Vox Popoli

From Electrolite:

I don’t understand. Are you denying that you said: “Women do not write hard science fiction today because so few can hack the physics” but, instead, you’re saying that some linear superposition of Barby and Ann Coulter said: “Women do not write hard science fiction today because so few can hack the physics?”

Or are you saying that a woman cannot both be a feminist and able to write hard science fiction?

Or are you saying that a woman cannot both be a feminist and a Physics professor?

Or what?

Please note that I am not attacking you. I am admitting that I had trouble understanding one paragraph of your because it seemed to deny the existence of my wife. I am giving you a chance to correct my misunderstanding.

I agree with you that Neal Stephenson is a good writer, although he needs a good editor. I agree with you that Bujold, Eco, Stross and Wrede are all very good writers. I agree with your statement that you had the best of intentions on the Nebula Jury. I did not accuse you of antisemitism.

I am just one reader of Patrick’s blog. But if you can clarify things for me, you have reduced from n+1 to n the number of readers of this blog that you need to persuade.

No, why would I deny it? Sure, it is theoretically possible for women to be feminist Physics professors writing science fiction. I have no doubt that one or two such unusual beasts exist floating about the fringes. However, because of the inclination of women towards Women’s Studies and other math-free majors, the pool of potentials is extremely small. If only 13 percent of Physics PhDs are female, as Physics Today claimed, then I don’t see why it should be controversial to state that few women are capable of writing hard SF.

I note that The Hard SF Renaissance declares the big names in hard SF in are: Greg Egan, Gregory Benford, Geoffrey Landis, G David Nordley, Paul McAuley, Nancy Kress, Kim Stanley Robinson, Charles Sheffield, Brian Stableford, Allen Steele, Bruce Sterling, Robert J. Sawyer, Poul Anderson, David Brin, Greg Bear, Hal Clement, Ben Bova and Larry Niven. With the exception of Ms Kress and Mrs. Robinson, these names strike me as overwhelmingly male. And Mrs. Robinson is one homely woman judging by her picture on her web site.

I believe I have a reasonably accurate snapshot of the state-of-the-field after getting book-bombed by genre publishers for the past year. Like my fellow jury members, I slogged my way through an astonishing amount of equine ejectus. And speaking of equine ejectus, I note that the cover of the award-winning physicist’s latest indicates rather strongly that what is supposedly the recent best in our field is nothing but a romance series. It’s not even a good romance cover… geez, win a Nebula and you STILL can’t get Fabio?

From the Washington Times:

Republican media adviser R. Gregory Stevens, who recently served as co-chairman of the Bush/Cheney Entertainment Task Force, was found dead Saturday in the Hollywood home of actress Carrie Fisher…. A flamboyant personality and bicoastal bachelor, Mr. Stevens was regarded as something of a misfit in the corridors of the buttoned-down lobbying firm, and yet “had a large circle who he touched. His life was a journey, not a destination,” said one member of the firm. “He was always fun and entertaining.”

This could get interesting, considering all the Democratic threats to out gay Republicans. I’ve never heard of the unfortunate Mr. Stevens before, but seeing the words “flamboyant” and “bicoastal bachelor” strikes me as being rather similar to those crime reports where the legacy media strangely happens to leave out the description of the murder suspect. VPQF, can we get a ruling?

I rather doubt that the late Hunter S. Thompson’s recent suicide was sparked by fears of being outed as a gay Republican, but then, you never really know.

UPDATE: Snowdog pronounces a verdict: Well, the words “flamboyant” and “bachelor” used in the same sentence would be a huge warning sign. “BI-coastal” has certain implications. Part of the “Entertainment Task Force?” He was SO gay.

Bradley Smith says that the freewheeling days of political blogging and online punditry are over. In just a few months, he warns, bloggers and news organizations could risk the wrath of the federal government if they improperly link to a campaign’s Web site. Even forwarding a political candidate’s press release to a mailing list, depending on the details, could be punished by fines.

Smith should know. He’s one of the six commissioners at the Federal Election Commission, which is beginning the perilous process of extending a controversial 2002 campaign finance law to the Internet.

In 2002, the FEC exempted the Internet by a 4-2 vote, but U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly last fall overturned that decision. “The commission’s exclusion of Internet communications from the coordinated communications regulation severely undermines” the campaign finance law’s purposes, Kollar-Kotelly wrote.

I saw this yesterday but didn’t even bother commenting on it. The notion is absurd. The Clinton administration wanted to shut down WND and even sent the IRS after it – Al Gore is still suing them, if I recall correctly – and couldn’t do so despite the fact that as a corporation that has people dependent on getting paid by it for a living, it is far more vulnerable than blogs.

