February 2005 Archives

Ok, so Syria is going to pull out of Lebanon, and Egypt is going to have real elections?

Wow.

IMAO Asks:

1. Who the hell do you think you are?

I’m a 38 year old man who got frustrated with the shitty-ass coverage of our foreign policy during one of the most important periods in American history.

1. So, other than blogging, what’s your job? Do you work at some fast food joint, dumbass?

I’m a software engineer, I work for Marketocracy.

1. Do you have like any experience in journalism, idiot?

Since I started blogging, I ended up with a column in the local art monthly, so yeah.

1. Do you even read newspapers?

I read the funnies.

1. Do you watch any other news than FOX News propaganda, you ignorant fool?

Sometimes.

1. I bet you’re some moron talk radio listener too, huh?

Nope, can’t stand talk radio.

1. So, do you get a fax from the GOP each day for what to say, you @#$% Republican parrot?

Not since they stopped sending me the checks. :-)

1. Why do you and your blogger friends want to silence and fire everyone who disagrees with you, fascist?

In my case, because its fun.

1. Are you completely ignorant of other countries, or do you actually own a passport?

Traveled a lot, actually.

1. Have you even been to another country, you dumb hick?

Yep.

1. If you’re so keen on the war, why haven’t you signed up, chickenhawk?

Thought about it actually, not the armed forces (too old), but I thought about the State Department. Worried I might not have a job when I get back, and it took me several years to get to the point where I could work from Flagstaff, AZ

1. Do you have any idea of the horrors of war? Have you ever reached into a pile of goo that was your best friend’s face?

Er, yes, I have an idea. No I haven’t.

1. Have you ever reached into any pile of goo?

Yep.

1. Once again, who the hell do you think you are?!

I’m the Opinionated Bastard, That’s who I am.

IMAO Asks:

1. Who the hell do you think you are?

I’m a 38 year old man who got frustrated with the shitty-ass coverage of our foreign policy during one of the most important periods in American history.

1. So, other than blogging, what’s your job? Do you work at some fast food joint, dumbass?

I’m a software engineer, I work for Marketocracy.

1. Do you have like any experience in journalism, idiot?

Since I started blogging, I ended up with a column in the local art monthly, so yeah.

1. Do you even read newspapers?

I read the funnies.

1. Do you watch any other news than FOX News propaganda, you ignorant fool?

Sometimes.

1. I bet you’re some moron talk radio listener too, huh?

Nope, can’t stand talk radio.

1. So, do you get a fax from the GOP each day for what to say, you @#$% Republican parrot?

Not since they stopped sending me the checks. :-)

1. Why do you and your blogger friends want to silence and fire everyone who disagrees with you, fascist?

In my case, because its fun.

1. Are you completely ignorant of other countries, or do you actually own a passport?

Traveled a lot, actually.

1. Have you even been to another country, you dumb hick?

Yep.

1. If you’re so keen on the war, why haven’t you signed up, chickenhawk?

Thought about it actually, not the armed forces (too old), but I thought about the State Department. Worried I might not have a job when I get back, and it took me several years to get to the point where I could work from Flagstaff, AZ

1. Do you have any idea of the horrors of war? Have you ever reached into a pile of goo that was your best friend’s face?

Er, yes, I have an idea. No I haven’t.

1. Have you ever reached into any pile of goo?

Yep.

1. Once again, who the hell do you think you are?!

I’m the Opinionated Bastard, That’s who I am.

From Der Speigel:

But history has shown that it wasn’t Reagan who was the dreamer as he voiced his demand. Rather, it was German politicians who were lacking in imagination — a group who in 1987 couldn’t imagine that there might be an alternative to a divided Germany. Those who spoke of reunification were labelled as nationalists and the entire German left was completely uninterested in a unified Germany…

Bush’s idea of a Middle Eastern democracy imported at the tip of a bayonet is, for Schroeder’s Social Democratic Party and his coalition partner the Green Party, the hysterical offspring off the American neo-cons. Even German conservatives find the idea that Arabic countries could transform themselves into enlightened democracies somewhat absurd.

