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At long last, my Treo has been returned to me… actually, they gave me a new one but she looks exactly the same, so there you go. After such a long and arduous absence, we’d like to be alone for a while, if you don’t mind.

Unfortunately, it turns out that Bliss Palm does not work on the 600. So much for the dream of carrying an Intellivision in your pocket to go with the porta-library. Looks like I’ll have to wait until I move up to the 700p this autumn. Does anyone happen to know what the Bible says about polytechny?

From the Washington Times:

More than a dozen D.C. public school system central office administrators are taking home base salaries of at least $150,000 per year, compared with just one official earning that much two years ago, according to an analysis of payroll records. The salary information, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, shows 14 central administration officials receiving a base pay of at least $150,000 in fiscal 2006, including five officials making $170,000 or more.

Naturally the DC school districts need to pay top dollar, or they wouldn’t be able to entice the excellent executives who have turned the Washington DC schools into some of the finest, highest-performing educational institutions in the country, to say nothing of the world.

I only wonder what monstrous salaries they’d command if DC schoolchildren were actually able to read after twelve years in the system?

So what do yinz think I should do? (That was my attempt at a Pittsburgh accent, appropos of nothing.) I’ve stated my disinclination to do TV and radio here in the past, and most of the invitations I’ve declined have been greeted with complete indifference, but the producer of a show for a gentleman who has hosted me before took me by surprise by agreeing with my critique of the ear fodder game.

They’d like to discuss the Sheepskin Scam and promise that we can go into whatever depth seems suitable to the discussion. I’m still not inclined to return to the airwaves, but I’m beginning to feel like some sort of prima donna who doesn’t deign to dirty her voice with the ears of the masses – just to completely mangle a metaphor – and that’s not my motivation at all.

I don’t care, so I suppose what it really comes down to is what you all would like. Does anyone actually want to hear me yammering on about this, assuming it is broadcast on the Internet? Or should we, as a self-sufficient, heterodox community continue to blithely ignore the archaic mainstream and their outmoded methods of communication while we carry on with half-baked theology, German sperm samples and Biblical numeromancy?

In short, am I being a prima donna or am I simply standing by my principles here? I don’t actually know, so feel free to chime in. The Bell has M in 25, you take the under?

MC sends the following info regarding the Israelites and their marriages:

Numbers 3:40-43 provides us with a census of the firstborn in Israel. The number given is 22,273 firstborn sons. We may safely conclude there were at least 22,273 families in Israel, since a family cannot have more than one firstborn son. There were, no doubt, families which had no sons.

That has no bearing upon this remarkable fact:

22,273 families are responsible for a total count of over 600,000 fighting men (Numbers 1:46). If you take 600,000 and divide it by 22,000, you get 27. The average Israelite household with sons had 28 of them!

The patriarch Jacob required four wives to get twelve sons. Is it too much to suppose that the typical Israelite needed twice as many wives to get 28 Sons? What about the daughters? If there was a daughter for every son, then there was 56 children per Israelite household, on the average scale. There is no way to know how many wives the average Israelite may have had, but it is impossible that the average woman could have had 56 children. Israelite society was a polygamous society.

So, a birth rate of more than twenty times the replacement rate versus one that is sub-replacement level. Here’s a question for the Christians: what supernatural entity wishes for the human race to multiply? And, on the other hand, what supernatural power actively works to see it extinguish itself?

Still confident that monogamy is God’s plan for Man?

The numbers aren’t quite right, though. The number of fighting men presumably included the fathers, so the correct formulation would be (600k – 22k)/22k, although this also assumes that the grandfathers are too old to fight which is unlikely considering that nomadic warriors usually don’t retire to Florida. Nevertheless, the basic point remains.

Jonah Goldberg has apparently begun to realize that Republicans and conservatives can’t be trusted to use power properly either:

A bunch of readers wanted to know what I meant when I said that my views on “libertarianism” have “evolved” since my earlier, full-throated, attacks. Well, for starters, I no longer make jokes like: “Q: What’s the hardest part about being a libertarian? A: Telling your parents you’re gay.”

Again, more seriously, as I’ve watched compassionate conservatism, Buchananism, Crunchy Conservatism, and similar movements bubble-up since the end of the Cold War, I think it’s better for everybody concerned if we start from a foundation of libertarianism and build up from it. In public policy — as opposed to cultural politics — I think the default position should be libertarian and then arguments should be made for why we should deviate from libertarian dogma. I’m more sympathetic to arguments based on tradition and custom than your average libertarian. But I’m more hostile than I used to be to what you might call neo-traditionalism in the forms of “national greatness” conservatism, Buchananism, Crunchy Conservatism, and the rest. I am extremely susceptible to nostalgia, but intellectually I think it is more often than not a poison to clear thinking. Starting from libertarian assumptions puts you in a better place to identify nostalgic toxins. My problem with the so-called paleolibertarians is that they are often more nostalgic than the conservatives they denounce.

The intellectual strength of libertarianism is that it is a proactive argument from first principles rather than a reactive response to the presumed leftist. The bankruptcy of what passes for today’s conservativism is obvious in the way it is eager to read nearly everyone with any small government principles out of the party as those intoxicated with government power abandon everything they claim to stand for in a futile attempt to cling to its reins.

