Michael Jackson is Dead

So, wacko Jacko moonwalks his way out of the mortal coil, and suddenly its like Mother Teresa died.

Stupid fucking American media. World-changing events are happening, and we have to avert our eyes to mourn this dilapidated icon?

His life was the tragedy. Where the hell were you then?

Of all the bigger tragedies occurring around the world today, this is what we waste brain cells on?

Our descendants will look back at our age and declare us crazy. 

The Western Media's Messiah

"I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God."    - Evan Thomas, Newsweek editor

You know, the "media worships Obama" thing was all merely an effective metaphor and source of parody for me before. But now, these media morons have moved beyond parody.

Have fun with Chocolate Jesus, you idiots. Just take care that he doesn't melt under the wilting gaze of reality. 

Speaking of Devils

Dante's Inferno is coming to a game platform near you!

Check it out!

It seems to me that there is a flaw in the overall game concept. Apparently, the game developers mistook Dante Alighieri for Dante from Devil May Cry.

Good Lord, I don't think the morons even read the book!

They just took the premise of a jaunt through Hell and ran with it. (What, no sequels? Purgatorio? Paradiso?)

But, for all these flaws, I'm just glad Dante the Crusader (!!!!!!) is a good guy. A Crusader who's a good guy! Finally!

BTW, yes, Crusader Dante is out to rescue Beatrice's soul from the clutches of Satan.

I think a few of my brain cells just died.

This game is brought to you by Electronic Arts, the same people who ruined Maxis and your expensive college education.

Term Limits for Tenured Morons

Here's a predictable American academic, howling out in his comfortable intellectual wilderness, that because of the Church teaching on contraception and condoms, this Pope should be impeached. And, yes, this old bean considers himself Catholic, for some odd reason.

As I detail in my latest book, "Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America" (Crown), the cardinal sin of the Catholic Church -- a literally deadly sin, if ever there was one -- is its opposition to birth control. Far from being, as the Church contends, part of its moral doctrine, this policy is, plainly, the immoral doctrine of the Church. The use of condoms is a pro-life position.

I know he's selling a book. But, this crank sounds like the equivalent of Galileo declaring the world to be a mound of cheese. Condoms, whose sole purpose is to prevent the interaction of two bodily fluids, are suddenly "pro-life"? Why, because of the spectacular rate of "success" they've had in African countries where they are the sole solution to fighting HIV? It boggles the mind, what hoops idiots will jump through to stroke a pet shaft.

When the world's most pressing problem is a coming demographic implosion that could worsen an already shaky economic situation, the best thing a so-called academic can come up with is this nonsense? This is ostrich mentality. Although, ostriches do occasionally pop their heads out of the sand.

One of these is supposed to be sentient. My money's on the feathered one.

Let me offer up a counter-proposal. Term limits for tenured morons. This stupidity ought to be grounds for a shit-canning.

And one of these to the face, for good measure. Thanks, Mr. Bale!

Plus, this article made the website of a well-known newspaper. The newspaper industry cannot die fast enough.

Footnotes to a Controversy

Earlier tonight, Joao asked me:

"What's the deal with Benedict XVI lifting the excommunication of the anti-Semitic bishop?"

I suppose, in case there are others among my friends also asking the same question, I must provide an answer.

I think these people are thinking of this particular scandal.

Of course, media being media, these idiots all seem to assume that Pope Benedict lifted Bishop Williamson's excommunication, which would be due to Williamson being an anti-Semitic nut job. Apparently, some editors have been cutting down their research department, because the hysteria is a product of poor research.

It would do well to realize that what the Pope was doing was lifting an excommunication handed down by John Paul II against the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), of which Bishop Williamson just happened to be a member.

The order was not excommunicated for being anti-Semitic. The order was excommunicated because this particular bunch of bishops were ordained as bishops illicitly by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in 1988. Of this particular bunch, only Williamson is an anti-Semitic horse's ass. You see, making anti-Semitic statements, while stupid and sinful, is far from an excommunicable offense. The excommunicable sin on the part of these bishops is accepting the ordination of orders from an outright schismatic, which does far more damage to the cause of Christian unity than simple anti-Semitic ass-hattery.

So, in short, the Pope did not suddenly find Antisemitism fashionable. He was trying to unify this breakaway group of people with the Church, something he has also been trying to do with traditionalist Anglicans and the Eastern Orthodox. That one idiot happened to be antisemitic doesn't change that. In a church of sinners, you do not condemn a group of people for the sins of one guy.

I think that at the heart of this scandal is the difficult nature of forgiveness. The most scandalous thing that the media, and everybody who believed the media, found was the notion that even somebody as noxious as Bishop Williamson could be forgiven.

