Vox Popoli

A few people have asked me about my opinion on what I think is now called Open Source Media, and wondered why I’m not involved or if I’m bitter about not being involved. My position can be summed up thusly:

1. Heard about it.
2. Didn’t sign up for it.
3. Don’t care about it.
4. Expect it to crash and burn.

I don’t even bother to click on Blogger’s AdSense and you think I’m going to get worked up about maybe, possibly, turning yet another hobby into a job? I don’t think so. I will admit that my ears did perk up for a moment when I first heard about Open Source Media, but only because I thought it might have something to do with a new Linux distro that runs Xine better than my FC3 does right now.

Why the #4, especially in light of the fact that I’ve paid virtually no attention to this experiment in new media? It’s pretty simple. I’ve successfully started one technology company, am in the process of successfully starting another one, and I do not believe that the VC model of financing is an effective one. If your business model does not permit you to begin making money from the start, your existence will largely consist of racing from one round of financing to the next.

Sure, you can draw a fat salary for a few years this way, but you can do that from producing pornography too. Personally, I’d rather produce porn; it’s more honest and the women are nicer.

The fact that VCs are willing to invest money says literally nothing about the fundamental strength of any business venture, in fact, one reason I’ve repeatedly turned down requests to invest in my new business is that these are the same people who sunk millions of dollars into remarkably stupid dot com ventures. I’ve also seen them turn down business that do nothing exciting except produce hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of profit every year for two decades. I’m not absolutely against every working with a VC, but as I told my good friend who works in that industry, they’d need to present me with one Hades of a case.

Another problem is that the typical VC exit strategy is built around taking the business public at the very first opportunity, which is nice if you just want to cash out for a few million, not so great if you actually want to build a viable business that will produce profits for many years to come without answering to the government and 500 other people.

A good friend of mine is applying for a prestigious and exclusive fellowship and asked me to write her a letter of recommendation. I agreed, of course, and then mailed her this… sometimes you just can’t resist:

HOW LONG HAVE YOU KNOWN THE APPLICANT

1. I have been acquainted with Miss M for eight years after meeting her through a mutual friend, who later, overcome with remorse, married a Frenchman. She has become a close friend of my family and has been a welcome guest in our home although my lawyer completely failed to seduce her despite repeatedly plying her with shots of tequila and Jagermeister.

I have not known her in the Biblical sense.

WHAT DO YOU CONSIDER THE APPLICANT’S GREATEST STRENGTHS

2. I consider her greatest strength to be her backside. It is so perfectly round that British scientists calibrate their instruments by it. She really knows how to use it when she walks, especially when she needs to distract someone from one of her occasional screwups. As you have probably noticed, her legs are good too, and she wears very short skirts in the office, which is nice when you get tired of looking at Internet porn.

Her integrity is also of a very high level. When I was bringing in a shipment of Rhodesian ivory taken from poached elephant tusks and Interpol called, she managed to leave them with the impression that the shipment consisted of children’s toys without actually lying.

She also works very hard, at least for a while, until she gets bored and moves on to her next job.

WHAT DO YOU CONSIDER TO BE THE APPLICANT’S WEAKNESS. (Be candid)

3. I have long felt that the applicant should consider getting implants. Nothing crazy, like double-Ds or anything, but a solid D-cup would be something I would recommend. I think we can all agree that if you’re going to have a woman in the office, pretty much everyone likes to look at breasts of the larger size. I don’t mean that in a sexist way or anything, after all, there’s plenty of the L-words out there, especially when you’re dealing with career chicks that no one wants to marry. Not that the applicant goes both ways or anything like that.

WHAT HAS THE APPLICANT DONE THAT YOU CONSIDER CREATIVE OR UNIQUE

4. She did a helicopter once off a mogul when we were skiing in Zermatt that was out of this f—— world! Also, after business hours, she changes her clothes in a telephone booth and spends her evenings fighting crime with the Justice League of America.

I got a phone call the next day. “That was so funny! Um, you didn’t actually send that in to them, did you?”

