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I’m not a big YouTube poster – Joe Namath’s Greatest Moment excepted – but this is pretty funny. Jonah Goldberg rightly cites it as one of the many fundamental dividing points between liberals and libertarians.

It doesn’t quite ring true, of course. The woman is nowhere nearly fat enough.

AEI senior fellow Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, who joined the Institute in 1978, died yesterday. As a young political scientist at Georgetown University, Kirkpatrick wrote the first major study of the role of women in modern politics, Political Woman, which was published in 1974. Her work on the McGovern-Fraser Commission, which was formed in the aftermath of the Democratic Party’s tumultuous 1968 convention and changed the way party delegates were chosen, led to Dismantling the Parties: Reflections on Party Reform and Party Decomposition, which AEI published in 1978. Yet it was an essay written for Commentary magazine in 1979, “Dictatorships and Double Standards” (later expanded into a full-length book), that launched her into the political limelight. In the article, Kirkpatrick chronicled the failures of the Carter administration’s foreign policy and argued for a clearer understanding of the American national interest. Her essay matched Ronald Reagan’s instincts and convictions, and when he became president, he appointed her to represent the United States at the United Nations. Ambassador Kirkpatrick was a member of the president’s cabinet and the National Security Council. The United States has lost a great patriot and champion of freedom, and AEI mourns our beloved colleague.

As a young Reagan Republican, I very much admired Jeane Kirkpatrick. She was certainly a staunch anti-communist, although as my political understanding has grown more sophisticated over the years, I developed a few reservations about her stance on women in politics and political parties. Given what we know now, it is difficult to argue that the changes for which Kirkpatrick pressed have been positive in terms of the freedom that she valued so. And yet there can be no question that she was genuinely devoted to the cause of human liberty.

I only met her once, in Washington DC at a party. She was less formidable in person that she appeared in print, but she was very pleasant and her intelligence was obvious to even the most casual observer. I consider it an honor to have met her and those who value freedom would do well to raise a glass to her memory tonight.

Hollywood could be in for a taste of its own liberal medicine:

A new study by the UCLA School of Law and UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center finds that Latino, black, Asian American and Native American actors have few acting opportunities available to them….

The study found that 69% of the roles were reserved for white actors and another 8.5% were open to white actors as well as non-white actors. Actors of color were limited to between .5% and about 8% of the roles, depending on racial background. “Casting directors take into account race and sex in a way that would be blatantly illegal in any other industry,” Robinson said. “Many actors accept this as normal, but depending on the facts of the case, lawsuits can be filed.” He believes that, in many instances, taking race and sex into account for acting roles violates Title VII of the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination. According to Robinson, many casting breakdowns currently restrict, without any strong narrative justification, the sex and race of the actors who may audition.

Burn, Hollywood, burn. I do wonder, though, if blacks and Jews aren’t seriously overrepresented on television. I don’t watch a great deal of TV, but I have noticed rather more of both than one would expect, and far fewer Asians, Hispanics and Somalis.

In any case, this is a petard-hoisting that is long overdue.

UPDATE: Upon further review, it seems that white Americans can join that class action suit against Hollywood. “White American is the largest racial group counted in the 2000 Census, comprising 77.1 percent of the population.”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but my impression is that 77.1 percent is greater than 69 percent. And if one counts “roles that are open to white actors”, that’s 77.5 percent, which is nearly spot-on from a racist equity point of view. (Did I say racist? I meant RACIAL, of course….) But as I mentioned before, I suspect that there are too many blacks on television, mostly at Hispanic and Asian expense.

This is hardly a surprise:

“In 1995, I published a short paper in the academic journal Science. In that study, I reviewed how borehole temperature data recorded a warming of about one degree Celsius in North America over the last 100 to 150 years. The week the article appeared, I was contacted by a reporter for National Public Radio. He offered to interview me, but only if I would state that the warming was due to human activity. When I refused to do so, he hung up on me.

“I had another interesting experience around the time my paper in Science was published. I received an astonishing email from a major researcher in the area of climate change. He said, “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.” “The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was a time of unusually warm weather that began around 1000 AD and persisted until a cold period known as the “Little Ice Age” took hold in the 14th century. … The existence of the MWP had been recognized in the scientific literature for decades. But now it was a major embarrassment to those maintaining that the 20th century warming was truly anomalous. It had to be “gotten rid of.”

