Old Stupidites Rediscovered

Over at The Torch they seem a little put out to have to deal with the inane chatter of one Grover Furr.

Grover Furr is at it again. Responding in the comments section to the Chronicle for Higher Education’s blog entry on this week’s release of FIRE’s annual speech codes report, Spotlight on Speech Codes 2007: The State of Free Speech on Our Nation’s Campuses, Furr calls the report a “fraud,” claiming that we seek only to advance a political agenda and that our analysis of speech codes is incorrect.

The thing is, we’ve answered Furr before - in 2005, when he was making nearly identical claims. Since he didn’t get the message then – and we suspect a finely-honed proclivity to ignore viewpoints differing from his own – we’re forced to respond again...

The exasperation the good folks at FIRE were obviously experiencing because of the painfully simple-minded "ideas" of Furr struck a chord with me. In fact, the practiced blinkered pig ignorance displayed by Furr coupled with his near total disregard for the basic tenets of intellectual honesty seemed familiar somehow.

"Grover Furr....where have I heard that name before?"

Well, I did a quick search and discovered I had had a run in with Furr eleven years ago back when I was in grad school at The Catholic University of America and Furr was wasting the time of serious academics on a Medieval Philosophy mailing list.

The following was written by me on March 23, 1996. In it I quote from Furr his response to another writers assertion that Stalin may not have been the nicest fellow in the world and the gulag was a bad thing:

On Sat, 23 Mar 1996, Grover Furr wrote:

This is just cold-war rubbish!

You might, with more accuracy, say that "the Americans perfected the slave state," keeping in mind (a) the fascist Jim Crow system; (b) peonage and virtual slavery, to say nothing of mass murder, in Central America, directly under American control; (c) support of fascists in South Africa, South Korea, Vietnam; (d) American corporations profiting from virtual slavery TODAY in Indonesia, Thailand, and South-East Asia generally: unions outlawed, and starvation wages and 14-hour days being the norm.

Look. Fascism is a specific thing and it is NOT profitably defined as "everything I happen not to like." Of course this might have to force us all to learn more terms (the HORROR) to accurately describe a given situation, but I think we can all think of this as a professional hazard. Likewise history deserves to be looked at more closely. Not every civil war is the Spanish Civil War. Thus not every civil war is
Communists v. Fascists.

RE: Fascism. Sabine, in the standard history of political thought states that the form fascism took was largely defined by its great enemy, communism. Marxists were materialists, therefore fascism defined themselves as idealists; Marxists saw class warfare as permanent, therefore fascists saw the organic totality of the state etc.

Of course fascism and communism seemed to be in lock-step as regards the totalitarian state.

Sabine [says]:

Both are dictatorships; both have condemned liberalism and parliamentarism in unmeasured terms; both tolerate but a single political party, which is in substance hardly distinguishable from the government of the state. In both the party is the self-proclaimed elite, the "best" brains and hearts, entrusted with the mission of giving ordinary men what is good for them and making them want it. The power of the factions in control of the party has had to be perpetuated in both systems by bloody "purges" which at the best are hardly more than judicial murder and at the worst are murder pure and simple.

And before someone claims this is "cold war" rhetoric it must be pointed out that this was published in 1937, well before the worst of the atrocities of either fascist Germany or soviet Russia were known.

"Jim Crow" laws are a uniquely American injustice. And it has nothing to do with fascism, unless someone wants to claim that only fascists have ever been racists.

Off the soapbox.

It is nice to know that old Grover isn't allowing the dearth of facts supporting his idiotic positions to slow him down.

Anti-Semites, Harvard Style

Folks should head over to Solomonia for an incredible post on what is passing for "learned thought" at Harvard these days. Here is a sample:

But what is most disturbing about Professor Matory’s apparent obsession with Israel and Jews (at one point he referred to "a moneyed and media connected American Israeli defense force" – I guess we can dispense with the usual coded language observation) is the unavoidable realization that for Professor Matory who was at the epicenter of ousting Larry Summers, ostensibly for sexist remarks, Israel was the primary trigger. It seems clear that for Professor Matory, Summers’ original sin was his opposition to the Harvard divestment - from - Israel campaign expressed long before his (in)famous speech on women in the sciences.