I should have. I’m sure she’ll get in anyhow, and I find it very difficult to believe that a group of people who have never heard of me will put much store in my opinion one way or the other. Sometimes my inability to follow through on these things just sickens me.

It seems Kyle Williams is hanging up his pen for the nonce. I’m not surprised; we exchanged email some months ago wherein he expressed a certain disgust with how he had spent more than a few columns regurgitating Republican talking points and mundane conservative conventions in the flower of his youth.

And while I may have tended to regard those early columns with an amount of eye-rolling disdain – and yes, I do understand that the point isn’t the dog’s grammar, but still – I very much respect the way in which he has continued to develop intellectually, in marked contrast to other writers whose work has appeared on WND over the same period. Kyle has learned to think for himself, which is no small achievement for any individual and is particularly impressive in one of his age. Again, he demonstrates his precociousness.

I rather doubt this is the last we’ll be hearing from young Mr. Williams, and I will not be terribly surprised if in the future, Mr. Williams sans adjective proves himself to be a formidable and creative thinker. I wish him well.

Jonathan Lethem writes about himself in the New York Times, using Italo Calvino as an excuse:

I took Italo Calvino’s death – 20 years and 5 days ago as I write this – personally. Though he didn’t know it, he’d broken a date. Calvino, one of the greatest European writers of the 20th century and among the only Italians (with Alberto Moravia, Luigi Pirandello and Umberto Eco) to have penetrated our shamefully translation-immune literary culture, had been about to visit the United States to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, when at the age of 61, sitting in his backyard garden, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and, two weeks later, died. As well as the Harvard lectures, he’d agreed to a small American book tour, which was to have brought him as far as Cody’s Books in Berkeley. I was to have been sitting in the front row, breathless. Instead, I learned of Calvino’s death by reading a notice taped to Cody’s doors, explaining the cancellation of the event, together with a clipping of the obituary I’d happened not to see.

This has got to be one of the worst pieces ever written about a writer since Jacqueline Carey wasted six pages explaining that she “gets” English humor in an essay nominally about Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Trilogy entitled – I kid you not – “Yes, I Got It”.

Here’s some advice for the would-be literary reviewer or biographer. IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU, MORON!

I very much like Calvino. I’m interested in serious discussions of his innovative works. But I’m really not interested in someone telling me what he thinks would have happened if Calvino had ever been so fortunate as to meet him.

Had he lived a few more weeks, Calvino probably would have tolerated my effort to waste a few of his shrinking hours on earth listening as I bragged of how much he’d influenced my then-unwritten works.

Sometimes, I really loathe writers. When I see one of those supercilious, self-conscious artistes pontificating pretentiously about something he hasn’t even written yet in a coffee shop, it makes me want to punch him in the face.

Real writers smoke like Eco, shoot guns like Bethke and Rosenberg and drink like Hemingway. In other words, they actually live their lives and write their books, they don’t sit around talking endlessly about them.

And what’s so shameful about America’s supposedly “translation-immune culture”? Go learn another language, you monolingual slothard! It’s not that hard, and based on this essay, it’s pretty obvious that Lethem doesn’t have anything better to do. Why is his inability to read a foreign writer’s book someone else’s fault?

From NRO’s Corner today:

The British are feeling the pinch in relation to recent bombings and have raised their security level from “Miffed” to “Peeved.” Soon though, security levels may be raised yet again to “Irritated” or even “A Bit Cross.” Londoners have not been “A Bit Cross” since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies all but ran out. Terrorists have been re-categorised from “Tiresome” to a “Bloody Nuisance.” The last time the British issued a “Bloody Nuisance” warning level was during the great fire of 1666.

Also, the French government announced yesterday that it has raised its terror alert level from “Run” to “Hide”. The only two higher levels in France are “Surrender” and “Collaborate.” The rise was precipitated by a recent fire that destroyed France’s white flag factory, effectively paralysing the country’s military capability.

