Category: Uncategorized

With the aforementioned apologies to Mr. Yeats.

I WILL arise and go now, and go to Innesmouth
And a small altar build there, of clay and fishbones made;
Nine dread nights will I have there, enshrouded in darkling myth,
And live alone in the lurking shade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes creeping slow,
Swelling in the veils of the black tide I hear the chittering;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and dawn an eerie glow,
And evening full as the deep ones sing.

I will arise and go now, for always night is day
I hear the Shoggoth calling with vile sounds by the shore
While I stand by the mirror, my face a pallid gray,
I hear it in my cold heart’s core.

Howard Phillips directs the Evangelical Studies Project at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. National Review’s Katherine Jean Lopez asked him for his thoughts on Dread Cthulhu and how his deityhood might play in a potential campaign for the Republican nomination for president in 2008.

KJL: Do evangelicals specifically think of worship of the Great Elder Gods as a cult? Is there something legit there?

Howard Phillips: Most evangelicals do perceive worship of the Elder Gods to be a cult and are deeply troubled by its theology. But this does not mean they would not vote for someone like Mighty Cthulhu. They admire his record and they agree with his conservatism on moral, social, and cultural issues. Given a choice between Hillary Clinton versus Cthulhu for President, evangelicals know how to bracket aside their theological differences with the Great Old One and would support him because of his positions on the social issues.

KJL: Hastur used Cthulhu’s religion against him in 6500000 BC. Wouldn’t people recoil a bit from it if it were tried again? Or is that wishful thinking?

Phillips: While many religious conservatives may have qualms with aspects of Elder God theology, they have even greater problems with religious bigotry and intolerance. Any candidate that chooses to attack his faith in a personal fashion will surely run the risk of a backlash.

KJL: Is it significant that Hillary Clinton is herself demonspawn, and Nancy Pelosi has sex with goat-headed devils — that prominent politicians have already become prominent despite being Satanists?

Phillips: Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi represent parts of the country where there is a heavy population of Satanists. That is different than running for national office where more people might have concerns and questions about Elder theology.

KJL: Do you hear positive or negative or lukewarm things about Cthulhu when you get into ’08 conversations?

Phillips: I hear positive comments about Dread Cthulhu as a being of integrity, and as a successful economic, political, and social conservative in a very blue state. I hear very lukewarm comments about the great tentacled one when it comes to his religious tradition. Evangelicals admire He Who Sleeps Beneath the Ice but find the Elder Gods to be a strange and baffling abberation of the historic Christian faith.

KJL: What would you advise Cthulhu deal with his religion when talking to groups, reporters?

Phillips: Cthulhu very much needs to do what John Kennedy did in 1960 in front of the Southern Baptists in Houston: Explain how he understands his faith and its application to his view of politics and public policy. He especially needs to articulate what a Great Elder God’s understanding of church and state is and how it applies to important issues of today. It is not at all clear that Elder Gods have views on church and state issues that are any different than the general understanding of most traditional Catholics and Protestants.

KJL: Would the religion thing play differently in the primaries? Say, could conservatives lay down their concerns because of issues they agree with him on but then the Elder God Factor play more of a negative role in the general election?

Phillips: I believe the “Elder God factor” will play a more negative role in the national, general election. But Mighty Cthlhu is a being of great cunning and a smart politician. I am sure he will address, early on, concerns about the “Elder God factor.” In fact, I suspect that speech has already been written or is being crafted even as we speak.

KJL: How important is religion in general in elections?

Phillips: The religious faith of candidates, especially presidential candidates have become more and more important. A Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey last summer indicated that an overwhelming majority of Americans, for some reason, want their presidents to be religious and a “person of faith.” This is why, late in the campaign, Senator Kerry started talking more and more about his Catholic faith. But it was too late and many perceived it as contrived.

KJL: Even with a good candidate and the power of the fear of President Hillary, if I were a Cthulhu adviser, I would not discount the power of prayer.

Phillips: Or human sacrifice. (places hand under chin and waves his fingers) La Cthulhu fhtagn!

