The Contra-Crunchy Conservative

Another great blog is the The Contra-Crunchy Conservative, which I discovered via a wonderful comment from Bubba at Mean Mr. Mustard's.

Are You Ready?

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution points to a Houston Chronicle Online article for his "Houston fact of the day":

Spanish titles or resources for learning English accounted for half of the top 20 most popular audio books [in Houston public libraries].

My favorite gem gleaned from the article is:

Among the least popular resources was FEMA's publication, Are You Ready? An In-Depth Guide to Citizen Preparedness. The book is one of more than 3,000 titles that have not been circulated during the past two years.

I also suspect that the conflated category "Spanish titles or resources for learning English" is more full of "novelas"-- Spanish-language pornographic comic books -- than ESL materials.

We Are Collective Pie

Our daughter has re-Christened my husband and me, no longer "Mama" and "Daddy," but both "Pie." I suppose we should have seen it coming, as I call him "Pookie Pie" and he calls me "Sweetie Pie."

I admire her syllabic economy, and note that she uses the interchangeable term for her collective parental units when she is being most rational and un-emotional: "Pie, what is that noise?" "Pie, where are we going?" "Pie, when are you going to turn off the computer and take me to the park?"

Of course, in the morning, after she wakes up alone in bed, she comes running into the living room to throw herself into my arms with a "Mama" sigh. And she hits her father's arms with torpedo speed after he comes home from work, screaming "Daddy home! Daddy home!" No gender-neutral term for the Biscuit when it comes to lovin'.

Good Stuff Out There

I am really, really uninteresting these days, but there are at least two other bloggers out there who aren't. Which is my convoluted way of saying I have found some nice blogs out there which have given me some pause and a chuckle or two. One is Flea's blog, who is an anonymous skeptical pediatrician. I have also found Monstera Deliciosa, a funny and insightful blog (via Mean Mr. Mustard) from a woman after my own heart.

MR's new logo

I dabble (barely) in graphic design. I would be the first to admit I am woefully ignorant, but at least I am learning to appreciate the importance of design and form (a difficult feat for an Aspie like me, who more naturally gravitates towards function, function, function).

Anyway, I just wanted to gush a bit over Marginal Revolution's new logo, as designed by Jacob Morse of Volo Creative. It is simple, elegant, eye-catching but not overwhelming. I love the clean lines and the perfect transmission of the concept of economics to a graphic. Well done, gents!

You don't see this very often

From an AFP news story about the famous "national debt clock" owned by real estate developer Douglas Durst:

Durst insists that the clock is non-partisan in its effort to shame the federal government over what he sees as its willingness to gamble away the nation's future.

"We're a family business," Durst said. "We think generationally, and we don't want to see the next generation crippled by this burden," he said.

Imagine, a public figure mentioning that our nation should be "thinking generationally"!

Thank you for my first belly laugh of the day!

... to Steve Sailer, who is reviewing "V for Vendetta":

An ambitious, deeply religious Conservative politician, he had imposed martial law in the wake of a terrorist virus attack, putting society under the thumb of fanatical Church of England bishops. (According to Google, the phrase "fanatical Church of England bishops" has never been seen before.) The government dispatched all Muslims and homosexuals to concentration camps (although the film forgets to mention how these two victimized minorities got along on the inside).

Good Night and God Bless

Buck Owens has passed on.

There are days...

...when I am really glad to be living in PoMo America.

And this is one of them.

Progressives have been hyperventilating over Daniel Edwards' sculpture "Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston," which, according to Salon, is a "life-size piece depict[ing] Britney Spears crouching naked on her elbows and knees atop a bearskin rug," giving birth.

The biggest problem with this piece is that the sculptor is dedicating his work to the anti-abortion movement. Says Laura Barcella at AlterNet, "…Please don't use some nutty, obsessed artist's hypersexualized fantasy of celebrity childbirth as your twisted anti-choice propaganda. On second thought -- do that, if you really think it'll help your cause. I think it makes all of y'all anti-choicers look as crazy as the artist -- which, of course, you are."

The problem is, of course, the piece is a hoax.

