Periscope test

I’m going to try one in a few hours. Since I’m locked out of my Twitter account again, I have no idea how it will be announced, or if you have to follow my Periscope account independently of my Twitter account. We’ll just press the red button and see what happens.

Anyhow, if you’re on Twitter/Periscope, please let me know here if an alert pops up and if you’re able to watch it, assuming you are so inclined.

Also, for the really old school readers, I’m going to be publishing a complete set of all my WND columns soon, in three volumes. If you were a reader of my column from 2001 to 2005 and would be interested in writing an introduction to that volume of around 1500 words, please let me know in the comments here.

I’m not looking for anything fawning, just a straightforward reader’s perspective on the historical column.

UPDATE: apparently you can follow me through periscope.tv here. Only 63,000 fewer followers than Cernovich!

UPDATE: It worked! 267 people showed up and watched – thank you all – and you can apparently watch a recording here. Quality wasn’t as nice as it usually seems to be on Mike’s but it did work. I’ll probably do another one tomorrow to discuss the inauguration and take some questions about the next four years.

Musing on meditations

Someone on Gab asked me if I would write a book of philosophy, and suggested something similar to one written by one of my intellectual heroes, Marcus Aurelius. His Meditations have been a significant influence on my thinking since high school, particularly this deeply meaningful piece of advice, with which he began Book Two in the Staniforth translation:

Begin each day by telling yourself: today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness—all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil. But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself, who is my brother (not in the physical sense, but as a fellow-creature similarly endowed with reason and a share of the divine); therefore none of those things can injure me, for nobody can implicate me in what is degrading.

Those who have read Meditations can probably see how the very way I live has been influenced by them; it was somewhat startling to listen to a song recently and realize that I’d written these words with my friend Paul more than 20 years ago. Much to my surprise, it’s become one of my favorites in retrospect.

Over sea, under stone
I will find myself alone
All I’ve seen and all I’ve known
In a dream far from home
I still find myself alone


In this place there’s nobody inside
In this place there’s nobody outside
I find myself alone

It seems we really do shape our future through our imaginations. Of course, what the non-reader of Meditations might fail to understand is that this is not a mournful song about loneliness, but rather a contemplative one about the need to abandon the world and its deafening, disharmonious distractions in order to find oneself, or rather, to honestly face the truth about oneself and one’s place in Creation.

A man must be able to look honestly inside before he can look accurately outside.

I don’t think I am ready yet to take on the task of writing my own Meditations. But I do have the sense that one day, I will be able to do so, though whether it will be before or after I attempt my magnum opus of economics philosophy written in the Aquinan form, I cannot say. In the meantime, perhaps the following ten aphorisms may be of some utility to a reader or two.

  • Tell yourself the unvarnished truth, even if you cannot bring yourself to admit it to anyone else.
  • We are all being deceived, in some matters, by someone, at all times.
  • An unsound foundation will never produce a sound conclusion. When a conclusion strikes you as dubious, look hard at the underlying assumptions supporting it.
  • Evil existed in the past. It will exist in the future. You are not going to eliminate it. You are not even going to eliminate it in yourself.
  • No amount of pleasure will ever satisfy a man. No amount of comfort will ever satisfy a woman.
  • Status is a dangerous and addictive psychological drug. Be deeply wary of it.
  • Leadership requires a surfeit of ego, because the good leader must be able to sacrifice his own for the benefit of his subordinates when need be.
  • Never trust an insecure man. Sooner or later, his fears will cause him to turn on those to whom he is closest.
  • The weak will always attempt to outlaw the strong.
  • Never stay down. Even the dead can haunt their killers.

Can confirm

Instapundit observes the difference:

THAT’S NOT FUNNY, COMRADE: The People’s Cube Purged from Wikipedia.

UPDATE (From Glenn): It’s still up at the more free-speech-oriented InfoGalactic.

InfoGalactic does not soapbox or thought-police. And yes, if you’ve noticed it is running a bit faster, we have made a few more improvements. More new announcements coming in the next few weeks.

The subsequent exchange was amusing:

p-dawg 
Meanwhile, on Infogalactic:
https://infogalactic.com/info/…
*edit* beaten to the scoop by Glenn. The ignominy. 🙂

Glenn Reynolds
Hey, they don’t call me “insta” for nothing!

