In Which We Again Find Tales of Oppression Are Wrong

We have been told again and again that there is a gender wage gap--that women are somehow underpaid in our economy. For instance, here is 1998 paper from the Clinton administration Council of Economic Advisers on the subject. I mention the Clinton Administration because in personal conversation a 1999 Clinton appointee to the Council of Economic Advisers,Kathryn Shaw, told me that the gender gap in wages is nonsense. Shaw is a labor economist. But it still get perpetuated. And today, I found an exciting new fact about the issue & it was hidden in the fashiion section of the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/fashion/23whopays.html?_r=4&pagewanted=1&n=Top%2f&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

It turns out that "for the first time, women in their 20s who work full time in several American cities — New York, Chicago, Boston and Minneapolis — are earning higher wages than men in the same age range, according to a recent analysis of 2005 census data by Andrew Beveridge." Yet, no doubt that in the coming months the alleged gender wage gap will be trotted out by the Democrats.

Then End of Senator Brownback's Presidential Bid

The presidential bid of Senator Brownback(R-KS) was always a longshot, but Brownback today basically called it quits. He voted for amnesty and we have seen how Republican primary voters feel about supporters of amnesty in Senator McCain's plummet in the polls. Brownback is not so stupid that he couldn't be aware that his vote sinks his unlikely campaign.

Why his vote? I suggest his vote simply reflects Brownback principles as a convert to Catholicism. This would surprise many people if thought about it. Most people think of Catholics as those normal people around us all the time who say they are Catholics. We forget these normal people Catholics knew next to nothing about Catholic doctrine and aren't interested in learning more. For instance, my fitness instructor calls herself a devout Catholic. We talk about gay romance often. I asked her if she felt any conflict between being open to gays and her Catholicism. Her pitiful attempts at answering indicated that the question hadn't even occurred to her. She ended up saying "you can't take all that stuff seriously." However, when people convert as Brownback did, they take the values seriously, and this means following Catholic moral teaching--even at the cost of a long-shot presidential bid.

I wish to pursue further the theme of what Catholicism may inspire people to do in further posts, but let me tell you where I'm going. Catholicism becomes a suicidal ideology when confronted with a jihadist religion like Islam. Catholicism has lost it Medieval survival instinct. Obviously, the Catholic Church did a lot of evil back during the Middle Ages, but we should always be conscience that the Crusades were not one of them. The Catholic Church finally decided to fight back after a few centuries of Islamic aggression. The decision to fight back against evil can only be considered good--even if Christiandom implemented the decision to fight back rather poorly.

Since Catholicism will not save us, we need either conservative protestantism or a militant secularism to save us. I hope we can pursue both paths, because both conservative protestantism and militant secularism have done so much to make the West a great place to live. Yet, as a militant secularlist, I'm forced to admit that at the current time secularism, like Catholicism, is failing to defend us from the Muslim savages. Conservative protestantism may be our best hope for decent societies for the future. It brothers me not at all to say,"Onward, Christian Soldiers". Really, Pat Robertson's America is not that bad of a place. The Christian Broadcasting Network has some great recipes!

The Empty Minds of the Political Elite

Senator Trent Lott must have been trying to make some point when he illustrated immigration issues with his troubles in keeping his goats on his property, but no one is quite sure what it is. The honours committee that selected Salmon Rushdie for knighthood claims to be startled that the selection of Salmon Rushdie caused a furore in the Islamic world. There is of course the well known lack of subtly and depth in U.S. president George W. Bush or the socialist French President candidate Ségolène Royal, who was luckily defeated, but still got 47% of the vote. Utter cluelessness transcends nation and political philosophy in Western nations. Why?

The ability to think about political issues is intimately related to the ability to think about moral issues. Morality addresses the question of how we are live together in a shared world. Sadly we are not taught to think about morality. Instead, we learn the morality consist of simple rules. On the left, we have "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten" by Fulghum and such feel good rot. On the right, we have simple-mindedness posing as intellectual depth in discussion of "objective morality". Let's pause for a second on the "intellectually deep" right talk about objective morality. Objective morality is the idea that morality consists of the simple minded application of a small set of rules without any consideration of context. It sounds intellectually to me. In discourse, the right loves to criticize the left for having a relative morality, yet leftist "anti-racism" is as objective as morality gets. Furthermore, the right does think about moral context, except when it doesn't. It depends on the context. We are lucky that the right gets over it objective morality insanity that killing anything homo sapien--even fetuses--when it comes to war.

Instead, of simple mindedness, we need honest conversation about morality so we can have honest political conversation. Of course, part of this is simply get over simple minded hatefulness like assuming that either George Bush or Hilary Clinton are wrong about everything. (I do believe both are wrong about almost everything, but I'm aware of how hard it is to be right.)

For us to have serious political conversation where we address the many complex facets around each issues, in which we admit that have to compromise and that some bad as will as some good will come out of the compromise, we need to start by learning to talk about morality. We should teach logical argumentation about morality in our high school literature classes. Most literature has serious moral components and people can learn to enjoy talking about them. Obviously, high school students will come to many bad answers, but once they learn to think about the questions, they can do a better job as they age. It will take a long time for this program to change society, but the empty headedness of our political elite suggests we can only go up.

Immigration and What the Voters Want

Since it looks like the Bush-McCain-Kennedy Amnesty bill will get through the Senate, I just called Congressman Doyle's office to express my opposition to the Amnesty Bill. I asked if there had many calls about the Amnesty bill. The intern girl said she had received many, many calls. I asked her how many she had received in favor of the Amnesty bill. She said none. Doyle is a moderate Democrat who will probably vote in favor of the amnesty bill.

