Sports Guy Game

Despite being a natural negger, Bill Simmons demonstrates that he’s not only a Delta, but he doesn’t actually understand the concept of Game:

Q: As a female, I usually have a hard time admitting that I read your articles. I have a harder time admitting that I think you’re hilarious. I feel like I should despise you on principle, because let’s be honest, you’re a pig. But I do like you. More than I care to admit. I find myself referencing you in everyday conversation. If I can use you to back up what I’m saying, I think it has more weight. And when guys find out I like you, they love it (thanks for that). So my question is, how do you do it? How have you managed to make a self-respecting woman eagerly await you next column, even though I’ve come to expect you to have at least one disrespectful comment in there?
— Amanda, Richmond

SG: Typical e-mail from a female reader: expresses her disgust, insults me, changes her mind three times and ultimately admits that she can’t live without me. I don’t blame Amanda because she’s been weaned on 20 years of chick flicks, and the one rule of chick flicks is this: “Find the one guy who either drives you crazy or you can’t have, then fall madly in love with him even though you know it’s completely wrong.”

Incorrect. Amanda doesn’t read the Sports Guy because of the chick flicks, the chick flicks are a hamster rationalization of the natural female tendency to be drawn to men who don’t put them on pedestals. Throw in the DHV aspect of fame – the woman wouldn’t find the column so irresistible if it wasn’t by a columnist who has rightly become famous by virtue of taking his talents to ESPN – and it’s quite natural that she would like it despite finding it despicable on principle.

I used to be puzzled when women would send me emails complaining about my columns… accompanied by their pictures. WTF? Now, in light of Game theory, it makes considerably more sense. Of course, it doesn’t happen as often now that my feminist critics of yore are all deathly afraid of provoking public responses to their criticism. It’s been rather interesting to see how the amount of public criticism has fallen dramatically while the daily blog readership has continued to steadily grow.

Better late than never

Joseph Farah flips on the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq:

For the life of me, I cannot begin to understand our objectives in either Iraq or Afghanistan any more.

Because I appreciate the sacrifice our men and women are making over there, it is with a heavy heart that I make this proclamation. But enough is enough. We have spent over $1 trillion on these two wars and spilled far too much American blood. We are obviously unwilling as a country to do what is necessary to kill the bad guys in either place, so what is the point? Isn’t it time to declare victory and get out? What is the point? Can someone, anyone, tell me?

I admit I was a supporter of both of these campaigns. I was obviously wrong.

Being one who flipped on the Iraqi War in 2004, I’m hardly in any position to condemn latecomers. I made the mistake of supporting the war under the misconception that the ceasefire Hussein had violated was an agreement between Iraq and the USA, (it was actually an agreement between Iraq and the UN and therefore had absolutely nothing to do with the USA or its national security), but I was always against any potential military occupation. Pat Buchanan, to his credit, was one of the very few who had it right from the start. As for Afghanistan, we never had any business fighting the Taliban in the first place, much less attempting to occupy the country.

Anyhow, it’s good to see relatively mainstream Republicans beginning to join the libertarians in opposing the ongoing occupations. What a pity that the anti-war Democrats have again decided that they like war after all so long as a Democrat is the Commander-in-Chief. But given the history of 20th century American military conflict, it is a mystery that anyone believes Democrats are anti-war.

WWI – Wilson (D)
WWII – Roosevelt (D)
Korea – Truman (D)
Vietnam – Johnson (D)

That is not the track record of an antiwar party. Which, of course, is why I predicted that Obama would not end the wars, but rather, expand them.

Don’t f— with 4chan

This is absolutely hilarious:

We all went to bed that night, and then at 1:15 AM, my doorbell rang. Our dog started barking and we heard bam, bam, bam … someone was banging on our door. It was the Marion County Sheriff’s Department. An officer said an anonymous tip had come in that our daughter was hurting herself. He wouldn’t tell us who called the tip in, but he made me wake my daughter up to make sure she was OK. The officer was really rude and my daughter kept denying that she made any videos. She kept saying, “I didn’t do any of this!” He was here for about 15 minutes.

