Top Ten of 2013

What a year. Just looking at the numbers there seem to be more people reading than the previous year.



1. The Sufficiently Alien Hypothesis

To be fair, there were six posts in this series, and it just barely made number one in page views. I'm thinking this is something most people wouldn't really be into, but some posts did get pretty good numbers on their own. Basically the series is my musings on philosophy of mind and basically why I am a creep and a weirdo.



2. The Government Shutdown

The biggest non-event of the entire year! It would be like someone's car breaking down on the freeway and nobody getting hurt making national news for weeks. A purely manufactured crisis to distract us from all the real issues like the NSA spying on us all the time and drones murdering thousands of innocent brown people. Come to think of it, why DIDN'T I write about the NSA? That's the real question. Like the alien question, I have no answer for this one either.



3. The War in Syria

Saudi Arabia dragging the US and Russia into a new world war over Syria? Selling chemical weapons on the black market? Check and check. And how did the biggest anti-war guy, John Kerry, all of a sudden become the biggest hawk? Isn't that weird?



4. Duck Dynasty

When I got an entire inbox full of mail about some guy I saw on a pillow in Wal*Mart I knew I should write an article (or three) on him. It paid off. Long story short: I don't like government interference in business, except when it comes to enforcing contractual agreements and preventing disastrous things like human trafficking and selling weapons to really bad people (Fast and Furious ring any bells?). But when it comes to anti-discrimination laws, they're really just pro-discrimination against people we dislike, and they treat adults like children.



5. The Difference Between "Fairness" and "Equality"

My desire to avoid the bukkake theater that is politics backfired and I ranted after just nine days. I actually think I focused more on politics this year than last year. I had enough of the mental contortions leftists go through with defining their words so vaguely that they can mean anything at all, and then getting pissed when you don't use one of the definitions that appears on their approved list of possible vague definitions. What is fairness? What does it mean to be rich? And why can't anyone ever give a concrete number when it comes to how much taxes any given person should pay? I'm guessing it has to do with brain damage caused by inhaling one's own farts for too long.



6. Enoch Strife 2024

My "America First" platform for when I run for president (meaning let's get America's shit in order before we start policing the world, not American national socialism). I plan to end the Fed, pass a balanced budget amendment, create a flat tax, bring our troops home, and investigate war crimes, among other things. A bunch of you seem to agree.



7. Trayvon Unmasked

A really long piece on what I think really happened and what the media circus that devolved around the situation says about who they are and who we are as a people.



8. Dreams of Foreign Suns

A pretty sad piece on why I think all the dreams of space travel I had as a kid reading science fiction stories will never happen. Humans seem doomed never to leave the Earth.



9. Lego, The Hagia Sophia, and Terrorism

Lego makes a toy that kind of sort of looks like a secular museum in Turkey and Islamists get pissed, threaten violence, and the toy gets pulled. Funny, the same group that wrote the "angry letter" also pretends the Armenian Genocide didn't happen. I wonder what's worse, making a toy that maybe looks like a building in Turkey or killing two million people and then ignoring it for the past hundred years? That's a tough one.



10. More On "The Walking Dead"

Yep, two years in a row! There are several reasons why Walking Dead style zombies are impossible (and that makes the show more interesting). Here's a funny quote I forgot about:



The zombies decay to the point where a fireplace shovel can cut through a
skull like a chainsaw through pound cake, or you can pull a face off a
skull easier than ripping off a band-aid, yet they never collapse under
their own weight, bugs don't eat them, and they can bite through limbs
like jello. I don't know about you, but if perfectly healthy and alive
me were to bite into someone wearing overalls' leg I would not only not
take a huge chunk out of his flesh, I would probably lose a couple
teeth, yet these aspic soft zombies can bite through denim and muscle
with no problem.





And what topics did I think not get enough attention? Well, pretty much just one.



On Gratitude

A lot of people complain about a lot of things (myself included). It is important to remember what we have to be thankful for, because, in the long run, those things are more important. If we have our health, loved ones, relative security and prosperity (a poor person in America is like a rich person in Namibia), we shouldn't focus so much on all the petty crap in our lives like that guy who cut us off in traffic, or the price of gas going up thirty cents.



I hope you enjoyed 2013. I look forward to spending the next year with y'all, and hopefully getting away from all the negative crap in the world.



