Category: Uncategorized

The Regression to the Mean wants a new plan:

THE most common cliché about the war in Iraq is now this: We didn’t have a plan, and now everything is in chaos; we didn’t have a plan, and now we can’t win.

This is entirely wrong. We did have a plan – the problem is that the plan didn’t work. And of course we can win – we just have to choose to do so.

The problem with our plan is that it wasn’t actually a military plan.

Please. I’ve been mocking the plan for literally years now. We had a plan, it was the neocons’ neo-Wilsonian World Democratic Revolution, which has managed to put Hamas into power and give a serious boost to Hezbollah and the Islamic Jihad, all three of which are popular movements which the most brain-dead strategist would expect to do well in any quasi-democratic environment.

The point that Podhoretz, the neocons and many Three Monkey Republicans and well-intentioned warbloggers all can’t seem to get through their heads is that simply repeating mindless mantras such as “we are at war” and “withdrawal is not an option” and “we just have to choose to do so” is not tantamount to convincing anyone of anything. If you find this a difficult concept, I recommend you try inserting yourself into the next woman you encounter on the street and telling her that “withdrawal is not an option”.

No doubt she’ll find that “argument” about as persuasive as the Shiite militias and the American public do.

Podhoretz is technically correct. We can win the occupation by utilizing either the British or Roman military method. Of course, this means we’d either have to kill and enslave many millions of Arabs, or alternatively, find hundreds of thousands of colonists to move into new villas built at US expense along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

Actually, there is a method of killing two birds with one stone and it would likely work better than anything else on the cards. Round up the 12-15 million illegal aliens currently invading America and settle them all in Iraq. Set up a free trade zone between this new protectorate and the USA. The immigrant-colonists get the benefit of the American rule they are seeking plus jobs in the oil industry as well as jobs providing food, clothing and sex to those working in the oil industry, Americans get rid of the crime and cultural problems they bring as well as the pressure on wage rates, the immigrant-colonists become the focus of Arab ire ala the Israelis thus keeping the hot zone well away from New York and Washington DC, and eventually the culture of the Middle East is gradually transformed rather than that of America.

Of course, this is totally impossible as it would require both Caesarian genius and a Roman degree of ruthlessness in order to implement it, but it does have the advantage of being both theoretically feasible as well as fully respectful of American rights. Naturally, anyone who seriously calls for this would be regarded as a complete lunatic.

Much better to stick with meaningless platitudes better suited for college football and fake wrestling while American rights and culture fade into the ashes of history.

We are at war! We can win if we choose! Win one for the Gipper!

Not as long as there are women sitting on the pub board, anyhow. Dr. Helen repeats Hog on Ice’s question:

Self-help experts tell us men need to change. Men need to be sensitive and submissive and put products in their hair and use moisturizer, because if we don’t, it makes women feel bad. Okay, it makes us feel bad when women yammer all day. So why aren’t the experts telling women to shut up?

Here’s a thought. Maybe it’s because ninety percent of self-help customers are women. They pay idiots like Oprah and Dr. Phil to tell them they’re right about everything, and they get what they want. If I wrote a book called Keep Your Man by Shutting up Once in a While and Occasionally Putting Out When You Don’t Want Something, I’d be preaching a vital and timely message. But nobody would buy it.

Actually the success of Maddox and Tucker Max suggests that such a book would sell very well indeed. The numbers for “Screwing Themselves: Why No One Wants to Marry Thirty-something Women” were projected to be quite good, but the project was killed at the sole behest of the single, forty-something woman on the pub board, who vehemently objected to Thomas Nelson being associated with such an obviously evil book.

Because so many women have fascist instincts, their initial reaction to criticism is to shut it down and attack any aspect that can even remotely be interpreted reflecting on them personally. Seriously, how many women do you know can bear even the smallest amount of criticism about how they vaccuum the carpet or change the oil? Two percent? So, unless an expert is either masochistic or supremely indifferent to the opinions of others, he’s not going to challenge the female thought police.

