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The fact that both Andrew Sullivan and I are both supporting Ron Paul lends additional credence to my assertion about the unusual breadth of Paul’s support in in today’s column on the Ron Paul epiphany:

My beloved candidate has just won an Alabama straw poll, although almost no one showed up and Alan Keyes won last time.

The salient notion is not that Paul is all things to everyone, but rather, that the Bush-Clintons, the Edward Obama-Thompsons and the Rudy McRomneys can all be exchanged seamlessly for one another without any significant difference in U.S. foreign policy, especially where national sovereignty and the Constitution are concerned. Ron Paul aside, there is literally no reason whatsoever for those who value liberty, sovereignty or the Constitution to vote in the 2008 presidential election. And it’s highly unlikely that you’ll be given the chance to vote for him there, except as a write-in protest.

UPDATE – A New England independent explains his own epiphany:

I am glad Dr Paul’s message is finally getting out. I myself had the epiphany about 2 years ago…. The RNC was disappointed (to say the least) to hear me say that when they called me for a survey and to solicit a donation. I explained to the person on the phone how the Republican Party is committing suicide with the “front runner” candidates. When I asked what constitutionalist candidates they were sponsoring, the answer was silence. Their only care is about getting back the congressional majority. I asked them, what’s the difference in controlling congress when you go out and prop up a bunch of RINO’s? Again, no intelligent answer.

I find this Pew survey to be pretty amusing in light of Pintopolis’s theory that atheists are unpopular because they are just so morally and ethically enviable:

In general, being a Mormon is viewed as far less of a liability for a presidential candidate than not believing in God or being a Muslim. Roughly six-in-ten Americans (61%) say they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who does not believe in God, while 45% say they would be reluctant to vote for a Muslim. At the same time, more people express reservations about voting for a Mormon (25%) than about supporting a candidate who is an evangelical Christian (16%), a Jew (11%) or a Catholic (7%).

I note that the public distaste for atheist candidates has actually increased since the 1999 Gallup poll, in which 49 percent of Americans were open to voting for an atheist candidate. It’s also down from the 2007 Gallup poll, in which 45 percent were willing to do so. That’s more than a 20 percent drop in perceived acceptability in only eight years.

I doubt much, if any, of this can be attributed to the activities of the New Atheists, but it is consistent with my theory that the more outspoken they are, the less popular atheism will become.

Univision is quickly becoming the #1 TV network in the USA:

In the first entire week (8/27/07-9/2/07) since all networks were reported from one single ratings sample, Univision ranked as the #1 network with an +11% advantage over its nearest competitor, FOX, and beating ABC by +43%, CBS by +42%, NBC by +57%, and fully +125% ahead of CW for all Adults 18-34, not just Hispanics.

And so much for that touching theory of “hard-working immigrants” yearning to breathe free and work hard. It looks like there’s a lot of Spanish speakers just sitting around watching television. However would the nation survive without them?

Individuals certainly can, but entire cultures don’t adapt up. It’s much more typical for an incoming mass of barbarians to bring the more civilized culture down; this is hardly the first migration in history. If you want to know what Hispanicized America will look like in fifty years, go to Mexico City.

SF writers take note. It’s not Chiba City that is the future, but Cholo City.

Richard Dawkins is such an incorrigible ass. He complains that critical books that have either covers or titles which are similar to the books they are criticizing are somehow committing “plagiarism”. This is absurd, since it is impossible to copyright either book titles or cover layouts, one could publish a book entitled The God Delusion and it would still not be plagiarism so long as one did not copy the actual text from Dawkins’s book. And so again we witness Dawkins demonstrate his total incompetence outside of his particular field of science propagandaevolutionary biology.

The thing I find amusing about the whole flea thing isn’t that Dawkins and company could be described as God’s fleas, but rather that The End of Faith is clearly a take-off on Fukuyama’s post-Marxian 1989 essay The End of History. It’s not even the first such take-off, as John Horgan published The End of Science in 1998.

I didn’t consider calling TIA The End of Atheism for a second, because such books are not meant to be taken in a literal manner. In his essay, which was expanded into a book in 1992, Fukuyama was not referring to history per se, but rather the end of a Marxist ideological concept, specifically, the idea of inevitable progress towards a Communist workers’ paradise. In like manner, The End of Science doesn’t refer to a literal end of science, but rather addresses the possibility that there are no big fundamental concepts left for science to discover. That’s why it’s so funny that Harris blithely titled his book in a manner that suggests a failure to understand the books whose titles he is “plagiarizing”, given that he is advocating a literal end to faith in The End of Faith.

To the empirical idiocy of gun control, anyhow:

Despite the recent spate of shootings on our streets, we pride ourselves on our strict gun laws. Every time an American gunman goes on a killing spree, we shake our heads in righteous disbelief at our poor benighted colonial cousins. Why is it, even after the Virginia Tech massacre, that Americans still resist calls for more gun controls?

The short answer is that “gun controls” do not work: they are indeed generally perverse in their effects….

Virginia Tech reinforced the lesson that gun controls are obeyed only by the law-abiding. New York has “banned” pistols since 1911, and its fellow murder capitals, Washington DC and Chicago, have similar bans. One can draw a map of the US, showing the inverse relationship of the strictness of its gun laws, and levels of violence: all the way down to Vermont, with no gun laws at all, and the lowest level of armed violence (one thirteenth that of Britain).

A mandatory firearms ownership laws combined with a ban on police firearms is the ideal situation, reducing the likelihood of crime as well as government-inflicted violence.