The intern girl mentioned the issue of families. In her mind, it seems because one child was born on American soil that an entire family is entitled to live in America. She says we can't break up families. I asked why the child couldn't go back with the parents to Mexico or wherever. She said because the child is an American. Now, I'm a patriotic American, but I can't help but notice that people have someway managed to survive in other countries. It's not like Mexico has some horrible government that routinely tortures its citizens to keep its grip on power, like say Cuba is. Yet, we sent back Elian Gonzoles. I supported sending back Elian Gonzoles to Cuba, and so my feelings about reuniting families in Mexico is even stronger.

Acts of War Are not Terrorism

Some muslims in New Jersey are accused of terrorism, because they wanted to attack Fort Dix in New Jersey. I strongly object to describing their plans as terrorism and don't think they should face any trial. These muslims are simply soldiers attacking a legitimate military target. As such, they are prisoners of war and should be treated as such.

These Islamic soldiers should not pay the price for our refusal to listen to the clear muslim declarations of war. Instead, this would be a good time for us to start listening to muslims. And in the process of listening, we may observe that we have a large number of enemy combatants on our soil. We need to encourage these combatants to find countries more suited for their lifestyle, like say, Sudan.

A Division of Labour Argument for Defending the Second Amendment

Given recent events, I thought it worthwhile to point out gun control opponents sometimes make arguments that do their cause more harm than good. I have sometimes encountered the "gun nut" who argues that self-defense is a personal responsibility, and for this reason that we have the right to bear arms. While I'm a big fan of personal responsibility, this argument has the repulsive implication that everyone should have a gun to defend themselves. Some "gun nuts" will even state this explicitly.

There are many people who do not desire this responsiblity. They see self-defense as annoying chore which they wish evade. Their evasion is not a bad thing for our interest in defending the Second Amendment, if we get them to view it properly.

Let's admit that people vary wildly in their desire for self-defense. Some people, usually men, think all the time about physical fights and self-defense. To be crude, but accurate, they get a hard-on carrying a gun (and probably would be the ones who would most stridently deny this). Other people have little interest in self-defense. We should view the Second Amendment as empowering those interested in self-defense to defend not only themselves, but also the innocents about them. The people who aren't so enamoured by self-defense still get something out of the Second Amendment-a safer society. It is for this reason they should be glad to support the Second Amendment. They receive the benefits of a public service. But if we castigate them as shirkers, they will feel resentful. Nor should any gun owner feel exploited. I'm sure many of the non-gun owners make their contributions to society. It's simply a sensible division of labour.

I myself have little interest in self-defense. Admittedly, my honest conversation about Islam has made it necessary for me to buy a gun. I know how to use it and wouldn't hesitate to wound or kill if I were attacked. Still, it is unnatural burden for me. If I weren't saying bad things about a pack of religious psychopaths, I wouldn't own a gun.

People like me usually don't own guns, but we still vote. There is no reason to annoy us with the argument about responsibility. Instead, we should point out that if many people carry concealed weapons, then criminals can not be certain who has a gun. The guns will deter crime for everyone whether they carry a gun or not. Without explicitly stating it, we should try to encourage non gun owners to be thankful for those who carry guns--just like rational folks are thankful for non-corrupt, non-abusive policemen. Gratitude, not resentment, will defend the Second Amendment.

The 15 Brits Captured by Iran

After a recent post about the need for more manly virtue in our society, I was at a loss to know what to think about the 15 Brits captured by Iran. I don't wish to understate my ignorance relative to this topic, but I have come to some tentative conclusions.

Should I condemn these Brits for caving in too easily to the Iranian government? For instance, Ralph Peters goes so far as to call for their court martial. These detractors compare the mild treatment of the Brits compared to what James Stockdale and John McCain endured in Vietnam. The Brits should be more tough. They also complain that the Brit soldiers should not have surrendered when surrounded by overwhelming Iranian force. These same people think Britain suffered a national humiliation for this soldiers being captured and ransomed.

I have some sympathy for that point of view. I was quite uncomfortable about seeing the Brits smile while in captivity. What ever happened to stiff upper lip? But should one restrain one happiness before cameras on seeing your comrades undamaged? We've never had cameras in such situations before.

Playing into my interpretation of these soldiers is that I've always admired the figure of the trickster, starting with a childhood fascination with the trickster pagan gods, Hermes and Loki. Yes, it may be less than manly in that the trickster uses brain not brawn to get out of a situation. Is that really so bad? Why shouldn't one lie and write meaningless statements to get out of evil clutches?

No, I don't think the problem for the West is the behavior of the Brit soldiers. The Iranians only got some PR of dubious value at best.

The problem is much more the moral myth that it is always evil to kill--the myth that stops us from killing more of the muslims. When we fought World War II, we killed Germans. We bombed German cities causing widespread civilian death. Consider our firebombing of Dresden. We didn't stop to analyze how much a particular German supported the Nazi regime. At most, forty percent of the Germans were Nazi enthusiasts--at least judging from the last vote of the Weimer Republic. We cannot afford to treat muslims any differently. We can't be squeamish and girlish over the slaughter of muslims, but we can forgive a few soldiers who did their best to save their lives.

In the big picture, our actions in World War II were just. Even the Germans who hated Nazism were still instrumental in keeping Nazi Germany going. The same is true for the secretly atheist or Christian, liberal person in muslim lands. They enable the muslim evil to continue and are legitimate targets, as much as we may lament that fact. In war, there is not time for subtle judgments about the enemy.

Dafur and NASCAR

It has been argued that the murder and mayhem in Dafur is a bad thing, but most people making such arguments want to have it both ways. They also want to condemn cultural imperialism, but it's surely cultural imperialism to stop muslims from their number one favorite hobby.

