Category: Uncategorized

The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof doesn’t like what he sees:

Since 1973, the National Opinion Research Center has measured public confidence in 13 institutions, including the press. All of the other institutions have generally retained a good measure of public respect, but confidence in the press has fallen sharply since 1990.

Those of us in the press tend to get defensive about our dwindling credibility. We protest that we’ve been made scapegoats by partisan demagogues, particularly on the right, and I think that’s true. But distrust for the news media, even if it’s unfair, is the new reality – and we will have to work much, much harder to win back our credibility with the public.

In any case, it’s not just right-wingers who distrust the media these days. The Pew Research Center found that while only 14 percent of Republicans believe all or most of what they read in The New York Times, even among Democrats the figure is only 31 percent. Other major news organizations face the same challenge. The Fox News Channel is considered credible by fewer than one-third of the Republicans – and an even smaller number of Democrats. Indeed, it’s a rare news organization that is trusted by more than one-third of the people in either party: the one thing Democrats and Republicans agree on is that the news media are not trustworthy.

The main reason is that they’re not. The news media is largely a bunch of undereducated pseudointellectuals who regularly confuse having heard of something with expertise in it. Being educated in journalism instead of an actual discipline, they tend to have a very small smattering of general knowledge and no depth of knowledge in anything.

Internet technology is the curse of the legacy media in more ways than one, because the men and women behind the curtain are now so easily revealed as the intellectual frauds they have usually been.

For example, when concealed carry laws were first passed, the newspapers in Florida and later Texas predicted bloodbaths soon to follow. But the significant fact was not that these newspapers were completely wrong, (although they were), but that newspapers in Minnesota and other states REPEATED EXACTLY THE SAME INACCURATE PREDICTIONS when similar carry laws were being debated ten years later. The same thing applies for the inability to recognize the farce of static revenue models when reporting on the expected impact of changes in tax rates.

It used to take a good memory and a newspaper addiction to notice this sort of thing. Now, even a casual news junkie may well read ten or twelve different papers online by the time he finishes his morning coffee, and should he notice something suspicious, he can check it out in seconds.

The blog phenomenon has merely magnified this new ability of the public to fact-check newspapers and other media, and since many journalists know very little about anything specific, it’s no surprise that their fraudulent credibility has finally been exploded.

TW shares some real world experience:

As a Christian having just gone through a unilateral divorce initiated by my wife I can honestly say I had no idea how corrupt the system was, people just really have no idea what kind of mess they can get into with a divorce.

When I found out my wife was cheating it was devastating, when she filed for divorce it was heart breaking, then the court ordered me to pay her boyfriend’s rent ( we have no children, and she works ) … I cannot begin to describe the negative emotions and anger it generated, it’s as if the court was trying to get me to go postal.

$65,000 in legal fee’s later, financially ruined and more than a little bitter I learned a lesson that all men in the United States need to understand: The family court is nothing more and nothing less than a social engineering laboratory where every crackpot liberal idea that would never see the light of day if voted on by the people is carried out AGAINST the laws of the state and country.

There is too much money in this as an industry for the Government to ever let it go. The liberals love the dictatorial powers, the lawyers love the money, and the Judges love the power and the money. In WA state you are forced to use a mediator (after 1 year of legal battling) before you go to “Trial” to “help you settle out of court, that costs $600 per hour which is paid to retired judges (what a surprise) and if no agreement is reached then off to “Trial” for another 10K you go.

It seems to me that if a man is to have any chance of financially surviving a situation like this, he has to file for a fault-based divorce immediately. You can always forgive her and reconcile later, but you won’t get the opportunity to pin the blame on her cheating once she files for no-fault.

This is where men, unaccustomed to viewing women as the enemy, are at a severe disadvantage. Women plot their divorces for months, if not years in advance; you need only check out a few women’s forums to find numerous examples of this preparation. My father once overheard a woman on a plane instructing her married daughter to make nice with her estranged husband in order to get her name added to the house title before filing for divorce. It makes you wonder why these women were so hot and bothered to get married in the first place!

Another option, of course, is to simply ignore the whole process altogether and expatriate. Join Fred and company down in Mexico, drinking margaritas and dating signoritas. Sure, you won’t be rich, but you won’t be paying any alimony either and the chances are you’ll be a good deal happier.

In any event, these are things men need to know before marrying. Go ahead and take the leap if you wish, but know precisely what you are risking before you do so. Men and women do their sons no favors when they hide these bitter possibilities from them prior to marriage.

VR vents her bitter spleen:

Nice. So you’re going to find some woman who will shack up with you. It’s a good thing, too, that you’re looking for a woman with no aspirations beyond scrubbing the toilet and popping out kids. It would take someone pretty stupid both to a.) believe shacking up is marriage and b.) to look to you as her leader.

Have you forgotten that if your shacking up arrangement lasts, said woman is going to eventually become your common-law wife who will be legally entitled to half your Star Wars toys? What are you planning to do, Vox? Dump her after six-and-a-half years for an upgrade? Having no job of her own, she’d be hard pressed to get her share of what any emotional support and maid service may have entitled to, let alone custody of the kids. I have to hand it to you. You really laid out a blueprint for any misogynistic “Christian” knucklehead out there who sees protecting his stuff as the most important goal of a marriage.

