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I always make a practice of pre-ordering my own books from Amazon to alert me as to when the book actually becomes available, which is usually prior to the scheduled release date. After getting an email from them informing me that The Irrational Atheist was on its way, I talked with the Original Cyberpunk and we decided to move the TIA surge forward to this coming weekend, the 19th and 20th. The OC will post the relevant instructions for everyone who is interested in participating on his blog and I’ll link to them once they’re up.

If you just can’t wait, hey, go ahead and order one now and give the second one to a friend or whatever, but I’d really prefer for you to participate in the surge if you’re only intending to buy one. Yes, of course I will make some money off these book sales, but that’s honestly of tertiary significance because the importance of the surge and the book’s ultimate success is directly tied to my ability to publish – not write – more books. Regardless of how TIA is received by the market, I will always continue writing and making my books available electronically, but publishers tend to place a certain priority on actually selling dead tree copies. So, if you want to see more of my work in print, please seriously consider ordering several copies of TIA from Amazon next weekend.

In the interest of putting my royalties where my mouth and my position on IP are, I’m very pleased to inform you that Glenn, my very open-minded and forward-thinking publisher at BenBella Books, graciously worded the book contract in such a way as to give me the right to release the complete electronic text of The Irrational Atheist in multiple formats on the book’s official launch date. This will be done in a Radiohead-style pay-what-you-want format, which includes the ability to pay nothing if you like. There is absolutely no obligation to pay anything, so critics and fans alike may download the ebook for free in good conscience if they so choose. Any proceeds derived from these downloads will be divided between BenBella Books and me just like any other book revenues.

Thank you very much for your enthusiasm, your support and even your criticism. Without those three things, TIA would never have been written, let alone published. As far as critical response to the book goes, you probably already know that John Derbyshire, an atheist, named TIA one of his 2007 holiday recommendations for NRO. So, it may further interest you to know that the philosopher Jacob Needleman, the author of The American Soul, had this to say about TIA:

“Mr. Day has made a much-needed contribution to the religious/atheist controversy by significantly raising the intellectual level of the entire debate.”

I was, of course, delighted that Dr. Needleman didn’t happen to mention anything about the way I lowered its tone. It’s probably safe to say that this is the only book on the subject which begins with an unprintable quote from Tupac Shakur.

Having demonstrated that he is no conservative in nearly every possible way and taken every opportunity to assault American liberties, George W. Bush now attacks the Second Amendment:

Since “unrestricted’ private ownership of guns clearly threatens the public safety, the 2nd Amendment can be interpreted to allow a variety of gun restrictions, according to the Bush administration.

The argument was delivered by U.S. Solicitor General Paul D. Clement in a brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court in the ongoing arguments over the legality of a District of Columbia ban on handguns in homes, according to a report from the Los Angeles Times. Clement suggested that gun rights are limited and subject to “reasonable regulation” and said all federal limits on guns should be upheld.

“Given the unquestionable threat to public safety that unrestricted private firearm possession would entail, various categories of firearm-related regulation are permitted by the 2nd Amendment,” he wrote in the brief, the Times reported.

As you all know, I never trusted George W. Bush from the very beginning. I tried to warn everyone about him, starting with my first political column written in September 2001. Very, very few listened, insisting that he was a secret small-government conservative with a double-secret plan to hoodwink those evil big-government liberals.

Do you still have confidence that the Supreme Court judges he appointed will be either pro-life or pro-gun? I don’t.

I cannot stand George Bush, I dislike him every bit as much as the leftists who fail to understand that he’s essentially on their side and call him Chimpy Bushitler or whatever do. But I also have a deep and abiding contempt for those who call themselves conservatives and continue to support him and his fellows – Giuliani, McCain, Romney, Huckabee, and yes, Thompson – who will govern in exactly the same treacherous manner that Bush has. You want war? Oh, they will give you wars a plenty, both at home and abroad!

Now, the Manhattan conservatives at places like National Review, Fox News, FrontPage and Townhall* will assure you that this just isn’t so, because times have changed and that conservatism must evolve as it moves forward into the future and so forth. What they won’t tell you is that what this “conservatism” is evolving into is nothing more than the progressive all-encompassing vision of the Platonic Left.

I readily admit that there are a lot more of them, they’re all much better-known and more highly regarded than I am and they’re much better connected in Washington D.C. than I will ever be. So, it’s perfectly understandable that most conservatives will be inclined to believe what the conservative commentariat is trumpeting rather than heed my warnings. I simply ask them to consider one question before they blithely trundle off to repeat their previous mistakes:

Who was correct about George W. Bush?

* I am not saying that every columnist or staff writer associated with these media outlets is a faux conservative, only that they appear to outnumber the genuine conservatives there.

