Vox Popoli

Mike Adams writes about intellectually mutilated women:

“I am 23 years old, and I am what a feminist looks like. Ever since I learned to embrace my feminist nature, I found great joy in threatening men’s lives, flicking off frat brothers and plotting the patriarchy’s death. I hate men because they are men, because I see them for what they are: misogynistic, sexist, oppressive and absurdly pathetic beings who only serve to pollute and contaminate this world with war, abuse, oppression and rape.”

Other members of the FAL [Feminist Action League] wore scissors around their necks and sang a song about castration.

The amusing thing is that within seven years, this loser will be lamenting the mysterious fact that no man wants to date her despite an education she no doubt considers impressive. And what do you suppose the chances are that she’s even remotely attractive? 1 in 20? 1 in 50?

Feminism is the last resort of the ugly and unpleasant college girl. Their bitterness colors their view of that about which they know nothing. The attractive and personable women, on the other hand, have enough experience of men to know better, even in the midst of their indoctrination by Women’s Studies professors.

Jonah Goldberg writes on NRO:

Maybe it’s the nitrogen bubbles in my brain or the afterglow of reading Bob Samuelson’s column today, but I finally feel willing to float a trial balloon in the Corner which, I admit, has been launched more times than the Goodyear blimp: Increase gas/oil taxes.

Admittedly, current high oil prices have caused pain for some and are probably a drag on the economy in significant respects (the airline industry, for example), but the negative effects certainly don’t track with the predictions of doom and gloom which typically accompany fuel tax proposals. Clinton’s 4.3 cent a gallon tax elicited howls that the economy would go off the rails, for example. Well, now gas prices are much higher than they were in 1996, though still lower — adjusted for inflation — than they were in the early 80s. And, more to the point, the economy seems to have absorbed high gas prices better than most would have predicted.

They really are taking this strong government Republicanism to new heights, aren’t they? Why not just exhume Nixon in 2008 and prop him up in the White House while you’re at it since the current inhabitant appears to be a walking revenant of FDR.

From WND:

PRESIDENTIAL SPOKESMAN McCLELLAN: In terms of the issue of the Minutemen that you bring up, again, the president spoke to that issue last week. And it’s one thing if people are working along the border, simply to report suspicious activity, and that activity should be reported to the proper authorities — the Department of Homeland Security officials, who are there to enforce our borders. If people are operating outside of the law, that cannot be tolerated. That’s a different —

WND: Well, that’s my point. That’s what they’re doing — they’re neighborhood crime watch.

McCLELLAN: Hang on. Hang on. That’s a different matter. People cannot take things into their own hands. But if they see suspicious activity, they should report that suspicious activity to the proper authorities

And here I thought power in this country derived from the people. Apparently Mr. Bush sees it very differently. This also leaves unanswered what people are to do when the “proper authorities” refuse to act, in complete dereliction of their duty.

The Washinton Post discovers grass is green:

College faculties, long assumed to be a liberal bastion, lean further to the left than even the most conspiratorial conservatives might have imagined, a new study says. By their own description, 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative, says the study being published this week. The imbalance is almost as striking in partisan terms, with 50 percent of the faculty members surveyed identifying themselves as Democrats and 11 percent as Republicans. The disparity is even more pronounced at the most elite schools, where, according to the study, 87 percent of faculty are liberal and 13 percent are conservative.

This is because conservatives don’t want to be professors… and if they do, they’re not qualified… and anyways, professors are trained not to let their biases influence their teaching. Or was that journalists?

Given the devolution of the academic mind, grade inflation and the general uselessness of a college degree, it’s almost time for the home university, I’d say.

60 Minutes throws a yellow flag:

A list obtained exclusively by 60 Minutes Wednesday reveals that three Carolina Panthers professional football players had prescriptions filled for a banned steroid less than two weeks before they played in the 2004 Super Bowl.

Contributor Anderson Cooper also reports that two of the players repeatedly refilled their steroid prescriptions — in one case, 10 times…. The prescription records, obtained by 60 Minutes Wednesday, show that offensive lineman Todd Stuessie got 11 prescriptions for testosterone cream over an eight-month period in 2004.

This made me and every other Minnesota Vikings fan laugh. OF COURSE it’s Steussie who was caught. It will be interesting to see how the league responds to this following the weird and embarrassing performance of Major League Baseball and its players.

I don’t know if it was the spill or the new Fedora Core 2 kernel, but my laptop is no longer booting in Linux. Fortunately, I’m still functional in XP – oh, the irony – but I need to get a backup of some mission-critical going on my old Dell before I start fixing my Linux partition. As it happens, FC 4 test 1 is out, so I may give that a whirl.

Anyhow, I don’t have access to yesterday’s emails, so I won’t be posting any responses to them for another day or two.