“In 1999, Michael Mann and his colleagues published a reconstruction of past temperature in which the MWP simply vanished. This unique estimate became known as the “hockey stick,” because of the shape of the temperature graph. “Normally in science, when you have a novel result that appears to overturn previous work, you have to demonstrate why the earlier work was wrong. But the work of Mann and his colleagues was initially accepted uncritically, even though it contradicted the results of more than 100 previous studies. Other researchers have since reaffirmed that the Medieval Warm Period was both warm and global in its extent.

First of all, it’s impossible to convince anyone from Minnesota that “global warming” is a bad thing. Unless you’ve stood outside at a bus stop for 45 minutes in -40 wind chills, waiting for a school bus, you can’t fully understand that the idea of a warmer planet sounds pretty darn good. Furthermore, it’s quite obvious to every Minnesotan that the planet has been getting warmer for a very long time, considering that THE ENTIRE STATE USED TO BE COVERED WITH GLACIERS!!!!!

Furthermore, anyone with a background in medieval history is well aware of the medieval warm period… how on Earth would the Vikings have established agricultural communities in Greenland that lasted for almost 500 years if its average annual temperature was -11C then as it is now? It’s not as if they had the benefit of Dan Marino and his Isotoners, after all.

“Global warming” is little more than the latest excuse for the expansion of central government power. It has been cooked up to replace the dead concept of Marxism and the dying concept of Keynesian economics.

Whenever one considers the general “consensus” on anything, always keep in mind that most people are unthinking, maleducated idiots.

From the Telegraph:

A cuckolded husband was banned by the High Court yesterday from naming a married public figure who conducted an affair with his wife. In what is believed to be the first case of its kind, Mr Justice Eady granted the adulterer — who may be identified only as CC — an injunction against the betrayed husband, referred to as AB….

The judge granted an injunction preventing AB from communicating, directly or indirectly, with the media or on the internet on the subject of his wife’s former relationship. Unless amended, the order will remain until a full hearing, planned for Feb 12.

In his ruling, the judge said: “There is a powerful argument that the conduct of an intimate or sexual relationship is a matter in respect of which there is ‘a reasonable expectation of privacy’.”

This is a powerful demonstration of the way that Western government are increasingly taking positions which not only attack traditional morality, but do so in a manner that demonstrates their intrinsic opposition to the very rights which they are supposedly protecting.

One would think that the “reasonable expectation of privacy” would easily, automatically, be trumped by the husband’s free speech and economic freedom rights, after all, one cannot slander someone so long as one speaks the truth, nor should one be prevented from profiting from his unique knowledge. That is, after all, the entire premise of the media business, that people will pay for knowledge they do not currently possess.

There is something deeper here. The pattern that reveals the pernicious spiritual element at works is the way in which that which is sin is increasingly protected by the force of government, whereas that which imposes any of the natural costs of sin upon itself is increasingly attacked.

Nothing positive will ever come of those who call good evil and evil good.

Well, it would explain why so many feminists look like Sasquatches.

Diversified social roles for men, women, and children may have given Homo sapiens an advantage over Neanderthals, says a new study in the December 2006 issue of Current Anthropology. The study argues that division of economic labor by sex and age emerged relatively recently in human evolutionary history and facilitated the spread of modern humans throughout Eurasia.

“The competitive advantage enjoyed by modern humans came not just from new weapons and devices but from the ways in which their economic lives were organized around the advantages of cooperation and complementary subsistence roles for men, women, and children,” write Steven L. Kuhn and Mary C. Stiner (University of Arizona).

Kuhn and Stiner note that the rich archaeological record for Neanderthal diets provides little direct evidence for a reliance on subsistence foods, such as milling stones to grind nuts and seeds. Instead, Neanderthals depended on large game, a high-stakes resource, to fuel their massive body mass and high caloric intake. This lack of food diversity and the presence of healed fractures on Neanderthal skeletons—attesting to a rough-and-tumble lifestyle—suggest that female and juvenile Neanderthals participated actively in the hunt by serving as game drivers, beating bushes or cutting off escape routes.

Feminism isn’t progressive, it’s social evolution in reverse. As others have mentioned, if everything was left to women we’d all be living in caves, albeit nicely decorated ones. And the more that female influence on the body politic grows, the more it looks as if humanity will be returning to those caves.

An interview with Mr. Charles Stross:

Last year, you released your novel Accelerando in a free electronic version at the same time the hardcover version of the novel debuted. What did this do for the sales of the book or when it came time for awards consideration? Would you do it again if you could?

The free electronic version of Accelerando is an interesting question. It had about 60,000 downloads in its first two months; in the same period, the hardcover edition pretty much sold out and had to be reprinted (and it had a larger print run than my previous SF novel).