The resident NFL conspiracy theorist announces this week’s results prior to kickoff:

Okay, so far they’re staying right on script. My guess is that this was Favre’s big farewell performance for the home-town fans, and that next week he’s going to choke big time and the Packers will get stomped in Dallas. BUT….I could be wrong, this may *not* have been Favre’s farewell performance tonight, in which case the Colts and Giants win tomorrow, the Packers beat the Giants in a squeaker in Lambeau next week, and Favre goes out in a blaze of glory in a rematch of Superbowl XXXI, as the Packers fight tooth and claw to pull a come-from-behind victory over the Patriots. For further explication, go watch the James Caan version of “Rollerball.”

Bread and circuses, chum. Bread and circuses…

New England should win handily tonight. It’s too early for them to
suffer the humiliating defeat that will end their season. That
happens in the Superbowl. (Remember your own principles. Everyone
loves a winner, but everyone hates a winner who make it look too easy, and watching a hero win is nowhere near as gratifying as watching a hero fall. The most powerful human emotion is schadenfreude.)

[And later, after post-game exchange of email about the New England win and the Redemption of Ryan Grant theme.]

PS: Even [omitted] picked up on the Redemption of Ryan Grant sub-plot, though, possibly because the AP wire service story used the word “redemption” in the headline and at least twice again in the body. I think Grant did his job admirably, considering that the Packers needed to spot the Seahawks 14 points just to keep it from looking like a lopsided blowout. Maybe Favre was getting tired of throwing strategic interceptions.

The Grant sub-plot settles it. Since he came to the Packers after a few years as a benchwarmer for the Giants, this means the Giants beat Dallas today, so that not only do we get the Average Joes Triumph Over The Smug All-Stars story today, but next week’s game at Lambeau becomes Grant’s Revenge.

In light of this elucidation, I couldn’t help but notice that the broadcasters actually had a little video piece prepared that began with the words “this week’s theme is REVENGE”. It was like something straight out of the WWF.

And yes, this is your Divisional Playoff discussion post.

The Right-Wing News surveys the blogs:

Right Wing News emailed more than 240 right-of-center bloggers and asked them to answer 10 questions. The following 55 blogs responded:

The Absurd Report, The American Princess, AtlanticBlog, Baldilocks, Barking Moonbat Early Warning System, BitsBlog, (John) BitsBlog, BizzyBlog, Blonde Sagacity, Bluey Blog, Bookworm Room, Lorie Byrd, Cold Fury, Dr. Melissa Clouthier, The Conservative Reader, Conservative Grapevine, Damian Penny, Election Projection, Musings, Flopping Aces, Freeman Hunt, GOPUSA Northeast, GOPUSA Northeast (Hank), Guardian Watchblog, Dr. Helen, Jeff Gannon – A Voice of the New Media, Inside Larry’s Head, Keith Burgess-Jackson, JackLewis, (Brian) Liberty Pundit, Likelihood of Success, Moonbattery, Neocon News, Newsbeat1, Newsbusters, Nosiy Room, No Oil For Pacifists, The Nose On Your Face, Outside The Beltway, PrestoPundit, Pundit Guy, QandO, (Alexham) Redstate, Reformed Chicks Blabbing, Right Wing Rocker, Say Anything, Sister Toldjah, Slobokan’s Site Of Schtuff, Knowledge Is Power, Stolen Thunder, The Sundries Shack, dcthornton.com, Trying To Grok, Vox Popoli, WILLisms,

The bloggers were asked to select answers to the following questions (because some bloggers skipped particular questions, gave answers that weren’t listed, or gave answers that were difficult to categorize, there are not 55 responses to each question.)

1) Which candidate would you like to see as the Republican Party’s nominee out of this group?

A) Rudy Giuliani: 4 — 7%
B) Mike Huckabee: 2 — 4%
C) Duncan Hunter: 9 — 17%
D) John McCain: 3 — 6%
E) Ron Paul: 1 — 2%
F) Mitt Romney: 4 — 7%
G) Fred Thompson: 31 — 57%

It’s interesting to see how little support Giuliani and Romney have these days. There are certainly worse options than the Tennessee Toad out there, I would certainly have no objection to a do-nothing presidency if a do-nothing campaign had any hope of surviving Team Clinton. And I’m sure it’s nearly impossible to guess which of these 55 blogs cast the lone vote for Ron Paul.

Some find it lonely at the top, I just enjoy the solitude.