Jessica’s email is fairly representational of the many responses to today’s column.

Excellent article. You told it exactly like it is.

For the first time in our lives, my husband and I are ashamed to be Americans. We are in our late 60’s and have always been Republican. We are now ashamed of the Republican party, especially the Bush brothers. Our opinion about the Bush’s has turned from trust to disgust.

When a probate judge has more power than congress, the governor and the president of the USA, it is clear that the cause is one of two things or perhaps a combination of both.

#1. Our court system has too much power and we must take steps to diminish that power
#2. Our elected officials are cowards

JL loudly echoes similar sentiments:

AS I READ YOUR COMMENTARY TODAY, IT WAS CREEPY. IT WAS LIKE YOU HAD LITERALLY GOTTEN INSIDE MY HEAD AND READ MY MIND. YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. WE KNOW FOR CERTAIN THE BUSH BOYS COULD STOP THIS AT ANY TIME. WHO DO THEY THINK THEY’RE FOOLIN’? THEY ARE COWARDS, AND I DON’T KNOW HOW YOU SLEEP AT NIGHT KNOWING THIS ATROCITY HAPPENED ON YOUR WATCH AND YOU DID NOTHING. THEY SHOULD BE TOTALLY ASHAMED

COD sums up her opinion in a succinct manner that will strike fear in many a Republican analyst:

I can’t believe I voted for Bush….

And for once, even regular critics are in accord, however briefly. TP drops this brief missive:

It may not mean much, but as one who once criticized you, I want you to know that I think this latest column was a magnificent effort.

Actually, I don’t mind being criticized at all. I depend on regular criticism to keep me from floating free into absurdity, as so many of the bigger names in commentary seem increasingly prone to do. Sometimes I find my critics’ cases persuasive, more often I don’t, but the frequent testing of my thinking is something I find quite valuable. I understand why most of the bigger blogs are nervous about allowing comments, but I think the benefits far outweigh the negatives. A little mild policing goes a long way towards weeding out the recalcitrants and the crazies and prevents the blog from devolving into a mere echo chamber.

The mere fact that nearly everyone is writing in support of the assertions made in my column today instead of, as is more often the case, taking vociferous exception to them, indicates to me that the Bush brothers may have badly miscalculated on this one. George Bush simply doesn’t have much credibility left with the conservative half of the Republican party, which is why he couldn’t successfully skate on this issue as he has on so many others. It is also why the mere mention of the possibility of a third Bush running for President makes many Republicans feel nauseous.

Bob Novak explains how events have backed up his predictions:

Amid the presidential campaign’s furious debate over Iraq, I reported last Sept. 20 (“Getting Out of Iraq”) about strong feeling in the policymaking apparatus to get out of Iraq in 2005 even if democracy and peace had not been achieved there. My column evoked widespread expressions of disbelief, but changes over the last six months have only strengthened the view of my Bush administration sources that the escape from Iraq should begin once a permanent government is in place in Baghdad.

The most obvious change is the improved situation on the ground in Iraq, where it is no longer preposterous to imagine local security forces in control. Subtler is the advent of Secretary of State Rice. This willowy, vulnerable-looking woman wields measurably more power than Colin Powell, the robust general who preceded her. Officials who know her well believe she favors the escape from Iraq.

“She is not controlled by the neo-cons insisting on achieving a perfect democracy before we go,” a colleague told me. That reflects not only the national consensus but also the preponderance of Republican opinion. Without debating the wisdom of military intervention in Iraq two years ago, President Bush’s supporters believe it now is time to go and leave the task of subduing the insurgents to Iraqis.

In my Sept. 20 column, I speculated that Rice would replace Powell at State, that she would be replaced as national security adviser by her deputy Stephen Hadley and that Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz would succeed Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at Defense. I was correct in two out of three, because Rumsfeld is staying on at the Pentagon.

This would be a very good thing. The action is perhaps 18 months late but better than never. If the Shiites choose to let the Kurds go their own way that really has nothing to do with us. If they don’t then they’re simply acting precisely as we have during the period of the US occupation. I don’t consider the establishment of a new Shiite government to be a particularly positive accomplishment – I don’t subscribe to the democracy fetish that insists the mere fact of voting cures all ills- but it’s certainly good to know that people are no longer being fed into paper shredders by the Hussein thugocracy. Was the war worth it? I doubt it but time will tell.

Now if we can only withdraw our troops from 100 other countries where they also don’t belong we can start to consider why federal imperialism is necessary at home. Unfortunately this move will likely have more to do with China’s recent saber-rattling than anything else.

