Blog — March, 2009

Kate Bush is fantastic. Especially a young Kate Bush. Or a thirty-something Kate Bush. Or even an older Kate Bush.

She's also long been a total New Age flake. Consider Them Heavy People:

They arrived at an inconvenient time
I was hiding in a room in my mind
They made me look at myself. I saw it well
I'd shut the people out of my life

So now I take the opportunities
Wonderful teachers ready to teach me
I must work on my mind. For now I realise
Everyone of us has a heaven inside

Them heavy people hit me in a soft spot
Them heavy people help me
Them heavy people hit me in a soft spot
Rolling the ball, rolling the ball, rolling the ball to me

They open doorways that I thought were shut for good
They read me Gurdjieff and Jesu
They build up my body, break me emotionally
It's nearly killing me, but what a lovely feeling!

I love the whirling of the dervishes
I love the beauty of rare innocence
You don't need no crystal ball
Don't fall for a magic wand
We humans got it all, we perform the miracles....

And Cloudbusting, of course, is an ode to Wilhelm Reich and his ideas on orgone ... even wasting Einstein's time with his quackery.

The mystical power of thought and speech in reshaping physical reality: "Just saying it could even make it happen."

Ah, but if "saying it could make it happen" ... what would you say to a young Kate Bush?

• Moments Of Pleasure

• Sat in Your Lap

• The Big Sky

• Breathing

• Hammer Horror

• Hounds of Love

P.S. Angie Harmon. Beautiful, too smart to get fooled by Barack Obullshit, and not a racist, either. Woo-hoo!

You remember George Carlin's "Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television"? Well, here are the Ten words you can't say around pre-rational, homophobic goat-fuckers ... I mean, devout, pedophile-worshiping Muslims:

• The Clash of Civilizations
• Secular
• Assimilation
• Reformation
• Jihadi
• Moderate
• Interfaith
• Freedom
• Religious Freedom
• Tolerance

It's actually an inversion of the traditional formulation of White Man's Burden. White Man's Burden used to mean the duty to bring the benighted savages [good word!] to Christ's arms. This inversion starts from similar presumptions about the nature of the benighted savages, but instead refuses to impose ANY values on them. That's IMPERIALISM!!!!!

We wouldn't to stop them from eating their own shit and fucking each other in the ear, that would be an imposition of western values. Instead, we should start eating our own shit so that they don't make us fuck each other in the ear.

And you thought I needed to watch my language!

On intentionalism:

When we allowed the Confederate Battle Flag to be defined as a symbol of racism/white supremacism, without reference to what it meant to the people displaying it, we set the precedent that claiming offense at what a symbol means to the alleged victim is all that is necessary to prove their victimhood.

Semi-Related to Something: I've had various qualms over the past half year, about whether referring to Obama and his minions as our "Socialist Overlords" was unduly hyperbolic (in trying to "tweak" the "typical, irrational woman" Ophelia Benson and her left-biased, grossly under-researching commenters). But it turns out I was absolutely right:

Question: What do you call a person who believes that government, and not the market, should control an economy? Or one who believes that it is the role of the government to step in buy up effective control of private corporations with (future) taxpayer money?

Yes, they're referring to L'il Timmy Geithner; but like they used to say back on the farm, "Same shit, different pile."

And speaking of shit:

Sharia law could apply to disputes in US courts. The United States constitutes an "axis of disobedience" along with North Korea and Saddam-era Iraq.

Those are the views of the man on track to become one of the US government's top lawyers: Harold Koh.

President Obama has nominated Koh—until last week the dean of Yale Law School—to be the State Department's legal adviser. In that job, Koh would forge a wide range of international agreements on issues from trade to arms control, and help represent our country in such places as the United Nations and the International Court of Justice....

Koh [is] a fan of "transnational legal process," arguing that the distinctions between US and international law should vanish....

[I]n addressing the Yale Club of Greenwich in 2007, Koh claimed that "in an appropriate case, he didn't see any reason why Sharia law would not be applied to govern a case in the United States."

You can bet that (nomination) wouldn't be happening if Sarah Palin was within 500 miles of D.C.

Which is why politics is always a question, not of finding an ideal candidate, but of priorities and compromises.

Because when you've got inhumane Sharia law creeping into your erstwhile-free society, the health of the nose-diving economy, in the long run, will be the least of your worries. And when the same people who are most-tolerating that creeping are also doing their best to destroy the free market ... your decision at the polling booth should be (i.e., should have been) an easy one, even if it required holding your nose and voting for the "less-wrong lizard."

This is not good:

The U.N. Human Rights Council on Thursday adopted a resolution condemning "defamation of religion" as a human rights violation. Of course, this was introduced by Pakistan as a curb on any speech against Islam. Certainly Muslim states would not want the resolution to be actually used against Muslims who say nasty things about filthy Crusaders and Jews....

Ironically, prohibiting anyone from defaming any religion is itself a human rights violation. I have the right to say Mohammed is a pedophile who screwed little girls, Allah is a piece of crap, and Islam is a fake religion. There, I said it, UN. What are you going to do about it?

Amazingly, it was a Canadian delegate to the UN who pointed out that "It is individuals who have rights, not religions.... Canada believes that to extend (the notion of) defamation beyond its proper scope would jeopardize the fundamental right to freedom of expression, which includes freedom of expression on religious subjects."

Indeed, just when you think this country is going completely to the (Muslim/African) dogs, you see this:

Immigrants, [Canadian Immigration minister Jason Kenney] says, should come prepared to accept our national standards, or stay out. "My job is in part to ensure that we successfully integrate newcomers into Canadian society and that our particular Canadian model of pluralism remains a success," he says. "There's always a danger that political correctness can dissuade us from making clear distinctions between what constitutes legitimate political debate, and on the other hand, extremism and the promotion of hatred and violence. We cannot allow political correctness to cloud our ability to make those basic distinctions"....

Mr. Kenney said he believes it does immigrants no favour to bring them here seeking work in fields that do not need them, or with unrecognized credentials. It might even harm their loyalty. He was stunned, he says, recently sitting in an Immigration Canada interview with a thirty-something citizen arrived in Canada over a decade ago who was unable to understand questions in English or French.

Canada has not yet gone as far as Australia in enforcing a cultural and economic compatibility from its immigrants, but Mr. Kenney seems to be headed in a similar direction (He also acknowledges following recent British moves to delegitimize Arab and Muslim groups involved with radical elements, while the Netherlands, France and even Quebec have experimented with methods of preserving traditional standards).

"The idea that we are a happy mosaic and we can continue to let people do anything they want, short of breaking the law, is short-sighted," says Martin Collacott, a former Canadian ambassador who studies immigration for the Fraser Institute; a country must select its immigrants carefully to ensure they are fit to become productive, dedicated citizens....

Since his appointment, the minister has yet to bring forward any legislation, though it's true that the opportunity to do so has so far been limited. But he promises an "ambitious policy agenda" coming soon.

Let's hope so ... though it's weird that they would place the health of the country over helping the rich get richer by driving down wages through immigration.

Either way, only a Conservative government would even be floating the ideas that Kenney's been discussing. And only the National Post would be such a right-wing paper as to publish a non-condemnatory piece about it. (I mean those as compliments.)

P.S. I Swiffered my less-than 100 sq. ft. of carpet today. You can sort of tell, but Swiffer isn't really much of a technology, with just those little sticky pads on the bottom of a long plastic handle.

So I started thinking about Steve Martin's old stand-up line about the high price of carpet, and how he was going to just buy two square yards of it, strap them to his feet, and walk around like that.

And then it hit me: If you put those Swiffer sheets on the bottoms of a pair of slippers, it would work great. The "Swipper"! (Or "Sliffer.") You'd be cleaning your carpet as you walk over it!

They say your first million is the hardest....

P.P.S. If you have any doubt at all that both Bill Maher and Mos Def are total fucking morons, check this out: Hitchens vs. Mos Def. Two-digit IQ, paranoid, loud-mouthed, dumbfuck, shit-eating animal who won't shut the fuck up long enough to learn the first thing about anything.

And Mos Def is even worse. Why they would invite that braindead, know-nothing nigger imbecile onto a show with Rushdie and Hitchens would be inexplicable, if Maher wasn't involved. A pity his (Def's) unfit mother never taught him even the most rudimentary manners. But hey, that's their "culture," innit?

The hardcover version of "Norman Einstein" is now available from amazon.com.

Interesting perspective on the teaching of Creationism in American schools:

While I disagree the world is 6000 years old, my kids are in far more danger of going to school and being fed total bullshit on a host of other issues I disagree with from the left. The most pervasive and dama[g]ing is the feminization of boys, followed by global warming extremism, followed by other scientific "realities" about the environment, how white people ruined the world, no American history or alternative versions of American history, that Huck Finn is bad or racist, that radical Islam is a religion of peace, etc. And there are not enough hours in a day to unravel that bullshit from my kids' brains.

Point taken; but still, you have to fight every battle as if it was the most important one, or the one thing you can be sure of is that you'll lose it. And if you lose enough battles, you're going to lose the war.

Hitchens:

Ken Mercer ... has said that evolution is disproved by the absence of any transitional forms between dogs and cats. If any state in the American union gave equal time in science class to such claims, it would certainly make itself unique in the world (perhaps no shame in that). But it would also set a precedent for the sharing of the astronomy period with the teaching of astrology, or indeed of equal time as between chemistry and alchemy....

