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February 12, 2009 - February 5, 2009

Friday, December 14, 2007

TGIF. A really really bad week in American political life. There's no way to dance around that sad fact. The two Iowa debates may not have been funny, but they were certainly follies. PBS thought it would be amusing to choose as emcee a nakedly biased martinet who would do her utmost to belittle and sabotage the Republican candidates in her own adaptation of The Weakest Link game show.


To this end, she broke into every single Republican response with repeated reminders that they had overrun her 45 second time allotment. Her expression never varied from a rigid sneer, and for just a moment when Fred Thompson defied her kindergarten request for a show of hands, it looked as if she might haul out a paddle and spank his bare rear end on the spot.

Speaking of rear ends, though, hers was the sole amusing aspect of the event. Would she have been quite so imperiously self-satisfied on that stage if she'd known what she looked like from, er, behind? If she has a husband, which we tend to doubt, this would have been a good time for her to ask him the infamous question, "Does this suit make my ass look big?" On the other hand, her putative husband was probably crushed beneath her chariot wheels so long ago that he wouldn't have had the nerve to tell the truth even this once: "Yes, dear. It makes your ass look as enormous as Hillary Clinton's."


That comparison probably occurred to her quite spontaneously when she viewed the video of her pogrom against the Republicans. Which might explain why she was so cold to Hillary in the Democratic debate the next day, even though she simply oozed good will to all the other Dem candidates. She dispensed with her metronomic time cues and at times she laughed, even simpered, in her appreciation of the astounding liberal wisdom the candidates were able to remember word for word from their stump speeches.

But she's not the only ridiculous figure in this sorry pair of circuses. The Republicans were mostly awful, despite Fred Thompson's brief outburst. As Malkin has pointed out (and as you can see in our top graphic), the leading Republicans all raised their hands to indicate that they believed in Global Warming and that it was principally caused by human activities. If Thompson had been given the minute he asked for, he would probably have agreed too. Since Global Warming has become the political flag under which all the anti-American, anti-capitalist forces in the world are marching, any Republicans who really still are Republicans (and not Democrats-Lite as the Iowa Republicans in attendance were) would be well advised to start noodling a way to engineer a brokered convention for the purpose of nominating someone other than these patsies to run against the Dhimmicrats.

The Hillary-Obama-Edwards-Biden-Dodd lineup performed just as poorly. Their answer to every question is to raise taxes on the "rich" (i.e., everyone who makes more than $75,000 a year) and plunder the Defense Department to raise money for the next uncontrollably huge entitlement in their vision of socialist Utopia. They think they can hold the entire world at bay by engaging in endless talks with certified monsters and that this threadbare strategy will somehow offset the tsunami of antipathy they plan to create by adopting dramatically more protectionist trade policies. It all sounded great to the Des Moines Register's little czarina, and the indications are that it also went down well with the Iowans in the audience.

What do we have so far? Debate events intended to be a forum for selecting the next occupant of the most powerful office in the world formatted and run like a cheesy game show. Candidates from both parties who appear to have no clue about the complexity of the issues confronting the nation or even which ones are the most vital to address. Great.

And then there's Iowa. A state which has by mysterious means become a kind of gatekeeper of the presidential nomination process. Iowa. A state which appears by its questions and its audience reactions to have no interest at all in contemporary immigration issues, the fundamentalist Islamic threat, the dangerous storms of hatred in the middle east, or in fact the existence of ambitious competitor nations outside the borders of the United States. What do they care about? Ethanol. Ethanol and however much "free" shit they can get from the federal government by agreeing to higher taxes for the nasty rich people on the east and west coasts. They also like people to be nice. You can say anything you want as long as you wear a bright superficial smile while saying it. The Democrat audience thought John Edwards came across as "authentic." Let me repeat that. The Democrats in the audience thought John Edwards came across as "authentic"

TIME OUT FOR DEEP BREATHING EXERCISES.

They also had no problem with Joe Biden's plan to pay for universal health care by looting the Defense Department during a time of war and dismantling the missile-defense program at a time when their country is entering the most dangerous period of exposure in its history to missile attacks by rogue nations who have openly declared their intention to destroy us.

