Thursday, June 30, 2011

Even Better

Via Bighugelabs.com, the motivational poster-maker! This one took me all of two seconds. Imagine how nice it would be if I actually spent time on it.

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

At Long Last! Equality!

Not Really


Curt Jester has the story with the parallel that is in the mind of all faithful Catholics these days. Discussion question: What is the next pillar of useless traditional morality to fall?

Discuss among yourselves. I have been real busy this week ...

Sunday, June 26, 2011

汽車人和狂派變形金鋼是中共黨的人質

Sorry, kids
在美國我們常常說“聖誕節之前不能打開禮物”。在中國應該有“宣傳看完之前不能看變形金鋼”的說法。

中共黨要讓人民快樂地收看《建黨偉業》的電影,可是因為有可能性沒有人要給錢看工廠黨的講道,所以在中國有新的規則:

 “在《建黨偉業》拿下一定的票房,比如8個億以前,《變形金剛3》之類的進口片都不能上。”
 我跟汽車人有衝突多次。他們是恨強的、恨勇氣的。我不知道工廠黨還有這樣偉大的能力能。到現在我以為工廠黨之有財政的能力。English below.

Saturday, June 25, 2011

New York Hit With Epidemic of Cold Feet

Victim Card: Revoked
Because if there is anything men who can freely have sex without consequence want, it is a 200lb ball-and-chain named Todd.

According to Thomas Peters, this gay marriage in New York thing is simply political shenanigans and, in a way, Politico corroborates his analysis. As much as I am for political end-runs to grasp power and enforce certain points of view (my points of view), when legislative bodies perform top-down revolutions in democratic societies, the results are always fleeting.

Mud-Stained Eurotrash Hippies Attempt Coherence

Economic Quagmire
BWAHAHAHAA! Part of me relishes U2 having to confront its own inconsistencies in conservative practices and liberal messaging. Part of me enjoys watching sheep-eyed Europeans double down on the lemming queue to economic oblivion.

Winner? All me, all the time.

Loser? Balloons:

The anti-capitalist group Art Uncut inflated a 6-metre balloon emblazoned with the message "U Pay Your Tax 2." Security guards wrestled them to the ground before deflating the balloon and taking it away. About 30 people were involved in the angry clash.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/violence-erupts-as-u2-rocks-glastonbury-20110625-1gkbg.html#ixzz1QJUm2Gtg
What have we learned here? Well, for one thing liberals will say anything, no matter how unsubstantiated and mindless to "convince" normal thinking people to hand over more money and power to the those least qualified to use it: the government. Remember how Obamacare would "create jobs" and "save the American taxpayer millions"? What did that even mean?

And now we have the enlightened folks in Europe, blithely unaware that higher taxes always impoverish  charities and thereby hurt the poor. You know who knows how to organize charity? Why, charities, that is who. Charities are positioned with the necessary manpower, infrastructure, and know-how to actually carry out their mission. When you rely on government to run charities, they create panels of useless college grads who debate endlessly on which end of six-figures their salaries should be and how many limousines get to park out front of their palatial headquaters. Hidden, of course, from unapproving onlookers. Because how can you justify asking congress for $10 million when it looks like you are rolling in all that cash yourself?

"Never mind all that! Let's act like the entitled snobs we are and demand U2 funnel all its largess into the gaping maw of system that is so undeniably broken that its only future lies in being a charity unto itself with the express purpose of squandering hard-earned money! Hooray for stupidity!" Say the toothless loser hooligans.

Full disclosure: I pay no taxes and convert all my earnings into gold bullion which I keep in a vault with my lifetime supply of incandescent bulbs and guarded by tigers which I feed with environmentalist volunteers too personally torn up about the size of their carbon footprints to go on living.

Friday, June 24, 2011

Push Back: the 時代s they are a'changing

Reverse Smackdown?
Via Drudge and CBS.

Times are changing. The Central Party has decided to release dissident artist Ai Weiwei and, though he is under a gag order to not relate anything about his last three months in prison, there is real reason to hope.