But, God has forgiven worse sins, and will continue to forgive even sins of such magnitude as to be beyond imagination. The Holy Father is simply following his boss' example with regards to the SSPX, who seem ready to attempt to reconcile. As for Williamson himself, nobody is beyond the pale when it comes to God. There are only those who wish themselves there.

As a corollary of the Beauty and the Beast rule, the SSPX, in order to get back into the Pope's good graces, has begun cleaning it's own house. They have already relieved Williamson and fellow antisemitic nut job Florian Abrahamowicz of their positions. 

One Sign an Entire People is Tempting Extinction...

...is when that society cares more about freaking seal pups than they do about their own children.

Maybe we can make these seals Canadian citizens...except that would mean aborting them would be legal.

Maybe we really should send all of our nurses, domestic helpers and other OFW's to Canada. That way, once the native population collapses under the weight of its own collective myopia, we can annex our first ever trans-oceanic colony!

Why Media and Studies Don't Mix

On their own, research studies are a valuable tool in advancing the sciences.

In the hands of media, studies are a very awkward club to wield in advancing a particular ideological agenda. (Sometimes, the researcher being an apparatchik himself doesn't make things much different.)

As a case in point, there's this news story going around that a study had just proved that abstinence pledges don't work. The gist is that the study supposedly says that teens who take abstinence pledges are just as likely to engage in premarital sex as their peers, but less likely to use condoms or others forms of "protection" in the process.

Of course, the running story in the background is the accusation that abstinence education doesn't work.

First, let's look at the particulars, then the running story.

The study itself has myriad flaws with regards to the conclusions it is supposed to support, according to media.

First off, the researcher herself, despite using the cliched "I have evangelical books (also friends)" defense, is not exactly a model of partiality. 

Second, the researcher said that she compared "apples to apples". In essence, the study compared people from the same peer group. The researcher justifies herself:

"This study came about because somebody who decides to take a virginity pledge tends to be different from the average American teenager. The pledgers tend to be more religious. They tend to be more conservative. They tend to be less positive about sex. There are some striking differences," Rosenbaum said. "So comparing pledgers to all non-pledgers doesn't make a lot of sense."

Okay then. I'm not sure about her rationale, but the fact that she took this route nullifies all of the media hyperbole about the conclusions of her study. (Which, unfortunately for her, the researcher seems to buy into...) First of all, if you situate the pledgers within the same strata of people who think like them, then you cannot make a generalization beyond that peer group analyzed. At best, the conclusion would be, "abstinence pledges do not affect rates of premarital intercourse among (insert peer group here)". I'm assuming that the peer group she studied is the one that tends to be more promiscuous, hence, highlighting the supposedly more "conservative" or "religious" people within the peer group who differentiate themselves by pledging. So, in effect, not only is she not comparing pledgers with all non-pledgers, she's not even comparing ALL kinds of pledgers with non-pledgers. It is a very specific study with a very specific conclusion. And that conclusion is "peer pressure" works. It doesn't really say anything about abstinence pledges as a whole. The only way to reach the conclusion the media wants this study to reach is if it compares rates between peer groups more likely to have pledgers in them with the rest of the other teens, which this study manifestly did not do.

Now, the US mainstream media is very liberal. (What, you didn't see the pom-poms for Obama?) So, the story running in the background, the supposed failure of abstinence education, is near and dear to their hearts. As a result, they grab on to conclusions that the study doesn't even support.

They heartily ignore the fact that the study doesn't even seem to control for the variable of "type of sex-education recieved", immediately assuming that all pledge-takers were part of abstinence programs (you'd never be able to tell from the study) and that pledge-taking is a component of abstinence programs. Both assumprtions are false. In fact, few abstinence programs make pledges a part of their curriculum. And, as it stands, not too many students are exposed to such programs. Not even Sarah Palin's children. (So, yeah, Bristol Palin recieved the regular awkward banana condom sex-ed.)

These media guys don't even seem to realize that a drunkard who takes a sobriety pledge will still drink if surrounded by prodding alcoholics will in fact, still drink. Same thing applies to smokers, or any sufferer of habitual addiction. Abstinence pledgers are no different. Especially if such pledgers are only doing it as part of a curriculum, and not out of personal conviction. (There's a reason why these pledges don't exist in many abstinence sex-ed courses.) Abstinence pledgers who do not recieve follow-up and continue abiding by the practices of their peer group do not an indictment of abstinence sex-ed make.

The study clearly takes a limited scope and has limited conclusions, and does not lend it itself to stretching over conclusions way beyond its scope like spandex on a fat chick. But, despite this, the purveyors of "nuance" still come up with crappy headlines like "Premarital Abstinence Pledges Ineffective, Study Says". One would think that the editor is a liberal version of J. Jonah Jamison. Or is at least similarly educated.

So, if the Philippine Daily Inquirer ever pulls a stunt like this out of its ass, especially when it comes to hot issues like the RH bill, you ought to know better than to stick with what some hack writer and his editor decides is important to you.

