Vox Popoli

SFWA vice-president Howard Hendrix illustrates the organization’s ironic technological myopia:

I’m also opposed to the increasing presence in our organization of webscabs, who post their creations on the net for free. A scab is someone who works for less than union wages or on non-union terms; more broadly, a scab is someone who feathers his own nest and advances his own career by undercutting the efforts of his fellow workers to gain better pay and working conditions for all. Webscabs claim they’re just posting their books for free in an attempt to market and publicize them, but to my mind they’re undercutting those of us who aren’t giving it away for free and are trying to get publishers to pay a better wage for our hard work.

Thus speaks the heart of a would-be monopolist. I’m not posting my writing here, professionally published and unpublished, because I want to let people read them, but because I want to undercut Howard Hendrix.

SFWA president-in-waiting John Scalzi – for whom I voted – sums it up nicely: “I don’t particularly have anything to say about it, other than to classify it as something akin to a buggy-whip manufacturer railing against the pernicious influence of the automobile.”

This obnoxious species utterly merits their coming extinction. They won’t be missed.

A district in China will be renamed ‘Woman Town’ – with strict rules that whatever women want, they get. And disobedient men will be punished, either with wooden boards or menial chores.

The 2.3km Shuangqiao district in Chongqing will become what is thought to be the world’s first ‘Woman Town’.The town gates will bear the ruling philosophy: ‘A woman never makes a mistake. A man can never reject a woman’s request.’

I’ll bet the men are just lining up to move there. But maybe they can make use of that new single-sex impregnation process. I think it would be a tremendously useful experiment to see what would result from a woman-only society. I estimate that they’d be back to living in caves within three generations.

But nice, tastefully decorated caves, of course.

To both of these prime examples of modern American society:

Grant said he and his wife were arguing in the upstairs of their suburban Detroit house Feb. 9 over what he said were her frequent work trips. She walked away, he said, and he grabbed her wrist. Tara Grant then slapped him in the face, causing a scratch to his nose. Stephen Grant, 37, told police he then hit his wife hard in the head and she fell to the floor.

Tara Grant, 34, told her husband that she would call the police, and he would go to jail for striking her, according to the account. The end result, he claims she said, would be that he would lose custody of the couple’s two young children.

Stephen Grant told police that he then began to choke his wife.

If you’re going to try to send a man to prison and take his children away for hitting you back, then you deserve to die. The fact that you’re using the fraudulent “family courts” as accomplices – they’re not actually part of the judiciary, you should know, but merely executive branch bureaucrats – makes it no more right than hiring a pair of Russian mobsters to grab the kids and taking them to Australia.

That being said, strangling and dismembering the woman on the mere basis of a threat, however credible, is a pretty extreme overreaction. One cannot excuse the behavior of either party here.

Still, it should be noted that women have no more carte blanche to start physical fights with men without risking the natural consequences than smaller men do. I have zero pity for a woman who strikes a man and then gets beaten up; it’s exactly what she or anyone else who starts a physical confrontation deserves. Yes, some men make a habit of attacking women and they should absolutely be punished accordingly. And yet, for every one such man, there are likely five women who make a habit of initiating violence.

Start nothing, finish everything.

U.S. Postal Service employee? Check. Disgruntled? Check:

Investigators have said she admitted shooting her husband on March 22, 2006, and that it had something to do with his constant criticism….. But Winkler said she got a job at the post office and that experience taught her to stand up for herself. “That’s the problem. I have nerve now, and I have self-esteem. My ugly came out.”

Okay, there’s just something vastly amusement about someone’s experience at the post office teaching them to stand up for themselves by shooting people. Just what sort of training program do they have there anyhow?

And if constant criticism proves to be an adequate justification for spousal murder, I think there will be an awful lot of annoying women getting shot in the near future.

Through sleet and snow, wind and rain
The postman braves the rigor
Until it leaves him quite insane
And reaching for the trigger

Let’s all shed a tear for this poor victim of a post-natal abortion. No, not the much-perforated unborn child, who we all know isn’t human even if it has actually been born, but rather, the traumatized young woman:

A 17-year-old stabbed her newborn baby 135 times and disposed of her body in a garbage can outside her home in Oakdale, authorities alleged Thursday.

Nicole Marie Beecroft was charged Thursday with first-degree murder. The charge carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. She was being held in a juvenile detention facility. Bail was set at $1 million on Friday afternoon.

“She kills the baby and now her life will be changed forever,” Washington County Attorney Doug Johnson said.

I won’t be surprised if she ends up serving less time than my father’s associate does. Because you can’t really blame a panicky young woman for stabbing a newborn baby over 100 times… see this is what happens when the Patriarchy bans abortion!

Obviously, the only solution is abortion clinics in every public school. And, of course, more sex ed.

Who could possibly figure it out?

“It’s scary,” added Kris Moore, a juvenile prosecutor in Harris County since 1980. ” … I don’t know if it’s media or television or violent games or what. You’ve got so many parents out there working their butts off trying to make ends meet, and it’s harder for them to supervise their kids. If you get into a situation where parents aren’t in control of their kids, they’re going to get into trouble.”

Moore said the violence against parents is escalating.

