He Should Have Known Better

I do have to wonder what he was studying in his self-declared subject area of sociology, because if he had been aware of the true landscape of male-female dynamics, rape, and crime, I don't think he would have so blithely committed the chain of errors that led to an arrest for rape and subsequent 14-month legal ordeal:

'But she didn't seem drunk to me. Merry, yes. Off her face, no. If she'd been all over the place, falling, not making any sense, I wouldn't even have thought about sleeping with her, of course I wouldn't. It would have been disrespectful to her, and to me.' [I]t just became . . . madness.'

The woman opened her eyes, took one look at him and became hysterical.

'She was just screaming at me, saying that because she didn't remember anything I must have raped her. She was going on about how the law had been changed to protect women from people like me. [EW: from the other article "‘The law has been changed for f*****s like you. If you’re too drunk to give consent then it’s rape.’ ". What our matriarchal legal system has wrought].

I was completely thrown, just bewildered.

Putting aside the obvious issues of equal protection under the law and feminine accountability, of which neither were much present in this case, this guy screwed up by the numbers and ended up being screwed by this cougar. In more ways than one. Enumerating, in no particular order:

- He allowed himself to be alone with a female who was not a member of his immediate family. Bad move #1.
- He slept with a woman who was not his wife. Bad move #2.
- He slept with a woman who had been drinking. Bad move #3.
- He slept with a woman who had recently banged other men, also while she was drunk. And he was aware of this. Bad move #4.
- She was an attorney. Bad move #5.
- She was old enough to be his mum. Bad move #6.
- He did the gentlemanly thing and stuck around for the morning after. Bad move #7.

At any point in this mishap chain, had he exercised some better judgement, this would not have happened. Luckily he was acquitted, other guys aren't so fortunate after rolling the dice in this manner. But like he says, it would be preferable for him to have been accused of murder and not rape, for his DNA is in a registry, he has a record, and his name has been soiled forever. Sex crimes have been so politicized by the hysterical class that simply being accused of one is sufficient evidence of where-there's-smoke-there's-fire guilt in the eyes of many men and nearly all women.

What I don't understand is why he is protecting the name of the child-like woman--despite her physical maturity--who falsely accused him of rape. She needs to be named and shamed. Justice requires it, otherwise other men will suffer the same fate. It is precisely because immature women like her can do what she did to him with impunity that the epidemic exists and spreads. She must be held to public account for her outrageous and reckless behavior--and I'm not just talking about the provocative clothing that this officer of the court evidently wears to Court. She must be taught that simply because she claims to not remember the previous evening's funnery, or if she regrets the sex after the fact, that does not constitute rape. Otherwise, disinterested men such as myself learn quickly to take the claim of rape by a woman with a grain of salt.

Still, one needs to be responsible for one's actions. As we've seen, western civilization seems to have an allergy to holding women accountable for theirs. Thus, men need to be extra-special cautious when dealing with the female sex as a result. To wit: the primary ways for men to get into trouble with the matriarchal state in this day and age almost all involve a woman/girl to some extent or another. Thus, probably the biggest thing a man can do to ensure his freedom is to not shag a chick before you're married to her. Barring that, prudence dictates avoiding being alone with a female of any age who is not your sister or mother, that is unless you have a wingman (or capture everything on tape). Also not bedding a woman who has had one drop of alcohol is a good idea. And so is maintaining sperm surety, especially when shagging a lonely older woman with a possible case of baby rabies.

Take note of the misfortune of others, my brothers, and act accordingly.

HT: Archivist at False Rape Society

The Future of Society

I found this theory interesting. David Ronfeldt (view his profile here) has postulated that Western civilization is on the cusp of transition to a new kind of society, according to his TIMN framework:

Basically, the model works like this (with due apologies to Ronfeldt for my butchery of his concept): All societies start out at the tribal (T) level. Over time, depending on the dynamics of the base (Tribal) case, they may add hierarchical institutions (I) that lay on top of the tribal layer. A prime example of such an institution...in a neat dovetailing with Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel...is the development of the technology of a bureaucracy, which diminishes the authority of the tribe and allows an expansion in size and increase their span of control to form societies, even empires. This T+I society may then "marketize" itself, which again diminishes the authority of the institution (usu the State), transfers that authority to the individual in a limited way. The T+I+M individual buys and sells and interacts with others not so much on the basis of familial or nation-state ties, but on the basis of markets, which are the primary mechanism of social justice and source of rule-making. Ronfeldt's thesis is that most Western countries are at the T+I+M level and have been for some time; they are now on the edge of making a transition to the "quadriform" T+I+M+N level, where the "+N" leverages communication technologies to enable loose associations of people--networks of NGOs or activist groups--to interact with other loose associations outside of a tribal, nation-state, or marketized framework.



Ronfeldt states in the explanation of his model that the look and feel of each T+I+M+N variant all depends on the nature of the base tribal case; this base case determines the character of the subsequent layers built on top of it. Which helps explain why some societies never progress beyond the tribe (like, say, some of the Islamic ones, whose tribal character is shall we say abnormally hostile to change) and why others fail to make the transition and get stuck at a level (Ronfeldt uses the socialist dictatorship of Cuba as an example). Reviewer John Robb of Global Guerrillas also warns against regression, that a society under too much stress may not only fail to make the transition, but even devolve toward an earlier form of organization.

Ronfeldt's model aptly sums up one of the chief challenges for the quadriform T+I+M+N society: the threat posed by criminal networks or other violent non-state syndicates; basically a domestic version of the 4GW challenge. I however, think the prognosis for Western T+I+M societies is much worse than Ronfeldt conceptualizes. It's not just "turbulence" as Ronfeldt put it; technology has allowed agile, nimble T*-level groups--related not necessarily by blood by also by ideology (which is why I label them T* to distinguish them from the T tribes in Ronfeldt's taxonomy)--to skip the intermediate levels of development, form T*+N societies, and then directly challenge the hegemony of large, slow-moving T+I+M societies. Worse, Western T+I+M societies are busy undermining the "T" in their own societies, by implementing policies that remake the nuclear family into a sub-department of the "I" level, in effect making the family an extension of the state, rather than the foundation on which the State rests. This policy makes the State a very vulnerable I+M form, which is less able to respond robustly to T*+N 4GW warfare, as the most atomistic components of the State now lack the strong ties of kinship and instead depend on the weaker ties of association or allegiance.

At any rate, Ronfeldt's vision is an interesting one. Perhaps I am too hide-bound in my conceptualization of society, but I have a difficult time seeing how a complex society can long survive the obliteration of its foundational layer and still make the jump to become a I+M+N tri-form society. I think the future belongs to the T*+Ners.

An Eye For An Eye...

...literally. In tribute to Mike T's suggestion that implementing Mosaic Law would cut down on a whole lotta crime, I give you this:

After 17 operations, Ameneh Bahrami is desperate for revenge and has been given the green light by a Tehran court.

“He will lie in front of me drugged. I will feel my way to his eyes and then drop 20 drops of acid in each eye,” Ameneh (30) explained.

The electrical engineer was attacked by Majid Emovahedi (25) because she had constantly turned down his marriage proposals. Majid waited for her as she left work in September 2004 and threw sulphuric acid over her head. She went blind immediately. Ameneh Bahrami moved to Spain, where she has had 17 operations on her eyes and face.

Yow. Guess that'll put the damper on repeats of this crime in the future.

Urinary Olympics

To which I compare the distance of mine to the distance of others:

MICHELLE MALKIN
V/D: 252,763
VL: 5 seconds
R/V: 16.65 words
WR/D: 4,208,503 words

INSTAPUNDIT
V/D: 380,532
VL: 1 second
R/V: 3.33 words
WR/D: 1,267,172 words

DAILY KOS
V/D: 726,387
VL: 1 second
R/V: 3.33 words
WR/D: 2,418,869 words

ANN ALTHOUSE
V/D: 23,741
VL: 200 seconds
RPV: 666 words
WR/D: 15,811,506 words

DR. HELEN
V/D: 5,750
VL: 359 seconds
RPV: 1,195 words
WR/D: 6,873,953 words

RACHEL LUCAS
V/D: 4,380
VL: 105 seconds
R/V: 350 words
R/D: 1,531,467 words

VOX POPOLI
V/D: 5,143
VL: 136 seconds
R/V: 452 words
R/D: 2,324,636 words

Here are EW's stats, by humbling comparison:
Avg Visits/Day: 232
Avg Visit Length: 243 seconds
Words Read / Visit: 802 words
Words Read / Day: 186,040 words

So what to make of this? Well, I don't get lots of hits, but those that do visit stick around and read for a little while.