McRapey responds

John Scalzi has bravely risen to defend his ritual public humiliations of his wife against the Chateau’s speciesist scorn:

John Scalzi ✔ @scalzi
1. Incidentally, it’s a thing with alt-right types to try to run down my marriage, ie, HOW DARE YOU BE BESOTTED WITH YOUR WIFE YOU BETA CUCK
10:59 PM – 17 Jan 2017

John Scalzi ✔ @scalzi
2. And it really just makes me giggle. Yes, you sad little boys. I’m married to a strong awesome equal partner, for 21 years now. How awful!
11:01 PM – 17 Jan 2017

John Scalzi ✔ @scalzi
3. I mean, honestly. I’m not sure how HA HA LOOK AT THIS LOSER WHO DELIGHTS IN HIS MARRIAGE is supposed to be an insult. To ME, anyway.
11:04 PM – 17 Jan 2017

John Scalzi ✔ @scalzi
4. Mind you, if being happy with my wife sends them into paroxysms of fury, well, I guess that’s a bonus? But otherwise: Silly little boys.
11:06 PM – 17 Jan 2017

 John Scalzi ✔ @scalzi
5. In sum: Yeah, being married to my wife is super-fabulous. I’d do it again in a heartbeat, any day of the week. And twice on Sundays.
11:14 PM – 17 Jan 2017

You have to see the wedding day picture to believe it. It’s hilarious. As Heartiste observed: I haven’t seen a “lean out” like that since Sheryl Sandberg’s husband set his treadmill speed to “the sweet relief of marital release”.


John, no one is running down your marriage, much less sent into “paroxysms of fury” over your ongoing experiment in interspecies relations. We think it’s great that you’re so happily married to an orc, or half-troll, or whatever it is. No one begrudges you that. We just think it’s funny. Especially when you brag about how strong your offspring are.

HALF-ORCS
These orc–human crossbreeds can be found in either orc or human society (where their status varies according to local sentiments), or in communities of their own. Half-orcs usually inherit a good blend of the physical characteristics of their parents. They are as tall as humans and a little heavier, thanks to their muscle.
    +2 Strength, –2 Intelligence, –2 Charisma.

Pull some hair

Glenn Reynolds has some sage advice for the Right facing an increasingly deranged Left and squadrons of SJWs resolutely doubling down:

Progressives Destroyed Normalcy And Now They’re Shocked Trump Isn’t Normal. Choose the form of your Destructor. But I disagree with the thesis of this piece that people on the right should embrace civility and normalcy. Civility and normalcy are privileges that require a broad consensus. Conservatives have been utter failures at “conserving” these traits.

Here’s my take:

There’s an old joke about a boy who complains to his mother that his little sister keeps pulling his hair.


“Oh,” responds the mother, “she doesn’t know that it hurts.”


A few minutes later, the mother hears the girl scream and runs into the other room. “She knows now,” the boy explains.


There’s a lesson for Republicans in that old joke, if they’re smart enough to absorb it.

I think that Trump is smart enough. Go pull some hair.

Conservatives and moderates – or if you prefer, losers – are always concerned more about form than substance. They subscribe to the Fallacy of Nice, which is that wickedness stems from ill-treatment, and therefore good will result from kindness. This reliably fails, because it requires ignoring both observable human behavior as well as the entire written history of Man. Glenn is absolutely right to disagree with the Federalist article, which concludes, in typically idiotic fashion:

Conservatives, Don’t Use the Tactics of the Left

A big part of what conservatives are meant to conserve is decency, decorum, and respect. We should oppose shouting expletives at those we disagree with. We should oppose public shaming and boycotts. We should oppose cruel mockery as a legitimate means to achieve our ends.

Those on the alt-right and their apologists tell us that we must use the Left’s tactics to defeat them. This is wrong. It’s wrong because there is no distinction between tactics and politics, you cannot defeat something by becoming it.

