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So fewer than three percent of federal indictments against federal, state and local government employees ever make it to trial… the very term “sovereign immunity” betrays the way that these so called public servants think of themselves. The “sovereign” cannot commit a crime against himself, therefore any government official breaking the law in performance of his duties cannot be found guilty of a crime.

I’ve repeatedly written that America, the idea made reality, is no more. The United States is no longer the most free nation in the world; its wealth and apparent freedom are the lingering, but fading blessings that remain from a place that is now gone.

If you don’t believe me, then let’s see you go pay cash for a cell phone without showing ID. Or open a bank account. Can’t do it legally in the USA, can you? Or go withdraw $30,000 dollars and pay cash for a car. Did anyone ask you any questions, fill out any forms and send them to the government? If they didn’t, you aren’t in the United States. As for the nation’s wealth, real wages have been falling for more than thirty years now. Per capita income is higher in Luxembourg and in Norway, in other countries, such as Bermuda, Switzerland and the Cayman Islands, the gross is lower, but the post-tax net is higher. In ten years, historically impoverished Ireland will be as well.

What people tend to forget is that it now takes two incomes to maintain a relative standard of living that once required only one. Since the government continues to grow fast, the US standard of living curve is bound to continue downward unless and until serious changes are made. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats can fix this as they are the jointly responsible for the present path.

I could be wrong. I certainly hope I am. But I doubt it.

Zink sends a link:

A Mexican man killed his lover in a drunken, drugged fight then cooked the man’s body in tomato and onion sauce and ate it over three days.

Is there some secret connection between cannibalism and homosexuality of which I was hitherto unaware? First Dahmer, then that German guy and now this Mexican gourmand. I always thought it was the addiction to bad dance music that was the deep, dark shame of the love that dare not speak its name.

I don’t think I like this turn that VQPF appears to be taking….

I very much enjoy and admire CS Lewis’ CHRONICLES OF NARNIA. One thing I’ve never actually heard anyone mention, however, is the howler he commits in the first book, (which is THE LION THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE, the books are distinctly less pleasing when read in a strict chronological order), when he has the animals using domestic appliances.

Now, I suppose that a literalist might find a case to be made in arguing that such things went out with the White Witch, who as we know was exposed, however briefly, to modern technologies on her visit to England as chronicled in THE MAGICIAN’S NEPHEW. And one could posit that Lewis was making a very Tolkein-like point about the inherent evils of industrialization by lumping the two together and life in Narnia returning to simpler, more innocent times with the rule of High King Peter under Aslan’s aegis.

Of course, to do so would be to imitate the modern literary critics who see nothing in a book but reflections of their own thoughts.

Charles Krauthammer wishes us a Merry Christmas:

I personally like Christmas because, as a day that for me is otherwise ordinary, I get to do nice things, such as covering for as many gentile colleagues as I could when I was a doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital. I will admit that my generosity had its rewards: I collected enough chits on Christmas Day to get reciprocal coverage not just for Yom Kippur, but for both days of Rosh Hashana and my other major holiday, Opening Day at Fenway.

Mind you, I’ve got nothing against Hanukkah, although I am constantly amused — and gratified — by how American culture has gone out of its way to inflate the importance of Hanukkah, easily the least important of Judaism’s seven holidays, into a giant event replete with cards, presents and public commemorations as a creative way to give Jews their Christmas equivalent….

Merry Christmas. To all.

Burt Prelusky is even harsher on his anti-Christian co-religionists in his column on WorldNetDaily. To me, the strangest thing is this: if a minority truly fears for its well-being in a land where it is massively outnumbered, why do they consistently go out of their way to infuriate the majority?

Good interfaith relations would seem to indicate more Krauthammers and Prelutskys and fewer Foxmans and public school officials.

Zink’s world is rocked:

Vox doesn’t believe in evolution? What the heck? Why not?

I’m too skeptical to believe in evolution, although I admit that it’s theoretically possible with a creator God. A God powerful enough to create Creation could have a) sped up or slowed down time, b) create a new earth that was old, or c) compressed millions of years into a few seconds. As sheer chance creating something out of nothing, forget it.

I regard evolution as a theory that is only marginally more believable than Keynesian theory. Once scientists actually replicate evolution by turning fast-breeding fruit flies into something else, I’ll take it seriously. Otherwise, it’s soft science, lacking both mathematical proof and replicable experimentation. I fully expect that future scientists will laugh at our modern beliefs in macroeconomic theory and evolutionary theory in much the same way that we laugh at past societies that believed in pure mercantilism and the idea that the earth was made out of the bones of a dead god. And I suspect that the universe is a much weirder place than we imagine.

If you have to hide your lack of successful experimentation behind the “it’s not practical” argument, then you’re doing little more than putting your faith in what appear to be probabilities. And anyone who remembers Long Term Capital Management knows dependable they are.

“I think there is a place for Christian bands, and schools aren’t where they belong,” Ms. Chiarelott said. “Maybe most people don’t really see anything wrong with it, but there is a line and this is crossing it. I’m amazed they even considered it.”