This, in fact, is likely the largest point of disagreement between Europe and the United States — and one that a President John Kerry likely would not have made smaller: Europeans today — just like the Europeans of 1987 — cannot imagine that the world might change. Maybe we don’t want the world to change, because change can, of course, be dangerous. But in a country of immigrants like the United States, one actually pushes for change. In Mainz today, the stagnant Europeans came face to face with the dynamic Americans. We Europeans always want to have the world from yesterday, whereas the Americans strive for the world of tomorrow.

Hat tip: Chrenkoff

Hosted on This Blog is Full of Crap who published my favorite blog rant of all time after 9/11 about how the terrorists shouldn’t mess with us because we were crazier then them. You can read it here

I wish I was Mark Steyn

One disadvantage of writing is that you often have all these half-finished pieces floating around in your head. One of the pieces is this imagined invective to the feminist princesses I had a run in about a month ago ( 1, 2 ). Since one of the liberal guys was going to write an article condemning the Noise editorial staff for the whole debacle, I’ve been carrying it around in my head. Better to get it out…

Basically, Skunk, the reason the editors of the Noise decided not to run your article unopposed was because by formatting it as a fake interview, you presumed upon the editorial voice. Now being an editor isn’t really that fun the best thing about it is that you always get the last word. When you presumed on that last word, you presumed on their opinion. At the New York Times, they have a special room in the basement where they take writers who presume to speak for the editors so that they can beat them with rubbers hoses without the screams of pain disturbing the other writers.

Luckily, the Noise is not the New York Times, so we get to write about truth, beauty and art instead of boring stuff like how much snow fell yesterday versus last year. Unluckily, the Noise doesn’t have a room in a basement, or even a basement. Instead, they have me, the journalistic equivalent of the rubber hose.

So consider yourself flogged.

As a fellow writer, I give you the following pieces of advice:

1. Use the editorial voice carefully. If you had called up the Noise and asked them to interview you, the price probably would have come out about the same but you wouldn’t have gotten the verbal flogging.

2. Editors are simple creatures. If you want them to like you, check your spelling, proofread, and always make your deadlines. If you want them to love you, turn in your pieces early.

Boy, those feminists can get bitchy.

Here’s my run ins:

1 2

So Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) has accused Karl Rove of planting the infamous Ra^therGate documents. transcript

Maurice, even if this was true, if the Democrats were so stupid that they fell for it then they don’t deserve to be in government because these weren’t just forgeries, they were bad forgeries.

One of the ironies of the Cold War was that the Soviets were more colonial and imperialist then the Americans were (most of the time, we can’t be bothered), yet accused America of the reverse.

Now it seems that one of the last bits of colonialism, dating back to end of the WWI, the Middle East is beginning to move forward.

• The Lebanese are protesting against Syria.
• Iraq is a democracy
• Afghanistan is a democracy
• Saudi Arabia had some elections.

If you want to understand the current US foreign policy, and why in a large sense, Bush is one of the most liberal presidents when it comes to foreign policy, you need to understand the cold war and the colonial period prior to WWII. Here’s my favorite book on the subject:

The Cold War: A History

This book is also great; it really shows how the colonialism of England and France got us into this mess in the first place. Finding out that Israel exists because the nuts in the English Foreign Office thought that Jews secretly ran the Ottoman empire was hysterical in a “you’d have to laugh or you’d cry” kind of way:

A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East

Flu reports nationwide from the CDC.

Bad News:

Paris Hilton has been cast in a movie.

Good News:

It’s a horror movie where she gets killed.

In other news, I really enjoyed Constantine, but that was a given because I loved the comic book it was based on.

After filling in one and seeing the number of telemarketing calls I get go from 1 a day to 5 a day after I gave them my real name and address, I now use:

Elwood Blues 1060 West Addison Chicago, IL 60613-4397

Which, if you’ve ever seen the movie the Blues Brothers, will ring familiar. It’s Wrigley field. You’ll also know why that’s funny.

Turns out that was a good idea. This guy in Tukwila, Washington almost got framed for arson, based on purchases from his Safeway club card. Read the article here with a hat tip to Bruce Schneier.

I really hate club cards. I especially hate the Barnes & Noble one since it bugs me to have to pay for the privilege of shopping there, and I wish whatever Asshole MBA who thought them up a slow, painful death followed by an enternity in Hell unable to buy a bottle of water because he doesn’t have his Hell club card so he’s short $0.01…

Have Kids? Go read this

Slacker Parents Unite!