I suggest channeling all that political energy about Dafur into a better cause. We should attempt to outlaw NASCAR for environmental reasons. How much greenhouse gases are produced in one race? While we could be accused of cultural imperialism towards Southern Baptists, NASCAR is not encouraged by the Bible. Murder and mayhem is encouraged by the Koran. Read the ninth chapter. So, let's stop being busy bodies in the Sudan. Let the muslims be muslims--at least when they aren't killing us.

some hope

I've been worried not so much about Iran trying to get nuclear weapons, but the rest of the world doing nothing to stop them. The idea that a nuclear armed Iran won't use it nuclear weapons goes against the entire history of the Islamic world. (Yes, I know Pakistan has nukes, but Musharraf is reasonable guy. What about Pakistan's next government? Would you want to relocate to New Delhi?)
Well, it seems that at least some common women here in America get what we are up against. A groups of mother's of soldiers, the Moms of Fury, visited Paul Hodes(D-NH) congressional office and talked about the Iraq occupation. For the most part, the talk is about the Iraq war. I'm not in complete agreement. They think we can pacify Iraq. I disagree since genocide is to Islam what vomiting is to a bulimic. But what is more important the Moms of Fury seem to understand the big geopolitical picture. We either fight over there or the muslims will bring the fighting here.

the abuse of racism is a bigger problem than racism itself

I've been reading a leftist humor book, Conservatize Me by John Moe. It's not that good, but there is an occasional observation of interest. In particular, Moe wants to understand why people are attracted to conservative beliefs. Moe is hampered in his efforts, because he decided that some conservative views are bad, while others are tolerable. In particular, conservative views like those expressed by Rush Limbaugh are evil and don't need understanding. Despite that flaw, and it is a major flaw, Moe does shed some insight on conservatism appeal. The one that impressed me was his explanation for the appeal of traditional values. Moe observes that people in small town America are friendlier than people in big cities, like Seattle where he comes from. Moe construes this friendliness as traditional values, and he has a point.

I told a leftist friend, who was extolling big cities, about Moe's observation. His immediate response was that small town America is not a friendly place if you are a racial minority. It was all too typical. Racism has become the all-purpose excuse to disregard the positive aspects of America. No matter what is said positive about America. The leftist response always involves some accusation or racism. Sample conversation: "American won the most gold medals at the Olympics." "Who cares, America is racist."


Thus, making accusations of racism has become an more important excuse to avoid serious political conversations than even making comparisons to the Nazi regime. And it use is every bit as frivolous. One simply labels one's opponents as racists rather than make real arguments. And to be clear, the right is as guilty of this as is the left. Listen to the preposterous "pro-life" arguments against abortion rights on the basis that abortion is somehow racist, and you'll get my point if you haven't already. (Google Margaret Sanger, abortion and racism, & I'm sure you'll get my point. N.B. I haven't done this google experiment personally, but if you get different results than I predict, please let me know.)

There are two important observation to be made in response to the conversation stopper user of racism:
1) Modern America is about the least racist society that the world has ever known. 2) Racism is not the worst thing we can do.
Let's examine both.

In the America where I live, I see black people and white people talking and chatting all the time. I see little black kids playing with little white kids and little asian kids in my neighborhood all the time. I live in a country where it is assumed that the worst crime one can do is being racists. Yet, after talking an "anti-racist", you would expect to see a "colored only" water fountain in every small town in America. Surprising you don't. What you do see instead in small town America is quarrels about gay rights. Some wacky small town high school students who fail to realize America's outrageous racism decide to confront the sexual orientation issue, because while they rarely hear racist comments, they frequently hear homophobic ones. And guess what? These small town high school students win more often than not. Is it too much to admit that no fairer and more decent a nation has existed than America today?

Racism is not the worse thing we can do. It is our duty as human beings to stop horrible abuse of women like genital mutilation, forced marriages, and honor killing, before we worry about subtle issues of racism, like the pain of a black corporate executive who doesn't become CEO. If this means discouraging from living among us racial groups who want to be mutilate, kill, and enslave their own daughters and sisters, we should so. We should not allow their barbarity against women to spread. Civilization's goal is to reduce barbarianism, not permit it to expand. Of course, it's not really a race that does such things but a religion--but a little bit of anti-Arab, anti-Persian racism to stop the evil treatment of women would not be such a bad thing. As long as people backed off from it when the Arab or Persian says they aren't muslim.

How I Started Loving the Apocalypse

I'm not sure everyone is aware of how bad the problem is, so let's review. Iran, controlled by a theocracy bent on apocalypse, is building nuclear weapons. The huge mass of the global population wants peace through appeasement and fantasizes that it is the United States resistance to Islamofascism that is the cause of our problems. Iran also directs Hezbollah a terrorist group with branches on every continent. Eventually, Iran will combine its nuclear threat with Hezbollah terrorism to subjugate other countries. Consider how the cartoon jihad against Denmark would have progressed, if Iran had had nukes. Terrorists would have done assorted evils in Denmark and then Iran would have demanded any suspected terrorists be released or else they would nuke. After all, the Hezbollah terrorists are employees of the Iran government. Notice that my only assumption here is that Iran continues to act like Iran. It's exactly the same assumption that underlies putting serial killers in prison or executing them.

The success of Iran's dual strategy of nukes and terrorists will prompt imitation. I hope that is that there is still enough passion in the West that we fight back, but if we have grown too multicultural and spineless to resist Iranian tyranny, Sunni muslim tyrannies will fight back against Iran. Given that whoever resists Iran at this point is going to be willing to risk it all, the conflict will go pass the brink. Nuclear bombs will fall like rain.

The future appears grim. I blame the peace movement more than the muslims themselves. A healthy sense of self-preservation would cure most of our problems, but basic self-preservation isn't going to get mass support anytime soon. It's enough to make one languish in despair.

