Vox Popoli

The Washington prostitution scandal offers one explanation for why career women are less likely to marry:

Palfrey recruited women by placing ads featuring her telephone number in local alternative newspapers and campus publications, including the University of Maryland school newspaper….

From career professionals to graduate students, most women who came to Palfrey to work did so because they needed money — to pay off credit card debt, cover school loans or pay tuition fees, according to Palfrey. “I had a gal, for example, who was at Georgetown Medical,” she said. At different times Palfrey employed a college professor, a medical researcher, a Navy officer, a legal secretary and a suburban realtor.

You know, if you’re spending your days working in an office and your evenings working as a prostitute, you really aren’t in much of a position to complain that you can’t meet a nice guy who wants to marry you.

Although I have never made use of their services, I have nothing against prostitutes of either the street or high class varieties. But I nevertheless find it more than a little ironic that a madam should find it profitable to look to college students, graduate students and career women – most likely East Coast, moderately feminist liberals all – in stocking her hooker store.

I was reading through a story about a new documentary dedicated to two men who were battling for the all-time high score on Donkey Kong and happened to click on a link for Twin Galaxies. I dimly recalled submitting a high score for a classic arcade game about ten years ago back when I was first enthralled with MAME and checked out the list for Pooyan.

Anyhow, it seems I’m in the record books as the holder of the 11th highest score, at 138,200. Alert Wikipedia! It’s a pity they didn’t go back a little further, because I only got that score after Spacebunny had broken my previous record, which at the time was the Internet high score. Hence her claim to arcade royalty. Respect.

Big Chilly should be in there too for 1942. He’s frighteningly good at that game; at one of the Digital Ghetto’s Christmas parties back in the day, he beat the Atari Jaguar version of it the very first time he played it without losing a plane.

It was the single most awesome video game performance I’ve seen before or since.

Feminists are all for choice, so long as women only choose to kill their unborn children for reasons of which they approve:

CAMPAIGNERS last night warned couples “not to play God” with a revolutionary home test that reveals an unborn baby’s sex at six weeks. They fear the £189 kit will create a massive leap in abortions if would-be parents are not having the gender they want.

Michaela Aston, spokeswoman for the charity LIFE, said: “This test is very dangerous. It could lead to babies being aborted simply for being the ‘wrong’ sex.” And Julia Millington, of the Prolife Alliance, said: “There is a real risk that some people would choose to abort babies of a certain gender.”

The earliest couples had previously known the gender of their baby was at the 20-week scan — four weeks before the legal limit for an abortion….

Prolife Alliance’s Ms Millington added: “We have already reached an alarming situation where hospitals in some parts of the UK will no longer disclose the gender of an unborn child.

As is dependably the case, the feminist position is hopelessly self-contradictory. They have absolutely no rationale for denying sex-based abortions, thus in the name of women’s equality, they are increasingly complicit in the murders of millions of little girls.

So, naturally, they’ll try to deny women information about the sex of the unborn child… just as they try to deny women information about abortion’s effects on them. Given their blatant attempts to keep women ignorant and uninformed, one really has to wonder just how dedicated to female empowerment they truly are.

Feminists are not merely disgusting, evil creatures, they’re demonstrably stupid as well.

UPDATE – Come on. Is it really plausible that hospitals are refusing to disclose the gender of the unborn child because they’re pro-life? I’m not accusing feminists of hypocrisy here… yet, only pointing out that their position is a rationally untenable one. The significance of the article to which I linked isn’t what anyone is saying right now, it’s the mere fact that this inexpensive and early test is now available. The current silence of American feminists on the issue notwithstanding, it’s already clear which way they’re going to have to jump in the near future:

At CSW 51, [Commission on the Status of Women] the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) supported a resolution banning sex-selection abortions.

One of UNIFEM’s publications on eliminating violence against women begins with an acknowledgment that the abortion of females is violence against women and girls: “The range of violence against women and girls is devastating, occurring quite literally from womb to tomb. It includes: abortion of female babies.”

Even in the more female-friendly West, it’s obvious which way the sex selection dial will usually be turned: That North Americans may not use new technologies to produce huge numbers of “extra” boys does not, however, mean that sex selection and sexism are unrelated. One study, by Roberta Steinbacher at Cleveland State University, found that 81% of women and 94% of men who say they would use sex selection would want their firstborn to be a boy.

But is that sexism or is it choice? And is there really a difference anyhow?