[Chairman of the Texas education board Don] McLeroy and his allies now say that they ask for evolution to be taught only with all its "strengths and weaknesses." But in this, they are surely being somewhat disingenuous. When their faction was strong enough to demand an outright ban on the teaching of what they call "Darwinism," they had such a ban written into law in several states.

Yep, believers never just "want to be left alone to practice their faith" while honoring the right of others to hold diverging opinions. Rather, they'll literally outlaw the teaching of ideas which don't fit into their fairy-tale view of reality.

An amazon.com reader review of STG:

This book relies heavily on other sources, but it accurately describes the main accusations of chicanery, fraud, sexual misconduct, and financial exploitation against a whole host of revered Eastern "gurus" -- as well as a few Westerners. The tone is humorous and lively. However, it could use some more details and serious analysis of what attracts people to these spiritual leaders in the first place.

Not that I object to a four-star review, but:

Yes, the book relies heavily on other sources. Many of which are very difficult to find, and/or out-of-print. Five thousand hours of research and $5000 in books, to be precise. So it's not as though you could easily go out and find the same information elsewhere.

Also, a big part of the reason why it's obvious that the book relies on other sources is simply because of the extensive block-quoting which I've done. It's not that other books are more original than the ones I write; it's just that I footnote everything so thoroughly, in-line, that you don't have to go separately to the sources to read them. Which, you know, would take you around five thousand hours, and $5000, to do....

And 45% of the figures covered at any depth in STG are Westerners. I actually explicitly pointed that out in the chapter on the Roman Catholic Church. So it's not just "a few Westerners," it's nearly half. (And there's no reason for "gurus" to be in scare-quotation marks there, either.)

The book could use some more details? Well, you can always use more details about the communities and teachings. But you realize that the only way to include more details would have been to make the book even longer, and it's already 536 printed pages. And a longer book is an even-higher priced book. And none of those details are necessary for documenting the abuse which goes on in each of the communities in question.

"Serious analysis of what attracts people to these spiritual leaders in the first place"? Yes, because merely debunking most of the claims about the necessity for brainwashing, love-bombing, etc., which the cult-studies field makes about why people get involved with destructive groups, isn't enough, is it?

Is the attraction based in more than just gullibility, the desperate need for a worldview in which everything makes sense, the comfort of belonging to a "saved" in-group, and the craving of peer- and authority-approval for one's beliefs and actions? Not as far as I can tell. Certainly, whatever attracts people to "these spiritual leaders" is exactly the same thing as attracts them to traditional religions.

So, there you go.

P.S. TDL Gaming: The World Series of Victimhood Poker:

A quick look through the Victimhood Poker deck reveals that muslims outrank plain old vanilla gays by 3 whole points in the leftist mind. The only way the left would have damned an attack by muslims on gays is if the gays possessed an additional valuable victim quality. If the gays were Native American gays, for example, the left would have damned the muslims because each Native American gay is worth 22 points whereas a muslim is only worth 12. Now, for argument's sake, let's say black muslims attacked and butchered Native American gays.

In such an instance, the left must clearly support the black muslims, because they are worth an overwhelming 26 victim points a piece!

Ooh, and this:

Like many other "activists", [Dr. Shakti] Butler obviously isn't opposed to racism per se. She isn't arguing for a reciprocal moral principle—i.e. that people shouldn't be prejudged on the basis of their skin colour or country of origin. She's simply encouraging paranoia, victimhood and disaffection among students, while apparently indulging her own bizarre racial revenge fantasies. Fantasies which others may begin to share after prolonged and coercive exposure to this lurid nonsense. Having redefined racism as "prejudice + power", is Dr Butler concerned by her own abuse of influence, or the power wielded by academic institutions like Delaware, or Duke, or by other likeminded educators, administrators and activists? Is she troubled by her own unsupported, overtly racist, efforts to indoctrinate? It seems not. Perpetuating this anxious, non-reciprocal outlook may be politically useful to some leftist ideologues and opportunist pressure groups, or those with serious mental health problems; but it isn't clear how believing "all white people" are racist helps anyone see further than the colour of a person's skin....

Shakti Butler, PhD., the author of the laughable "Life Diversity Facilitation Training" pamphlet referenced above, got her doctorate from something called the "California Institute of Integral Studies"....

Heartwarming, to realize that the slimy spawn of the integral movement are at the forefront of hate-whitey race-baiting in higher education, innit? Makes Integral University look absolutely spiffy by comparison.

Is there anything these people of "integral consciousness" can't fuck up, if they put their feeble minds to it?

From "Some of them masked"?:

The double standard that kept [Obama] going this long required an endless propaganda loop and infinite second chances. It demanded that the public think the best of Obama and the worst of his opponents. So when Obama talked about visiting 57 states, it was written off as a meaningless gaffe, but when Palin talked about seeing Alaska from her house, it was transformed into an ongoing taunt.

And now thanks to the wonders of the teleprompter and carefully screened questions from the press, we have a man in the White House who might be more incompetent than he is corrupt, or more corrupt than he is incompetent. With the economy stumbling further, stock in incompetence is rising, even while no other stock is.

There's no question about it, the paint is flaking, the antenna is bent and the wheels are coming off. To increasing numbers of Americans who did vote him, Obama is a nice guy who's completely out of his depth. A year in, the assessment is likely to be far worse.

Unless, of course, he gets his own "9/11"—GWB was comparably corrupt, incompetent, and out of his depth, and widely viewed as such, as a sure one-term president, before being "gifted" with that rallying point.

Not that Obama would take equal advantage of such a tragedy, though. On the contrary, he'd be all "unclench your fist" and "we can talk about it" and "we deserved it," even while the country was burning. (Yes, Bush kept reading that children's book, too, on Sept. 11; you can bet his handlers weren't too happy about having to spin that.)

Meanwhile, the "chillbilly" Sarah Palin rejects a big chunk of Obama's "found money." Go figure, huh?

P.S. I was grabbing a late lunch in a pub near the U of Toronto this afternoon. While the Chinese-Irish barmaid was trying to get me to sign a Greenpeace-produced mailer opposing nuclear power, she got into a discussion with the only other patron in the place, about how there wasn't enough ethnic food available from carts on street-corners in Toronto—it's just sausages and hot dogs. And with Gord as my witness, I swear that in touting the many enclaves down Spadina, on the Western border of the campus, that annoying (patron) loud-mouth actually said:

"Our diversity is our strength."

He went on to relate about how a relative of his who was living in a small, "99% white" town (actually 95% white, good for them) in British Columbia, was positively amazed at the diversity when he came to visit Toronto.

As if that multicultural diversity was a good thing, rather than an inherent source of conflict!

He wasn't done yet, though: next up was how it annoyed him when "hockey players" (i.e., young, two-digit-IQ white Canadian males) dissed basketball players (i.e., thyroid-case niggardly sniggers) by saying that they didn't need to be athletic, they just needed to be tall. Course, he had to admit that he "thankfully" hadn't encountered that attitude recently. But still, even once is too much, isn't it? esp. for a university-affiliated dumbfuck cracker like that Ayers wanna-be. (This wasn't the first time I ran into him at this bar; he was just as annoying—and much more drunk—the first time, several months ago.)

What kind of city is this, where you can't even grab a beer on the Lord's Day (I say that as a borderline atheist, whose only remaining realistic spiritual hope is that the universe may have some point to its existence, in answer to the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?") without having to deal with stuff like that, from the mouths of liberal morons?

By the time they realize what they've given away in the name of "diversity," it will be far too late to do anything about it. So rest in peace, Western/Enlightenment civilization—the best thing which our sad species has ever produced, which is worth far more than any "naked apes," whether as individuals or groups ... which is precisely why we quite rightly kill to defend our way of life in declared "wars."

If a black person laughs in a covert or suppressed manner, is it okay to remark that they've just sniggered? Or is that a racist word, which they might take offense at, given how much their race has suffered?

How about "sticky knickers," said where an African-American can hear it, but where you don't enunciate the second word clearly?

Inquiring minds want to know. How else can we avoid giving offense?

Until then: "Peace out, my sniggers!"

Niggardly sniggers, that is.

P.S. Good to see that there appears to be a temporary moratorium on our human-rights kangaroo courts actually sentencing people (though they're still prosecuting):

[The] Tribunal has concluded that, pending the outcome of Marc Lemire's constitutional challenge, the [Section 13(1) ] law is unenforceable.

Sad to say, it's become illegal to be funny in England, too ... at least if your targets (ooh, there must be a better word for that) are of the goat-fucking persuasion:

Mike Reid could face prosecution over anti-Muslim jokes he reportedly cracked on stage

Police are investigating complaints that the comic and ex-EastEnders star broke new religious hatred laws drafted after September 11....

The complaint comes from 23-year-old politics graduate Helen Kirrane, from Greater Manchester, who saw Reid in Chatham, Kent.

She said he made jokes about Muslims being told to bungee jump without elastic, and working as strippers.

She said: "It was like listening to the ranting of a racist dinosaur. Anti-Muslim jokes are disgusting, as are all racist jokes. [Note to Ms. Kirrane: "Muslim" is not a race. The stupid bint pays to hear material which she could have easily avoided by simply not attending the performance, and then registers a "hate crime" complaint 'cause she doesn't like what she paid to hear. "Too fucking stupid to live" is putting it mildly.]