And then I realized I'm an environmentalist who would like to see a massive reduction in human population. I had envisioned something like a global one-child policy. When civilization gets around to fighting back against the muslim barbarians, the rain of nuclear bombs will reduce human population to numbers more appropriate for the planet. Even better, we learned after Chernobyl that plants and animals can thrive in the shadows of nuclear disaster. Maybe I should just stop fighting Jihad and advocate an eco-terrorism dedicated to helping this process along. Of course, after the bombs have fallen, I do hope that we will have learned a lesson: that religions that hold a tenet of world domination can not be permitted. Any followers of such a religion should be given the choice of conversion or death.

Well, I suppose the idea in the last paragraph is a plan B. There is still hope that we don't go down that route. The hope is basically boils down to letting the muslims commit a few more atrocities. Perhaps, enough people will wake up. Plan A is still that if I had five million dollars lying around, I'd donate it to al-Queda. Let muslims be muslims.

If there is a lesson for the future here, it is that people who cry peace when there is no peace are not simply false prophets, but the greatest danger. While I abhor barbarianism, I will make one exception. When the war comes that the peace activist have done everything possible to make as horrible as possible, I suggest torturing peace activists to death--a mild torture, like say feeding them unseasoned grits for their last meals. It would be well deserved. In contrast, for the muslims I suggest giving them a honorable death with the meal of their choice, though too many may want goat eyes for their last supper. We'll have to ration them, and perhaps sneak in a few pig eyes.

Why does something as evil and dysfunctional as the "peace movement" even exist? I think it's just yet another example of how we can go wrong. I recently read the relevant parts of Nietzsche's work on this subject. Sadly, Nietzsche's ideas seem to echo the anti-Semites he hated. He blamed the wealthy for not wanting war to interfere with their profits. But to give Nietzsche credit, US immigration policy seems to be accurately described by his model: the wealthy get a few extra bucks and everyone else gets screwed.

A light-hearted coda that in the end fails to be light-hearted: I just got my junk mail for the day. It's from the Citizens for Global Solutions, the ultimate leftist appeasement organization, and the Sierra Club's Blue Green alliance. Are direct marketers usually this far off? Do the Iranian Ayotallohs get sent many tracts on the ideas of Cyrus the Great of Persia? I suppose the mailman would be executed for delivering them. (It's probably worth noting that King Cyrus, who articulated the first human rights laws, would have been utterly ruthless to peace activists. Ancient societies couldn't afford to permit much self-destructiveness. Our condition may less far different than ancient societies than we would like to admit.)

An Anti-Christain's Defence of Christianity

I've always rejected the idea that is one right answer to the universe. My assumption as always been the universe changes in response to whatever answers or solutions we concoct. As a result of this and my recognition that the Catholic Church and many Protestant Church's ideas about birth control and abortion amount to nothing more than a sure path to ecological devastation, I've long been anti-Christian. I got a kick of Serrano's Piss Christ, though admittedly it is a rather childish form of anti-Christianity.

But, now, I feel the need to defend Christianity. (Is today Easter? Or is it next week? I don't really pay attention to such things.) What so infuriated me was a post on Daily Kos. The author seems to believe that it is ok to offend Christians, because Christ didn't forbid it, but not to offend muslims, because macho Mo had no sense of humour. I proclaim the secular freedom to offend both. I will continue to attack Christianity where it is evil, but for now my attacks on Christianity will be with a recognition of the brotherhood of my pagan Ancient Greek philosophy with Christianity. I wish to hold out my hand in alliance with Christianity against the monstrous evil of Islam. Isn't really too much for our Western pussy leftist to admit the truth of the basic decency of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and their followers? Would it really hurt our Western pussy leftists to examine their hatreds and react to real threats and not imagined ones? Look, I'm a gay atheist, and view the Mexico City policy as evil as anything Hitler or the Communist did (and no that is not hyperbole in my value system). Yet, Jerry Falwell would be perfectly happy to have lunch with me to show his basic decency towards those he disagrees with. He does not want me put in prison. The holy men of the muslim murder cult would want me stoned to death. This is a basic fact. I wish the Left Secularist, the Liberal Christian pussies, and the George W. faux-conservative Christians would deal with it.

The secular leftist, the Liberal Christian pussies, and George W. faux-conservative Christians are simply wrong to equate Christianity with Islam. Let's ask a question of each group in turn. How can secularist who hate Christianity give a free pass to the much more brutal religion of Islam? How can the ultimate religion of pussies--liberal Christianity--even pretend to themselves that pussy liberal Christianity says the same thing as a macho murder cult? How can any conservative Christian reject the clear message of the Bible that Christianity is the one true way?

Can we not admit our superiority to a cult that kills and whips young women for the perception of having had sex, that rips out girls genitalia, stones homosexuals, mutilates people for slight theft, kills people for their freedom of mind, produces a true apartheid states with non-muslims as second-class citizens, and so forth?

