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And the cunning nature of his strategic approach to life:

Say, instead, a man sits around or get some half-assed job where he doesn’t make much. His wife is working and supporting the family or at least pays for more than half. He no longer has to worry about working himself into an early grave, his wife can take that risk. He can spend more time with the kids and if the marriage goes bad, he has every right to claim he was around them more and had more hands on time with them–thus gaining him a greater chance at custody or at least more visitation time. If the marriage goes well, the man wins since he gets to spend more time with his kids and avoid an early heart attack. If he does head to divorce court, even a chivalrous judge will have to admit that the father is the primary caregiver.

That’s the real advantage of the house-husband over the game designer. Sure, we both sit around doing nothing but play games all day, but if Dr. Who ever leaves his redneck posterior for the handsome and urbane surgeon that is clearly her due, Nate not only hits the financial jackpot but gets to keep his kids. Outstanding! Watch and learn, grasshopper, watch and learn. And don’t fret about the tears shed by would-be parasites upset at finding themselves outparasat. A girlfriend of mine told me that her three best girlfriends all have husbands that stay home while their wives work and the men sit around complaining about their wives. That just seems wrong somehow.

That’s not wrong, it’s just funny. Butch up? Seems to me that the modern American woman already has. Anyhow, if you’ll excuse me, I believe I have some hookers to beat up and cops to run over in my stolen automobile.

UPDATE – Why do women think that any real man is going to pay attention to their endless attempts to define a Real Man? This woman’s advice rather reminds me of a cat telling mice that a Real Mouse will sit patiently in the food dish until the cat gets hungry:

If a woman wants to work outside the home, then that’s great. A real man would encourage her to, if that’s what she chose to do. But a real man would also accept her role as housewife if that was what she wanted — even if it meant taking on extra financial responsibility.

In other words, a Real Man will do whatever a woman wants. Right… anyhow, those cops aren’t going to shoot themselves.

I don’t have any objection to other bloggers commenting on what has been a headline story in the local news. PZ is good enough to point out that the story has little to do with me and goes so far as to encourage people to pray for my father. Of course, he is being sarcastic, but it was still was an appropriate and wittily sardonic way of noting the news:

On this National Day of Prayer, pray ferociously for Robert Beale.

I will, naturally, object to the assertion that my father is particularly dishonest, greedy, or sleazy. From what I’ve heard, no one involved in the case, including the prosecutors and the jury, actually believed that to be the case. It’s not as if he couldn’t have easily deprived more than a hundred families of their source of income and retired to Tahiti any time over the last twenty years; the 1.6 million reported in the story may sound like a lot, but it probably represents less than one quarter of one percent of his corporate income since he started his first company. (NB: this is all public info, I’m not pointing out anything new here.) This may help one understand why most people familiar with the case tend to think he’s a pretty nice guy who happens to be crazy, regardless of which side they’re on. He isn’t, but it’s not hard to understand why a rational observer would reach that conclusion.

It’s a pity that PZ’s Pharyngulans couldn’t have followed his civil lead. Because regardless of what they may think of him now, they were the people that he wanted to help too.

Jason Whitlock rightly points out how the media has cut its own throat even as his journalistic counterparts rage, rage, against the dying of their might:

Bloggers, like journalists and writers, play favorites. Leitch’s site troubles a lot of journalists, traditional newspaper writers and broadcasters because we are often the target of his humiliation…. Bloggers might be inspired by their loathing of traditional media, but they are not the cause of our growing irrelevance. We did that with our refusal to adapt to new technology, our clutching of political correctness and the transparency of our agenda-driven “objective journalism.” We opened the door. And it won’t be closed with bluster and anger.

Now, it’s obvious that journalism’s decline isn’t entirely the result of their faux objectivity, educational incompetence and institutional arrogance. Journalists are also caught on the wrong side of the technology curve. But they can either adapt or die. I’m often described as a blogger, but I’m also a former three-time nationally syndicated columnist. Sure, I didn’t pursue it as a career and the political syndication was obviously doomed from the start – I told UPS that I couldn’t imagine them pulling it off before signing the contract – but the fact of the matter is that the blog makes my WND column not only more relevant, but better.

Bloggers are much better than journalists for two reasons. Number one, we’re smarter on average. Number two, we tend to have expertise and educations that are not limited to the field of transmitting information from point A to point B. This happens to be rather useful when there’s a need to clarify, place in context, or otherwise process the information being transmitted.

I half expect Obama to appear in public carrying a copy of The God Delusion soon. This whole black church thing really doesn’t appear to be working for the Magic Negro:

The man slated to become chief pastor at the Trinity United Church of Christ has called blacks “lepers” with a “skin disease,” claimed U.S. entertainment corporations operate with “disdain” for black people, and in a fiery sermon claimed retired pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright was “lynched” by the media and compared the embattled pastor to Jesus. Otis Moss III, lauded this week by Obama as a “wonderful young pastor,” also recently refused to deny claims by Wright that the U.S. government was involved in distributing illegal drugs to minorities or spreading the AIDS virus to blacks.