"The police said it was something they would take seriously."

When the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act was passed in 2001, comedians claimed it would restrict freedom of expression.

At the time, Rowan Atkinson said: "I am aghast at the notion that it could, in effect, be made illegal to imply ridicule of a religion or to lampoon religious figures."

Pardon me while I snigger. "No jokes, please, we're British."

(Oh-oh, I just realized that "snigger" could be taken as a contraction of "shit-colored nigger." Wouldn't want that to happen ... heh.)

Yes, the Community Reinvestment Act Really Did Help Cause the Housing Crisis.

If I lived in Boston, I know where I'd be banking: East Bridgewater Savings.

P.S. If you have a strong stomach: 13 Beautiful Muslim Women. "Savages" isn't nearly a strong enough word for the sub-human animals who have disfigured those women.

P.P.S. This is how you deal with whining, perpetually offended, "entitled" minorities:

boy: "You know what? Give me back that fucking bone. And then go fetch me my slippers. Unless you want to lose your big house privileges."

dog: "Yes, boss. Slippers comin' right up now, boss."

How did we get to that point, where even classical liberals are beginning to realize that no matter what they do, and no matter how much they watch their language, they can't win—in which case, a smart person simply stops trying at all? Something like this (from the comments in the same above thread):

Dramatis Personae: Boy, Black man, Dog
Time: 1656

Boy (to dog): "Here boy."

Dog [runs] to boy.

Black man: {Blinks, looking on.} [Doesn't have the hang of English yet, having just arrived the day before]

Time: 1797

Boy (to dog): "Here boy."

Dog [runs] to boy.

Black man: Good looking dog you've got there, quite obedient.

Time: 1851

Boy (to dog): "Here boy."

Dog [runs] to boy.

Black man: {Mumbles to self.} Man, I'm shore glad he didn't want nothing from me. I'm busy enough as it is.

Time: 1888

Boy (to dog): "Here boy."

Dog [runs] to boy.

Black man: {Flinches visibly. Mumbles to self.} Oooh fuck, here we go. I can see it coming now……..nasty little cracker.

Time: 1925

Boy (to dog): "Here boy."

Dog [runs] to boy.

Black man: (whisper under his breath) One of these days I'm gonna smack that kid upside his greasy head.

Time: 1954

Boy (to dog): "Here boy."

Dog [runs] to boy.

Black man: Hey! You talking to me kid?

Time: 1973

Boy (to dog): "Here boy."

Dog [runs] to boy.

Black man: {Dashes to boy, fwaps him right in the noggin} Watch your mouth you little punk!

Time: 1998

Boy (to dog): "Here boy."

Dog [runs] to boy.

Black man: {Muses to self} Huh. That word used to be used to denigrate people like me, or so Daddy said. I wonder what that must have been like? Pretty shitty I'll bet.

Time: 2009

Boy (to dog): "Here boy."

Dog [runs] to boy.

Black man: {Blinks. Looking on} [Doesn't have the hang of English yet, having just arrived the day before]

First they came for "niggardly"
And I did nothing
because I didn't say niggardly much.
Then they came for "boy"
and I was all like
Are you fucking kidding me?
Bitch.

You see, my niggers? That's how it's done.

Since I finally got the CIP data for NE last week (apparently the gov't had misplaced the request for an extra week or two), I've been doing the semi-final proofread of that book. So, it will indeed be in (hardcover) print by early/mid April.

Taking a break from that, I saw that Jeff Goldstein has another great post up, about intentionalism in the meaning of language:

This way lies fascism: an OUTLAW's lament (cont.).

And in the comments, someone mentioned a "Whitey will pay" t-shirt.

Brilliant. I've just ordered one. 'Cause if the imported blacks in this city won't let me walk down the street without (unprovokededly) crapping on (skinny, white) me just for the color of my skin, the least I can do is give the little low-IQ, savage, racist shit-sticks a reason, eh?

01000001010000010100000101000001
01000001010000010100000101000001

What does that mean?

It could mean:

The ASCII text string "AAAAAAAA".

It could mean:

The integer 4702111234474983745.

It could mean:

The 4702111234474983745th word in a (very large) dictionary.

It could mean:

The current pattern set on an array of 80 on-off switches.

It could mean:

Some random number in IEEE floating point format.

It could mean:

One specific element of a set of cardinality ~1.20892582 × 10^24. 80 bits lets us distinguish between ~1.20892582 × 10^24 different things, so we can encode many things in 80 bits.

So, which does one it really mean? Any. All. As it stands, it is a pure symbol (a "mark" in Jeff's terminology). If we (or our computer) receives this message, how are we to decide which of the (countably infinite) different encodings is correct? The only honest choice is the encoding that the sender imposed when it generated the message.

If the sender is transmitting ASCII text, and we're "interpreting" the message to be floating point numbers, we are simply WRONG. There's nothing for it. We're just wrong. The message doesn't suddenly become a floating point number just because we say it is, or because we think (or claim to think) that it is.

From a pragmatic perspective, it's a good idea for the sender (or the person writing to the documentation for the sender) to say "Hey, I'm going to be sending you ASCII text," but that has nothing to do with the actual meaning. The meaning doesn’t change, whether the receiver understands it or not. In the absence of such documentation, we may attempt various methods to discern the meaning (the crypto guys are really good at this), but they’re just that: attempts. If our proposed symbol->meaning map does not match the one used by the sender, we have FAILED.

The situation where the receiver claims that its (wildly divergent) "interpretation"; of the message is "just as valid" as the one imposed by the sender is even more FULL OF FAIL. As Jeff has pointed out repeatedly, there is no communication whatsoever in such a case. The receiver might as well be generating the bits by throwing dice, since any semantic content deriving from the sender has been discarded.

It's difficult to see how anyone could see that as anything other than dishonest.

The same applies to "boy," "spade," "niggardly," etc.

Of course, all of that will be lost on the average nigger....

[A] common, superficial dismissal of societies based upon liberty or freedom of choice and free markets has often been something like "That all sounds great, but it could only work if everyone acted like angels!" On the contrary, because angels don't exist in the real world we cannot cede the clarity of our intent and speech to the uncertain motives of others listening, just as we cannot let the uncertain intent and motives of central planners usurp our freedom of economic activity. The fact that men are not angels is one very compelling reason to deny them the powers of a central planner, among dozens of others. This begins to remind me of the sort of argument that is the "unconstrained vision" Thomas Sowell describes. The argument that "We only have to find the perfectly precise, exquisitely chosen words, taking into account all possible perceptions of our audience" sounds perilously close to the unconstrained vision of the collectivist, of the utopian. You've heard it, it goes like this: "If we can only perfect our gathering of information, coordinate and monitor and control more and more of people's lives and decisions, we can successfully plan and build a truly just and prosperous society. We merely have to control, survey and direct in greater detail."

[T]he ancient Greeks, whom we see today as proud and brilliant, were considered by the Romans to be glib, deceitful, childlike, and untrustworthy. As the historian Orlando Patterson has pointed out, the Romans knew the Greeks as slaves. And masters have been consistent in the way they have described slaves throughout the world....

The ancient Greeks called [their fellow] slaves andrapoda, the "human-footed stock."

And hurt like that just doesn't go away, even after thousands of years.

So you can see why any tolerant person wouldn't use the "a-word" around anyone of Grecian ancestry.

Indeed, just as you can literally be tried for Section 13(1) "hate crimes" in Canada today for using the n-word—which is all the more reason to use it, in pushing back against that Orwellian suppression of free speech and thought—we should all look forward to the day when the "a-word" (or worse, whatever word the Romans used to refer to their Greek slaves—griggers?) is seen quite validly as being equal grounds for one to be summarily viewed as racist and guilty of hatethought toward the Greeks whose distant, forgotten ancestors were treated so inhumanely, by people just as white as they were/are.

More realistically, the next time anyone tries to tell you that there's no word that could be directed toward whites that has the same effect as the n-word when it's directed toward ... well, niggers ... if you've got even one drop of Greek blood in you ("one-drop rule," sauce for the black, sauce for the Greek), you know how to reply to those "innocent victims." Noble, innocent victims, that is, whose ancestors were just "minding their own business" in Africa (i.e., cannibalizing and crucifying each other with wild, savage abandon) when Evil Whitey so rudely snatched them from their edenic homeland ... before, you know, some black Muslim slave-trader could get to them. Heh.

Note also: It was a very small percentage of Africans who were taken from their worthless, Dark-as-Shit Continent to be slaves in America. Should any black who's just immigrated to the West recently have any right to claim "ancestral offense" from that? If so, why shouldn't all whites, rather than just Greeks, have a right to feel offended by the a-word? Or even better, why shouldn't all whites have a right to feel persecuted today, from white slavery in the past? (Don't try and tell me that whitey having power more recently makes the past any less painful. It doesn't. Or does having Barack Obama as the Prez-a-da-U-S make the pain, humiliation and dehumanization of past slavery in America go away for blacks? Will any amount of power ever make up for what was done to their distant, long-forgotten ancestors? Didn't think so.)

Consider:

• Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500-1800

• They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America

• White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives

So I await my well-deserved $$$ reparations, niggaz.