It would seem that Professor Matory has a bad case of Jews-on-the brain. He is beset by Israeli colonizers and their minions on campus: Practitioners of "character assassination, dis-invitation, and other losses of career opportunities campaign contributions, income or friends, and, above all, the damage done by fervent Zionists to the process of intellectual inquiry and debate in this university". By dis-invitation, he was referring to the wide opposition to the Harvard English Department’s invitation to Tom Paulin, an Irish poet who has called for the murder of all Jewish settlers, including men, women and children (a position predictably skipped over by the Professor). Continuing his breathless rant he claimed that even his teaching compensation was not off limits for the vaporous cabal: "Even my annual salary is set by officials who appear to feel threatened by my bringing up this issue."

Boy, hate-filled racists sure have it tough in today's academy. Being tenured at Harvard must be hell.

Distasteful? Maybe. Unconstitutional? Not Really.

Concerning Mitt Romney's speech on religion Jason Steck writes the following in a post entitled Religious Bigotry Lives:

Mormons are subjected to a double-whammy. At the same time that they are opposed by anti-Mormons who deem them a “non-Christian” “cult”, they are barred by anti-Christians who hate them because of their Christian religious beliefs. There exists, in effect, not one but two unconstitutional religious tests barring Romney and every other one of the millions of American Mormons from ever aspiring to the Presidency. That these two tests contradict each other in every way merely adds insult to injury.

I repeat here what I wrote there in the comments.

During the World Wars it was said that "Loose Lips Sinks Ships." Nowadays I think that idea should be revived as "Loose Terminology Sinks Ideas." The notion that since the government is not allowed to use religious tests as a prerequisite for holding political office then individual voters are not allowed to be uncomfortable with candidates who hold religious beliefs they find odd or downright weird is simple nonsense. We do not say that since the government cannot censor publications they dislike then any individual who chooses not to allow a copy of The Turner Diaries in their collection is guilty of censorship. The Constitution is a document that regulates the running of the mechanism of government, it is not a source of personal ethics. You may personally feel that voters shouldn’t ever take religious background into account, but that is nothing but the expression of your personal preference.

I myself would find it difficult to vote for a practitioner of voodoo, or a scientologist, or a believer in the divinity of Jim Jones, or someone who believes completely in astrology, therefore I cannot say that there is something inherently wrong with those people who are distrustful of Mormonism. Now, I may argue that their fears are exaggerated or completely misplaced, their ignorance too great to make any knowledgeable decision on the matter, etc., but that is an entirely different argument than the one made here.

Yeah. And Napoleon's Invasion Of Russia Was Really A Success Too.

Let us re-visit a topic I brought up back in January of this year. You may remember that I took the company Risk Management Solutions to task:

Insurance companies are now using the threat of global warming to rip its customers off. Evidently a group called Risk Management Solutions (RMS) supplies the models insurance companies use to get an idea of what their risks and liabilities are in hurricane prone areas. Well, last spring threw out its old models based upon 100 years worth of empirical evidence in favor of a guess; a guess real life hurricane experts call "actually unscientific."

I then looked at the data and found:

The claim that "significantly higher hurricane activity that has persisted in 9 out of the last 12 years" is simply false. Since hurricanes can only hit in full integers (i.e. one at a time), it is dishonest to claim a year that has 2 hurricanes is an example of "higher activity" when the average is around 1.75. It would be much more honest to claim it is an example of bouncing around the mean.

I then worked on a more statistically sophisticated post (as sophisticated as I can get anyway) where I concluded:

According to my work the claim that the last 12 years of hurricane activity is significantly different from what came before is false. In fact I found that the activity fell within a standard deviation from the mean. I also ran the numbers using as a baseline the data from 1946-1993 and comparing the 1994-2005 years to that (i.e. a log10 mean of 0.9625, with a standard deviation of 0.1326 for the 1946-1993 data, vs. a log10 mean of 1.1354 for the 1994-2005 period.), and found the 12 year period was still only barely one standard deviation away from the older numbers.