For one, the government trumped up charges to arrest Ai in the first place when they could have just arrested him on suspicion of being anti-government or anti-party or reactionary or whatever. The charges appear to be tax evasion which again is actually kind of nice. It would have been easy enough to plant evidence seeing as the same party which controls the government also controls the courts, the military, and the police.

If they were able to plant drugs or phony money on him, the famed artist would be very dead by now as both drug trafficking and counterfeiting are capital offenses in the Worker's Paradise (Progressivism be praised). Yet Beijing is downright sweet for a change.

The point is, if they really wanted him taken care of, the Communists could have done whatever they felt like. Especially back in the day.

So call it "Arab Spring with Chinese Characteristics" and blame it on grinchy hearts in Beijing finally thawing. Or maybe it was the international pressure brought on by a combination of diplomatic and economic manueverings and a self-generating information infrastructure that has become an echo-chamber of antipathy and hostility towards the CCP.

Whatever it is, I like it.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

On Going Rogue

It happened before and it has happened again and again. What is it? Have we entered some sort of weird phase in our culture? Why do people choose to go rogue?

I think I can answer that and not just because this blog itself is an attempt to "go rogue" (actually, it goes further. I "go villain" here) but because in my own professional life, I have on one occassion been pushed to the point where I could see no other alternative than to just break out.

In all three cases linked above: Palin, myself, and Corapi, we were put in a position of basically being bullied into a position of silence. (So great was the impact of the bullying in my case, that I went as far as to write a 270-plus page novel about bullies. After years of maltreatment by an untouchable few, I had a few issues to work out and writing was my only outlet.)

In both my case and the case of Palin those doing the bullying were untouchable because of they were well-respected. In Palin's case it was the media. Not just a few namable members, but the whole entire enterprise of news reporting and entertainment media from the radio to TV to the internet. This was not just a small conspiracy this was the American Communications Establishment. To the average joe, earning the scorn of a few reporters can do much damage to a person's reputation, but to earn the unceasing hatred of Media is not the kind of thing that you can come ever hope to redeem yourself of. We want to be able to trust our media and to trust that it serves us as a people.

It does not serve us. But who would know if Sarah Palin had not gone rogue?

And that is the point. Bullies like to present their victims with some Faustian bargain. What were governor Palin's choices?
1) Shut up
or
2) We will keep dragging your name through the mud

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

CCP Attacks Anti-Corruption Websites as Part of Increased Anti-Corruption Efforts

Corruption Strikes Back
New Tang Dynasty TV. The gist is my own, there being no English version yet.

Recently the upper echelons of the Chinese Government has stepped up anti-corruption activity, however the fates of domestic Chinese anti-corruption websites are very much in doubt as many of these sites have died out in rapid succession this month.

Recently Chinese netizens have taken inspiration from Indian anti-corruption websites and even the official internet media have been reporting from three "I bribed" websites: www.woxinghuile.info, www.522phone.com, and www.ibribery.com.

Shortly after going into operation, these three private-run websites became very popular. There were numerous incidents of public safety (read: "the police") accepting bribes and doctors demanding extra payment.

The 522phone.com site garnered two hundred thousand hits in a single two-week period but hits like this could only be maintained for a short time.

On Monday, during Beijing City Police Department's "National Week for Propagandizing Against Criminal Acts" Deputy Bureau Chief of the City Police Anti-Corruption Bureau Zhang Jinghong said "There need to be standards when collecting tips on the internet". His reason being that if the clues do not pan out, it could lead to a negative influence upon those who have been named. Also public declarations on the internet could scare off those implicated, complicating further investigations. Another city official engaged in prosecution declared the format illegal.

Almost to the minute of this announcement, the three above mentioned sites all ceased operations and none of them have been able to open since the 21st.

Because authorities are not being forthcoming with what exactly the legal requirements for such sites are leading some to conclude that although the government encourages civilians to rat out crimes to authorities, they keep an iron grip on some platforms like the internet and display an alarming degree of sensitivity when it comes the government's own involvement in corruption and bribes.