Always Love

I'm a sexy woman, so stop objectifying me!

Why is it deemed perfectly okay for women to objectify David Beckham,
while men who waggle their eyebrows at pretty young women are considered
pigs?



Watch and subscribe. Brilliant channel.

The Adjustment Bureaucracy

HE'S BAAAACK!







I guess A&E knows how to count after all.
14 million viewers is the bigger number than a couple thousand butthurt
professional activists who never watched the show in the first place.
The quasi-free market (which is really a corporatist global oligarchy) has adjusted itself just like... wait for it... I mentioned a few days ago:



If a business doesn't want to hire someone, fine. If a people don't
want to shop there as a result, fine. Markets adjust and societies reach
equilibrium without needing to be micromanaged by a top-down
bureaucracy.



Phil Robertson is back with A&E filming episodes for "Duck Dynasty", the higest rated show in cable history. From the article:



In a statement released late Friday afternoon, A&E said, “While Phil's comments made in the (GQ) interview reflect his personal views based on his own beliefs, and his own personal journey, he and his family have publicly stated they regret the ‘coarse language’ he used and the misinterpretation of his core beliefs based only on the article. He also made it clear he would ‘never incite or encourage hate.’"

The network added that “Duck Dynasty is not a show about one man's views. It resonates with a large audience because it is a show about family, a family that America has come to love. As you might have seen in many episodes, they come together to reflect and pray for unity, tolerance and forgiveness. These are three values that we at A&E Networks also feel strongly about.



GLAAD (GLobalist Anti-American Douchebags) made some shit up about Robertson "comparing gay people to terrorists and praising Jim Crow laws," which anyone with basic reading comprehension of the English Language can clearly see he never said and never implied. Even someone new to the English Language or with a first grade reading level who actually took the fifteen seconds to read Phil Robertson's actual statement can see this statement from the New World Order front group is a bullface lie.



Family Research Council president Tony Perkins said ... "A&E Network’s reversal in the face of backlash is quite telling to the American people who are growing tired of GLAAD and cultural elites who want to silence people and remove God and His word from every aspect of public life."



Got to love that mean green. Turns out greed is a bigger motivating factor than intimidation, even among the globalists. A step has been taken to restore the balance created by exactly 50 years of tyranny.

Free Will and Individual Liberty

A VERY abridged version of my very long Duck Dynasty piece.



Why can't businesses discriminate against whomever they want? Because mommy and daddy government want the children to play nice? Because the enlightened bureaucrats know better than us? Why can't we treat the businesses, the workers, and the customers like adults? If a business doesn't want to hire someone, fine. If a people don't want to shop there as a result, fine. Markets adjust and societies reach equilibrium without needing to be micromanaged by a top-down bureaucracy.



The attitude of the power elite and the lemmings who support them right there is the non-problem of evil. God, the ultimate parent, lets us have free will to choose to be good or not so we'll grow up on our own. The all powerful authoritarian nanny state wants to keep us in Matrix pods where we can't hurt ourselves or anyone else (WE can't, but they hurt us all the time with the deadly psychotropic drugs they push on everyone, endless abortions, GMO foods, and hormones and fluoride in our water), and where we can't make any of our own choices. And all this time I thought they were "pro-choice"! No, they're pro-abortion and anti-choice. They don't want us to have free will and as such we cannot say we are living in a free society.



REAL crimes against persons and property (murder, arson, theft, rape) still have consequences in this world, just as there are consequences for transgressing God's law as well, but to force people to "get along" and to force people to do business with people they do not want is totalitarian evil. It is anti-free will, it is forced will. Thought and will are no longer free and so society is no longer free.



If a person is forced to be good that person's deeds are no longer good because they are meaningless. Forcing someone to do good is slavery, and forcing someone to give charity is theft, and silencing dissent and punishing thought crimes is rape of the mind and soul. These actions are all the hallmark of tyranny.



Maybe if we stop treating adults like children they will stop acting like children.

Duck Dynasty and Individual Liberty

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On Disability

All
these pro-disability people are a fucking joke. They're right about one
thing, it's not a good thing to mock disabled people, but they're wrong
about everything else.