Otherwise, it seems it isn’t the white boys that the ladies need worry about:

In Table 42, entitled “Personal crimes of violence, 2005, percent distribution of single-offender victimizations, based on race of victims, by type of crime and perceived race of offender,” we learn that there were 111,590 white victims and 36,620 black victims of rape or sexual assault in 2005. (The number of rapes is not distinguished from those of sexual assaults; it is maddening that sexual assault, an ill-defined category that covers various types of criminal acts ranging from penetration to inappropriate touching, is conflated with the more specific crime of rape.) In the 111,590 cases in which the victim of rape or sexual assault was white, 44.5 percent of the offenders were white, and 33.6 percent of the offenders were black. In the 36,620 cases in which the victim of rape or sexual assault was black, 100 percent of the offenders were black, and 0.0 percent of the offenders were white. The table explains that 0.0 percent means that there were under 10 incidents nationally.

That’s a pretty significant difference. When one factors in that Hispanics are counted as white offenders, it’s pretty obvious that there are actually fewer Caucasian offenders than black offenders. Considering that American blacks have been a part American culture for more than half of the countries existence, the idea that there is some sort of cultural difference here doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

There seem to be two contradictory multiculti arguments here. One is that “race” doesn’t exist, in which case we can go ahead and end all affirmative action and employment laws. Since I’ve never heard anyone who claims that there is no such thing as “race” is willing to eliminate all race-based preferences and laws based on that “scientific fact”, it’s safe to conclude that even they don’t believe what they are saying.

The other argument is that everyone is equal, skin color notwithstanding. But this makes no sense, as there are a whole host of statistically observable differences between the various races. And it certainly calls into serious question the basic assumption of those who believe that a racially mixed America will have more in common with historical white America than it does with every other third world nation. It won’t.

Interestingly enough, all of those sophisticated Europeans that American liberals so admire are far more “racist” in this regard than the right-wing conservative American that they despise. European laws heavily favor immigration from other European countries; in some cases America is now considered no more desirable an origin than Ghana or Zimbabwe. Perhaps that’s because Europeans have born witness to the sharp differences between various ethnic groups for centuries while America indulged itself in the myth of the Melting Pot, which was really just an exercise in seeing how many non-Anglos could be mixed into Anglo-European culture without destroying it.

(Remember, Europe’s immigration angst which is beginning to boil over into violence and their national politics concerns Muslims making up 4-5 percent of their population. The USA has twice that many ILLEGAL Hispanic immigrants alone. In France, despite the notorious ghettos and riots, the number is only has 8-9 percent.)

In any event, the risk-reward ratio simply doesn’t make sense, it’s far too high. Why risk the existence of your entire peaceful and wealthy civilization… for theories which suggest that change will be harmless? But Americans have brought this on themselves, with their sixties-era canonization of racial egalitarianism, cultural relativism and global immigration.

So, don’t cry for me, America, when you end up like Argentina.

What would the consciousness dabblers or evolutionary biologists here recommend for the latest books on the evolution of morality? Marc Hauser’s Moral Minds and Richard Joyce’s Evolution of Morality appear two of the more recommended books, is there anything else that is a must-have?

Dr. Helen is amused by a fellow forensic psychologist with a poor grasp of history:

Perhaps Dr. Schlesinger has a poor memory, because if she thought about it, she would know that the famous song by the BoomTown Rats entitled, “I Don’t Like Mondays” was written about “non-existent” (at least to some experts) Brenda Spencer. Spencer was a seventeen-year-old high school senior in San Diego who in January of 1979 opened fire into a crowded elementary school across the street from her home.

Because women tend to do things rather differently than men, people sometimes errantly conclude that they don’t do them at all. Given how many deaths take place in hospitals, I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that more people are killed by murderous nurses every year than by angry school and workplace shooters.

Of course, a quiet injection every now and then doesn’t create quite as much noise in the media.

ZT may be waiting a long, long time:

I already bought Wrath of Angels from amazon but would rather buy from you if you had it direct some place. Might actually get it faster as well as it seems to be on back order at Amazon.

You’d better cancel that order, ZT, since Pocket won’t be providing Amazon with Wrath anytime soon. Or ever, as far as I know, since I reclaimed the rights from them after they sat on it longer than the contract allowed. If you’d like to read it in material form, I strongly suggest buying it here since that’s the only place you can do so. As for those of you who are waiting on the second run, the books have shipped from the printers so they should be going out relatively soon.