Setting aside the lameness of the “anti-drug” nonsense and the amusing concept of a “rock” band playing in schools, I don’t know how much more clear the point can be made that the public schools do not want Christianity in any shape or form being permitted to enter. Why any Christian would want to voluntarily subject their children to this sort of virulent opposition from a very young age is utterly beyond me.

It strikes me as ironic that those who would never consider subjecting their children to a physical beating in order to toughen them up for the real world think that it is a good idea to send them to those who despise Christians during what are manifestly their developmental years.

The point of parenting is to train your children to meet the real world when they are ready for it; leaving them to television and teachers is not parenting but parenting by proxy.

What strategy should you adopt? Well, if you wait to the end, the odds are only 1/100 that the last person is the optimal choice; ditto if you choose the first person. The modeler then asks: what strategy should you adopt for optimum results? A little bit of mathematics involving infinite series gives the answer. You can prove mathematically that the best strategy is to look at (approximately) the first 36.787944117144235 people (rounding it to, say, 37 people) and then you should choose the first person from that point on that is ‘better’ then the previous 37 people. This increases the odds of your finding the best match from 1% to about 37%- roughly a 37 times improvement. (In the pre-politically correct literature this model was called “The Sultan’s Dowry Problem,” or “The Secretary Problem”; now, alas, it is usually called simply an example of an “Optimal Stopping Problem.” )

Is this a good model for how we behave? Is this a strategy that one can realistically adopt? Certainly, 100 possibilities seems like a lot of choices to have if one is not the current day equivalent of a sultan — a movie star or an athlete. But the model is intriguing, if not totally realistic and applicable.

Models that spring from modification of the rules of the Sultan problem have always been one of my favorites in this area. This makes Chapter 3 my favorite chapter: it is chock full of goodies with lots of interesting variations of the original problem, and thus even more interesting models. Some may be far more applicable. For example, if you get to play the cad and can keep potential mates ‘stockpiled,’ then, by stockpiling seven potential mates, there’s a strategy that you can use to increase the odds of finding the best one to 96% or so!

Now, the notion of relying on mathematicians for romantic advice seems sketchy at best, but there seems to be an element of truth to what the author of MATHEMATICS AND SEX posits, especially when it comes to stockpiling. Women, being somewhat more ruthless than the average man when planning for the future, have a strong tendency to do this “stockpiling”; this is the sort of thing I’ve described before when I referred to the “posses” of quasi-friends that many women keep about them.

Whereas men like to create love stables, a sort of harem-by-telephone to keep them provided with a dependable variety of casual rides, women’s posses ensure that they’ll have several fall-back options in case Mr. Perfect doesn’t materialize by a certain point of time. And as the numbers suggest, this is the mathematically optimal strategy.

So, keep that in mind the next time she “just wants to be friends” but confuses you by calling you up all the time and stirring up your interest in her. The good news is that there is a small chance in the long term. The bad news is that you’re nothing but a stashed man, held in pocket for a rainy day.

I’ve been intending to do this for a while, but I finally got around to learning the Palm Markup Language (or is it Meta Language) and creating an e-book out of the nine short and not-so-short stories that I’ve written over the past few years. I’ve started writing a lot more, and I must have another nine that are languishing in various stages of completion.

Anyhow, I’d like to have a few pairs of eyes go over it before I put it out there for the general public, so if you a) like fantasy and science fiction, b) read on a PDA or on your computer, and c) wouldn’t mind jotting down notes when you run into a typo or more egregious error, send me an email and I’ll fire off a .pdb format ebook, THE ALTAR OF HATE AND OTHER STORIES, to you.

Kriston, I tried to email you my log file as well as my xorg.conf, but it got caught by your spam filter and bounced. The discrepancy is as follows: there are already 1680 modelines in the .conf file but no reference to 1680 shows up in the log file you mentioned. The 1400 resolutions show up in the log file even though there are no 1400 modelines, and of course, the system is running at 1400×1050 instead of 1680×1050 as in XP.

Any ideas?

RJ Rummel is one of the most important academics alive today. His landmark studies on democide have been crucial influences on my thinking, and if there was justice in the academy, he would be an intellectual star and not racist buffoons like Cornell West. Today, he provides a brief summary of his thesis on WorldNetDaily:

Our academic and intellectual Marxists today are getting a free ride. They get a certain respect because of their words about improving the lot of the worker and the poor, their utopian pretensions. But when empowered, Marxism has failed utterly, as has fascism. Instead of being treated with respect and tolerance, Marxists should be treated as though they wished a deadly plague on all of us.

His work should be read by everyone who believes that giving more power to a government, be it Communist, Fascist, Nazi, Democrat, or Republican, is a bad and often lethal idea. I am not a libertarian because I am optimistic about human behavior, I am a libertarian because I am extremely pessimistic about it. I’ve seen far too many people go mad with tiny and insignificant bits of power over others to believe that anyone should be trusted with great amounts of it.