IT BEGINS WITH A 'P'. I am cracking my toes in glee repeatedly over the special election in New York. Brief recap for those not up to speed: Obama appointed a NY "Republican" Congressman to be the Secretary of the Army. No clue what his name was, but it doesn't matter. The Governor (can't recollect his name either, but I think it rhymes with 'blind') called a special election to fill Army guy's seat. Naturally, a Democrat, Bill Owens, and a Republican, Dede Scozzafavorita, are selected in non-smoke-filled rooms to run for the seat. Owens is a monster (but I repeat myself! HA!), and Scozzafatta is worryingly described as "moderate to liberal" by every news outfit reporting. Another lock for the forces of octopoid government, right?

Hang on. Out of nowhere, some nonentities called The Conservative Party of New York State FUBARed the race (HA! again) by nominating some nobody named Doug Hoffman who actually believes what Republicans claim to believe. Suddenly, support for the nominated Republican doughgirl starts falling so fast all the graphs measuring that sort of thing have to be renumbered.

Finally, last Saturday, Scozzafatasso quits! Really!



Now it's a two-man race, between a genuine conservative and a run-of-the-mill totalitarian. Zounds! (Sorry. That's to make the Boss happy. Won't happen again.)

But what does our stateswomanish Republican do next? She turns around and endorses Bill Owens -- the Democrat -- over the ostensibly ideologically compatible candidate who knocked her cellulitic RINO ass out of the race. Sour grapes much, Scozzafyouio?

Today, she's got robocalls going out that remind me of nothing so much as the "confessions" at a Soviet show trial. Just before the train ride to Siberia.


Guess what, Dede? The only people who think they have to keep telling everyone that something isn't "about them" are narcissists. And since you brought it up, one of the great rhetorical victories of the left has been to erase the difference between the words "partisan" and "principled," turning the former into a slur of the latter. Thus, "rise above partisanship" means, and always means, "sink below principle."

It took me all day yesterday to remember the word for people like this: feckless. Morally flakey. Indifferent to obligations. Lacking in feck.

What excuse could she, a Republican, have for endorsing a Democrat over a conservative? If it's out of spite, she has no principles. If she truly prefers a Democrat, she has crap principles. What's the point of you, Scazzafollotypo? Why don't you believe in anything good? WHERE'S YOUR FECK, WOMAN?

Speaking of woman, I can't let this pass without comment and correction:


He actually has an airtight "excuse": IT'S A PLAY ON WORDS, AND YOU KNOW IT'S A PLAY ON WORDS, DUMBASS. And we know you know it.

I love how stupid people think everyone's dumber than them. You think we don't know a dumbass liberal like you would only use the word "assemblywoman" to play on the sympathies of the decent?

So it's unconscionable to even joke about bestiality, since Scoffatollo is a woman? Chickenshit. Playing the damsel-in-distress card is as despicable as playing the race card. The older Punks may have half a notion that women are fragile flowers and whatever, and should get a social handicap in games of hardball. I can't agree. You want to play with the boys? You consent to play as rough as the boys. Can't handle it? Then you shouldn't even be voting. And you sure as hell shouldn't be in a position to write and pass laws, for Chrissake.

Harsh? Yep. But fair. The price of full equality is giving up special treatment. If Scozzafoolo has any partisanshipprinciples, she'll denounce her beloved Bill Owens riding his white charger to her defense.

One more thing. The Wall Street Journal offers a well conceived word of caution:



A bitter pill to swallow but one that's medicinally sound. Nevertheless, look how easy it is for another (increasingly) feckless politician to twist this caveat into a threat against party disloyalty:



In other words, it'd be too hard to do anything without the GOP, so stop trying. Because God forbid we "anoint" candidates based on PRINCIPLE rather than PARTISANSHIP. Or do I have that backwards?

New York's 23rd district has a chance to make history. To make some change we can really believe in. Don't fuck this up, guys. Vote early and often.

H/T HOTAIR. Finally, some people are noticing that Ayn Rand is back on the front burner of political philosophy. It must be significant if Ed Morrissey has noticed:


Us.


Good of you, Ed. One might even call your tone generous. Not that we think Ed is ever ungenerous; it's just that a political philosophy like his, which consists of bringing the meat cleaver down sharply in the middle of whatever topic is being discussed, rarely lends itself to recognizing any kind of whole without first bisecting it into moderately digestible halves. However...