The reason Three Monkey Republicans are so prone to calling me a leftist – in spite of the copious evidence – is that they have been spun around so many times that they are no longer capable of rational thought. Good = Conservative = whatever Dear Leader proclaims it to be. So, the poor Three Monkey finds himself in support of Hamas, Sharia in Iraq and the right of the Afghani government to kill converts to Christianity and loses his temper whenever someone points out that he has become what he hates in the equally mindless Party of Asses.

The New York Times on the travails of single spawners:

At long last, after something like 100 dates in the past 10 years and several serious relationships, she had found the man she refers to, tongue only slightly in cheek, as “the one.” It all began last summer, when she broke off a relationship with a younger man who wasn’t ready for children and got serious about the idea of conceiving on her own. She gathered information about fertility doctors and sperm banks. “Then a childhood friend of mine was over,” she told me. “I pulled up the Web site of the only sperm bank that I know of that has adult photos. There happened to be one Jewish person. I pulled up the photo, and I looked at my friend, and I looked at his picture, and I said, ‘Oh, my God.’ I can’t say love at first sight, because, you know. But he was the one.”

…. She told her parents and married sister what was going on, e-mailing the donor’s picture to her father with an invitation that he meet his son-in-law. She also printed the donor’s picture and kept it on the coffee table of her Manhattan studio apartment, where she sleeps in a Murphy bed. “I kind of glance at it as I pass,” she said of the picture. “It’s almost like when you date someone, and you keep looking at them, and you’re, like, Are they cute? But every time I pass, I’m, like, Oh, he’s really cute. It’s a comforting feeling.”

And thus we are quickly given to understand why no one wanted to marry this freak. But while it’s always fun to read about strong, independent and utterly insane women, I find it more intriguing to note that elsewhere on the same New York Times front page is a story about how hard black men have it, in part because absent fathers contribute so greatly to social pathology in the black community.

Combine that pathology with the 21 children engendered by the blond Aryan uberdonor and the pattern becomes all too clear. There are obviously some nefarious plans lurking beneath the helpful facade of your local neighborhood fertility clinic.

It’s a toss-up as to who is more prone to confusing legality and morality, Scripture-quoting Christians or government-loving atheists. In either case, the complete silliness of the former with regards to the forthcoming polygamy debate is clear. The Evangelical Outpost features an interesting discussion of the subject, wherein the mindless monogamaniacs repeat Joseph Farah’s specious point last week about how monogamy is the Christian ideal.

First, I note that this is a stupid line of quasi-reasoning which no one with an IQ over 75 would dare to try with regards to any other subject. Baptism is a much more important Christian ideal and yet not even the Southern Baptists believe that baptism should be enshrined into law, let alone the Constitution. Better yet, why not mandate a public confession of Jesus Christ as Lord? That is not only the ultimate Christian ideal, it is inevitable anyhow.

Second, it betrays an impressive ignorance of Scripture. Monogamous marriage is absolutely NOT the Christian ideal. Paul states very clearly that it is better not to marry at all, but to live a celibate life in service to the Lord. Having pointed this out, I shall now wait with interest to see how long it takes all of these nominal idealists to begin calling for the banning of all marriage….

More relevant than the “one flesh” verse, (which says nothing about it being an exclusive or unrepeatable experience), is the very useful one about fruits and judging. The fruits of state-sponsored monogamous marriage are very clear, both here in the United States and across Western Europe. Considering how Christianity grew powerfully in various polygamous cultures, including Africa today, at least at first glance this would appear to be a clear strike against the notion that government-imposed monogamy is either godly or societally beneficial.

As I have written before, I do not think the state has any role to play in marriage, either pro or con. Christians who turn to the government to impose their vision of marriage on others are making a huge mistake and they will suffer the same disappointment that conservatives who elected George Bush to impose limited government are now experiencing.

The government that can dictate marriage to your liking is the government that will dictate marriage that is not to your liking.

Donald Rumsfeld raises a middle finger to the democratically-elected Iraqi government of which the Administration is so proud:

Leaving Iraq now would be like handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in a column published on Sunday, the third anniversary of the start of the Iraq war.

“Turning our backs on postwar Iraq today would be the modern equivalent of handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis,” he wrote in an essay in The Washington Post.

And then he goes on to brag that 75 percent of the military activities are being at least partly carried out by those same Nazis. The frightening thing about the Bush Administration is that Rumsfeld is one of the bright ones, which means that either he doesn’t believe what he is saying and has complete contempt for the Three Monkey Republicans who he knows will swallow his words and mindlessly repeat them, or he’s whole a lot dumber than I think he is.

There are no Nazis in Iraq. The far more accurate metaphor is comparing the Americans to Tito in Yugoslavia. It didn’t matter when he died and it doesn’t matter when we leave, the serious fighting starts as soon as the oppressor/occupier exits the scene.

MSNBC on the patent predators:

While most technology companies make money by developing software, building hardware or providing services, Forgent Networks Inc. has taken a different route: It produces threats and lawsuits that try to cash in on ideas.

Forgent and other companies with similar strategies — often called “patent trolling” by critics — amass intellectual property portfolios and file suits against other businesses, accusing them of infringement.

With a skeleton crew of 30 employees and the help of a law firm, Forgent has built a business out of suing — or threatening to sue — companies, even though it offers no related products and does no development of the technology itself.

What was that about how patents protect creators and support innovation? Anyone who has seen firsthand how Microsoft systematically obliterates the true innovators knows how specious the logic of IP is, at least in the software world.

There’s no question that what Forgent is doing is legal, the question is whether the present system aids or detracts from encouraging technological advancement and economic growth.