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Secularists may not like it, but that’s the choice they’re facing. A shiny, secular science-fiction society is just that, a fiction:

The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a body of the country’s leading military and diplomatic figures, says the loss of British values and national identity caused by “flabby and bogus” Government thinking has made the country vulnerable to attack from Islamic extremists.

“The UK presents itself as a target, as a fragmenting, post-Christian society,” the report says, and is “increasingly divided” on its history, national aims, values and political identity. That fragmentation is worsened by the firm self-image of those elements within it who refuse to integrate…. The deep guarantee of real strength is our knowledge of who we are. Our loss of cultural self-confidence weakens our ability to develop new means to provide for our security in the face of new risks. Our uncertainty incubates the embryonic threats these risks represent.”

Cultures do not survive if they do not propagate. Secular culture is sterile in every sense, this is why it cannot survive except on the foundation of a religious culture. But, because it erodes its foundation, it dooms itself to a short-lived existence and inevitable replacement by that which it was believed to itself replace.

The New England dynasty claims look as if they were based on long-term cheating after all:

Bill Belichick has been illegally taping opponents’ defensive signals since he became the New England Patriots’ coach in 2000, according to Sen. Arlen Specter, who said NFL commissioner Roger Goodell told him that during a meeting Wednesday.

That rush to destroy the tapes always looked suspicious, didn’t it? Although, I can’t say that I regard this as being even a remotely legitimate action item for the U.S. Congress. Even so, Patriot-haters, you may start your engines….

A strange column, but in the end, an eminently reasonable perspective:

I think we should all start out hoping for the best, but keep in mind that hope can be a terrible liar. If the best doesn’t show up, we should “settle”— as St. Paul said, it is better to marry than to burn — and then make the best we can of it. Love, like other kinds of happiness, has a way of showing up when you least expect it, as a by-product of something else you are doing. If that something else is the building of a family and the raising of children with someone you have settled for, take the deal: you won’t find many better ones.

I think it’s a pity that no one has ever done an empirical, scientific study tracking the long-term results of those who insist on pursuing the time-tested romantic ideal of True Love versus those who “settle” for mere compatibility. I strongly suspect that it’s the latter group whose relationships not only have the greater success over time, but are happier as well.

One choice is always the negation of a thousand other possibilities. This is what the economists call opportunity cost and it exists no matter what choice you make. To “choose love” is not the same as “choosing to love”, and most human beings are lovable, in some way or another, should one make the choice to give them a chance.

11 straight. That’s how many times the Alliance has crushed the Horde since a Finnish leader demonstrated that with a battleground leader staying in one place and calling out directions, we could win despite being outleveled and battling hard core twinks with immunity potions and whatnot. I added my own spin by working out the correct order of procedure, so far 453-0 is the most lopsided win I’ve commanded.

What’s interesting is that I was only involved in four of those victories, but four or five guys who fought in the earlier battles grasped the strategy and have been remorselessly cramming it down Frostwolf throats. However, on the most recent occasion, we found ourselves saddled with a lousy leader who had no idea what he was doing, so people were running wildly all over the place getting themselves killed and we were down 350-240 before the guy finally acceded to some extremely imperative demands to hand over the battleground leadership to me. (I’d been trying to give orders, to little avail except for holding Stonehearth for a while, then preserving the northern bunkers.) To be honest, I didn’t see how we could possibly pull it out since we were behind by more than 100 reinforcements, we’d lost Stonehearth, Snowfall and didn’t have Iceblood, but I pulled everyone in the north back and sacrified Stonehearth and the surrounding bunkers in order to protect the base and Stormpike, ordered everyone in the south to leave the towers alone and concentrate on defending Iceblood, which one of our paladins managed to steal as the Horde rushed north to take advantage of our retreat.

Fortunately, people were desperate enough to listen now, and as I hoped, the Horde split up and wasted time with the bunkers near Stonehearth, allowing us to hold both the northern and southern strongpoints. They dashed themselves to pieces against our barely sufficient northern line while our southern forces first held Iceblood and then, methodically this time, pushed south to take out one tower after another. When the Horde got desperate and rushed south, I led the northern forces on a hard push down to Stonehearth, which we took, robbing them of the ability to hit our southern forces safely from behind. Once that was accomplished, it was just easy slaughter before killing Galve for a surprisingly big 178-0 comeback victory for the Alliance.

Frankly, I’m still shocked. But very, very pleased.

In some ways, McCrazy is even less conservative than the Lizard Queen. There is nothing conservative, nothing at all, about the idea of bringing the Imperial World Democratic Revolution to the Middle East for 100 years. If you liked the performance of Bush the Younger, then you’ll love John McCrazy:

During the 1990s, when most Republican politicians were against nation-building and extravagant interventionism – perhaps in reaction to the Clinton administration’s taste for both – McCain, in the words of John Judis, sought “to differentiate his views from those of other Republican presidential aspirants and from the growing isolationism of House Republicans” from “within a larger ideological framework. That ideological framework was neoconservatism.”