What shameless dishonesty. I don’t know what I despise more about conservatives, their fecklessness or their smug, shameless, self-righteous dishonesty. Tactics are not politics are not objectives are not ideals; just as the US Marines did not become the Wehrmacht by adopting maneuver warfare, the Alt-Right will not become SJWs due to the effective use of rhetoric and going on the offensive. The fact that the ends may or may not justify the means does not mean that the ends are the means.

American conservatism is a failed political posture; it can reasonably be described as the political philosophy of failure. That is why the Alt-Right is the only reasonable political philosophy for anyone who wishes to oppose the madness of SJWs and the Left’s dream of a fully converged social justice state. Nothing else offers more than the promise – usually false – of holding one’s political ground.

In this vein, I absolutely adore Glenn’s idea of restoring the 20 percent tax on motion picture theater gross revenues and applying it to all Hollywood products. Trump and the GOP should institute it immediately. Tax EVERY Democrat-dominated industry at the highest rate applied by the US tax code; after all, Democrats just love high taxes.

Pull some hair. Kick some ass. Bring more cowbell. Remember, the Alt-Right doesn’t believe in noble defeat, it believes in WINNING.

A failure of dialectic

This account of feminism perverting theology is an excellent example of the way in which dialectic is impotent when faced with a literally unreasonable opponent:

The meaning of head in Ephesians 5 is critical not for egalitarians, nor even for traditionalists.  Even if head meant “source” in Ephesians 5, the passage still tells wives to submit to their husbands, and it is merely one of many which does so.  Egalitarians are lost even if they win this argument, and traditionalists are largely unfazed even if they somehow lost it.  On the other hand, the meaning of the word head is critical for complementarians, because complementarians twist themselves into knots to avoid telling wives to submit to their husbands out of a fear of seeming harsh, demeaning, and male supremacist.  The only way complementarians can sound traditional while avoiding preaching submission is to focus all of their energies on the responsibility of the husband to act in such a way that his wife naturally wants to submit.  This is not the biblical model of marriage, it is the complementarian model of marriage.  The closest to a biblical justification for this invention is the word head in Eph 5.  This is true despite the fact that even the word headship is discomforting to complementarians, who have coined the term servant leader and focus on cartoonish chivalry.

Even so, Grudem has done a great service by vigorously refuting the spurious claim about head.


Why did I do this? So that commentaries, Greek lexicons, and Bible translations in future generations will accurately teach and translate a crucial verse in the word of God. If head equals “authority over” as has been shown now in over sixty examples, then the ballgame is over. And even today, twenty-four years after my first article, there are still zero examples where a person is called “head” of someone else and is not in authority over that person. Zero.

But as Grudem notes, despite the original claim being made without evidence, and having been thoroughly debunked, the Bible is not (and never was) the issue:


That kind of evidence would normally settle the debate forever in ordinary exegesis of ordinary verses.


But this is not an ordinary verse. Because the evangelical feminists cannot lose this verse, they continue to ignore or deny the evidence. I think that is very significant.


It now seems to me that, for some people in this dispute who have thought through the issue and are committed to the egalitarian cause and have the academic knowledge to evaluate the evidence for themselves, what the Bible says on this question is not decisive. And, sadly, InterVarsity Press (USA), in spite of being given evidence of multiple factual errors in Catherine Kroeger’s article on “head” in Dictionary of Paul and His Letters,5 still continues to refuse to make any changes to the article.

Grudem goes on to recount his recollection of the founding of the CBMW.  I won’t summarize it here, but you can read it in the linked piece.  After the CBMW was founded, Grudem had his second major learning experience with egalitarians. Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE) asked for CBMW leadership to meet with them in an effort to find common ground.  At CBE’s urging the CBMW created what they expected would be a joint statement on abuse.  The CBMW leadership did not seem to understand that feminists are very open that their focus on abuse is about eradicating headship, not on actual abuse.  Even worse, the CBE was merely trying to take the CBMW off message, and had no interest in a mutual statement:

As we talked, there seemed to be agreement that one thing we could do together would be for both organizations to agree publicly that abuse within marriage is wrong. So we agreed to work on a joint statement on abuse. After the meeting, Mary Kassian drafted such a statement, and we got some feedback from the CBE people, and we were going to issue it. But, then on October 10, 1994, we received a letter from them saying that their board had considered it, and they would not join with us in the joint statement opposing abuse. I was shocked and disappointed when the letter came. I wondered then if their highest goal in this issue was to be faithful to Scripture above all and stop the horrors of abuse, or was to promote the egalitarian agenda. We ended up publishing the statement ourselves in CBMW NEWS (later renamed The Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood).

