Category: Uncategorized

Ladies and gentlemen, your Republican president:

“At this moment, somewhere in the world, terrorists are planning a new attack on America. And Congress has no higher responsibility than ensuring we have the tools to stop them.”

Oh, really? Is that what you vowed in your oath of office? To ensure that the executive branch has the tools to stop an imagined terrorist attack? That’s a straight-up security over liberty argument right there. It doesn’t get much clearer, or more un-American, than that. Sam Adams would tar and feather this wretched charlatan that the Manhattan conservatives love so very much.

The only consolation is that both they and George Bush will go down in the annals of American history as utter failures. And when they whine about President Rodham, I, for one, will take great pleasure in reminding them that it was Bush’s fault – and therefore theirs – that she is in office and in possession of the executive-branch powers that she is abusing.

The OC appears to have been infected by the anti-equalitarian cognivirus inhabiting these parts:

At risk of being sexist, I believe this is why the market is dominated by female-oriented fantasy written by women for women. It’s easier to find a husband (or male-role domestic partner) willing to support the wife while she stays home and writes than it is to find a woman willing to work long hours at a high-paying job while her husband (or boy-toy) stays home and writes…. The economics of the publishing industry are predicated on the assumption that there is an infinite supply of young writers who are willing to sacrifice everything in order to sustain the two dozen or so big names that are at the top of the heap.

To sacrifice everything… or, alternatively, to be in a position that involves the sacrifice of nothing but time. The latter can be achieved in a variety of ways, of course, but the OC’s reasoning makes a lot more sense if you happen to understand the realities of the book-selling industry. This UK report on book sales is why I was so vastly amused by the various accusations of being a “failed” writer even prior to the publication of TIA. Which book, by the way, continues to do extremely well despite the ongoing failure of the media to even notice its existence.

Last month The Times published statistics from Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks book sales nationwide, showing that, of 200,000 books on sale last year, 190,000 titles sold fewer than 3,500 copies. More devastating still, of 85,933 new books, as many as 58,325 sold an average of just 18 copies. And things aren’t much better over the pond: I read recently that, of the 1.2 million titles sold in the United States in 2004, only 2 per cent sold more than 5,000 copies.

While I haven’t ever put any of the best-seller lists in peril, none of my books except the self-published Wrath has ever sold less than 3,500 books, and two have sold more than ten times that number. That’s not bad, considering that getting massive breast implants and taking your clothes off is arguably a faster track to a lucrative book deal and a Top Ten bestseller than actually writing anything.

My anti-equalitarianism often causes me to be accused of hating women, an accusation which those who know me personally tend to regard as ludicrous. It must be admitted, though, that there is a certain group of women that I despise with a deep and abiding contempt, the Useless Wealthy Women:

Jon Stokes, an organisational psychologist, has noticed a disconnect between hard-working, successful men and their bored wives. “From the outside, there seems to be no sense of purpose to a wealthy wife’s life, no reason to get out of bed. If they have successfully delegated their job to nannies, housekeepers and tutors, they have organised themselves out of their own existence,” he says. In the absence of any real stress, Merc Mothers resort to manufacturing it.

If you happen to be of a social class where you don’t encounter these women, consider yourself fortunate indeed. A more poisonous, parasitic, and problem-causing group of human beings on the planet does not exist. On more than one occasion when writing Wrath, I found a group of these incredible creatures sitting at the next table, complaining for literally HOURS about how terrible their lives were, how horribly busy they were and how useless and unappreciative their husbands – who were, of course, off at work funding all this non-activity – also happened to be. I’m about as far from a Communist revolutionary as can be, but I have to admit, had the Ghost of Che Guevara appeared at that moment, lined them up against the wall, handed me an AK-47 and demanded that I blow them away in the name of the Revolution, I would have done so in the complete certainty that I was doing all humanity a great service indeed.

To be honest, I tend to dislike most people prone to boredom, male and female alike. I wish there were 10 more hours in the day to do all the things that I’d like to do, and 10 more lives to investigate all the various opportunity costs I paid along the way. Read a book. Learn your culture. Just shut up and do something.

Apparently never having worked in the music industry, Lucy O’Brien fails to understand how funny her metaphor for female success is:

What’s important about this noughties generation is that they reflect how far women’s role has changed since the Sixties. They’re in control of their careers, they sing frankly about sex and independence, and, rather than performing other people’s songs, they write passionate, sassy lyrics about the reality of their lives…. Self-possessed, focused and in control, these girls embody the modern woman’s achievement. As Adele says, “We have the belief and the ability… we’re kind of running it all.”

Of course, most of these youthful prodigies don’t play an instrument and rely on men to write their music and produce their recordings for them…. Meanwhile, Girls Aloud is probably outselling all of them combined.

In case you still can’t figure out how purely secular dogma can be every bit as repressive and bizarre as religious dogma, here’s what the good Chinese atheists are up to now:

Offending content included “wronged spirits and violent ghosts, monsters, demons, and other inhuman portrayals, strange and supernatural storytelling for the sole purpose of seeking terror and horror,” the administration said. The new guidelines aim to “control and cleanse the negative effect these items have on society, and to prevent horror, violent, cruel publications from entering the market through official channels and to protect adolescents’ psychological health.”

Ironically, the current scientific evidence suggests that banning godlessness would be justified as harmful to one’s psychological health.

