Vox Popoli

It turns out that the Fowl Atheist actually defended the Muslim outrage sparked by the notorious Danish cartoons:

There are some things a cartoonist would be rightly excoriated for publishing: imagine that one had drawn an African-American figure as thick-lipped, low-browed, smirking clown with a watermelon in one hand and a fried chicken drumstick in the other. Feeding bigotry and flaunting racist stereotypes would be something that would drive me to protest any newspaper that endorsed it—of course, my protests would involve writing letters and canceling subscriptions, not rioting and burning down buildings. There is a genuine social concern here, I think. Muslims represent a poor and oppressed underclass, and those cartoons represent a ruling establishment intentionally taunting them and basically flipping them off. They have cause to be furious!

So much for all those Pharyngulans attempting to defend PZ as some sort of equal-opportunity offender. Also, perhaps someone could explain to PZ that there isn’t exactly a shortage of wealth in the Muslim world. And while there is a global elite, I’m certain it’s not based in Copenhagen. I can’t help wonder, when canceling his subscription, would Associate Professor Myers have also called for the dismissal of the responsible cartoonist?

Being a confirmed anti-French Revolutionary, I’ve never celebrated Bastille Day. Gerald Warner provides a good, succinct explanation why no reasonable man should:

When you are reduced to celebrating the murder by the canaille of Paris in 1789 of the French equivalent of the Chelsea Pensioners, you are inadvertently advertising the sinister origins of the dysfunctional state you are trying to prop up with a mythology as grotesque as it is pathetic. The Umpteenth French Republic is the one entity whose absorption by the European Union is not to be regretted.

Pompous parades will today celebrate the event that triggered the French Revolution, that is to say, the most appalling bloodbath anterior to the Russian Revolution. Seven prisoners were released from the Bastille – four counterfeiters, an accomplice to murder and two lunatics – whose return to the community was hardly beneficial. The attack on the prison, reserved for the well-off, was orchestrated by the Marquis de Sade and Camille Desmoulins on behalf of the Nine Sisters masonic lodge.

There followed the September massacres, the marriages republicains in which people of opposite sexes were stripped naked and lashed together in obscene postures before being drowned, mothers forced to watch their children being guillotined and the massacre of 400,000 Catholic royalists – the majority of them women and children – in La Vendee.

As I pointed out in TIA, the EUSSR is only the latest iteration of the same ideological virus that travelled from Paris to London, then to Moscow, then back again to Paris. It’s interesting to note that Warner clearly sees the intellectual lineage as well.

To virtually no one’s surprise, the Fed and the Treasury aren’t going to let capitalism take its course with Freddie and Fannie. This should remove any last vestiges of doubt from those of you who still believe that the USA is a capitalist society. Or, for that matter, a free market one:

The US Government took dramatic steps to prop up America’s financial system last night, announcing that it was prepared to pump billions of dollars into the country’s mortgage market in a desperate measure to prevent the economy going into a tailspin. In a late-night announcement designed to calm increasing panic on Wall Street before today’s market opening, the US Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve issued a joint statement in which they pledged to spend billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to bail out the two American mortgage giants that collectively underpin the entire housing market “if needed”.

And no, it’s not going to work. The housing crash has barely begun. But don’t think everything is going to head south in a hurry, as the more the government draws it out by fighting the market forces, the longer it’s going to take. Use the inevitable 400-point rally days as exit opportunities and keep in mind that giant one- and two-day rallies are the hallmark of a bear market, not the return of a bull.

Shockingly, British corporations aren’t terribly enthusiastic about hiring people who aren’t required to actually work for them:

The radical extension of maternity leave is in danger of sabotaging women’s careers, the head of the new equality watchdog has warned. With women now entitled to a year off for each child, Nicola Brewer, the chief executive of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, said employers were thinking twice about offering them jobs or promotion. She said that her concerns were underlined when the entrepreneur Sir Alan Sugar said that many employers simply binned CVs of women of child-bearing age.

This isn’t new. I remember when my mother was running an HR department, and it was her principle to only hire women under the age of 30 for positions that weren’t career-oriented. It didn’t matter what the young woman said about her plans; she’d seen too many women who swore up and down that they intended to continue working suddenly change their plans after getting married.

That’s not a bad thing, as children are much better off with their mother at home. But this need to fix the fix is just one more indication of the unsustainability of equalitarian culture, as with socialism and other forms of interventionist society, the unstable foundation on irrational premises requires constant adjustments by the government, the cumulative effect of which will permanently destabilize the society and cause it to collapse.