On the other hand, men always resent being controlled so even as the thought police wax in public influence, male opinion hardens in private. It is not a coincidence that at the same time that one can no longer say chairman or refer to “girls” at work, the best-selling music and games are filled with violent references to bitches and hos. How can this be? Because there are very few women in positions of influence in the music and games publishing industries compared to the number in the book publishing industry.

Personally, I find it very amusing that in these supposedly equalitarian times, the most famous and influential women in the world are being reduced to exposing their naked genitals in public. Feminism really is a great force for female dignity, isn’t it….

But I still haven’t answered the question. Would I buy that book? No, but then, I’m not given to reading books devoted to informing me of the wetness of water or the liberal inclinations of college professors either.

1. Opening up the back of my car in London and seeing the back of someone’s head in the driver’s seat. “Excuse me, what are you doing in my car?” It seems he was after the DVD player, but the situation was resolved amicably enough.

2. “It’s just a publicity stunt….” Those who say this haven’t been paying attention to the publishing industry of late. If you want to get published, your four best options are a) release a sex tape, b) get very, very large breast implants, or c) become a very successful professional athlete, d) get that rapping career started.

Selling books these days has virtually nothing to do with the writing.

3. A word of warning for those who ordered or were thinking of ordering a certain little book. The quality on the first run is somewhat disappointing, as the printer made two mistakes. The book is not perfect-bound but bound like a magazine, and the illustrations follow the text, they aren’t on facing pages. Just FYI. On the other hand, the illustrations are really cute. These things will be corrected on the second run.

4. The NFL Game Pass is a must if you’re on the road. However, do mind your start time. The 24 hours viewing period expired just after Romo hit Whitten with thirty seconds left in the Dallas-New York game, shutting off the video stream. I think people are harsher on Manning than he deserves, but man, Romo is impressive. I found myself thinking of Elway with those deep rollout passes downfield, especially that last one in the clutch.

5. 5110 3Dmark06. Yeah, baby. Oh yeah. That’s not a laptop, that’s a lapdance.

76 Newport Sea Dogs
62 East Mesa WhiteTrash

76 West Texas Vikings
51 Burns Montgomerys

71 Mounds View Meerkats
64 Pale Horse Cowboys

55 Mile High Club
46 Santa Barbarians

54 Greenfield Grizzlies
34 COS McRays

Supernaut’s bitter post-game comments made me laugh: “Take a look at your bench. And see Reggie Bush’s 4 TD day wasted away…and then take comfort that were it not for the beating the Chicago Defense gave to the Vikings, you would have lost to EQ and I.”

It’s hardly a waste when you win. Of course I wouldn’t be winning without the Chicago D, although I think Peyton Manning, Jeff Wilkins and Fast Willie have also performed very well for me this season. But then, erhaps that’s why I drafted Chicago two rounds before anyone else bothered to pick up a defense.

“So where you cheering or jeering when the Bears INT Brad Johnson 4 times, or sacked Bollinger or forced TJ to fumble? Because other than Chicago, the rest of your roster did JACK.”

I don’t know if I would say “JACK” considering the rest of my roster still tied the Barbarians, outscored the McRays, and that’s without Reggie’s 31 points. As for your question, I was neither cheering nor jeering, only wincing. I take no pleasure in any Vikings loss, although the 25 points was a definite silver lining.

And yes, WB, you are welcome for your current first place position….

Yeah, I don’t think so:

The dream of a libertarian-liberal alliance has been a staple of libertarian strategizing forever. Lindsey’s boss, Ed Crane, has trotted it out every few years since Cato was founded in the ‘70s. Before Crane, it was a bedrock precept of Murray Rothbard, the true mastermind of American libertarianism. Rothbard adopted this strategy around 1950.

The hinge of the strategy is something Lindsey doesn’t discuss: foreign policy. Rothbard’s foreign policy trademark was radical non-interventionism – WWII, WWI, Viet Nam, Civil War, Cold War, doesn’t matter. He was opposed to all of them. The idea of liberals aligning with libertarians is based on their common hostility to American foreign policy. That was true in 1950, and it’s true today.

