Vox Popoli

I searched in vain for references to Michelle Malkin and “Fiver”. Couldn’t find any. Can anyone explain?

What are you, an idiot? All it requires is a knowledge of Watership Down as well as an obscure Internet debate from two years ago. Anyhow, the term refers to Michelle Malkin’s rabbit-like inability to count beyond the number five, as evidenced by her tally of USN carriers in 1942.

On a related note, I expect I’ll be making more friends in the right-wing commentariat tomorrow morning. And yes, before you ask, I was reading a little Wolfe of late….

I was speaking to a publisher this week when I learned the funniest news I’ve heard in a long time. It seems a certain NFL star will soon be publishing a children’s book, one dedicated to the worthwhile topic of teaching children how to share.

As for his identity, let’s just say that there is an amount of irony involved in the concept.

On a tangentially related note, I had an interesting conversation with John Romero yesterday evening. His forthcoming MMOG sounds as if it will be characteristically innovative; he has a sharp mind and always brings a creatively synergistic approach to game design. I harbor great respect for those who aren’t afraid to take risks, whether they manage to pull it off every time or not.

In any event, it’s always fun to speak with guys from the CGDC old school.

Britainis becoming a Belgian province:

TONY Blair will ignore voters’ wishes today and hand over Britain’s control of law and order to Brussels. The PM has decided to give up our veto during a crunch meeting with EU officials. He agrees with a plan to give the EU power over cross-border terrorism and the way courts deal with suspects.

But last night critics warned the move flies in the face of the British public’s demands. And they say it paves the way for Brussels to dictate future justice laws in the UK. A survey showed seven out of ten voters are against the bombshell move.

First they gave up their monarchy in favor of Parliament, now they’ve surrendered Parliament to the oligarchic European Commission.

This is amusing… mostly because the majority of women who read it are going to get upset about the perceived criticism rather than considering its relevancy to their lives and modifying their behavior accordingly:

Women can be real idiots. Just hear me out: I’ve been watching friend after friend go down in flames, and I’m not talking about being burned at the stake in stoic glory. It doesn’t seem to matter how beautiful they are, how smart, how strong, or powerful. The bottom line is we’re submissive by nature.

I’m almost thinking the more powerful or smart a woman is, the more confused and frustrated she gets by her instinct to submit. She tries to feign control over the situation, tries to analyze it, and tries to find reason in something that is entirely innate. The almost funny part is we girls are all so good at telling each other what to do only to turn around and make the exact same mistakes ourselves….

Then we women take our stupidity a step further and try to analyze these bad situations we’ve willingly put ourselves in. We talk all the live-long day, writing these novel-length emails. (If I spent even half as much time on my book as I did on these e-mails, I would have published at least four books by now.) We talk on the phone for hours and cry in our beers during girls night out, all the while checking our cell phones every five seconds to see if he left a voice mail or sent a text message.

The best is when we’re like, “What do you think he’s thinking?” or “What do you think it means when he said this or did that?” Meanwhile, the guy is somewhere at that exact moment, thinking about being hungry or wanting a beer or wondering which game is playing that night on TV. These guys are not the complicated creatures we make them out to be.

The last line is the money quote. Men are much more straightforward creatures than women seem to want to admit, even the lying Lotharios blatantly telegraph their intentions to anyone who is paying attention. Sex, support, smiles and silence will do the trick for almost any man, although you may need to throw suds and sustenance in there for the working class fellows.

The fundamental problem that I see is that most women hate making decisions even more than your average man does, but in modern American society, they no longer have anyone making significant decisions or often even reasonable recommendations for them. Instead of Mom and Dad telling her to marry the young college grad with a job, a house and a car, they’re patting her on the back and telling her that they just want her to be happy while she’s going down on the unemployed, uneducated wanna-be-but-never-will rock star as an unwitting appetizer to his post-date appointment with his alternate girlfriend.

Q: What’s he thinking about?
A: Not you.

This isn’t to say that guys can’t be complete morons about women, of course. I can’t believe the number of times I have had to tell grown men that it is not completely unheard of for a woman to allow a falsehood to cross her lips.

But whether they want to admit it or not, women are submissive and they are happiest when they allow themselves to live in accordance with their submissive nature, preferably with a dominant male.

From Spruill on the NR media blog:

Brendan Nyhan has written an account of his short-lived tenure as a media blogger for The American Prospect. According to Nyhan, he faced a choice: Limit your criticism to conservatives or hit the road. He chose the latter.

My personal observation is that left-wing blogs and online media are somewhat less open to intra-ideological criticism than their right-wing counterparts, although the way in which the bigger media names tend to avoid unmoderated comments appears to reflect more of a trans-ideological liking for empty praise and echo chambers than anything else.

In fair counterpoint, however, I have to mention that a conservative publishing house which had previously been very enthusiastic about my book “Media Whores” and signed me to a book contract did a 180 and paid me to go away when they learned that I was targeting Bill “Al Qaida has marked me for death!” O’Reilly, Michelle “Fiver” Malkin and a few others in addition to the various left-wing figures on the whores list.