In the wake of the Popular Mechanics great debunking of all the major 9/11 conspiracy nonsense I’ve seen lots of links to the article.

However, sometimes I think the blogosphere takes itself too seriously. So here’s a heretical thought.

Scientists have correlated admissions to mental health facilities with the incidence of magnetic storms in the atmosphere.

Which leads to the question: What if the Tin Foil Hat Brigade is right? Not that the tin foil protects their brains from the evil mind control rays of the (Aliens, Government, Israelis) per se, but rather that wearing tin foil on their head makes them a little less crazy.

Next time you have a headache or are feeling stressed, get out the Reynolds wrap…

Only one post so far.

It’s pretty interesting already though, seeing the left smack down the radical left.

You know, I first heard about Scott Ritter when he was criticizing the weapons inspection regime because he thought Iraq had weapons and we weren’t finding them because it would embarrass the French.

Then he showed up saying Iraq didn’t have weapons I went huh? Is this the same guy?

Now he’s on Al Jazeera? link

Weird.

So I was in the the Noise Editorial meeting, and one of the guys there commented on how the right wing was “stupid” and ignorant.

Nope, I didn’t kill him.

I decided to write this post instead.

From my experience, its the left that are shallow and stupid, not the right. I often agree with the left on ends but not on means. It’s the how where the knee-jerk left seems weak, they don’t think things through. Policy is hard, and good science doesn’t always make good policy.

For an example, consider the environment. Imagine if there was a device that cost $500 that would reduce car exhaust emissions by 5%.

If I’m a lefty environmentalist, I’d want to pass a law forcing all auto manufacturers to include said device on all new cars. Sounds good right? It would cut emissions by 5%.

As a righty environmentalist, I can tell you, this would be a disaster for the environment. You have to look at this magic device in the larger picture of life.

Only $7.99:

You can see it here

My entry is my rant called Real Women Have Hips

Though I’m not sure I really understand this bonfire thing, since its supposed to be your worst posts, and I always submit my best posts…

From Patrick Ruffini.

You’ll want to download the larger version instead of squinting at the tiny version in the blog, but his analysis is interesting as well. I didn’t know that the Kurdish coalition was made up of two factions that had been fighting against each other. Seems to me that people, given these huge coalitions, either were voting for specific people they knew, or were voting for people of their own ethnicity who they expected to represent their interests.

I predict that the individual coalitions will be smart, that they’ll realize that the best way to protect their own interests is to guarantee freedom for everyone. Let’s hope I’m right.

So my wife was telling me this story last night as we were watching this PBS Documentary I got from Netflix called the 50-year war that was basically about Israel.

During the Cold War, the Russians ripped off one of America’s Jet fighter designs.

Except for these valves that they didn’t think were important. Well, it turns out they were critical. So the Russians were buying these valves in America, and then smuggling them out through Canada. So the Pentagon, being pretty sly, contracted with a company to make copies of the valve. Except these valves would fail at 20,000 feet causing the plane to crash. Not even the company knew they were making faulty valves, since they were just following the spec the Pentagon gave them. The Pentagon would then slip these valves to the Russians…

The problem was somehow there was some mixup, and the bad valves started showing up with good parts as well. So my wife’s father, who was a jet mechanic at Edwards Air Force Base at the time, figured out some way to tell the good parts from the bad parts.

He got in trouble since it was supposed to be this big secret that there were bad parts. Now he didn’t know the whole story about the Russian part, he just thought a vendor was messing up so he came up with the test. One of the pilots had to bail him out of trouble, since he was actually doing a really good job and had no idea why he was getting yelled at for testing parts.

Which brings us to the 6 day war.

not that he’s actually done anything stupid yet…

But it’s coming.

You know, this is all Jimmy Carter’s fault. Back when he was President, and under his guidance, the Democratic party changed the rules about how it operates disenfranchising the “silent majority” in favor of the “focal minotiry”. At the time, it seemed like Jimmy was trying to throw the nomination to Jesse Jackson. The end result is that the more crazy you are as a Democrat, the easier it is to get the nomination.

