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I’ve been predicting a serious Democratic landslide for some years now, it looks like the massacre might even exceed my expectations:

In a major blow to national Republicans, a Mississippi congressional seat that once voted for President Bush by a twenty-five point margin elected a Democrat on Tuesday. Prentiss County Chancery Clerk Travis Childers beat out Republican candidate Greg Davis, the mayor of Southaven, by a 54%-46% margin, a spread that several Republican strategists on Capitol Hill characterized as a startling wake-up call for a party in dire straits.

What does this make, the fifth or sixth straight wake-up call for Republicans? And yet, they seem to think that banging the war drums and chanting “we are at war” is going to work if they just repeat it one more time. I’ve long felt that George W. Bush’s job was to run down the Republicans in order to hand the White House to Hillary Clinton, but between him and the anti-conservative Congress, they may have sentenced the Republican party to another 40 years in the minority.

This is the price of political pragmatism. This is the predictable result of what voting the lesser evil inevitably entailed. Was it worth it, o compromising conservatives? You got Bush, you got Schwarzenegger, you got the power you sold your principles for, was it really, truly worth the price you’re going to pay?

There is no reason to vote for a Republican in 2008. None. Let them suffer the consequences of their actions. Celebrate their well-deserved self-immolation. False friends are always more dangerous than enemies.

The salient point eludes Jerry Pournelle:

I have a number of letters about McCain and why we ought to vote Libertarian and “Send a message.” I understand the argument.

The fact is that the Democrats will control Congress. If they also control the White House, we will have a series of legislative packages that will make the Great Society look like a libertarian government. In opposition the Republicans rediscover their principles; it’s power they haven’t been able to handle since Newt Gingrich was Speaker.

The country is in trouble. We have forgotten our founding principles, and we move inexorably toward a European style socialist state, with the only winners being an enormous bureaucracy. This will accelerate the economic decline.

The argument is to give the Democrats their head, and pick up the pieces after the inevitable crash. I think that overlooks the resilience of tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect regimes. We haven’t seen much in the way of reforms in Europe. The Democrats will create new bureaucracies that can never be dismantled: an example is the Department of Education. Reagan came into office determined to abolish it. Now it owns US education, and No Child Left Behind is entrenched. The Iron Law of Bureaucracy is inexorable.

Not voting for McCain isn’t about “sending a message”. Even if one accepts the notion that he is the lesser evil, it is supporting the “lesser evil” that has gotten the nation into this mess. It’s not going to get the nation out of it. It can’t, and nothing, in fact, is likely to extricate Americans from the morass in which they find themselves. The sooner people accept this, the sooner they can make intelligent decisions about how they are going to prepare for what comes next. Remember, the end of the halcyon days are not the end of the universe; people have survived every single fallen empire of the past and they’ll survive this one too. But you can’t fix what is irretrievably broken and I should be very, very interested to hear someone explain how electing John McCain would fix anything about the current situation, let alone everything.

That being said, I do agree with the spirit of Pournelle’s conclusion: “The post-Gingrich Republicans who invented “big government conservatism” have much to answer for.”

I’m not sure they invented anything, but they certainly do have much for which to answer.

On the one hand, she can be quite perceptive:

I’m puzzled by the optimism of so many commentators and Democratic functionaries who are prophesying Hillary’s graceful withdrawal by mid-June. Is there anything in the Clintons’ tawdry history to support such a thesis? Why wouldn’t they play smiley-face rope-a-dope now and smash-mouth alley-and-ambush fisticuffs right to the bitter end — meaning the convention in August? It’s now or never for Ms. Hill. Even if Obama loses this fall, there’s no guarantee whatever that she would win the Democratic nomination in 2012. That hoss will have been around the rodeo way too many times.

And on the other, astoundingly obtuse:

Where Hillary divides and sows bitterness, Obama wants to unite and heal. It is a project that all Americans of good will should wish to succeed.

As Jonah Goldberg has tirelessly pointed out, there’s a synonym for “union”. It’s “fascism”. I’ve been reading the Sharpe novels lately, and it’s interesting to see how a desire to unite was the “progressive” vision of Napoleon Bonaparte. It was the vision of Benito Mussolini. It was the vision of Vladimir Lenin. It was the vision of Adolf Hitler. It is the vision of the bureaucrats in Brussels and it is the vision of Barrack Obama. The desire “to unite and heal” is nothing more than the desire to control and dictate. It is amazing how people of varying degrees of intelligence have been repeatedly falling for this old chestnut for more than 200 years. If I am wrong about the inevitability of the Lizard Queen, (and the West Virginia results indicate that I am not), there’s a very good chance that you’ll get the chance to see that I’m correct about the evil inherent in Obama’s vision.