Paul Johnson writes in the Spectator:

I have the impression that most PC advocates and enforcers in this country are women in their thirties or forties, with some education of a red-brick or white-tile nature, no longer young enough to be much interested in sex but old enough to have acquired a certain modest authority in their work, which is overwhelmingly in the state sector, and often unmarried or childless (a significant section of the rank-and-file is employed in making it difficult to adopt children, an area where PC rules are enforced with peculiar ferocity). I would also describe these women as unappealing physically, non-orgasmic, disapproving and fastidious by nature, embittered by personal misfortune or slights real or imaginary, overwhelmingly agnostic or atheist, women who in an earlier age might well have been nuns but are now fanatics for whom class warfare and hatred of Christianity form a fulfilling creed.

I’ve long thought that history is going to be very, very unkind to feminism. Now, I’m absolutely sure of it. Women are already retreating from the label, in another 50 years, they’ll flee from it as instinctively as they recoil from National Socialism or slave ownership.

Todd poses what appears to be a simple question:

What is New York named after?
(I especially like asking New Yorkers this one)

I’ll give them a hint when I see confusion. I’ll say: focus on the word “New”.

I can ask 20 people this question and sometimes I can get 1 correct answer. When I see the blank stares on their faces I’ll then ask how about “New Orleans”? 90% of the time I have to tell them the answer.

This just shows me people question very little that is in front of them.

Perhaps the sheer obviousness of the answers is making me look too hard for traps, but my understanding is that the answer is York, as in the city in the north of England. Previously, the city had been named after Amsterdam, if my memory serves me correctly. As for New Orleans, I’m assuming it’s named after the French city of Orleans.

Either I’m completely missing something or people really are that much more ignorant than even an arrogant elitist would assume.

From Drudge:

Bill Clinton Signed Executive Order that allowed Attorney General to do searches without court approval Clinton, February 9, 1995: “The Attorney General is authorized to approve physical searches, without a court order”

WASH POST, July 15, 1994: Extend not only to searches of the homes of U.S. citizens but also — in the delicate words of a Justice Department official — to “places where you wouldn’t find or would be unlikely to find information involving a U.S. citizen… would allow the government to use classified electronic surveillance techniques, such as infrared sensors to observe people inside their homes, without a court order.”

Deputy Attorney General Jamie S. Gorelick, the Clinton administration believes the president “has inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches for foreign intelligence purposes.”

Secret searches and wiretaps of Aldrich Ames’s office and home in June and October 1993, both without a federal warrant.

Jimmy Carter Signed Executive Order on May 23, 1979: “Attorney General is authorized to approve electronic surveillance to acquire foreign intelligence information without a court order.”

I’m eagerly awaiting the expected Three Monkey argument that because Clinton and Carter did it, it is therefore right for George Bush to do it. Is that seriously a foundation upon which Republicans wish to make a stand? And since I fully expect people to miss the obvious… these illegal and totalitarian measures obviously didn’t prevent Aldrich Ames’s spying or 9/11. The logical conclusion is that they won’t prevent future terrorist attacks either.

“Everybody’s doing it” is not considered an acceptable argument for children and it is certainly not an acceptable one for presidents.

Nor should it come as any surprise that the number of intercepts doesn’t involve just a few probable terrorists, and that contrary to the authorization order, domestic-to-domestic calls are being “accidentally” spied on. The NYT reports today:

But in at least one instance, someone using an international cellphone was thought to be outside the United States when in fact both people in the conversation were in the country. Officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the program remains classified, would not discuss the number of accidental intercepts, but the total is thought to represent a very small fraction of the total number of wiretaps that Mr. Bush has authorized without getting warrants. In all, officials say the program has been used to eavesdrop on as many as 500 people at any one time, with the total number of people reaching perhaps into the thousands in the last three years.

Here’s an idea: if a foreign national is suspected of being a terrorist, why not simply deport him instead of using him as an excuse to violate American liberties?