It seems clear to me that the claims of the folks at RMS (" "Increases in hurricane frequency should be expected along the entire U.S. coast, but will be highest in the Gulf, Florida, and the Southeast, while lower in the Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast.") is in no way borne out by the data.

So, we now are two years into the "predictions" offered by RMS. Who is doing a better job, RMS or The Iconic Midwest? Thanks to Roger Pielke over at Prometheus you can be the judge:

In the spring of 2006, a company called Risk Management Solutions (RMS) issued a five year forecast of hurricane activity (for 2006-2010) predicting U.S. insured losses to be 40% higher than average. RMS is an important company because their loss models are used by insurance companies to set rates charged to homeowners, by reinsurance companies to set rates they charge to insurers, by ratings agencies for evaluating risks, and others.

We are now two years into the RMS forecast period and can thus say something preliminary about their forecast based on actual hurricane damage from 2006 and 2007, which was minimal. In short, the forecast doesn't look too good. For 2006 and 2007, the following figure shows average annual insured historical losses (for 2005 and earlier) in blue (based on Pielke et al. 2008, adjusted up by 4% from 2006 to 2007 to account for changing exposure), the RMS prediction of 40% more losses above the average in pink, and the actual losses in red.

So the RMS forecast has been spectacularly wrong to this point. They predicted close to $15 Billion in storm damages for 2006-7 and we have had under $1 billion. The historical average would predict $11 billion for the same time period, so yes we have been lucky during the last two years. But what seems more likely, that we are in a totally different situation where we can expect Katrina like events every few years, OR that we are bouncing around the historical mean for these events?

Well, if you are RMS you don't even admit your models have failed to this point.

From Prometheus:

So what has RMS done is the face of evidence that its first 5-year forecast was not so accurate? Well, they have declared success and issued another 5-year forecast of 40% higher losses for the period 2008-2012.

Risk Management Solutions (RMS) has confirmed its modeled hurricane activity rates for 2008 to 2012 following an elicitation with a group of the world's leading hurricane researchers. . . . The current activity rates lead to estimates of average annual insured losses that will be 40% higher than those predicted by the long-term mean of hurricane activity for the Gulf Coast, Florida, and the Southeast, and 25-30% higher for the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast coastal regions.

In gambling terms, RMS has effectively doubled down. Adding 40% increases to the remaining three years in their original 2006-2010 forecast means we will have to average $17.5 Billion in storm losses during the next three years.

Not only is RMS doubling down, they are doing so on the basis of cards showing a King and a Six against a house showing an Ace.

Good luck with that.

ADDED:

I'll point out RMS' strange way of attempting to "confirm" their models. They look not at what actually has happened during the period they were supposedly predicting, but instead talk "with a group of the world's leading hurricane researchers." Huh, and here I was thinking they should use empirical observations instead.

This new science amazes me....explain again how sheep's bladders can be used to prevent earthquakes.

PoliGazette

As I mentioned below, the The Van Der Galiën Gazette is winding down its publishing life to be replaced by PoliGazette. I enjoyed writing for the old Gazette, and I am happy to say I will continue to be affiliated with the new blog. I do not have the time I used to for my blogging, but I hope to contribute the occasional essay.

I look forward to being a witness to the birth of this fine new political voice. So, to Michael, Pieter, and Jason I wish you the best of luck with the new endeavor!

The Limits Of Political Junkiedom

Here is another of my The Van Der Galiën Gazette pieces. Enjoy again for the first time!

Back when I was in my first iteration of grad school (Political Science, 1990-1993), I was witness to one of the more infamous scenes at that particular institution of higher learning. Most of the Political Science department gathered to hear a talk being given by one of the American politics professors. I don’t recall exactly the topic, but it had something to do with Congress and how the political process was perceived. During the Q&A time after the talk another of the Political Science professors, a well respected scholar in the field of International Relations, asked the following question:

What is meant by this phrase ‘inside the beltway’?