Many times the victims are bruised in a fight or shoved down stairs. Others are stabbed with scissors. Last November, one was beaten to death with a hammer. And the suspects, in more than 1,800 cases documented in Harris County over a recent 2½-year period, were their children….

You mean refusing to discipline your children, placing them in a feral environment for 13 years and spending only “quality time” with them is a suboptimal way to raise children?

Who would have ever expected that?

This is more likely to mean war:

Tehran has reached a decision to end all oil sales in dollars, according to statements by Iran’s central bank governor, Ehrabhim Sheibany, in Kuala Lumpur at the end of last month.

Zhuhai Zhenrong Trading, a Chinese state-run company that buys 240,000 barrels of oil per day from Iran, approximately 10 percent of Iran’s 2.2 million barrels per day total output, has confirmed a shift to the euro for its Iranian oil purchases.

Interesting that this announcement should take place so soon after that little test of Western resolve last week. It sounds to me as if Iran is increasingly confident that the Brits won’t back the States in the scenario that the US attacks Iran in order to defend its dollar. And if the Brits don’t, no one except Israel will see any need to either.

Still, the lifespan of a currency is normally 60-70 years, so I would have thought that the Fed had until 2035 or thereabouts becore they’d need to switch to the Amero or whatever they’ll end up calling the NAU’s currency. But then, that’s an average, and if Iran gets away with this strike against US financial power, no doubt countries like Venezuala will be soon to follow and bring the let’s-pretend-it’s-money game to an early end.

That doesn’t mean the US will collapse or anything, it could even be a good thing in terms of expanding personal liberty. But all bets will be off….

Me So Michelle gets her ho on at National Socialist Review:

The Rutgers women’s basketball team didn’t deserve to be disrespected as “nappy-headed hos.” No woman deserves that. I agree with the athletes that Imus’s misogynist mockery was “deplorable, despicable and unconscionable.” And, as I noted on Fox News’s O’Reilly Factor this week, I believe top public officials and journalists who have appeared on Imus’s show should take responsibility for enabling Imus—and should disavow his longstanding invective.

1. How on Earth does she know that? True, given their sport, “nappy-headed lezbots with surgically repaired knees” would likely be a more accurate description, but I rather doubt that any of those rushing to the defense of the Rutgers’ women actually know anything about the promiscuity of these women or the lack thereof. Or if any of them have, in fact, turned pro.

2. “Disrespected”. (chortles with amusement) She’s so MLK BLVD. Why not do it like Don Imus and simply write “dissed”.

3. If a woman acts like a whore, then she merits being identified as a whore. All the more so if a woman actually does provide sex for money. It’s entirely possible that the Rutgers’ women didn’t deserve it, but plenty of women do, among them Me So Michelle herself, being one of the prime examples of a media whore.

4. The issue isn’t the “hos” anyhow, it’s the “nappy-headed”. Remember, all Negros are nice, clean fabulous people who don’t commit crime. And they’re smart too. And they’re not especially good at sports, unless they are. They’re just a magic people, really.

5. It’s mockery. Deal. If Howard Stern had said it, the firestorm of invective he would have directed at any PC criticism would have quickly ended the story.

6. I would very much like to hear top public officials going on the radio and explaining, in detail, precisely why they believe that the Rutgers women’s basketball team are not “nappy-headed hos”. What is with this new obsession with public guilt-by-association cleansing rituals anyhow? Going on someone’s show does not mean that you approve of them; shall we hold Malkin responsible for enabling Chris Matthews?

While Me So is surpassing her already impressive standards of moronic meandering, I’m only surprised she hasn’t managed to inject herself directly into the story. Yet.

But one must give credit with credit is due, her keen thumb on the nation’s cultural pulse has allowed her to break the startling news that popular rappers write raps that are less than flattering about women!

Little is known about her past
So listen to me cos I know her ass
Used to steal money out her boyfriend’s clothes
And never got caught so the story goes
She kept doing that to all her men
Found the wrong man when she did it again
And still to this day people wonder why
He didn’t beat the bitch down till she almost died

“Sophisticated Bitch”, Public Enemy
1987

I note that I have never listened to Don Imus, couldn’t care less what he does, says or stands for and find this entire manufactured tempest in a teapot to be entirely uninteresting except in that it is yet another demonstration of the contemptible weeniehood of modern America.

From the Star Tribune:

The former executive of a Maple Grove computer company was sentenced Wednesday to three years and seven months in prison for tax evasion and aiding and abetting the tax evasion of fugitive millionaire tax protester Robert Beale…. Beale, 62, who lived in North Oaks, did not turn up for trial and remains at large.

It’s so hard to imagine why, when you consider that the prosecution is on the public record demanding that the judge sentence his associate for things the guy was neither charged with nor convicted for. Still, I find it amusing how tax-related sentencings always happen to be delayed for one reason or another, just long enough to produce the required scary news reports around April 15th.

So it looks like Dad would be in for more time than anyone at Enron got… long may he roam free.

About this:

Smart phone maker Palm said on Tuesday it would use a new platform based on Linux to help the company compete better.

The ability to hotsync easily, combined with my own application’s move to a platform model, is all I will really require to move back to Linux for day-to-day operations.