(Don't forget that much of the ... erm, "racier" stuff I post here, could literally get me tried in front of a human-rights kangaroo court in Canada, and actually get me thrown in jail if I refused to apologize and cough up a big chunk of financial compensation to the offended groups, after already being bled dry by lawyers' fees. If you wonder why it especially annoys the hell out of me when anonymous cowards—worthless twats/twains who don't even have the minimal courage to criticize me under their own names—whine about my "consistent" use of the [gasp!] n-word, and about how I'm not "tolerant" enough of people who deserve to be deliberately offended rather than tolerated ... fuck, don't even get me started. Eric Holder was right about one thing: We are indeed "nation[s] of cowards," but that's true in just about exactly the opposite sense from what he was intending. That is, it's not for us not indulging in endless, manipulative "dialogues about race," but rather for allowing ourselves to be cowed into silence by the very same people who want to use that dialog just to carve out more perks for themselves, and more apologies and undeserved reparations from whitey.)

When I was just a kid, my parents had comprehensive (literal) lists of names that we weren't allowed to call each other, even well before the use of f-words, b-words, and c-words. That supposed adults in the civilized world resort to the same infantile "running to mommy" when they come across words they feel hurt by even when those words aren't directed toward them personally, tells you all that you need to know about the emotional maturity of the average "persecuted minority" member. They are truly children masquerading as adults, from Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Gloria Steinem on down.

So: Fuck!! Bitch!! Cunt!! Nigger!! Grigger!! Andrapoda!!!

There, I said it.

From the iSteve comments:

[Read Joseph] Needham, just don't believe him. Needham was an ardent Communist and an impassioned anti-American. He was a life long collaborator with the Chinese communists. He promoted a story that the US used biological weapons in the Korean War. His friends and colleagues said the communists duped him. His enemies just said he was a traitor.

Needham's scholarship is very untrustworthy. Much of the evidence for technological primacy between East and West is ambiguous. In virtually every case Needham concludes that knowledge traveled from East to West.

The clearest example of this sort of giving credit to China for Western inventions is the invention of gunpowder. Today the man on the street and all writers of TV history shows "know" that gunpowder was invented in China.

You also read that China had the crossbow a millenium before the West—more nonsense or rather more purposeful propaganda.

Read any text on military history. Look up The Gunpowder Revolution. You will find that it began in the fifteenth century in Europe. In the sixteenth century gunpowder transformed military architecture and military tactics. Gunpowder swept from West to East—not the other way around. China still hadn't accepted gunwder weapons when McCartney visited the Manchu emperor in the late eighteenth century. In the subsequent Opium Wars the Chinese fought Western cannon and muskets with their crossbows.

The Chinese experimented with nitrates very early if only because India and China have more nitrate deposits than does Europe. But we conventionally regard the inventor as the last person to assemble all the elements (e.g. Edison) into something new. We do not call the first person who worked on one of the parts the inventor.

Nitrate compounds were used as incendiaries and rocket propellants for centuries but they were very minor contributors on the battlefield. Then in Europe around 1420 corning was invented. The new true gunpowder soon ended the 100 Years War, ended the Byzantine Empire, and knocked down every castle in Italy. European kingdoms made the manufacture of gunpowder a royal monopoly. All of this was European not Chinese.

As to crossbows, the Greeks used the gastraphetes long before anyone else. The Romans used a large mounted crossbow called a Ballista for centuries before the Chinese. You can see ballistas in the first scene of the movie Gladiator. Romans however used big crossbows as artillery. The Chinese used little crossbows as light arms.

It's disturbing that these clear and well known aspects of history are befouled by the purposeful lies of men like Needham.

All of which would be more convincing if it weren't for this:

The first reference of gunpowder is probably a passage in the Zhenyuan miaodao yaolüe, a Taoist text tentatively dated to the mid-800s:

Some have heated together realgar and saltpeter [potassium nitrate] with honey; smoke and flames result, so that their hands and faces have been burnt, and even the whole house where they were working burned down.

The Chinese wasted little time in applying gunpowder to warfare, and they produced a variety of gunpowder weapons, including flamethrowers, rockets, bombs, and mines, before inventing firearms. There was once a great deal of confusion and controversy surrounding the invention of firearms, but it is now generally accepted that firearms originated in China.

Although there is no solid evidence for firearms in Europe before the 1300s, archeologists have discovered a gun in Manchuria dating from the 1200s, and an historian has identified a sculpture in Sichuan dating fro the 1100s that appears to represent a figure with a firearm.

P.S. This is very disturbing: "Ham radio" internet.

A while ago, I wrote about a proposed idea to alter the way Canadians access the internet: instead of "connecting" to the "Great Wide Web" and navigating it freely, this "model" would more closely resemble the way Cable companies allow customers to access various TV channels....

Now, the UK is proposing EXACTLY the same scheme!!!

This would mean that unless a website or blog was "influential enough" to muscle its way onto the "approved" list for a particular "bundle" of websites "offered" by an ISP, it would be 100% invisible and unaccessible to the UK internet subscribers!....

Let's look at the laws proposed for New Zeland: at the end of March (miracle notwithstanding), ALL internet service providers will be legally forced to cease to provide any and all internet access to any IP address which has been ACCUSED of a copyright violation!

From More on Porn and Art:

[D]o you follow porn? I don't much either, but here's a little list of recent innovations and styles that even I'm aware of: gonzo, amateur, webcam, alt, user-generated.

I was reading that, and then it hit me, like Archimedes jumping out of the bathtub:

Tilt-Shift Porn.

I'm pretty sure it hasn't been done before; I may have just founded (conceptually) a whole new art movement. And if there isn't a market for real humans framed as miniatures (or vice versa) having sex, then I don't know what this world's coming to.

P.S. We Should not Help the Poor go to College. And this is interesting:

[I]t's irksome to hear the constant complaint from black activists that "it was against the law for them to read," etc. Many southern states did, indeed, pass such laws precisely because so many slave-owners taught their slaves, at least partly because it increased their practical value. I remember something written by an "abolitionist" Yankee to the effect that, when he'd spent time in the South, he frequently observed teachers hired to teach owners' kids teaching the black kids at the same time. He asked one such owner about this and was told that everybody did it, the law was just so they could arrest and prosecute any "outside troublemakers." Martha Washington taught school for slaves and white employees at Mt. Vernon.

Jefferson has been scuffed up a bit lately but his slaves had regular hours and, when "off," could come and go more or less as they pleased. Most actually chose to work for neighbor outfits for cash wages and were good customers at the local "general store," especially for imported crystal ware and Wedgewood china. Most also ran charge accounts and paid their bills monthly (from C-SPAN documentary about 15 years ago).

Also hardly ever mentioned is that the largest slaveowner in the country was a black man named Harris with about 15000 slaves, whom he leased out in gangs, especially for construction projects, for which he had every type of trade specialty needed.

Another story (similar source) I found interesting is that a young slave in Georgia designed a covered bridge which was an enormous improvement on existing bridges. His owner applied for a patent (in the slave's name) and, when it came through, freed him and spent about $30K to set him up in a fine home in the black professional neighborhood of Charleston, SC as a consulting engineer; then applied for $10K loan for him for working capital at a bank in Atlanta. They asked for his co-signature, which he refused, saying that, if they couldn't recognize a good loan when they saw one, another bank certainly would. The guy got the loan. Eventually, nearly every covered bridge in the country was built to that design (called the "Princess").

And more about monkeys:

Thai monkeys have been observed showing their young how to floss—proof primates teach offspring to use tools, a Japanese researcher said Wednesday.

"I was surprised because teaching techniques on using tools properly to a third party are said to be an activity carried out only by humans," Professor Nobuo Masataka of Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute told AFP.

And more about human monkeys:

Memory, self-control, planning, logic and mathematical ability are all linked to the quality of myelin sheath that protects nervews of white matter from damage, according to New Scientist magazine....

The research also found that inherited genes play a greater role in intelligence than was previously thought....

Identical twins share the same genes while fraternal twins share about half their genes. Comparing the results from each showed that myelin integrity was genetically determined in many parts of the brain important for intelligence.

They include the corpus callosum, which brings together signals from the left and right side of the body, and the parietal lobes responsible for visual and spatial reasoning and logic.

Myelin quality in these areas correlated with scores from tests of abstract reasoning and overall intelligence.

And more on the "tolerance" which I, for one, so dreadfully lack:

Karen Armstrong [has been taken] to task for promoting and defending an idea of "tolerance" that is, at its core, the opposite of tolerance: which is to say, by institutionalizing restrictions on speech that are determined either by the groups under critical examination (who have reason to want criticism muzzled) or by those who hold that "tolerance" is synonymous with "not giving offense" (who would reduce freedom of speech to a glorified speech code, with "freedom," in this new formulation, replaced by "approved," and with themselves and the identity groups they favor in charge of doing the approving)[.] Armstrong is effectively arguing for a "free speech" that is, by design, only "free" once the content has been socially sanctioned....

Turning "tolerance" into a demand that no offense be given is to turn tolerance into an intolerance of those things that give offense—even though free speech was designed exactly to protect those things that DO give offense.

David Thompson has a great post on related "victim" problems: Defined by Whining.

From the 2Blowhards five-part conversation with Gregory Cochran:

Cutting off a dog's tail will not result in tailless puppies in the next generation (or the next, or the next): Lamarck thought so, but he was wrong. But if you cut off dog tails for a very long time, eventually a mutation might arise that creates a Manx dog—and that dog might do better in life, if only because it would be spared dangerous trauma. Then the no-tail mutation would gradually become common and might eventually become universal in that breed of dogs.

