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Lisa Schiffren offers support for Charlotte Allen’s thesis:

Does a certain type of man swoon and faint in the same way? I don’t know. But over a lifetime in and around politics I have seen the equally awful spectacle of the drippy, excrutiatingly earnest young man, defending his views and his candidate at painful and tedious length. All campaigns are stocked with these young men. They approach the candidate with extreme reverence, citing little known and generally irrelevant details about his or her life as if they were kabbalistic invocations. They trade received opinions about floor fights at political conventions held in their infancy as if those had been the high points of their own, personal lives. They have no sense of humor or distance whatsoever. Is this better than swooning?

So, this woman deems the male ability to focus – an aspect of male behavior that is indubitably connected to such things as technological advancement, entrepeneurialism and great guitar solos – is somehow equivalent to women fainting in sexual excitement over a politician? This is nothing more than the typical woman’s equalitarian response to criticism and conflict.

John Hawkins talks to five women who are successful bloggers in large part because they are attractive women about the hardships that come with obtaining your success through being attractive and female:

Michelle on how to be a success at blogging.

There are a couple of factors. The first is not to try to be somebody else. If you want to be a success…don’t be another Michelle Malkin or Glenn Reynolds or a Drudge wannabe. The marketplace of ideas rewards original ideas and original thinkers and I think having a niche is very important….

This is more than just a bit ironic coming from the world’s most dedicated Ann Coulter impersonator. I’m only surprised Me So hasn’t dyed her hair blonde. Malkin, like Dawkins and Harris, is an intellectual charlatan who is unable to defend her own positions and she knows it. On the plus side, she is an extremely hard worker and she should be given credit for being one of the earliest campaigners against the Mexican migration, but this is balanced by the fact that she’s the quintessential media whore. That people like John Hawkins should “respect and admire” her simply astounds me. And “courageous”? Please, John, the woman won’t even stand up to defend her own book.

The latest publishing scandal is hardly a surprise. I’d bet that the majority of the non-fiction personal triumph tearjerkers out there are substantially fictional:

In “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods. The problem is that none of it is true.

Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. Nor did she graduate from the University of Oregon, as she had claimed….

The revelations of Ms. Seltzer’s mendacity came in the wake of the news last week that a Holocaust memoir, “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years” by Misha Defonseca, was a fake, and perhaps more notoriously, two years ago James Frey, the author of a best-selling memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” admitted that he had made up or exaggerated details in his account of his drug addiction and recovery.

One would think that the first sign that a chubby, literate white girl claiming that she had run drugs for the Bloods was telling tale tales would be it’s a chubby white girl claiming to have run drugs for the Bloods! In addition to the completely obvious, such as the names “Terrell” (Owens) and “Taye” (Diggs) for her non-existent black foster brothers and the aforementioned fact of the author’s chubby white girlness, it’s worth noting that there is no gang per se called “Bloods”, it’s a broad criminal affiliation to which many location-based gangs belong, not that the chick lit editor who was listening to Ms Seltzer’s melodramatic stories with her heart in her mouth would have known that.

This sort of thing was old when it was Vanilla Ice and Rigoberta Menchu doing it more than a decade ago; I’d guess that most of the successful black gangster rappers are the college-educated sons of doctors and lawyers. This happens because most people like fantasy, but many of them don’t like to admit it.

The foreign press is much more open about the horrid state of the U.S. economy:

The verdict is in. The Fed’s emergency rate cuts in January have failed to halt the downward spiral towards a full-blown debt deflation. Much more drastic action will be needed. Yields on two-year US Treasuries plummeted to 1.63pc on Friday in a flight to safety, foretelling financial winter. The debt markets are freezing ever deeper, a full eight months into the crunch. Contagion is spreading into the safest pockets of the US credit universe.

The desperate emergency rate-cutting was a foolish idea anyhow. More of the venom that’s poisoning you isn’t going to help, Americans would have been a lot better off if they’d taken their medicine back in 2001. Instead, more money was pumped in and no amount of hiding the statistics can conceal the fact that running the printing presses until they melt isn’t going to fix anything.

The Fed is like a guy with a hammer trying to steer a car. The car is headed for a cliff, so he frantically pounds on the steering wheel until it breaks. Now, there’s nothing it can do. A friend of mine was cursing the fact that he’s tied into dollars because of his stock options. “They’re so screwed”, he said, in unconscious imitation of what two other executives had concluded just last week.