And I don’t know how to break this to you, but women can have careers and raise kids at the same time. A lot of women today are doing just that. Some of us even make as much or more than our husbands. Go figure, huh? Personally, I like to contribute to the household income. And I appreciate being married to a guy strong and wise enough to trust his own judgement – and me – enough to enter the same legal agreement that you see as a trap.

I don’t know what happened between you and your mother, but it must have been bad. You really seem to hate women. I don’t know if you write the headlines for you column, but in the case of the one on Worldnet Daily, it’s appropriate. You should most definitely stay single, especially if it keeps you from reproducing.

Apparently men and women were doing nothing more than shacking up for six thousand years until the government began issuing marriage certificates 150 years ago. And while a lot of women are having careers and raising kids at the same time, they are demonstrably doing a shoddy job at both. The anger here is particularly interesting because this is clearly a married woman, and yet the mere notion that men might swear off marriage is enough to send her into a hissy fit. I checked out a Canadian forum while preparing to write today’s column and it was very telling how these successful men who date regularly were labled losers by women simply because they stated that they had no intention of getting married. Of course, any man who is dumb enough to get married because he’s afraid of women calling him names deserves precisely what he’s going to get, namely, a woman calling him names.

In my recent contribution to THE ANTHOLOGY AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE, I highlighted how Douglas Adams showed how government interference causes people to behave in otherwise irrational ways. If the law forces men to trade in their women every six years in order to avoid being subject to unjust forfeiture of their property, then that’s precisely what you can expect them to eventually do. Perhaps the government will then propose prosecuting men who show a suspicious pattern of serial monogamy, just as they do with those who regularly withdraw sums of cash from their bank account.

I also enjoy the pop psychology that inevitably surfaces anytime one fails to sufficiently prostrate oneself before female dogma. It seems clear to me that VR is subject to a terrible case of penis envy and her anger is rooted in her sexual frustration with her husband.

UPDATE – It’s interesting, but the BLS actually excludes all mention of married couples wherein the husband works and the wife does not in order to jack up the percentage of wives who make more than their husbands do. But since I am approximately 8x smarter than the average government bureaucrat, I took the liberty of dividing the number of wives who earn more than their husbands – 11,329,000 – by the number of married couples, 56,747,000. This gives a more accurate figure of 19.6 percent instead of the 30.7 percent reported by the BLS.

So this means that there are still 19,883,000 traditional wives who remain outside the labor force, but they are now outnumbered almost two-to-one.

Those of us who regularly pollute our souls by reading BaneRants are aware that as just recompense for his multitude of evils, a vast list of crimes against humanity exceeded only by Hilary Clinton and various Elder Gods now sleeping (we hope) beneath the Antarctic ice, Bane has been inflicted by various plagues and poxes of the financial variety, mostly due to his fateful decision to pass on his inferior genetics to future generations.

Since he is the most likely vice-presidential nominee for the Cthulhu 2008 campaign, it is of course desirable that the fiscal viability of this probable candidate and potential savior of the nation be maintained. Therefore, I would encourage the regulars to consider doing one of two things:

Visit the Blogathon for Bane site and make a pledge, which is in no way tax-deductible and will in all probability be used to pay for expanding Difster’s already gargantuan collection of lesbian Chinese midget porn, but, like USA For Africa, will make you feel good while achieving absolutely nothing, or simply hit Bane’s tip jar and give the money directly to Amazon.com and increase the value of Jeff Bezos’ stock options.

I should probably add that one of the prizes mentioned by Difster will be a copy of THE ANTHOLOGY AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE signed by two contributors, the Original Cyberpunk and me.

The Virgin Queen shares a heartwarming educational experience:

I am a 19-year-old female college student in Boston, and last week during one of my constant arguments with my Black Studies professor ( it is a required freshman course), he not only called me a fascist but told me that I was “probably Vox Day in disguise!” as though it were the worst insult he could muster. Never having heard of myself (apparently I write columns for a VERY evil website called WorldNetDaily), I googled the name and have been reading up on you.

I can honestly say that G-d works in mysterious ways because if not for the most dismal educational experience I have ever had, I might never have discovered your stimulating columns.

I MUST send this to my old history prof. He’ll be vastly amused to know that a decade later, I’m still pissing off the leftist parasites of the Academy.

Anyhow, Virgin Queen, you can tell your professor for me that he clearly doesn’t know a damn thing about fascism, as confusing a libertarian for a fascist is roughly equivalent to confusing a La Scala enthusiast for a New York Yankees fan. And that’s speaking as someone who has personally translated the Manifesto of the Fascist Struggle from the original.

Be sure to also tell him that he’s welcome to stop by and get kicked around anytime.

