing. This simply is not true…. The trouble is that the banking system is insolvent; that is, it lacks sufficient capital to hold its existing portfolio of assets, let alone to make new loans. Its capital is dissolving as loan losses mount. Banks have written off nearly $600 billion of mortgages or securities backed by mortgages during the past year. Against this, they have raised $350 billion in new capital from investors. But investors believe that losses will continue to rise in the mortgage market – and that is before other asset classes begin to decay, including credit cards, and corporate loans….

Why anyone believes that the Treasury plan will prevent widespread economic misery is unclear. Assuming that the Treasury overpays for the so-called “troubled assets” it purchases from banks, it cannot overpay by too much. Let us suppose that it overpays by 20%. In this case, it would effectively give the banks a $140 billion boost. That is a small fraction of what they have written off already, and an even smaller fraction of what they must write off as American wealth continues to shrink. It will help the shareholders of a few big institutions, and that is about it. The banks need a good trillion dollars or so of new capital. The Paulson plan, unfair and indirect as it might be, cannot provide more than a small fraction of that amount.

Needless to say, it is the shareholders of a few big institutions – like one Henry Paulson, lately of Goldman Sachs – who are the driving force behind the bailoutrescue plan. “Conservatives” who supported either the previous plan or its expanded and revised form have done nothing but publicly demonstrate both naivete and economic ignorance.

Marcher Lord Press is now accepting orders for its three launch titles, one of which is my latest fictional concoction, a fantasy novel entitled Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy; you may order it directly from Marcher Lord’s online store. For the time being, the Marcher Lord store will be the only place the book will be available for sale.

If you’re not sure the novel will justify shelling out $12.99, if you can’t afford it, or if you are simply philosophically opposed to further contributing to the the lifestyle of a Lamborghini libertarian, then you can simply download the PDF of the complete manuscript instead. But regardless of how you elect to read the book, I hope you will consider giving it a whirl, as I believe I can guarantee that it will be one of the more unique fantasy novels published this year.