ANOTHER TIME OUT.

Okay. It's probably true that we're stuck with one of the candidates who tap-danced his or her way through these most recent debates. But isn't it possible that we could at least do something about Iowa?

How about throwing them out of the damn United States? Let them go play in their cornfields, make ethanol instead of food, and then drink themselves into a coma with the stuff. We sure wouldn't lose any sleep over that outcome. Here's what a new improved map of the continental U.S. would look like:

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

SINCE YOU DIDN'T LISTEN... It's the Championship Round in Iowa. Like Billy Conn against Joe Louis, Mike Huckabee has outpointed the favorite(s) by dancing nimbly around the ring and somehow escaping any serious punishment, making his opposition look flatfooted by comparison:


But this late in the fight, it's the time for sluggers, the time when the ones who are truly tough start stalking their victim across the ring in single-minded pursuit of a knockout. Giuliani and McCain in particular know what it is to be in a lowdown brawl, and they'll be going after Huckabee with all the lead pipes and baseball bats in their arsenal.

But Huckabee has a different agenda. He can just duck the pipes and bats as long as he's brought the right weapons for the one opponent he really has to bring down.


That's why Mike's arsenal will look a little different.


But the Mormon Prince of Darkness is also ready. He has a stake-resistant suit of underwear and a Secret Weapon of the Latter Day Saints.


So what's going to happen? Take a look at what transpires starting at two minutes into this clip.


Not a prediction. Just an intimation.

UPDATE FOLLOWING THE DEBATE. Wow. We were utterly and completely wrong. And, boy, are we disappointed. What a bunch of castrati. With the exception of Thompson (one time), Tancredo, and Keyes who resisted or ignored the Nurse Ratchet moderator.  That's what really concerned us. These are the only ones -- let's face it, the doomed losers -- who seemed to make any sense. We also watched the Luntz dynamic audience response graphics Fox showed  for each candidate as questions were responded to. In Iowa, at least, there are no more Republicans. Every time a response suggested that the federal government doesn't know best or shouldn't intervene, the ratings dipped into the throwaway zone. (Especially poor Alan. He's the only traditional old-school Republican in the bunch. Which makes him an angry pariah descending into the hell of moderate contempt.) McCain passed up his one opportunity to mend fences with legiimate conservatives by failing to cite his obnoxious support for amnesty as a mistake he would undo if given a second chance. He's an arrogant jerk. Romney's so smoothly and evenly above it all that we're beginning to wonder if he has any emotions at all; in fact, it seems possible he's a sociopath. Is he a serial killer, too? Truthfully, it wouldn't surprise us. Huckabee is absolutely the dumb yokel the Republican establishment fears he is, but none of the leading candidates showed the guts to confront him or make the obvious points. Ron Paul should be locked up. He's a monomaniac.

The only standout was the Des Moines Register moderator. She single-handedly transformed the whole debate into an episode of the Weakest Link.


[Uh, for those who didn't see the actual debate, the part of Mike Huckabee was played by 'Lorraine.'] Unless it was more like this.


Ladies and gentlemen, the Republican Party is doomed in the short term. Which makes us right after all. Because this would be infinitely better than what we've got -- namely, no candidates who are  up to leading the most powerful nation in the world if it means standing up to an officious bitch when voters might be watching.

Ugh.

Dean Barnett? Hugh Hewitt? Don't you dare spin this as a win for Mitt Romney. Here's who he is. Is that what you really want? Well, most of us don't. And we're not that much dumber than you.

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

MODERATE INSANITY. A contingent of actual scientists disrupted the festivities in Bali by crashing the international Global Warming shindig being hosted there by the U.N. While bouncers fumed and grant-whores huffed in outrage (emitting more tons of dangerous carbon exhaust), a variety of skeptics proved beyond doubt that the vaunted 'consensus' on Global Warming does not exist because skeptical scientists do exist.


But nobody was listening. Most of the attendees were relaxing by the pool...

Monday, December 10, 2007

A HUGE MESS.I just had the uneasiest feeling about this post. I think it may wind up costing me my life to speak in greater depth about this photograph than IP did here. But I will anyway.

