Category: Uncategorized

Amber Pawlik writes: A man’s sexual attraction to a woman is largely physical in nature; a woman’s sexual attraction to a man is largely spiritual. A man is sexually aroused predominantly by the female figure. A man’s sexual attraction to a woman is seeing a woman with a great body, with healthy hair, a pretty face. For a woman, her sexual attraction is fundamentally different. A woman is not predominantly attracted to particular physical attributes of a man, but rather is attracted to masculinity, i.e. his ability to behave as a hero. As such, when a man or a woman rejects heterosexuality, for the man, it will be physical in nature and for the woman, it will be spiritual in nature.

A homosexual man will be someone repulsed by the female figure. Instead, he admires the male figure. Indeed, he likes it so much that he demands his partner be very good-looking. This is why gay men are often highly attractive. For a homosexual woman, however, it is not that she is attracted or repulsed by the male figure — she is repulsed by masculinity. Indeed, no woman is particularly attracted to the male physique — a woman’s attraction to a man is the ability to admire him.

I think that women’s attaction to masculinity is more primal than Amber suggests. It’s not just the ability to behave as a hero, it’s raw power, be it revealed in character, wealth, physical strength, intelligence or fame. She’s on to something here, though, as one thing I learned from my time in the software industry is that if you’re a straight man and you’re picky about who you date, move to the Bay Area. The women there are so starved for masculinity – even the straight men are over-metrosexualized – that a Midwesterner can silence an entire Adobe department filled with women simply by walking in the room. Big Chilly married a pretty cheerleader from Monterrey and except for his exceptional intelligence, he’s a normal Minnesota Swedegian. So we all burst out laughing when one of the Chilliette’s Bay Area bridemaids met him, and said: “he’s nice, but isn’t he a little, I don’t know, macho?”

Right, everyone knows that Swedish-Norwegian Lutherans are reknowned for their touchy Latin machismo. I think it was his walking through the room, nodding to the women, then slapping Chilliette on the butt as he walked by and saying nothing more than “what’s up, babe” that struck the Bay Area girl as utterly alien behavior. But that’s a lack of diffidence, not puffed-up insecurity.

It’s always strange, too, to see how many lesbians literally cringe in fear from nothing more than the presence of a masculine man. You feel as if simply saying “boo” will cause them to die of heart failure on the spot. No loud noises… no sudden movements…. Amber’s point about the male physique thing is interesting too. There’s nothing more depressing for a weightlifter than to have a woman tell him that he’s too big, and that he’d look better if he’d just chill out on the muscle thing.

Charles Stross writes: it turns out that The Atrocity Archives (which has just been proof-read and is off to the printer) can be pre-ordered from Amazon, as can Iron Sunrise!

I read the first two parts of The Atrocity Archives in serial form in Spectrum magazine – it’s really funny, a blend of James Bond, tech geekery and transdimensional Cthulhoid evil. This is the book that I’ve been waiting two years to read. Don’t hesitate to get Accelerando when it is published either.

This is what you will be able to see happening more and more often as Microsoft moves towards trusted computing. It’s a hardware issue, you see, so if you don’t have the approved hardware, you’ll be out of luck if your software “requires” it. In this case, Microsoft just blew off everyone who was dumb enough to go with the Microsoft Reader format instead of Palm’s. Surprise, surprise. Doesn’t anyone ever learn?

Never use Microsoft if you have any choice in the matter. The decision will usually come back to haunt you. Big Chilly and I made over a million dollars one year based on our philosophy that Microsoft is dependably full of merde and sticking with third-party software libraries instead of doing what all of our competitors were doing and waiting for Microsoft’s promised solution. Which, of course, was not ready in time for the mission-critical deadline.

“[Jason] Dunn could not be reached for comment on Microsoft’s response, but in his weblog article he called the company’s decision “a slap in the face” for Pocket PC owners, adding that the company must take responsibility for its decision. “I still use Reader daily, and there’s some excellent free content out there, but Microsoft didn’t deliver on it’s commitment to give you an upgrade and that’s something they’re going to have to live with,” Dunn wrote.”

Somehow, I imagine they’ll survive. They have a lot of experience with this sort of thing.

Rich Lowry notes: According to WSJ today, Republicans had a 28-point lead over Democrats as party best able to “control government spending” in 1996. Now, their lead is just 2 points!