The resurgence of Ayn Rand is hardly news. It's ongoing and will likely only increase. We're living through the crisis she prophesied. With that in mind, we thought it might be helpful to remind people of some interesting posts and the comments on them in which Instapunk has talked about Ayn Rand or Atlas Shrugged in the past. (There's also a post, summoned in response to the search term "Atlas," which isn't specifically about Rand but adds tremendously to the argument made in another recent post.) Enjoy the synaptic activity occasioned by the following:


There's some authentic reason for hope in there if you look, especially in some of the comments.

INSURE YOURSELF. I don't know anything about Traveller's Insurance. But I do know something about capitalism. And I just luuuuv the way the market is trying to respond to the recession. Think about it. During the Great Depression, there was no television. What I see today on TV is car dealers, insurance agents, real estate companies, fast-food franchises, and the big guys in every conceivable industry fighting for business. Result: Immediate responsiveness, competitive pricing, and some of the most creative advertising I've ever seen. Like my all-time, completely love-it-to-death favorite:


There are actually multiple versions of this commercial. I watch all of them, all the way through, every time. I want to buy the album. I want to buy the dog, which is sick, because I already have four, every one of them dumb as fenceposts (sighthounds are idiots: I'm no doggist. But pugs are morons too.) When I was a kid, we had German Shepherds (scary smart) and terriers (annoying smart)... and now I have a, uh, Scottish Deerhound. Handsome, sweet, noble, dignifiedly affectionate, and smart as a bathroom U-joint. Capitalism. Non-Rand style. Him we take care of. Because he can't compete.


The rest of them? We watch them compete like nobody's business -- clever as rocks and contending for every scrap...


If and when they want an insurance policy, we'll help them with that, too. But they have to ask us first. That's the capitalist way.

Monday, November 02, 2009

JESUS. Well, this is rich:


Kewl. A "biopic" that won't depict its subject. Just think about that cinematically. Seems like a horror movie doesn't it? Lots of heavy breathing behind a camera that keeps closing in on its victims... Think of the Matrix with Neo permanently off-camera. Sound interesting? uh, no. Sounds awful. Sounds like political whoring with a ginormously huge checkbook behind it. But please correct me if you have ideas about how to do a biopic that never shows its protagonist. "Malcolm X" would have been so much greater if we'd never seen the face of Denzel Washinton, wouldn't it? Can't wait for all the filmic innovations that will make "Muhammedix" an Oscar winner.

Maybe you thought Hollywood had reached its lowpoint with the Polanski defense. Not at all. Hollywood hasn't yet begun to reach its lowpoint. Two kinds of points to make here. The first is theological and historical. Jesus Christ transformed the world and human consciousness without being documented in any verifiable historical terms. The proof of his existence rests entirely on the fact that unless he existed, it's impossible to explain the subsequent course of human civilization. Muhammed was an historical figure, a fairly obvious imitation of a Biblical prophet who plagiarized his betters to found a religion based on racial and ethnic hatreds, mysogyny, brutal oppression, and mass murder. (Find me any language beautiful in the Koran that competes with the King James Bible. It's all generic phony scripture, as dull as it is mean and didactic.) But all religions are equal in the eyes of those who simultaneously patronize all faiths that proclaim a god of some sort and forgive every barbarian excess as a proof of the evils of civilization itself.

The second point has to do with the real bond between Hollywood and Islam -- the twisted sexuality that has produced both the casting couch and honor killings, a tradtition of open-secret homosexuality (uh, yeah, gays have a whole 24/7 cable movie channel even as they ululate about the uniqueness in cinematic history of Brokeback Mountain) that promulgates female subjugation while it pretends to respect women even as it sanctifies purely male kinship and bromances (however defined), espouses artistic and moral freedom for everyone but dumb sluts who show off their vaginas on camera, and promotes (dirtiest secret of all) systematized pedophilia.