I was in college at the same time as these people -- and thousands of their friends. Here's what Bill has to say about that time now:


Yecch. Ye-e-e-e-ch.

You can't know. If you're not between 55 and 60, you'll never know. These people were the scum of the earth, and they ruined a lot of lives. Even Dr. Sanity doesn't know what narcisssism is if she didn't witness the tantrum that occurred on Ivy league campuses during the radical years. The militant anti-war movement was a Marxist and thoroughly male-chauvinist offensive. The modern feminist movement was born out of the atrocious way male radicals treated female hangers-on in this timeframe. Women were there to provide sex to the political leaders of the movement. Period. As a sexual gambit it worked because the women who allied themselves with the radical anti-war movement were not attaractive. They didn't try to be. They didn't even bathe. But neither did the men.

Try to imagine the smell of the photograph above. You can't. Crisp snowy air is a mitigating factor. Imagine the dorm room they came from. I'm a veteran of that age. Sandalwood incense intended to cover the reek of marijuana, but failing at that and utterly powerless to mask the stench of unwashed clothes, the grime of hippie lassitude, the body odor of the politically indigent.

I'm sitting here aghast. Is it really possible that the United States of America will elect this totally unqualified -- except by marriage -- radical concubine as the President of the United States?

And just how fooled are you by the protestations of a two-term hippie President who always said whatever he thought people wanted to hear and who now says that he always believed his thick-ankled wife was the leader we all want and need?

LOOK AT THE GODDAM PICTURE. They both agitated against the interests of the United States. They both sympathized with the communist government of North Vietnam. And there's very little reason to think either of them have reformed their views in any material way. Bill despised the military and the CIA while terrorists attacked the World Trade Center with NO U.S. response. Hillary -- a Bernardine Dohrn who got away with it -- asks us to trust her because she can castrate a general in her sleep. Is this the United States of America? or a sick inside-out version of the Wizard of Oz?

Half the United States knows voting for Hillary is a return to the radical 60s. That's why half the Democrats are willing to consider a totally unqualified half-term senator from Illinois as a superior alternative.

How do you render a scream of anguish in print? Exclamation points? Okay. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

UPDATE 12/14/07: Some evidence to back up my gut convictions. At American Digest. Here's just a sample:


Read as much as your stomach will tolerate. If you're like me, that will probably end with a nauseated bump at his description of Bill and Hillary "balling" to the Doors after a meal of "palatable chicken curry."


Nothing worse than throwing up... Anyone have a breath mint?

Worst thing about this site? Always being right.

Saturday, December 08, 2007

THERE IS NO GOD. The existence or nonexistence of God is a big question. It amuses me that young leftists have succeeded in asserting their atheism so often that they've put theists on the defensive. Flush with their rhetorical triumph, they're amazingly arrogant about proclaiming that they're infinitely smarter than the fools who continue to believe in God.

Apologists for God have been caught off guard. I, personally, was stupefied when a longtime Roman Catholic friend I asked to cite the best argument he knew of against atheism recommended a book by the Anglican C. S. Lewis.

Sound dire? It isn't. The Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens of the world -- and all their dumb disciples -- can't talk their way around the fact that common sense is on the side of the existence of a "higher power" of some kind, meaning a power possessed of far more intelligence than Dawkins or Hitchens can lay claim to. The stridency of their objections is a lot like that of the solid citizen who shakes his fist at the lightning storm daring it to strike him.

Fools. Atheism isn't the intelligent default position. It's simply the "Get out of Jail Free" card for a bunch of folks who equate a lack of knowledge with certainty. Atheists put their faith in the mathematics of the universe, the ellipses of the orbits, the explosive temperatures of gases, the mutations of organic molecules. But why do the laws of math or biology obtain in the first place? They don't know, and they don't care. They don't know where the universe came from, they don't know how life began, and they can't explain how man erupted from primate mediocrity in less than 50,000 years to produce Leonardo and Michelangelo. All they're certain of is that God had nothing to do with it.