Don’t plan on moving anytime soon, and if you’re thinking of selling your house, better do it now. Prices are going to continue to go lower, and they’ll do so for longer than anyone thinks. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you’re into cash, or better yet, if you’ve been into gold for the last five years. But it is problematic given the size of the debt edifice that has been constructed upon the housing market.

UPDATE – Unsurprisingly, the reaction of state and local governments to this decline in availability and concomitant increase in the price of credit is to try to change the rules in their favor:

A complex system of credit ratings and insurance policies that Wall Street uses to set prices for municipal bonds makes borrowing needlessly expensive for many localities, some officials say. States and cities have begun to fight back, saying they can no longer afford the status quo given the slackening economy and recent market turmoil.

Gunny JMC testifies:

I found the school system substantially flawed and only those students with the burning desire to educate themselves, getting an actual education, in my day, graduating high school in 1975. At the time, the teachers were mostly good teachers, and well educated, but fighting a bureaucratic system. It occupied too much of their time, but had not destroyed them yet.

I watched my son and daughter get a horrible education, ameliorated only by my demands of their reading skills, and the constant discussions on everything, each day and evening at home. Neither of my two children graduated high school, but they fit right in with the statistical failure of their school. I’m not sure how one would graduate from the school they went to, it was over-run with gangs and drugs, and only a few male teachers were able to control the mob scenes. I went there on a regular basis, sometimes in uniform, sometimes not, but I always saw kids in the halls, and on many occasion, reached out and grabbed a firm hold and stopped a kid from doing something.

You are absolutely right in calling for the end of these schools.

It’s easy for the college-educated class to forget that while they can afford to have terrible schools tearing away at the values that sustain the social fabric, the less-educated have no such margin of error. It doesn’t actually matter much what is learned or not learned by the suburban girl whose parents pay for a quiet abortion, by the suburban boy whose parents hire lawyers to plea-bargain a felony distribution charge down to a possession misdemeanor and 100 hours of community service, or by the adult-children of either sex who take eight years to complete their sociology degrees on Mommy and Daddy’s dime. They can afford to mess around for 12 years, then settle down into a functional role as an office drone or hausfrau without their lack of an actual education having any significant effect on their lives. They possess the economic ticket, which is all that a college degree represents nowadays.

As I have written previously, the schools are now so bad that they actually maleducate, the net effect is negative and a child would learn more and receive a better education by doing nothing but playing XBox and PS/3 for 12 years. At least he’d learn reading, math and geography, you’d be amazed at the level of geographical knowledge possessed by the average 12-year old wargamer.

Publisher’s Weekly comes up with a description of TIA that actually manages to be less accurate than that of the most hostile atheist non-reading reviewer:

The atheists write with what Matt Baugher, v-p and publisher for spiritual growth and Christian thought at Thomas Nelson, calls “venom,” stridently stating that religious belief is delusional and dangerous and the world would be better off without it. Becky Garrison (InProfile, this issue), senior contributing editor for the smart Christian humor magazine the Wittenburg Door, offers a snarky, satiric response in The New Atheist Crusaders and Their Unholy Grail (Thomas Nelson, Jan.). Baugher said orders from mainstream retailers for Garrison’s book have been double what they expected.

Blogger and political columnist Vox Day comes at the issues from a nontheological perspective in The Irrational Atheist (BenBella, Feb.), relying on factual evidence to counter atheist claims that religion causes war, that religious people are more apt to commit crime and that the Bible and other sacred texts are unreliable and fictitious…. All of these books aim to move the discussion in a less vitriolic direction, and none more so than Zondervan’s A Friendly Dialogue Between an Atheist and a Christian (Feb.).

Less vitriolic. That’s just… astounding, considering that I did nearly everything but question Richard Dawkin’s parentage and tear out Sam Harris’s liver with my bare hands. PW is known throughout the publishing industry for its oft-peculiar take on books, but this may take the cake. Of course, it’s possible that they had the insight to see through the aggressive gamer’s pose and realized that at heart I’m all about the kumbaya and mutual hair-braiding.

On a tangential note, I was helping some guild mates on a quest at the Hellfire Citadel last night when a L70 Blood Elf priest and an L61 Tauren warrior happened to show up at the instance gate where we were waiting for the last member of our party to arrive. I immediately hit the priest with a Viper Sting and set my wolf on the warrior, leading to a violent free-for-all that left five dead, two of ours and three of theirs. The two that got killed were understandably annoyed, which amused the last member of our party when he showed up, saw all the skeletons and asked what happened.