We're saying that when people are subject to a new and different environment, gene variants that cause their bearers to have higher fitness (be better at surviving and having children) will gradually become more common. Given enough time (thousands of years, sometimes less than that) change can be substantial....

[The development of agriculture was such a major event where human evolution was concerned because it] increased human density by tens of times, which made a big difference in disease risks. It radically changed diet, and it dramatically furthered hierarchy and social complexity....

Peoples with short histories of agriculture have trouble with alcoholism, diabetes, and generally have a lot of trouble fitting into complex hierarchical societies....

Another important factor driving differences must be whether the population ever got big: Polynesians farm, but their populations have been always been small and isolated from each other—that would make it harder for new favorable mutations to show up and to spread....

The development of strong states probably limited local violence [i.e., selected culturally against aggression] and thus upped the [evolutionary] selective importance of food shortages and infectious diseases. In the past, good government, absent of rapid technological change, led to lower living standards....

We know quite a bit about measureable differences involving disease between existing human populations: susceptibility to infections, diabetes and alcoholism: there is reason to think that these originated recently. In a number of cases, we know that risk alleles are ancestral alleles, the version of the gene everyone once had (and some still do).

Populations vary in color-blindness, in the fraction of working olfactory genes, in visual acuity, in susceptibility to myopia. They vary in brain size by more than a standard deviation (from smallest to largest). And of course IQ scores vary by more than that....

Cranial capacity has shrunk 10% in 15,000 years: that's the fastest rate of change ever seen in the human fossil record, by far.

Consider the number of genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees: they occurred over about six million years, from which you can determine the average rate or change. The number of genes that are apparently being replaced by new versions is much larger than you would expect from that long-term rate—something like 100 times larger....

Known changes are not limited to appearance. Going from the genes up, we know of many changes involving metabolism and digestion, immune defenses, DNA repair, sense of hearing and smell, brain, etc....

Color blindness is far more common among long-civilized peoples than among hunters (~8% in European males, ~1% in Pygmies) and I guess we can imagine what that does [in hunter-gatherer societies, where it can be the difference between life and death, in seeing predators in the brush, and distinguishing between edible and poisonous plants, etc.]. We don't have much detailed, down-to-the-gene understanding, but we know plenty of differences whose genetic causes are not yet understood. We know that American Indians are on average laconic: I'd guess that is an innate tendency, but I don't know yet. Nisbett has talked about different cognitive styles between East and West, although he insists that they can't be biological. Of course they could be, and they may be....

Theory predicts something like [that current human evolution may be proceeding as much as 100 times as fast as it once did], just from the degree of population expansion (roughly 100-fold) and the newness of the environmental challenges. And we get a similar estimate from comparing recent estimates of selection with the long-term rate determined from the differences between humans and chimpanzees....

If we're right about big populations under agriculture changing rapidly, hunter-gatherers must have changed less. It would seem that Chinese probably changed a good deal faster than Australian Aborigines....

I can't think of any genuine reasons for thinking that human evolution had stopped. Some people seem to have thought that 40,000 years was small potatoes compared to the time since the chimp-human split (five or six million years), so that there wouldn't have been much change over that time period. Of course this ignores the massive ecological changes that humans experienced over the last 40 millennia, and the resulting selective pressures.

Others seem to have thought that newly clever humans instantly came up with a technological fix for any problem that arose, which would have removed the selective pressure associated with the problem. Face it, we're not that smart. People suffered from malaria for thousands of years before figuring out that it was transmitted by mosquitoes (in 1897, by Ronald Ross)—and we haven't knocked it out yet.

And often when we did solve problems, they didn't stay solved. For example, whenever we came up with better methods of food production, population increased until people were hungry again. At that point you see selection for metabolic efficiency, for the ability to digest newly available foods such as milk, etc.

Environmental change leaves a species poorly fitted to the new environment and opens up opportunities for genetic improvement (a situation we call selective pressure). So, fast change causes rapid evolution. And that is what humanity has experienced over the past 50k years: we left Africa, colonized new lands, watched the glaciers come and go, while inventing radically new ways of life like farming. A storm of change, triggered by an increased ability to innovate....

Different ethnic and racial groups vary in many ways, and we know that those differences arose fairly rapidly, since humans only left Africa ~50,000 years ago. The only plausible explanation is recent evolution.

Increasingly we have strong evidence that particular genes have recently been completely or partly replaced by new variants: we know, for example, that most people in north Europe today have a mutation that allows them to drink milk as adults, and we know that this mutation was very rare or nonexistent in the inhabitants of those same lands 7 or 8 thousand years ago. And we know that similar mutations have appeared (more recently) in other milk-drinking, cattle-raising populations such as the Tutsi....

It may well mean that some of what we call progress was made possible by biological changes over historical time, as Greg Clark suggests. Recent evolution must have taken different courses in different populations: we're going to have to take that into account too. Group differences in outcomes won't all be environmental: it's hard to see how environment explains why the grandchildren of immigrant Chinese tin miners run all the industries in Malaysia.

There are only two large groups that average 100 or higher on IQ tests, Europeans and East Asians. No hunter-gatherer group scores that high. This suggests that IQ might have been lower when everyone was a hunter-gatherer....

We have nonverbal IQ tests, and hunter-gatherers generally do poorly on them. When integrated into a larger society, they do poorly in school. I've often heard that they're probably smarter than us when it comes to their own life challenges—but being a born tracker doesn't seem to translate into a well-paid modern job. The problem is that machine civilization has won, and you have to be good at that, not something else.

Average genetic IQ potential is probably dropping: something in the range of 0.5 -1.0 pts per generation [i.e., 2.5 to 5 points per century]. The driver is mostly low fertility among women with lots of education....

I don't recall, off the top of my head, exactly how many square miles are required to support one hunter-gatherer, but it's enough that the only way you can sustain five-figure populations in cities is through agriculture ... which then leads to the development of writing, to keep track of grain quantities and trade which are too much to simply remember, etc.

If you wonder (contra the data-bending, anti-white racist Jared Diamond) just how little intelligence is required to survive as a hunter-gatherer (in the absence of wars with neighboring tribes), consider this:

No fewer than 22 times, researchers documented wild chimpanzees on an African savanna fashioning sticks into "spears" to hunt small primates... In each case a chimpanzee modified a branch by breaking off one or two ends and, frequently, using its teeth to sharpen the stick. The ape then jabbed the spear into hollows in tree trunks where bush babies sleep ... Anthropologist and study co-author Paco Bertolani witnessed ... a chimpanzee successfully extract a bush baby with a spear.

P.S. Regarding the selection-effects of harsh weather: Several years ago, there was a report in the news about a guy from southern California who had met a woman from Winnipeg (I think) online, and had gotten it into his head to meet the lady. So he bought a bus ticket—it was all he could afford—and traveled up to North Dakota. In the middle of winter.

He wasn't sure about whether he'd be allowed to cross the border into Canada legally, so he decided to surreptitiously walk across, through a wooded area. In his light, California clothes and sneakers.

In any previous century, he would have died in the snow. As it stands, the border patrol found him, and rushed him to the nearest hospital, where they had to amputate his feet from the frostbite.

So if you really think that harsh weather doesn't select for intelligence at all, try telling that to the moron who thought his illegal border-crossing there was a good idea—though he'd surely be too stupid to understand. Equally, thanks to the work of a lot of Very Smart People in saving him from his own idiocy (i.e., preventing him from suitably removing himself from the gene pool), he's still around to reproduce ... though presumably with a different girl. Heh. (By the end of the news item, he still hadn't met her.)

Related: High IQ Linked To Reduced Risk Of Death.

P.P.S. One other thing: Early agrarian societies universally used a "planting stick" in sowing their crops—just a long, straight branch, used to scratch a furrow into the ground for the seed, and then cover it back up with earth.

Any teenage boy would recognize the phallic nature of such a stick, particularly when it was coupled with a literal impregnation-of-the-earth process. But that stick is also the same general shape as the shaman's pole, providing a natural vehicle to bring forward the shamanistic (hunter-gatherer) mythologies into a later, agrarian religion. (There's a common motif in shamanistic ritual, of climbing a pole to reach the Center of the Universe—a sympathetic-magical mimicking of the path of souls along the "path" of the Milky Way to reach the magically stationary North Star.)

What's the first lesson that agrarian societies learn? They learn that, if they eat all their seed stock over the winter, they'll have nothing to plant next year. (Comparably, attempts to convert contemporary hunter-gatherers into nomadic herders frequently fail when the "herders," having no experience with delayed gratification, eat all their goats before they've had a chance to reproduce at replacement level.) Even if they're literally starving during the winter, they have to leave some food/seed for planting next spring.

That's a situation which teaches a lot of self-denial in the present, for a future reward. But it's also a situation where what is being denied (the seed/food) has not only a phallic/sexual association (by the shape of the planting stick) but religious associations also (per the shaman's pole, and its path to the heavens where dwell the ancestors' souls, etc.).

So how would you expect that to translate into early-agrarian religion, e.g., the second-millennium B.C. fertility myths that form the origins of Christianity? Is not conserving seed over the winters, to grow it in the following summer via the use of the planting stick, intriguingly similar in structure (and so establishing a "causal" connection in sympathetic-magical thinking) to conserving the male seed, in celibacy, for a future "spiritual harvest"?