Conservatives should probably think twice before throwing any stones on this one.

Prof. Bainbridge points us to the WSJ:

President Bush could also do more. Republican Sen. Jim DeMint notes that the Congressional Research Service has found that 95% of recent earmarks were slipped into committee reports and not written into law. “These non-legislated earmarks are not legally binding,” he says. “President Bush could ignore them. He doesn’t need a line-item veto.”

The federal government is now an astounding 185 times as big in real terms as it was a century ago.

Voting will not cure this disease. Neither will reform nor a third party in power. The “lawmakers” aren’t even bothering to pretend that their actions are legal anymore. Pillaging the public coffers is not exactly a new phenomenon, but such brazen pillager-politicians is yet another indication that a final collapse into Caesarism of one form or another is in the cards.

K-Lo on Nip/Tuck and the wonders of abortion:

It might be the unlikeliest forum for a pro-life debate, as the show has long been the target (for good reason) of conservative scorn for the “utter depravity of its sensationalism.” But this particular episode offers an opportunity to consider the under-reported fact that some 85 percent of American unborn children with Down Syndrome are believed to be aborted. Down Syndrome is certainly disappearing, but it’s not because anyone’s cured it.

How wonderful that America is on the verge of eradicating mongoloids! So, who should next be targeted to experience the glorious results of Choice, Jews or Blacks? If only we could locate that tricksy Gay gene….

They seek it here, they seek it there
Those flamers see it everywhere.
Will he be normal or a queen?
That demmed elusive homo gene.

You may have noticed a small change on the sidebar there. Rowena is completing the cover for “THE WRATH OF ANGELS” next week and so the Original Cyberpunk will soon be taking preorders for it at his online bookstore. This will be the only place anyone will be able to buy the book in the USA, as I don’t intend to sign again with an American publisher.

If I have to deal with a “pub board” I’m not interested, not after my latest experience with one. I’m done with having editors contact me out of the blue, telling me how much they love my stuff, requesting proposals and getting publicly enthusiastic about them, then finding out that someone on the “pub board” has shot down the project over a completely nonsensical reason that has nothing to do with me. In the most recent case, a proposed mystery trilogy, it was because an in-house power struggle inspired a consultant to assert “murder mysteries don’t sell”, the current New York Times bestseller lists notwithstanding.

I simply can’t bear dealing with incompetent people and the publishing houses are chock full of clueless English majors who are terrified of making decisions. It was amazing to witness how Pocket Books operated by blundering from one stupid and easily avoided mistake to another. Since I primarily write for fun and the technology has arrived, I’m going to stick with self-publishing unless the initial contact from a publisher consists of a contract offered by the ultimate decision-maker.

(And no, editors, I’m not interested in hearing how much pull you have and how your boss pretty much does everything you recommend and how it’s a slam dunk, etc. I didn’t buy it from IT dorks back when I worked in computer sales and I shouldn’t have bought it from you. Go away.)

UK versions of all three books will likely come out sometime next year, possibly in an omnibus version.

Apparently the football gods don’t look kindly on parodies of Les Miserables. Who would have known they were into musicals? Because despite putting up as many points as last week, I was hammered by the WB’s Grizzlies in the VPFL as well as in THE MOST PRESTIGIOUS LEAGUE IN SPORTS. I think that’s what is called Bitch Squared, otherwise known as Not Good Times. And in a nail-biter, the Santa Barbarians managed to hold off Nate, whose coaching has no doubt been thrown off by the ongoing multi-level debacle in Tennessee.

Without further ado or public wound-licking, the results:

92 Greenfield Grizzlies
70 Mounds View Meerkats

64 Pale Horse Cowboys
53 West Texas Vikings

63 East Mesa WhiteTrash
58 COS McRays

60 Santa Barbarians
59 Burns Montgomerys

58 Mile High Club
50 Newport Sea Dogs

Camille Paglia draws an unusual analogy from Marie Antoinette:

Has representative democracy, paralyzed by rancorous partisanship and bureaucratic incompetence, become the waning ancien régime assailed by hordes at the gates? There is an uneasy sense of siege in Europe and the United States from restive immigrant minorities who have taken to the streets or bred saboteurs. The intelligentsia seem fatigued, sapped by pointless theory, and impotent to affect events. Fervor has shifted to religious fundamentalists in both Christianity and Islam. Materialism and status anxiety (evident even in higher education, with its brand-name snobbery) have come to the fore in the glitteringly high-tech West. Yet the turbulent third world offers agonizingly stark contrasts. The Marie Antoinette story, with its premonitions of doom amid a giddy fatalism, seems to signal a pervasive guilt about near-intractable social inequities….

The return of Marie Antoinette suggests that there are political forces at work in the world that Western humanism does not fully understand and that it may not be able to control.

I find it interesting that La Paglia should reach a conclusion regarding representative democracy not dissimilar to my own, but from such a very different inspiration.