After being informed, he took one look at my Field-Marshal’s Pursuit and said “Never invite a battleground guy anywhere you’re likely to run into Horde.”

Charlotte Allen notices the obvious in the Washington Post:

“Women ‘Falling for Obama,’ ” the story’s headline read. Elsewhere around the country, women were falling for the presidential candidate literally. Connecticut radio talk show host Jim Vicevich has counted five separate instances in which women fainted at Obama rallies since last September. And I thought such fainting was supposed to be a relic of the sexist past, when patriarchs forced their wives and daughters to lace themselves into corsets that cut off their oxygen.

I can’t help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning makes me wonder whether women — I should say, “we women,” of course — aren’t the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial. Women “are only children of a larger growth,” wrote the 18th-century Earl of Chesterfield. Could he have been right?

Short answer: yes. But the women’s foolishness she mentions is far from harmless, unfortunately, it will likely require the collapse of Western civilization – or at least its partial conquest by non-feminized cultures – before it will be universally acknowledged that permitting female influence in government does not yield significantly better long-term results than permitting children a similar influence. If this statement upsets you, then I’d be very interested in hearing what, precisely, you believe the difference would likely be. As it stands, most government policy revolves around giving anyone who screams loud enough whatever they want.

It’s been said that if women had run the world from the start, we’d still be living in caves. That’s an exaggeration, of course; matriarchal societies actually tend to produce grass-hut dwellers. To me, the interesting question is if a post-patriarchal culture will survive long enough to return to hut-dwelling or if it will simply die out altogether.

Science aficionado Scott Hatfield raises a hypothesis and asks a question:

Vox likes to talk of scientistry, scientody, and other self-appointed neologisms, and the unmistakable impression I receive is that he resents the relative standing of science in the intellectual world and would like to see it taken down a peg. In this respect Vox Day, the ‘Christian Libertarian and Forensic Atheologist’, has more in common with the science envy displayed by post-modern readers in the sociology of science.

Resents? Science envy? By no means! After all, by one of the temporary definitions of science put forth by the science fetishists, I am myself a member of the secular priesthood, if a low-ranking one. And I hasten to point out that the aforementioned neologisms are merely my labels for the definitions of science provided for us by an atheist scientist, they’re not my definitions. I would like to see a reform of scientistry in defense of scientage and scientody; it’s precisely because I value the latter two that I tend to oppose the former.

In return, I should very much like to know Scott’s definition of science, if PZ’s is unsatisfactory.

I was getting ready to put this dog to bed when I came across a cute little note from fellow Molly winner Blake Stacey about the effects of a series of posts over at Pharyngula. Essentially, the owner of that blog (PZ Myers) was instrumental in marshaling his readership to investigate possible plagiarism and other sins in a peer-reviewed publication, as described here.

What makes this especially fascinating is that it shows that peer review is (of course!) not perfect, as it is done by human beings; at the same time, it shows that the larger role of the scientific community to ‘review’ the reviewers is well-served by the existence of a network of science bloggers! So, Vox, if you’re reading this, please acknowledge that science blogging, even if not science itself, contributes to an important part of the scientific method, which is peer review.

I will certainly do no such thing! I will, however, acknowledge that science blogging, while not science itself, contributes to an important part of the scientific PROFESSION, which is peer review. Ironically, Scott provides us with an illustration of why the distinctions between scientistry, scientody and scientage are so important. Peer review is nothing more than a form of professional group editing, as one commenter previously pointed out, peer review is no more science than a group of editors writing the daily unsigned editorial for the opinion page is news.

“Meta-science” is good, but in this case, “not-science” is better.

I think my publisher was a bit taken aback when I let him know that not only was the journal of the Savitri Era Learning Forum interested in publishing an excerpt from TIA, but that I was entirely inclined to permit them to do so. He was sympathethic, however, when I pointed out that it would be hypocritical of me to openly declare that I am pro-crazy, then turn up my nose at the first Zen-science journal to come along. Besides, from my perspective, random gurus with German names living in India have at least as much intellectual credibility as any of the Unholy Trinity.

To the publisher’s eternal credit, he threw up his hands and said, “hey, why not,” and promptly granted permission. I love BenBella, I really do.

And let’s face it, how could you possibly be expected to resist a name like Koantum Matters?