Well, every grad student at the talk groaned; inwardly in the room at the time of the question, audibly back in our T.A. offices or at a favorite watering hole later. It was typical, we said. The Political Science faculty simply did not seem to be as interested in the political world as we were. We devoured news coverage of national party politics, kept current on the latest controversies, had passionate opinions on policy debates, and many even kept a close watch on local party politics. We were, to a man and woman, political junkies. The professors were not. The political news that made up the fodder of our daily conversations and debates seemed to be only dimly perceived by the members of the faculty. A typical response from a professor were a current “hot” political topic to arise in a seminar would be something along the lines of “Yeah, yeah, yeah. That thing.” So, they were kinda aware of the debate, but not so much they’d actually have an opinion on the matter.

As good grad students we were, of course, scandalized. How and why, we wondered, did these people become Political Scientists in the first place if they were not all that interested in politics? We granted, being even handed folks, that they might be focusing upon their specific research questions, but was that any excuse for not having been exposed to the concept of inside the beltway? No! We answered over our frosty malted beverages. No! No! A thousand times no!

Ah, the joys of being young and in a near perpetual state of indignation.

Today, I have a lot more sympathy with my old professors. Yes, I still think it wouldn’t kill them to have some basic knowledge of the present political scene, even if they do nothing else in their careers but study sub-Saharan Africa or IR formal modelling. (Subscribe to Newsweek, for God’s sake.. It takes all of 15 minutes a week to read and you at least have a primer.) But, I think their aloofness was on to something about the political scene. There is a sameness about the disputes and controversies. Pure political junkies don’t really notice this as they can always live “in the moment.” They are like the guy in Memento: everything is perpetually new. Every new issue is taken upon its face value, and analogies are just tools used to bludgeon the other side and not to remind us that we have been here before.

For Political Scientists, however, we have always been here before. Every new political issue can be related to older issues. You don’t have to take anything at its face value, because chances are it is in reality an older controversy dressed up in new clothes. And, as much as it pains me to repudiate the me of 15 years ago, I can see a lot of merit in this view. Political junkies always see the world they live in as a “tipping point” (the most overused trope of the last fifty years). Every issue is of epoch making importance, each setback is a “disaster”, and every politician can be categorically labelled as ally, enemy, hero or traitor. Contrary to a common opinion Political Science has actually taught us some things, including that such hyperbole is largely nonsense. Today, I cannot blame these professors for not getting worked up about the controversies of the moment. Why should they? So the political junkies of today get themselves in a tizzy over the guilt or innocence of a man named Scooter? So what? In so many ways it is no different from all of the political junkies who got worked up (and still do) over Sacco & Vanzetti, Whittaker Chambers or Alger Hiss. The names may change, but the motivations remain largely the same. In any event, Political Science is more interested in abstracting out patterns of political behavior as opposed to obsessing about the minutiae of the political tabloids.

Political junkies simply do not and cannot recognize when their world is deja vu all over again.

Of course, there are those rare times when the political junkie has the better of the skeptical/cynical Political Scientists, such as when epoch changing moments do arrive. Soviet experts were too wedded to old patterns of behavior to notice the end of the U.S.S.R. until it was upon them, and the general reaction of Political Scientists to the Republican takeover of Congress in the 1990’s was “How’d that happen?” But these moments don’t alter the fact political junkies most often lack even the semblance of perspective.

Not that any real political junkie would ever care. Get them on a good day and they might even agree with my basic premise.

“Yes!”, they would say to me, “I’m often myopic and can rarely see the forest for the trees. But, when you get right down to it, that is part of the reason it is so much damn fun.”

In Praise of Incivility

I originally wrote this for the The Van Der Galiën Gazette this past summer. As the VDGG is soon to be a thing of the past, I thought it best to collect some of those pieces here as well.

It says something about our society that even after all of this time the internet can still give so many folks the screaming heebie jeebies. You cannot swing a nice four-letter expletive around without hitting a main stream media lament about the state of American discourse. The culprits, we are told, are various bloggers of the left and right, anonymous commentors with dubious language skills, and assorted other evil doers who add to the near certain ruination of our fine republic. For the most part, bloggers react to such criticism by stomping their feet and shouting, “You don’t understand me! You’ve never loved me and you never will! I hate you!” If there was an internet equivalent of running up to their room and slamming the door, I’m sure they would add that as well.

