Category: Uncategorized

The Weekly Standard reports that Western civilization hangs by a thread:

The Evening Standard also understands that US secret services have a number of secret files on Diana and her closest associates that are held by the national security agency. The files, which include reports from foreign intelligence – thought to include MI5 and MI6 – come under both top secret and secret categories. The reports cannot be released because of “exceptionally grave damage to the national security”.

This makes sense. It’s obvious that Diana planned the attack on the Twin Towers with her secret lover, Osama bin Laden. The CIA thought bin Laden was in Paris with her, not realizing that they’d confused him with Dodi al-Fayed after both men attended the same exclusive party thrown by the princess following an Elton John concert.

After the CIA took out Diana in Paris, an embittered bin Laden decided to expand his attack to include the White House and the Pentagon as well.

No wonder they don’t dare to release those reports to the public!

Question: if the people are supposed to be in charge, why is it that they can’t ever be permitted to know anything in our “democracy”?

I don’t know about you, but I’d certainly prefer the chaos of the half-civilized third-world society that appears to be in America’s future to the mad totalitarian hellhole that Cthulhu’s Coven are fantasizing about. Someone needs to haul off these womyn and get them fitted for burqahs, stat! Seriously, this uberwellian vision should give serious pause to anyone who still believes that women’s suffrage was a fine idea.

In bringing this to our attention, RK writes:

Amanda and her friends are discussing their utopia. If you want to be both amused and depressed, take a look. No need to comment. It speaks for itself.

Like a bunch of college freshman talking over a few too many beers. They do have some odd ideas about economics. One odd note, Amanda seems to agree with you on IP laws.

Only because she doesn’t understand them, no doubt.

Perhaps the Chinese are not fated to rule over the world after all:

There’s a lot of talk about what enabled China to become the industrial supplier to the world. Low labor costs are first on that list – but any third world nation will have low labor costs. The thing that really enabled China to fit into that slot was something we miss. It was the really low costs of shipping goods from there to here and Europe….

The only way to explain how that many of the shipping containers can be sitting here is if there’s something running outside of an ordinary market situation. This little Ponzi game is my best guess at explaining it.

I know nothing about the shipping industry, but it’s an interesting hypothesis and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if it turned out to have some utility in explaining the strangely expendable shipping container. After all, free trade agreements have very little to do with what the normal person would understand free trade to be, if trade were actually free, there’d be no need for these massive, all-encompassing agreements.

A few things:

1. I KNEW I should have started Jones-Drew. I agonized over that one for about five minutes and finally went with Marion Barber III.

2. The Original Cyberpunk located my last formatting issue with the WRATH document, so that’s uploading to the printer now. They claim 7-10 working days, so if you want one of the very first run, contact K&B this week.

3. While there’s no foreign demand for my books, the same is not true of other authors in the house….

I have written previously about my skepticism regarding copyright laws, which is not entirely due to my being a lifelong computer pirate. As I have pointed out before, one cannot steal a loaf of bread that is still there after one has “stolen” it.

What shards of an argument remain to the IP apologists have now been trampled upon by that bastion of evil, the RIAA. I always knew their tears for the poor artist were crocodilian, now that is eminently clear to everyone:

In publicly defending its strong arm tactics and stated desire to scare consumers into absolute compliance, the RIAA has long cited the negative repercussions of piracy and lost revenue upon the recording artists that pour their talent into making the music that people like to hear. It’s a sympathetic defense, yet in the past week the RIAA has made it quite clear whose profits the group is truly out to defend, and it’s certainly not the artists who actually make the music.

On December 1 The Hollywood Reporter revealed that the RIAA is currently petitioning the panel of federal government Copyright Royalty Judges to lower the rates paid to publishers and songwriters for use of lyrics and melodies in applications like cell phone ring tones and other digital recordings. The last time the American government set the rate was in 1981, but since that time, the RIAA argues in its petition, a lot has changed.

Download an MP3 or rip a DVD in the RIAA’s honor today. What utter scum!

George Bush gleefully urinates on the corpse of the conservatism he stabbed in the back:

Zalmay Khalilzad, who was announced this week as leaving as U.S. ambassador to Iraq, is the leading prospect to replace John Bolton as envoy to the United Nations.

President Bush was reported by aides as looking for someone who approximates Bolton’s combination of toughness and diplomatic skill and has tentatively decided on Khalilzad. A native of Afghanistan, he has served in government posts dating back to 1985 and is the highest-ranking Muslim in the Bush administration.

I think I’m really going to enjoy Bush the Younger’s lame duck period. It’s petty, of course, but watching conservatives writhe in agony at the actions of the man they voted into office under the “lesser of two evils” mantra is genuinely amusing.

Even the Three Monkeys at NRO can’t summon up the energy to think up excuses for him any more. Get ready for Hillary, folks. And I agree with Dick Morris on the name game, I fully expect her to go by Rodham Clinton during her campaign, then drop the Clinton altogether once she gets elected.

I, for one, welcome our new reptilesbian overlordess.

Here’s an old, but amusing example of a clown of reason cutting himself with the razor of logic:

If a woman consents to extramarital sex, she is committing a moral offense which is equal to that committed by the man who engages in consensual sex with her, or by the man who, in the absence of such consent, rapes her. Christianity knows no hierarchy of sins. Since only the woman who is not entertaining the possibility of sex with a man and is subsequently raped can truly be considered a wholly innocent victim under this ethic, it is no wonder that women who insist that internal consent is the sole determining factor of a woman’s victimization find traditional Western morality to be inherently distasteful.