Make that, the Formerly Magic Negro. His next blunder looks to be a tremendously entertaining one. “Barack Obama has turned to his wife, Michelle, in an effort to woo working class voters after being cast as an elitist in the race for the White House.”

Yeah, subjecting America to the highly annoying Mrs. Obama, now that’s really going to help his candidacy. I suspect he’s in full late-season NBA tank mode. About all that’s left to complete his self-immolation is lighting up a cigarette on national TV while announcing that he prefers Olympic figure skating to the NFL, then putting on a checkered kaffir and denying the Holocaust.

And as for those “older men”, it’s not necessarily the image that everyone had in mind:

Texas District Judge Barbara Walther signed the order Wednesday giving the state custody of the 1-day-old infant born to a teen believed to be 15 or 16 years old. The girl has claimed to be 18 and based on a bishop’s record used during the custody hearing two weeks ago, she would be 18 now. But officials believe she is younger and placed her in foster care with other children taken from the ranch. The newborn is the teen’s second child; the first is a 20-month-old boy. The father of both children was identified as Jackson Jessop, 22….

The bishop’s records released Thursday were used by CPS to demonstrate a pattern of abuse justifying the removal of all FLDS children in a hearing two weeks ago. The records indicate that about two-thirds of the ranch’s households were polygamous while the others were young couples or traditional nuclear families.

So, an infant has been taken away from his mother because the father is four years older, and possibly as much as seven years older. The horror! Even more disturbing, about one-third of the families likely weren’t guilty of anything worse than living in the vicinity of those who have so offended the State of Texas. And yet, their children have been kidnapped too.

Some atheists insist on significantly overrating their own intelligence. Dev says that he “would like to see any of the theists try to tear anything in the first three paragraphs apart”, so I see no reason why we should not give him what he wishes:

Most of us know why theists cling so pathetically to their incorrect definition of the word “atheism”. And the clinging truly is pathetic– the atheists on this group state in plain English that they simply lack a belief in God like they lack a belief in other fictional characters. Theists know that when the burden of proof is shifted where it belongs–on them, for making the outrageous assertions in question–they are thoroughly fucked. Since they realize they cannot carry out a debate honestly–and let’s be honest with ourselves, none of them can–they cling to this strawman like a beloved childhood toy they can’t bear to part with.

First, the idea that there is “an incorrect definition of the word atheism” that is presumably in conflict with the correct one is an interesting assertion, given that the man he describes as “the great Sam Harris” has given multiple definitions of the word. I should be very interested to know which of those definitions – none of which correspond with simply lacking “a belief in God like they lack a belief in other fictional characters” – he deems to be likewise incorrect. Second, as we have repeatedly seen, one atheist’s definition of atheism varies greatly from another’s. Irratheists such as John Derbyshire and Kelly of the RRS insist that an atheist can believe in the existence of the tooth fairy, whereas the American Atheists insist that atheism requires a complete rejection of all that cannot be reduced to the material. Richard Dawkins, meanwhile, defines it as a gradient, which is also incompatible with Dev’s simplistic definition.

I don’t cling to any one definition of atheism. Indeed, I am quite happy to abide by any definition provided by the atheist with whom I am debating, mostly because the irrational nature of most atheisms almost require the arguing atheist to make use of a slippery and easily moved definition that will allow him to extricate himself every time he is cornered in a rationally untenable position.

As for the assertion of a theistic inability to debate honestly, I note first that it is atheists who consistently demonstrate a fear of debate and reading opposing material. None of the New Atheists know the Bible or the bases of other religions anywhere nearly as well as they pretend and they demonstrably don’t know much about the theological literature that has been produced over the millenia. I have been quite willing to debate any atheist who presents a challenge; it is my atheist opponents who repeatedly thump their chests just prior to making a wide variety of excuses for why they cannot be expected to defend their point of view. Second, a perusal of the published debates by the New Atheists or even the shorter debates on this blog shows quite clearly that if there is a difficulty with debating honestly, it tends to lie with the atheists. False accusations, moving targets, denials of previous statements and a reluctance to answer direct questions have been the rule, not the exceptions.

Finally, there is only a burden of proof when one makes a claim to another party. If I say to you that there is a God, then the burden of proof lies with me. But if you say to me that there is not a God, then you have made the claim and the burden of proof lies with you. There is no implication whatsoever that the evidence to meet this burden must be scientific, indeed, the term is a legal one in which the various forms of non-scientific evidence utilized to demonstrate a balance of probabilities is sufficient.

If there was one rule that theists should have enough discretion to place upon themselves in a debate it would be this: if the same argument for God could apply to pink unicorns, The Flying Spaghetti Monster, Harry Potter or Spongebob Squarepants it is best left alone. Nonetheless, they can’t seem to live with this limitation. So they give an argument equivalent to saying Stalin didn’t believe in Harry Potter, therefore not believing in Harry Potter makes you an evil dictator. When the religious right tries to argue that a movie, band or video game inspired a kid to blow his head off just because he or she was exposed to it they aren’t moved by all the violence caused by people not exposed to the same alleged motivation factor. The strange thing about religion, in this situation, is that it is _explicitly_ the motive for so much needless bloodshed that these same “people” convince themselves that any atrocities that _aren’t_ explicitly the fault of theism are somehow an airtight case that theism is a good thing. They all, as I’ve said before, think they deserve a cookie for the people they _didn’t_ kill.