Okay, That was my translation. Here is my short opinion: when discourse is only allowed to serve one side, it is too easy to subvert reason.

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

“安鐵“和高鐵有衝突


慢走。真的,慢走。

在NTDTV我看了這個這個報說中國鐵首部工程師要建立世界上最高速的鐵路讓火車達到350深知80公理,可是有恨大的問題:德國和日本賣給的最高時速之能達到300公理。
啊呀。

The folks at the anti-China (as if there was anything wrong with that) NTDTV have not yet gotten around to translating this article but it comes on the tail of news that test runs of the new trains have not been going all that well. You can not build a good national rail network system when you have a bureaucracy willing to cut this many corners. One of the main issues: the trains should not go the advertised 218mph because the trains they bought from Germany and Japan are rated with a top speed of 186mph. They could go faster, but the passengers' lives would be facing a bigger risk.

Ah CCP. Why is everything you do so awkward and wrong?

Sunday, June 19, 2011

美國發明了網絡雲、中共發明了網絡傘要保護人民從下來的自由雨

我正在讀一本關於信息科技的書,作者說未來因特網和地方能變成一個同樣的地方。因為未來的“聰明”汽車、電子遊戲、iphone、用具、設備、等都要用無限科技互相交換信息,網絡的網站和我們世界的地處要結合起來。現代人類的“地方”的概念要能變成包括實在和網絡的方位。

這個影片確定作者的預言。中共計畫建立一個網雲的特地,讓外國公司使用。對不起中國人民,你們的政府肯定想中國人不能對付世界上最普通的自由(比如:信息、宗教、發言、等)。如何不生氣?

English below the fold.

A Tale of Two Sex Scandals


It is about time I got around to writing something Catholic in this purportedly Catholic blog...

These past few weeks two big sex scandals have run their course. One is quite well known. The other; not so much. I am talking about shameful fall of full-time politician Anthony Weiner and the dis-robing of the very fiery and well-loved priest, John Corapi. Both men have been taken down by scandal. Although the truth behind the scandal is anything but certain in the case of the latter.

While Weiner in his resignation video decries the damage he caused himself, Corapi (in honor of his decision to not be recognized as a priest any longer I forgo his former title of "Father") chooses to walk away from the scandal out of respect for the hierarchy of the Church. Weiner exhibits all the signs of someone locked in vicious cycle of uncontrollable behavior mixed with dangerously high levels of narcissism. Corapi is, by his own personal testimony, a former addict: someone who has fought his personal demons in their most corrosive forms: sex, drugs, and money. He fought them and I believe him when he says he beat them.

Now I am by my own admission a recovering sexual behavior addict. This does not make me an expert but by bearing the scar of this most heinous of sins, I know my own when I see them. You do not have to trust my instincts. Look at the facts. Most people who suffer from unhealthy sexual behaviors have three things in common:
1) Intelligent
2) Sensitive
3) Spiritual with a well-defined value system.

Anyone who hears Corapi speak knows he has these traits in spades. He is an extremely passionate and compassionate man. He has as many degrees as I have appendages. If he was never held within the Satanic thrall, then he would have been extremely lucky. If he was lying about anything, it would be his triumph over these glamours. Still, I believe he had the profound experiences he claims and he reached a state of mastery over his internal darkness. 

On the other hand, one could argue that, at one point at least, Anthony Weiner may have exhibited these traits. I really feel there is something more going on with this one. In the many ways he so casually resorted to outrageous lies to create political cover and quickly resorted to contemptuous slander to protect what little honor he had left, I would say that this man never really had any value system or principle beyond the sickly facade meant as cover for a life of virtual pedophiliac leering. 

But Weiner is a politician and we as a nation have really lost all faith in our public servants. We truly hold them to such low standards that during one MSNBC show, it became a topic of argument about whether Democrats needed to have any standards at all.

Meanwhile in the world of popular Catholic apologetics and punditry, a number of people (ie, The Anchoress and Mark Shea two people who I admire and trust) have confused disgust at the appearance of scandal with righteousness.