The government might be able to make life a little more difficult for Blogspot and other hosting services, and will almost certainly be a pain for the Kos-style professional bloggers, but it will be virtually impossible to shut down blogs like this one, at least until the globalist traitors in the US manage to hand the Internet over to the UN. In the meantime, hosting it somewhere outside of US jurisdiction would be a matter of hours, if not minutes.

Color me both unsurprised and unconcerned. There’s a lot of things to be genuinely concerned about; this isn’t one of them. It’s ironic that blogs like the Captain’s Quarters would get their panties in a bunch over this, while simultaneously saluting the UN’s embrace of military power.

I have zero intellectual regard for the abortionettes, mostly because they can’t offer a single argument that can hold up to ten seconds debate before an impartial judge. The OC did a fine job of destroying the most cherished arguments in one or two sentences apiece; my favorite idiocy has always been the utterly asinine “it’s my body” argument, which of course doesn’t apply to almost anything else you eat, drink, wear or do in our current legal system.

But the argument I find the most tiresome is the “poor frightened young girl” argument. First, it’s a cop-out. Few would harbor similar pity for a “poor sexually deprived young boy” who rapes someone. Second, it’s a stupid basis for abortion rights as a whole, since it would be trivially simple to enact lesser penalties for girls under the age of 18 on the basis of their being non compos mentis, although I’d think that this could just as easily be regarded as an insult. In any event, the ease with which this “problem” can theoretically be addressed demonstrates that it’s nothing but a stalking horse designed to take the pressure off a beleagured abortionette who’s losing an argument.

A tangential annoyance is how abortionettes, when faced with the need to acknowledge the irresponsibility of the woman in getting pregnant in the first place given the plethora of available birth control methods, start whining about how men are irresponsible too. But this simply leads their argument onto very thin ice, as they don’t want men to be responsible or even have any voice in the matter. This is because bringing male responsibility into the pro-abortion argument would require granting men the right to either force the woman to have an abortion or be able to deny any subsequent paternal responsibility for the child.

This, of course, would be more terrifying to the abortionettes than an outright ban on the disgusting practice. What a contemptible lot! On top of everything else, they can’t even manage to take responsibility for the logic of their own haphazard arguments.

Anonymous asks a few reasonable questions:

One thing I’d like to know from all opposed to abortion. If it become illegal — what should the penalty for women who have abortions be?

And what should the penalty for doctors who perform them be?

If you think abortion if murder — shouldn’t the penalty for having or performing an abortion be the death penalty?

Penalty for women who have abortions: imprisonment until menopause.
Penalty for doctors: medical license revoked, imprisonment for life.

That will end abortion very quickly. The very remote possibility of being shot by an activist appears to have caused the number of abortionists to drop significantly. Although the notion of giving the abortionist a fair trial and executing him via rope-and-equine quartering offers just appeal, I do not believe in the death penalty because given the history of the 20th century, it is demonstrably foolish to the point of insanity to grant the state the legal power to kill its citizens.

The Original Cyberpunk performs a post-natal verbal abortion on a male abortionette. WARNING: graphic intellectual bitchslapping may be offensive to readers of a sensitive nature:

I had just put my lunch in the microwave and closed the door when the Insufferable Liberal confronted me. “I had no idea you were such a right-wing religious whack-job.”

Hmm. Strange way to begin a supposedly friendly conversation. I set the microwave timer for three minutes, pressed the start button, and turned to face him.

“Your web site. I read what you wrote about Planned Parenthood. How can you possibly be opposed to a woman’s right to choose?”

Yeah, you can’t front on that.

Utah lawmakers want to leave home schooling as unregulated as possible. Legislators have approved a bill that blocks school boards from requiring that home-schooling parents meet minimum credential requirements and keep records of what they teach and of student attendance.Also under the legislation, school boards could not require standardized testing of home-schooled students….

Rep. Mike Morley, R-Spanish Fork, noted that three of the top students at Yale this year were home-schooled. “It would be difficult to hold public education to the same standard that home school is achieving,” he said. “In most standards, we judge our parents as competent and fit unless otherwise proved.” But House Democrats questioned the hands-off legislation home-schooling parents requested. “It sounds a little like: ‘We don’t want you involved or interfering in any way,’ ” said Rep. Carol Moss, D-Holladay, a retired high school teacher.

I’m not surprised Madam Moss finds it so difficult to ascertain the message the home-schooling parents were sending the Utah legislature. She is, after all, a former teacher.