UPDATE – As events unfold, however, I find myself less and less concerned about being wrong. It’s pretty clear that the big guns haven’t even started firing yet:

Obama: Israel is a ‘constant sore’

Obama, under fire for attracting praise and support for his presidential run from the terrorist group Hamas, spoke to Atlantic Monthly at length about his views of the Middle East. Asked if he thought Israel represented a drag on America’s reputation overseas, Obama said: “No, no, no. But what I think is that this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy.

The Baseball Savant opts for jujitsu over aikido:

I’ve been thinking a lot about martial arts training and did some shopping around. I think I’m going the jujitsu route. After reading the advice you gave on your blog back on December 20, 2006, I found a school pretty close to where I am. With med school I sort of needed it to be convenient. Anyway, I went and there were no women and the instructors were pretty cool and said they encourage contact fighting.

I’m not a real big guy at 5’10″/200lbs. However, I can incline bench 390lbs and squat 550lbs. I haven’t done regular bench in awhile. I thought the ground fighting you talked of sounded good because I’m not that big and long but I’m pretty strong and athletic and I thought maybe being in a martial art where reach would matter would hurt me a bit. You had talked of akido being a good self defense martial art, but can jujitsu be that too? With all the locks and chokes and strangles, it sounds like you can do some serious damage to the skeletal system.

Jujitsu is a great martial art for which I have a great deal of respect. One of our most dangerous black belts, who did pretty well in one MMO tournament, was also a jujitsu brown belt. That being said, I would tend to favor aikido because I generally prefer hard styles to soft styles. Hard styles tend to favor those with a lot of natural strength and provide for more aggressive techniques that I find to be a little bit safer if weapons happen to enter the picture. I once saw a guy who had a purse snatcher in headlock get knifed in the throat – in fact, that incident was the one that inspired Big Chilly and I to start our martial arts training – and I prefer to incapacitate quickly and without all the physical contact. In two out of the three incidents wherein I actually had to act, I didn’t even use a proper strike per se, I simply made use of the closest wall or floor. A brick wall is a lot harder than your fist and it hurts a lot less to hit someone hard with it.

Now, I was trained in a blended style that combined two hard styles, Shorin Ryu and Kali, with the soft style of Wing Chun kung fu. The latter was quite useful with some of the blocks and locks, but I personally dislike fighting at grappling range since it negates my usual speed advantage. Since BS has enough strength and size that most guys with any sense are going to be reluctant to close with him, I’m wondering if he might have a need for some offensive techniques that he’s less likely to learn in a soft style. If you’ve got plenty of your own strength, then why rely on a strategy that almost requires waiting for the other guy to throw his at you? But the truth is that any good instructor is going to teach you useful techniques from other styles regardless of his own style, and the more adept you are at one style the easier you’ll pick up the tricks of the others.

(Tangential aside: my favorite non-fight was when the Dragon we called Terminator nearly got into it with this obnoxious guy at my favorite night club. After a few words were exchanged, they both dropped into what were quite obviously the combat stance of an experienced fighter… and their eyes widened in mutual recognition of this. They just stared at each other for a moment, then Terminator said “so, do you want to match styles or what?” The other guy, who may have been obnoxious, but was clearly no dummy, shook his head and said “not really”. Terminator nodded and stepped, and the rest of us exhaled. I kind of wanted to see how it turned out, to be honest, but it could have also been really ugly and he was a pretty good friend of mine.)

One of the best things that my sensei incorporated into our training was regularly bringing in fighters from other styles on sparring night. So, we learned to keep boxers outside with defensive sidekicks while crashing our bodies into Tae Kwon Do kickers to knock them off balance before they could bring their legs up. A one-legged Wall of Bone topples over pretty easily if you just slam right into it. It’s one thing to know that you should work to your opponent’s weakness, its another thing to be forced to deal with very different strengths and weaknesses on a regular basis. I always had the worst time with the real kickboxers, the Muay Thai guys with the tattooed backs. They’d give you centerline and take a hard shot, then just hammer you from both sides. That open center was just too tempting to resist and I wasn’t sure what else you were supposed to do anyhow. I mean, the window’s open, that’s what you want, right? I don’t think I ever had the better of a single sparring round with any of them.

The American kickboxers, on the other hand, were usually a joke. They were basically like Tae Kwon Do guys who couldn’t use their hands very well, but couldn’t kick effectively either. You’d just wait until they raised their front foot for that little flick kick at your front calf and then stick them with a skipping sidekick. That would knock them off balance and their hands would flail about and open up their head, so you step in with hands, bang, bang, bang… no problem.

Anyhow, any martial art is much, much better than none, and jujitsu is definitely more useful than most because so many fights end up going to ground one way or another. Watch out for the wrestlers, though. Those squirmy bastards can be very tricky if you don’t lock up their neck at the start.

David Brooks considers some developments in the neurosciences:

In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation.

