Category: Uncategorized

Bomb New York,
Light up the New York sky
Like the Fourth of July!

It’s typical Onion humor, but it wouldn’t be so funny if there weren’t more than a grain of truth to it. I don’t give a damn about New York City or its denizens and it’s not hard to make a powerful case that America as a nation would be better off without it and Washington DC.

“You can just reduce New York City to a pile of rubble, it ain’t going to affect us much.”

Whether you think that’s sad or not, it’s absolutely true. It also means that the Giuliani campaign, based as it is on his self-styled status as “the thavior of New York Thity”, isn’t going to get anywhere near the White House. You’ll notice that the Queen-in-waiting hasn’t been talking about being a big Yankees fan since her campaign started, she’s been playing up her carpetbagging Southern twang instead.

Nothing will change with mass immigration:

A southwest suburban school district has taken action, responding to the concerns of a parent who is Arabic….

There was some heated discussion between parents outside Columbus Manor Elementary School in Oak Lawn on Friday. The thought of no more traditional holiday celebrations has many parents really upset. For now, children in Ridgeland School District 122 will celebrate fall festival instead of Halloween and winter festival instead of Christmas….

The district has a 30 percent Arabic population. The superintendent says the reason for the change in tradition comes after one parent wanted Ramadan decorations put up inside Columbus Manor Elementary.

One wonders if the multicultis at the ACLU will finally begin to see a problem with third world immigration when the public schools are no longer content to ban Christmas, begin teaching “kill the Jew” and require mandatory clitorectomies in addition to vaccinations for all the girls.

History teaches that mass immigration – migration – is always a terrible thing for the host population, but it’s a particularly bad idea in any society that pretends to pass for democratic.

The Evangelical Outpost uses game theory to demonstrate that moderate Republicans who support Giuliani in the primary will be responsible for electing Hillary Clinton, not conservative Republicans who stay home in November:

Imagine that you have three groups of voters. Group A likes Hillary and opposes all Republican nominees; Group B prefers Giuliani, but would choose another nominee over Hillary; Group C prefers anyone other than Giuliani and Hillary….

Group A would be happy with A1, and unhappy with either A2 or A3. Similarly, Group B would be unhappiest with B1, happy with B2, and satisfied with B3. Group C would be unhappy with C1, dissatisfied with C2, and happy with C3.

Now let’s examine what rational choices each group of voters should make in a Republican primary.

Since the GOP is never going to nominate Hillary, the most rational choice for Group A would be to skip the Republican primary altogether and vote in the Democratic primaries. The most rational choice for Group C would be C3–anyone other than Giuliani. So what should Group B choose? Even though their first preference is B2, they have to consider how Group C will vote.

For Group B, choice B3 is what game theorists call the minimax condition, the choice which minimizes the maximum possible loss. They don’t get Giuliani but they don’t get Hillary either. (That same outcome, by the way, is the optimum choice for Group C.)

Even if they were unable to communicate with Group C, the most rational choice for Group B would be to choose the minimax. But they have even more incentive because social conservatives (Group C) have communicated to Giuliani supporters (Group B) that they will not accept option C2. All things being equal, it would therefore be irrational for primary voters to choose Giuliani….

Unless social conservatives vote for Hillary in either the primaries or the general election, we are in no way to blame for her moving back into the White House. That blame will go to our friends and neighbors. The same goes for the nomination of Rudy.

But what if the reason that Hillary wins is, as some want to claim, because social conservatives did not choose the lesser of two evils and vote for Rudy? Again, we social conservatives are not to blame at all. We are the ones who will have made the rational choice during the primaries while the Giuliani supporters made an irrational choice.

This is a solid explanation of the inherent futility of the moderate Republican candidate, one that I wish I had thought to develop. As I’ve been pointing out for months now, it is counterproductive to nominate a candidate who is so moderate that he has negative appeal to the base. The polls are irrelevant, Giuliani and Romney are demonstrably less electable than Paul, Huckabee or Thompson. Thompson and Huckabee can’t beat Clinton because they share her views on the major issues of the election cycle, but that’s another matter entirely.