It’s a strategy as foolish as it is unprincipled. Liberals, in the modern America sense of the word, FAVOR GOVERNMENT EXPANSION. Foreign adventurism is a very good way to justify this, which is why liberals such as Woodrow Wilson, FDR and Bill Clinton have been every bit as exo-interventionist as faux conservatives George Bush, George W. Bush and Richard Nixon.

There is no grand alliance that will bring libertarians into power. Too many people love government and its seductive promises at this time. The only thing to do is to continue to seek the truth and speak the truth as best one understands it.

DJ Gallo is actually funny on occasion:

New England very nearly lost to the Detroit Lions. At home. But of course the Patriots are fine heading into the playoffs. It would be wrong to question them in any way. Anyone who looks past the Pats is simply falling into Bill Belichick’s trap. Underestimate him at your own risk, but all you will see is a loss. And your wife in his arms.

You might not think that Bill Belichick is an irresistible romantic force. You might look at those sagging shoulders, that ratty, sleeveless old grey hoody that he wears with almost a complete absence of the panache displayed by clothes horses like Mike Nolan and Pat Riley, that bleary-eyed seeming indifference to life, the universe and everything, and conclude that here is a man who has no chance with any woman, let alone yours.

And that’s just what Bill wants you to think. Because he is the cobra of love. What most people don’t realize is that Tom Brady actually looks like Martin Gramatica and throws like Tim Robbins, only the Belichick has mesmerized everyone into believing differently.

In like manner, Brad Johnson is actually a washed-up, ex-quarterback who has lost his ability to read a defense… okay, that’s not fair. I like Brad as a backup, but I still don’t know what Childress was thinking by deciding to go with him as a starter. Of course, it could be worse. He could be Rex Grossman.

Yikes, that may have been the worst quarterbacked game I’ve seen in my life.

I’m reasonably sure that this wasn’t a case of a column getting killed as happened once before with the infamous “Fascists and Faggotry” piece four years ago, but for whatever reason, my column wasn’t up today.

So, in case you were curious, here it is:

Godless Criminals

One of the more unexpected themes in the critical responses to my three “Clowns of Reason” columns was the counterintuitive assertion that atheists are more moral than religious individuals in general and Christians in particular. This assertion was usually supported by various rationalizations, one historical, one theoretical and one statistical.

The historical argument for atheist morality is the most easily addressed, as it is simply a variant on the demonstrably false “religion causes war” claim. The critic usually pointed to the Spanish Inquisition or the European witch-burnings and said: “see, atheists don’t burn people at the stake.” Well, that’s technically true, although since atheists are currently crushing Christian skulls with bulldozers in North Korea and beating them to death in China, it’s an argument that is as nonsensical as it is outdated.

The theoretical argument is that since atheists don’t require the threat of punishment in the afterlife to behave morally in the here and now, they are better, more moral individuals. Of course, this would be true, if it could be established that they were, in fact, better behaved… and that they possessed a universal morality to which their behavior could be reasonably compared.

Now, some atheists have claimed that the irreligious are better behaved in term of Christian morality, but little evidence to support this has been offered, while John Stossel and Arthur Brooks have both found that “the single biggest predictor of whether someone will be charitable is their religious participation”; religious people give four times more than the non-religious.

Charity, of course, is far from the only measure of morality. And this leads us to the third argument, the statistical one. It should come as a surprise to no one that the last and least of Reason’s clowns leans heavily upon it; in his latest proselytistic pamphlet, “Letter to a Christian Nation, Sam Harris writes:

While political party affiliation in the United States is not a perfect indicator of religiosity, it is no secret that the “red states” are primarily red because of the overwhelming political influence of conservative Christians. If there were a strong correlation between Christian conservatism and social health, we might expect to see some sign of it in red-state America. We don’t. Of the twenty-five cities with the lowest rates of violent crime, 62 percent are in “blue” states and 38 percent are in “red” states…. Of the twenty-two states with the highest rates of murder, seventeen are red.