Apparently I was prescient for leaving the Republican party back in 1992. I’ve never regretted it for a second, and I hope to welcome many former Republicans to the Christian Libertarian, Libertarian or Constitutional ranks in the coming year. What I’d really like to see is a functional alliance formed between my theoretical CL party and the two Freedom parties.

As for the Republicans, well, they don’t mean it, ladies and gentlemen. It’s sad, but it’s absolutely true.

Definitely a concept whose time has come. I have long felt that the eco-freaks could not care less about the people who live in the places that the eco-freaks want to keep pristine. Good on them.

“The environmental movement I helped found has lost its objectivity,morality and humanity,” says Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore. “The pain and suffering it inflicts on families indeveloping countries can no longer be tolerated.” Moore will be one of eight experts from around the world will demonstrate from first-hand experience how environmental extremists deny destitute nations electricity, and deepen the poverty, malaria, malnutrition, tuberculosis and dysentery that kill their people. “We intend to stop this callous eco-manslaughter,” says CORE national spokesman Niger Innis. “The green movement imposes the views of mostly wealthy, comfortable Americans and Europeans on mostly poor, desperate Africans, Asians and Latin Americans. It violates their most basic human rights. CORE will lay down the gauntlet. Eco-imperialism may not be a household word yet, but it will be after this conference, the first one to address these issues.”

U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton dismissed the lawsuit in which the plaintiffs argued that the 28-year-old law violated their Second Amendment right to own guns. The D.C. law prohibits ownership or possession of handguns and requires that others, such as shotguns, be kept unloaded, disassembled or equipped with trigger locks.

Walton ruled that the Second Amendment is not a broad-based right of gun ownership. “The Second Amendment does not confer an individual a right to possess firearms. Rather, the Amendment’s objective is to ensure the vitality of state militias,” Walton wrote. He went on to say that the amendment was designed to protect the citizens against a potentially oppressive federal government.

Yes, that’s precisely why it was designed. Of course, the militias weren’t state militias then, which explodes Walton’s ludicrous argument. I hope the Supreme Court will hear this challenge, but I don’t expect that corrupt gang of tyrannical enablers to do so.

And I sure wish the Founding Fathers had left that cursed explanatory clause out. Never explain if you can help it; it only gives others the chance to twist your words.

VDH writes: Anwar Sadat, by his own admission, went to war in 1973 not to liberate outright the Sinai (that was militarily impossible), but to show the Arab world he could surprise — and for three to four days even stun — the Israelis, and thereby restore the wounded “pride” of the Egyptians. We think that the total encirclement of his Third Army was a terrible defeat — saved from abject annihilation by American diplomacy and Soviet threat. Egyptians saw it instead as a source of honor that it even got across the canal.

I have the advantage of being acquainted, to varying degrees, with three distinct non-American cultures. Thus, it always surprises me when Americans are surprised when people from other cultures do not analyze things as we do. A victory-obsessed culture such as the United States can barely relate to the blase Europeans, much less a culture excited about the military equivalent of kicking the ball off and tackling the return man.

Some of my Italian friends were shocked when I told them the day after 9/11 that more than one Arab country was certain to be conquered. Right or wrong, it was inevitable. (I don’t have a problem with warring on terrorists; I do have a problem with a) not following the Constitution; b) encroaching on American liberties while simultaneously opening borders; and c) invading countries while ignoring the country responsible for the attack.) Now, I imagine they’d be surprised when I say that I don’t believe we’re done yet, either.

It’s important to keep in mind Nazi Germany never attacked us either, and yet we fought them until they were crushed. Americans are fat, lazy and irresponsible. But the same determination to win that pervades American culture, that once transformed Jewish accountants and Midwest farmboys into some of the most lethal warriors in history, is still alive and today it applies to fat suburban video gamers and fatherless inner city petty criminals as it once did to their grandfathers. I am not saying this is a universally good thing; it poses its own dangers as we are led too easily into war and domineering hubris. But this national trait does not bode well for the enemy within or without.

Consider this. The Taliban is fallen. Saddam Hussein is a captive. And yet, in all sincerity, many of us – myself included- are not even sure that we’ve accomplished much of anything at all. No wonder the Arabs think we’re crazy. By their standards, we are.

Randy comments: Just because its an electronic blip or a piece of green paper rather than a lump of metal, doesn’t mean it is not money. Money is a store of value: $1000 in the bank will give you at least $1000 next year (and you might have gotten interest too). If it were not a store of value, it wouldn’t function as money (money which became worthless instantly would never be accepted.)