By the way, Richard Dawkins should note that this is a proper use of game theory, not inventing Evolutionary Stable Strategies out of arbitrary assumptions and imaginary values.

Richard Dawkins proposes eliminating theology departments:

We who doubt that “theology” is a subject at all, or who compare it with the study of leprechauns, are eagerly hoping to be proved wrong. Of course, university departments of theology house many excellent scholars of history, linguistics, literature, ecclesiastical art and music, archaeology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, iconology, and other worthwhile and important subjects. These academics would be welcomed into appropriate departments elsewhere in the university. But as for theology itself, defined as “the organised body of knowledge dealing with the nature, attributes, and governance of God”, a positive case now needs to be made that it has any real content at all, and that it has any place in today’s universities.

Given that universities are no longer the important centers of Christian-centered intellectual development that they were founded to be, and given that they are demonstrably almost entirely useless in both professional and pure knowledge terms – tests have shown that the average student at an elite university actually knows less about history, law and economics after she graduates than when she enters – why not get rid of them altogether?

The best computer programmers don’t learn how to program at university. Econ majors can graduate from major state universities without ever learning who John Maynard Keynes was. Real published writers don’t learn how to write by studying English. Sociology, Womyn’s Studies and Art History majors are all self-evidently useless. It’s funny to see all the folks with useless degrees in pointless disciplines at Pharyngula who usually chime in with a hearty atheist amen to everything Dawkins and Myers preach suddenly stopping and saying, “hey, wait a minute, now….”

Coincidentally enough, I’ve developed a new technology design that, according to the gentleman at Oxford responsible for education technology, will likely go a long way towards doing precisely that.

The elite are never going to convince Americans that transforming themselves into North Mexicans is desirable. The more non-Americans that are forced on the citizenry, the more likely it is that extreme measures will eventually be adopted. History suggests that the choices are to either a) deport them now, or, b) do very bad things to them later.

Mayor Herbert Gears estimates that about 300 people in Irving are being turned over each month – more than in any other city in the nation. He said city officials are obligated to uphold the law and will continue to use the program, which is available to any city that wishes to participate.

“Of the 200 e-mails I’ve read so far, one is negative and all the rest are positive,” Mr. Gears said Thursday afternoon. “People are very overwhelmingly supporting what we are doing.”

The problem, of course, is that our fascist elites love violence , since conflict gives them the opportunity to create profit as well as the excuse to enact radical societal change. (It’s no accident that such changes in peacetime are typically categorizes as “the war on X”). So, from their point of view, immigration is a win-win, as it will either lead to a subjected third-world people or the chaos of widespread violence.

To avoid those probable outcomes, civilized and peaceful deportations are the only solution.

John Derbyshire exhibits an uncommonly good sense of artistic justice:

What do I think about all this? Well, first I think that the directors of the Tate Gallery, which receives funding from general taxation, should be locked up in prison and made to do hard labor scraping the rust off bolts for twenty years or so with nothing to eat but cold oatmeal porridge. Then I think Mr Creed should be stripped naked, sprayed all over with bright blue paint, and made to run round and round Piccadilly Circus until he drops from exhaustion, after which he should be killed by some not-very-humane method. Then the Tate Gallery should be reduced to rubble by aerial bombardment, the rubble carted away to be used as landfill, and the ground sown with salt. Then the fools who pay good money to look at this “art” should be packed into boxcars and tipped off the white cliffs of Dover, and their mangled corpses left to be feasted on by dogs, crows and crabs.

We don’t need a Drug Czar, we need an Art Czar possessed of the requisite authority to mete out both the High Justice and the Low. I nominate Derb.