SB, Esquire, isn’t up on the games governments play:

It appears you are at it again. The last time I wrote you, which was a good while ago, you were adopting the fatally flawed arguments of tax protesters regarding the federal income tax. Now, in your latest column, which is generally full of good points, I see this:

“the family “courts” (which are actually fraudulent executive-branch entities that operate in total violation of the constitutional law’s separation of powers)….”

What, exactly, does that mean? For one thing, only state, not federal, courts handle issues of family law like divorce and child custody. My own state of Georgia’s constitution has a provision that the executive, legislative and judicial powers are and shall forever remain separate and distinct. Can you provide an example of a state where this practice is not followed?

Lesson: never trust the so-called experts. Despite the fact that I’ve never even glanced at George law, I’m sure that Georgia, like every other state in the Union and the federal government, completely ignores the separation of powers and uses administrative courts that look, act and feel like judicial courts, but are in fact nothing of the kind.

Give an example? Sure. The Minnesota Tax Court. Or, for that matter, the Minnesota family courts. Both of which are staffed by employees of the relevant state agency, not judges. Need proof? No problem. “271.01 Creation of tax court; jurisdiction. Subdivision 1. Membership, appointment, qualifications. There is hereby created a tax court as an independent agency of the executive branch of the government.“

Furthermore, as the Minnesota Supreme Court stated in its appalling and convoluted decision, (WULFF v.TAX COURT OF APPEALS, 1979), justifying an overt violation of the separation of powers spelled out in its state constitution: “[1] We must note at the outset that nomenclature is not determinative. The names of the various administrative agencies in the state change with regularity, and with respect to its constitutionality, whether the Tax Court is called a court, a board, an agency, or a commission seems to us less important than a critical analysis of its function in conjunction with an examination of the doctrine of separation of powers….As we stated earlier in this opinion, taxation is a peculiar function of the legislature. Solely because of this unique nature and the judicial checks present in this case, we are not disposed to render the Tax Court statute unconstitutional.“

Dante, no doubt, would have those judges burning in one of the lower circles of Hell for that twisted abuse of power, language and reason. The truth is that a law degree doesn’t mean that you know anything about the law. In fact, it’s almost an assurance that you have no idea what is creeping about in its dark corners.

UPDATE – I’m wrong about the Georgia family courts. “No, our Georgia Superior Courts (which handle family law matters, among other things) are not in any sense of the word executive branch entities. While we do have administrative law judges (or hearing officers) for some things, such as initial hearings of workers’ compensation cases, the Superior Courts are delineated in the state constitution as part of the judicial branch, and every county in the state has one.” I am, however, correct about the Minnesota “courts” and the federal immigration “courts”. No word on the Georgia tax courts, or if they even have such beasts.

Papapete swings and misses:

Umm, Vox, you have a little problem with those two points. Both are correct, but women entered the work force in large numbers in the 1960s. Therefore if your theory is correct, real wages shouldn’t have peaked as late as 1973, they should have gone down much earlier in inverse relationship to the proportion of women in the workforce.

Come on. Do you honestly think I’m going to shoot my mouth off on something as controversial as this without being loaded for bear? See the Bureau of Labor Statistics for annual details.

1970 29,688,000 (40.8%) 48,990,000 (76.2%)
1980 42,117,000 (47.7%) 57,186,000 (72.0%)
1990 53,689,000 (54.3%) 65,104,000 (72.0%)
2000 63,586,000 (57.5%) 73,305,000 (71.9%)

Guess which column is which? Now, the percentage of women certainly increased from 1950 to 1970 (from 29.6 percent to 40.8 percent), but even so, their numbers more than doubled again from 1970 to 2000. It’s worth noting that during this time, the number of men not in the labor force also more than doubled, from 13 million to 27 million.

If 70 percent of percent of women had remained outside the labor force, as they did in 1950, there would be 32.7 million women in the labor force and the average real wage would be 29 percent higher than it is today. Would a raise of almost one-third enable most men to allow their wives to stay at home with the children instead of working? In most cases, I suspect the answer would be yes.

From the New York Times:

The information in these files was so abstract, so sterile, so tinged with the depressing reality of paternal grandmothers with diabetes and fathers with heart disease.

What about personality, love, intellect, passion? All I had to go on was the hieroglyphics of handwriting. I couldn’t visualize any of them. From what I understood they were mostly kids, college students in need of tuition money, with mothers who were probably younger than I. I’d probably be better off grading their college English papers and picking a father for my child on that basis. What was I doing here?

UNFORTUNATELY I was looking for love, still trying to make an intuitive selection, not a rational one. I tried to fall for something on each page, some soaring words in their short essays, but there was barely the flair of a crossed T to swoon over.

Um, lady, you’re in a sperm bank. Your chance at romance and Daddy taking the kids to their soccer game has passed. Following your intuition instead of reason is precisely what got you here in the first place. No doubt her intuition told her that those men who were willing to marry her in years past were not exciting and passionate enough for her.

The thing is, excitement and passion are the very last things you want in a marriage. Infidelity is exciting. Divorce is passionate. Safe, friendly and mutually comfortable is what men and women should pursue in an ideal marriage, but of course, such pedestrian wisdom is wasted on young hearts steeped in Hollywood romance.