Category: Uncategorized

Craigp learns not to mess with Space Bunny, the hard way:

Craigp, as I believe I stated earlier, I’ve not done a country by country study of who does or does not have more personal freedoms and I already established what that meant in the context of your assertation that the US is supposed to be “a shining example of freedom”

It’s easy enough to prove that Craig is utterly, totally and hopelessly wrong. First, Space Bunny is correct in saying that her choice of where to live says nothing about where freedom is greatest. And while she has not done a country-by-country study, the Heritage Foundation has. Following are the Index of Economic Freedom’s top ten list of most free countries, from most free to least free.

Hong Kong

Singapore

New Zealand

Luxembourg

Ireland

Estonia

United Kingdom

Denmark

Switzerland

United States

Ironic, is it not, that the USA is considered less free now than the country from which it declared independence. The differences can be glaring, for example, the maximum Swiss federal income tax is only 9 percent, compared to 38 percent in the USA, while Ireland’s tax on corporate net income, at 16 percent, is less than half the USA’s 35 percent.

Petty personal freedoms are also greater, as anyone who has seen Italians smoking anywhere and everywhere can testify. The USA does have the advantage of less imperial bureaucracies than the countries of Western Europe, but to blithely assert that the USA is still a shining example of human freedom to the world requires an almost total avoidance of the relevant facts.

From Drudge:

House and Senate move to set rules for states that would turn driver’s license into a national ID card…. Developing….

That should end what little remains of state sovereignty, not that much of it was left anyhow. So, yes, in answer to all that have asked, I’d certainly prefer the unavoidable idiocies of a pure democracy over the new federal feudalism that is being forced upon us by the globalist aristocracy.

This isn’t conspiracy theory, it’s right out in the open. In fact, it’s been predicted for more than 2,000 years. You didn’t seriously think world government was going to happen by itself, did you?

One of these days, everyone who has mocked the United Nations as a harmless debate club is going to be very, very shocked when they learn that UN law has supplanted US law. The English have already learned this with the European Union and it hasn’t upset them unduly. Unfortunately, most Americans will just shrug and assume that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

Slashdot collects reports of a new superchimp:

Shelly Williams, a U.S. primatologist affiliated with the Jane Goodall Institute in Maryland, captured the apes on video in 2002 with the help of local people and was once briefly confronted by a group of four of them in dense forest. This, along with other evidence, makes her think that there is a chance the animals could be a new species of great primate — in other words, an undiscovered genetic relative of humans.

Other possibilities are that it is gorilla-chimp hybrid, or a new sub-species of chimp that would be 50 percent bigger than its largest cousins. Anecdotal evidence about the unusual apes dates back to photos taken by European hunters in 1898, when the region was the Belgian Congo.

The trail was then picked up in 1996 by Karl Ammann, a Kenyan-based Swiss photographer, who was intrigued by local tales that the forests were inhabited by large ferocious apes that could kill lions.

The best part about Slashdot, however, is always the comments. “I for one welcome our new hitherto unknown giant congolese ape overlords.” Damn dirty apes! Where’s Mr. Heston when we need him?

As vociferous as my opposition to the Bush administration is, even the supporters of the Kerry campaign give me the willies. I watched about two minutes of Forbes on Fox, and this little androgynous quasi-male was lying so badly about how Kerry and Edwards would take on the trial lawyers that he couldn’t even look at the camera. Not only that, but he went out of his way to sneak in a reference to Halliburton, which just sounded desparate and stupid in the context of the conversation.

Talking points are good, but not when you are completely ignoring the subject at hand when asked a direct question. Combining that behavior with a visually disturbing sexual persona makes you wonder who on Earth wanted to put this little lump on television.

Nobody wants to see that. Nobody.

By the way, one reason that the media is blacking out Badnarik’s campaign is because he does not pay his Federal income tax. One writer on NRO’s Corner wondered why Badnarik’s failure to file hasn’t been hammered on by the press; it’s because allowing a man who teaches classes on the Constitution to speak publicly on the subject would demolish the grand charade. Just to give one example, if you file a Freedom of Information Act request to get your IRS Master File and have it decoded, you’ll find that you are classified as a corporation engaged in taxable activity.

For example, one acquaintance of mine just learned to his surprise that he is, according to the IRS records, a corporation manufacturing trucks for export.

Nate nearly blows a gasket:

Hey, I thought you didn’t advocate democracy, much less digital anarchy…. What in the blue Hell were you thinking when wrote that? For crying out loud, one may be a good thing but the latter is Abomination!

Like Nate, I don’t have much regard for democracy. But I never miss an opportunity to hammer it into people’s heads that what we have in the United States, (and what we are exporting to the Middle East), does not even come close to approximating genuine democracy.