Let's Celebrate Manliness

I worry about being perceived as ridiculous, but I’m going to advocate manliness despite being an effeminate homosexual. How effeminate? Your grandmother could pick me out as gay. Obviously, I'm not holding myself out as a role model. I can only encourage. When twenty year old boys whine about slight physical exertion or their suffering from being in a house heated only to 60 degrees, I insult them like a drill sargent would. So please don't lisp with me as I say manliness does matter. The decline of Rome, a very complex decline, was certainly aided by a decline in manliness in Rome. As a result, the Romans became less willing and able to fight for Rome.
I have stories about how this is happening in America. I went to watch the band Savage Republic. The band is full of macho posturing and displays a manly joy in banging on things. A current song of the band is titled 1938 with the implied observation about World War. The band is not part of the decline, but I went to watch the band with a 22 year old gay boy who is part of the problem. He's not particularly effeminate, as the stereotypical 22 year old gay boy would have nothing to do with a band like Savage Republic. It's his job. He’s working in Whole Foods grocery market stacking vegetables into neat piles. I told him he is a fucking faggot for doing such a job, but I smiled as I said it, because he wasn’t going to be shamed into giving up his ridiculous toy poodle of a job and because he’s quite an attractive boy. Being an attractive man does require some sinuous sinews, and those sinews could be put to use roofing a house, doing landscaping, but his biceps are for beauty only—not very different than his fucking earring. So he does a job that an 80 year old women could do, and Whole Foods’ pussy clientèle get their tidy piles of vegetables. His pussiness is why we are stuck with lonely old women with nothing to do and mexican illegal immigrants doing the work that this boy should be doing. Illegal immigration is an issue because American boys in their early twenties aren’t willing to do a man’s work. To be non-sexist in a non-pussy sort of way, I’d also like to see American women in their early twenties do some hard physical labor.
Even more of disaster than the flood of Mexicans into America is the pussy peace movement and its attack on manly self-defense. John Lott has shown gun control increases crime. (Though looking somewhat like a space alien, John Lott is a great guy who does excellent research. I meet him when was doing research on voting in Congress instead of gun control, and I will vouch that he does quality research.) But gun control is a minor issue. One of the two great challenges of our time is how we confront the imperialist religion Islam. The peace movment want us to follow the fucking pussy Gandhi, who was murdered by a muslim. The fucking pussy pacifists don’t seem to get the implication of Gahndi’s murder: while pacifism will sometimes work against decent chaps like the Brits, it’s not going to work against savages like Nazis or Muslims. And yet what do we hear from peace activist but that we should do nothing to stop Iran from making nuclear weapons. What exactly do the pussy activists think Iran is going to do with nuclear weapons? What do Iranians mean by “wipe Israel from the map?” I wonder what other countries the Iranians hate?

The Right Wing Moonbats

Most conservatives have no difficulty identifying the common moonbat who can't fly because his has only a left wing, but they tend to be blind to the right-wing moonbat. I pay attention to this fascinating but dangerous species. When I heard that Mark Cuban, a billionaire entrepreneur and owner of a sports team, is funding the 9/11 conspiracy theory film "Loose Change", my suspicions about his motivation were immediate, an instantaneousness reflex on my behalf. Yet when I ask other people the most probable reason for Cuban's funding of film that claims 9/11 was a government conspiracy, instead of muslim conspiracy, they draw a blank.

My guess was that Cuban is a libertarian and perhaps a libertarian of the Ayn Rand denomination called Objectivism. (Technically, Rand and the Objectivists hate the Libertarians, but it is one of those Judean People's Front vs the People's Front of Judea fights and not easily understood by outsiders.) To test my theory of Cuban's belief, I went to the Wikipedia and, gosh darn it, I was right. If my understanding of Cuban's thinking is correct, Cuban is being slippery when he defended his decision to fund "Loose Change" on the O'Reilly Factor by saying "its better to have the film out in the open than lurk in the shadows." Cuban hints that we should understand his funding as similar in motive to those of former Senator Alan Cranston (D-CA) when he translated Mien Kampf into English. Yet, if I'm right about how Cuban thinks, his funding of "Loose Change" is in fact out of sympathy for its message. Many Libertarians have the moonbat perception that the United States government is a bigger threat than Islamic terrorist. Thus, Cathy Young, the editor of most important Libertarian magazine, Reason, holds that Islam is no threat to us. And like the moonbats of the left, libertarian views of the Iraqi can descend to hopes of US defeat just like what you would see in the Kucinich moonbat cave. The current Liberty Unbound journal features an article this month on why the surge in Iraq will fail.

At first glance, it makes no sense that the Libertarians would undermine the United States in the fight against Islam. Why would Libertarians hate the United States, one of the most stalwart defenders of capitalism in the world? In fact, the United States ranks fourth world-wide in Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom. Part of the problem is simply the United States is not a libertarian utopia, and American democracy stands in their way. Thus, as always with fanatics, the US government is evil. Permit to pause my anti-Libertarian rant to observe that we make more reasonable decisions when we view decision making as balancing between different values, when we think economically in terms of costs and benefits rather than when we pursue a true faith. Without this pluralism of values, we observe creatures like one libertarian I met who compared a publicly funded library to a Nazi death camp. I have found that my friend's over the top comparison of a public library is only slightly more unhinged than what you will encounter in the average discussion with a libertarian about the government, but there is no reason to listen to me. Please read up about libertarianism yourself, here's a link which will help you find many Libertarian sites on the web: http://www.rlc.org/Libertarian.html. And remember even if the idea seems a joke, they mean it. I had a discussion with a guy who had been an intern at the Cato Institute, a Libertarian think tank. He believed we could solve the Greenhouse Gas problem by painting Canada white with the stuff that makes toothpaste white. He was completely serious! I asked him what we would do if Canada got dusty. There are other amusing libertarian "solutions" to climate change out there if you google around, and while you're googling try "blue libertarian candidate Senate Montana" for more wacky libertarianism. And I once rented an apartment from a libertarian whose blue in the last story was orange! It was the magic of beta carotene, completely excessive amounts of beta carotene. The Libertarians are a colorful bunch.

In fairness to libertarians, I should point out that libertarian ideas about economic policy are in almost every case are the best ideas (e.g., the Cato Institute's ideas about Social Security) and that not every libertarian is anti-American. For instance, the Ayn Rand Institute has good ideas about how to deal with Iraq. In fact, I was too glib in my earlier statement about the lack of real difference between Libertarians and Objectivists. Some Objectivists do seem willing to defend the West. I welcome their aid. However, despite the exception of some Objectivists, we should view Libertarian organizations--despite being right wing--as every bit as disloyal to the West as John Murtha's congressional office.

faulty logic

Rational political dialog is a necessary step to solve our problems. It's too bad we have Sean Hannity instead. Of course, Hannity is just my example of the day. Just about any political commentator would do as well, but I just saw Hannity being egregiously irrational to people on both his left and his right. On his left, Hannity did a presentation of the top ten instances of liberal hate speech. For the most part, the liberal "hate speech" was wishful thinking on his part. He should ask himself if his interpretations are reasonable. Even worse was his conflation of race-mentioning speech with racism and hate speech. Hilary Clinton made some utterly harmless remark about asian Indians and Hannity used it as an example of hate speech. I suppose Hannity would also call hate speech something I said at age 18 years when I was trying to be seductive. I told a black boy that his skin was the most wonderful shade of chocolate. Send me to rehab, now!! And wait, I just committed another crime, I called a black boy of age 19, a "black boy"!! I'm worse than David Duke. I'm even worse than Ann Coulter!