To which I say thank you for the honor of you lending me your time.

Quote O' The Day

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation, is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.

Ernest Hemingway

That's No Moon...

...that's Uranus:



Tee hee.

Quote O' The Day

The first POTUS, on the proper scope of our nation's foreign policy:

The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible

George Washington, in his farewell address, 1796

Guns Don't Kill People...

...people kill people. And in this case, it was probably a good thing, as a CCW-permit holder issued a one-way ticket for a eternal celestial dirt nap to a would be robber:

The robber entered wearing a ski mask. He approached a clerk, showed his gun and demanded money, said Miami police spokesman Jeff Giordano. A customer eyed him and the two started arguing. The customer had a concealed-weapons permit and his gun -- and the two exchanged gunfire. The robber crumpled to the floor and was pronounced dead at the scene. The customer, with several gunshot wounds, was in serious but stable condition at Jackson Memorial Hospital's Ryder Trauma Center.

Police are rarely there when you need them to be. Most times, they just bring the yellow tape and try to find someone to pin it on. Imagine how much safer and freer our society would be if people took more responsibility for their own safety and security, instead of delegating that natural right to government agents.

Maybe There's a Reason Why Vox Moved to Italy

Because it seems the Italians are starting to do something to climb out of the hole they're in, rather than keep digging, like Speaker Pelosi and Co insist we do:

ROME (Reuters) - Italy's center-right government wants to introduce a 30 percent cap on the number of foreigners per school class in the belief that it will help immigrant children integrate with Italians, a minister said on Tuesday. Quotas are the latest in a string of initiatives aimed at regulating immigrants, including tougher laws against illegal immigrants, which have boosted Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in opinion polls but also provoked accusations of racism.

The simple fact of the matter is that uncontrolled migration is lethal for the host culture. Anyone who lives in Houston, Miami, the PRK, or anywhere along the border with Mexico, can attest to that fact. There is no reason for large groups of migrants to assimilate, and what's more, our politicians seem to bend over backwards to turn American culture into a Latin American culture or whatever culture, just as long as it isn't the culture of dead white European men. Which is precisely how Rome fell--by Roman elite failing to see the merit in Roman culture propagating itself, and to invite the barbarians in by the hordes.

Seems that some in Europe are starting to realize that their civilization is being subsumed by people from other civilizations. The Dutch have realized it to a certain extent, and the Danes too. Even the Germans have started to wake up from 70 years of self-hate and stand up for native Germans. Personally I think it is a matter of cultural survival. And no amount of accusations of racism by the etymologically challenged will dissuade me.

Shall Arrest Laws Pervert DV Justice

Seems that states where police are compelled by law to arrest someone in a DV call-out have 60% lower conviction rates for DV arrests compared to states with discretionary-arrest laws. Thus it suggests to me that feminist legislation that strikes a "gets tough" pose with DV--by requiring LEOs to arrest the "predominant aggressor", a loaded term that translates into "arrest the man" as we shall see below--squanders resources and clogs the criminal justice system with innocents, rendering such legislation ineffective at best and perverse bills of attainder at worst. Ironically, it's even-odds that these innocent men are probably themselves the victim of assaultive behavior of a woman. (Click here to read more about the problems regarding shall-arrest policies).

I came across this statistical result via this article by DV researcher Richard Davis, itself written in response to the a paper titled Police Officer Perceptions of Intimate Partner Violence, or POPIV, that appears in the November 2008 edition of the journal Violence and Victims. The POPIV paper was written by two women, and from reading the abstract, it's clear to me the prejudices the POPIV authors have regarding police officers and DV.

Davis ignores the POPIV author's obvious motivations and gets down to an analysis of the data that the POPIV authors collected. And the data is damning for the DV mavens who try to snow all of us into believing that (a) violent, injurious DV is rampant, and (b) it is the men who primarily initiate it. For instance, the POPIV data shows that in nearly 2/3 of DV call-outs sampled by POPIV were for verbal altercations, a situation where technically no DV occurred (unless your definition of DV is so wide as to include "verbal violence"). In addition, in another 1/5 of DV call-outs it was difficult for the responding officers to determine which party was the aggressor and which was the victim. Thus, the POPIV's own data shows that for slightly more than 4/5 of DV call-outs, the responding officer had significant difficulty in determining who the initiator of the DV incident was, if there was even an incident at all. Davis, who apparently has a penchant for understatement, wrote:

Hence, the vast majority...of IPV interventions can be problematic for responding officers. The POPIPV [data] documents that in the vast majority of interventions, there is a great deal of difficulty establishing proper probable cause for an arrest.

Yet, in this difficult environment where probable cause for an arrest may be difficult to establish, some states have shall-arrest laws that require an LEO to arrest someone in a situation like this. So how does an LEO pick who gets hauled off to jail? Davis again:

Contemporary, unprecedented IPV training curriculums establish a bias found nowhere else in the criminal justice system. IPV trainers simply refer to females as victims and males as offenders.

Some states have provided “primary or dominant aggressor” laws and IPV training programs that are based on what the POPIPV refers to as “gender clues.” The intent of the “gender clues” is to suggest to officers which gender is the offender. These primary or dominant aggressor laws or training imply that when there is little physical evidence or it is difficult to determine who is guilty, the officers should make an arrest based on the difference in size and strength of the partners or which partner of the two appears most fearful.

Thus we have a situation in which feminists, in an effort to get police to "take DV seriously"--when Davis' article suggests that they always have, even back in the bad old days prior to the 1980s--have created a Napoleonic law-enforcement nightmare for men. Despite the fact that only a small proportion of DV call-outs involve physical violence of any type, and a tiny fraction result in injury, and more likely than not the man is not the initiating party, a whole ton of innocent men are sucked into the DV criminal justice machinery for no reason other than they are men. And given how DV allegations are oftimes the opening salvo in a divorce filing, a man may find his family gone--or that he's been locked out of his own home and forced to stay away via an ex parte TRO--when the police let him go, prosecutors drop charges, or judges dismiss the case for lack of evidence. But by then it's too late, as Mom has already established herself as having custody of the children and residence of the family home. This pre-emptive strike is key, as judges are loathe to disturb the status quo, and innocent men may find themselves on the outside of their families looking in.

Yep, such bias in the criminal justice system does no one any favors. Men as a whole, because they're the targets of such outrageous feminist-inspired jurisprudence, and true victims of DV of either sex because the system is clogged with the chaff that drowns out the wheat.

HT: Glenn Sacks

Don't Talk to the Police

An interesting video about the 5th Amendment by law school prof and criminal defense attorney James Duane. Throughout the entire thing, I kept thinking of Cardinal Richelieu's statement that: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him".

In case you don't want to watch a 28 minute video, here are the highlights:

- Even the Feds don't know how many Federal criminal statutes there are, let alone lesser state and local laws. They estimate there are over 10,000 Federal crimes, scattered across 50 titles and 27,000 pages of the USC. Some of these laws even make it a crime to be in violation of foreign laws on US soil, believe it or not. Since ignorance of this multitude of laws is no excuse, you can be convicted of breaking a law that even the cops themselves don't know about until they get a hold of you and want to do something about it, and do some research.

Thus, Duane advises that we are staunch about our 5th Amendment rights:

- Don't talk to the cops because it won't help. And you can't talk your way out of being arrested.

- If you are guilty--or innocent--don't talk to the cops because you may admit your guilt with no benefit in return...and innocent people confess all the time to crimes that they didn't commit.

- Even if you are innocent and deny guilt and mostly tell the truth, you can get easily carried away and tell some little "pop off" falsehood under the stress of the interrogation or make some other little mistake that will hang you.

- Even if you are innocent and only tell the truth, you will always give the police some piece of information that may be used to against you.

- Even if you are innocent and only tell the truth and do not tell the police anything incriminating, your answers may still convict you if the cops don't 100% correctly recall what you said.

- Even if you are innocent, tell the truth, don't tell the police anything incriminating, and the interview is taped, the police may find some evidence, true or false, that calls your testimony into question.




Note: you may find the second half of this talk, given by Officer George Bruch, here.

Maybe I Spoke Too Fast

Last November, I wrote a post that highlighted how the leadership and many of the rank-and-file of the military would reject an unlawful order such as one to forcibly disarm American citizens on American soil. This article over at WND, pointing to this website (HT: SCS), seems to reinforce that point.