As with so much that Harris writes, this immediately triggers the thinking man’s bovine ejectus detector. Since Christian conservatives aren’t generally known to be big city dwellers, the implication would seem to be that Texas Christians are driving into Houston, Dallas and San Antonio to wreak lethal havoc. Of course, as with his blatant errors on war and suicide bombers, it’s easy enough to prove that Harris not only has it wrong, but backwards.

Consider Florida, which went Republican in 2004. It has 67 counties, and the ten which supported John Kerry most heavily, (thus, by Harris’ reckoning, the least religious), were home to 367 murders in 2006. The ten counties wherein Bush found his strongest support, on the other hand, had only 19. Even taking population differences into account, the murder rate per 100,000 in the “blue” counties was more than twice that of the “red” counties, 4.7 to 2.0. And the two most murderous counties in the state, Gadsden and Madison, averaged a murder rate of 13.9 to go with their 60 percent support for the Democrat.

It is clearly perverse, bordering on the intellectually dishonest, to attempt charging these godless “blue-county” murders to the religious “red-state” account.

Nor are American statistics the only means of demonstrating a godless proclivity for crime, the inherent problem of equating legality with morality notwithstanding. A comparison of a 2000 survey of the British prison population with the 2001 national census revealed that whereas individuals claiming atheism or no religion make up only 15.5 percent of the British population, they comprise 31.9 percent of those imprisoned.

Of course, it stands to reason that those who do not believe in Biblical morality would not subscribe to it. The fact that so many atheists behave as well as anyone else is not testimony to superior atheist morality, but rather, the moral inertia fortuitously intrinsic to Western civilization.

UPDATE – the commentary editor emails: This is the first we’ve seen this column. Did you send it in earlier? I’ll put up your piece now and run it tomorrow as well.

See? No worries.

One hardly knows where to begin with this one:

Bob Greifeld, the chief executive of the Nasdaq stock market, admitted under oath that he did not understand how to calculate gross profit margin, one of the most rudimentary formulas in business accounting.

The admission is humiliating for Mr Greifefld, an MBA graduate who is in the thick of a hostile bid to take over the London Stock Exchange, one of the most significant moves of his career.

I’m not sure which this is a worse condemnation of, the Nasdaq, the American education system as a whole or the business schools. Anyone who lauds the stock markets as some sort of fabulous capitalist tool should first be punched in the face, then forced to read the linked article.

It also raises some very hard questions about the legitimacy of those ridiculous CEO compensation packages. The stock market is primarily one of the many means of elevating the managerial class above the genuinely productive classes, one has to cling pretty desperately to theory in the face of all the evidence to insist that it has anything to do with genuine capitalism.

One does wonder how this math wizard got that plum job. Please, please tell me that Wall Street doesn’t have its equivalent of the casting couch… brrrrrrr.

Anyhow, gross profit margin = (total revenue – cost of sales)/total revenue. It’s not exactly rocket science. I’ve learned better than to assume what will happen, but in a rational world, Nasdaq futures would be heading south on Monday.

John Hawkins’ is collecting the votes again. Here’s mine:

1) The Funniest Blog

1. The Dilbert Blog. 2. Fraters Libertas. 3. The Reaper’s Hairball (aka BaneRants). 4. Feministe. (Hey, unintentional humor counts too.) 5. The Original Cyberpunk’s Ranting Room.

2) Best Designed Blog

They pretty much all suck from a design perspective. One of the many reasons I just stick with the standard Blogger template. No vote.

3) Most Missed (The best blog that’s out of business now)

Sixteen Volts. I don’t know what his deal was or why he quit, but I liked it even though he now repudiates everything. Honorable mention: The Dark Window. I miss my nemesis and still have not found an adequate replacement for lo, these many moons.

4) Best Original Reporting By A Blog

Got to be Powerline. Honorable mention to Captain Ed.