Consider: Kundalini yoga "works" by raising that energy from the base of the spine, up the cerebrospinal "pole," to the bindu/point in the center of the brain—the human head being the "center of the world" (thus sympathetic-magically connected with the North/Pole Star as the comparable center of the heavens) through which we experience its sights, sounds, smells, and tastes. Kriya yoga actually explicitly involves a visualization of one's subtle energies alternately ascending and then descending the astral spine.

The mental climbing and descending of that spinal pole is a clear internalization of earlier shamanic ritual activities, into the "internal ritual" called meditation. And along with all of the other associations of ecstatic kundalini-raising as being "internalized sex with the Goddess," it's hardly surprising to find it emphasizing a conservation of the seed at the base of the "planting stick" of the spine.

That ecstasy, by the way, really probably does come down to just a self-stimulation of one's pleasure centers and other regions of the brain, in a way every bit as physical as when Robert Heath's injection of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine into a woman's (septal region) brain caused her to experience multiple orgasms.

Note: Don't try that at home.

The fact that the ape stayed calm while preparing his weapons but used them when he was extremely agitated proves that the planning behavior was not based on an immediate emotional drive, Osvath said. (more)

Related: They're Gaining On Us (2).

P.S. The Rye or the Kaiser. And the Breakfast Song. Man, where's the nearest "prayer breakfast," I'm hungry now....

In other news, I was reading the "Just A Girl..." blog this morning, and saw her alarmist and outright misrepresentative posting on Stem Cell Research in the Collectivist State.

Her false presentation and arguments are totally shredded in the comments section, of course. But it just goes to show you how religion skews your perception of reality. Because the only reason she thinks her position and simplistic arguments are "logical" is because she believes in an imaginary thing called a soul, which must get connected to its body at the moment of conception.

She is, after all, a Catholic, with all of the foolishness which that entails.

In other, other news, there's this:

Lacking a program manager, your garden-variety super-smart programmer is going to come up with a completely baffling user interface that makes perfect sense IF YOU'RE A VULCAN (cf. git). The best programmers are notoriously brilliant, and have some trouble imagining what it must be like not to be able to memorize 16 one-letter command line arguments.

One of the best things a program manager can add to the software design process is a second opinion as to how things should be designed, hopefully one that is more empathetic to those RETARDED USERS with their pesky mental feebleness requiring that an application be usable without reading the man page, writing a custom emacs-lisp function, or translating numbers into octal in your head.

That's why I can't stand most open-source software: Being written "by geeks for geeks" with no aesthetic sense, it's almost always both ugly and unusable. (I'm a rather rare creature: A best-in-cohort software developer who also does very good interface design.)

I suppose that by the time genetic engineering gets really going, and all the new children have super-genius IQs, our interfaces with the silicon world won't even resemble what we use today. Heck, there's already stuff around that can move objects onscreen by "reading your thoughts." But if by any chance those interface changes don't happen ... what makes you think the technology they're building half a century from now would be usable by anyone of a below-genius IQ?

Stuff today gets built to be usable by non-geeks because there's a strong consumer demand for that. But what happens when the non-geniuses in the world have no earning power, no money, and nothing to contribute to a super-genius world? Why would any business cater to them?

And, in news of the Other:

Patterico, in response to the linguistic aspect of my arguments, has offered his own idea about how interpretation should work, namely, that "words should be interpreted the way a reasonable person would interpret them." But what Patterico doesn't seem to understand is that a "reasonable" person might "reasonably" interpret, for instance, Curious George in a "reasonable" way, arriving at the conclusion that what we have is a post-colonial text: the man in the big yellow hat captures the native, brings him home and hopes to civilize him, at which point the reluctant captive's essential Otherness rubs against the conventions of the culture into which he was forcibly assimilated. And mayhem ensues.

Or perhaps the story is homoerotic, with the cute, furry monkey spending time in the pajamas of the man in the big yellow (conical) hat, who by all appearances is a bachelor and someone who likes to spend a lot of time in a long overcoat.

Reasonable, certainly. And in fact, this is what literary critics do all the time.

Which is one good reason to pay no attention whatsoever to "literary critics."

But what we need to do is ask ourselves, if what we are claiming to do is "interpret," what is it that we think the author(s) were trying to say? What did they mean?

And it is at that point most of us recognize that what they meant to do was write a children's story about the exploits of a curious monkey....

That we are having this debate about how to proceed as a movement is a step in the right direction, I think—and it is a debate I don't think we'd be having were it not for Rush [Limbaugh]'s choice of language. And so arguments that more clarity and less provocation are the proper way for conservatives to communicate in the current media culture must be tempered by the realization that sometimes the best defense is a good offense....

So, you see, there is a point to the use of deliberately provocative, or even offensive, language.

Ah, but you already knew that, didn't you?

It's just a pity Limbaugh couldn't have worked in an n-word or two, in honor of President Tuvok. Sorry, wait—it was Spock who was half-Vulcan, wasn't it?

P.S. Steve Sailer and Jeff Goldstein in dialog, from some years ago: How the right hijacked the magic words...?, The Race Race, and Race Race, Redux.

All of the problems that plague racial categories can be found in one form or another in the classification of virtually any object. I find the Halle Barry self-identification argument [another half-black person identifying as black, for the social benefits] particularly unpersuasive in this context. There is chocolate ice cream, vanilla ice cream, and chocolate/vanilla (mixed) ice cream. The existence of a combination does not render the pre-combined entities meaningless.

This is again from the insightful comments section on Sailer's blog:

This is my own personal way of distinguishing leftists from liberals:

Leftists know history, and they want to annihilate Western civilization and culture, and they see liberals are naive hippies that they can use to make their alliance seem less dangerous.

Liberals are naive hippies that don't want to destroy anything. They want freedom [i.e., "live and let live"]. Mostly, they seek freedom from having to read history. (Occasionally they will read Zinn's Peaple's Digest on the way to the outdoor naked showers at the Burning Dope Art Festival, but that hardly counts.) Another [thing] liberals love is coolness, and coolness means resisting authority. While the liberals resist authority by singing songs and wearing ugly sandals, leftists resist it much more vehemently and are thus cooler.

Thus, the liberals look up to the leftists, and believe everything they say. If the liberals remember their commitment to freedom at an inconvenient moment, the leftists can always disappear them.

From Why Do Brothers and Sisters Make You Stupid?

[T]he IQ difference between being an only child and being one of six is about 7 points[,] and having 13 siblings 15 points. The most obvious reason for this is the Idiocracy effect—duller people [i.e., blacks, wetbacks, and rednecks] have more children.

Coming from a traditional farming background, both sides of my family are actually fairly large, with well over half a dozen blood-related uncles/aunts on each. But that was for needing to have large numbers of children for helping out with the farm three-quarters of a century ago, not for just cashing in on today's welfare perks.

Yes, one of my grandfathers wound up living in a trailer park; but that doesn't make us "trailer trash," goddammit!

The thing is, the dysgenic "idiocracy effect" would be happening (at a slower rate) even if it hadn't been for Ted Kennedy greatly increasing unskilled immigration to the USA back in the '60s, or Trudeau (and later Mulroney) doing the same to Canada in the '80s. It would be happening even if Lincoln had managed to send the slaves back to the pre-rational, violent, shithole countries/cultures they came from, and even if America had the sense to build an impenetrable fence across the border with Mexico now. That is, civilization would be sinking even if it was just from white trailer trash outreproducing smart whites and Jews—whose women (in general), for one, understandably don't want to give up their careers to raise large families, while stupid women with low earning power and no potential to ever matter in the world anyway are encouraged by the welfare state to reproduce their genes with abandon.

Even if it wasn't for the welfare state, though, that freedom for smart women to pursue challenging careers (i.e., the secularization of society and converse decline of the "Christian values" which kept them chained in either the kitchen or the attic) was going to mean they'd be having less children than they otherwise would. "Money for getting pregnant" makes the descent happen faster, esp. among people who never had the potential to achieve high standards of living in the first place and are thus "satisfied" to just survive in relative poverty; but it was going to happen anyway, as soon as women were given the choice about what to do with their lives and bodies.

(For the record, I'm a big fan of those choices; it's just that there are predictable-in-hindsight consequences to them. [Those negative effects could largely be ameliorated by allowing only skilled immigration, and harshly restructuring welfare. But since "the babies won't give up their gubmint lollipops," the latter will never happen: when you start down that "compassionate" road, you're stuck with it.] The funny thing about religion is that, while it has absolutely no [ontological] value in itself, it can encode principles which have strong cultural survival value, and provide a "damn[ation] good reason" for people to follow them ... especially when those [e.g., Catholic or Muslim] principles turn women into baby-producing machines. A Christian guy was actually lamenting to me recently about how Jews got rich in the first place by being able to lend money with interest, while Christians, in dutifully following "God's law" [har!], were forbidden from doing that. And all I could think to myself was: Well, good on the Jews, then, for having chosen a set of fairy tales that have greater cultural survival value, without causing the oppression of any other race or sex!)

Plus, back a century or more ago, when the Native Americans in Ontario had a 25% death rate over the winters, there were real selection pressures for at least the minimal intelligence required to plan ahead for that. But by now, the Western world has become so user-friendly and un-Social-Darwinian, with basic survival so easy, and so many safeguards built into its technologies by smart people to prevent stupid people from Darwin-awarding themselves out of the gene pool, that there's very little selection against pure stupidity in the civilized world anymore.