And then there was Hannity arguing with someone to his right. Yes, there are people to Hannity's right. It was Reverend Thomas Euteneuer of Human Life International. Reverend Thomas Euteneuer thinks Hannity is a "heretic" for not fully supporting the Catholic Church's teaching on birth control. Now there was a chance for a rational conversation here. One could talk about the role of reason in the faith of the lay Catholic. Instead, Hannity went off on some attack on the Catholic Church for its sex scandals. Hannity would have accused any liberal of hating religion, if the liberal would have talked to a Catholic priest like he did. On the other hand Euteneuer, whom I hate in the same way I hate Osama bin Laden[*], tried to have a rational conversation. I wish Colmes would have tried to get Hannity to let Euteneuer talk more. Though I don't agree with Colmes often, he at least tries to be more rational than Hannity does.


[*]Both Euteneuer and Osama bin Laden spend every ounce of their energy attempting to recreate the Earth as a hell world. Euteneuer wants to lead us to environmental disaster and bin Laden to sharia.

What the Right Gets Right about Al Gore

I'm not clear whether I watched the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee's Climate Change Hearing on 3/21/2007 or MTV's Real World-DC. All I know is that Al Gore was there with a couple of Senators not intimidated by cameras into phony niceness. Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer(D-CA) and the ranking member James Inhofe(R-OK) kept it real with their petty bickering. Jerry Springer's idea of becoming a Senator from Ohio may be a natural job progression. I suppose it is a weakness on my behalf, but my reaction to petty nastiness is to turn away in disgust.

Despite Boxer and Inhofe challenging my resolve to watch Al Gore testify, I was able to make it through with the occasional use of the mute button. To give Gore credit, he talked with the gentility we would hope to observe in the Senate, which gets called "august body" for some reason. Yet, I was unimpressed by Gore's testimony. He almost certainly overstates about the effects of Global Warming and thus gives deniers like Inhofe the openings that they need to attack doing anything about Global Warming. There is another more subtle problem with overstating Global Warming. Our environmental problems are far greater than the carbon dioxide in the air. We face a collapse in the number of species on this planet as great as when a meteorite struck the Yucatan peninsula and caused massive devastation. It's somewhat delusional to think that this is not going to cause difficulties for homo sapien.

My disappointment with Gore began to crescendo with Inhofe's cross-examination. While I find Senator Inhofe a contemptible maggot, he really honed into Gore's tragic flaw in his bid for secular eco-sainthood. Inhofe hammered Gore's personal consumption of electricity at his home. Talking about the consumption of electricty at Gore's home is fair. I have seen attacks on Gore based on his airline travel, which is wrong as Gore does need to travel to publicize this issue--even if air travel is a major source of greenhouse gases. Gore's response to Inhofe was to simply repeat some silliness about carbon neutral energy. There is only form of carbon neutral energy that will amount to much in the short run. It's called nuclear power. It's not the windmills and pious hopes of the wine and cheese liberals. We should all remember the Second Law of Thermodynamics when people start suggestimg we need more research into alternative energy. Except for nuclear energy, virtually all the rest of the energy on this planet ultimately comes from the sun. The basic implication of this is that Gore is paying a little more for energy to assuage liberal guilt without the chance that his solutions will have any impact. Actually, Gore reaction is worse than hypocrisy. If one wants eco-sainthood, one should be able to consume less energy than the average America not twelve times as much. Unless Gore is running some sort of commune and his household is twenty times the average American household size, I can't even begin to understand how Gore's energy consumption is reasonable. If he is running a commune more power to him.

An Orwellian Note from the Sierra Club

I continue to be a member of the Sierra Club so that I can take the occasional hike, though my feelings towards the commissars who head the Sierra Club is little short of total loathing. My loathing is not that we disagree, as I strive to be tolerant about disagreement.

The issue instead is that the commissars sabotaged democracy within the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club used to have vibrant elections where different viewpoints were expressed. The elections were real elections about policy--not the rubber stamp events that typically occur when a major corporation elects a board of directors or when a leftist dictatorship holds an election. Sadly, the Sierra Club Board of Directors decided that debating real issues was not appropriate for a Sierra Club election, because some people wanted the Sierra Club to support efforts by right-wing politicians to reduce immigration in the United States and thus keep the population relatively low. Meanwhile, the Board of Directors want to walk the path of leftist political correctness with their blue/green alliance with labor. So, they made it much more difficult for non-approved candidates to become a candidate for the Board of Directors, and then proceeded to lie about their opponents in the media, and in Sierra Club meetings. The Board of Directors called their opponents "racist" and "far right". Peculiarly enough, I found out about these charges just after a phone call to the leader of Sierra Club dissidents, Alan Kuper. He struck me as a typical leftist pussy--not nearly the man Ann Coulter is. While he wants to keep down the population of the United States, he didn't even seem to get my ideas about how we can have ecologically useful economic growth and he certainly didn't like my idea that it would be environmentally useful to allow to chemical warfare and forbid instead huge traditional bombs.

Anyway--to get to the punchline--the envelop for this year's Sierra Club elections have the slogan "Make Democracy Work" on them.