Commenter quinnskylark [at the same blogpost, above] pointed to Dan Edwards' other work, which includes a Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy Memorial. He writes, "If I were a betting man, I’d guess that the artist’s point in this sculpture has nothing to do with the pro-choice/pro-life discussion and everything to do with the perception and judgment of pseudo-liberals. The press release is not meant to promote the work; it is itself part of the artwork, intended to provoke reactions like your blog post. Thus your reaction is also part of the artwork. A really good showing of the artist's work would be not only the sculpture, but framed reproductions of the condemning articles written about it. The fact that you were so emotionally affected by this artwork shows that it was successful. It is likely that the artist is not pro-life, but that he’s pro-self-expression. Perhaps he wanted to say that liberals could be as bad as conservatives when it came to reacting to opinions different than their own. If that's the case, it worked. You took the bait and revealed yourself to be a philistine in liberal clothing."

Well done, sir.

What We Have Lost

The WarNerd nails it again:

So much of what made war worth doing died in '45. That's the Nazis' real crime, if you ask me: they ruined it for everybody except the damn suits.

Via Steve Sailer, natch.

Harvesting Federal Students Loans

Expect to see the least among us saddled with increasing student loan debt, thanks to these kinds of "opportunities."

Online Colleges Receive a Boost From Congress

"This is a growth industry and you get rich not by being skeptical, but by being enthusiastic," said Henry M. Levin, director of Columbia University's National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education.

"Restore, I pray you, to them, even this day..."

from ParaPundit:

America's Younger Workers Losing Ground On Income

A new survey shows that median incomes fell for householders under 45, even as they rose for older ones, between 2001 and 2004.

Randall Parker suspects this may be because the U.S. is becoming less white, and the predominate immigrant groups are downwardly-mobile.

He points out that "from 1970 to 1997 men under 35 experienced a 19% decline in income."

• The entry of women into the workforce in those decades has helped push median family incomes up over time. But even when men and women are included together, younger workers (age 25-34) are earning well below what they did in 1970. And at all ages, evidence suggests that families are putting in more hours of work to make their household incomes rise.

• Even with extra time at work, median family income has barely budged since 1995 for householders below 45, up about 5 percent after inflation through 2004.

He writes, "Some libertarians argue that a rising tide lifts all boats. Well, wrong. A large proportion of the boats have leaks and are sitting rather lower in the water. Think of all the technological advances that have boosted productivity since 1970 and then consider these results. Something is going terribly wrong."

Parker also refers to the problems facing the children of America's majority population, most notably raging student loan and consumer debt.

Is the problem really that we are all feckless debtors? I think there is some truth to this, and it has be admitted. We have all been raised with a buy-now pay-later mentality. However, even without the problematic consumer debt saddling younger people, there is the larger issue of student loan debt, due to America's education racket.

In the future, as men continue to eschew higher education, I believe that the student loan problem will fade away on its own. Higher education will not be tenable without men. It certainly will prove to be a bad investment, as future earnings will cease to track with education.

The bigger problem facing Red State America will be weaning our children off of credit.

"I'll explain it all to them when they get older about why they look so different."

Black and white twins

When Kylie Hodgson gave birth to twin daughters by caesarean section, she was just relieved that they had arrived safely.
It was only when the midwife handed them over for her to hold that she noticed the difference between them.
Remee, who weighed 5lb 15oz, was blonde and fair skinned. Her sister Kian, born a minute later weighing 6lb, was black.

Notice they aren't in red, white, and blue

Judi Werthein has designed a special "crossing trainer" to help illegal immigrants cross the border from Mexico to the US.

A Random Assortment of Links

My husband treats me like a piece of property! And I like it just fine, thank you. For example, he sent me the link to Electric Venom's website, who has been discussing her family's decision to homeschool their young son. He also turned me on to Salon's article discussing the fact that more and more men are eschewing college. (Don't miss the "Letters" section. My favorite? "Sorry, but if the future of caucasian [sic] humanity depends upon women being nothing but fetus factories, as far as I'm concerned, the white race will just have to die out.")

JLH's pens the best blog entry I have ever read. The only thing I would add is one more link: "Why Some Old Lovers Look Alike."

Yes, it is true: "If your spouse is genetically similar, you're more likely to have a happy marriage, for example. Child abuse rates are lower when similarity is high, and you'll also be more altruistic and willing to sacrifice more for someone who is more genetically like you, research shows."