5) Best Blog Round-Up Site (Best website/blog to go to see the
top/most interesting stories in the blogosphere for the day)

1. Icerocket. 2. Technorati

6) Favorite Columnist Who’s Not A Blogger

1. Fred Reed. 2. John Derbyshire. 3. Pat Buchanan. 4. Ramesh Ponnuru. 5. Thomas Sowell.

7) Least Liked Columnist Who’s Not A Blogger

1. Maureen Dowd. 2. Susan Estrich. 3. John Podhoretz. 4. Ben Shapiro. 5. The Gay Mustacio

8) Favorite Political Website That’s Not A Blog

WorldNetDaily. Still weird, sadly not as good as it’s been in the past, but you still find interesting pieces there that you just won’t find anywhere else. And I’m not talking about my column, but rather Jack Cahill, Joseph Farah and the original reporting. Honorable mention to NRO, the trashy twosome of J-Pod and K-Lo notwithstanding.

9) Favorite Left-Of-Center Blogger

1. John Scalzi, Whatever. 2. Charles Stross 3. Scott Adams, The Dilbert Blog.

10) Most Annoying Left-Of-Center Blogger

Amynda of Pandagon.

11) Most Annoying Right-Of-Center Blogger

Michelle Malkin. Hands down.

12) Most Overrated Blog

1. Powerline. 2. Daily Kos. 3. Michelle Malkin. 4. Instapundit. Don’t get me wrong, Powerline is great, especially if you’re in the mood for serious politics as sport. But it’s not reinventing the brass pole, okay?

13) Best Linker

Instapundit. That’s what he does. He does it well.

14) The Best Original Content For A Blog

Zapata King… just kidding. Bulletproof Pimp. Evangelical Outpost. There isn’t enough original content out there, including here. Although I like to think that the ebooks mitigate that somewhat.

15) Best Blog Overall

NRO’s The Corner. I wish it wasn’t usually dominated by Three Monkey Republican grooming each other and that they were more willing to engage in serious intramural scrimmaging, but nevertheless, it’s the best, most reliably entertaining blog I read on a regular basis.

I don’t think most men need to worry about marrying a serial husband-killer, but this commenter at Dr. Helen’s blog offers some good advice anyhow:

As I see it, the objectives for any young man these days should be as follows:

1. Make absolutely 100% certain that at least until you are in your early/mid thirties, you don’t get married, don’t get any woman pregnant and if whatever legal jurisdiction you are in has or gets palimony laws, you don’t get involved in any ‘relationship’ with a woman whereby she can lay claim to your assets or future income.

2. Get your career on track

3. Live abroad for a while – if you don’t do it in your twenties, you probably won’t do it until you retire, if at all.

4. While you’re living abroad, get a foreign passport and bank account. Choose a country that is not overly compliant with your current jurisdiction and if possible make sure the bank account is non-interest bearing so you don’t have to declare it on you tax forms. Never transfer money to or from that account.

5. Never go near a woman who is a feminist, a divorcee, claims she has been abused or is otherwise weird or has a victim mentality.

I’d add one more point:

6. Unless you are religious or want children, don’t even consider marriage. Seriously, there are tremendous potential costs and comparatively few potential benefits for men in marriages without those two elements, given that so few women now view marriage as a prerequisite to a full and intimate relationship. And given the current child support laws, even the motivation of wanting children is unreliable. If you’re only popping the question because she’s pressuring you, well, all I can say is enjoy your slide into Gamma Male Hell.

While there are women who aren’t self-centered sociopaths ready to unleash the full fury of the man-hating “legal” system on you, they are generally the sort of traditional, religious women who won’t cohabitate or engage in a faux marriage relationship in the first place. It’s really not all that hard to distinguish the gems from the gorgons… always listen carefully to your friends and family’s opinions, it’s much harder to fool those who don’t aren’t being provided with a constantly reinforcing endorphin-reward loop.

It’s hard to imagine a single reason to marry a woman who isn’t a believing and practicing Christian, (unless I was Jewish, Muslim or whatever). Well, I suppose there’s the whole heiress/rich girl game henceforth to be known as the “Federline”, but unless she’s worth a lot more than you are financially, why would you bother? More importantly, how can you afford to dare?