Further note: Alan Kuper someway managed to get on the ballot this year. Last year, he had a whole slate of candidates to run with him. I shall send Alan an email and find out how he managed to get on the ballot. If he has anything interesting to say, I'll add it to this post. Alan Kuper has my full support, even if he is a leftist pussy.

The Lynn Woolsey Counseling Center for Battered Women

I watched the latest C-SPAN interview with Representative Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) about Iraq. She is a co-founder of the Out of Iraq Caucus in the House, but didn't manage to sound as crazy as one would guess. She admitted that it would take six months to withdraw, but Iraq is not the issue that concerns me.
It is the portion of the interview about Iran, which starts about 18:40 minutes into the interview. Congresswomen Woolsey doesn't consider Iran to be a particular threat--"not if we use some diplomacy". I was truly impressed by this statement. If I had the funds, I'd would start The Lynn Woolsey Counseling Center for Battered Women. It would teach battered women to return to their spouse--of either gender--and deal with their batterers through diplomacy. Discussion can solve all problems!

Religion, Politically Correct Lies, & the Environment

Reuters published yesterday a short gushing piece titled "World's Churches Go Green and Rally to Cause" by Paul Majedie. Majedie fantasizes an ecumenical movemnt by Christians, Muslims, and Jews to fight global warming and other environmental causes. The handicapping for the muslims is pretty obvious. After spending a sentence or two on the environmental ideas of the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, leader of the Anglican Church, and Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew, the spiritual leader of Orthodox Churches, Majedie goes on provide concrete examples of synagogues being environmental. We then get to the muslim bit. Majedie quotes Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra, "We believe that we are God's deputies on the planet and we have been given the responsibility to ensure we use God's gift in the correct manner and leave it in a fit state which can be passed on to future generations." Who is this Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra? A major muslim religious leader? No, he is chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain's inter-faith relations committee. In other words, he is the Muslim paid to the lie to the infidels about Islam, in accordance with the muslim practice of taqiya.

I started wondering how Majedie found Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra for this quote. Obviously, there are all sorts of possibilities, but the most likely is that environmental liberal Christians suggested Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra. The liberal Christians would have got to known him from the inter-faith relations committee, where he lies to them. Not that Mogra's lies are unwelcome. The liberal Christians need them so the basic tenet of their faith that all religions say the same thing can be validated. No matter that the idea of all religions saying the same thing is an idea more closely related to Hinduism than anything in the Bible. The liberal Christians will determine the Muslims aren't all that different than Quakers, and Mogra is there to help them. Mogra makes the liberal Christians happy and if the liberal Christians need someone to say muslims are concerned about the environment, I'm sure Mogra is happy to oblige. Everybody gets to feel good.

Then, there are those other times when the liberal Christian feels that fundamentalist Christian say something very different than they. The liberal Christian may even sneer at the fundamentalists for believing in nonsense like Creationism. Yet, isn't the fact that religions say different things a tab bit more obvious than biological evolution?

Here's the problem with lying to yourself as the liberal Christians and politically correct are doing. You actually start telling your lies to other people, which is a sin in Christianity, even in liberal Christianity. Lying is even a sin for the secular media's political correctness. So what about this sentence in Majedie's article, " And for Muslims, the issue[environmentalism] is just as pressing"?

To be fair here, Majedie also had to work hard to ignore obvious facts about Catholicism when he reported that "Catholics are also very much singing from the same hymn sheet with Pope Benedict making protection of the environment one of the keynotes of his papacy." Majedie did not mention birth control in the next sentence.

The End Racial Profiling Act

I have an amusing story relevant to the End Racial Profiling Act (EPRA), which would de facto make it illegal to question a muslim about terrorism. Before the amusing story, I thought I should review that logic of how ERPA would make it illegal to question muslims about terrorism, as obviously, the bill doesn't state that explicitly. Pretend you are a screener at a airport and an obvious muslim comes up and acts suspicious. If ERPA passed and you search the muslim without finding evidence of bad intent, you would be accused of racism and possibly fired and even fined! Islamic terrorists are smart enough to send out a few suspicious decoys until the airport screeners learn to just not question muslims.

Now, the promised amusing story: I talked to a homeless man already taking advantage of leftist sentiment about racial profiling. The University near where I live is using its police force to chase the homeless out of the area. I'm not wise to know whether I should condemn this or support this. So the homeless man's response is to wear one of those wretched Arab scarves. The University police now leave him alone. The actions of the University police are a weird, but altogether expected, leftist mixture of political correctness and disdain for the actual poor.

Islam and the Green Left

When I accuse the left of being in a de facto political alliance with Islamic fascist, I often encounter doubt. I've been suggesting David Horowitz's book, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, but David Horowitz is hardly the guy to convince someone on the moderate left—even if Horowitz is right. Thus, I needed to come up with a better argument. I now have some talking points about the left/muslim alliance in Europe. I only learned these details yesterday, when I was inspired by Snouck's blog which I found at the Infidel Blogger's Alliance to read the Wikipedia about Dutch political parties. It was the GreenLeft Party—a left-wing environmental party that I found particular disturbing. While the GreenLeft's Party economic policy is considerably more sane than the Dutch Socialist Party, a Marxist Party, it surprisingly seems to exceed it in attracting Islamic radicals.