Why shouldn't we look for a cure for
blindness or deafness or crippleness? Why should we celebrate disibility
like it were a real accomplishment? It is wrong for the exact same
reason as chastising disibility. In trying to combat
hate or disaproval or "discrimination" or whatever they want to call
it, the pro-disability crowd goes off the deep end in the other
direction, becoming just as fanatical about celebrating what, in
reality, is nothing to celebrate.

That's one of the biggest
gripes I have, that it only makes sense to celebrate or take pride in
accoplishments, not accidents. Why should I be proud of my height, or
race, or the number of fingers and toes I have? I had NOTHING to do with
any of that. It took ZERO effort on my part to achieve any of that. In
what sense, then, should I be proud of what ammounts to chance and
circumstance? If I had nothing to do with it, if I had no choice, didn't
set out to do something and then did it, what does it have to do with
my greatness (or lack thereof)? Nothing.

Everyone is all on the
pride bandwagon. No accomplishments? Didn't succeed at anything in your
entire life? Can't win worth a damn? No problem. You too can be a
champion! Just pick some random aspect of your person, it doesn't really
matter, and claim in a confident voice "I won the genetic lottery!"
It's the ultimate self-esteem booster for losers and lazy people, like
"Everyone Gets A Trophy Day".

There's accomidating disability
(which is what humans do really well, as evient from all those seriously
injured cro magnon skeletons that indicated they lived long lives being
cared for by others), then there's treating it like it's better than
ability, which it's not. Being blind does not make one better than a
sighted person. People with proper hearing shouldn't ALL learn sign
language, doctors should look for a cure for deafness and blindness.
There's a reason we don't have "Polio Pride" or "National Measles Day,"
because people recognise that fatal diseases are nothing to celebrate.
Unfortunately, in this hyper-sensitive society we live in, people DO
celebrate non-fatal diseases*.

I think, but am not certain, the
problem is a faulty association in the pro-disability people the
proposition that |in society it is accepted that the word "disease" =
"moral failure of the individual," or, otherwise, that the word
"disease" is associated with "moral failure of the individual.| I have pointed out before, many times, that being diseased is not a moral
failure. One does not need to feel ashamed to admit one is diseased. One
is not immoral because one is diseased. That is true. However, I think
the pro-disability people are as guilty of perpetuating this faulty
association as the anti-disability people. A scab indicates that a wound
is healing. If you pick the scab it will never heal. It's the same
problem with race baiters, who sabotage healthy race relations just as
much, if not worse, than extreme outspoken racists.

I'm never
going to run a four minute mile, I'll never be able to box like Mike
Tyson, or write music like Mozart, or see properly without mechanical
aid. That doesn't make me immoral, that doesn't make me bad, but I'm not
going to celebrate being slow, or frail, or musically disinclined, or
having poor eyesight. Those are not accomplishments, and I refuse to be
proud of them.

*Disease
noun
A disordered or
incorrectly functioning organ, part, structure, or system of the body
resulting from the effect of genetic or developmental errors, infection,
poisons, nutritional deficiency or imbalance, toxicity, or unfavorable
environmental factors; illness; sickness; ailment.

If a body part, or mental function, or whatever, isn't working properly it is diseased.

Eternal Day

A lovely short program (22 minutes) on the Super Specialty Hospitals founded by Sai Baba. This is in celebration of the 22nd anniversay of the hospitals, which opened in 1991. Tragically, Swami cannot be here in person to witness this event, but he is ever present, even if we cannot see his body.


The lovely ideal of selfless service (seva) is exemplified in this pair of free hospitals which have thus far helped 2.3 million patients.







This is the ideal. This is totally different from universal healthcare/ socialised medicine/ single payer. When people give of themselves of their own will selflessly that is the highest virtue. When a government steals money from people and redistributes it as it sees fit that is worse than thievery. A government cannot mandate morality, or else the value is totally removed. One cannot be moral or virtuous if one is compelled to act in such a way. It is only through one's own will that one may be virtuous.

Funeral Fiasco!

Millions (I guess) attended the funeral of South Africa's most famous native son Nelson Mandela. It was meant to be a solemn occasion, admiring how a radical communist terrorist turned his life around while in prison and adopted love instead of revenge. Instead it was a circus of horrors.