I’m not, strictly speaking, on Facebook, to the extent that I actually intend to make any use of it. But since Blackblade was kind enough to create a profile for me there – I think we’ll be using it for some interesting automated CoComment stuff soon – I thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to let those of you who make use of Facebook know about it, since a few folks have clearly run across it.

I have to admit, I find the whole “will you be my friend” thing to be rather cringeworthy, but then, this is hardly the first social trend that has left me entirely mystified. I mean, why on Azaroth would you waste time collecting friends on Facebook when you could be racking up a seven-digit body count in the battlegrounds?

Okay, maybe I am just a tad anti-social.

UPDATE – Speaking of social networks, Spacebunny has created a homeschool group for those who might be interested. If you want to join, login to CoComment and request an invitation from her.

As I said before, it’s like listening to a deaf man musing on the intricacies of melody:

Dan Wolter, a spokesman for the University of Minnesota system, said of Mr. Myers’s site that while “there is no question that those views do not reflect the views of the University of Minnesota, Morris, or the system,… they were made on a personal blog and everyone has a right to free speech.”

Mr. Wolter said the Web link was taken off the biology’s department’s page because “it was a violation of university Web policy” to link to personal sites without a “this does not represent university views” disclaimer. He said the content of Mr. Myers’s speech was not at issue….

As a tenured associate professor, Mr. Myers would be difficult to fire, but could more easily be denied promotion to a full professorship. Mr. Myers said such efforts from Catholics would be “thoroughly contemptible.”

Mr. Wolter said he could not say whether the university’s response would be different if Mr. Myers went through with his threat, nor could he say whether acts outside the classroom can, in principle, provide a basis to revoke tenure.

It would be fascinating to know what grounds PZ would provide for supporting his assertion that it would be “thoroughly contemptible” for Minnesota Catholics to lobby for his firing or against his future promotion. They’ve certainly got far more cause for going after his job than he ever had for going after their beliefs. And shouldn’t he expect them to behave in a contemptible manner, given the total contempt he has always demonstrated for them?

While it would be highly unusual for PZ to get fired over what was nothing more than a silly statement of intent, when one considers the hostile attention he has brought to his university backwater, I expect he has been warned that he will be disciplined if he is stupid enough to carry on with the announced cracker abuse. The delinking of Pharyngula is an obvious shot across the bow, as is the statement by the university spokesman distancing the university from PZ’s views. At this point, only an utter idiot would proceed with flouting the university’s authority and its distaste for bad press; proceeding as planned would offer clear justification for a firing on the basis of blatant insubordination.

We already know that PZ is a coward at heart – he is “the Fowl Atheist” after all – so he’ll be warned to leave the crackers alone, the stolen crackers will go unmolested, and the tempest in the teapot will come to an end… until the next socially autistic miscalculation. Afraid to abuse a cracker! What a sadly ironic fate for such a brave little atheist militant.

Dave has begun contributing to WND. What do you think? He strikes me as a bit out of step with the neoconservative National Greatness doctrine:

Conservative Christians can jive with this analysis of the welfare state’s failure. It’s clear that Christ spoke not to Caesar when he advocated helping the weak, but to every individual, even the poor themselves. The founders understood this concept. The revolution got the state out of the way so Christ’s movement could work in a free society to transform lives. Nevertheless, America has lost its faith in God. We have turned to man to solve our problems. Blinded by ignorance, we have forgotten Washington’s warning: “Government is force.” When man uses force to try to “fix” lives, he always fails. We are selfish. We do not know how to run people’s lives. Institutions we use to consolidate “power” only highlight this reality.

Tony Snow exits the scene with customary grace and dignity. In pace requiscat:

We shouldn’t spend too much time trying to answer the why questions: Why me? Why must people suffer? Why can’t someone else get sick? We can’t answer such things, and the questions themselves often are designed more to express our anguish than to solicit an answer.

I don’t know why I have cancer, and I don’t much care. It is what it is—a plain and indisputable fact. Yet even while staring into a mirror darkly, great and stunning truths begin to take shape. Our maladies define a central feature of our existence: We are fallen. We are imperfect. Our bodies give out.

But despite this—because of it—God offers the possibility of salvation and grace. We don’t know how the narrative of our lives will end, but we get to choose how to use the interval between now and the moment we meet our Creator face-to-face.