It’s not only the English and French that are on a heightened level of alert. Italy has increased the alert level from “shout loudly and excitedly” to “elaborate military posturing”. Two more levels remain, “ineffective combat operations” and “change sides”.

The Germans also increased their alert state from “disdainful arrogance” to “dress in uniform and sing marching songs”. They also have two higher levels: “invade a neighbour” and “lose”.

Belgians, on the other hand, are all on holiday as usual and the only threat they worry about is NATO pulling out of Brussels.

My favorite is still SNL’s German Jeopardy. Subjects: Pain, Suffering, Countries That Are Weak….

I’ve never bought into the Attention Deficit Disorder epidemic, and having a certain amount of experience with illegal chemicals, I’ve always found it impossible to believe that passing out speed to kids is a good idea. If they were having them smoke pot, I’d be more open to the possibility, but I can’t imagine having a boy hork a few lines of coke being particularly helpful with his studies either.

Anyhow, it seems pretty clear to me that as with fat people, there is a small group with a genuine medical problem requiring treatment and a much larger group that uses the medical problem as an excuse to cover their lack of responsibility. How do you distinguish between an out-of-control, undisciplined child and one who genuine suffers from ADD, especially with the cursory examinations provided by the school-affiliated personnel who do much of the diagnosing? I’d like to see one of the television shows run a sting and have perfectly normal kids act hyperactive and see how many medical “experts” diagnose them with ADD.

ADD may well be real, but so is Discipline Deficit Disorder. I always found it interesting how these supposedly out-of-control teens never had a problem behaving in the dojo. They seemed to mysteriously find the ability to behave when the alternative was becoming the receipient of a literal beat-down. It worked on adults too; even the most hot-tempered men learned that they actually did have the ability to keep their cool.

Discipline doesn’t always have to be physical, of course. But it has to be there and be consistent, in whatever form.

Bane points us to an excellent set of Diesel-related hagiography:

If you were to lock Vin Diesel in a room with a guitar, a year later you would have the greatest album ever, it would sweep the Grammy’s. When asked why he doesn’t do this Vin replied “Because Grammy’s are for queers.” Then he ate a knife to show the seriousness of his response.

Vin Diesel is not lactose intolerant, he just refuses to put up with lactose’s shit.

Vin Diesel is the reason why Waldo is hiding.

There is no theory of evolution, just a list of creatures Vin Diesel allows to live.

I laughed, I cried. Much better than Cats.

I had one of those ramp days yesterday. You know, when you’ve been stuck on a plateau for months, then one day, for no reason, you decide to throw on a few extra pounds and you suddenly discover that it turns out to be doable.

I started out with 10×90, then hit 8×100, 6×108 and 4×117 on the straight bar. I probably could have got five on that last one, but I wasn’t wearing a weight belt and my backbone felt as if it was about to explode right out of the skin, so I just put it down. After the straight bar sets, I’ve been doing four sets of 10x on the pulley machines; machines are lame but they do give you a nicer cut once you get your mass going with the free weights.

Now I’ve decided my goal is to be able to curl Spacebunny ten times, ideally sans a creatine boost. This is complicated by the fact that I’d also like to lose a few pounds and get ripped again. So, my bench has dropped twenty pounds, as normally happens when I’m not eating like a horse, but I’ve noticed that the smaller muscle groups, like the arms, sometimes aren’t negatively affected by having less fuel in the tank.

And full credit to anyone not named WB or BC who can name the author of the quote cited in the post title off the top of their head.

qwerty complains:

That has been my exact point all along, for which I am called names (old bitter man, asshole, pervert) by the good Christians on this blog.

All I’ve ever done on this blog is to state that some of us cannot believe. Those who do believe are not influenced by any logic or evidence that contradicts their beliefs.

That’s more than a bit of an exaggeration. When one baits and belittles, one should not complain when one gets bit. When one behaves like an anal orifice and indulges in the occasional vulgarity, one should not be surprised when one is labeled, more or less accurately, as an asshole.