Even after this, Grudem seems to have still expected good faith from egalitarians.  In yet another incident, Grudem and the CBMW were assured that the gender neutral version of the NIV had been scrapped:


But just before the meeting began, the IBS issued a statement saying they had “abandoned all plans” for changes in gender-related language in future editions of the NIV. So we thought the controversy was done and the NIV would remain faithful in its translation of gender-related language in the Bible.


Little did we know, however, that the Committee on Bible Translation for the NIV had not “abandoned all plans”! Far from it! Unknown to anyone outside their circles, for the next four years the Committee on Bible Translation, apparently with the quiet cooperation of people at Zondervan and the International Bible Society, continued working to produce a gender-neutral NIV. They had publicly “abandoned all plans,” but privately they were going full-steam ahead. Then suddenly in 2001, they announced unilaterally they were abandoning the agreement not to publish gender related changes in the NIV, and they published the TNIV New Testament in 2001 and the whole Bible in 2005.

In his conclusion Grudem says he originally thought the whole feminist rebellion would blow over once he and others carefully explained the correct meaning of Scripture:

I am surprised that this controversy has gone on so long. In the late 80s and early 90s when we began this, I expected that this would probably be over in ten years. By force of argument, by use of facts, by careful exegesis, by the power of the clear word of God, by the truth, I expected the entire church would be persuaded, the battle for the purity of the church would be won, and egalitarian advocates would be marginalized and have no significant influence. But it has not completely happened yet!

Unspoken in this (and complementarianism at large) is an attitude that Christian feminists are not rebelling against God in a pattern that dates back to the fall, but are the natural reaction to a suddenly harsh generation of Christian men.  This is why Grudem and his colleagues repeatedly fell for the feminist ruses, and why to this day they are most concerned with showing how reasonable they are.

I have a simple and efficient metric that permits me to avoid such problems. Any time anyone relies on “equality” for any aspect of their argument, I assume they are, at best, deluded, and on average, dishonest. I take arguments that appeal to, or rely upon, equality, about as seriously as those that rely upon “unicorns” or “leprechauns” as their justifications.

I have yet to see anyone make an honest and compelling argument that utilized equality. It is an intrinsically evil concept that always leads even otherwise honest men astray.

Mr. Grudem could have saved himself 21 years of pointless argument by applying this extraordinarily reliable metric. But at least he did the rest of us the favor of demonstrating that Churchian equalitarianism is every bit as evil and deceptive as its worldly counterpart, and that it is only a matter of time before Christian feminism drops the adjective as well as the concept of Scriptural authority.

What a pity that even Biblical scholars don’t know how to utilize the wisdom of Proverbs.

A continual dripping on a very rainy day and a contentious woman are alike; Whoever restrains her restrains the wind, and grasps oil with his right hand.
– Proverbs 27:15-16

Migration killing tourism

The European governments are going to have to choose between migrants and tourists:

Tourists from China are avoiding France amid surging violence and crime, a Chinese tourism expert has said, reporting that customers are turning to Russia as a safer destination.

President of the Chinese Association of Travel Agencies in France, Jean-François Zhou, said “increasingly violent” thefts and assaults are turning France into “one of the worst destinations for foreign tourists”.

Mr. Zhou, a representative for major Chinese travel agency Utour in France, reported a steep decline in visitor numbers from Asia, and said many tourists are now looking to Russia as a less dangerous holiday destination

“In 2016, there were 1.6 million Chinese tourists compared to 2.2 million in 2015. The  number of Japanese tourists dropped 39 per cent, and Koreans 27 per cent. Our tourists have turned to Russia, which is less attractive but at least it is a safe country. For Putin, it is an economic windfall”, he told Le Parisien.

Rising violence and aggression account for the drop, according to Mr. Zhou, who said: “For a number of Chinese tourists, the dream of visiting France and Paris has turned into a nightmare.