Another court miraculously sees reason:

Writing for the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Richard Suhrheinrich said the ACLU’s “repeated reference ‘to the separation of church and state’ … has grown tiresome. The First Amendment does not demand a wall of separation between church and state. The ACLU… does not embody the reasonable person.”

It never ceases to amaze me that “Congress shall make no law….” has been successfully transmuted into “Nothing funded by any government authority, state, federal or local, shall make any reference to anything even remotely Christian” in the eyes of the ignorant. It’s nice to see a court finally begin to point out that the ACLU king is as naked as a porn star without her belly ring.

Orac again demonstrates that he doesn’t know very much:

Vox seemed to be making excuses for the Nazis….Even Orac, who normally cared little for the affairs of humans and was interested in finding the Hitler Zombie more as an intellectual exercise to understand how historical analogies could be twisted beyond recognition and how a sense of proportion could be utterly lost than because of the horror that it caused, couldn’t help but be repulsed by such “reasoning” that equated a struggle to attain equal rights with the activities of a bloodthirsty tyrant and the genocidal regime that he spawned. Vox seemed to be making excuses for the Nazis on the basis that they sincerely believed the Jews were undermining Germany and that most of the Jews the Nazis murdered were adults who apparently in his mind could have defended themselves. (Had he never heard of the bravely suicidal Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943 and what the result was?) But that wasn’t all…. He definitely seems to admire the Nazis.

Yes, most ASL players and Leon Uris readers are completely unfamiliar with the Warsaw Ghetto. It’s also to amusing to note Orac’s inability to apply logic, as he cites the bravely suicidal Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto while rejecting my similar characterization of National Socialist Germany (population 80 million) taking on the United Kingdom (48 million), France (41 million), Poland (35 million), the Soviet Union (195 million) and the United States (130 million). If he’s arguing that the Germans had a better chance of defeating the Allies than the Warsaw Jews had of defeating the SS, he knows nothing about military history. Indeed, the numerical German advantage over European Jewry (6.6x) is not dissimilar to the numerical enjoyed by Germany’s enemies (5.6x). Call it nuts, call it bravely suicidal, but either way, it was never going to work even if the National Socialists tried it one bite at a time.

Furthermore, Orac’s citation of the 1943 uprising supports my earlier point. The Endlosung began in 1941. Jews didn’t begin trying to defend themselves for 18 months, at which point it was unfortunately much too late.

Orac’s use of weasel words indicates that he knows perfectly well that as a libertarian extremist, I am far less sympathetic to historical National Socialist policies than he is. I don’t support public schools, social security, national parks, central state authority or laws taking race into account, whereas most liberals and Democrats, like their National Socialist intellectual kindred, do. This is just a particularly feeble attempt to tar an ideological opponent with the dread “Nazi” label.

It’s simply a tremendously silly point. I admire Lenin’s ability to completely turn Marx’s explanation of communist inevitability on its head and somehow get away with it, but I’m not a Leninist. I admire the Soviet T-34 tank and the resilience of the Red Army, but I’m not a Soviet apologist. I have neither patience nor respect for those who demand a Two-Minute Hate of others. Just as one can find evil in the best of things, one can find a silver lining even in the darkest, most evil cloud.

So, I stand by my words. To call a feminist a feminazi is an insult to the German National Socialist Worker’s Party. It’s a very low bar, true, but at least murdering children was not a definitive aspect of their self-identity.

UPDATE: Orac is apparently upset that I didn’t link to him when I quoted a small part of his long and meandering post. Okay, here’s some links. Happy now? FYI: if what I’m quoting is only a small part of someone’s post, I’m not going to bother making anyone else wade through irrelevant material to find that which is related to mine.

An intriguing Illinois decision:

Docket No. 98932-Agenda 7-September 2005.
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, Appellant, v. VALDY OLENDER et al., Appellees.
Opinion filed December 15, 2005.