It’s very hard to prove that a free ebook edition of a novel either helped or hindered the sales of a paper edition published at the same time, but the email feedback I’ve had from readers has typically been along the lines of “thanks for making the ebook available, I have now bought a couple of your other books”, or “I read the ebook then bought the hardcover just so I could have it on dead tree as well”. Which is encouraging.

I also believe that the free ebook route is going to become increasingly important in the reader award ballots over the next few years (especially the Hugo awards, which are voted on by the public in the shape of members of the World Science Fiction Society). Over the past few years, it’s become almost impossible to win a Hugo without releasing a short story or novella on-line for the voters to read, as magazine circulations have declined so far that the voters are unfamiliar with the entire range of published stories for a given year. I think the same is, to a lesser extent, happening withnovels, as witness the 2006 shortlist (in which all the novels were available as downloads for the Hugo voters).

As for whether I’d do it again if I could … yes, I would. Contractual arrangements prevented me from doing so with my last SF novel, Glasshouse (essentially, it was published at different times in different countries, and my publishers quite reasonably objected to a free download appearing months before the readers could buy their paper editions), but I hope to be able to repeat the promotion again with a forthcoming book.

I can’t say that I’ve seen similar results with the ebooks available here – actually, I have absolutely no idea how many people downloaded them, except I’m sure it’s well short of 60,000. The forthcoming ebook for “The Wrath of Angels” will be a better test, as I’m probably only going to print 200 of them in the first run so it will be interesting to see if word gets out that the book is available or not.

In any event, “The Jennifer Morgue” is definitely on my Christmas list…. If you haven’t read “Accelerando” or “The Atrocity Archive”, I highly recommend both.

Kurtz comes at the social problem of atheism from a different angle:

Conservatives like George Weigel (The Cube and the Cathedral), Claire Berlinski (Menace in Europe), and Mark Steyn (America Alone) argue that Europe is being slowly killed off by its secularism. These authors root demographic decline, and the reluctance to stand up to Islamist foes, in a secular presentism, unconcerned with the existence or fate of future generations. I think Weigel, Berlinski, and Steyn have got a point, but it can certainly be debated.

Take a look at Russia, however, and you see a country with decades more experience of atheism than Western Europe, and a far more advanced case of demographic decline. To be sure, there are plenty of confounding factors that need to be acknowledged and accounted for. But as a candidate for the case that atheism has serious real-world costs, Russia is at the top of the list.

It is significant, I think, to note that Harris happened to leave out all of the countries of Eastern Europe from his discussion of social health in “Letter to a Christian Nation”. While he brings up the examples of France and the Scandinavian countries as being shining paragons of atheist paradise, the omission of those countries where atheism has been established longer and more powerfully is so obvious as to approach the appearance of disingenuousness at a minimum.

If it were someone else, one would have to give them the benefit of the doubt. But Harris has been caught out so often, and so badly, in making factual errors and engaging in deceptive spin, that it’s more likely more intellectual dishonesty on his part.

Even though I hadn’t read it in years, I was a little depressed to hear that the venerable Computer Gaming World magazine was being folded into a lifeless Microsofted bastard publication entitled Games for Windows. However, the discovery of this PDF archive cheered me up greatly, especially since I’d once tried to put together my own comprehensive collection of CGWs back in the early 1990s when Pocket and I had been discussing the possibility of an Encyclopedia of Electronic Games.

Unfortunately, not even CGW had a complete collection, having somehow lost many magazines in the move from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Or perhaps it was the other way, I can’t remember now.

It’s interesting to see how perceptive some of the early reviewers were. Wizardry was rightly identified as an instant classic, suitable for the then nonexistent Hall of Fame. On the other hand, I think most gamers would be surprised to know that SSI’s Kampfgruppe won game of the year in 1985, beating out the excellent Ultima III.

Derb ruins one’s day:

I had a conversation once with “Theodore” (real name Tony) about whether there was any particular literary approach common to doctor-writers like Somerset Maugham (not much read now, but a great storyteller), Smollett (ditto), and Chekhov. We concluded that there was—a certain detachment and distance, obviously essential requirements for a job which consists in part of watching people die.

Forget it. Henceforth, I’m cheering on the feminists, the globalists and the jihadis. Western civilization doesn’t deserve to survive. A society that can’t be bothered to read Maugham is a society that is dead to me.

And how much more does it deserve to be damned considering that it’s not even as if our scivilization has cast aside Maugham in favor of halfway-interesting things, (such as the ur-Gesamtkunstwerk of Doom III, for example,) but for fawning over wretched creatures such as the Three Airheads of the Apocalypse.

Not much read now indeed.