However, on issues that aren't quite so cut-and-dried, I fear that our nation's ignorance of the law and "Good German" attitude toward law enforcement, make it easy for people to do dimwit stuff such as this and decide to employ the military where it has no business being:

On March 10, after a report of an apparent mass murder in Samson, Ala., 22 military police soldiers from Fort Rucker, Ala., along with the provost marshal, were sent to the city of Samson,” Harvey Perritt, spokesman for the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) at Fort Monroe, Va., told CNSNews.com on Monday.

The troops were apparently not deployed by the request of Alabama Gov. Bob Riley -- or by the request of President Obama, as required by law.

Of course, the PCA has been eroded to the point that all it takes is a resolution from Congress to order the military into battle against American citizens for the flimsiest of reasons. And I understand that there are all kinds of exceptions built into the law to permit military involvement in civil law enforcement as a result of the nearly three decade long War on Drugs; one of the unfortunate side effects of this is to blur the line between lawful and unlawful military assistance to civil authorities.

So while the decision to deploy the above company of MPs from Fort Rucker into Samson appears to be unlawful, it would take very little to make it lawful. And that's the scary part of all this--if the military can be used improperly, and go along with it so easily, in a time of relative peace and calm, imagine what could happen when seriously bad things are happening. Officers and senior noncoms who failed this easy test of an unlawful order may be presented with harder ones, like, hypothetically, an order to disarm law-abiding citizens during a natural disaster or disperse peaceable assemblies of protesters. And be fired or worse if they disobey.

All that said, it was this quote that got me:

Stromenger said the town needed help--calls had gone out to all police departments in the area. “We only have a five-man police department,” he told CNSNews.com. “We had officers from all surrounding areas helping out. There were a lot of streets to be blocked off and there had to be someone physically there to block them off. That’s what these MPs were doing. I don’t think they were even armed. The troops helped keep nosy people away.”

This is so easy it's painful for me to even have to say it: Call. Out. The. Posse. That's what sheriff's have the right to do. How easy would it have been to call up a reserve force of trained citizens who volunteer to be deputized in an emergency like this? All it would take would be a little bit of pre-planning. We've so locked ourselves into this notion that the militia is the National Guard that we've lost what it means to be citizens or what the responsibilities of a citizen are. Call out the militia. Raise the posse. Do what you need to do to keep order. And in Alabama or other such right-wing states, I doubt you'll have trouble filling your posse with quality people who wish to do their duty to society and do it well.

Conservative Women’s Attitudes Are An Issue

Until MRAs convince family-minded conservative women to look beyond their own gardens and realize that men’s issues are really their issues, I don’t think that the men’s rights movement will make much progress. And if this woman’s (visit her website here) article in the WashTimes is a reliable indicator of the state of conservative female thought, it’s going to be a while before that happens:

I'm the mother of three girls, and I happen to think Mr. Obama's new council won't win the battle of the sexes. That's because the best thing anyone can do for American women and girls is to encourage men and boys to “man up.” A council on men and boys would promote stable marriage as the best avenue to improve the lives and living conditions of America's women and families. A council on men and boys would address the crisis in American manhood that results in the scourge of infidelity, divorce, lack of commitment and fatherhood with multiple partners. A council on men and boys would seek to eliminate the objectification of women in the media. It would battle our hypersexual culture by fighting against the “hook-up” mentality that defines the way in which young men view young women. And most importantly, it would stamp out the violence against women that emanates from men's widespread exposure and growing addiction to pornography. Such a council would work to train a new generation of boys to become real men, who honor and uphold women as equals in the workplace, the community and the home - not because the government regulates such an attitude, but because it's right. A council on men and boys also would address the underlying problems that create “women's issues” such as child care, inadequate pay and domestic violence. These aren't “women's issues,” but issues related to the systemic collapse of the American family.

Hmmm. First, let me start with the shaming language. Every time I hear a social con, male or female, tell a man or men to “man up”, I reflexively reach for my wallet because it’s about to get picked. The phrase “man up” has become synonymous with someone else’s normative concept of responsibility, and we know what taking responsibility means for men these days…it means that someone’s telling a man he’s gotta pay for this-or-that. It’s not his presence, his contributions as a man that are desired, but the resources that he generates through the sweat of his brow. In other words, it his money that is coveted, not the man as a person or as a father or as a husband.

Next, while her focus on strengthening marriage is laudable, Hicks needs to pick some new villains. Not all of society’s ills are due to male negligence or malfeasance. So while men and women both are unfaithful to their spouses in roughly equal rates, it is women, not men, who propagate the scourge of marriage absence and/or destruction in our society and who objectively have the most difficulty with commitment. Moreover, there are indicators that women now lead men in average number of sexual partners. And it is women who encourage and promote their self-objectification in the media…they need no help from the men (who themselves are harmed by the proliferation of sexuality in the culture) to achieve this dubious feat. Furthermore, an objective assessment of the facts surrounding IPV would demonstrate to Hicks that women too are perpetrators as well as are victims of DV, and that women need exhortations to stamp out intimate partner violence as much if not more than men. In regards to the visual pornography-DV connection, Hicks may have a point if she is speaking against the most violent and depraved sort of visual porn. Yet she should also realize that women’s visual porn consumption is not insignificant either, and on top of that she fails to assay women’s $1B/yr consumption of romance fiction, which is emotional pornography. The deleterious effects of this sort of pornography on relationships is something that hasn’t been seriously measured to my knowledge, but I doubt that it promotes realistic expectations of male-female relations.

Third, Hicks’ op-ed exposes just how much femarxism has permeated the consciousness of even self-described conservative women, and how much it has blinded women to the effects of that political philosophy. For instance, she speaks of training men and boys to “honor and uphold women as equals in the workplace, the community and the home…because it’s right”, when it is the very act of considering women as equals when they are not--intellectually, behaviorally, physically--that results in their being treated with contempt. Women are clearly not equal to men, and it baffles me that they would wish to be considered as such. Women and girls are happier, fare better, and are treated better, by themselves, by other women, and by men, when they do not attempt to be the equal of men but embrace the differential nature of their creation and the role created for them. In addition, the sudden “need” for child care and the collapse of the American family that Hicks bemoans are foreseeable consequences of the political philosophy that she subscribes to: besides aiming to make women the legal superior of men (in order to compensate for the physical/intellectual/behavioral inequalities addressed above), femarxism aims to eliminate marriage, redefine the family as mother and child(ren), and make the authority of parents--particularly the father, but also the mother--contingent upon the State’s “by-your-leave”. Hicks is silent on this issue, which leads me to believe that she is either ignorant of feminism’s effects or in fact supports these objectives.

Yep, if Hicks’ article is any indicator, men have a long row to hoe before we will be able to count conservative women as allies in the struggle to improve their own lives, if not that of men’s. Women’s issues are really men’s issues, which is to say that they are our issues. And as long as the femarxists are able to convince women that their interests diverge from that of men, there will be no turning this ship around short of revolution.

HT: Dr Helen

Worried About the Wrong Kinds of Families

What does it say about the perversion of the rule of law when our elected representatives--on a racial basis, no less--agitate for a halt in enforcing immigration law to protect the integrity of illegal alien families, when those same representatives can’t be bothered to oppose with the same passion the forcible removal of non-criminal parents in native-born families:

"We think that families are the cornerstone of our society and our nation, and an immigration system should preserve those families, not destroy them," Gutierrez told FOX News Capitol Hill Producer Chad Pergram on Tuesday. The congressman is collecting petitions that ask President Obama to "stop the immigration raids and deportations that are tearing our marriages, families and children apart." He is expected to present those petitions when Hispanic members of Congress meet with the President Wednesday.

I for one would love to see a member of Congress say on live television that he was petitioning the President to stop the Federal funding of divorce and family dissolution, because the government’s support of forced deportation of one parent from the family is tearing our marriages, families, children, and country apart.

Si se puede!

Media Rapes Facts Re: Mil Rape Report

The media whipped themselves into a frenzy yesterday--and attempted to get you, the people, as spun up about it as they were--about a reported rise in sexual assault reports in the armed services in 2008. In doing so, unsurprisingly, they twisted the picture to make it look like military women were at increased risk of assault by those terrible monstrous men who can’t seem to keep their hands off these innocent slaughtered saints.

Both NBC and CBS ran stories about how a 9% rise in sexual assault reports heralds a new tidal wave of abuse of military women at the hands of their male counterparts. Then these major news organizations started to get fast and loose with the facts. Both NBC and CBS ran equally craptastic stories; I will only fisk the CBS one here.

First, one must realize that a rise in reports is simply a rise in reports. Nothing more, nothing less. Could be a statistical artifact, could be that efforts to convince military women to report--such as refusing to prosecute them for making false reports which Kanin found that they did nearly half the time--bear fruit in that they get more reports. Which is what they want, more reports. Yay! Did the rise in reports result in more convictions? We don’t know, and the story doesn’t tell us.