Like any good survivalist, I just purchased "How to Survive a Robot Uprising." Consider yourselves warned, people!

This was reported under "Odd News" on Yahoo! News...

Marriage builds wealth more than being single?

By Joanne Morrison
Fri Jan 20, 1:55 PM ET


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Staying married has its benefits, especially financial, as a new U.S.-wide study shows the wealth of a married person is almost double that of somebody who is single.

Divorce among U.S. baby boomers reduced personal wealth by about 77 percent compared to that of a single person, while the financial standing among those who remained married almost doubled, according to a nationwide study released this week.

"If you really want to increase your wealth, get married and stay married. On the other hand, divorce can devastate your wealth," said Jay Zagorsky, author of the study and a research scientist at Ohio Sate University's Center for Human Resource Research. (emphasis mine)

"If you really want to increase your wealth, get married and stay married..." It is hard to believe that this would shock anyone over the age of 12. As much as this is a dog-bites-man story, however, it is still quite telling that this was filed as a fluff piece.

The Sacred Nursery

I think many of the cognoscenti are beginning to wake up to the reality of their lack of reproductive fitness (for example, university-educated women have a 35 percent lower fitness than those who leave school as early as possible).

After defining the worldliness which is killing our best and brightest White and Asian minds, Professor Geoffrey Miller speculates that the most important factors that will keep a population from entertaining itself to death include those which are near and dear to the Kinist heart: "Those who persist will evolve more self-control, conscientiousness, and pragmatism. They will evolve a horror of virtual entertainment, psychoactive drugs, and contraception. They will stress the values of hard work, delayed gratification, child-rearing, and environmental stewardship. They will combine the family values of the Religious Right with the sustainability values of the Greenpeace Left."

Of course, Steve Sailer has taken Mark Steyn to task for saying essentially the same thing with regards to the United States. Sailer points out that massive amounts of unskilled Latin American immigration will mitigate any increase in the native population, no matter how booming the natalist movement.

Sailer is right that there isn't much hope for a right-wing political boon from these demographic projections. The USA will become increasingly left-wing and totalitarian as it becomes more similar in population to other Latin-American countries. However, what is not being said is that Whites by definition will become increasingly more racially-aware, Christian, and conservative.

Those Whites who survive will do so only by embracing the Christian values of our ancestors. Whites who do not have a world view which eschews the nihilism of today's entertainment-based culture will see little reason to invest long-term time and resources into enterprises such as marriage or entrepreneurship which are the foundations of successful extended families and communities.

The Christians who survive will survive as Whites only through an explicit racial consciousness; less racially-aware White Christians will be lost through miscegenation and absorption into the majority non-White population. Many mainstream Christians may be comfortable with this, but the Christianity that their children's children may practice will not resemble their own.

Local Costs of the Iraq War

Follow this link to see the breakdown of the cost of the Iraq War for various towns, cities and counties across the U.S. This breakdown is based upon a total cost of $251 billion. Bear in mind this is just through FY2006.

Unlinked to the Future

The End of Courtship: Part 2 of 3 by Leon R. Kass.

Thanks to technology, a woman could declare herself free from the teleological meaning of her sexuality — as free as a man appears to be from his. Her menstrual cycle, since puberty a regular reminder of her natural maternal destiny, is now anovulatory and directed instead by her will and her medications, serving goals only of pleasure and convenience, enjoyable without apparent risk to personal health and safety. Woman on the pill is thus not only freed from the practical risk of pregnancy; she has, wittingly or not, begun to redefine the meaning of her own womanliness. Her sexuality unlinked to procreation, its exercise no longer needs to be concerned with the character of her partner and whether he is suitable to be the father and co-rearer of her yet-to-be-born children. Female sexuality becomes, like male, unlinked to the future. The new woman's anthem: Girls just want to have fun. Ironically, but absolutely predictably, the chemicals devised to assist in family planning keep many a potential family from forming, at least with a proper matrimonial beginning.

See also The End of Courtship: Part 1 of 3

Avian Flu Wiki

The Flu Wiki is a collection of resources on influenza and coping with an influenza pandemic.