The sign language guy at the
funeral had a schizophrenic episode and made meaningless hand gestures
instead of real sign language. He also has a history of violence and
they let him get within three feet of the President Oblahblah. Guess the
Secret Service was drunk that day - very drunk.



Speaking of Oblahblah, he took a selfie next to Mandela's dead body. He then gave a speech in which he talked entirely
about himself, not mentioning Mandela once. In total he used the words
"I," "Me," "My," and other first person pronouns 5,724 times. His wife
was disgusted. The photographer who took the picture of Oblahblah's wife
being disgusted at Oblahblah's behaviour apologised and then committed
suicide for shaming his one true god. Oh, yeah, Oblahblah also Frenched some blonde.

Housing Discrimination and Private Property Rights

HUD
has a radio ad about "property discrimination." Surprisingly, it is a
crime to be discriminating when deciding whom may rent your private
property. Maybe I don't want to retrofit my 150 year old building to
accommodate people with wheelchairs or who are morbidly obese. Maybe I
don't want a crack dealer or gang member or convicted felon renting my
property. Maybe I don't want people who can't speak
English or who play loud music or have huge parties with their entire
tribe at my private property. There should be absolutely nothing
controversial about this!

If I can't be discriminating with
regard to who rents my private property – people who are my
responsibility – then in what sense can we say we have private property
rights? In what sense can we call this a free country?

This is a
separate issue from the ideal world. Divorced from issues of love thy
brother as thyself and judging people by the content of their character
rather than the colour of their marble (the Dr. King statue
controversy). Al that is still true, and that is the ideal, but this is
an issue of freedom. Let's face it, if someone tried to have a "coloured
only" fast food shop today the free market wold see the place lose
business and close down rather quickly. If we treat people like adults
and let them have the free choice the Lord has endowed us all with, many
people will choose to do the right thing and the free market will close
down many of the other establishments. What this really is about is the
issue of a grotesquely bloated predatory government trying to legislate
morality. We see how well the government runs the post office and the
IRS and public education (fewer than 40% of HS graduates actually have a
twelfth grade level of education – "no child left behind" was
instituted by Bush because he didn't want to be left behind as a child.
It may or may not be true, but it still is funny.). So, with the stellar
failure of everything the government does, why do we think the
government should try to regulate morality?

And this is all
skirting the issue that it is my property! My private property should be
something I have more control over. If I want whites only living in my
house I should have that right. Other like-minded people will congregate
around me and different-minded people will go somewhere else, like
adults. People who like to smoke should have freedom of smoking and be
allowed to work at pro-smoking establishments and non-smokers would do
the same at smoke-free places, just like I should have the right to rent
my private property to whomever I want.

I know I'm repeating
myself here, but freedom is something I am really concerned with. My
earliest memory is of wanting freedom and resenting authority, so
freedom is sort of my thing. Again, this is beside the point of loving
others and judging people based on their characters – all good stuff –
but being good is meaningless when it is forced.



(Written 31 October 2012)

Blan B is Racialist

From Mother Jones:



"The European manufacturer of a pill identical to Plan B
says its product won't work for women who weigh more than 176 pounds.
Will American pharma companies warn women of weight limits?"



The abortion pill* NorLevo (Levonorgestrel - the same drug sold in the United States as Plan B) is completely ineffective in women who weigh more than 176 pounds (how did they come up with that number? Why not 175 or 177? Why not just round to 170 or 180?), and has greatly diminished effectiveness in women over 165 pounds. Weight data from the CDC indicates that the average American woman weighs 166 pounds and is therefore too fat to use Plan B.



I think the important point to take away from this story is not that American women are too fat. The point to take, at least for me, is that the makers of Plan B are racialist. From the article: "The average weight of non-Hispanic black women aged 20 to 39 is 186
pounds, well above the weight at which these pills are completely
ineffective." [Italics added]



The average black woman in America is too fat to use Plan B. Only those skinny white (I'm guessing) women can use it. Isn't that racialist? They make a pill black women can't take to save themselves from bad decisions. Making something for one race and not for black people is racialism, plain and simple.