This little drama seemingly repeats itself every month or two; so often in fact that I sometimes feel like I’m stuck in the movie Groundhog Day, except without the ability to actually change anything. The reason nothing ever changes in this scenario has to do with the intersection of human nature with the nature of the internet. Believe it or not, it is a question with philosophical import and it has quite a pedigree.

In his dialogue The Laws, Plato discusses what has to be the best analogous practice to the internet in all of the history of philosophy: the drinking party. The problem with drinking parties, obviously, is their ability to get out of hand. They become riotous affairs.

Athenian Stranger- What I’m asking is this: doesn’t the drinking of wine make pleasures, pain, the spirited emotions, and the erotic emotions, more intense?

Kleinias- Very much so.

Athenian Stranger- What about sensations, memories, opinions, and prudent thoughts? Do they become more intense in the same way? Or don’t they abandon anyone who becomes thoroughly soused?

Kleinias- Yes, they completely abandon him.

Replace the pleasurable activity of drinking wine with the pleasurable activity of online discourse and I’m not sure what is different, other than the lack of a hangover. Many media types blame the anonymity of the web for much of this, but I’m sure that misses the mark. People will gladly sign their name to examples of their bad behavior, forgoing any semblance of anonymity in the bargain. There seems to be something in the way the internet allows us to be connected and disconnected simultaneously. We can forcefully present our ideas to any number of people without ever sharing proximity with them. Some might say the internet allows people to be belligerent without fear of actually being, well, beaten to a bloody pulp. But… it never really reads that way. It reads more like people affected by, if Michael will forgive the term, Dutch courage.

Of course, not everyone gets “soused” in that special internet way. Many folks employ the internet the same way Plato advocates the use of wine. For those who take a moderate approach free discourse is encouraged and much can be learned for our mutual edification. Those who “overindulge” and thus act immoderately stick out like a sore thumb. In any society it is important to know who you can look to for their steady outlook on life, and who you want to avoid as being prone to flights of unhinged invective. Incivility is thus a positive benefit to our political order. You may be discouraged by the sheer numbers of these buffoons, but at least you aware of the actual state of the polity and are not deceived by polite appearances.

In fact, for all the complaining about the coarseness of political discourse today, it might be worse in an unfailingly “proper” society. As Rousseau stated in his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts:

One no longer dares to appear as he is; and in this perpetual constraint, the men who form the herd called society, placed in the same circumstances, will all do the same things unless stronger motives deter them. Therefore one will never know well those with whom he deals, for to know one’s friends thoroughly, it would be necessary to wait for emergencies-that is, to wait until it is too late…

Lucky thing for us we live in a time with no such difficulties. Thanks to the wonderfully intoxicating properties of the internet we can all have a clear idea of just who we are dealing with in this cyber world. We may at times be distressed at the depths people will descend to in the name of their political ideology, but we will always know the true score thanks to those moments of incivility.

So, with pure philosophical purpose in our voices we can heartily say, “Thanks, jerks.”

Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me

The DK offers this today:

I started writing for the most selfish of reasons. I wanted to change the world around me. Or, failing that, I wanted to leave the slightest imprint upon it, during dark days, so that I could feel I had stirred the dust in some small way. Like a leaf pressed in the pages of a book, rediscovered long afterwards, I wanted the thin veins of words to exist somewhere, even if only as memory of the true thing itself.

We have plenty of people who write about politics, these days. And some of them are rational people, and the larger share are butchers. It is easier to be bloodthirsty than not; it requires no courage. It is easy to shave the smallest possible straws of principle from the larger sheaf, and the smallest possible slivers of paper from the law; it is the harder challenge to leave them there. It is the easiest thing in the world to be a bigot: it requires no knowledge, no sense, no logic. It is harder not to be.

