Category: Uncategorized

France has sent a stiff complaint to Brussels about the European Union’s choice of logo to commemorate its 50th birthday next year. The offending image, a child-like rendition of the English word together, does nothing to serve the cause of European unity, the French Government claims.

Their objections come after a shower of rude comment throughout Europe about the logo, which was chosen at a cost of €200,000 (£134,000) last month by a jury of experts from EU institutions and member states. The winning entry from among 1,700 submissions was the work of a Polish art student. A common gibe on the internet is that the jumbled letters evoke a ransom note more than festive celebration of the 1957 Treaty of Rome. The full slogan says: “Together since 1957”.

The interesting thing is that for most of those 50 years, the citizens of the EU did not realize they were subject to Brussels. I wonder when we’ll be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the American Union? My guess is 2042.

We are all Mexamericanadians now.

I may be somewhat of an anti-abortion extremist, but I have to say that I have seen better cases against the ongoing atrocity than this unusual one:

Imagine what our cultural conversation would have been without… Juan Ruiz de Alarcon, the 17th century Mexican dramatist, who also was a hunchback and wrote some 20 dramas including “La Verdad Sospechosa.”

Actually, that’s really not all that hard for, oh, I don’t know, PRETTY MUCH EVERYONE! Seriously, while there’s certainly a time to show off your knowledge of obscure literary figures, any such urge is probably better resisted while making an argument designed to play on the emotions of the masses.

And the long list of “accomplished people with birth defects” doesn’t strike me as all that impressive considering that it starts with a retired ice skater and a Congressman dead for more than a century.

Next time, stick with Byron, baby. You can’t go wrong with Byron… okay, you can, and in fact probably will, but you’ll have a good time anyhow.

From the Sunday Telegraph:

Labour heartland turning to BNP, warns Cruddas

More and more disgruntled Labour voters are switching to support the far-right British National Party, deputy leadership hopeful Jon Cruddas will warn today. Mr Cruddas, a former Downing Street aide, will suggest people in Labour heartlands have lost hope and turned to the BNP in protest at mainstream politics….

“There are signs that the fascist party is becoming a home for many disgruntled former Labour voters.”

The human ability to rationalize away clear and incontravertible evidence in favor of its cherished beliefs never ceases to astound me. Setting aside the question of whether the BNP is actually fascist or not, this movement of left-wingers towards fascism is not the mysterious and unusual counter-intuitive phenomenon it is usually described to be. From the very start, when the Socialist Mussolini first penned the Manifesto of the Fascist struggle, leftists from British suffragettes to Le Pen supporters have been drawn to the evolved form of socialism that is fascism.

One would think the fact that fascist parties inevitably draw primarily from other left-wing parties would suffice to demonstrate its nature, (never mind the host of similarities between the ideologies and governing practices), but it seems that many, if not most, leftists are more than happy to sacrifice consistency and credibility in favor of baseless attack propaganda.

Of course, as various faux conservatives have shown with their silly accusations of “Islamo-fascists” and “Nazi libertarians”, this is not solely a left-wing phenomenon.

And Steven Gordon is unimpressed. Well, perhaps Mr. Medved will be able to find consolation with a nice, tender massage from Mike Jones, as I understand he has a client opening:

Medved was up to his usual name calling as he blamed the Republican loss in the Senate on third party candidates. Here’s a clip:

Montana provides an even more alarming example. Democratic John Tester beat the Republican incumbent Conrad Burns by a margin of less than 3,000 votes. At the same time, Libertarian standard bearer Stan Jones drew 10,324 votes. In general, Libertarians draw more than two-thirds of their votes directly from Republicans. Once again, the Stan Jones juggernaut (which earned an anemic 2.6% of the total vote) drew more than enough support to change the course of history for the worse.

In what must of been some sort of intellectual challenge for him, he didn’t call us “Losertarians” more than once in the Townhall.com article. He made up for it by slinging a few words like sucker, fringe, kook and crazy. For some reason he forgot to call us Nazi-lovers, as he did recently to libertarian Vox Day.

You don’t earn the votes, you don’t get the votes. So much for that pragmatic Big Tent, Strong Government Republicanism. Naturally the flaming little film enthusiast believes the correct solution to losing is whine and try to to change the rules… so who’s the Losertarian now, Mr. Mustache?

DJ begins to grok:

Now that the Dems won in this last election, I now see why you take the fight to the “heretic and apostates” within our ranks. The American people have become disenfranchised with the Republican leadership, and rightly so. They have put their own interests ahead of the voters, and now they are paying for it.

I can honestly say that you have opened my eyes.

The important thing to remember is that “Republican” is just another label. Politicians, even more so than other people, must be judged by their concrete actions, and not by their words and affiliations.

The particular significance of this email is that it came from a gentleman whose last email to me was entitled “Anti-conservative, as usual”.