Don’t expect to see a lot of commas today (see – there should have been one there) because I managed to spill onto my laptop keyboard last night. I’m pretty optimistic (you’ll have to imagine the commas from this point on) because I was getting no keyboard input at all last night. At first the doggone thing didn’t even want to boot which was more than a little worrisome.

But after a blow-drying the beast and leaving it to sit overnight I’ve almost got complete functionality back. The right side of the keyboard took the brunt of the spill and right now the comma shift-comma shift-period capital-l and the Numpads 1-3 5 8 9 + and – aren’t working. Numpad * works but wildly repeats. Anyone know where I can download a linux keyboard remapper?

Still the Numbpad * craziness a good sign – I think – because when the machine first started drying out only the semi-colon worked and it repeated like mad. Now it’s fine. Here’s hoping full functionality comes about by tomorrow so I don’t have to order a new keyboard. As Space Bunny said after 27 years the law of averages finally caught up. It’s still irritating but it’s sure a lot less irritating now than it was last night.

UPDATE: We have commas! And L and

Brody asks a legitimate question:

I am curious to know: how do the christians here KNOW they are right about who created earth and humans and why they were created? Is it a feeling? A bit of knowledge? What makes you certain you chose the correct religion, rather than say, buddhism?

I am a Christian because I not only believe in Jesus Christ, but have accepted that he is the Lord of my life, not me. Some might find this little quiz interesting, which shows that I tend more strongly towards agnosticism than any other religion; the Christianity of most conservatives will usually tend to orient more towards Buddhism or one of the Abrahamic faiths. Thus, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I don’t have any problem with saying that I don’t KNOW that my religion is based on the truth, I simply BELIEVE that it is.

You scored as Christianity. Christianity 92% agnosticism 46% Buddhism 33% Islam 29% Judaism 25% Hinduism 17% Paganism 13% Satanism 0% atheism 0% Which religion is the right one for you? (new version) created with QuizFarm.com

That being said, my reasons for deciding to follow Jesus Christ and abide by the principles of Christianity as laid out in the Bible and by Christian tradition – however poorly I may do so – are threefold. (Neither four, nor five, shall be the reasons, neither shall they be one or two, excepting that they then proceedeth on to three… I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

1. Christian principles predict human behavior and its concomitant consequences better than anything else I’ve witnessed or studied. This holds true on both individual and societal levels. Within its intellectual tradition, Christianity provides an explanation for everything from unhappy housewives to the inevitability of war to the marginal utility of wealth. Regardless of whether one accepts those explanations, a reasonable one almost always exists. While not always intellectually credible at first glance, on the whole it is more intellectually coherent than any other philosophy or religion.

2. I have witnessed and experienced the power of Jesus Christ in my life and in the lives of those around me. The main reason I became more open to the possibility that Christianity might indeed be something to consider was witnessing some dramatic changes in the White Buffalo, only to learn after the fact that he had become a Christian some time before. I was completely unaware that he’d even been attending church, much less become a Christian, because I never, ever, got up before noon and he was going to an early service. I can still remember overhearing a conversation of his, one totally unrelated to religion, and wondering if the Pod People had come in the night.

So, even if Christianity was, by its own lights, false, it would still be an uncannily powerful placebo and one that one would be churlish, if not downright evil, to deny others. The very hatred that so many betray for Christianity, as opposed to Islam, Judaism (the religion, not the people) and Buddhism is, to me, testimony of the veracity of the Christian worldview.

3. The existence and persistence of evil, great and small. I believed in the tangible reality of evil before I believed in the existence of God. The one requires the other, for without God, there is no evil, there is only opinion or a lack of perfect utility. Indeed, even if Christianity is nothing but a human construct, I’ll take it on that Voltairean grounds alone, for it is a construct that has served humanity longer and better than any other.

Those are my chief intellectual reasons; there are many others. Perhaps they are meaningless for you, but they happen to be sufficient for me. Certainly, I have believed other things with far less cause and after far less thought. But beyond the merely intellectual, there is a joy in my heart when I contemplate the simple phrase “He is Risen” that gives me a persistent optimism even in the face of the world’s panoply of evils. The world is a madhouse ruled by a vicious sadist, but it is only a shadow, and soon enough, the Son will rise once more.

People often consider me a pessimist because of the conclusions I draw from the available evidence, without stopping to consider how often I am correct. And perhaps they’re right, although I’m probably one of the more cheerful pessimists you’ll ever meet. Because although the world is doomed – damned, actually – it has been almost from the start. Christians may be in the world, but we are not of it, and that is a very cheering thought indeed. It’s rather like being a tourist in a third world hellhole; no matter how bad it is around you at the moment, it won’t get you too down since you know it won’t be all that long before you’re back in air-conditioned civilization again.

I don’t know that I am right with regards to these things. But it is enough, it is more than enough, to trust that I am.