Sixteen Volts

I have recently uploaded quite a lot of David Bowie into my MP3 player. I had forgotten how good his music is, even if I can't really distinguish between any of his albums that came after "1. Outside". Earlier today I also actually listened to the lyrics of the song "Pablo Picasso" now that I had it in the headphones so that I can actually make out what was being said. (Native speakers of English, when you listen to rock music, do you just automatically understand the lyrics, or do you actually have to make an effort to hear what was said?) I have to point out that there is a humorous message in this song for certain people, especially the gamma males. "The girls would turn the colour of a juicy avocado, when he would drive down their street in his El Dorado..."

I have occasionally read and even enjoyed writings of Charlie Stross at the Antipope website. However, in his post "Charlie Stross, master of fantasy", Tjic skewers the folly of a new post by Stross, "Two Minute Hate". It is easy to earn lot of edgy rebellion points by being all contrarian and doubting the official line and all that stuff, but one should still try to be careful of which horses to bet on.

Two Blowhards links to the user geriatric1927, the friendly and polite grandpa type from Britain who is perhaps the world's oldest videoblogger, at least among those who have a significant viewership.

For a really scary thought, imagine for a moment being a little boy who has feminists for parents. Shudder. Perhaps being raised by feminists would be better for female daughters. In this light, we can note the post "How To Raise Feminist Daughters" at "Alas, A Blog" and its comments. For some reason, this topic also made me think of Edmund Kemper for a moment, another little boy who was made to wear a dress.

Since today is Wednesday, I was kind of hoping that the brand new edition of the Carnival of Feminists would contain lots of nuttiness and thus liberate me from the burden of coming up with entertaining original thoughts, since I can just link to the feminist silliness and say something like "Heh, indeed". But there just doesn't seem to be much of anything over there this time, unlike, say, the previous edition. That one was just chock-full of absolutely hilarious feminist lament of being poor or otherwise a loser. The whole phenomenon of feminists intentionally making themselves losers and less attractive to quality males, and then having to settle for loser males who then go on to confirm all the feminist bad ideas about men is something that truly belongs to an O. Henry story.

Ending all welfare and wealth transfers would quickly reveal which groups, worldviews and ideologies can stand and survive on their own, and which ones need the productive others to parasitically mooch on. This observation, by the way, also tells you why certain groups are so motivated to create an all-powerful welfare state. Whenever the free market has a chance to operate, its participants will quickly notice and decide that some people are worth less to them than the others. In the free market, you can't just take and demand and take from others, but if you want something from them, you have to give them something equally valuable in return. Since certain people and groups, especially leftists, have very little of anything that others might voluntarily want, they have no choice but to demand that others must behave as if these losers were more valuable to them than what they really are. Perhaps one day demanding money from others this way will be considered as evil and heinous as demanding sex from others this way would be. Until then, the opinion piece "Why Welfare Reform Worked" explains why taking away the free money from the do-nothing welfare queens worked so very well.

Now, perhaps we should not make fun of feminists since we know that they are raped and harassed all the time. In fact, all women everywhere have to live in constant fear of rape, and nothing that a woman does has any effect on the probability of her becoming a victim of rape. The same goes for what the woman is, since for example, a pretty twentysomething has the exact same probability of becoming raped as a morbidly obese middle-aged woman. Or not. A reader emailed me a link to the article "Australian safety survey kills feminist distortions". The figures listed in this article reminded me of the figures in the U.S. Department of Justice report "Criminal Victimization in the United States, 2003 Statistical Tables". The reality of rapes and gang rapes seems to be rather different from what the leftists and feminists would like to pretend it to be. The problem of rich white fratboys raping minority women is actually rather small in the real world, as the statistical tables 42 and 46 inform us. So we are left with the mystery of why this minuscule part of the rape problem gets so much publicity, while many other kinds of rapes that are several orders of magnitude more common go virtually unnoticed by the progressive community. Perhaps if we all think about this puzzling issue together, we will eventually uncover the explanation.

Moving from the women's bodies to heavenly bodies, I noticed that the whole idea of what is considered a planet and what is not is currently subject to debate. Unlike the schoolchildren have been told, there is now a total of twelve planets (or thirteen, if you include Counter-Earth). At "Siris", the post "Planets" examines the criteria of what is considered a planet and what is not.

But perhaps we shouldn't try to hard to create objective criteria for deciding what is a planet, since objective science is only an illusion anyway. First, everything is socially constructed and second, all kind of classifying, evaluating and judging things is nothing but Western privilege and hegemony of patriarchy. We need more feminist science that is concerned of how things make you feel instead of how things are. In the post "A Jaunt into the Post-Modern "Scientific" Literature", TangoMan at Gene Expression has dug up a hilarious example of what happens when postmodern thought spreads from humanities to reality-based sciences such as medicine. I have to wonder if the people in humanities ever feel ashamed of what they are. Or perhaps they simply can't feel any more shame about themselves than a dung beetle can be ashamed of what it is. On the other hand, the dung beetle is an important and useful member of biosphere, unlike the people in humanities whose main role and purpose in society tends to be similar to that of an intestinal parasite.

Meanwhile, science marches on in all fronts, as illustrated in the post "The progress of science" at Marginal Revolution. The results of this experiment remound me of the old Space Moose strip "Karate Man".

To end this post with a cutesy-poo note, the post "Big Money In Small Houses?" at NicheGeek shows us a new trend in housing that is in a vivid contrast to the sprawling McMansions.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Wednesday, August 16, 2006 at 8:13 PM