Putting aside the use of the anecdotal allegations of rape and sexual abuse for three former military women seemingly intended to manipulate the emotions of the reader--I could almost hear the violins in the background--my eyes seized upon this tidbit in the CBS article:

One in three female soldiers will experience sexual assault while serving in the military, compared to one in six women in the civilian world.

1 in 3? And compared to 1/6 in the civilian world? Holy cow! How can we as men and women stand having our women sexually assaulted by beastly hypermasculine boys-club men at such rates?

The problem is these unsourced statistics are grossly inflated. How do we know? Well, there is no type of felonious crime anywhere in the United States that approaches a 33% victimization rate; if it were, it would be a crime wave of unprecedented proportions that would compel action, and rightly so. And in an organization like the military, responsive as it is to political pressure from social tinkerers, you’d have that action faster than you can say “court martial”. This 1/3 stat is just not credible…heck it even exceeds Mary Koss’ farcically derived, infamous, and long since debunked “1 in 4” statistic for on-campus rape. I guess if big lies don’t impress, tell bigger ones and eventually some wide-eyed Suzy Soccer Mom--probably the only demo left that actually watches the CBS Evening News--will believe it.

Next, we see that--horrors!--the go-to-trial rate for sexual assault accusations is quite low:

The Pentagon only started a comprehensive program to track incidents in 2006, and only after Congress mandated it do so. That year there were 2,974 cases of rape and sexual assault [Cases? They are more accurately termed accusations…EW] across the services. And of those, only 292 cases resulted in a military trial. And in 2007 there were even fewer prosecutions.

“Of more than 2,200 servicemen investigated for sexual assault, only 181 were prosecuted?” Couric asked Dominguez.

Wow. Less than 10% of accusations go to trial. Pretty bad, huh? Well, maybe not. First, consider that nearly half of sexual assault and rape allegations are false. False as in the accuser made it up from the fevered swamp of her imagination. That fact right there will slash your conviction rates. And, giving lie to Vivian Gembara’s assertion that rookie military lawyers don’t get convictions out of the remaining half of allegations, a 10% conviction-to-accusation rate is slightly higher than what happens in the civilian world, either here in the States, or in the UK. And civilians have much more experienced prosecutors. Thus the low conviction rate is a function of some other variable. Perhaps it is because the cases are hard to try. Perhaps it is because a sex offense is sometimes difficult to distinguish from offensive sex, and when it comes down to he-said, she-said, particularly when both accused and accuser are drunk and accompany each other into a bedroom, only she regrets it come the light of morning, well, it may be pretty hard to convict a guy when there is a reasonable argument that he thought he had consent. No matter what the hysterical rape activists say.

Then there was this one, which just shows the sloppy thinking that surrounds this overly politicized crime:

For many victims their assault remains a shameful secret. The Pentagon acknowledges that some 80 percent of rapes are never reported - making it the most under-documented crime in the military.

I hate the language that is used when talking about sexual assault, because it biases the discourse about what happens. I know that the rape activists don’t care what happens to a man accused of a major crime, but I do, and the sloppy language they use subverts justice. To automatically refer to an accuser…and that’s what a woman who makes a rape allegation is…as a victim is to a priori convict the accused of a crime that he probably didn’t commit. Moreover, while on the topic of sloppiness, the Pentagon’s “acknowledgement” that some 80% of rapes are never reported is disingenuous. Rape industry activists estimate that ¾ to 4/5 of rapes are not reported. You don’t know what you don’t know, and an estimation is just that…a guess made by a person based on their experience and their gut feel.

So there you have it. Activists in the MSM pick up on a report by the Pentagon that shows a 9% rise in rape/sexual assault allegations and go crazy with it, all in a transparent attempt to get credulous women and men fired up about how bad women in the military are supposedly treated by their brothers in arms. Problem is that this hysteria has little connection with the facts on the ground, and that women are just as safe from sexual assault in the military as they are anywhere else. Unfortunately, some critical thinking also shows that men are just as vulnerable to rampant, unpunished false accusations and rape witch hunts in the military as they are anywhere else. More’s the pity.

A New .45 for CCW

I'm looking at procuring a .45 ACP handgun for CCW.

I've boiled my choices down to two candidates: a Taurus PT145 or Glock 36.

Both were available at the local gun store.

I'm curious if any of you out there have experience with either and are willing to share your thoughts. Both have decent reviews in terms of accuracy and reliability. Both are similar in terms of empty weight. Really the only difference (besides price) is the Taurus has a 10+1 magazine, while the Glock has a 6+1 magazine, and the delta in magazine width drives a larger grip on the Taurus and a fairly slender one on the Glock.

I've fondled both weapons; the Taurus feels better in my hand, while the Glock is a bit on the small side. My concern about the Taurus though is that the larger grip would print through clothing more than the slimmer Glock; meanwhile my concern with the Glock would be that the small size would lead it to "jump" more in my hand during firing.

I'd appreciate any opinions or experiences out there that any of you all would be willing to share.

An Encouraging Tidbit

Reading about the reaction of these Boston students in reference to the Rihanna-Brown incident, it gives me hope that the youth of the future aren't completely lost. This despite the determined efforts of DV "professionals" to alter their moral calculus toward a more PC conclusion:

Nearly half of the 200 Boston teenagers interviewed for an informal poll said pop star Rihanna was responsible for the beating she allegedly took at the hands of her boyfriend, fellow music star Chris Brown, in February. Of the teens questioned, more than half said both Brown, 19, and Rihanna, 21, were equally responsible for the assault. More than half said the media were treating Brown unfairly, and 46 percent said Rihanna was responsible for the incident.

Health counselors are specifically concerned with teenagers' views of the controversy. "I think you'd have to be pretty jaded if you weren't startled by it," said Casey Corcoran, director of the health commission's new Start Strong program.

The program began in the fall as part of a Start Strong: Building Healthy Teen Relationships Initiative, a private foundation program that was offered in 11 cities across the country. Corcoran said the four-year, $1 million competitive grant program will allow the city to train mentors and outreach workers to speak to 11- to 14-year-olds about the dangers of domestic violence.

That nearly half of the students surveyed saw through the DV industry line parotted in the media that poor wittle Rihanna was simply an innocent victim of a monstrous man is encouraging. They correctly perceived that Rihanna started the fight that ended up in her getting her chops busted, and hold her accountable for her actions. That these teens hold fast to this ungallant opinion despite obvious pressure from the DV "professionals" is doubly so. One can only hope they retain such discernment into their adult lives.

What little I was able to find out about the "Start Strong" initiative didn't shed much light about the political motivations behind it. I hope that the mentors and outreach workers involved with the program do sit down with children of both sexes and give them the facts: that women and girls start 3/4 of the mutual combat DV episodes, and sometimes those incidents turn out badly for the women/girl who started it.

They may even be able to use Rihanna as a poster child for what not to do--batter a larger stronger person and expect that person's self-control to exceed your own.

Making Mistakes...On Purpose

Via Dr. Helen, today I read about a segment of women out there who deliberately "forget" their birth control and screw random men in order to achieve "gotcha" pregnancies.

There was a time where I would get very unhappy about behavior like this. I mean, the sheer narcissism of spreading your legs for a good looking piece of ass when your fertility is at its peak just so that you can satisfy your baby rabies is stunning. And that's not even taking into consideration the effects on the sperm donor involved, or the child(ren) that probably will result from the union that are doomed to a life outside of a two-parent family. Nope, it's all about the woman, her feelings, the cobwebs infesting her womb, her out-of-control sexuality, and her body. Sheesh. No wonder that the ancients picked out a mirror as a symbol for women...using women such as these as an example, self-centered vanity seems to be sex's defining characteristic. Yet we allow these walking emotional/hormonal train wrecks to exercise the vote, knowing full well that society will be destroyed as a result. It's astonishing.

Perhaps it is a bad sign that I am now so jaded that behavior like this no longer surprises or shocks. It's now just part of the landscape. Which means I now turn my attention to the men involved with these women. Fellas, you have been forewarned. There is no longer any credible pleading of ignorance. If you shag one of these women and don't maintain absolute control over your swimmers, then you deserve what is coming to you. The female author of this article, Kate Spicer, an admitted practitioner of "getting pregnant accidentally on purpose" sex, writes:

As far as I'm concerned, if a guy is having unprotected sex with me, then he knows what he is doing, and if he doesn't, then he is just arrogant and more fool him. If men aren't responsible about their own contraception, they are laying themselves open to manipulation by women. Pregnancy has long been used as leverage by the desperate. Maybe the woman is in a relationship with a powerful man and she wants to get a hold over him, even if only in a financial way...what kind of fool has unprotected sex with an older woman without considering what her agenda might be? I joked about that to a guy I was seeing last year after we had made love: 'Ooh, unprotected sex with someone of my age. Very risky.' He laughed nervously. Then said: 'What will be, will be.'