CHIEF JUSTICE THOMAS delivered the opinion of the court:

At issue in this case is whether the General Assembly violated the single subject clause of the Illinois Constitution of 1970 (Ill. Const. 1970, art. IV, §8(d)) when it enacted Public Act 88-669 (Pub. Act 88-669, eff. November 29, 1994). The legislation in Public Act 88-669, entitled “An Act in relation to government regulation,” amended, among other statutes, section 1301 of the Illinois Income Tax Act (35 ILCS 5/1301 (West 1994)), to state that a first violation of that section is a Class 4 felony and each subsequent violation is a Class 3 felony. The defendants, Valdy and Malgorzata Olender, had been charged under the amended version of section 1301. Defendants moved to dismiss the indictments against them on the ground that section 1301 had been unconstitutionally amended by Public Act 88-669 in violation of the single subject clause. The circuit court of Cook County granted defendants’ motions to dismiss. The State appealed directly to this court pursuant to Supreme Court Rule 302(a) (134 Ill. 2d R. 302(a)). For the following reasons, we affirm the judgment of the circuit court and hold that Public Act 88-669 violates the single subject clause.

Well, that’s quite interesting. Wouldn’t it be nice if the U.S. Supreme Court had the same regard for the U.S. Constitution that the Illinois court demonstrated for the Illinois state constitution.

In reading the decision, it was interesting to note that the state made the usual attempt to argue that the defendants had no standing rather than attempt to defend its illegal actions.

CG is hoping to get a George W. Bush vibrator for Georgemas:

It’s hard to believe a member of MENSA would hold the warped views you espouse. But you got one thing right….don’t shoot the messenger just because you don’t like the message. That seems to be what you left-wing Bush-hating liberals want to do to President Bush. YOU are the anti-American one and should be fired from your job, and have your tongue cut out for lying.

Yes, I’m a left-wing liberal… anyone who doesn’t have a poster of Dear Leader on their bedroom wall is a left-wing liberal, and they deserve to be physically mutilated because of their insufficient love for the bestest and handsomest man that ever defended the country from evil.

DG’s nightmare came true:

Thank you for the article “The anti-American president.” After I heard the news about Bush’s authorization of the NSA eavesdropping on domestic communication my blood began to boil. I was not one of those Republicans who “twice voted enthusiastically for George Bush.” However, I did vote for him with a shaking hand and with a bitter taste in my mouth. I was motivated by the normal ”lesser of two evils” philosophy.

Now I fear I may be culpable for helping this man undermine our constitutional rights more quickly than at any time in American history. Worse still I am sickened by how silent conservatives are on this issue today. Contrary to a conservative outcry, instead I hear apologists like Limbaugh trying to defend the Bush administration and demonize the democrats. Now there are plenty of reasons to demonize democrats but this boldface spinning by conservatives has gotten me feeling truly sick.

RF demonstrates his Three Monkey credentials:

Our President is not perfect and does have faults, but he is a whole lot better than ANY left-wing NAZI DEMOCRAT. You are no different or better than the rest of the Democratic Party who want to sell out, pack up and surrender to Islamic radicals. I can tell by your article that you are not a Christian and you would like nothing better than the failure of our President.

Well, it’s true, I have committed the obvious blasphemy of failing to bow my head before the lawd and saveyah, Sweet White Gee-orge, who warn’t nevah a yaller dawg. Meanwhile, DG regrets his past actions:

I voted for Bush II twice, now I wish I could take these votes back. I have said for a long time he has violated his office oath, lied & is tearing our country down. You hit the nail on the head with your viewpoint.

It will be interesting to see if RF manages to remember who established these ugly new government powers when the Lizard Queen is wielding them three years from now.

GU writes:

You are truly ignorant and immature. Go read your Bible…preferably a Companion Bible with a Strongs Exhaustive Concordance. You have much to learn about what a Christian is and what GOD wants His children to do, have done, and fail to do.