The Weekly Standard became McCain’s Pravda, and he began consulting regularly with Bill Kristol, who soon became a close adviser. Neocons Marshall Wittmann and Daniel McKivergan – two close friends of Kristol’s – were hired by McCain, and the former became one of his top advisers during the presidential campaign. The neocons, having destroyed the presidency of George W. Bush, have already found another willing host, and they are primed and ready for another go.

The thing that I find interesting is that although I left the Republican party in 1990, I still maintained some lingering emotional ties to it and tended to find a degree of satisfaction in Democratic electoral defeats even though I wasn’t voting for any of the Republicans on offer. But the current presidency and the rise of the neocons managed to sever those ties entirely. I have no interest in thinking about how to save the Republican party, assuming that can even be done at this point, let it crash and burn along with the lethal ideological parasites that infest its brain.

Unfortunately, even the probable Republican crash-and-burn will likely not suffice, for as Justin Raimondo points out, the unconscionable neocons, like rats, won’t hesitate to leave the ship they sank in favor of boarding the next.

If and when the Democrats take the White House, you can bet your bottom dollar the neocons will have some kind of presence, whether it’s in the form of a few mid-level bureaucrats placed in sensitive positions or in top spots close to President Hillary or Obama. They’re already crawling all over the DLC, and they’ll find their way into a Democratic White House via the interstices between pure politics and policy wonkery.

It should be interesting watching the Left go berserk as it gets betrayed in much the same manner that Bush betrayed conservatives. And at the behest of much the same crew.

If you’re at all interested in writing, or even simply better understanding the various forms of genre fiction, you will not want to miss the OC’s lecture on Advanced Scribbling 301 being conducted at his blog:

Comedy and horror are two sides of the same coin. Both depend on timing; both depend on setting the reader up for the emotional payoff; both deliver the ending with a twist. Twist it one way and it’s comedy: man slips on a banana peel, falls down, and loses his dignity. Twist it the other way and it’s tragedy: man slips on a banana peel, falls down, fractures his skull on the sidewalk and dies. Twist it a notch past tragedy and it’s horror: man slips on a banana peel, falls down, is impaled on a picket fence, and as he’s dying the psycho killer who placed the banana peel there in the first place emerges from the shadows to lick his dripping blood.

Me, I’m not so much of a fan of dripping blood. I went for comedy.

But, here’s another heretical little secret for you. Science fiction writers like to gas on about how SF is “the literature of ideas.” The more honest statement is that SF is the sanctimonious member of the horror, comedy, and adventure family. In short fiction especially, it is far more about setting the reader up for the emotional spike than it is about exploring any breathtaking new frontiers of speculative thought, and it’s far more acceptable to end the story with an ironic twist or a disquieting ambiguity.

John Derbyshire makes an uncharacteristic error of logic:

You have to wonder how these people with such contempt for science and scientific method can ever summon up the courage to get on a plane. I guess aerodynamics, medicine, electronics, geology (you want petroleum, right?) and other useful fields are exempt from the critique, like Japanese businessmen being “honorary whites” in apartheid South Africa. Very convenient.

It’s hardly convenient, it’s a simple matter of observing whose models are precise and reliable, and whose are not. As I wrote in the chapter on Daniel Dennett, in reference to his doxastic division of labor:

Dennett also digs another logical hole for himself when he admits that only a tiny fraction of humanity understands what he describes as “the ultimate talismanic formula of science,” Einstein’s E=mc2 equation. He has no problem with the fact that most people are content to accept this scientific dogma on faith and leave the burden of understanding the details to the priesthood of scientific experts, then, seventy-seven pages later, turns around and declares that it is personally immoral for the religious faithful to practice this very same division of doxastic labor by placing trust in their pastors, priests, rabbis, and imams to make their moral decisions for them.

Dennett attempts to justify these contrary stances by stating that the difference is that the scientific priesthood really know what they’re doing, that they understand their formulas and use them to achieve amazingly accurate results, while the religious priesthood do not. But Dennett is demonstrably incorrect on both scores. Dennett’s two favorite sciences, cognitive science and evolutionary biology, are primarily distinguished by the way in which no one understands exactly how anything works nor has managed to construct any significant formulas, let alone achieve any results demonstrating the precision of the quantum electrodynamic calculations cited in Dennett’s example. Dennett himself confesses that human consciousness is a mystery, a phenomenon that people don’t even know how to think about yet, and while he is rather more sanguine about the achievements of evolutionary biology, he admits that the science which began with the Origin of Species still regards the way in which species begin to be a mystery, too, albeit one with more of the details filled in.

So while some sciences have proven themselves worthy enough of our complete confidence that we need not trouble our pretty little heads about them, to claim that we are justified in placing blind trust in cognitive scientists, evolutionary biologists, and sociologists because physicists really know what they’re doing is absurd.
– TIA p. 184-185

Bonus points to be awarded to those noting the startling departure from conventional evolutionary apologetics in the linked exchange. I need to alert my TENS instructor, he’s out of date!

As you all know, I have been a Ron Paul supporter from the very start. And while I continue to wish Ron Paul every success in both his presidential and congressional campaigns, the fact is that my official endorsement is still available due to the Paul campaign’s entirely understandable disinclination to waste any time defending my various controversialities to the dim-witted and the reading-comprehension challenged lot otherwise known as the mainstream media. I have no problem whatsoever with their decision and fully respect it, on the other hand, I feel that it would be irresponsible to not do something with my unoccupied endorsement considering the immense weight of my opinion on the matter with the American electorate.