But, seriously, if a man takes a risk like that, he has to face the consequences. The woman, meanwhile, needs to make sure she has unprotected sex with the right kind of man.

I guess it's nice to see that, in the midst of depravity, rabid cougars still have some standards. I mean, they won't just let themselves be plugged by just any guy. Most of the time. Other times, when they're "a bit drunk on lust", well, just about any penis will do. Which suggests to me that the market for game-players is wide and deep. And also that the market for women suitable as wives is quite shallow indeed.

So the lesson here boys is that you're nothing but a means to an end for a huge portion of the female population. So if you're having sex with a woman and you're not ready for kids (if married) or a two-decade-long child support hidden alimony sentence (if unmarried), you best take appropriate precautions. Because it's clear that you cannot always trust your partner to be trustworthy and to take the concerns of others, namely you and any future children, into account.

Shifting gears for a moment, something Spicer said alludes to the origin of the whole mess inside her head and millions of her brothers and sisters. To wit:

And as the child myself of a marriage that ended in bitter divorce, I don't really want to impose a broken family on another. Or, worse, no family at all.

But I doubt very much that I was ever mature enough to settle into a long-term relationship with any of the men I took risks with.

I suppose what I'm saying is that there are no guarantees. Given the fragility of the nuclear family dream, are women really so bad for just procreating as and when an opportunity arises?

Here we witness the self-reinforcing death spiral of divorce and family disintegration. Woman admits that her ability to maintain a mature relationship with a man is weak. Research shows that this is because divorce impedes this maturing process. In addition, woman learns from personal experience that the dream of the nuclear family is fragile, and she thinks it worse to impose a broken family on someone else (a man, presumably), and as a consequence that she'd rather just skip the breaking step and just go direct to broken family right off the bat. Divorce begats more divorce until there is next to nothing left.

One Reason For The Pay Gap

Men do more dangerous stuff. Women make up 46% of the paid labor force, but only 7% of the fatalities.

Somehow I don't think we'll ever hear feminists clamoring for this sort of equality, only the equality that works to their advantage.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2005.

Cultural Critique In The Arts

The arts have long been a locus of cultural critique, some good, some bad. While I wouldn't necessarily elevate this work of art to the same level of Canterbury Tales or Othello or Candide or any of the other artistic classics, take a look at this video--ostensibly by the German industrial-metal band Rammstein--and catalog the in-your-face critiques of the relationship between the sexes that it makes:




Don't know if it was on purpose or not, but this video strikes as quite metaphorical to much of the complaints of MRAs about the dating scene and the adverse nature of marriage and providerhood these days.

Men laboring in dank, dark, dangerous jobs for the benefit of ungrateful women? Check. Women obtusely and inappropriately flaunting their sexuality? Check. Women mentally and physically abusing men? Check. Women exploiting men for gifts and money? Check.

HT: Vox

Steak and a ** Day

Got this idea from Dr. Helen last month. And what better time to celebrate this than during Wimmyn's Herstory Month? Since Vagina Day seems to be all about making women happy, perhaps we can create a holiday where women will stop to think of their men in a similar fashion.

Thus I, your gracious host, in the interest of propagating this auspicious unofficial holiday, bring you: Steak and a ** Day

(Note to humorless vegans and feminists: link includes references to searing mammal flesh and fellating. More seriously, best to avoid the WWJJD hyperlink--pr0n--and the YouTube vid has some blue language).

The Ghost of Furious Styles

Anyone remember Furious Styles, the character played by Lawrence Fishburne in the early 90s flick Boyz n the Hood? Furious is meant to be a positive character in this film, and by and large he fulfills this purpose as he tries to keep his son by his ex wife from turning to a life of crime. The Furious character may also be seen as a mouthpiece for director John Singleton's political philosophy...particularly in regard to how blacks should only patronize black businesses, thereby keeping "black money" in the black community.

Well apparently that philosophy hasn't died out after nearly two decades of "progress"--if you can call it that--in race relations that resulted in the election of the nation's first half-black president. Take this black couple for instance. They are "brave[ly] and courageous[ly]" living Furious' advice by participating in the "ebony experiment" in which they only purchase goods and services from other blacks for one year and encourage other blacks to do so, thus keeping their money "black" and within the black community.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for freedom of association, even if it means discriminating against whites. But I have no doubt that a white who started a social movement--let's call it the "ivory initiative"--to encourage whites to only buy from other whites and invest in white businesses...note no loans to blacks from white banks, or white people buying stock in black-owned companies, nor federal subsidies of HBCUs...in order to keep white money white, would be torn apart in the media. They would certainly not be described with adjectives like "brave" or "courageous". Furthermore, the ebony experiment depends on the grace and bemused forebearance of whites for its very existence; many blacks would be wiped out if whites reciprocated by refusing to buy goods and services from them.

Blacks need to be careful about using the race-based pass to be as ethnocentric as they wanna be in the Age of the Obamassiah. The times where blacks could point to the government and claim that the Man keeps them down because he's a honkey are gone. Because if whites acted as blacks do, you know, stop being cowards and all about race issues, I think that ethno-centric Jim Crow such as this would backfire in the black community's face very quickly. I have no doubt that if the Ivory Initiative were to ever be realized, it would be quickly hooted down as racist* by the race warlord set. In the interest of calling a spade a spade, I contend that the Ebony Experiment is exactly as racist, and deserves the exact same treatment.

* I use the term racism in the exact same manner that the Jackson/Sharpton/Race Warlord set use it...any racially motivated action that offends a member of the target race. Thus if the Ivory Initiative is racist because it discriminates against non-whites, the Ebony Experiment is racist because it discriminates against non-blacks in the exact same manner.

The Matriarchy Marches On

In an exercise of collective delusion, our culture continues to focus its money and efforts to improve the lot of the most privileged among us, thinking such measures are necessary to relieve alleged feminine suffering and hardship. The truth is exactly the opposite--these efforts go to further advantage an already ridiculously advantaged class--and it is men who pay the price for this willful ignorance.

From the Left side of the culture, we have the Obama administration, in a fit of “son, grandson, husband and father”-style protective chivalry, created, by executive order, a White House Council on Women and Girls:

The new council will work to ensure each government agency is directly orientated to improving the economic status of women and to try to frame policies that establish a balance between work and family. It will also work with the vice president's office and the Justice Department to seek ways to halt violence against women in the United States and abroad, and work to improve women's healthcare.

Why is it that every time I turn around, someone (usually a man) is prostrating himself to improve the lot of women, when the facts are clear that women are the most advantaged, safest population in the country? Never mind that single women are paid more than men in urban areas, that women make more than men per unit of effort, that women, and particularly white ones, are the safest population in this country, that our country spends an order of magnitude more on government research for women’s health than men’s, and that women in this country live 7 years longer than men. If that’s evidence of membership in an oppressed class, then unsex me now and let me skate the rest of my life in government-assured comfort, secure in my entitlement to having nearly half the population is literally kill themselves to make me more comfortable and happy.

Yet I expect such skirt-pandering from the Left. But the Right does it too, apparently also believing that wymmin and girls need to be protected from those oppressive men:

Maryland Citizens for a Responsible Government says a measure is pending in the state legislature that is similar to Montgomery County's permissive ordinance and now presents "one of the greatest threats to privacy, safety and security that Maryland residents have ever known." "The proposed law adds a broadly defined category of 'gender identity' to the state's existing anti-discrimination law," the organization said in an alert. "Because the bill's broad definition of 'gender identity' includes 'expression and behavior,' men are not required to have undergone a sex change operation." Ruth Jacobs, chief of the organization, said, "The effect of this bill is to give special rights to men who want to dress like women, but completely disregards the safety of vulnerable women and children. Restrooms and showers will be opened up to cross-dressing or female affirming men, thereby allowing undressing in front of women and children in a woman's locker room. We believe that the bill should be dropped," she said. "Even the senator sponsoring the bill admits that he does not understand gender identity issues."

Thus, from the left, wymmin and girls need to be protected from the oppression and evil nature of men. From the right--even, or especially, the religious right--women and girls need to be protected from the oppression and evil nature of men. With the predictable result that the entire social and legal edifice is set up to shove men down and to lift women up, to enslave men and boys the for the benefit of women and girls as a class, to imprison or execute those troublesome or non-compliant men, and to doom men to a shorter life span so that women and girls can further enjoy the fruits of a man’s labors without the man around to consume a portion of his fruits.