Second, if constitutional republicanism with limited suffrage is not an option, I’d prefer pure democracy over the current charade, that is neither constitutional republicanism nor democracy but claims to be both simultaneously.

This brings us to what we might consider modern literature and two of the earliest exponents of early romance or fantasy are H. Rider Haggard and William Morris* who both developed the template for quest fantasy as we are familiar with it today. William Morris’ fantasies owe something to Malory and medieval romance and Lin Carter calls The Wood Beyond the World (1894) with its sea voyage to a magical kingdom “the first great fantasy novel ever written”. However, Morris’ magnum opus is The Well At the World’s End (1896), which clearly influenced Tolkien. This novel is set in a completely imaginary world and tells of a prince’s quest to find the fountain of youth.

Morris defined what we now know as genre fantasy. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom sequence, begun in 1912, started the heroic fantasy genre that was continued by Robert E. Howard in Conan the Conqueror (1935) whose hero was violent and barbaric. Far more mannered was The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany (1924) which was a direct descendent of William Morris and an inspiration to both E.R. Eddison and J.R.R. Tolkien.

One thing I always find interesting is how George MacDonald always goes unmentioned when it comes to discussions of modern fantasy literature. His first fantasy novel, Phantastes, was published in 1858, long before William Morris or Lord Dunsany, and his work was a far greater influence on seminal fantasy writers CS Lewis and JRR Tolkein than either Morris or Dunsany. In fact, the beginning of The Princess and the Goblin will be almost disturbingly familiar to anyone who has read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, as it involves a little girl wandering around a large house….

MacDonald clearly deserves far more credit than he is given, as he was publishing long before Jules Verne had first seen print and before HG Wells was even born. The fact that he was a minister and a prolific author of sermons may be one reason that the notoriously secular writers of fantasy are somewhat reluctant to recognize that their genre was first created by Christians.

*Morris was clearly familiar with MacDonald; he later acquired MacDonald’s house and lived there.

I had a sneaking suspicion that the salesguy didn’t know what he was talking about, but since his opinion was backed up by the technical information on the company’s web site, I decided to turn off my brain for a moment and for once in my life simply accept what someone who theoretically should know what he was talking about said.

So, I ordered a laptop with a 128-meg video card instead of the 256-meg one I was planning on buying, because I really didn’t want a 17-inch screen. After all, I was assured, there’s no way that the additional memory is needed, even if you’re running a graphics intensive application.

Of course, the guy turns out to be completely wrong. Somewhere between 87 and 99 megs of uncompressed textures, we’re falling off a performance cliff, because the 128-meg card can’t handle the amount of 24-bit textures we’re throwing at it. It’s definitely the textures, because the geometry is the same and dropping down to 16-bit restores the performance. (This reduces the memory requirement by one-third, keeping us on the safe side of the cliff.)

It seems that the company is willing to rectify the error and allow me to swap out machines, but it’s still annoying. First, because I really didn’t want to lug a 17-inch beast around Second, because sometimes I really don’t want to think, I just want someone to accurately tell me what my options are.

Robert Novak writes:

Sen. Arlen Specter, who moved right to stave off a conservative challenge in this year’s Pennsylvania Republican primary, took a sharp left turn in a general election debate last weekend. Noting that he is in line to become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Specter promised: “I can bring centrist judges to the bench.” This contrasted with his primary campaign promise to back all of George W. Bush’s judicial nominees.

Vote for George Bush, because he’s going to nominate centrist judges of whom Arlen approves… that’s got to have loads of appeal to Christian conservatives who still harbor the hope that Bush work to overturn Roe vs Wade. Of course, nearly everyone has forgotten by now that Bush personally interceded in the Republican senatorial nomination to ensure that Specter would stay in office.

Drudge quotes Jonathan Chait:

In a LA TIMES column, Jonathan Chait blasts: “To say that I consider Bush a ‘bad’ president would be a severe understatement. I think he’s bad in a way that redefines my understanding of the word ‘bad.’

“I used to think U.S. history had many bad presidents. Now, my ‘bad’ category consists entirely of George W. Bush, with every previous president redefined as ‘good.’

Now, I think it’s pretty clear that I’m no Bush fan, nor will I be voting for him this November, but I don’t think he’s in the worst five at this point. Worse presidents, in declining order of awfulness, were:

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Abraham Lincoln

Ronald Reagan

Woodrow Wilson

Richard Nixon

Relax, I’m totally kidding about the one in the middle. But Jimmy Carter was definitely worse than W, as was Lyndon Baines Johnson. I do think W is worse than Clinton, but only because Bill was hamstrung by the once-Republican Congress and distracted by other matters.