Fine. Except that all self-professed atheists are lying. Nobody can be sure there's no higher power -- you know, the one who dreamed up mathematics and physics and chemistry and biology... The atheists are all agnostics unless they're utter imbeciles. What they're saying is that they don't know where we come from bu they're pretty sure all the religions are wrong. They think they know Yahweh never rescued the Jews from annihilation, Christ didn't die for mankind on the cross, and Buddha didn't ascend into heaven after telling his followers how to live their lives. All such notions of divinity are wrong and stupid. But such nonbeliefs are a far cry from asserting anything as positively true about the universe we live in.

That would be fine but for a few things. Atheism is not a religion. It's not a philosophy. It's an abnegation. There's nothing about it that's a moral system. Once I agree with you that the universe exists without a creator, we're all free to interpret our existence as we like. No God, okay. No spiritual life that isn't a function of chemistry, great. If we drink some wine and agree in our cups that there just might be some grand architect of existence who wrote all the laws of our beloved science, that still doesn't mean there's any implicit morality in his scheme. Right? But specification of the creator scientist who doesn't care who we fuck or kill or dismember is an assumed human limitation of a power we can't possibly know is limited to some cosmological laboratory. When a scientist concedes that God might exist as a soulless didact of mathematics he is seeking to constrain that higher power to dimensions he can comprehend. His sterile conclusions say nothing about whether it's good or bad for people to steal, commit adultery, engage in incest, or slaughter anyone who obstructs his wishes. On what basis does any atheist proclaim any of these activities unacceptable? Why shouldn't they all be acceptable? Unless there's some spurious, and entirely unenforceable, philosophy which says such things are not to be done because... well, because.

Here's my take. Math is more than accident. God is more than a gifted geek. The planets do spin round, the stars do shine, and we are really here, some of us smarter than chimpanzees. An accident? Perhaps.

But perhaps not, too. A conscious species looks to the heavens and seems to find an answer. Do the scientists and atheists ask why there are so many more of us human beings than there are gorillas, chimps, rhinos, bears, leopards, elephants, and giraffes? No. They automatically assume our preponderance is a kind of guilt. It never occurs to them there might be a kind of meaning in the fact that a conscious species which has gone out of its way to believe in something beyond its own existence -- to the point of being willing to sacrifice itself individually for a nonexistent deity -- has a vastly superior chance of survival.

If some one wrote the laws of math and physics and biology, it doesn't mean he's just a scientist. It means he's so far above us we can't assume he's also not personally involved in all our daily lives. It also means he might interact with us at the level of art literature, music, and, yes, religion.

What I've never gotten over is the endless symbolism of Christ's death and resurrection. It goes out in all directions. Forever. Such a huge story that it seems a divine event.

Hmmmm. Suggest anything to you?

How do you explain it? For that matter, how do you explain anything that's happened to the race of mankind?

Forget all that. Just tell me why it is exactly you act so fucking superior to anyone who believes in God. Do that and I'll listen. I promise.

No, I don't. You're all a bunch of pseudo-intellectual fakes. If we debated face to face, I'd crush you. With pleasure. Don't ever doubt it.

UPDATE. Interesting comments. I'll respond to a few points here. First, I was principally disappointed in the C.S. Lewis reference not because he was an Anglican but because he is yesterday's news in the context of the current war on religion being waged by atheists. Lewis argued the question principally as a philosopher and lived before a lot of the science which could and probably should be marshalled in support of those who believe in God even existed. Lewis is an eloquent advocate for people who have wrestled with questions of faith in the context of faith, but he's beside the point for today's default secularists, who are ignorant of both the history of theology and the history of its impacts on the development of civilization. His is simply not the argument that's required to puncture the arrogance of the self-ordained demigods of science and its herd of incurious followers.

Edward's comments are the providence I was hoping for. He is polite, articulate, and a perfect example of the fallacious reasoning I described in the post. Like most atheists, he hasn't inquired deeply enough into the matter to realize that he is looking at a two-part question. He therefore believes his position is easily justified by what he mistakes for an absence of evidence.

He believes, as I indicated in my post, that the argument against God is synonymous with the argument against the God of the Old and New Testaments, the Allah of Islam, the pantheon of Hinduism, the implicit divinity of Buddha, etc. He correctly states that there is no scientific or rational proof of these religious interpretations and concludes that his atheism is defensible against all comers with no need even to break a sweat. Problem is, that's only part two of the question.