This is an unusually stupid argument. Even if we accept the baseless assertion that an argument for God that could be applied to Harry Potter is best left alone, the fact of the matter is that the arguments for God CANNOT be applied to Harry Potter or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. There is no evidence for these things, while there is a host of documentary and testimonial evidence for the existence of God, and as for Harry Potter, there is both documentary and testimonial evidence that Harry Potter is a fictional creation of a specific individual.

Regarding Stalin, none of the examples given provide for any identifiable moral standard of right conduct, whereas Stalin rejected both God and the Judeo-Christian moral standard given by God. And, of course, the “so much needless bloodshed” for which Dev claims religion is the explicit motive is largely the product of his imagination. While his point about movies and video games is a good one, he doesn’t realize how badly it also damns atheism for the historical crimes of atheist political leaders, for as I’ve demonstrated in TIA, the majority of atheist political leaders have committed atrocities whereas only a statistically insignificant percentage of theist leaders have done likewise. And yes, theist leaders really do deserve a cookie for avoiding the murderous temptation that history suggests is so irresistible to their atheist counterparts.

There weren’t actually any significant points in the third paragraph; he didn’t identify a single logical fallacy, example of hypocrisy or misrepresentation in TIA, except to strangely imply that because Sam Harris is tolerated today, the possibility that he might not be tolerated tomorrow somehow disproves a refutation of a Harrisian argument that is based on the fact that he is currently tolerated.

Meanwhile, I note with admiration that Kelly is grimly soldiering on. She’s made it through Chapter III, now can she survive the epic climb through Chapter IV that has defeated so many atheists before her?

Although it’s a pity he didn’t see fit to endorse Ron Paul back when that might have made a difference. But at least he’s finally breaking with the Three Monkey Republicans:

It’s probably no secret to anyone who reads my column regularly that I will not be voting for either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton for president.

But I will also not be voting for John McCain…. He won’t get my vote. In fact, to be honest, if the Republican Party is ever going to recover itself and become the party it was under Ronald Reagan, it will happen faster if John McCain is beaten. It will happen faster if Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton gets elected and implement the Big Brother, socialist agenda they both endorse.

Of course, we’ll have to see if he remains firm in the front of the inevitable “Most Importantest Election Ever” once Obama gets kicked to the side or to the vice-presidency and the Three Monkey Republicans begin beating their scary jungle drums about the evils of the Lizard Queen.

Whoops, wrong show. I’m actually doing The John Moore Show on CFRB-AM in Toronto at 4:30 EST. Sorry, looked at the wrong email.

It will be interesting to listen to those who supposedly favor democracy complaining about what is indubitably the will of the Italian people:

Gianni Alemanno, 50, a firebrand neo-fascist and the first Right-wing mayor of the city since the Second World War, vowed to make Rome “secure” as he was sworn into office after his election at the weekend. The election of Mr Alemanno confirmed a strong shift to the Right by Italians, who have been sickened by a spate of violent crimes committed by immigrants….

The new mayor said that his first action would be to begin “immediate expulsions” of the 20,000 immigrants in the city with criminal records. “We cannot welcome them without discipline,” he said. “We will chase out the delinquents. There are 85 abusive nomad camps to destroy.”

Things are getting very strange when former Fascists are the most rational-sounding politicians on the world stage. Of course, when it comes to the aggressive rhetoric – Bossi’s smoking rifles, for example – it must always be remembered that these are Italians speaking and they are not exactly the most literal people in the world.

Never mind the practical reality:

Not for the first time, the UN is actively bringing evil into the world. To be sure, it has done more outrageous things in the past, as when it herded Muslim men into Sarajevo, methodically disarmed them and then handed them over to Serb militiamen to be shot, or when it ordered its commanding officer in Rwanda not to seize the arms caches that were about to be used for the genocide. Still, even by UN standards, these are serious allegations.

It’s extraordinary how we keep ignoring the actual UN in favour of some theoretical one. However much its bureaucrats engage in fraud, however often its officials are found running smuggling rackets or child prostitution rings, we still maintain that the UN embodies a lofty ideal.

If you learn one thing from history, it’s that evil men are attracted to power and will pursue it. Byzantine, Greek, and Roman history are all littered with plot after conspiracy after attempt to grab power. Creating a single, central government to rule over the nations is like breeding for Hitlers; instead of seeing the various Pol Pots, Stalins, Qaddafis and Maos of the world descending into madness as they rule over their various dictatorships, all of them will be competing with one another and the most ruthless will wind up on top.

How can anyone seriously think the United Nations is a desirable thing? And can anyone even come up with a scenario where this doesn’t end in an entirely predictable nightmare for Mankind?