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