Richard Dawkins notices that the so-called fleas are multiplying. This is true and will continue, but what Dawkins doesn’t realize is that they are also evolving; the assumptions expressed in the comment thread notwithstanding, there is likely very little in common between Alistair McGrath’s arguments and mine. I rather doubt his publisher ever had a conversation with him that began with “You really can’t start a chapter title with the word ‘Bitches’.”

I’ve made some ‘orbit’ images of the fleas to highlight some of the name and cover plagiarism.

I argued against the cover parody myself, (how typical that a whiner like Dawkins would call it “plagiarism”), but publishers will be publishers, and I have to admit, while my idea of a cartoon of fish-squirrels gang-sodomizing a shrieking Dr. Dawkins was hilarious, I suppose it might have been considered a bit vulgar for what is supposed to be an intellectual rebuttal. (Needless to say, my arguments are probably just a little less theologically inclined than everyone else’s.) I say that a bitch-slapping isn’t any less of a bitch-slapping because you’re wearing white gloves, but obviously the publisher disagrees.

Of course, I anticipated Dawkins’s flea theme in TIA. The guy isn’t stupid, but he’s far from brilliant and is almost boringly predictable; most of his arguments were made previously by Meslier and Russell except, of course, for that burning logical train wreck he insists on calling the Ultimate 747. Unfortunately, my publisher also insisted on repressing some of my poetical inspirations, which is why A Dog Named Flea does not appear in the book.

But fans of scientific poetry will be glad to know that at least one poem inspired by the Archbishop of Oxford did make it into the final text, albeit in slightly edited form.

UPDATE – I will be very surprised if this guy means what he says:

I’m still wating for a ‘flea’ to tackle any one of Dawkins’ clear and straightforward arguments head on – I mean with real intellectual honesty and logical rigour. It just never happens.

In the one chapter dedicated to dissecting Dawkins – which is almost as easy as demonstrating the multiple factual and logical errors made by Sam Harris with tedious regularity – I go step-by-step through what Dawkins himself describes as the central argument of The God Delusion. What’s amusing isn’t so much the four factual and logical errors he makes in the first five steps, although they are pretty bad, but rather, the fact that what ends up passing for the conclusion of this “irrefutable” argument is, by his own admission, in no way based on the steps leading up to it.

To describe Dawkins’s arguments as clear and straightforward – or even coherent – is proof of one’s own intellectual incompetence. Dawkins is dependent upon his critics arguing theology, because any highly intelligent individual with a working knowledge of logic and history can demolish his arguments without breaking a sweat.

Not only have I done so in TIA, but I am certain that every other non-theologically focused Dawkins critic will as well because the great atheist icon’s factual and logical errors are so glaringly apparent.

I’m not expecting signs and wonders out of Tavaris this season, but I’m certainly not as down on the Vikes as this poor Football Outsider is on the Giants:

Bill Barnwell: New York Giants. When I think about this upcoming Giants season, my heart hurts in the way it does when you think of ex-girlfriends sleeping with new people. Many new people. At the same time. While she reassures them all how much better they are in bed than you. Oh, and she does this all in the next room over from you while you’re trying to sleep. And then makes the whole group breakfast afterwards, your favorite breakfast, too, and throws out the last helping as you go to grab some. It’s like that, except it’s going to happen for about 17 consecutive weekends. It astounds me that some people still think this team has a chance of being competitive in 2007.

This is particularly funny due to the way in which most residents of Media Central are inclined to have such an overrated view of their sports teams.

The Dark is Rising apparently is not famous enough to be spared the full Hollywood treatment:

A joke among the journalists covering The Dark Is Rising set visit in Bucharest over the last couple of days was that the movie has only changed three things from the Newberry-winning novel on which it’s based: they’ve changed the lead kid’s nationality from English to American, they’ve changed the lead kid’s age from 11 to 14, and they’ve changed everything that happens in the story.

In case you haven’t figured out why I have turned down every request to option the EW novels for film – and there have been several – this sort of nonsense is why I’m just not interested. Now, I have been sketching a thriller called Second Revelations, which is the action-packed sort of thing that can’t be ruined because there’s nothing particularly unique there to ruin.

I’ve always wondered why Satan’s servants would bother to fight for him, unless they believe he can win. And if they believe that, then they would have to have their own set of prophecies and so forth, as well as their own spin on the events of the New Testament. Hence, The Revelation of St. Iscariot the Damned. It starts off with a bang; a Vatican strike force wiping out an Alpine nunnery with only one nun saved by an agent of a secret order of rogue Benedictines.

Everything you could possibly want to know about Vox Day and more. Part 12: In which Our Hero finally relents and stops tormenting a certain percent of his readers:

Vox Day and Me (Part 12).

Vox Day and Me (Part 11).

Vox Day and Me (Part 10).

Vox Day and Me (Part 9), (Part 9.1), and (Part 9.2)

Vox Day and Me (Part 8)

Vox Day and Me (Part 7)

Vox Day and Me (Part 6)

Vox Day and Me (Part 5)

Vox Day and Me (Part 4)

Vox Day and Me (Part 3)

Vox Day and Me (Part 2)

Vox Day and Me (Part 1)

Italy is in mourning today for one of its favorite sons, who was famous throughout the world but never forgot that he was an Italian.

“Spero di essere ricordato come cantante d’opera, ovvero come rappresentante di una forma d’arte che ha trovato la sua massima espressione nel mio Paesera.”

“I wish to be remembered as a singer of the opera, as a representative of the art form that has found its ultimate expression in my country.”