Coming from a farming background, I've endured family gatherings which degenerated into horror-story telling (not at Halloween, either), about neighbors who got their arms torn off from reaching into balers to clear them out, without first making sure that the PTO drive was disengaged, etc. All of my relatives still have all their limbs ... well, except for an uncle (who's now a Conservative politician) who lost part of a finger after getting it caught in an augar. But even at that, my other grandfather once got his overalls caught in a combine chain, to the point of requiring surgery to stitch the affected parts (you don't wanna know) back together. Another friend of the family—a teacher who was seriously into computers, not even a farmer—got killed when he was mowing a steep ditch on his rural property with one of those six-foot-wide PTO mowers, and the tractor overturned on top of him. Another uncle was using a similar mower, and the bolt attaching the blade came loose, sending that spinning Blade of Death shooting out the side. Didn't hit anyone, but sure scared the hell out of me whenever I'd see them starting that machine up in the weeks after hearing about that.

Heck, even back when automobiles were new, you could at least break a hand from cranking the engine if it backfired; and at the very least, that wasn't gonna help yer chances at gettin' inside Emmy-Lou's gingham dress, especially if old Doc Watson (the local dentist, not a real doctor) didn't set it right.

Speaking of Halloween stories, though: Decades before I was born, a local girl had been riding with her family in a horse-drawn carriage. They took a corner too fast (or something), she fell off ... and one of the big steel wheels of the carriage rolled right over her neck, killing her instantly.

Where was she buried? At the south end of our garden, in an unmarked grave. Seriously.

Anyway, much as eugenics has a sordid history, some form of it is the only way to prevent even the civilized world from degenerating into nations of idiots over the next few centuries. That's even aside from the risk of the goat-fucking, not-afraid-to-use-violence Muslims here turning us into subservient nations of dhimmis over the same period.

P.S. Very funny piece by Mark Steyn, on The Great Destabilization. Seems President Oreo was also too tired from all the "Work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work" (audio) to diplomatically mind his manners. Guess he was used to the forty-hour weeks, with scheduled breaks, in his old slackass jobs....

In happier news: Wilders' Freedom Party leads polls.

P.P.S. Blazing Saddles has seventeen instances of the word "nigger." God bless Mel Brooks ... and Richard Pryor, who co-wrote the script. And the refined French:

Le Pétomane ... was the stage name of the French professional farter and entertainer Joseph Pujol (June 1, 1857 - 1945).

He was famous for his remarkable control of the abdominal muscles, which enabled him to fart at will....

Some of the highlights of his stage act involved sound effects of cannon fire and thunderstorms, as well as playing 'O Sole Mio and La Marseillaise on an ocarina through a rubber tube in his anus. He could also blow out a candle from several yards away. His audience included Edward, Prince of Wales, King Leopold II of the Belgians and Sigmund Freud....

In the following decade Pujol tried to "refine" and make his acts "gentler"; one of his favourite numbers became a rhyme about a farm which he himself composed, and which he punctuated with the usual anal renditions of the animals' sounds. The climax of his act however involved him farting his impression of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

With the outbreak of World War I, Pujol, horrified by the inhumanity of the conflict, retired from the stage and returned to his bakery in Marseille. Later he opened a biscuit factory in Toulon.

More interesting comments on iSteve:

My girlfriend and I were eating dinner at a table in the bar area of a restaurant. Two black men were sitting at the bar watching the [stereotype alert!] basketball game and having an amiable conversation with the white bartender. A black waiter, who apparently knew the black patrons, came over and said hello to them. One of the patrons used the "n-word" in his greeting in response. The waiter, sotto voce, said something like, "what are you doing calling me that with white people around?" And one of the black patrons said, "What's the difference? They're calling you that when you're not around anyway."

My girlfriend and I were a little shocked by this bit of persecution complex. We don't use the "n-word" to describe black people when they're not around. I said to her, "What would it take for black guys like that to not think that every white person is a closet racist? Electing a black man President wasn't enough?"

Yes, I realize that my own frequent and deliberate use of the (gasp! verboten! thought-crime alert!!) N-word could be used to justify that (overwhelmingly unjustified) persecution complex, on the part of a group of people who are, on average, psychological adolescents, i.e., boys, not men. I'll stop when those shit-colored, low-IQ, cowardly, racist savages let me walk down the street without harassing me just for the color of my skin. Deal, niggers?

(I hereby denounce myself as being an Awful Racist and furthermore an Intolerant Person. You can quote me on that too, if you want.)

If black people had spent 1% of the time and effort the white people have spent trying to end racism within their own ranks this country would look like utopia.

I'm shocked frequently about the depth and ease with which the few black people I see in a day express open racism toward white people. [Geoff's note: "Turnabout is fair play."] I won't even get into the anti-American sentiments. The ethnic studies industry makes sure no good deed of America can be mentioned except that one of their students is ever ready to tamp down the patriotism with some incident....

Some fringe white man can say some racist comment and that proves America is beyond redemption. However, Africans can take turns trying to destroy whole swaths of that continent and that just signifies Africans need more aid or the impure thoughts of the nearest white guy caused the trouble in the first place.

Nobody is challenging black people to end racism, it's open and common, from what I know. There's hardly even a recognition there is any racism among them. "Blacks aren't racist, we have no power."

Giving psychological children that easy, Marxist-ideology-inspired "out" of course has exactly the same effect as it would if you gave your teenage children a comparable latitude. That is, they'd grow up learning to never accept responsibility for anything, truly believing that they're justified in parlaying their supposed "powerlessness" into an excuse for their every wrong behavior, especially for indulging in exactly the same the behaviors as they most hypocritically denouce in their own parents. (If you simply recognize that racism, far from having anything to do with power relationships, derives from simple in-group/out-group dynamics, with skin color as the dividing-line criterion, you will not fall into the corrosive idiocy of believing that "powerless [sic] people can't be racist.")

When I was just an (eldest-child) kid, and conflicts would develop between myself and my younger siblings, inevitably I would be the only one who was punished (e.g., by sometimes-brutal spanking, or having my "television privileges" taken away for periods of time), regardless of who started the fight.

So I grew up to accept a lot of responsibility in life, even for stuff that really has nothing to do with me, and for things which I didn't start—not in a "white guilt" way, but just in terms of trying to help fix problems which I didn't create. And my siblings grew up with worldviews in which (to generalize) it was their god-given right to provoke others; where actions of theirs which adversely affected others were not their fault; and where anything bad that happened to them was always Someone Else's Fault, with there being nothing they could have done to avoid it.

Would it surprise you to learn that one of them spent her teenage years and early twenties as an Angry Feminist, truly believing, on the basis of her own experiences, that "it only takes one to fight"? Or why do you think the AF worldview would resonate so deeply with someone who grew up regularly provoking others, and then seeing the people (i.e., me) she provoked get punished when they struck back, while the provocateur (a.k.a. "victim") got off scot-free?

As the Britons have just become aware, Michelle Obama is one of those people who argues that a racist incident can be said to have occurred whenever the putative victim feels that it has occurred. This is, at root, a cynical kind of madness, but it is one that has been carefully inculcated and nurtured in academe and the media for decades, and which has now taken up residence in our very courts ... thanks to legislators who find some personal or partisan gain from pandering to the appetite for victimhood and the moral authority that it is accorded. And if you reward victimhood by according it this special status and esteem, then you incentivize it, in the parlance and the parliament of our betters. And when this happens, human relations are the victim, and mutual respect is the victim, and we are all victims.

Michelle doesn't reciprocate our [British] affection, one bit. Her broad-brush view of history associates Brits with the wicked white global hegemony responsible for the slave trade. Never mind that a white, Tory Englishman—William Wilberforce—brought the slave trade to an end. Judging by her record, Michelle does not make room for such subtle nuance.

Yes, you surely don't want to get on the wrong side of the Angry Klingon (a.k.a., "First Lady Worf" or "Lady MacBama," if you prefer). "There be dragons" ... or at least, Dragon-Ladies.

As someone once noted of Michelle O.'s questionable fashion sense: Her couch-fabric dresses don't need accessorizing, so much as they need a couple of end-tables.

P.S. This looks interesting: Welcome to Obamaland.

Well, this is interesting:

[L]et's suppose that some planes have engines made from metal and some planes have engines made from plastic.

Let's suppose the plastic planes seem to crash a lot more frequently. However, everyone really really wants to believe that plastic is just as good as metal. Anyone who dares suggest otherwise risks strong public censure.

In that case, there's much less of a point in investigating the crash of yet another plastic plane. All you will do is invent some lame reason. For example, that the pilot believed plastic planes are unsafe so he was more nervous and error-prone....

"[S]tereotype threat" made the pilots of plastic planes crash more often than the pilots of metal planes. Or maybe, due to invidious stereotypes about plastic planes, all the good pilots connived to get jobs with airlines that only had metal planes, so the airlines with plastic planes wound up with all the suicidal, alcoholic, retarded, and/or blind pilots.