The Lizard Queen sheds her skin again in preparation for her ascension to the Cherry Blossom Throne:

Liberal Democrats such as the membership of the activist organization MoveOn.org want the party to investigate the administration’s case for the Iraq war and instances of possible corporate misconduct. By contrast, centrist and conservative Democrats like New York Sen. Hillary Clinton and many of the newly elected lawmakers from Southern and Western states argue the party should avoid taking too harsh a stance against big business or the Bush administration.

Hillary Clinton is as centrist and conservative as she is heterosexual. Or human, for that matter.

How interesting that it should be the Wall Street Journal clearing trail for her…. Nevertheless, I, for one, welcome our new Reptilesbian Overlordess.

Hillary and Nancy ruling in D.C.
K-I-S-S-I-N-G
First comes socialized health care
Then gay and polygamous marriage
Then the American Union of an exoconstitutional sovereign tripartite superstate, presumably in the company of a new currency pegged to the Euro, in the proverbial baby carriage.

Shadowin presents the sort of criticism that I’d like to see more often, and he even bothers to go to the effort of perusing the referenced source material:

In your article, you confuse “causes of war” with “warfare.” A cause of war is just that, a cause. Warfare, on the other hand, is the actual means. Sun Tzu, Vegetius, Machievelli, and Clausewitz wrote about the means of war. Caesar’s works were primarily accounts of his wars. Even so, religion is mentioned in their works:

The confusion is not mine, but that of the atheists attempting to forge a strong connection between “war” and “God”. (Specifically the Christian God in most cases, I’ve yet to see an atheist criticism of Hindu or Buddhist aggression.) The fact that I am aware of the distinction can be seen by my research below. This confusion is why the argument between godless atheists and educated theists tends to go thusly:

GA: “Religion has caused countless bloodshed in the name of God.”
ET: “No, it hasn’t.”
GA: “Oh yeah? Well, what about the Crusades? And the Thirty-Years War? And the Spanish Inquisition?” (laughs triumphantly) “You Bible-thumpers are so uneducated!”
ET: “I’ll give you the first two, but then, what about every other war from the Trojan War to Iraq II? Has the world’s leading military power ever even fought a religious war? Who has ever heard of, much less cares about, the 30-Years War? And by the way, the Spanish Inquisition isn’t a war, doorknob!”
GA: (momentary stunned silence) “Yeah, okay, well, um, religion may not be a major cause of war, but it’s what makes people susceptible to supporting war. You know, they get whipped up into a religious frenzy, otherwise they wouldn’t fight it.”
ET: “Yes, they’re in such a religious fervor that the govenment has to conscript or even enslave them to get them to fight. And given how there are hundreds of examples of mutinies by troops that didn’t get paid, isn’t it obvious that money is a more important motivating factor as well?”
GA: “Yeah, well, what about Ted Haggard? Huh? Huh?”

Now, Shadowin doesn’t do this, but it’s not my fault that neither Dawkins nor Harris can distinguish between causes of war and the art of warmaking either. Shadowin next references what he considers to be some counterexamples:

“The Moral Law causes the people to be in complete accord with their ruler, so that they will follow him regardless of their lives, undismayed by any danger.” – Sun Tzu, The Art of War ch.1

Considering how many times I have had atheists inform me that morality and God are two entirely separate and unrelated things, this tends to strike me as a case of Cake: the simultaneously wanting and having thereof. However, I’ve never heard it from Shadowin himself, so I’ll grant him the benefit of the doubt and accept it at its theistic face value.

Shadowin points out in a subsequent email that this is one of the five constant factors in the art of war. But Sun Tzu is merely attempting to explain that a leader must have be in accord with his people in order to successfully make war, he is neither describing nor advocating the use of religion in order to manipulate them as Dawkins and Harris suggest. The recent vote is a good example of a failure to abide by this principle in action.

“By the will of Ptolemy the father, the elder of his two sons and the more advanced in years of his two daughters were declared his heirs, and for the more effectual performance of his intention, in the same will he conjured the Roman people by all the gods, and by the league which he had entered into at Rome, to see his will executed.” -Julius Caesar, Civil Wars, Book 3

I was actually expecting someone to try to make the case that Caesar, as former Pontifex Maxiumus, was a priest-warrior. That would have been amusing, as Caesar got stuck with the position in a failed attempt to keep him out of military affairs. As for this reference to the gods, it should be obvious that this is simply a dying king’s plea to have Rome recognize his elder son and elder daughter as joint heirs to the throne of Egypt, it has nothing to do with the subject under discussion.

He’s got a few more quotes from Vegetius and Machiavelli which I shall address later. Shadowin then goes on to address my claims of evidence:

I do not have Dawkin’s book just yet, so I can not comment on the claim that religion is “a primary cause of war.” It is indeed a cause, but in many cases it is merely a tool to rouse the populace to war.

You claim that there are “vast quantities of evidence recorded to the contrary” of religion being a primary cause of war. However, you fail to provide any of this evidence. If you attempted to do so, it would require ignorance of the European Wars of Religion, the Crusades, and the Reconquista.