And that is, in a word, insanity. It is a flaw in the fabric of the world. We are, apparently, monstrous creatures, and if we are truly created in God's image than God would have to be a more petty creator than we can possibly imagine. It seems more likely we are beasts.

Translation? "People who do not think exactly as I do are evil sons-of-bitches. I hate them so"

Somebody, please give this guy a lolipop, a hug, and a clue.

Counting Hurricanes Is Like Pulling Rabbits From A Hat...

...You never know when another one is coming. U.S. upgrades storm Karen as hurricane season ends

U.S. weather experts posthumously upgraded Tropical Storm Karen to a hurricane as the 2007 Atlantic storm season drew to a close on Friday, making the year a near-average one for hurricane activity.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center, in a post-season analysis of Karen, said the storm briefly reached hurricane intensity on September 26, with winds of 65 knots, equal to 74.8 mph (120 kph) or just over the threshold at which tropical storms become hurricanes.

The upgrade of Karen took the 2007 season's hurricane toll to six, bang on the long-term average. The 14 named storms that formed exceeded the long-term average of around 10 for a six-month Atlantic hurricane season.

Boy, that sure is convenient for the forecasters who were way off in their predictions this year, isn't it? So, let me get this straight. We are flying hurricane hunter patrols, and have large weather service staffs whose only job is to monitor the tropics for exactly this type of weather activity, and we are only able to identify a storm as a hurricane two months after the fact?

I usually have a rule about things that look like bullshit and smell like bullshit. Chances are they're bullshit. The more these "re-evaluations" take place, and the more we see questions about the validity of what are being called named storms by the National Hurricane Center these days, you cannot help but get the feeling there is a lot of bullshit out there.

Now, there is two ways to look at this. One could say that this simply represents a difference in our data gathering methods which allows for a greater level of precision than was available in the past, or one could say that outside considerations, maybe of a political nature, are influencing the way data is categorized. I'll admit the former seems unlikely when we confine ourselves to the last 10-15 years. I don't see that there has been any dramatic upgrade in our capabilities over that time period. Certainly, the desire to have a homogeneous storm data set should have been enough to keep storm categorization criteria constant over time, but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

One is left with the impression that there are those at work who do not care that they are rending the data set useless for making valid comparisons over time. And, of course, there is a small cottage industry that has arisen simply to take advantage of these sorts of limitations in the data set to espouse their pet political projects, ala Kerry Emanuel.

Of course, these are the exact same people who insist that the pre-satellite era data is nearly 100% complete and accurate. Once again, how convenient.

For the time being, the only option I'm left with is to read this stuff and hold my nose.

Momentum?

From the New York Times:

The spotlight on the two entertainment icons was just the latest flurry of attention for Hollywood backers of presidential candidates. Though Mr. Obama made a splash by picking up the support of David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg of Dreamworks early this year, their partner, Steven Spielberg, and Peter Chernin of News Corp. came out for Mrs. Clinton soon after, scotching any notions that her Hollywood base was deserting her.

Since then Rob Reiner has added his name to Mrs. Clinton’s camp, while Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt have come out for John Edwards.

Which only goes to confirm that old political maxim: As goes Bonnie Raitt, so goes John Hiatt.

A Little Matter Of Truthiness

QandO notes the UN's "revised" HIV/AIDS infection numbers. What are the chances they were originally exaggerated for political effect? Probably one hundred percent. But, of course, in this day and age that is fine if your heart is in the right place. And when you are shown to be wrong you can always file a press release which will be covered by the MSM in the following manner:



Gee, it is nice to know we are being looked out for.

Giving Thanks

Well, you may have noticed that this blog is prone to fits and starts. A look at the blog archive will show 2007 to be, by far, the most productive in terms of outright blog postings, with nearly ten times (!) the posts I got around to in all of 2006. Still, it has been quiet around here of late, and there is a good reason for that: Employment. Being unemployed does wonders for my ability to post timely criticism on national and world events. I cannot fathom how a blog like CQ could have been kept up by one person holding down a full time job. I suppose it helps if the blog becomes your only true hobby and all consuming passion. For me that could never be, so this one man dog & pony show will continue to rev up and down as fortunes wax and wane. That's okay as this is a blog after all. Just consider it a "bloggy" blog and it will help you deal with my absences.