You’ve got to love the technofreaks. Even if I didn’t loathe Microsoft – and I do, by the mad pipings of Azathoth, I sure do – I think I’d have to switch to Linux based on the inspiration of this heart-warming story alone. Thanks to oneJohn for bringing this to our attention.

The project began when Nils Schneider, a 17-year-old computer science student from Germany, received an iPod for Christmas. Unlike most new iPod owners, he decided to install Linux – a freely available computer operating system not used as standard in iPods – on his device.

The existing version of Linux for the iPod would not install easily, however, as the latest generation of player features new hardware. Undeterred, Schneider decided to figure out how these components worked by himself. He found he could control some parts of the device but not
those containing details about the way the unit starts up, which is vital to getting Linux installed.

Instead of going through the usual process of trial and error to work out the code, Schneider realised that listening to it could provide a shortcut. Bernard Leach, a UK software engineer who helped set up the so-called iPod Linux project, had already worked out how to control the piezoelectric component within the iPod that produces the click.

To decipher the bootloader code – the program which allows the iPod to start up – Schneider decided to use Leach’s system to play the bootloader code as sound. “I just tried to encode a single byte as a click sound with different spaces between the clicks,” Schneider told New Scientist. “It seemed to work but it was slow so I played around with the code and found out how
to make the clicks faster.”

After encoding the bootloader data he recorded the resulting sounds onto another PC programmed to convert it back into computer code. The whole process took more than 20 hours and Schneider had to construct a sound proof box for the recording. But, in the end, he had extracted the information intact. This made it possible to get Linux running on the device, along with a variety of compatible software programs such as simple games and audio recorders.

“After extracting the bootloader it was only a couple of days’ worth of work to get iPod Linux booting,” Leach told New Scientist. “Otherwise it would have taken months.”

Does anyone doubt that the kid would have forged on anyhow even if it did take months? This bizarre impulse to mess around with things is why we’re not all still living in caves, mud huts and thatched dwellings. I love the phrase “unlike most new iPod owners”, as if ten or fifteen percent of them are modifying the operating systems.

Jeanne can’t take it any longer:

Screw the Republicans. What a flippin’ joke! 55 seats in the Senate and they slink around worried about what the Democrats think and propose tax increases! Are you ****ing kidding me!!

I was stupid enough to stick by Bush through this last election, to defend him, to vote for him and he gets re-lected with a good majority in the Senate and this is what we get? A proposed tax increase?

Baseless cowards! Screw them all. This literally raises my blood pressure spike!!!

Where is that voter registration change form…..

Unfortunately, former Democrats appear to be flooding into the Grand Old Party even faster than those who genuinely love freedom are fleeing it. Thus, one can expect the Republican Party to continue to move left, perhaps even nominating a pro-choice presidential candidate such as Condoleeza Rice. That could get interesting.

Perhaps in the next election, people will be more inclined to base their vote on less nonsensical and mathematically challenged grounds than the inevitable “a vote for [2008 Libertarian candidate] is a vote for [2008 Democratic candidate]” mantra.

Captain Ed visualizes world peace… in a graveyard:

“United Nations peacekeepers have gone on the offensive against a militia group in Congo, deploying helicopters and killing nearly 60 people in the biggest battle fought by the world body in more than a decade.”

The wave of democratization that has accompanied the steel will of George Bush to enforce the terms of the cease-fire and UNSC resolutions involving Saddam has changed the demeanor of the tinpot dictators of Southwest Asia; it may have inflamed the ire of the Europeans in the short term, but it put a lot of credibility into American warnings. The UN has lost that credibility after a decade of fleeing at the first shot, and if they want to regain any ability to actually keep peace, they need more examples of this kind of reaction to provocation. This is a good start.”

Blessed be the peacekeepers, for they shall rack up a body count. So, it’s important for the most dangerous organization on the planet, one utterly dedicated to nothing less than destroying national sovereignty, to demonstrate its willingness to slaughter? I wish I could say that it is stunning to me, as an ex-Republican, to see the voices of the party, large and small, embracing the would-be Last Reich.

I should add that George Bush may not be Hitler, but he and his “steel will” are looking more and more like Bismarck. Unlike the president’s leftist critics, I wouldn’t dream of denying that the recent developments in the Middle East are the direct result of his decision to uphold the ideals and defend the credibility of the United Nations by invading, liberating and then occupying Iraq. I also suspect that this military muscle flexing on the part of the blue helmets is inspired by it as well.

A few years ago, I wrote a novel that began with a blue-helmeted force of UN Peacekeepers going into combat against a rebel militia force. But I never imagined that less than a decade later, we’d be reading about UN troops going on the offensive in the bloody news.