Pretty sure I'm the first ever to call out the similarities between Hollywood and Arab oil magnates. But they're legion. Way too much unearned money on both sides. The Hollywood kids are, by definition, not anyone. Imagine what it's like to play all those parts of people who are brave, accomplished, eloquent, creative, and important. They're not those people. And they don't see their own movies the way we do. They see them the way they're made -- with lights, sets, glass paintings, cameras, directors, stand-ins, stunt people, scripts, multiple takes, and blue-screen-CGI effects. No wonder they feel guilty when they get a $20 million check for pretending to be Napoleon, Shakespeare, Cleopatra, or a cop who refuses to give up in the face of formidable odds. Add to that the fact that most "action heroes" are shrimps, and most "femme fatales" are the creations of cosmetic surgeons, or makeup (guess who...) who wow people on-screen without being able to keep their boyfriends or husbands faithful and interested for more than a year or three at best. They're all fakes and they know it because that's their line of work. And they've all, male and female, slept with someone they wouldn't have if a part they wanted wasn't on the line. How much purer a definition of "hypocrisy as a profession" could you ever find?

It's basically the same situation with Arab oil princes (and royalty generally). They get all this money, truly endless amounts of money, just for being someone's son or cousin or brother. Are they motivated by religion, even the mysterious barbarian religion of Islam we automatically excuse ourselves from understanding? No. A fact of human nature: nobody ever really believes in an evil religion when they're in charge of enforcing it. Islam is an evil religion. What men of the spiritual desert get from Islam is permission. For everything a self-righteous, Jew- and woman-hating man might want to do. A rich muslim is a hypocrite-paradox by definition. Hypocrite because rich is a violation of jihad while infidels still exist. Paradox because riches are a persistent temptation to luxury, and luxury usually wins over orthodoxy. It certainly did with Muhammed. So maybe hypocrisy isn't that big a deal with Islam after all.

Quivering, are you? Offended? Outraged. Politically correctly protesting? Terrified? Muhammed consummated a marriage with a nine year old girl.


I'm thinking that the same rationale applies to righteous muslims who desire the bottoms of nine-year-old boys. Clearly, there's no sexual moral distinction at work, no Koranic differential postulated between the adult sexual desire of a bearded man and the target of his lust. How can it count? If a woman is responsible for being raped, then how can a man be responsible for raping a woman, a girl, or a boy? Kind of a perfect Hollywood religion. Those who have the money and the power get to do what they wantdesire.

Saudi princes and Hollywood bigwigs are the same. No doubt, Hollywooders have witnessed the behavior of Arab princes when they come to this country (i.e., Los Angeles) and believe they understand the faith they share in common, which is that the powerful are accountable to no one. Arab chieftains are free to believe in the chastity of muslim womanhood, the preferable promiscuity of Hollywood actresses, the moral ideal of clitorectomies in general (er, in muslim countries specifically), and that Roman Polanski is not guilty of rape. (If only we could have clitorectomies in show biz, the producers say, er, thay.)

As for the Hollywood women...? Not women. That's the other secret of Hollywood. The ones who make it big are also sexual predators. They're the only ones who survive the honor-rapes of the casting couch. (Jon Voight is upset because his daughter isn't a woman but an alpha male with a perpetually erect vagina. I'd be devastated too.) It wouldn't occur to them that there are females who might guard their chastity or modesty as a treasure worth preserving. (Not saying there aren't exceptions. There probably are. They just keep quiet about it. Kind of like female Christian converts in muslim neighborhoods.)

It's not about religion. It's about elites. Money. Power. And a lot of the frightened insecure people who know this about themselves hate themselves for being frightened and insecure. They think everyone else is like that too. Which makes them deathly afraid of the idea of meritocracy and and thriving or not on the basis of what you're worth. Which makes them think the biggest problem is capitalism. But it isn't. Capitalism is about earning money. For having a better idea. For working harder. For manufacturing products and providing services people couldn't have had without your imagination and inventiveness and determination.  Which is a very different thing from being paid for being a little guy who looks big on camera, a dull witch who looks interesting on camera, or a smelly, concupiscient barbarian who looks white-robed and rich on the world stage.

Saudi princes want to kill the whole world for the temptations they can't resist. So do Hollywood stars. But we do need fewer sodomites and pedophiliacs. It won't work to condemn the Catholics, forgive the Arabs, and celebrate the Hollywood celebrities who would make a religion of perversity.

Oh. Forgot to include the film trailer that Fox Entertainment has made the World Series a wholly owned subsidiary of. It's great. All about the evil military who do whatever it is evil American militaries do so that Hollywood directors get to spend $300 million in hopes of earning half a billion condemning it.


I'm not paid to do this promo. I'm just hoping I won't get arrested for the rest of the content because I'm following the lead of Media Nation.

Do I sound bitter? I hope so. Because I am.