Anyway...in the spirit of those dumb classroom exercises where my Catholic grade school teachers had us come up with what we were thankful for, I figured The Iconic Midwest should give it a go as an adult (of a sort.)

I'm thankful for the loyal readers of this blog - some old friends, others I've never met - who check it out just to see what I'm up to. The answer is almost always "Not too much." but you still check and that is the important part.

I'm thankful for my blog friends, particularly the gangs at The Van Der Galiën Gazette, Blue Crab Boulevard, and Stubborn Facts. The IMW have always been humbled by the good company we keep.

I'm thankful to Andrew Sullivan for quoting, in a positive vein no less, one of my efforts earlier this year.

I'm thankful for the improved play of the St. Louis Blues.

I'm thankful that my inner muse was sufficient to get me to write:

It says something about our society that even after all of this time the internet can still give so many folks the screaming heebie jeebies. You cannot swing a nice four-letter expletive around without hitting a main stream media lament about the state of American discourse. The culprits, we are told, are various bloggers of the left and right, anonymous commentors with dubious language skills, and assorted other evil doers who add to the near certain ruination of our fine republic. For the most part, bloggers react to such criticism by stomping their feet and shouting, “You don’t understand me! You’ve never loved me and you never will! I hate you!” If there was an internet equivalent of running up to their room and slamming the door, I’m sure they would add that as well.

Yes, I still chuckle at my own writing. Sue me. :-)

I'm thankful that I'll get the chance to do it all over again next year.

Honesty Will Get You Everywhere

From Reuters: It's official: you don't have to live in France

Ask most Britons if they would rather live in France and they'd probably answer "oui." But British judges have ruled that two English boys who hate living there don't have to.

The boys, 11 and 16, who have a French mother and a British father, were taken to live in France after the parents' marriage broke down. But during a visit to England they asserted their "Britishness" and refused to return to live with their mother.

The mother took the case to court, arguing that she had a right to decide where they should live and that the father had put the children up to it, the Times newspaper reported.

But three of Britain's most senior judges decided the boys had an inherent right to refuse to live in France, where nearly 300,000 Britons have chosen to live.

Describing the case as "not just exceptional but very exceptional," the chief judge said it was clear the children really disliked the country and hadn't settled in.

They preferred England because, apparently, they could "walk to school, could have their own key and would not have to do as much homework."

Teenagers not wanting to do homework? Who would have guessed?

The Death Of God?

Something else to ponder while you are wondering how any just and loving God could allow the Boston Red Sox to be the winningest team of the new millennium:

The guys at Fark.com had this take on college football: “Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies, rivers and seas boiling, forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes, the dead rising from the grave, and human sacrifice: Missouri and Kansas ranked in the AP top 10. MASS HYSTERIA.”

Something is SERIOUSLY wrong here.

Someone Tell Me When It Is Over

I hate days like these because I can't turn on the f-ing television without seeing something that pisses me off. My wife insists on watching the NewsHour on PBS and I watched until I couldn't stand it any longer. The combination of willfully spread inaccuracies designed to further a leftist agenda coupled with a less willful scientific ignorance they don't have the basic intelligence to mask, was enough to make me want to "add a little more carbon emissions to the world," if you catch my drift. That my wife buys it all hook, line and sinker just makes matters worse... so I'm up here writing this while she is downstairs watching the porno video that is PBS fellating the Goracle and the entire IPCC. ("PBS the Jenna Jameson of news media.")

When will folks realize this media fueled hysteria has made them turn off any semblance of common sense we as a people ever had? I've gotta imagine what I'm feeling is akin to those few in Germany who in 1938 looked at the spectacle of their fellow citizens adoring Hitler and thought "What is wrong with you people?" That it seems to be affecting the entire Western world just makes it seem all the more like a form of civilizational sickness. Maybe Nietzsche was right after all.

Hey, Western world! You can all commit suicide if you want to, you just are not taking me with you.