Randy has caught enough Keynesian theory to have lost his grasp on the classic definitions. First, $1,000 in the bank will not give you the same value as $1,000 next year, because inflation and interest tax will reduce it to less than $974 of what you could have bought previously. Second, “store of value” refers to inherent value. Ask Europeans holding lira or Deutsch marks printed only three years ago just how much value they’ve stored. Stone, metal and land will all have value one thousand years from now; a green piece of paper will not.

The fact that you might be willing to accept an I.O.U. from me does not make it money. Nor does the fact that most people will accept pieces of paper or electrons in exchange for goods and services at this point in time require modifying the economic definition of money.

Randy also misses the point of the hedonic error. Computers being faster does not make one inherently more productive or the economy larger. If you use your 3 Ghz machine to write the same emails and surf the same web sites as your old 486/100, it is bizarre to declare that you are 30x more productive. Technological advancement is glorious and necessary, to be sure, but it is not synonymous with economic growth or productivity despite the statistician’s attempts to equate them.

Is it appropriate to factor this into quality of life? Absolutely. In the price index? No way, especially not when goods that can’t be interpreted hedonically, such as real estate, have been sky-rocketing in line with the activity of the printing presses.

Why space, why now? My best guess is that it’s one more way to inject liquidity into the economy and subsidize American manufacturers. I’m all for private space ventures, but this will be yet another massive boondoggle. M3 has been dropping despite the continuing increase in debt issuance, which is a very ominous sign, so it looks as if they’re pulling out all the stops in order to get the money supply moving again. It looks like we’re not far from following John Maynard Keynes suggestion to bury bags of money all over the place so people could keep themselves busy digging it up, thus boosting the economy.

That’s right, he suggested that. And you wonder why an economy based on his theories is in trouble?

Michael Silver writes: So here were are, with Indy’s Tony Dungy one victory away from becoming the first African-American coach to guide his team to the Super Bowl, and still the overall football landscape seems nearly as backward as ever. And for you Limbaugh-philes out there, realize that it’s not just liberal, desirous me fretting over this. Every single African-American coach I know shares this frustration, as do a whole lot of players. White players, too. The lack of African-Americans in positions of authority in the NFL is just wrong and people on the inside of the football world understand this better than anyone.

I’m sure there’s plenty of white basketball players who believe that the lack of white basketball players on the NBA court is just wrong too. Does that mean that the NBA should require every team to work out a white player before it makes a first-round draft choice? For that matter, are more than 12 percent of the players on the football field black? Talk about overrepresentation! Not that I’m saying that I’d want Jason Sehorn as my safety, you understand.

Note that Silver is openly admitting that he wants a) more blacks in positions of authority, and b) he wants blacks in positions of authority to succeed. We’re also supposed to believe that neither he, nor all these other people he mentions, have had any interest in the success of black quarterbacks in the past. But does anyone believe that McNair would have been co-MVP with Peyton Manning if Manning had been black? I don’t. McNair is an excellent quarterback – much better than Donovan McNabb – but Manning beat him head-to-head in both meetings this year, had much better stats, and didn’t need his backups to win two games down the stretch. And to underline the point, Manning is playing in the AFC championship game, while McNair isn’t.

Sure, the Marino hiring is bizarre. I thought the Millen hiring would be a disaster from day one. Callahan to Nebraska I don’t get, although Pete Carroll and Steve Spurrier both show that college coaching is a different, easier kettle of fish. Interesting to note that Ty Willingham’s name didn’t get mentioned at all…. I’m also curious to know just how many black coaches Mike Silver believes is the right number. How many black head coaches would not “be a disgrace”? And, since we’re into racial math, how many is too many? 6? 12? 32? Why are there no Hispanic or Asian coaches? Racism! Racism! How many head coaches are gay? Jewish? Bi-lingual and trans-gendered? And we haven’t even begun to get into the shocking absence of women coaches!

Please. Silver is a typical left-liberal racist who fails to realize his own racism. Furthermore, he clearly has no regard for the Constitutional right of free association. If a team owner wants to hire a dumb white coach who will sink his team like a stone, that is his right. It’s stupid, sure, but so are a lot of things that are not illegal.

Furthermore, this isn’t the first time that Tony Dungy has been one victory away etc etc. Denny Green’s been one victory away twice. What a dishonest little turn of rhetoric. CNN/SI has some great sportswriters. Michael Silver isn’t one of them.