If this is starting to sound like a rant, you’re right. I’m sick of everyone, and I mean everyone, from the UN on down all but ensuring girls or a women won’t be inconvenienced by the consequences of their choices. I’m tired of policies that ensure that disposable males are suppressed, made to suffer, are murdered, and die early deaths worldwide for the misfortune of being born male. Left wing and right wing, they’re all the same. Neither side of the political spectrum gives a crap about men, but both sides expect men to lay down their lives so that women--the privileged class--can have it a little bit better. Useful idiots in developed countries see to it that women in under-developed countries are elevated above men, so as to ensure that the matriarchy becomes a global phenomenon.

A Coming Evangelical Collapse?

Now here is an interesting article. In it, the author claims that Evangelicalism is due for a fall of epic proportions. His list of reasons why is interesting and bears quoting:

1. Evangelicals have identified their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism...[e]vangelicals will increasingly be seen as a threat to cultural progress. Public leaders will consider us bad for America, bad for education, bad for children, and bad for society. Being against gay marriage and being rhetorically pro-life will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of Evangelicals can't articulate the Gospel with any coherence. We fell for the trap of believing in a cause more than a faith.

2. We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures.

3. There are three kinds of evangelical churches today: consumer-driven megachurches, dying churches, and new churches whose future is fragile. Denominations will shrink, even vanish, while fewer and fewer evangelical churches will survive and thrive.

4. Christian education has not produced a product that can withstand the rising tide of secularism. Evangelicalism has used its educational system primarily to staff its own needs and talk to itself.

5. The confrontation between cultural secularism and the faith at the core of evangelical efforts to "do good" is rapidly approaching. We will soon see that the good Evangelicals want to do will be viewed as bad by so many, and much of that work will not be done. Look for ministries to take on a less and less distinctively Christian face in order to survive.

6. Even in areas where Evangelicals imagine themselves strong (like the Bible Belt), we will find a great inability to pass on to our children a vital evangelical confidence in the Bible and the importance of the faith.

7. The money will dry up.

Of these seven reasons, one and two (reason six is really a restatement of reason two) are particularly accurate and particularly damning. The failure of our children to adopt our faith is well documented, and I think this has a lot to do with Churchianity being very soft, squishy, and seeker-sensitive. In addition, I think that there is a distinct lack of rigor in the theology of the modern church. These two items, coupled with a reluctance to live lives in accordance with our professed beliefs and adhere to the written Word--for example, our blase acceptance of the terrible sin of divorce among ourselves and in the Body--lead many to declare the lot of us as hypocrites. Our own crappy example drives unbelievers away.

Now reason one isn't as bad as the author makes it out to be. In fact, I welcome it. Evangelical Christianity has endured decades of hostile treatment from the culture, and particularly from a media that is suspicious of religion in the first place and is hostile to any whiff of fundie Christianity in the second. This phenomenon, coupled by a de-coupling from the Republican party, will actually serve to separate the Church from the Kultur even more, and I think the result of this will be (much-needed) pressure and persecution of the Church and church members by an increasingly alienated government and popular culture. We've become too fat from our coddling, cozy relationship with a fallen world and her immorality and her politics. As a result, the Church has been weakened, and the Faith of the Faithful has waned. History has shown that the Christian Church flourishes most when under the greatest pressure and persecution. So I welcome the culture thinking us roadblocks to progress, I really do. Because the more obstructionist, subversive, even revolutionary, we are, the more we are doing our job as salt and light, and the more we are doing to advance the Kingdom on earth.

I take difference with some of what the authors says we evangelicals can expect to happen. The first is more of the same as what our community is presently experiencing:

Expect evangelicalism [will] look more like the pragmatic, therapeutic, church-growth oriented megachurches that have defined success. Emphasis will shift from doctrine to relevance, motivation, and personal success – resulting in churches further compromised and weakened in their ability to pass on the faith.

Boy I hope not. Because it is precisely this pragmatism, this bastardized Milquetoast your-best-life-now therapeutic Churchianity that is killing the Church. What we need, I think, is a more fundamentalist faith. One that is lived with zeal. One that preaches the Lion with the Lamb. Not one that is a hodgepodge of compromises made to draw more people into the church so that we can have big houses of worship. One that draws a line in the sand and says that this is how God directs us to live our lives. For instance, I am envisioning a more forceful preaching of what Scripture directs a family should look like...men who don't run from their responsibility and embrace the call to leadership. And women who willingly submit to their husband's leadership in the family and in the Church instead of submitting to feminist rebellion. We are thus far failing in this critical mission, as the data still shows that women are and have been more "religious" than men. Perhaps this is because men find church tilted too much toward the feminine? Perhaps this is an opportune time to bring back a more balanced Jesus instead of the hermaphrodite Sky Fairy we've been instructed to worship for the last 100 years?

And while I agree that people are craving more orthodoxy, more structure, more fundamentalism, I dispute that

two of the beneficiaries [of the evangelical crackup] will be the Roman Catholic and Orthodox communions. Evangelicals have been entering these churches in recent decades and that trend will continue, with more efforts aimed at the "conversion" of Evangelicals to the Catholic and Orthodox traditions.

The data clearly suggests otherwise. Don't know about Orthodox Christianity, but Catholicism has been losing members in droves. Maybe it's the Purple Mafia, where an estimated 40-60% of Catholic priests have homo preferences, that is creating an environment hostile to belief. Who knows? Whatever the reasons, of all the Christian denominations, it is only Evangelicalism that is growing. I say this not to pat ourselves on the back. Far from it. We have lotsa housecleaning to do. I say that in an effort to correct the record and get true facts out into the open.

This last snippet from the author I found gives me hope, in that the Evangelical divorce from an exploitative Republican Party will be good for us all:

The loss of their political clout may impel many Evangelicals to reconsider the wisdom of trying to create a "godly society." That doesn't mean they'll focus solely on saving souls, but the increasing concern will be how to keep secularism out of church, not stop it altogether. The integrity of the church as a countercultural movement with a message of "empire subversion" will increasingly replace a message of cultural and political entitlement.

The first order of business when you're trying to save a sinking ship is to stop the leaks. To shore up the integrity of the hull. Thus the first thing we need to do is cleanse our theology of ascriptural teachings and customs such as feminism and therapeutic theology. It's all about God and His glory, and not about making women feel good or empowered or about making men into "soft patriarchs".

After that spiritual house cleaning is accomplished, we can get down to what the author happily labelled "empire subversion" and "countercultural movement". The former allegiance of the Church with Caesar has held us back and has had the effect of neutering the Church's authority on social issues. A separation from a political party unties us from that party's platform, and consequently frees Christians to aggressively pursue politics in the public square on their own terms. It permits Christians to bring their Faith to bear on the public discourse, to rise in opposition the Religion of the Church of Liberalism, and remain unfettered by partisan political baggage.

Let's face it. Evangelicals, with their Faith and zeal, are poised to be the new counter culture, opposing the forces of evil while humbly promoting right living. Kinda feels good to be a rebel, does it not?

Paul Harvey's "If I Were The Devil"

The legendary Paul Harvey wrote this on WND ten years ago. Good stuff. So I'm reproducing it here for you. Enjoy "the rest of the story" with reverence.

I would gain control of the most powerful nation in the world;

I would delude their minds into thinking that they had come from man's effort, instead of God's blessings;

I would promote an attitude of loving things and using people, instead of the other way around;

I would dupe entire states into relying on gambling for their state revenue;

I would convince people that character is not an issue when it comes to leadership;

I would make it legal to take the life of unborn babies;

I would make it socially acceptable to take one's own life, and invent machines to make it convenient;

I would cheapen human life as much as possible so that the life of animals are valued more than human beings;

I would take God out of the schools, where even the mention of His name was grounds for a lawsuit;

I would come up with drugs that sedate the mind and target the young, and I would get sports heroes to advertise them;

I would get control of the media, so that every night I could pollute the mind of every family member for my agenda;

I would attack the family, the backbone of any nation.

I would make divorce acceptable and easy, even fashionable. If the family crumbles, so does the nation;

I would compel people to express their most depraved fantasies on canvas and movie screens, and I would call it art;

I would convince the world that people are born homosexuals, and that their lifestyles should be accepted and marveled;

I would convince the people that right and wrong are determined by a few who call themselves authorities and refer to their agenda as politically correct;

I would persuade people that the church is irrelevant and out of date, and the Bible is for the naive;

I would dull the minds of Christians, and make them believe that prayer is not important, and that faithfulness and obedience are optional;

I guess I would leave things pretty much the way they are.