It’s too bad he didn’t follow the link provided in the article, wherein I referenced my study of the 489 wars listed in the Wikipedia, in which only 53 were determined to have had religious causes if each Crusade was counted separately. Thus, it is clear that even if all religion was eliminated from the world tomorrow, Man would remain occupied with what has historically proven to be one of his favorite pasttimes.

It seems too few blacks or too few women is bad, but too many Jews is dandy:

An accurate count shows that the number of Jewish senators has risen from 11 to 13, with the addition of two former representatives Benjamin Cardin (Maryland-D) and Bernard Sanders (Vermont-I) who were successfully elected to the Senate.

Sander’s and Cardin’s departure from the House didn’t lower the number of Jews there – on the contrary. The number of Jewish representatives elected to the House of Representatives also grew. They now number 30….

Are they counting Hillary? Anyhow, it appears that 1.7 percent of the country enjoys 10 percent representation in Congress*, and is thus overrepresented by a factor of six. I don’t care myself, given that white Methodist Republicans and black Baptist Democrats appear to be every bit as committed to national destruction as our newly elected Jewish Socialist, (henceforth known as “Leon”), but I don’t see how this isn’t a legal abomination if the dysproportional incidence of male athletes at a university is a problem demanding legislation and Federal intervention.

What’s ironic is that most of these Congressmen and Senators are big supporters of affirmative action based on proportionality. And even more ironic are Israeli concerns that the Democratic takeover of the House and Senate, for which an overwhelming majority of Jews voted, will prove to be dangerous for Israel.

This is good news, however, for if the newly elected pride of Minnesota, Rep. Keith Ellison, hears the call of jihad, he won’t have far to go. And of course, those who know their Old Testament would think that Israelis would do better to worry about the implications of the gay pride march taking place in Jerusalem this week. One would think that the knowledge of an Iranian nuke coming online soon would maybe be an indication that this probably isn’t the best time to piss off the Almighty.**

It’s like a cartoon or something. When did America turn into South Park? And more importantly, who is Kenny?

*13 percent of the Senate and 6.8 percent of the House averages out to 9.9 percent.

**Yes, I know, an atheists can say: “Who cares what a nonexistent ancient sky deity thinks? The Flying Spaghetti Monster loves gay pride marches!” To which I reply: “Fair enough, but then, what’s it to you if a few random collections of atoms happen to get rearranged into sheets of glass?”

As much as I loathe the Bush administration, I never disliked Donald Rumsfeld. While I’m sure he’s as corrupt as anyone else who is ambitious enough to reach such a lofty position in government, I always admired his willingness to speak in what for Washington DC was a laudably open manner.

Since I’ve spent little time examining the pre-mortem intra-administration fingerpointing, I don’t know what mistakes were his responsibility and which were saddled on him by his superior. Still, I never saw him as a neocon, and if his arrogance led him to believe he could achieve the imposssible, well, this was not the first nor the last time that will happen.

What’s good about his “resignation” is that it’s pretty clear that Gates signifies a willigness to withdraw from an untenable position in Iraq. Of course, he’s part of the Baker gang, so this does not mean that one should get carried away and assume that the president has abandoned his New Wilsonian principles entirely.

They always were golddiggers:

The San Francisco 49ers ended negotiations with the city about building a new stadium and plan to move to either Santa Clara or somewhere else in California, The Associated Press learned Wednesday night.

Owner John York notified Mayor Gavin Newsom of the team’s decision earlier Wednesday, the mayor’s spokesman, Peter Ragone, told the AP.

Oh, how I hope they move to Los Angeles! I have a love-hate relationship with the Bay Area, with all the enmity being directed at the 49ers and their hordes of annoying fans who didn’t actually follow football but merely enjoyed being associated with a winner.

I’d rather they didn’t just move to Santa Clara, though. I rather like Santa Clara and wouldn’t like to see it spoiled by association. Other teams I dislike:

The Washington Redskins
The Detroit Lions (especially the Millen-era Lions. I loathe Matt Millen.)
The Oakland/LA Raidess (although Al Davis is amusing)
The St. Louis/LA Rams (who belong in Los Angeles)
The Arizona/St. Louis Cardinals (despicable on several levels)
The Indianapolis Colts (I’m conflicted, I admire TD but Peyton, however quality, is annoying. And a choker. I’m still annoyed that the Vikes didn’t fire Denny and promote TD when they had the chance.)

I disliked the Steelers in the 1970s because they beat the Vikings, but I found myself liking them as an adult because of how the Rooney family runs the operation. Teams I like:

The Dallas Cowboys
The New England Patriots
The Jacksonville Jaguars

The Green Bay Packers, of course, are in their own category. I don’t hate them or their fans and it may have gotten a little dusty in the room when news of Reggie White’s death hit. But at the same time, a 2-14 season with a sweep of the Pack is a successful year in my book.