There are plenty of regulars here who are not Christian. Some are Jews, some are atheists, most, I suspect, are agnostic. Since they have not had any problem with being attacked for their divergent belief or outright non-belief, the notion that one is being called names for that reason simply is not credible.

It’s not that hard. You can make a case against an idea, even a witheringly contemptuous one, without making it personal. Cedarford, just to give an example of one who is not exactly shy about disagreeing with me, has gone from being a considered a complete troll to one whose opinions must be carefully weighed primarily through the modifying his primary mode of address. (I can just see a few hundred of you nodding your head, then hating yourself for it. But give credit where credit is due.)

I seldom ban people simply for being jerks; you have to go out of your way to manage that. But being a jerk doesn’t intimidate anyone nor will it help you make your case. This may sound somewhat hypocritical given the way in which I often address others who are active outside this blog, but in those cases the negative tone of the communication has already been set by them and there is no direct debate between the critic and I. Also, in such cases the communication is made outside the framework of an intellectual community, unlike here where one’s character is often well-understood by others.

You don’t have to play nice here, but it is in one’s own interest, over time, to play polite.

In case there are those who wonder why Christians are so “paranoid” about the secular movement to force Christianity out of the public sphere and into the ghetto, here’s the latest explanation for why they might have just a few concerns about where things are headed in the West:

Hunted down at their workplaces by military police, the 25 Christians were rounded up and detained without any formal judicial procedure. Later that month, the parishioners and their clergy were brought to the road construction site, where spectators had been arranged in neat rows to observe the public execution of the pastor, assistant pastors, and elders. According to a report based on an eyewitness account, the five church leaders “were bound hand and foot and made to lie down in front of a steamroller,” accused of subversion and of being Kiddokyo, or Protestant Christian, spies.

The 20 parishioners were detained near their clergy, and watched, along with the assembled audience, as the five Christian leaders were told they could escape death if they denied their faith and pledged to serve only Kim Jong Il and his father, the first dictator of communist Korea, Kim Il Sung. According to the eyewitness, the clergy remained silent.

For their steadfast belief, the Christians were executed. According to the report, “Some of the fellow parishioners assembled to watch the execution cried, screamed out, or fainted when the skulls made a popping sound as they were crushed beneath the steamroller.”

Another account contained in the report says that on a summer day in North Korea in 1997, a young woman was washing clothes in a tributary of the Tumen River when she dropped a small Bible she had hidden amid the laundry. Spotted by a fellow washerwoman, the girl was reported to North Korean authorities on the suspicion that she was engaging in an exercise of thought or religion condemned by the state. The girl, believed to be in her 20s, and her father, estimated to be around 60, were arrested by local national security police and imprisoned for three months.

One morning, they were taken to a public market area, where, after a brief show trial, the father and daughter were condemned as traitors to the North Korean nation and its communist dictator, Kim Jong Il. The father and daughter were then tied to stakes a few meters from where they had been “tried,” and, before an assembly of schoolchildren, were riddled with bullets by seven policemen who fired three shots each into the pair. According to a report drawn from eyewitness accounts, “The force of the rifle shots, fired from fifteen meters away, caused blood and brain matter to be blown out of their heads.”

According to one defector who was grilled by North Korean border guards, the Kim regime fears that “Juche will be toppled by Christianity,” referring to the state ideology, and exercises brutal control over North Koreans who have been exposed to Chinese or South Korean Christian churches.

Do not forget those brave men and women, and pray that you never face such a test of your faith… or lack of it. I shall await with interest the usual explanation of how the North Koreans are really Christians ala the National Socialists, how Kim Jong Il was actually an altar boy in his youth, and so on….

Before anyone brings it up, I note that the Inquisition, (ironically, one of the most humane institutions of its time), was a long time ago. Christians might as fairly and accurately point to Nero; the point is that atheists and Muslims are killing Christians today.

And Juche will be toppled by Christianity. Evil knows its master. The gates of Hell will not prevail.