Sounds a lot like where Sam Harris appears to be headed. It’s interesting that Brooks has spotted this since he never struck me as one interested in such things. But it’s precisely why I described Jon Haidt and his Enlightenment 2.0 as being potentially more dangerous to humanity in the long term than the militant atheists. I am not optimistic that those inspired by the neuroscientific possibilities will be able to resist the inevitable urge to meddle, modify and otherwise go about the age-old, tragic process of attempting to create yet another New Man.

Visitors: 4 million
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That’s not bad at all when you consider that the main reason I started the blog was to get out of answering the same emails over and over again. There are bigger blogs and there are better blogs, but I like this one just fine. Speaking of which, if you want a link on the Voxologisti, please let me know in the comments here. Also, I’m thinking of putting together a Best Of page, so if you happen to have a favorite quote of mine from either the blog, the columns, or the books, let me know what it is.

By the time the Clinton Machine is finished, there won’t be any more talk about President Hussein. If he’s lucky, the only question will be to which nation he will accept exile. Can you even imagine this article being permitted to appear in the New York Times six months ago?

As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother’s Christian background is irrelevant.

It looks rather like the Lizard Queen nailed down the NYT with her tough talk on obliterating Iran.

Needless to say, Sags in the City or whatever the movie is called isn’t on my list to go see. But the poor male reviewer cruelly given the task nicely captures why men find not only the bygone show, but its cult, so loathesome.

If the atmosphere inside the cinema bordered on the devotional and the theatre was filled with the sounds of women emoting, outside the atmosphere was hysterical.

Don’t get me wrong, I would have loved to write the script for the big move to the big screen. Two-thirds of the way through, after the usual montage of tiresome romance, relationship babble in expensive restaurants and designer retail therapy, the four aging ghouls would be revealed to be vampires. That’s right, the perfect blending of the Sexually Empowered ’90s Woman and Dark Romance! And after two hours of this excruciating sensory torture, what man wouldn’t pay to see a grand finale of the Unsexiest Woman Alive thrashing around screaming and spraying blood all over the place with a wooden stake hammered through her chest?

For how can you celebrate la petite mort in a situation that cries out for La Grand Guignol?

This is America’s favorite conservative writer?

I’m all for the option of invading just about anyone, at least in the sense that I believe in a doctrine of conditional sovereignty. That’s to say, there’s no reason why a dictatorship should expect its sovereignty to be as respected as, say, New Zealand’s

If you’re looking for the likes of conservative favorite Mark Steyn – a Canadian – to defend American national sovereignty against the North American Union, the World Court, the Law of the Sea Treaty, or any other suprenational organization, you’re almost surely misplacing your trust. Because anyone who believes in “conditional sovereignty” will always find some excuse, some condition to go along with the program. As F.A. von Hayek pointed out, the adjective is there to modify the noun, and “sovereignty” that is only respected on the conditional basis of one’s approval is no sovereignty at all.

No wonder American conservatism is in such dire straits.

He’s not the only one who is late to notice the femalization of the fantasy genre. I was speaking with an executive at a major MMO company last Friday, who asked me in what genre they should set their next MMO. When I told him “dark romance”, he had no idea what I was talking about. And I’m not sure he believed me when I told him how popular it is these days:

It’s also been a long, long time since I plumbed that paragon of mass-market genrefication, the warehouse shopping version of a bookstore, and I discovered a new (to me) development…. the real surprise was the second most popular genre that was everywhere on those book shelves: vampire novels. It’s as if Laurell Hamilton and Anne Rice have recently had an unholy tryst and have spawned a scampering horde of little horror-romance novelists who have all skittered off and scrawled out series after series of stories about vampiresses, vampire huntresses, vampire princesses, vampire trailer park queens, and vampire lovers. They all seemed to be by female authors and feature female protagonists, too; some of the covers also blurred into similarity with the romance novels, except that the muscular-breasted Fabio on the cover was also sporting fangs.

I’ve got nothing against vampires or dark fantasy. In fact, I love Jim Butcher’s books and intend to dabble a bit more in that area at some point in the future. But fantasy romance is every bit as tiresome as space romance, if a bit bloodier. And they wonder why boys don’t read or watch television any longer… it’s an increasingly vicious circle that will only get worse. Now that Jim Baen is gone, how long will it be before the onetime leader in military science fiction begins publishing chick-lit in space or sexy were-seal novels?

That conversation with the MMO exec was sort of funny. When he asked me to explain what “dark romance” was, I said that it was just sexy vampires. There was a long pause, and then he said “seriously?” I couldn’t help but laugh at the total disbelief in his voice. And yet, the funniest thing is that despite all the evidence to the contrary, some men STILL think that women are attracted to nice guys. It’s clearly all about the fangs, metaphorically or otherwise.