Vox Day wrote the above. Like so many things which Vox Day writes, this vile little rant almost screams out as a sign of sociopathology, but I’d like to focus on an interesting aspect which might go overlooked. As disgustingly immoral as his position is, it’s also logically inconsistent and incoherent.

Allow us to assume, for the sake of argument, the premises that there is no hierarchy of sins and that a women who sins (as with having extramarital sex) is not an innocent victim when raped. Clearly it’s not the case that only sexual sins prevents a woman from being an innocent victim — after all, there is no hierarchy of sins, with sexual sins being worse than others. A woman who blasphemes, lies, shoplifts, or who commits any other transgression cannot be a “wholly innocent victim either.” Since it’s a basic Christian doctrine that we are all sinners, this means that no woman is a wholly innocent victim.

Austin makes the clumsy mistake here of applying the general to the particular due to a failure to grasp context. The context was a comparison of the immorality of rape with the immorality of extramarital sex. A woman who blasphemes, lies, etc. cannot be wholly innocent in general, to be sure, but she can certainly be a victim wholly innocent of sexual immorality despite the physical act of sexual congress in which she was forced to engage. The same is clearly not true of the woman who was engaging in immoral sexual behavior prior to withdrawing her previously given consent. Still a victim, just not a wholly innocent one and therefore it is correct to view her situation differently from a moral perspective.

After all, we regard those shot while committing bank robberies very differently than those who are shot while sitting peacefully at home. And before anyone is silly enough to say anything about the legality of extramarital sex versus bank robbery, please keep in mind that legality is neither morality nor under discussion here.

So that it all might be made more clear to Austin, I wonder if he would criticize the logic of the statement if it read as follows:

“only the woman who is not entertaining the possibility of sex with a man and is subsequently raped can truly be considered a [victim wholly innocent of sexual immorality] under this ethic.”

Unless he has an issue with the coherence or the logic of that, it should be quite clear that his only problem with the previous version is that he failed to comprehend the context, which is rather strange since the entire column was dealing with the question of morality, rape and sex.

The very idea of viewing the statement from a general point of view is a profoundly silly one, since one could easily and pointlessly add that since Austin and I have both told lies at some point in our lives, we are as immoral in the eyes of God as the rapist. And the rape victim. And Vladimir Putin. Which is all true, of course, but hardly germane to the matter being discussed in the column.

Finally, on what basis can he possibly claim my position on the moral equivalence of rape and extramarital sex is “immoral”? What ethic, what moral tradition can he, the godless disbeliever in all things supernatural, cite to demonstrate this, beyond “Austin’s personal dictate that Rape is Immoral and Sex is Moral”?

Honestly, the haphazard way in which these memetic parasites sling around the very words they simultaneously claim to be meaningless is downright embarrassing.

The Sports Gal may not be in the Sports Guy’s league, but she’s pretty funny in her own right. Universal Press Syndicate should just go ahead and sign their little girl to a column already:

You already know about the traffic in L.A., but now that it’s Xmas season, even parking has become impossible. Fortunately I happen to be married to a guy with the self-proclaimed “parking gene.” (Apparently this runs in the family because his dad thinks he has it, too.) Every so often, Bill stumbles upon the perfect spot — like last week, when I made him stop at Pinkberry (the greatest frozen yogurt shop ever) and he found a space right in front, then spent the next 30 seconds congratulating himself. He was so pleased. It’s too bad they can’t have the League of Dorks for finding parking spaces, I’m sure he’d be in three leagues and calling his buddy Hench every time he found a good space so they could calculate the standings….

If I’m ever found dead in a parking garage, skip the autopsy and just assume that I died of a carbon monoxide overdose or my bladder exploded while Bill was circling around looking for the perfect space.

Of course, they’re doomed.

UPDATE: Bill Simmons is very, very happy right now. I just read the following on Sports Illustrated.

Cincinnati Bengals cornerback Deltha O’Neal was charged with driving while intoxicated early Saturday morning after being stopped at a traffic checkpoint, the State Highway Patrol said…. O’Neal, a seven-year veteran, is the eighth Bengals player arrested this year on various charges.

That comes only hours after read this:Now that we have that settled — what about seven Bengals players getting arrested out of 53? That’s 13 percent of the team! Imagine if 13 percent of your office or classroom had been arrested in the past few months? Can they get to 10 before the end of the season? You figure with holiday parties coming, that’s good for one DUI. And the holidays bring visitors and family members, which usually brings trouble, so that’s good for some sort of incident at a party or a club. So we only need one more wild-card arrest — something harmless like speeding and attempting to evade an officer, or shoplifting a Christmas present of something — and then we’ll be at 10. Now that would be something. Ten Bengals arrested in one year? We’ll be telling our grandkids about that one. Keep your fingers crossed.

No doubt Jamie will prefer to read this version of the blog.

I think my favorite part was the way in which it translated two of the lesser teams in the VPFL:

5-8-0 Pizzy Horse Cowboys
4-9-0 Wizzay Texas Ho-slappin’

Truer words, my friends, truer words.