I suppose he’s right, my column today was simply reprehensible, considering how we will be celebrating George Bush’s birth later this week. RM adds, in like vein:

You’ve fallen into the trap like so many others. Making temporary sacrifices of liberty to preserve that same liberty for the long term only makes common sense. No one would have even noticed these slight losses of liberty if not for the fools leaking highly secret information to the communist press, much to the approval of our enemies. So few people are affected, it is of no business of the masses to know what our government is doing to protect us from an unscrupulous enemy for these losses are minimal and only temporary. I would much rather have a president like Bush who is doing these things to save our nation as a whole instead of Clinton who used these methods to spy on political opponents and to coerce so called friends and allies to take the heat to save his political ass. You’ve lost your mind and allowed the demonic forces to alter your perception as have too many weak souls in the world today.

It’s amazing how people are still falling for the “temporary” and “slight” loss of liberty argument. It’s been around since the second consulship of Marius, truly, there is nothing new under the sun.

George Bush speaks:

Since the removal of Saddam, this war – like other wars in our history – has been difficult. The mission of American troops in urban raids and desert patrols – fighting Saddam loyalists and foreign terrorists – has brought danger and suffering and loss. This loss has caused sorrow for our whole Nation – and it has led some to ask if we are creating more problems than we are solving.

The war is undeclared – unlike most other wars in our history – but whatever. The question is fair.

That is an important question, and the answer depends on your view of the war on terror. If you think the terrorists would become peaceful if only America would stop provoking them, then it might make sense to leave them alone.

Nice little bait and switch there. The statement is true, but fails to answer the question. The question was not if George Bush believed that terrorists would become peaceful if America stopped provoking them, but if we are creating more problems than we are solving, which is a paraphrase of Rumsfeld’s proposed metric of success.

This is not the threat I see. I see a global terrorist movement that exploits Islam in the service of radical political aims – a vision in which books are burned, and women are oppressed, and all dissent is crushed. Terrorist operatives conduct their campaign of murder with a set of declared and specific goals – to de-moralize free nations … to drive us out of the Middle East … to spread an empire of fear across that region … and to wage a perpetual war against America and our friends. These terrorists view the world as a giant battlefield – and they seek to attack us wherever they can. This has attracted al Qaida to Iraq, where they are attempting to frighten and intimidate America into a policy of retreat.

Retreat from what? Having our troops stationed in every corner of the globe in a misguided, quasi-imperial Pax Americana? We don’t belong in the Middle East and the Islamic empire has stretched across the Middle East since the 700s. I further note that we did retreat from Saudi Arabia post-9/11, that there’d be no need to retreat from Iraq if George hadn’t ordered 160,000 troops there in the first place, and that George still hasn’t answered the question he raised.

The terrorists do not merely object to American actions in Iraq and elsewhere – they object to our deepest values and our way of life. And if we were not fighting them in Iraq … in Afghanistan … in Southeast Asia … and in other places, the terrorists would not be peaceful citizens – they would be on the offense, and headed our way.

This is a weird argument which assumes that because America is attacking Iraqis, non-Iraqis can’t attack America. It makes no sense. Sure, foreign terrorists can go to Iraq and Afghanistan if they want to attack American troops, but they remain just as free to walk across the Mexican border if they want.

September 11th, 2001 required us to take every emerging threat to our country seriously, and it shattered the illusion that terrorists attack us only after we provoke them. On that day, we were not in Iraq … we were not in Afghanistan … but the terrorists attacked us anyway – and killed nearly 3,000 men, women, and children in our own country. My conviction comes down to this: We do not create terrorism by fighting the terrorists. We invite terrorism by ignoring them. And we will defeat the terrorists by capturing and killing them abroad … removing their safe havens … and strengthening new allies like Iraq and Afghanistan in the fight we share.

This is spin worthy of a Clinton. The facts are that we were in Saudi Arabia, and Saudi Arabians attacked America because, according to the Saudis supposedly responsible, they didn’t want American troops in Saudi Arabia. This is just a wildly dishonest paragraph, as even Rumsfeld has freely admitted that we do create terrorists by fighting them, the important question – which George Bush avoids – is whether we create them faster than we kill them.

What’s sickening is the way that this is cited as being “terrific and important” and “a great address” by Three Monkeys like NRO editor Katharine Lopez.