Why Is It a "News" Magazine Again?

Looks like some skirts were ruffled at Newsweek over people actually taking its idiotic writer to task for her egregious hit piece.

So, the editor, Jon Meacham, who did a shitty job editing comes out to defend his work. And, in a fashion reminiscent of a high school drama queen, he defends the turd-bucket he helped release by telling his writer's critics to go fuck themselves.

No matter what one thinks about gay rights—for, against or somewhere in between —this conservative resort to biblical authority is the worst kind of fundamentalism. Given the history of the making of the Scriptures and the millennia of critical attention scholars and others have given to the stories and injunctions that come to us in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, to argue that something is so because it is in the Bible is more than intellectually bankrupt—it is unserious, and unworthy of the great Judeo-Christian tradition.

There it is, the liberal version of an f-word (emphasis was mine). If he thinks this, then this liberal Episcopalian douche knows absolutely nothing about "the great Judeo-Christian tradition". Because that tradition tended to take the Bible quite seriously, and will not dismiss arguments made out of it so flippantly. Also, the other half of the Judeo-Christian framework, what the Church calls "Tradition", would not bode well for the arguments made by his half-wit writer either.

But, this guy Meacham is supposedly a genius. So, if its not stupidity, then it must be some form of deliberate deceit. If malice is what drove that monstrous piece of misinformation, then Meacham is much worse than his writer, who reeks of ignorance.

Briefly put, the Judeo-Christian religious case for supporting gay marriage begins with the recognition that sexual orientation is not a choice—a matter of behavior—but is as intrinsic to a person's makeup as skin color.

That line of thinking never was, and never will be, "Judeo-Christian". If it is the premise for a religious case, that religion is not Christianity or Judaism (maybe secular humanism? I heard that crap's a religion now, according to Harvard). Because, neither Judaism nor Christianity assumes that sin is intrinsic to a person's make-up. A corruption of the human nature maybe, but not something intrinsic like skin color. We may not have had a choice in our particular sins, but our sins are not what define us. You want to make a Christian case for same-sex marriage, you begin by explaining why we have to legitimize a corruption of our natures instead of transcending it. Good luck with that.

The analogy with race is apt, for Christians in particular long cited scriptural authority to justify and perpetuate slavery with the same certitude that some now use to point to certain passages in the Bible to condemn homosexuality and to deny the sacrament of marriage to homosexuals.

No, the analogy to race is NOT apt. First off, let's get the evil of slavery out of the way. Within the Christian tradition few Christians outside of the Southern Baptists ever used Scripture to defend slavery. And even then, you'd have to discount the great Christian thinkers who railed against it, using Scripture and Tradition no less, from Wilberforce to De Las Casas. The Christian thinkers who went against slavery far outnumber those who defended it. If we're talking numbers, the Christian thinkers who defended slavery are in the same position as these "Christian thinkers" who would defend same-sex marriage.

As for race itself, the defense of the marital arrangement stretches all the way back to antiquity. Even the boy-loving Athenians dared not tamper with it. The people who use the striking down of racist marriage laws as a comparative situation forget that racist marriage laws were a post-American Civil War phenomenon, and they do not exist anywhere else. (Laws against marrying outside caste or tribe, yes, but not specifically race.) Striking down racist marriage laws falls within the tradition of the marital arrangement. Striking down the arrangement itself is not.

The NEWSWEEK Poll confirms what other surveys have also found: that there is a decided generational difference on the issue, with younger people supporting gay marriage at a higher rate than older Americans. One era's accepted reality often becomes the next era's clear wrong. So it was with segregation, and so it will be, I suspect, with the sacrament of marriage.

The same thing can be said for abortion and euthanasia laws. Same thing can also be said for Nazi Germany, where it was the old guard that tried, unsuccessfully, to block Hitler's rise and his policies. Colonel von Stauffenberg and his old Catholic family fell within that old guard. So, the generational argument is bullshit.

Religious conservatives will say that the liberal media are once again seeking to impose their values (or their "agenda," a favorite term to describe the views of those who disagree with you) on a God-fearing nation. Let the letters and e-mails come. History and demographics are on the side of those who favor inclusion over exclusion.

Oh, brother. If this guy even bothered to read actual demographic studies beyond the piss-poor polls Newsweek puts out, he'll discover that the religious "fundamentalists" he is so afraid of reproduce at a much faster rate. The demographics that voted Prop. 8 in place were blacks and Hispanics. Hispanics are the fastest-expanding population in the US. Among the whites, the liberals are reproducing at a much slower rate. Having babies gets in the way of saving the trees, you know. They get in the way of dismantling traditional marriage too.

Oh, and fuck you too, Jon Meacham. You can take your rag and shove it up your orifice. Time Magazine may be just as liberal, but I've never seen it go out of its way to be this fucking stupid.