It hasn’t been fixed yet. Probably won’t be either…

The ultimate 2008 ticket: Guiliani & Condi.

Not Safe For Work (but free):

Yowsa! Or this one? Hell, why stop there? :1 2 3 4

Maybe its just me, but if you look at the examples above, it seems like they’re both higher quality and much nastier then the American equivalents. (Without being particularly misogynistic.)

He’s behind, I thought of her last November. I paired her with Colin though.

Hat Tip: Patrick Ruffini

This single song, which just has some cool drumming:

A Marilyn Manson Greatest Hits CD:

The Marilyn Manson CD was the big surprise for me. I once heard him live and thought he was terrible, but the Matrix Soundtrack kind of made me a convert since I kind of liked those selections. I don’t quite like him enough of one to buy the individual albums, so the Greatest Hits was a good deal.

And I found out that when John Cusack says “I will now sell 5 copies of the “The Three EP’s” by the Beta Band, that’s “the Three EP’s” is an album name:

For you R&B fans, a while back a made an iMix of all the original songs from the Commitments soundtrack:

While I think the people at P.M.S. Media are freaking nuts, I do think its cool that they exist. Here’s their website.

Hosted at SophistPundit

I got top billing!

My wife has been getting pneumonia every year for 7 years now.

We thought it might be an allergy to Ponderosa Pine trees, which would mean moving away from Flagstaff, which would have really sucked.

We found out today that’s not it.

Whoo Hoo!

I’m a small-l libertarian, so mostly I’m in favor of legalizing things. Then I read this piece on samizdata.

A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing “sexual services” at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.

Prostitution was legalised in Germany just over two years ago and brothel owners – who must pay tax and employee health insurance – were granted access to official databases of jobseekers.

The waitress, an unemployed information technology professional, had said that she was willing to work in a bar at night and had worked in a cafe.

She received a letter from the job centre telling her that an employer was interested in her “profile” and that she should ring them. Only on doing so did the woman, who has not been identified for legal reasons, realise that she was calling a brothel.

Under Germany’s welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job – including in the sex industry – or lose her unemployment benefit. Last month German unemployment rose for the 11th consecutive month to 4.5 million, taking the number out of work to its highest since reunification in 1990.

So if we legalized prostitution, then people who turned down said jobs could lose their unemployment.

Pretty good example of why policy is hard and you have to think of the big picture.

Update: You think I would have learned by now not to trust an article from the Telegraph. Turns out the story isn’t true. Snopes as always has wonderful coverage.

My wife gets a Victoria’s Secret catalog about once/week. I look at them for fun sometimes. (I’m perfectly willing to admit I like looking at scantily clad women. Duh.) Overall though, I mostly just ignore them. They’re geared towards women, and selling to women, so they’re only mildly interesting.

Last month a catalog from Playboy showed up for Valentine’s Day. I couldn’t help myself I picked up the catalog and read every page. Then it struck me. The Victoria’s Secret catalog is geared towards women, and it’s filled with, let’s face it, skinny-ass stick figures. The message on every page of the Victoria’s Secret catalog is “spend $30 on this piece of lace, and you can look like this”.

The Playboy catalog is geared towards men. Its message is, “spend $10 on this piece of cotton, and your wife can look like this”. In fact, their catalog even says that!

The catalogs sound similar but the key is that the pictures are different. The women in Victoria’s Secret are skinny. The women in Playboy aren’t, rather the women in Playboy are well, Bodacious, or if you’re a traditionalist, voluptuous. So you can see what I mean, here are two images from their respective websites:

Victoria, the anorexia victim on the left, has no butt. The Playgirl, on the other hand, not only does she have a butt, but hers tells you to kiss it, which (blush) sounds kind of fun.

Now why am I blathering on about all this? Because it occurred to me that for all the things about unhealthy body images I hear from feminists, very little of that has to do with men. Men like looking at women, naked, scantily clad, fully clothed, whatever, but we don’t really like women who look like fashion models in real life. We like women who look healthy and fun. The woman on the left? She doesn’t look healthy to me, and she doesn’t look fun. The woman on the right? She looks healthy and fun.