Saturday, October 31, 2009

Friday, October 30, 2009

DRAGGED IN. I keep doing this and I shouldn't. But I will, one more time, because Billy Oblivion is a valued commenter and I believe he's actually trying to have a discussion despite his, uh, [DELIBERATELY LEFT BLANK]. In his comment on the last post, he said this:


So I'm going to respond, which I really really shouldn't do, because [DELIBERATELY LEFT BLANK]. Billy O:

I appreciate your agnosticism, but I have to call bullshit on your major points, which are delivered in exactly the same condescending tone I object to from Dawkins and Hitchens.

Lake's points are pretty accurate, but they overlook a fundamental cheat by evolutionists, and they tend to obscure "real" science that already exists.

For a long time, neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory (which IS a lot more specific than you describe it in your convenient blur...) has ruled the origin of life a separate question from the evolution of life forms once they came into being.  They get pretty obstreperous about this separation. Why? Because it's a serious problem for them.

As I made clear in the original post, for example, it's obvious that evolution AS change occurs. New species emerge. Existing species change and adapt. That's NOT what the opponents of Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould are objecting to. What they're objecting to is the specific description of how that change occurs, its fundamental mechanisms. The neo-Darwinians insist that it's driven by random genetic mutations and adaptation to environmental conditions. That life essentially stumbles into greater and greater complexity by a process of entropy combined with, uh, climate change and mutating neighborhoods.

It's important to bear in mind here that the original Darwinian theory is, in modern scientific terms, ancient; that is, it predates many of the most useful scientific, mathematical, and biological metaphors we have available to us. Darwin, for example, knew virtually nothing about the functions and mechanisms of the cell. He lived before the invention of the manufacturing assembly line and couldn't possibly have anticipated anything of systems theory, which illuminated the fact that initial conditions of a dynamic system have everything to do with what that system produces and is capable of producing. What we know that he couldn't have known is the principle of "Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions," which has demonstrated time and again that small changes in initial inputs can effect exponential changes in system output.

Now we have to consider the response of neo-Darwinians -- that is, the "scientists" who had to explain away Darwin's admirable anticipation of the mechanical  assembly-line view of  genetic variation in dealing with reported fossil findings like the Cambrian Explosion, which made it obvious that there were periods when species creation suddenly became a huge "thing" in the history of life on earth. And they had to do it without acknowledging in any way the importance of initial conditions. Which I have more than fairly lampooned thus:


You see, the problem their antique metaphors can't overcome is that in the age of systems theory, you can't isolate the change of organisms over time as a phenomenon independent of initial conditions. If we don't know how life originated, we can't nevertheless presume to speak with authority about how life changed subsequently. In the current metaphor milieu -- THE MOST MODERN SCIENTIFIC ONE, BILLY O -- that's a lot like saying we have a theory why all this software programming is unintelligent and we have no obligation whatsoever to explain where the computer that's running it comes from. Overstated? No.

All forms of life we know about, even the earliest and most primitive Eukaryotes, are governed by DNA, which is a pretty damn complex molecule. The more we learn about it, the more it seems to behave like and exhibit the characteristics of a computer program, instructing cells with what look like nested algorithms on how to change and why in response to changing environmental conditions. I grant you that "science" works with the best currently available metaphors from intelligent human experience -- and that it may yet discover a process (i.e., a new metaphor) for the spontaneous generation of a self-creating computer -- BUT. This still leaves four problems for neo-Darwinian evolutionists.

One is a philosophical problem. The second is a garden-variety scientific problem. The third is a mechanical problem. The fourth is a hard-science problem. Which one do you want to hear about first?

I'll take time out here to reaffirm the postulate that all the Billy O's of the world ignore with their preemptive condescension. We who oppose the Dawkins certainty are not all creationists. If we believe in God, we do not see him as the Yahweh of the Old Testament. But we also don't exclude the possibility that a mind so vast as to conceive of the universe might also have some purpose in what he has created. A god, er, uh, a mind of first causes only is a distinct possibility. But it's hardly inevitable. If there's a computer at the beginning, there's absolutely nothing which insists that its expertise is limited to physics, biology, and math. Although the existence of all three as consistent laws of nature certainly makes a mockery of the notion that everything in our universe is a function of randomness. Why should there ever be consistency in a random universe? What mandates laws of nature? Why should anything stand still long enough to admit of a question, philosophical, scientific, or religious? And on what basis do scientists declare that scientific matters matter and philosophical matters do not?