Part One is the universe we live in. What does that tell us about whether or not there is a -- for want of a better word -- divine intelligence at work? It's an unpardonable omission, really, given that the war against God is being led by scientists (and the scientifically disposed) whose case depends on ignoring the macro view in favor of micro models. Since Dawkins believes he can explain the evolution of life from one-celled organisms to mankind by exclusively chemical and biological processes which function without intelligence and largely via accidental circumstances, he also believes he has eliminated higher intelligence from the workings of the entire universe. From here it's a short step to proclaiming that if the twelve plagues of Egypt have similarly mundane scientific explanations, the entire Judeo-Christian tradition is delusion.

This is, to put it mildly, an example of drawing the question too narrowly. Historically, the mission of science was to explain the natural world and its workings, including cosmology, not to amass legalistic arguments against the likelihood of divine intervention in those workings. How can we be sure the question is too narrowly drawn? Because every religion in the world could be utter bunk, and it could still be the case that the universe -- i.e., the natural, physical state of the existence we experience -- is the creation of a supernatural intelligence, meaning an intelligence that is literally above and beyond the natural. That's a concept normally referred to by the word 'God.'

For atheists to be truly atheists and not agnostics, they must believe that there is not and never was a supernatural agent who created the existence we all experience. And it is here that they are required to confront voluminous evidence which can only be explained away by acts of faith that make the irrational beliefs of Christians look puny by comparison. Their own rules of science are against them.

Consider this paradox. The more Dawkins can make evolution seem like a rational, predictable series of responses to random changes in the environment, the more he makes the process of evolution resemble a computer program. The more he excludes intelligent intervention from that process, the more programmatic he makes it. Because algorithms, and complex alogorithms at that, are clearly at work. According to evolutionary models, eyes have evolved separately and independently in multiple branches of the animal family tree. Why? And how? Eyes are distinguished by the fact that none of their properties offers any survival value at all until their myriad components come together and produce the ability to see. The evolutionary program may be running automatically and without intervention, but it has to include an algorithm for making eyes. So there's a computer and a program, but no programmer.

Consider another paradox. In the Dawkins model, human beings are intelligent but the universe itself is not. The universe is just a series of meaningless chemical reactions that nevetheless obey physical and mathematical constraints even the most determined atheists are compelled to describe as laws. These are laws which human intelligence has struggled, and still struggles, to understand, with only partial success. Dawkins and his brethren have spent their lives endeavoring to understand these laws and yet, with a straight face, they declare that there is no absolutely no evidence of a supreme intelligence operating behind or prior to the phenomena of nature. As if the mere fact of conscious human intelligence doesn't indicate that such intelligence has a precedent in the universe itself or is any kind of pale reflection of a built-in property of that universe. Got it.

I could go on citing paradoxes but I won't. The bottom line is simple. We live in a house whose architecture, plumbing, and electrical systems we know to be operating in complex, dynamic ways through time and we're studying their operation like crazy, but we're certain there's no evidence anyone built the house in the first place. That's what it means when Edward says he sees "no evidence" for the existence of God.

The second part of the question really does become a matter of philosophy and faith, but if one has properly considered the first part, the second is no longer purely academic or purely foolish. If the house we live in had an architect or an engineer, we really have no basis for presuming that his intelligence would be unaware of or uninterested in ours. If he were there, we certainly couldn't be sure that he is NOT above nature or that his engineering is not so beyond comprehension that it could seem to be operating without intervention even though its author is intimately involved in every aspect of its, and our, phenomenology. There is no value system we could confidently impute to such an intelligence that would guarantee the sheer size of the house (i.e., universe) would make our existence in it seem too negligible to pay attention to. In fact, the evidence of nature is quite contrary to this kind of size-based snobbery. Wouldn't a generic lab-rat god be content with identical snowflakes? And why would the laws of his mathematics extend into areas that have no physical analogues at all, featuring properties that appear to have no conceivable purpose but the excitation of intelligent imagination?

But I'm sure Edward can explain all this away. As easily as he dismisses the countless manifestations of human faith which have resulted in his own freedom to regard the contemplation of life itself as a "waste of time."

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