UPDATE- He’s not bad on George W. Bush either:

I was having a conversation over drinks with a friend, a lifelong Republican, big Wall Street legal brain (but now retired), sometime generous contributor to party funds, normally good-natured and mild-mannered. We weren’t even talking politics. The topic was the current woes of the poor old dollar.

Suddenly, with uncharacteristic anger, my drinking buddy said something like this: “The federal government’s main functions are to maintain a stable currency, keep us out of unnecessary foreign entanglements and wars, and patrol the coasts and borders. That’s three strikes on George Bush, [blasphemous expletive]! The man’s been a total [sexual expletive] disaster. What the [blasphemous expletive] [sexual expletive] hell was I thinking of, voting for this [cognitive-function expletive]?”

[Sexual expletive] yeah!

Then the Bush administration will do what it wants and start a third successive war:

American diplomats have been ordered to compile a dossier detailing Iran’s violations of international law that some fear could be used to justify military strikes against the Islamic republic’s nuclear programme. Members of the US secretariat in the United Nations were asked earlier this month to begin “searching for things that Iran has done wrong”, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt.

Some US diplomats believe the exercise — reminiscent of attempts by vice-president Dick Cheney and the former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld to build the case against Saddam Hussein before the Iraq war — will boost calls for military action by neo-conservatives inside and outside the administration.

Those calls have already started, courtesy of Podhoretz the Elder. I know I’m excited about the inevitable “Ahmadinejad is Hitler” justifications, aren’t you?

A Swedish diplomat and a Burmese military defector say that the monks’ protest is over:

Word reaching dissidents hiding out on the border suggested that as well as executions, some 2,000 monks are being held in the notorious Insein Prison or in university rooms which have been turned into cells. There were reports that many were savagely beaten at a sports ground on the outskirts of Rangoon, where they were heard crying for help.Others who had failed to escape disguised as civilians were locked in their bloodstained temples.

There, troops abandoned religious beliefs, propped their rifles against statues of Buddha and began cooking meals on stoves set up in shrines….

‘People are scared and the general assessment is that the fight is over. We were informed from one of the largest embassies in Burma that 40 monks in the Insein prison were beaten to death today and subsequently burned.’ The [Swedish]diplomat also said that three monasteries were raided yesterday afternoon and are now totally abandoned.

At his border hideout last night, 42-year-old Mr Win said he hopes to cross into Thailand and seek asylum at the Norwegian Embassy. The 42-year-old chief of military intelligence in Rangoon’s northern region, added: ‘I decided to desert when I was ordered to raid two monasteries and force several hundred monks onto trucks.

‘They were to be killed and their bodies dumped deep inside the jungle. I refused to participate in this.’

Whether the victims are Jews, Buddhists, Christians or even atheists like most of the Chinese students at Tiananmen, the equation is always the same. The secular state, jealous of its power, murdering those it deems threatening.

Government is the problem. Government has murdered more human beings in the last century than every war, civil war and private crime in the world combined.

There’s almost no chance that Brett Favre won’t break Dan Marino’s record for most TD passes in a career in today’s game at the Metrodome, Vikings fans are merely hoping that he also breaks George Blanda’s record for most INTs in a career as well.

In both cases, it would be fitting. I remember seeing many a Favre interception in the Hump back when I had season tickets; I can still recall correctly calling his first interception in his first pass in the Pro Bowl before the ball was snapped. Hey, the NFC had the ball on the twenty yard line, the game doesn’t count, where else is he going to do but drill the ball into the end zone as hard as he can? As the Sports Guy points out, after 16 years, he’s not playing any differently, he’s not managing the game, he’s going out as a gunslinger and you have to respect that.

Although we’d all love to see an upset today – how typical that the line for a Vikes-Packers game should open at 1 even though the Pack is 3-0 and the Vikes are 1-2 – Vikings fans like and respect Favre and it won’t surprise me at all if they give him a standing ovation when he breaks Marino’s record. And they DEFINITELY will give him one if he manages to break Blanda’s.