I am, of course, vehemently opposed to the Lizard Queen and the only thing about her I can wholeheartedly endorse is our shared appreciation for attractive young women. Since she seems disinclined to publicly advertise that aspect of her lizardliness, I imagine that she, too, would fail to properly appreciate my endorsement of her campaign.

Like everyone else, I don’t know much about the Magic Negro except for the fact that his fellow senator assures us that he is a black man who showers regularly, is unlikely to steal the silverware and seldom bursts into spontaneous rap. Also, he is audacious enough to “hope”, although the American public remains in blissed ignorance of precisely what he is so audaciously hoping for. While I am generally pro-shower, I don’t know if there’s enough there there to even justify an opinion of the man, let alone an endorsement.

McCrazy would certainly make for an entertaining president as he pursued Osama bin Laden TO THE GATES OF HELL!!!!!! That being said, I’m not sure that being unashamedly mentally unbalanced is particularly desirable in a national leader and “the lesser of two evils” equation is really rendered incalculable by McCrazy since he is not so much the lesser of two evils as the more unstable of two evils. And if the nation is united in its collective decision to walk down the left-hand path together, I feel that we would be wise to do so with vigor and to actively embrace the greater evil rather than the lesser. Also, I have to assume that a candidate of ancient and unabashed evil is unlikely to have any significant problem with controversial endorsers.

Therefore, I have decided to endorse a truly great and fearsome evil, Dread Cthulhu, for president in 2008. For as it is written, that is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange æons even death may die.

From an atheist… or maybe an agnostic of sorts. I have to admit, I’m not exactly sure when The Great Agnostic became classified as an atheist either:

The Irrational Atheist is a succinct rebuttal to what I felt were apparently bad arguments from little tomes of regurgitated atheist liturgy. None of the refuted authors offer the power of voice or intellect that past freethinkers have.

This is the sort of book I have been waiting for since first reading The God Delusion, and moving on to Letter and god is not Great. The book itself is not surprising, but the source from which it comes is a surprise. I expected the heretical community to be up in arms against a group of best selling authors who in my opinion have done more to make unbelievers look like assholes than to give atheism any new ideas, or even a refreshing take on old ones. Instead of the likes of a more secular author, a Jennifer Hecht or Susan Jacoby, it has taken a libertarian Christian to point to the elephant in the room. It was about time someone did.

I have to confess, I didn’t really understand what the publisher was getting at when they wrote something about the book being a surprise… from my perspective, it seemed obvious that a Christian would be opposed to the New Atheism and marshal arguments against it. So, where’s the surprise? Now, I think I understand that from their entirely secular point of view, they truly didn’t believe that a God-addled theist would be capable of looking at the situation from a purely logical, scientific and historical perspective. Which I’d like to say is spectacularly unfair, except that from what I’ve seen post-publication, it’s at the very least true as often as it is not.

On a tangential note, this is the root of my dislike for theologians and scientists alike. Both groups are intrinsicly gnostic and insist on communicating with outsiders solely in their own intentionally obscure, jargon-ridden language, then complain when they are inevitably misunderstood. I see this behavior as being not only pointless and self-defeating, but inexcusably obnoxious.

Maureen Dowd complains about the unbearable hardship of being a wealthy white woman:

The joke goes: “Obama is just creaming Hillary. You know, all these primaries, you know. And Hillary says it’s not fair, because they’re being held in February, and February is Black History Month. And unfortunately for Hillary, there’s no White Bitch Month.”…

Those close to Hillary say she’s feeling blue. It’s an unbearable twist of fate to spend all those years in the shadow of one Secretariat, only to have another gallop past while you’re plodding toward the finish line. I know that the attacks against powerful women can be harsh and personal and unfair, enough to make anyone cry.

There’s another word for those who understandably cry at the “unbearable” realization that they might not get what they want. That word is “children”. Dowd is just projecting here anyhow, the legend of the crying crocodile notwithstanding, everyone knows that reptiles don’t actually shed tears. That glistening people keep detecting in Hillary Clinton’s eyes is nothing more than the light reflecting off her nictitating membranes.

I still expect the Lizard Queen to be made president one way or another. I don’t put much stock in all the distracting “primary” activity meant to occupy everyone’s attention, so the Magic Negro’s sweep of three states means about as much to me as John McCrazy’s, which is to say virtually none. I’ll be delighted to be proven wrong, of course, but until I see an actual human being sworn into office, I’ll have my doubts.

UPDATE – one of my favorite historians agrees. VDH concludes, on the basis of recent history:

The Clintons will do anything—anything—to win the nomination for Hillary, the popular vote be blasted. The filing of lawsuits, the dangling before the noses of superdelegates of various irresistible blandishments—whatever it takes, the Clintons will do. Without compunction. Even with a certain glee. Regardless of the popular vote going into the convention, therefore, Hillary Clinton, and not Barack Obama, will emerge with the nomination.