The next morning, my husband and I were sitting in our home when the doorbell rang again. Another sheriff’s department officer was banging on the door. This time, they had another anonymous tip from someone in California claiming my daughter had female prostitutes coming in and out of our home from ads posted on Craigslist.

The punchline? All sorts of idiots on both sides of the political spectrum think that the problem here is Internet trolls and the solution is even MORE police activity. Of course, the only reason that anyone can be harassed this way is because of the police state in which the police do everything from sending investigative officers to armed SWAT teams to people’s houses without warrants on the sole basis of anonymous tips.

What’s happening here does reflect a sick society, but 4chan is not the sickness. It is merely a symptom of the myriad of ways in which the mere existence of the police state creates harassment of the individual.

Rape, ex post facto

If it is rape for an Arab to pass for a Israeli, I imagine that Jews who are mistaken for Italians or Caucasians will have to be prosecuted as well. To say nothing of all those women who falsely claim to be single when they actually have boyfriends or husbands.

A Palestinian man has been convicted of rape after having consensual sex with a woman who had believed him to be a fellow Jew. Sabbar Kashur, 30, was sentenced to 18 months in prison on Monday after the court ruled that he was guilty of rape by deception. According to the complaint filed by the woman with the Jerusalem district court, the two met in downtown Jerusalem in September 2008 where Kashur, an Arab from East Jerusalem, introduced himself as a Jewish bachelor seeking a serious relationship. The two then had consensual sex in a nearby building before Kashur left.

When she later found out that he was not Jewish but an Arab, she filed a criminal complaint for rape and indecent assault.The two then had consensual sex in a nearby building before Kashur left.

This ex post facto claim of rape is both logically and legally absurd, of course, but it does tend to suggest that Israel is as brutally ethnocentric as the European anti-Zionists claim contra the claims of its defenders. Given the apparent precedent set by this conviction, one is inclined to wonder if the American Jews who so eagerly descended upon the South during the Sixties on behalf of black rights will now take their guilt-ridden activism to Israel on behalf of the Arabs.

However, to be fair to the Israeli legal system, it should be kept in mind that this was the result of a plea-bargain, not a trial, so no precedent was, in fact, set. While the ethno-religious aspect of the case is what has attracted the media’s attention, I don’t think that the focus of the deception was actually on his married state is any less potentially problematic.

The end of trend

Nicholas Kristof is correct to say that men should not be written off, but for the wrong reasons:

With women making far-reaching gains, there’s a larger question. Are women simply better-suited than men to today’s jobs? The Atlantic raised this issue provocatively in this month’s issue with a cover story by Hanna Rosin bluntly entitled, “The End of Men.”

“What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men?” Ms. Rosin asked. She adds: “The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men’s size and strength. The attributes that are most valuable today — social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus — are, at a minimum, not predominately male. In fact, the opposite may be true.”

It’s a fair question, and others also have been wondering aloud if a new age of femininity is dawning. After all, Ms. Rosin notes that Americans who use high-tech biology to try to pick a baby’s sex seek a girl more often than a boy. And women now make up 51 percent of professional and managerial positions in America, up from 26 percent in 1980.

This demonstrates the problem with the linear thinker. Those who see the transformation of the workforce and academia into female-majority populations are assuming that the present post-industrial system is sustainable. But it isn’t. It’s true that women will continue to collect more and more worthless degrees than men and fill more and more needless paper-shifting jobs than men right up until the point at which a debt-laden society can no longer afford to pay for people to learn nothing and do nothing.

A private sector job which exists solely to comply with government-dictated paperwork is every bit as government-manufactured and unproductive as a public sector job. And that is precisely the type of job which is going to disappear entirely once the debt edifice collapses and the extent of the dollar-denominated imaginary economy is revealed. Just as stripping out the debt-funded component of GDP reveals that there has been no actual economic growth for decades, stripping out the paperwork jobs will demonstrate that the real labor force is still roughly 2/3rd male, just as it was in 1950.

Note for the historically illiterate. Women have ALWAYS worked. One-third of the labor force has ALWAYS been female. A more accurate description of “women in the workplace” is “middle-class mothers in the workplace”. The idea of the American stay-at-home mother was always a fundamentally middle-class one, and now, thanks to the increase in the labor supply combined with increasing taxes, most middle-class couples require two incomes in order to stay middle-class.