Both scientists and art historians have noticed this as well. In the 17th century, this was considered the height of sexy:

Peter Paul Rubens, the Three Graces, 1639

Even though these women look like every woman I’ve ever slept with, they probably would no longer meet the modern standards of beauty. What’s changed? We have. In various studies by sociologists, when asked to choose the most beautiful images out of hundreds of photographs, both men and women chose the photos of the opposite sex they felt most reflected health. In other studies, when asked to choose between specific facial features (eyes, noses, chins, etc.), both men and women chose the facial features that were actually the most common: they chose the average nose, the average eye shape, the average chin.

Beauty, it seems, is being healthy and average looking. No great mystery really. Both men and women are looking for mates, right? So they want good genes, which ultimately means looking healthy and “average” looking. Since most of us don’t have all of the “average” facial features, our standard of beauty is the few members of us that managed to get all of those average features at the same time.

Applying this to the painting above, in the world of the 17th century even the wealthy didn’t always get enough to eat. Children often didn’t live to adulthood, and birth control was more difficult. So in that world the Rubenesqe women above would look healthy and fertile, and by that world’s standards, sexy. In fact, the clothing of that period would actually exaggerate a woman’s hips, because being healthy was associated with having wide hips because so many women would die in childbirth.

In the 21st century, children live longer so we aren’t forced by that to have so many of them. Women also no longer die in childbirth on a regular basis. The end result is that we associate health with being athletic. When it comes to measuring the opposite sex, while the pictures of our standards of beauty have changed, the underlying basis, good health and good genes has not. Which makes sense, because people haven’t changed that much between the 17th and 21st century.

In the present, when it comes to the same sex though, it seems we disagree. The women and mostly gay men who control the fashion industry have settled on a standard of female beauty that to my eye makes the women look diseased. For a long time, I figured it was just my particular taste in women. Judging by the catalog I got from Playboy though, it seems I’m not alone, that men in general agree with me: we like women with a little meat on their bones. Because ultimately, we like healthy women not anorexic women.

In fact, it’s really obvious when I think about it. The sexual characteristics that I most notice on women are the sexual characteristics that are different between men and women. Women have boobs (duh) but they also have hips! And curves! Wonderful curves! Women with boyish hips don’t seem as attractive to me, but if a woman were obviously healthy, I probably wouldn’t notice because different people have different body types and what’s healthy on one person is unhealthy on another. Healthy and Fun, that’s what I look for.

So if you’re a woman, and you want to see what men consider beauty, don’t buy Cosmo or Vogue, buy yourself a copy of Playboy. You’ll see lots of women with real hips, and real smiles. Healthy and Fun.

Don’t complain to me about the fashion industries beauty standard though. As a heterosexual male, that has nothing to do with me. I like hips. As far as the standard body image goes, to be honest, I don’t even like it when women wear high heels, because then I have to listen to them complain about their feet hurting when they could have been having fun dancing.

Healthy and Fun Yes! Anorexic with sore feet, No!

So I went to my editorial meeting for the Noise yesterday.

SkunkRising (the author of the piece I made fun of here) showed up and proceeded to dominate the editorial meeting for 45 minutes whining because I wasn’t nice to her. Then she left.

Oh, and by the way, she wasn’t a lesbian it turns out. She wasn’t quite like I thought. I pictured her as sort of this freshman NAU student with more piercings and passion then sense who had decided she was a lesbian and that men were responsible for all the evils of the world. The reality is that she’s a single mom who somehow makes time out of the rest of her life to work for her beliefs, who was deeply offended that I automatically assumed she was a lesbian because she said she was a radical feminist. Even more annoying, this is the standard response she gets from people.

What can I say? Its true. I felt I was making fun of her mostly for being whiny while claiming she was a “radical”, but I can see her point of view. It is bad (not that I care) that radical feminists get labeled as lesbians. But I’m not one of those people who thinks being a lesbian is a bad thing, and frankly, if you go around using the word “queer” 3 times in one eassy, not to mention in normal conversation, people are going to think you’re gay.

I was right about the nose ring though.