Quote O' The Day

In light of my "Render Unto Caesar" post, and the background implication in that post that a society without religion is one that fails to be moral and eventually one that becomes unfree, I thought it auspicious to cite here the opinion of the first POTUS in matters of religion and morality and government:

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity...[a]nd let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle. It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government.

George Washington, in his farewell address to the nation, 1796.

So if I failed to say it explicitly in my "Caesar" post, let me say it again: It is endemic upon Christians to see to it that religion and morality flourishes in the social fabric of a nation. That effort is crucial to the maintenance of freedom and liberty for all. We have a duty to stand up and fight the reactionary leftist elements in and among us that would see our freedom subverted into tyranny. We cannot and must not sit idly by as the evils of the unfaithful work their damage on our society.

I Resemble that Google Search!

Whodathunkit that someone who searched on the terms "male bitterness" would land here?



I'm not bitter! I'm just...experienced. Yeah, experienced!

Render Unto Caesar What Is Caesar's...

...and oppose evil committed by our government.

A couple of months ago, Joe Farah of WND fame wrote an article titled "Pray Obama Fails". I found that article somewhat interesting in light of a couple phenomena: (1) the Christian right's fading-yet-still-reflexive allegiance to the Republican Party, and (2) the bullying of the Christian population into silence and paralysis by the secular majority.

In regards to phenomenon one, I am happy to see that, after long last, the population of religious conservatives is finally waking up to how they've been exploited and taken for granted by the Republican party, as much or more than how blacks and conservative Catholics have been by taken advantage of by the Democrat party. The Republican party supports much evil in this world, and I'm happy to see that the victory of the Democratic Obamassiah--and the moral repugnance that many of his political policies has generated--has prompted people of conservative faith to finally take a good hard look at how their faith is lived out in their daily lives. By their fruits ye shall know them, and the fruits of many Christian conservatives of either party isn't as bright and shiny as we tell ourselves it is. Thus I think social cons, duped into reflexive big-government-ism, were jarred, hopefully positively, by Farah's call to "pray that Obama fails" and openly disobey if government instructs us to go against our faith.

This brings me to the second phenomenon, commented upon here in an excellent essay by a Catholic bishop, that Christians have been cajoled, convinced, or otherwise bullied into inaction regarding living out their faith in the public sphere. I think this has been to our great collective disservice. Because of Christian silence, America, while not founded explicitly as a sectarian state, was allowed to drift toward a radical form of secularism that was never contemplated by the Founding Fathers. While one can debate about whether or not America was founded as a Christian nation--for America was founded with many secular institutions--it is clear that Christianity informed the design of the country and that the Founding Fathers had assumed that a continued faith in and fealty to God would similarly inform the customs, habits, and mores of her people.

This is clearly not longer the case, and has been so since liberalism stormed through the culture in the early 60s. Liberals fear not the God of the Bible, but supplicate to the god of the State, worship the wielding of power, and hold as their highest value the right of those who have the greatest will to power to rule. Their morality stems not from a deliberately unseen God that bestows equal cosmic value upon all His creation, but from within themselves, based upon the expediency of the moment or one's value to the powerful. Call it the Hierarchy of the Equalitarian, where some beings are more equal than others, more moral than others, and that morality dictates how those lower in the Equalitarian taxonomy are treated. This isn't progress, it is actually retrograde, a throwback to the days of pre-Christian Europe or to pagan Canaanite cultures in modern-day Palestine. We have fallen back to a time where the strong sacrifice the weak and defenseless to benefit the strong and powerful. And it is those powerful who today make the laws and declare illegitimate those objections that are based upon sectarian rather than secular (equalitarian and/or utilitarian) grounds.

Now this brings me back to Farah's call for us to pray against the Obamassiah, and to actively disobey if required. When his article came out, some of the Faithful objected (as in the comments to this example), mostly out of what I see as a faulty reading of Romans 13. I agree with Farah's contention that a proper reading of Romans 13 directs the Christian to oppose evil and to refuse to follow the directives of evil rulers. I just wish he and others like him would have done so more vociferously much earlier, during the rule of previous administrations of either political party. It is because religious leaders and the Farahs of the world have failed to oppose little evils early on, became too closely associated with one political party or the other, and let itself be bullied into submission over the big evils, that we today have the situation where religious faith is verboten in the public square and the Faithful are seemingly impotent to stop it. (As an aside, I think this is a primary reason why the Church is as decadent as it is, and why it is withering. It has become co-opted by government.)

At any rate, we Faithful may not be as impotent to influence the wider culture as we think we are. Nor am I convinced that we are at the point where the open disobedience that Farah calls for is necessary. For I take another lesson from Romans 13 that Farah apparently does not: that government, while it may do evil things, may not be as evil as the anarchy that would result from a revolution. This I think is what Paul is getting at in his epistle...that God gave us the gift of government so that we don't live nasty brutish and short lives. Now I don't think that Paul was saying that government is holy. Far from it (remember this is the guy that was persecuted by the Jewish and Roman governments and allegedly beheaded in Rome by Nero). It's just that the alternative...anarchy or revolution...may be worse than a stable but not-quite-as-good-as-it-should-be government. We as Americans, short as our memories and ignorant of history as we are, may not think so because of our own revolutionary past. But I contend that the American Revolution is an outlier...history suggests that the outcome from a violent revolution isn't nearly as pretty and sunny as we may think it is, and much suffering comes from the process. So, while our government may be evil--and I think that encouraging sin and the murder of the helpless is most certainly evil--it may not be as bad as the suffering that may happen in a state of revolt or anarchy.

As tardy as it is, Farah's call to spiritual arms is timely nonetheless. We do need a counter-revolution to fight the evil that has snaked its way into our midst. And from my perspective, we have not yet begun to fight.

The first order of business is for Christians to reclaim the political vocabulary first if we are to effectively fight evil in government from within government, as the Catholic bishop mentioned earlier explains:

Words are important because they shape our thinking, and our thinking drives our actions. When we subvert the meaning of words like “the common good” or “conscience” or “community” or “family,” we undermine the language that sustains our thinking about the law. Dishonest language leads to dishonest debate and bad laws.

We need to remember that tolerance is not a Christian virtue. Charity, justice, mercy, prudence, honesty – these are Christian virtues. And obviously, in a diverse community, tolerance is an important working principle. But it’s never an end itself. In fact, tolerating grave evil within a society is itself a form of serious evil. Likewise, democratic pluralism does not mean that Catholics should be quiet in public about serious moral issues because of some misguided sense of good manners. A healthy democracy requires vigorous moral debate to survive. Real pluralism demands that people of strong beliefs will advance their convictions in the public square – peacefully, legally and respectfully, but energetically and without embarrassment. Anything less is bad citizenship and a form of theft from the public conversation.

Then, after reclaiming the language of the debate, we are to no longer be frightened away by spurious claims that religion has no place in the public discourse:

The “separation of Church and state” does not mean – and it can never mean – separating our Catholic faith from our public witness, our political choices and our political actions. That kind of separation would require Christians to deny who we are; to repudiate Jesus when he commands us to be “leaven in the world” and to “make disciples of all nations.” That kind of radical separation steals the moral content of a society. It’s the equivalent of telling a married man that he can’t act married in public. Of course, he can certainly do that, but he won’t stay married for long.

And finally, Bishop Chaput echoes Farah with this quote, which I think underscores the entire point of this post:

We owe no leader any submission or cooperation in the pursuit of grave evil. In fact, we have the duty to change bad laws and resist grave evil in our public life

Of course, each Christian must do as he is led by God to do. And I am gladdened by what I see as some Christians beginning shed their idolatry of Caesar and to rally against the evil that Caesar commits. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, but do not forget that Caesar himself draws his authority from God in the first place, and that Caesar's use of his God-given power has "moral content and human consequences".

A Factoid About Hidden Alimony

No doubt that many readers hear much about how much so-called child support is owed in this country by deadbeats.

But what many of us do not hear is the inconvenient truth of the matter: that 70% of hidden alimony is owed by those making less than $10K a year, and that if you take away the unemployed, some 80 to 100% of hidden alimony is paid on time.

And this is the OSCE reporting these facts, not some fringe whacko FRA-MRA like myself.

A Victim Because I Wanna Be

Via Rob Franklin at Glenn Sacks, I stumbled across this article by Peggy Drexler (her of "Raising Boys w/o Men" fame and lead cheerleader for the "choice mom" movement) in the always entertaining HuffPo.