I’m not exactly what you’d call an active member:

Since 2004, American Mensa has had a virtual makeover, debuting our new online Community. The AML Community features a personalized My Mensa page, online forums, a Meet-A-Member program that connects you with members who share your interests, and The 2% Journals – a collection of articles and essays of interest to Mensans from various online sources…. As always, Mensa members have the chance to meet new people and share ideas at local, regional and national events. Special events in 2008 include Mind Games®, a 48-hour game playing marathon; CultureQuest®, where teams of Mensans go head-to-head in a test of cultural knowledge; Tracking Granny’s Granny, a Colloquium focused on genealogy; and, of course, the Annual Gathering, Mensa’s largest event, bringing together more than 2,000 members from across the country.

It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry. And how sad is that, coming as it does from a man whose greatest achievement in the last year is commanding a 478-0 Alliance victory in Alterac Valley.

It’s not often that I find myself impressed with a dictatorial Communist leader, but I have to say that I was most amused with Vladimir Putin’s most excellent response to Hillary Clinton’s jab:

The former KGB lieutenant colonel appeared to lash out at U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton — a leading Democratic candidate for president — when one reporter quoted her as saying that former KGB officers have no soul:

“At a minimum, a head of state should have a head,” Putin said.

Yeah, that’s going to leave a mark. Although it’s probably just as well Putin doesn’t have a soul, because you can bet that otherwise the Lizard Queen would already be offering her own to the Devil in return for it. She would if she had another one to sell, anyhow.

So, a female President, you can already see how that’s going to work out just dandy for everyone concerned. Can someone please ask Maureen Dowd if it’s okay to cry when a foreign head of state that possesses nuclear weapons bitch-slaps you via the global media?

Despite their literally hundreds of comments on The Irrational Atheist, (1,983 to be precise) Dawkins.Net wound up conceding that the book did indeed trounce the targeted god-deniers and that they’ve got neither the collective capacity nor the courage to confront the refutation of their hero contained in TIA. Other than Crazy Ivan’s valiant but unconvincing efforts and Stephen Bain’s ability to demonstrate that science has actually inspired a few little poems here and there, the Dawkins.Net troop was unable to come up with any substantial responses to the Seven Impossible Things believed by their iconic Red Queen.

I also note that the various individuals who declared their intentions of doing to do a chapter-by-chapter rebuttal seem to have mysteriously given up right around the time they reached Chapter Three. Apparently, they discovered that while it’s possible to dispute aspects of the rhetorical framing of my arguments, it’s not quite so easy to finesse the arguments themselves presented in TIA… especially when I anticipate many of the objections that were, as expected, raised to the first two chapters. On a tangential note, I must say that I particularly enjoyed The Professor’s classic Fighting Withdrawal, when he cut the heart out of the New Atheism movement as well as Richard Dawkins’s OUT campaign by trying to argue that atheists can believe in the supernatural and in Heaven and Hell, to say nothing of his demonstrated inability to perform the basic math required to determine the relationship between the fraction of a larger population and a fraction of a smaller population.

By the way, it occurs to me that we appear to have the need for a little TIA-related lexicon. If there’s any words you think should be included, leave them in the comments here. And yes, we already know about the O-word, the T-word and the Four Horsemen of the B-word.

Rod Dreher on the maturation of the male psyche:

I used to get stoked on the idea of taking Julie to the perfect little French cafe, and speaking torridly of romantic matters over candlelight and good wine. I wouldn’t mind having the time to do that now, but you know, it’s hard to describe the fulfillment of opening the front door at day’s end, and hearing three little voices scream “Daddy!” in unison, and come running into the front room to give me a hug. God, I love that. That’s how romance has been sublimated for me. That’s what it’s ripened into. And it’s great.

It will be impossible for those with more hormones than sense coursing through their brains to understand, but Dreher is absolutely right. Heedless romance and wildfire passion have their merits, as do psychologically scarred young women with self-esteem issues and eating disorders, but no romance, however wickedly fiery, can compare with the unadulterated joy to be found in the sudden appearance of a toothless smile on a fat-cheeked face.

The ongoing collapse of post-Christian culture notwithstanding, the human race and Christianity will survive, because faith, hope and joy always survive fear, hate and selfishness.

Another woman laments her lack of appeal to men:

Men are like eggs. They must hatch or go bad. I came to this conclusion after seeing in the new year with a gang of university friends and hearing one of them, a single guy of 35 called Jamie, declare with complete sincerity that his resolution for 2008 was not to get a girlfriend.

I groaned. His vow struck me as odd, not just because Jamie is a remarkably warm, kind and entertaining individual rather than some ropey Lothario, but because I knew him ten years ago when he was mustard keen to marry his then girlfriend. And when I thought harder about it, I realised that over the past decade Jamie has effectively been degenerating from the man he was at 25 years old to the boy he is today.

Let me get this straight. Men are often willing to settle down, get married and start a family in their mid-twenties, however, the women they know are too busy having fun and enjoying the peak of their appeal to want to do so. Ten years pass. Now, the woman is sensitive that her looks are fading and the quality of the men she attracts is declining, so she wants to lock in and settle down. The men, who are having more fun than ever because they are more secure, making more money and are of more appeal to women than ever before, are no longer interested in settling down.

This is the MEN’S fault?

Look, it’s not that hard. Women are at the peak of their appeal from 18-25. If they don’t settle for whatever is on offer then, they can always settle later. However – and this is the significant point – what will be on offer later will usually, (although not always), be of lower quality than was available before. This is a vicious circle… it’s both amusing and painful to hear from aging single friends and see how they are carefully weighing the marital merits of men with whom they wouldn’t have even contemplated having dinner ten years ago.

And how can a woman who has just spent a decade dedicated to “having fun” possibly begrudge her male peers electing to do exactly the same thing, albeit a bit later? Furthermore, speaking of experience, it’s worth noting that the divorce courts have rendered all women but the most exemplary unmarriageable. A twenty-something single guy may not realize this, the thirty-something single man knows it all too well.