Police make lousy soldiers. Soldiers make lousy policemen. And a militarized police force is counterproductive regardless of whether you want to keep the peace or win a war:

There’s a telling scene related to all of this in Evan Wright’s terrific book Generation Kill. Wright was embedded with an elite U.S. Marine unit in Iraq. Throughout his time with the unit, Wright documents the extraordinary precautions the unit takes to avoid unnecessary civilian casualties, and the real heartbreak the soldiers feel when they do inadvertently kill a civilian. About 3/4 through the book, Wright explains how the full-time Marines were getting increasingly irritated with a reserve unit traveling with them. The reserve unit was mostly made up people who in their civilians lives were law enforcement, “from LAPD cops to DEA agents to air marshals,” and were acting like idiot renegades. Wright quotes a gunnery sargeant who traveled with the reserve unit:

Some of the cops in Delta started doing this cowboy stuff. They put cattle horns on their Humvees. They’d roll into these hamlets, doing shows of force—kicking down doors, doing sweeps—just for the fuck of it. There was this little clique of them. Their ringleader was this beat cop…He’s like five feet tall, talks like Joe Friday and everybody calls him ‘Napoleon.'”

The unit ends up firebombing a village of Iraqis who’d been helping the Marines with intelligence about insurgents and Iraqi troops.

Yeah, there’s a group of idiots you want to arm and send out on nightly no-knock raids so they can bravely kill 92-year old women in their homes.

Anyhow, it’s good to see that these lying murderers are no longer “protecting and serving”.

It’s no wonder that feminists aren’t so keen on evolutionary biology:

Female ducks seem to be equipped to block the sperm of unwanted males. Their lower oviduct is spiraled like the male phallus, for example, but it turns in the opposite direction. Dr. Brennan suspects that the female ducks can force sperm into one of the pockets and then expel it. “It only makes sense as a barrier,” she said.

To support her argument, Dr. Brennan notes studies on some species that have found that forced matings make up about a third of all matings. Yet only 3 percent of the offspring are the result of forced matings. “To me, it means these females are successful with this strategy,” she said.

Dr. Brennan suspects that when the females of a species evolved better defenses, they drove the evolution of male phalluses. “The males have to step up to produce a longer or more flexible phallus,” she said.

This is scientific evidence which clearly suggests the vast majority of men are not inclined to commit rape, given most men’s lack of longer, more flexible phalluses and the apparent absence of corkscrew vaginas among women. It does raise some interesting questions about two old stereotypes, of course, given the historical supposition that gentlemen of African descent possessed larger phalluses as well as lower inhibitions against forced matings.

Having spent no time in intimate relations with any gentlemen of African descent, forced or voluntary, I cannot testify to the truth or fiction of the old stereotype, but it would be interesting to know if there is less rape in Japan, home to the famous “rice-penis”, than in a nation wherein the men are demonstrably more well-endowed.

Or, of course, where the women are shaped like corkscrews.

Given this new avian research, I suppose we must conclude that the only evolutionarily accurate explanation for the singular attribute of the White Buffalo is that his ancestors made a regular habit of forced matings every weekday and twice on Sundays.

Anyhow, the thought of the operation of Natural Selection entertwined with morality-related actions such as involuntary intercourse got me thinking about the common claim that human morals evolved over time. If this is true, there should be some sort of moral fossile record which can be tracked over the centuries, even as civilization has itself evolved. But what little I’ve seen of this fossile record of morality tends to demonstrate precisely the opposite… especially when taking into account how fast our current socially dictated mores have changed over the last fifty years.

Take the notion of sexual chastity being a moral virtue. According to some, this is no longer true. Nor was it true in most pagan cultures, so at what point did it evolve and and what point did it become an evolutionary dead-end?

These are questions that must be answered, and answered in some degree of detail, if we are to accept the model of evolving morals. But not only has the model not yet been proven in any way, I’m not aware of it even having been articulated to any significant degree.

09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0. But it’s nice to see that there’s at least one company that actually listens to its users:

You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

It was a nice touch putting in the HD-DVD crack into the post title as well. Anyhow, this concept of a site owner being responsible in any way for information that other people put on it has got to go. It’s exactly like prosecuting the owner of a building for a hate crime because someone else spray-painted a swastika on it.

The “crime” is non-existent and the party being held liable isn’t responsible.