“[Chinese tourists] are robbed in the palace of Versailles, at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, in front of their hotel, as they leave the coaches … In high season, not a day goes by without tourists being assaulted.”

You can try to talk your way around reality as long as you like. But eventually, people are going to notice the gap between what you’re saying and what they’re seeing, and then the web of words will fail. I’m just surprised that Russia is already beginning to become a tourist destination. Should it eventually become more popular than the USA, the decline will be unmistakable.

Hard BREXIT it is

It’s far from over, but the British people are clearly no more interested in the dire threats from Europe than the God-Emperor Ascendant is:

Just a few weeks after the Brexit vote, I was confronted by one of Britain’s most senior bankers at a social event stuffed with the nation’s business elite.  The message was shrill: ‘This is a disaster. You have to help convince the Government we must stay in the single market.’

Now the banker, who has been patrolling the corridors of Whitehall with the same message ever since, has received a similarly robust response from the Prime Minister herself.

Britain will not remain part of the single market. It will not be seeking any off-the-shelf, Norway-style deals. Nor is it interested in a customs union — imposing standardised EU-wide import tariffs — which would limit its ability to forge independent trade deals with the world’s great economies.

Theresa May’s muscular bargaining position with Brussels has been immeasurably strengthened by two factors: the imminent arrival of Donald Trump in the White House; and the sparkling performance of the UK’s economy since June, which has defied all the ‘expert’ predictions of doom. A Trump presidency, we are now promised, will put Britain at the front of the queue for a trade deal — not at the back, as threatened by Barack Obama.

That is enormously significant because the U.S. is Britain’s biggest single trading partner, accounting for 20 per cent of our commerce with the rest of the world, and 6 per cent of the UK’s total output. Britain’s economy is showing a remarkable resilience in the face of Brexit beyond the wildest dreams of those who advocated that we should leave.

The economists and architects of the EU lied to get the nations of Europe into the EU. It shouldn’t be terribly surprising to discover that they will lie to try to keep them from leaving and reclaiming their national sovereignty. Indeed, the harder the Europeans argue, lie, and threaten, the more it becomes obvious to everyone across Europe that the Brits, and everyone else, will be better off out of the bankers’ corporatist state.

The toll

There is a common phrase one hears among skeptics of biracial relationships between blacks and whites, “burn the coal, pay the toll”. But given my background in economics, I couldn’t help wondering what, precisely, is the toll? Here are some relevant facts, figures, and probabilities for white women contemplating the costs and benefits of coal-burning.

  • 100 percent greater chance of getting divorced.

Marriages that took place between African American men and white women had twice the potential of ending up in divorce in comparison to marriages involving a white man and a white woman. White female and African American male couples also had the greatest chances of divorce out of all non-white and white marriages.
– “Is Interracial Marriage More Likely to End in Divorce?”

  • 3 percent chance of having legitimate children

92% of biracial children with African American fathers are born out of wedlock,with Caucasian mothers leading in that percentage [at 97%]. 90% of women who have children out of wedlock with African American men will not end up marrying that man, where as 10% will wed,  yet those that wed, or do have their children in wedlock, typically end up a single mother nonetheless due to divorce.
– “Ninety Two Percent: Examining the Birth Trends, Family Structure, Economic Standing, Paternal Relationships, and Emotional Stability of Biracial Children with African American Fathers”

  • 98 percent chance of not being financially supported by the child’s father

Does the father of your children support financially? Caucasian: NO 98% YES 2%
– “Ninety Two Percent: Examining the Birth Trends, Family Structure, Economic Standing, Paternal Relationships, and Emotional Stability of Biracial Children with African American Fathers”

  • A one-in-three chance of encountering herpes.