I'm guessing you want to hear first about the garden-variety scientific problem. Actually, there are two. First, how can you explain away the fact that the first life on earth already possesses the most advanced molecule needed for life? Second, how do you explain the existence of life on earth in particular? Which can be broadly described by the Occam's Razor test. The simplest answer is likeliest to be the right one. Right? (I'm going to use this one again, so be forewarned.) You want to tell me about the moon? Do you? No scientist has ever had a fully convincing explanation of where the moon came from. Yet the moon is absolutely critical to the existence of human life on earth. Without the moon, we would as a planet roll and wander with constant enormous changes of climate that would doom the possibility of prosperous life, if not the evolution in the first place, of homo sapiens. Our moon is the largest relative to the planet in the entire solar system. We have yet to find any planet with a moon like ours, either as big or as stabilizing in is affect. Does this make us an anomaly in our galaxy? If it does, which it probably does, is intelligent life on a planet a rarity, and is the simplest explanation that intelligent life on a planet is an exception in a vast sea of meaninglessness? Or are we to make something of the fact that we do exist? That the moon is precisely the right size and distance from the earth at this particular point in our evolution to give us perfect wedding ring eclipses and to ask all the grand questions about meaning our scientists don't want us to ask. Which way do your Occam antennae go on this question?


Where the FUCK did the moon come from? Yeah, they claim they can tell us where the universe came from, but the Moon? No. That's a pretty elementary scientific question, cosmologically speaking. Unanswered. And Neo-Darwinian Evolution is no longer a theory. Right. Like Global FartingWarming.

I'm guessing your next question is the hard-science one. Wouldn't want to get into mere philosophy when SCIENTISTS are flirting with oblivion in the hall.  Physicists are about three generations ahead of evolutionary biologists. They're grappling with alternative universes and multiple dimensions of existence that make the insistence on existential unintelligence look, well, as stupid as it is. Here's Michio Kaku, whose brains I'd put up against Dawkins any day of the week, speculating about the eleventh dimension (Are you aware that the existence of even the fifth dimension defeats time itself? Meaning the, uh, inevitability of cause relentlessly preceding effect, etc, etc, etc?)


Oh. The mechanical problem. The cosmologists can't figure out all the forces at work in the universe. They need dark matter to account for two-thirds of the mass in the universe. They need dark energy to account for the behavior of dark matter. And evolutionary biologists know exactly how raptors turned into hummingbirds?? I don't think so. It's nice to feel that you know how octopuses and birds independently evolved the sharp-focusing eye, but it's another to be able to prove it. As a pure coincidence. Without purpose.

And, finally, the philosophical problem. A much harder question to make the Billys of the world recognize. Another Occam's Razor test. What are the odds that the greatest intelligences ever manifested in the universe are Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Billy Oblivion? Which is snide but also on point.

Occam's Razor. Intelligence is an incredibly rare phenomenon exhibited by certain representatives of a random species generated on a planet with an unexpectedly stabilizing moon, who are somehow able to divine the way the entire universe came into being with perfect contemporary political acuity -- OR we don't know shit and are still trying to get to first base. (What on earth would we do without AllahPundit?)

Intelligence is really a product of an unintelligent process that succeeds in the heretofore unknown aim of producing something from nothing? Free lunch? With no previous example in any of our or natural human history? Kewl.

You see, it just MIGHT be, oh Oblivious One, that something wrote the first program -- not even God, Watson, or Crick -- which throws all of evolutionary science into the pickel barrel. In which case, all your sanctimonious pronouncements are total f___ing bullshit.

That's all I'm saying.

And as an aside, God might have something to do with it. I'm not asserting it, just allowing it. Since you're too ritzy to do that, I MAKE FUN OF YOU.

Joyfully. That's the real by-product of being so f___ing smart. Which I oldfully am.

The real question to be answered is how the rest of you can get by for a day or rwo or three without InstaPunk? Even I don't know the answer to that one.

OF COURSE SHE'S FAITHFUL. There's absolutely no chance that Michelle is cheating on Barack. Well, hardly any. He didn't have his best week ever, that's true. But he did defend his wife's $10 million trip to Broadway in no uncertain terms:


'Cause he, you know, loves her and like that. I'm betting, though, that Michelle is not happy about this really really bad week her hubby has been through:


Awful week. That's all. She'll forgive you eventually. She loves you. Sort of. Maybe not sexually. At least until until Other Guy (see above)  came along.