And the idea that the few Americans (300 million) who use sex selection technology to choose girls are going to counterbalance the millions of Chinese and Indians (2.3 billion) who use it to select boys is obviously absurd.

The non-linear thinker is forced to contemplate very different questions. Rather than occupy himself with asking if men are at an end or will be employable in a world of government-dictated make-work, he is forced to ask when the inevitable employment and academic collapse will take place in America and when the war between China and India, never officially ended, will resume. In other words, is it the end of men or the end of a societal trend?

What a bunch of emo idiots

The JournoLister reaction to Obama’s election. It’s an amusing exercise in competitive moral posturing between white progressives… it would appear black rule is the goal towards which they wish to progress because it’s worked so well everywhere from Atlanta to Zimbabwe.

DAVID ROBERTS, GRIST: It’s all I can do not to start bawling.

LUKE MITCHELL, HARPER’S: I’m picturing something like VJ Day in Times Square. Seriously!

JOHN BLEVINS, SOUTH TEXAS COLLEGE OF LAW: It’s all I can do to hold it together.

MOIRA WHELAN, NATIONAL SECURITY NETWORK: I’m looking across the street at my polling place, and the line is wrapped around the block. I nearly burst into tears when I saw it. I’m feeling like today is closing the door on a terrible era, and opening another. I’m glad you started this thread because I was feeling kind of like I was the only one who is deeply emotional today.

HENRY FARRELL, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY: I had to close my office door yesterday because I was watching YouTube videos of elderly African Americans saying what this meant to them and tearing up.

JOSH BEARMAN, LA WEEKLY: 11 months ago I burst into tears by myself on a plane while watching Hardball when my mind wandered to the image of President Obama being sworn in. I’ve been fighting it ever since.

EZRA KLEIN, AMERICAN PROSPECT: OHIO!

ALEC MCGILLIS, WASHINGTON POST: If you need further proof that VA is looking to go blue, check out what’s going on in VA-5 in deepest Southside Virginia, where Tom Perriello, my college roommate and a very good guy, is now up .06 percentage points — 2,000 votes — against Virgil Goode with 88 percent reporting.

GREG ANRIG, THE CENTURY FOUNDATION: This is really happening.

ADELE STAN, THE MEDIA CONSORTIUM: At last I can breathe.

SPENCER ACKERMAN, WASHINGTON INDEPENDENT: YES WE DID!

STEVEN TELES, YALE UNIVERSITY: I’m not sure why, but this part of the Battle Hymn of the Republic came to me . . . . Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Since God is marching on.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: [quoting Obama] “…we may not get there in one year or in one term, but America I promise you, we as a people will get there.”

HOLY. FUCKING. SHIT.

MICHAEL TOMASKY, THE GUARDIAN: I’m just jelly. Lord!

HAROLD POLLACK, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO: I am awed by the responsibility we have taken on. Tomorrow a desperately ill African-American woman will present at my university hospital for care, and she will be turned away.* She will expect us to live up to what we feel tonight. So we’ve got a lot to live up to.

All this for an incompetent and probably ineligible half-negro who is doing his clueless best to turn America into a bankrupt Detroit. No wonder they’re so bitter about his rapid political implosion. As I see it, the only fitting end for them would be to have their hearts torn out at sunrise and offered to Quetzalcoatl by Aztlan separatists on the UCLA campus as part of the celebrations accompanying the first Rodriguez inauguration in 2020.

Yeah, they’ll get there. They won’t like it when they do, but they’ll get there. The problem is that they’ll take you with them.

*Special bonus humor. Michelle Obama was responsible for instituting this patient-dumping program at this very hospital.

Already a lame duck

This is why Obama won’t be on the ballot in 2012:

A year after President Barack Obama’s political honeymoon ended, his job approval rating has dropped to a negative 44 – 48 percent, his worst net score ever, and American voters say by a narrow 39 – 36 percent margin that they would vote for an unnamed Republican rather than President Obama in 2012, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.