White infection rate: 6 percent. Black infection rate: 32 percent.
– “Percentage of Adults Aged 20–29 Years with Genital Herpes Infection, by Race/Ethnicity”, National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey

  • 1,524 percent greater chance of encountering gonorrhea

White male infection rate: 28.8/100,000. Black male infection rate: 467.7/100,000.
– “STD/HIV incidence rates in the US (breakdown by race) 2014”, Centers for Disease Control

  • 1,524 percent greater chance of encountering gonorrhea

White male infection rate: 28.8/100,000. Black male infection rate: 467.7/100,000.
– “STD/HIV incidence rates in the US (breakdown by race) 2014”, Centers for Disease Control

  • 670 percent greater chance of being murdered 

In this paper we examine patterns and trends in homicides between marriage partners in the United States for 1976 through 1985 using data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Supplemental Homicide Reports (FBI-SHR). We identified 16,595 spouse homicides accounting for 8.8 per cent of all homicides reported to the FBI-SHR during this 10-year period…. The risk of victimization was greater for spouses in interracial than in intraracial marriages … Spouse homicides in marriages where the husband was Black and the wife was White constituted 1.4 per cent of the total … Spouse homicide incidence rates were 7.7 times higher in interracial marriages relative to intraracial marriages.
– “Fatal Violence among Spouses in the United States, 1976-85,” by James A. Mercy and Linda E. Saltzman.

So, that’s the toll involved. It’s not even close to the cheerful middle-class picture so often presented by the television commercials. In light of the statistical probabilities involved, any parent who remains silent for fear of being called “racist” fully deserves the 18-year penalty that so often results from biracial relationships. I note that any parent who permitted their children to take such similarly high risks in other circumstances would probably be charged with abuse.

On the macro level, the obvious conclusion is that the media’s propagandistic push for biracial relationships is just another front in its 52-year war on the family, of every race and color. And on Gab, a biracial individual commented on the truth of these observations concerning illegitimacy and child support: @voxday Hitting me right in the childhood

The doomed presidency

(((Richard Cohen))) warns that the Trump presidency is doomed:

Whether he knows it or not, the specter of Lyndon Baines Johnson haunts Donald John Trump. There are some jarring similarities — two big, fleshy men given to vulgarities and gauche behavior, boastful, thin-skinned, politically amoral, vengeful, unforgiving and, most important, considered illegitimate presidents. For Johnson, that took some time to sink in; Trump is already there….

The president-elect will take the oath with a minority of the popular vote — a substantial deficit of almost 3 million votes. He enters the Oval Office with historically dismal poll numbers, lower now than right after he won the election. He has done nothing to woo the majority of Americans who rejected his candidacy and has, instead, adhered to his schoolyard habit of tweeting his every grievance, denigrating his every critic, making cameos with vaccine and global-warming doubters and, as if to show some versatility, rascals such as Don King and Kanye West. It is a “Gong Show” with no gong in sight.

Lyndon Johnson would no doubt warn Trump that he is already on thin ice and he will plunge through it the moment Congress takes the measure of his unpopularity. Johnson was a man of huge political abilities and experience, and his achievements in civil rights entitled him to greatness. Yet, when Vietnam went sour, so did the public, and it seemed, after a while, that his personal characteristics, scathingly caricatured by artists such as David Levine and Jules Feiffer, oozed out of him so that they obscured both him and his accomplishments. He was deemed capable of anything — of lying and perversion of all kinds. This is where Trump stands now.

By the end of the week, Trump will be the president. I wish him the best; I wish him the worst. The dilemma is how to separate loathing for him from love of country. I am leaving it to time to work that out. Meanwhile, Trump will have his moment, that’s for sure, but when things go wrong he will be chased from office — just like Johnson once was. The ancient Greeks knew why: A man’s character is his fate. In that case, Trump’s presidency is doomed.

My two-word rebuttal: Bill Clinton.

Now, LBJ was, in my opinion, the very worst president the USA has ever had, with the arguable exception of Lincoln. Say what you will of Wilson and FDR, (much less trivialities such as Carter, the Bushes, and Obama) but in both cases, the nation-state not only survived their administrations, but came out of them at least temporarily stronger than before, even though various seeds for long term problems had been planted. And LBJ managed to do his mortal damage to the nation in less than two full terms.

By signing the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 and instituting the Great Society, LBJ murdered the American nation-state, which no longer exists any more than the Chickesaw nation in northern Mississippi or the Cherokee nation in Georgia do. The USA is now a multinational, multicultural, multireligious state, with less stability and worse long-term prospects than the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1900.

We should hope and pray the Trump presidency is as significant as LBJ’s doomed one, although, of course, in the opposite direction. MAGA! MAWA! MAAA!