Happy Halloween. She loves you. Sure she does. You're the mother of her children. Or something like that...

PW just isn't in it. At all. No. Of course not. Take her for another Big Apple trip. That'll do the the trick. Unless she's just not that sort.

UPDATE. How right we so often are. Revisit the link in the final paragraph above and then drink in the following pic of Michelloween in her own Trick or Treat garb.


It could be that Barry the Dry Stick is in more trouble than he suspects. We're reminded, sadly, of this.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Annoying Brizoni:

MY DAD IS TURNING OVER IN HIS GRAVE. Yeah, it was Brizoni who once opined that he liked InstaPunk except when we were indulging in Christian apologetics. Sorry, B-Boy. This time we ran into a kind of perfect storm -- separate hints that it was time to mention the dreaded C-word once again.

It started with a TV show I watched on behalf of all our sci-fi junkies here. Stargate Universe. I work my fingers to the bone for these kids, lemme tell ya. Well, it wasn't all altruism. The producers had the wit to engage Robert Carlyle, the brilliant Scottish actor whose presence could probably make me watch even the brainless sitcom Two and a Half Men (No effin' way. I exaggerate sometimes. You don't?) So I watched the first four episodes of Stargate Universe, though I had never watched the various other Stargate TV things after catching my first glimpse of the trans-gendered Oprah clone with the bar code on his forehead. He gave me the creeps. Like this does (absitively NSFW but posilutely funny).

Where were we? Oh. Stargate Universe. Not a rave review but not a pan either. Anything Carlyle is in is worth watching, unless, you know. The extreme outer limits of the universe and a crazy Scot go together somehow, if you know what I mean. The pilot episode was an hour and a half long and resolved nothing, except for killing off Agent DiNozzo's senator dad.


I had all kinds of problems with the pilot. Who really thinks that a bunch of marooned people in immediate danger of losing their lives can't see what's most important in spite of all their soap opera bullsh_t? And who believes that even (er, especially) in a life-and-death situation, military discipline would simply melt away into an ugly "me, me, me" style tantrum of dim-witted resistance against the one Scot who just might be able to find a way out? I mean, I know Scots are all a__holes and like that, but come on. If they're the only guy who can understand the ship's ancient alien command consoles, wouldn't you stop hating him long enough to listen when he says, "Stop pushing every f___ing button you find!" Or at least the colonel in command might listen? uh, no.

But I dutifully plowed onward. (Such is my devotion to my flock.) And then, in Episode 2, I thought I was going to have to pull the plug. You see, the cast was marooned on an ancient spaceship that was running out of oxygen scrubbers (?!), and so the ship (hmmm) aimed them at a desert planet that just might have the lime they needed to replace the scrubbers (Yawn. I know. Beam us down, Scotty.) And the gung-ho lieutenant in charge starts hallucinating the way people in the desert do, only his hallucinations are religious, focused on a drunken priest. "Here we go," I thought. Because -- and this may surprise the flock -- I have become cynical about show biz depictions of religion... BUT.

But the Catholic lieutenant turned out to be the hero. The drunken priest wasn't finally an evil corruptocrat but a too-good man disappointed by the sins of the lieutenant he had raised like his own son. And the hallucinations weren't. Hallucinations, I mean. When the lieutenant had pushed himself as far and as hard as he could in pursuit of his vision of Christ on the cross, the hallucinations intervened directly, bubbling the water up under his passed-out nose so that he could wake up and see the saving limestone sea a hundred yards away.

Hmmm. Now I'm starting to pay attention to the fact that this ship, which sent our hardy band of idiots to this desert planet, is, despite all the excellent design reasons to the contrary, a stylized cross. Double hmmmm. The ship itself knows something. What?

In the next episode, doom awaits. All power in the ship's systems goes away. The colonel (who by my count has committed only four or five career-ending court-martial offenses to date) decides that he'll offer life to about a third of the cast by conducting a lottery for the fifteen seats a surviving shuttle can ferry to a planet in the nearest star system. One of the many (all) undisciplined enlisted men objects to the lottery and gets cold-cocked by our favorite other undisciplined enlisted man when he sees what's going on. When mutiny boy wakes up he goes looking for his erstwhile cheering section. They're playing cards in the dark and tell him they're the "fun" ones. The "not" fun ones are gathered at the ship's vast windows, watching their approach to the sun that will kill them and reciting the Lord's Prayer. Yes, you read that right. The Lord's Prayer. (Earlier in the same episode our sinful lieutenant recited the 23rd Psalm.) What the hell is going on here? Are the writers of Stargate Universe making a statement about God?