Well, my editor asked me this month for a piece responding to this blatantly one-sided left wing article these two “radical” feminists had submitted. It was written as this fake interview, with one member of the group interviewing the other. It was, in my not very humble opinion, complete dreck. I barely got through the first two paragraphs. There were lots of gratuitous exclamation points, and this weird comparison between life for women under the Taliban and women wearing high heels in America.

Rather then write a response to it, I interleaved my comments in with the original article. I wasn’t very nice. In fact you might say, I was an opinionated bastard. The resulting article was much more fun to read, and pretty funny. They made their points, I made fun of them, and the article was much enjoyed by all the people I inflict my rough drafts on.

Even my editor liked it. He was a little concerned where I mocked them for being lesbians, but really, since they never said they were lesbians, I think I was mocking them for how their sexuality was obviously influencing their political beliefs. (“Men are evil” if you want the short version.)

The “radical” feminists? They felt “attacked”, and chose to pull the entire article.

As my wife put it “What princesses. They fold their tent and go home because someone says something mean to them? I’ve been shot at for my beliefs.” (It’s true, she has. In fact, my wife actually IS a radical feminist unlike these two. )

So much for the wannabe “radical anarcho-feminists”. There are women in the world who get beaten/jailed/killed fighting for their rights, but these two couldn’t handle being mocked? Princesses.

So not only am I the token Evil Neanderthal Conservative for the Noise that you know and love, I have a new title: Crusher of Princesses

It brings to mind a funny true story though. Once upon a time there were these two man-hating trust-fund lesbians who ran a non-profit. (They weren’t really man-hating, but its funnier if you think of them that way.) They had this one male employee.

One day, one of the women found that someone had been looking at naked pictures of women on the internet! On their computer! The horror!

Clearly, it was the man’s fault. He was looking at porn, the evil patriarchical bastard! Didn’t he know that naked pictures of women subjugates women and teaches men to treat women as sex objects?

So they fired him.

He responded by suing them for wrongful termination.

So they asked a friend of mine to look at their computer, to prove what a moral degenerate this guy was.

You know what he found? During the time that the gentleman in question was on vacation, or after hours when he wasn’t in the office, that’s when someone was looking at naked pictures of women on the internet. It wasn’t the evil patriarchical bastard trying to keep women down, it was the other lesbian.

I laughed for days when I found this out. My friend recommended to their lawyer that they settle, and that was the last I heard about it.

Of course, the moral to these two stories:

Calling yourself radical doesn’t make you a radical. In fact, being a lesbian doesn’t make you a radical feminist either. Real radicals don’t whine, and they don’t have to call themselves radical.

It’s not just men who oppress women by looking at naked pictures of them on the internet. Life and Truth are complex.

Anyways, given the joy of the internet you can read the original interleave after the “continue” link.

What if the true culprits of 9/11 was Iran?

Would our foreign policy be any different? We weren’t in a position to attack Iran then, but now:

• Iraq is a Democracy, and a US Ally
• Afghanistan is a Democracy, and a US Ally
• Turkey is a Democracy, and a US Ally
• Armenia is a Democracy, and a US Ally
• Turkmenistan is a Democracy, and if not a US Ally, pretty cordial
• Azerbaijan is a Democracy, and cordial like Turkmenistant
• Pakistan is NOT a Democracy, but is a US Ally

Look at the following image, and tell me who’s left?

Iraq has been a big gamble for President Bush, and by extension, the United States.

This week, it looked like that gamble had paid off, and paid off well.

But I ask you, was it every really a gamble to bet on Democracy? Are there any people in the world, who given a choice, would choose not to be in charge of their own life? Betting on Democracy is a pretty safe bet.

You know the pundits were surprised in El Salvador in ‘89, in Afghanistan in ‘04, and in Iraq in ‘05. I wasn’t. I was worried that there might be lots of attacks in Iraq, so I worried about people being being hurt. On balance though, the election on Sunday, while more dangerous then in Afghanistan, was safer then the El Salvador election.

President Bush has transformed the Middle East. It took balls, but as the head of the Arab League said yesterday on NPR: “The time for Dictators and Fools is past”.

Democracy, Sexy, Whiskey!

I’m still blogging, just been hectic here and I haven’t been feeling well.

Coming up soon though: Crushing the Princesses, the true story of how I exposed some “radicals” as a bunch of whiners.