*The definition of "abortion," like the definition of "marriage," was changed by the quack medical establishment to be "the termination of pregnancy," and of course "pregnancy" is redefined as "beginning with implantation of the zygote [the new human being, fictitious referred to as a "fertilised egg" so it sounds like a tumor or a turd and not something alive with unique DNA]. Since Levonogestrel cannot destroy the zygote once it has implanted itself in the uterine lining it is, by the new magic definition, not causing an abortion. The drug supposedly works by preventing or delaying ovulation (it is admitted that no one knows how it really works, and it is still sold over the counter without having to show ID), however the drug may thin the uterine lining, making implantation more difficult. While not "technically" an abortion, it is still ending the life of a brand new human being with unique DNA who is in no way part of the mother's body. Not "technically" an abortion, it is still homicide.

Nuclear News You DIDN'T Hear

Have you heard the one about the deal between
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan regarding nuclear weapons? No? Maybe the news
was too busy focusing on what inanimate object Miley Cyrus was having
sex with this week.



Stolen Cobalt-60



A truck delivering 40 grams of cobalt-60 pellets, material used in radiotherapy, was hijacked last week in central Mexico. The truck and the cargo was recovered near Hueypoxtla, and the hijackers are believed to have received a fatal dose of radiation.



This was another narrow miss. There is an increasing number of nuclear incidents in the world today. Cobalt-60 is particularly deadly and persistent isotope that was proposed in use for area denial weapons. An area exposed to the fallout of a cobalt bomb would be uninhabitable for 100 years due to lethal levels of radiation. Had this stolen material been placed in a truck bomb like the kind that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, it could contaminate an area of four square miles[1]. If set off at Wall Street the plume of radioactive debris would probably reach the Empire State Building.



Iranian Nukes



"Saudi King Abdullah and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu were
not won over by President Barack Obama's pledges in personal phone calls
to the two Middle East leaders last week not to allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon. Their skepticism only grew."



He probably said something along the lines of "if you like your nuclear program, you can keep it*"



*"Program" does not include "programs Oblahblah does not like," or "programs that do not include abortion on demand until three years after birth." "Like" is a subjective term, subject to verification by Oblahblah and his bureaucrats.



This is exactly what the mullahs wanted. Oblahblah is eating out of their hands. After stalling for time "negotiating," they managed to get Oblahblah to back down and give them everything they wanted and more. Experts estimate that Iran  has enough material to make four nukes already.



Leaders in Saudi Arabia have made clear that if Iran gets a nuke then they will be forced to get one as well, since they may well be the primary target of attack, before Israel even, due to the fierce hatred between rival Muslim factions. Saudi Arabia funded Pakistan's nuclear program, and if push comes to shove they claim to have an agreement whereby Pakistan will deliver weapons to them as compensation.



Both Iran and Saudi Arabia are ticking time bombs in the region. Both are ruled by horrible, knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing, prehistoric, amoral, psychopathic monsters. The war in Syria is, in part, a proxy war between these two repressive regimes that threatens to suck the entire world in with it. If either one gets their hands on a nuke it would be a disaster for every freedom loving, moral human being on the planet.



Iran will not negotiate at all with Israel, and probably won't negotiate with Saudi Arabia either. In the world of inter-tribal warfare the aim is always extermination, and both proto-nuclear nations most definitely are run by tribal strongmen.







Notes

1. "Here the lethal combination of glass and a bomb projected shards at high
speed causing 5 per cent of the deaths and 69 per cent of the injuries
outside the buildings for a radius of over 10 blocks from the blast
centre."



10 blocks, as seen on a map, is about one mile. A circle with a radius of 1 mile has an area of exactly pi square miles. I rounded up to 4 to be safe.

A Minarchist Justification of Taxation

Basic points to take away from this very short (4 minute) video:

*Governments are inevitable

*Elected governments are better than warlords

*People should be compensated for their work, including elected officials

*Something has to pay government wages, and that is what taxation is for



Now, there may be some confusion about the title. I'm not saying I'm a minarchist, or anything else for that matter (besides a constitutionalist, as that is the rules of the government we have in place and, since we have them, we should follow those rules and not just invent things on the fly without justification or oversight, but that is not to say I think we have an optimal constitution or anything). My own thoughts on an "ideal society 1000 years from now" can be found, pretty much in this video:







A framework of working out different issues with government can be found in my Integral Politics series.

What Idiots Actually Believe About George Zimmerman

THIS IS WHAT IDIOTS ACTUALLY BELIEVE