Possible. The only character more arresting than the charismatic Scot, Carlyle, is the ship itself. The doom the lottery was intended to forestall consisted of flight directly into the sun of the star system the ship had aimed them at. Turns out, the ship is impervious to the heat of a star and simply uses it to replenish its power. Discovery of this fact causes the colonel to register even greater suspicion of the only Scot on the scene. Obviously.

But the rest of us are left to wonder... why is this massive ancient cross flying through space, toward the ends of the universe? What are the SyFy writers trying to pull off here? Don't they know they'll never get away with it? Or are they on a mission of their own?

Still don't know what I'm thinking about, do you? There was, while I was ignoring the Stargate Universe review I wasn't going to do, another annoying piece by atheist Christopher Hitchens. Annoying because, well, I'll explain later.


First, a word about the boldface sections. [1] Hitchens is laughing about the idea of a female theologian. He's an a__hole. [2] Neo-Darwinian evolution is a theory. The fact is that species change is observable and a fact. However, the specific description of how that change occurs -- um, meaning Neo-Darwinian Evolutionary Theory -- is a theory. Sorry Chris. [3] Of course they're more polite and hospitable. They're Christians. [4]  Me too. [5] uh, doubt is not lack of faith. It's rather the proof that people of faith are intelligent, intellectual, and curious. DUH. [6] The usual nonsense. See the next paragraphs.

My weariness with atheists is the weariness the smart always experience with the dull. Sorry to break it to y'all (to use an Obama locution...) This insistence that "intelligent design" is synonymous with "creationism" is nonsense, a priori dismissiveness invoked as a defense of an indefensible position. It's evolutionists who insist they have the right to separate the legitimate question about the source of life from the subsequent change in life forms we see in the fossil record. Any fool can see that they're the same question. Denouncing those who see that they're the same question is akin to Hitchens's famous pseudo-sophisticate diktat that the most overrated experiences in life are champagne, lobster, and anal sex. Most people know he's dead wrong about all three. Others know he's wrong about at least one if not two of the three. But the lesson is the same. People who play at being God are playing the fool.

Let me repeat that. People who play at being God are playing the fool. Awful. (This still isn't the reason for the title and the pic, so bear with me.) I'd had it in mind to do a post about the real separation of powers -- between God and man -- but I wimped out because I'm sick of hearing from the millennial clowns who think they know everything and do know absolutely nothing in truly obscene detail. (To put 'obscene detail' in focus for you, these are the guys who believe absolutely that all college girls on 'Spring Break' spread their legs and flash/screw/pee on camera because they're 'emancipated,' and have, themselves, never gotten laid or seen a bare breast or a, gulp, vagina, shaved or hairy.)

Pretty much like Hitchens. And Allahpundit. Very very tired of these condescending jerks. Their unremitting insistence that we Christians are all fundamentalists at heart, all creationists, all dumber than their Big Ten (or Oxbridge) natural science majors. All they are is lawyers. Lawyers of philosophy. Cain couldn't have killed Abel because there were other people in that other place who would have arrested his ass, and besides there aren't any 'giants' or 'arks.' And 'Christ' was probably a community organizer who offended the mayor of ChicagoJerusalem and got his ass kicked for being a disobedient Jewactivist.

I'm only going to say this once. And tersely. The separation of powers in the Constitution that matters is the separation between God and Man. The framers understood that their real ace in the hole was belief in a Christian God who would always stand in the way of Mankind's smartypants conceit that it could divine what was best for all the dumb ones.

The role of God was Intercession. Thomas Jefferson was smarter than everyone else. Why didn't he assert his right to rule? If he were here today, you think he wouldn't trounce Obama in every possible venue? What Jefferson understood was that men needed God as a shield against government. Each man's personal relationship with God was a proof against tyranny by government. Right is right and Government is, er, more of the same old corruption, men masquerading as divinity.

Which brings me to the final point. The Pope is willing, he says, to let me keep the holiest book in the world next to the King James Bible.

Now. Finally. As I said, I'm thinking about it.


Seriously thinking.

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