Brent Rasmussen and I have widely divergent opinions about God, life, the universes and everything. What we share, however, is a basic understanding of why it is unwise to embrace government oppression of your political or religious foes:

Dawn Sherman, the 14 year old student in Buffalo Grove High School in Illinois who is fighting a mandatory moment of silence law, is getting hammered by the incredibly intolerant, misinformed, “persecuted” Christians who are willing to throw away their civil rights because they happen to be in the majority at this moment.

From my perspective, it’s even worse than that. Forget “civil rights”, which are held at the whim of the granting authority. They are throwing away their unalienable God-given rights. Now, there is some legitimate room for discussion here, as a school is not Congress and a school policy is not a law. The concept of separation of Church and State has certainly been stretched to encompass absurd applications. But since that’s not the level upon which this debate is normally held, it’s really not relevant here.

Unlike far too many atheists and Christians alike, Brent understands that once government possesses a certain power, the only question that remains is who will be targeted by that power. Use government to oppress today and you may very well be among the oppressed tomorrow. Moreover, you will deserve it.

This is not rocket science. What is merely a mandated moment of silence can easily be transformed into the mandated worship of Caesar’s image.

It’s not always wise to put your money where your mouth is:

Pregnancy robs a teenager of her girlhood. This stark fact is one reason girls used to be so carefully guarded and protected — in a system that at once limited their horizons and safeguarded them from devastating consequences. The feminist historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg has written that “however prudish and ‘uptight’ the Victorians were, our ancestors had a deep commitment to girls.”

We, too, have a deep commitment to girls, and ours centers not on protecting their chastity, but on supporting their ability to compete with boys, to be free — perhaps for the first time in history — from the restraints that kept women from achieving on the same level.

When described this way, feminism sounds almost noble and it’s not hard to understand its emotional appeal, not just to women but fair-minded men as well. The problem is that it’s completely based on a lie that has been repeatedly disproven by the historical, logical and scientific evidence. The modern commitment to girls has amounted to little more than an effort to turn them into inferior androgynous evolutionary dead-ends. Fortunately for Mankind, the effort fails much more often than not.

Women simply cannot compete with men without being artificially and externally advantaged by government. This is as true in the boardroom as on the basketball court. It is biology, not bias, and explains why in that a time when women are better educated than men, they still can’t manage achieve anything even remotely as significant as men regularly do. A female Steve Jobs or Bill Gates may have been unlikely, given their historical time frame, although such a beast was still theoretically quite possible. But these days, the absence of a female Niklas Zennstrom, Janus Friis, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page or Sergey Brin in a time of statistical female advantage among the educational elite is downright damning.

Although, one must note that the evidence shows the connection between what passes for education and finanancial or intellectual success to be nearly as spurious as the idea that feminism’s commitment to girls is beneficial to them.

The good news is that the police are spending far less time in doughnut shops than people think. The bad news is that the reason is that they’re spending quite a bit of it with prossies:

University of Chicago professor and “Freakonomics” author Steven D. Levitt and sociology professor Sudhir Venkatesh of Columbia University are the authors of the two-year study of street-level prostitution in Chicago’s Roseland, Washington Park and Pullman neighborhoods….

Prostitutes taking part in the study — who were paid $150 a week — reported that about 3 percent of the sex acts they performed were “freebies” given to Chicago police officers to avoid arrest. Police spokeswoman Monique Bond did not respond to requests for comment on the study’s finding. The study found full-time prostitutes made on average less than $20,000 a year.

But, you know, I’m sure protecting you from criminals is still the first thing on their minds when they’re getting a hummer in the squad car. It kind of makes you wonder what other shakedowns they’re involved with, doesn’t it?

I note that the study also tends to generally support the conclusions of my ground-breaking theoretical work in calculating the average sexual value of a woman to be around $1,350.00 annually. This is, no doubt, why so many police prefer the street hos.

Today, you have to go with the Packers and Patriots. But considering the two underdogs, I’d be less surprised by a Jacksonville upset.

A Harvard psychologist reaches essentially the same conclusion I have about morality and its universal applicability:

Here is the worry. The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world. The qualitative difference between red and green, the tastiness of fruit and foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights and prettiness of flowers are design features of our common nervous system, and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or if we were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other way. Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?

I can only marvel at the way my various atheist critics get tremendously upset when I point out the very same conclusion that secular scientists are reaching. If God does not exist, then no objective and universal morality exists either. This is really not up for debate among anyone who is sufficiently educated and capable of basic logic.

And furthermore, this is precisely why the secular position gravitates so readily and reliably towards totalitarianism, because in the absence of any objective and universal morality, one must be created and imposed.

I note, however, that Pinker is incorrect about Plato somehow disproving the idea that God can define morality. He’s implicitly referring to Euthyphro here, which no one has successfully disputed that I have conclusively refuted.