Of course, if the pollsters had asked about any Disney cartoon character, Obama would have fared even worse. While I have no doubt that the Republicans would like to do their utmost to throw the election by nominating a RINO in the Dole/McCain vein, they’re going to be far too busy attempting to discredit Ron Paul and co-opting the Tea Party to pay much attention to laying down for Obama. The real threat to Obama comes from within the Democratic Party; the Lizard Queen has been remarkably quiet for the last eighteen months and I don’t believe for a second that she has abandoned any of her presidential ambitions.

She’s reinvented herself as a moderate in comparison with Obama, and now that the first black president is a failure, she can still hope to break new ground as the first female president. And she won’t be the only Democrat to challenge Obama, in fact, she probably won’t even be the first. Once a fringe challenger begins to look capable of upsetting Obama’s primary nomination, the party elders will begin putting pressure on him to stand down in favor of a more popular, more moderate Democrat, like the Secretary of State.

One more thing. If you look at Obama, does he look like a man who enjoys being president? I think he knows he’s in way over his head and might even welcome the chance to get off the hot seat.

TARP rape

In case you were wondering where those record financial industry profits are coming from:

Increased housing commitments swelled U.S. taxpayers’ total support for the financial system by $700 billion in the past year to around $3.7 trillion, a government watchdog said on Wednesday. The Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program said the increase was due largely to the government’s pledges to supply capital to Fannie Mae (FNMA.OB) and Freddie Mac (FMCC.OB) and to guarantee more mortgages to the support the housing market.

It’s a brilliant business plan.

1) Gamble billions of dollars.  If you win, gamble more.  If you lose, go to step 2.
2) Ask the government to pay you trillions of dollars to prevent you from going bankrupt.  Otherwise cats and dogs will start living together!  Tanks on the streets!
3) Profit!

PS – Don’t forget to pay yourself millions of dollars in bonuses for your incredible and irreplaceable business acumen.

This is nothing less than financial rape by politics. It amounts to locking up one-quarter of the economy to guarantee the continued operation of the financial sector, which somehow can’t survive on only one-third of all American profits.

If you want to understand how America threw away its post-WWII economic advantage over the rest of the world, just look at that chart.  And notice how the fall in financial profits corresponded with the nation’s climb out of the 1970s economic malaise.  Profits are the economy’s lifesblood, but diverting those profits to the financial sector has the same effect as a vampire draining the blood out of a human body.  When the historians of the future write the history of America’s decline and fall, you can be sure that the Congress-assisted TARP rape will be marked as a significant event in that process.

Breaking the Army

As if there wasn’t enough reason to stop occupying Iraq and Afghanistan:

For those of us working in the US military it was clear that by the surge in 2007 the US forces were in terrible shape. By 2007, the repeated deployments resulted in an estimated 30 per cent of the US Army with some degree of post traumatic stress disorder. Every indicator of morale showed problems. Divorce and suicide were way up. Officers leaving the service after repeated deployments meant that the promotion selection of those remaining rose to 100 per cent. Before the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars lower performing officers were weeded out on the promotion lists from captain to major and major to lieutenant colonel. Competition for promotions ensured high standards in the officer corps. Normally only about 60 per cent of majors were selected for promotion to lieutenant colonel and those not promoted retired.

Yet by 2007 officer retention was so low that virtually all officers below full colonel were being selected for promotion to the next higher rank. The joke in the US Army was that the new standard for promotion was “fogging a mirror.” This also means that a lot of incompetent officers are moving higher in rank. This means big trouble now and even more in the future.

The absurd thing about these occupations, as with the Korean occupation, is that they have absolutely NOTHING to do with national security except to threaten it. Meanwhile, the southern border is being invaded on a daily basis. And both political parties are culpable.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

“While [the King of Sweden and Norway and former Marshal of France] Bernadotte was in Paris I saw him every day. He but faintly disguised from me the hope he had entertained of ruling France; and in the numerous conversations to which our respective occupations led I ascertained, though Bernadotte did not formally tell me so, that he once had strong expectations of succeeding Napoleon…. Bernadotte expressed to me astonishment at the recall of the Bourbons, and assured me that he had not expected the French people would so readily have consented to the Restoration. I confess I was surprised that Bernadotte, with the intelligence I knew him to possess, should imagine that the will of subjects has any influence in changes of government!”
– Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, The Memoirs of Napoleon