Basically, Drexler's article is a rant that states the lessons that fathers teach girls don't extend much beyond rudimentary playground tasks like throwing a ball and riding a bicycle. What's more, according to Drexler, fathers actually do a disservice to their daughters because they are too "controlling" and "constricting", in effect, "dictating" the lives of their daughters in some sort of paternal vicarious power trip:

What happens to time-calibrated roles when a daughter has to make life choices that are a bit more complex, personal and lasting than "keep the handlebars steady, and don't stop peddling?"

For many high-achieving women in my study of the changing relationship between daughters and fathers, the transition can be difficult. They find themselves walking the often thread-thin divide between contribution and control. Some maintain their equilibrium, others don't. Without the precise balance of contribution and independence, however, women may find -- instead of a pathway to the benefits of experience -- a constriction that cuts off the oxygen to their own plans and dreams.

Margo, a litigator for a major Chicago law firm, said "my father came from a poor background; his father died when he was seven. So he wanted more than that for me. He pushed me hard toward medicine or law. He even picked out my first year courses in college. I ended up choosing law -- although I guess you can't really call it a choice." It was, as things turned out, a less than perfect fit. Even though she commands an excellent salary -- more in a year than her father made in five -- she is keeping brutal hours on the partner track, doing work she finds unfulfilling. "Some days, I really feel like I'm living somebody else's life. But I've put so much into this; it's hard to simply abandon it. Besides, it would just about kill my dad. He is very proud of what we've accomplished."

Jessica, a fast-track manager in a computer-services firm, has a different issue. It's not that her father believes she is too good. It's that she is never good enough. He is her most loyal supporter and most relentless critic. "He has always been my role model," she said. "We talk almost every day. He wants the best for me. He believes in me. But it seems like all I hear is criticism -- that I'm not working hard enough, that I need to lose weight, that I need to demand more challenging assignments. He even tells me I don't have enough friends. He has this ability to make me feel powerful, and then awful," she confided. "The bad feelings seem to stay around longer than the good ones. I take his opinion seriously. When he is hypercritical, I just take it to heart so much."

Drexler's study subjects are adults. They don't have to take Dad's constructive criticism personally, and they don't have to listen to what dear old Dad advises them to do. Moreover, the fact that they let a parent run their life--if that is indeed what is happening here--is neither much the parent's fault nor does it speak well of these fine ladies' level of maturity. I know that if I were dating an adult woman with this strong an umbilicus to either of her parents, I'd be running as hard as I can the opposite direction. Because she has demonstrated to one and all that she *will* have difficulties cleaving from her parents and cleaving to a husband.

These women are high-powered lawyers and/or managers because they chose--or assented to choices made for them--to be there. Yet they have some vague sense of dissatisfaction with where they are and what they are doing. Unwilling to take responsibility for their actions and/or choices, they then choose to blame the out-of-control feeling on the very man in their lives (which it is a wonder that said man is still in their lives these days, what with rampant divorce and the Drexlers of the world encouraging chicks to make kids without a man in sight) who pushes them to dream big and achieve bigger. They whine like victims because they chose--they want--to be victims.

The Fraud of Our Banking System

Found this vid over at mroberts' Discerning Citizen. While at 47-odd minutes it is quite long, I think it's well worth the time invested to educate oneself about how our money and banking system works. After you view the video, trundle on over to Ron Paul's blog and read what he had to say there last week about the money system. If Paul didn't make much sense before, after this video, I bet he will then. Enjoy!



After having watched the video, I felt vindicated--just a little--on a variety of subjects, but namely the subject of charging interest, which I addressed at length in a recent series about the morality of usury banking. Quoth the narrator of the video in regards to usury: "the charging of interest is both a moral and a practical problem" wrt a stable society and a stable monetary system. The video makes a pointed case about the inevitability of foreclosure and human suffering, as well as the dubious moral value of a system which accrues unholy profits at the very top, in a system where banks lend out 10 and demand back 11, just as I did in my topic series.

The video also forced me to adjust my quaint conceptualization about where banks get the money that they loan. Whereas I had previously thought that banks simply loaned out the money that their depositors left with them on deposit--subject to the multiplier effect of a fractional reserve--this is an archaic model of banking that doesn't exist today. Instead, banks simply conjure money into being, literally out of thin air. Thus, the only things of value in the banking system is the "high order money" on deposit at the central bank, a tiny fraction of the amount of money in circulation, and the IOU from the borrower. The remainder of our money is really debt. The dollars and pounds and euros we all have in our pockets are really just fractional slivers of other people's IOUs, something that doesn't make me feel terribly confident in its value.

In addition, the video also reminded me about legal tender laws, something that I hadn't thought about in a while, which all but require the use of the debased debt money as payment for public and private debts. The basic effect of a legal tender law is that if a debtor owes you money, and that if a debtor offers up a whole pile of worthless FRNs to pay off his debt, you have to take it; a court will consider the debt discharged if you don't.

The video had a interesting discussion about the exponentially increasing size of debt and the symmetrically increasing economic growth and consumption that has to support it if inflation is to be kept in check. Basically, the economy--goods and services--must grow along with the money supply if the system is to stay in balance. This was an argument that I recall brother Roci making in my post series about usury, but I didn't quite grok it at the time. Of course, one cannot feasibly have an exponentially growing function toward infinity in a system with finite resources (labor, raw materials, energy, etc). At some point the economy cannot grow any more.

Finally, the video proposes a stable alternative to our present system where the government--not a hybrid public-private institution that has been granted monopoly power by the government--takes charge of the printing of its own money, but still eschews hard currencies like gold and silver. It works like this: when it wants to spend money, like on public works or some other item of public value, it simply prints the money it wants into circulation. This inflation could be viewed as an "inflation tax" since each consumer's wealth is eroded by the rate of inflation. Taxes, which also reduce wealth, are seen as operating in the same fashion. When the government wished to lower this "inflation tax", it simply printed less money that year, or even hiked taxes, which would then deflate the currency. The video sees this system are more accountable as the political system would serve to keep rates of inflation low. I am skeptical of this proposed solution, but I'll leave it to you, dear reader, to judge for yourselves.

Quote O' The Day

One thing to realize about our fractional reserve banking system is that, like a child's game of musical chairs, as long as the music is playing,* there are no losers

Andrew Gause, monetary historian

* meaning new debt money being invoked into existence by another borrower somewhere; this new debt money in circulation is then taken out of circulation by other creditors to use to pay off the interest on their loan. The practice of the charging of interest requires that new debt money be continuously created...if it fails to be created, that's when the music stops.

Driving While Intexticated

Received this email from a friend. Can't attest to its veracity--particularly the speed at which the crash occurred, which looks like 40-50 mph crash, not 70 mph--but other than that, it seems plausible enough. Enjoy and take heed to the moral of today's message: don't drive while intexticated...


An 18-year-old girl plowed directly into the rear of another vehicle. She was going 70 mph. She apparently never even saw them. You see, she had been texting at the time.

You can see that she hit them dead-center with no attempt to slow or evade the collision.



She hit dead-center on her 2008 Yukon SUV as well. She escaped unscathed.



There was no blowout, no wet road, no curve or hill or fog to limit visibility. This girl clearly should have been able to see the traffic conditions at least a half mile ahead had she been looking and not texting.

Here's a personal look at the real human cost of texting while driving. Gaze upon 3 yo Griffin before the accident:



Griffin the day after 4 hours of surgery to repair multiple skull fractures. He would surely have died or been severely disabled had they not been minutes away (by StarFlight helicopter) from Austin's world-class children's Dell Children's Medical Center and neurosurgeon Dr. Timothy George.



Day 4 - watching a movie on his Dad's iPhone. The swelling of his head will go away, but that scar from ear-to-ear will be with him forever.



Day 5 - All my tubes are finally out. I'm going home today!
Note how much the swelling has improved in just three days.





There have been several times where I've nearly been sideswiped on my motorcycle by cell-phone blabbing soccer moms piloting 3 ton SUVs. Luckily for me, I learned quickly that one should assume that cage drivers are out to kill you until proven otherwise. I ride defensively (sometimes offensively) so as to insulate myself from their lack of situational awareness. And many times I've witnessed teens (also usu female) swerving and just basically not paying attention as they text their BFFs on their cell phones. Most studies peg the performance penalty from cell phone use...not dialing or texting...as equivalent to .08 BAC and this study found that talking on the cell phone is actually worse than driving while drunk. It follows that texting brings with it a heavier performance penalty than talking on a cell phone, thus a texting driver is more performance impaired than someone who stumbled out of a bar and climbed into their car.