For those of you who haven't been playing along at home, the "plastic planes" are low-IQ and low-income NAMs (non-Asian minorities). And the "crash" is the subprime lending/mortgage crisis. (Lending standards lowered to be "fair" and "non-racist" to minorities, starting in the late '70s with the Community Reinvestment Act, allowed even whites with poor credit to qualify for mortgages they couldn't afford, but it's still NAMs who are disproportionately defaulting.)

In much more disheartening news, this idea just came up in the comments at the normally insightful Protein Wisdom blog:

Conservatives are (or should be) highly in favor of [legal] immigration—if nothing else, it's a heartfelt compliment given by the immigrant to the new society.

Yeah, and that "compliment," plus a buck-seventy-five, will get your new society a cup of coffee.

In the end, it doesn't matter whether the immigration is legal or illegal: Open your borders to every wetback who wants to come, and give amnesty to everyone who was already there illegally, and it's all "legal." But that won't improve the effect of those bodies on your country one damned bit. They'll still drive housing prices up, and wages down, for everyone who was born there, even if they're skilled-laboring individuals. (The skilled ones may increase productivity enough, and pay enough taxes, to be a net benefit. The high-school-dropout ones won't. They'll just decrease the pressure on society to become more productive through mechanization of manual tasks, etc., thus also killing the higher-skill jobs for people to design and maintain those machines.)

And when the underclass (e.g., blacks) can't find decent-paying manual-labor jobs (e.g., in construction) because all the wetbacks are doing that for around minimum wage, what do they do? Turn to crime, of course, and end up in prison.

No one at PW called that commenter out on his foolish idea. Which probably means that the vast majority of them agree with it. Which means they haven't done any competent research at all into the subject.

And if they haven't researched that Very Important Political Subject, what other topics are they equally ignorant about, and just "following their classical-liberal feelings" on, without having bothered to find out even the most elementary facts?

And these are the "outlaws" who are going to correct the course of the political right in America? If so, that country is well and truly fucked.

And so, I'm once again in the position, as I was back before the U.S. election when Ophelia Benson showed her irrational and brutally uninformed (leftist) side, of wondering whether I haven't learned too much from those "classical liberals."

By contrast, a deeply insightful post by Dennis Dale, Deconstructing Eric, or, Little by Little:

Those who most fear the reality of a "transformation" to a "post-racial" America are those who've most benefited from the decidedly racial nature of recent American politics—again, embarrassingly demonstrated with Obama's success. The end game of affirmative action and discrimination-through-litigation is revealed as long overdue. The intent of the "conversation" about race, now more than ever, is to deligitimize that challenge by declaring it unfit for conversation.

If we should start taking seriously the "post-racial" nature of Obama's rise, we might start asking that it mean something beyond assigning a professional and political premium to certain individuals based on Obama's myth of "race and inheritance." But the obvious advantage that race played for the inauthentic son of slavery and segregation contradicts the myth. The notion of a white American jackboot forever on the neck of our culturally most powerful—black Americans—was questionable before Obama's remarkable campaign and the ecstatic reception of his inauguration. Now it is farcical.

But it isn't only that Barack Obama renders the white/black reparations dynamic absurd. The nascent Diversity State finds itself too soon and too totally triumphant. The bogey of white oppression threatens to become no longer plausible, and those groups assigned varying stature within the hierarchy of grievance are already eyeing one another uneasily.

Yes, what happens when people whose entire identity is wrapped up in the easy excuse of being a "persecuted minority" finally get all of the opportunities they've been insisting were denied to them for so long, in such a windfall that it's obvious to anyone with unprejudiced eyes to see that they're not merely not being discriminated against, but are actually being actively given a free ride? Do you really think that's going to make them happy, when so much of their worldview is based on having someone else to blame for their consistent failures and inability to compete against their "oppressors"? What happens when generations of "someone else's fault" turn with glaring clarity into "you're just not good enough, or just not smart enough" to succeed? (This is a problem for feminist "perpetual victims" just as much as for whining blacks: neither group of cowards can be happy without an "oppressor" to blame for all of their problems.)

The order now threatened by diversity is not pre- but post-civil rights. That minority became synonymous with oppressed, and "underrepresented" synonymous with denied, once only enhanced the power of the dominant minority, which extracted concessions from a still comfortable majority (that could still afford them and held an expectation of final conciliation). Smaller minority groups were content to follow the leader and accept a subordinate position. But what happens to that dynamic in a "post-racial" ("post-white") America where the majority of individuals have a birthright claim against the white plurality and no sense of obligation toward a black population that is culturally dominant, politically favored and stubbornly lagging in professional and scholastic achievement?....

From What is the Monkeysphere?:

Go flip on the radio. Listen to the conservative talk about "The Government" as if it were some huge, lurking dragon ready to eat you and your paycheck whole. Never mind that the government is made up of people and that all of that money they take goes into the pockets of human beings. Talk radio's Rush Limbaugh is known to tip 50% at restaurants, but flies into a broadcast tirade if even half that dollar amount is [involuntarily] deducted from his paycheck by "The Government." That's despite the fact that the money helps that very same single mom he had no problem tipping in her capacity as a waitress.

Now click over to a liberal show now, listen to them describe "Multinational Corporations" in the same diabolical terms, an evil black force that belches smoke and poisons water and enslaves humanity. Isn't it strange how, say, a lone man who carves and sells children's toys in his basement is a sweetheart who just loves bringing joy at Christmas, but a big-time toy corporation (which brings toys to millions of kids at Christmas) is an inhuman soul-grinding greed machine? Strangely enough, if the kindly lone toy making guy made enough toys and hired enough people and expanded to enough shops, we'd eventually stop seeing it as a toy-making shop and start seeing it as the fiery Orc factories of Mordor....

[M]onkeys are happy to stay in small groups and rarely interact with others outside their monkey gang. This is why they rarely go to war, though when they do it is widely thought to be hilarious. Humans, however, require cars and oil and quality manufactured goods by the fine folks at 3M and Japanese video games and worldwide internets and, most importantly, governments. All of these things take groups larger than 150 people to maintain effectively. Thus, we routinely find ourselves functioning in bunches larger than our primate brains are able to cope with.

This is where the problems begin. Like a fragile naked human pyramid, we are simultaneously supporting and resenting each other. We bitch out loud about our soul-sucking job as an anonymous face on an assembly line, while at the exact same time riding in a car that only an assembly line could have produced.

Of course, the overpaid, unionized, two-digit-IQ dregs working on those assembly lines could and should be replaced by machines; but that would only make the clueless pig-fuckers unhappier, wouldn't it? 'Cause if you're working on an assembly line, chances are pretty damned good that you don't even have the potential to do anything that will ever matter in the world.

And again, on the problems with extending tolerance to people who will not reciprocate it—and who will, indeed, simply use the freedoms you grant them, to take yours away when they have the democratic numbers to do so (via their higher birth rates). Islam bus ads sponsored by CAIR and ICNA roll into San Francisco:

There's nothing wrong or illegal about religious groups trying to convert non-believers, but such activities become unethical when the groups try to pass themselves off as something else entirely—for example, when Scientologists set up innocent-looking "personality assessment" and "stress testing" booths in shopping malls, or when CAIR tries to pretend that it is a civil rights organization.

This is interesting:

Fucking Hollywood thinks San Fran invented teh ghey in 1967. My people in Ottawa were electing dykes - socially conservative dykes - to office fifty years before California was rejecting gay marriage.

Fast forward 50 years:

A very popular gay councilor ran for office this past election. He lost to a bald white evil looking multimillionaire dude, despite the media giving the gay candidate near-Obama levels of nuthuggery.

Basically what happened is that the gays have been co-opted, and that identity politics have so fragmented the electorate that "gay" is now synonymous with "tax hikes, sensitivity training classes, and mandatory recycling", making gays unelectable so long as they are "professionally" gay.

For contrast, a gay Conservative MP won re-election in Ottawa in a riding with many seniors and military. Why? He's not closeted per se, he disclosed on community TV that he was gay, once, and got on with the business of serving the people. The seniors and military folks who support him care less that he is gay than that he is effective, pro-military, and pro-senior.

So, gays, this is what the gay lobby has wrought: gays - professional gays who make their gheyness a large part of their politics - are unelectable because the populace rightly identifies professionally gay politicians with tax hikes and PC. I fear you haven't come a long way, boys.

With any luck, the combination of Barack Obama in a position of power, and "professional blacks" like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson whining about "racism" even in cartoons about chimps in Congress, will do for blacks around the world what the gay lobby has done for gays. Heh.

Because really, all you need to do to prove these people to be damned fools is let them speak their minds ... and destroy a developed country or two.

And Jeff Goldstein responds to the idea that classical liberalism is now a "reactionary" stance, in the era of Hopenchange.

Classical liberalism ... is a doctrine stressing individual freedom, free markets, and limited government. This includes the importance of human rationality, individual property rights, natural rights, the protection of civil liberties, individual freedom from restraint, equality under the law, constitutional limitation of government, free markets, and a gold standard to place fiscal constraints on government.... The "normative core" of classical liberalism is the idea that laissez-faire economics will bring about a spontaneous order or invisible hand that benefits the society, though it does not necessarily oppose the state's provision of some basic public goods with what constitutes public goods being seen as very limited.... Classical liberals are suspicious of all but the most minimal government and object to the welfare state. (Wikipedia)

Yep, that's me exactly. "Reactionary."

P.S. Rush Limbaugh tees off beautifully on Barack "Titleist" Obama and his crooked handlers.

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