The GreenLeft party has had two radical Islamic terrorists as members of parliament. I suppose one could be overlooked given the randomness on Earth, but two is too much when the GreenLeft currently has seven members in the lower house and five in the upper house. This is after an election in which the GreenLeft did relatively well. One GreenLeft party member and so called “human rights activist”, Farah Karimi, disclosed in a book her participation in the Iranian Revolution. Her revelation was greeted with silence as she had already told the party board. In November 2005, the GreenLeft party board asked Sam Pormes to give up his seat in the Upper House of Dutch Parliament, because “continuing rumors about his involvement with guerrilla-training in Yemen in the 1970s and the 1977 train hijacking by Moluccan youth and allegations of welfare fraud were harmful for the party.” When Pormes refused to step down, the party board tried to expel him from the party. In March 2006, a general party meeting sided with Pormes, and party chair Herman Meijer resigned. In other words, the GreenLeft party activists weren't only just fine with having a member of the Iranian revolution as a member of the party, they approved of having a known terrorist and welfare cheat as their representative in government—over the objection of their party's leadership. I don't know what could say de facto alliance better than that.

As an avid environmentalist, this radical Islam/Green alliance puzzles me. Of course, as I have ranted for ages, Green parties are actually Red parties who have appropriated environmentalism much to the determent of environmentalism. Still, Green Parties have some residual concern about the environment--even if misdirected--as in this instance: how do people who worry about greenhouse gases oppose nuclear power? Admittedly, the Green energy solution relies on renewable sources, but it is peculiar that a group of people who sneer at Creationism propose an energy policy every bit as magical. To give the Greens the benefit of the doubt, my wanting to look at the details is such a weird anal-rententive fetish. Anyway, I suppose the more urgent question here is why do people who oppose nuclear power think it is just dandy for Iran to have atomic weapons?

The flip side of this question is why are muslims willing to join Green parties. Blowing stuff up hardly strikes me as an expression of concern for the Earth. I suppose there has been some environmental terrorism--which may make sense internally--but its motivation is far different than Islamic wars of conquest. There is something about imperialism (and especially of the Islamic variety) that just doesn't jibe with environmentalism. Why wouldn't jihadists join the Dutch Socialist Party, which received more than three times as many votes as the GreenLeft party. Marxist romanticism about revolution is similar to muslim sentiments about jihad. Also, I can't help but note that one of the important environmental issues is greenhouse gases, and muslim holy men tend to come from countries with a strong interest in doing nothing about reducing greenhouse gases.

My suspicion the reason for this Green Left/Muslim alliance is that the multiculturalism cult has done most damage among the type of environmentalists who considers themselves trendy and intellectual. Sadly, this bizarre alliance seems to be spreading to the United States. The Democratic National Committee at their winter meeting had a pro-Hezbollah iman speak. I bet this iman claims to think the environment is an important issue.

Why Morality Shouldn't Be a Matter of Fetishes

Morality is a means to create a better world, but too often we make a fetish out of some past event such that the future is made worse. The simple moral narratives we tell are more often wrong and outdated than not. As an example let's consider the media's decision not to make front page news out of three muslims who were beat up at Guilford College in North Carolina and their alleged assailants were charged with ethnic intimidation. This would appear to be the sort of news that the mainstream media loves. What could be more delightful to them than a story in which they can cast white Southerners as bigots? After all, didn't white Southerners have terrible, bigoted laws in their past? And isn't that Pat Robertson fellow from somewhere in the South? And what could be a better display of a reporter's moral purity than to portray muslims as victims? Sadly for the mainstream media, they couldn't make a Duke rape case out it. USA Today covered it in their college football section. Tragically, the alleged assailants were racially mixed.

I'm not trying to make a point about the bigotry of the mainstream media against the Southern Whites--though it certainly exists. I'm trying to say we need to move on from the crimes of now mostly dead Southern white men and stop fetishizing the historical South. This is not to Southern White Men or rednecks aren't without their faults. The anti-environmental ethos of NASCAR disgusts me. Rednecks haven't caught on how to defend deer hunting in this century, and I would be glad to give them some rhetorical advise about the issue: the environmental arguments for deer hunting are overwhelming. But let's compare these contemporary redneck moral issues of NASCAR and deer hunting to the heinous cruelty of foie gras production in France or Muslim mutilation of girl's genitalia or the anarchy in Somalia or Sudanese slavery or Chinese prison camps or random abuses of people in Nepal or countries enslaving people to go to the UN and listen to deadly boring speeches and so forth. (I'm so glad that John Bolton was emancipated!) We must get beyond the moral stories we tell ourselves and think about the world as it is and how it could be. Nothing is helped by making a moral fetish of the wrongs of the South over half a century ago.

Nor are our moral fetishes particularly accurate. I harbor the suspicion that the worst crime by whites against another people was what the Belgians did in the Congo, but someway that never gets mentioned. Nazism is name of evil in the 20th century. Yet, if one looks at the actual killings, the actual torture and so forth, the Communists were far worse.

Since our moral fetishes are both out-dated and inaccurate in their historical account of evil, I suggest that we shelf them and talk earnestly about what type of world we'd like to have using the facts of the world we see today. I think two facts in particular need addressing: an imperialistic religious cult that is obtaining more and more nuclear weapons and the destruction of our natural eco-systems by human overpopulation--global climate change or no global climate change due to greenhouse gases. (Greenhouse gases are quite likely to have serious effects on the Earth's climate, but if someone wants to doubt them, there is a smörgåsbord of other environmental risks we are taking.)

the ultimate dhimmi

Because of my relatively unusual position in society, I encounter the most freakish dhimmis in America. I thought I had meet the ultimate in a transsexual squatter dhimmi who liked to discuss from a "Christian perspective" how cool is muslim commitment to jihad. Today, I meet someone even more insane. He's a extremely effeminate black gay man and he wants to have the word "Jihad" tattooed over his heart, because he thinks "the word sounds so great." And my social needs are such that I have to pretend that he's not completely fucking insane. So there I was listening to him congratulate himself on his fashion sense in wearing one of those horrid Arab scarves in support of those oppressed Palestinians. I wonder if I'm in Hell having to pretend that he is sane.

(note of explanation: My life is happy despite the loons that I encounter. I suppose someone sane has to verify their existence for those who may doubt such people exist.)