Despite the great differences in how Corapi and Weiner handle their given situations, in the eyes of too many bloggers these personages are virtually interchangeable.

These bloggers are also forgetting a really important fact:

Some saints have been known to be less than patient in waiting for those who would play the Church's own administrative processes against them. Case in point: the Carmelite Saint Teresa was denied permission by her order to create a new convent on the basis that they were endlessly awaiting approval from Rome. What did she do? She founded the convent anyway. Because she was responding to a call from God. Permission from Rome was eventually granted but only after construction was already completed. Remember her confrere St. John of the Cross was himself an escapee from a Carmelite jail. Like Corapi, none of these people played the victim, though their treatment was an outward sign of deep institutional disorder. 

And what did Corapi rail against the most in his life as a priest? That's right, the deeply institutional disorders that have beset the Church in America and elsewhere. Is it possible that Corapi left the priesthood not because he is guilty but because he is innocent and wants to follow God's call?

Also for generations now, women have been raised to think that their true power lies in their sensuality and appearance. In addition to this, females are increasingly shallow and will offer more and more terrible revenge for ever more petty perceived offenses. In my travels around the country, I have personally seen a congregation go after a priest with a phony sex scandal because he was not their brand of Catholic. The priest, though innocent, was dismissed by the bishop.

We live in a country where fear of litigation means teachers fear to touch students who get unruly and violent. That same political timidity is starting to infect our Church. Nowadays what teacher or priest or caretaker cannot be destroyed by the mere semblance of scandal? Do not judge too harshly, folks, we live in dangerous times when it comes to being openly virtuous. It is easier to be openly gay than openly pro-self-control.

The world out there is a minefield designed to trap the good men who serve as the most worthy of trophies. Every day is a chess match to do one's job while still somehow retaining one's dignity. As Corapi was one who made himself a lightning rod for these same forces of societal decay, he was bound to set off some sparks at one time or another. 

Really. Ignoring the simple political facts behind his life is silly. Of course politics are involved.

This blog is written mostly tongue-in-cheek where I portray myself as the villain in opposition to the "good" forces of the world (you know: contraception, social engineering, environmentalism, tolerance), but there is a lot more to this than mere schtick, if you get it (and most probably do not). 

I believe Johnathan Corapi is very likely telling the truth. There is nothing nefarious nor selfish about his desire to take the route he has. Nor is his inaugural video melodramatic and full of self-pity as some critics say. These are easy assumptions based on unfounded accusations.

He is not on drugs. He is not calling for pitchforks against the unknown female who brought unknown charges against him. He is very intelligent and, like Saint Teresa, he understands there is no service to God to be done in simply waiting out the rest of his life while someone uses procedural processes to keep a priest who believes in limbo in just such a state until his lifeblood and ministry wither away with years of indecision. (Especially if he is innocent.) And like Saint Teresa, he is A) innocent until proven guilty and B) Right as long as Rome is on his side.


He joins Monster Mohel as my latest new ally (which is a step up from Nefarious Cohort). The Black Sheepdog deserves our support.

Saturday, June 18, 2011

Failure of Planning is the Planning of Failure

Liberticus Destroyicus
A bird of a different feather?
Why Liberalism always fails. One of the tidbits that left such a lingering impression in Jonah Goldberg's very well-researched book Liberal Fascism was the the Progressive "We planned in war!" lament and critique of how government control of private lives fell out of favor with the average American in the years following World Wars I and II.

A little bit of background is necessary here (and if you want a lot of background on this, I highly recommend Golberg's book). During the world wars, various presidents sought to expand the powers of the government until it was essentially a functioning fascistic state. Granted, at the time these social experiments started up, fascism, bolshevism, and socialism were all viewed favorably not just in America but around the world. How bad did it really get here? Here are a few choice quotes from Goldberg's book where he explains the significance of the Blue Eagle and the strong-arm tactics used by National Recovery Act Administrator Hugh Samuel Johnson:

The Blue Eagle was the patriotic symbol of compliance that all companies were expected to hang from their doors, along with the motto "We do our part," a phrase used by the administration the way the Germans used "Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz." Now largely airbrushed from popular awareness, the stylized Indian eagle clutching a band of lightning bolts in one claw and an industrial cogwheel in the other was often compared to the swastika or the German Reich eagle in both American and German newspapers. [Hugh Samuel] Johnson demanded that compliance with the Blue Eagle program be monitored by an army of quasi-official informants, from union members to Boy Scouts. ... Johnson's favorite means of promoting compliance with the Blue Eagle were military parades and Nuremberg style rallies. ... New York was nearly shut down [by one such parade] ... Under the direction of a U.S. Army major general, the Blue Eagle parade marched from Washington Square up Fifth Avenue to the New York Public Library, where it passed reviewing stand upon which stood Johnson, the governors from the tristate area, and Eleanor Roosevelt.
Roosevelt himself was willing to sacrifice the guarantees of the constitution in pursuing the expansion of state over the individual:
Under the New Deal, governmental goons smashed down doors to impose domestic policies. G-men were treated like demigods, even as they spied on dissidents. Captains of industry wrote the rules by which they were governed. FDR secretly taped his conversations, used the postal service to punish enemies, lied repeatedly to maneuver the United States into war, and undermined Congress's war-making powers at several turns. When warned by Frances Perkins in 1932 that many provisions of the New Deal were unconstitutional, he in effect shrugged and said that they'd [sic, I do not use contractions outside quotes in serious writing] deal with that later (his intended solution: pack the Supreme Court with cronies). 

If that really was the case, where did all the goose-steepers go and why is the government so much less invasive today as it was then? The simple answer is that Americans were willing to accept such drastic measures as part of the unique circumstances of having to fight two world wars. When that state of crisis disappeared, so too did its de facto organs and politics. Lamenting that they planned in war but not for peace, Progressives realized they failed to take in account the simple matter that culture trumps politics. A culture that is not disposed to top-down micromanagement by enormous, faceless, and bullying government agencies can, in the span of a few election cycles tear those structures down.

The horrible truth of democracy is the people truly do have all the power. This runs counter to Progressive aims, so the new task of the American political left in the following decades was to continue to search for crises that could be exploited to create new political footholds because not all Progressive institutions were completely erased. That is why the creation of Obamacare in the current financial crisis follows the same tactical pattern as the creation of Social Security during the Great Depression.

That is also why everything Liberals focus on is in the shrieking tones of crisis.

Therein lies their greatest weakness. In seeking to capitalize on so many of our current crises, the current administration is forgetting something else: success matters. In their choice to use guerilla politics to cause the collapse of government institutions in order to build them up again, they are overplaying their hand and putting Liberalism (or Progressivism) in jeopardy of being soundly discredited. This is not the 1930's. These political machinations are happening in broad daylight. And they are not working.

People can see that Keynesian economics failed to help Americans out of our current economic slump and may have even exacerbated it creating a double-dip recession. Social engineering. Managed economies. Managed environment. All of these goals/tactics are quickly losing their appeal in the eyes of  even die-hard liberals these days.

As a villain bent on world-domination, I know the score. There are two widely utilized methods for world domination:

1) Charismatic Leader. This is where you seize power through love. Everybody loves you, and then willingly hands over the reigns of power as some sort of sign of appreciation.

2) Brute force. This involves just taking everything you have the power to take, usually through military tactics but also by intimidation through actual or psychological violence.

Pretty much every attempt at world conquest has used some combination of both these methods. The Charismatic Leader approach relies too heavily on the public mood, which is changeable. Yet the Brute Force method finds itself equally reliant upon military might and terror, which are also too unstable when stretched beyond certain geographical or temporal borders. What is more, it is an amazing trick to be able to move between these two methods because one requires gaining the affection of the masses and the other requires earning their fear.

At the most you can make this crossover about once in a generation. You cannot continually oscillate back and forth without ultimately wearing down the effectiveness of both.

And that, my friends, is where Progressivism finds itself currently. Liberals have nearly used up all their charismatic and fear credit.

Personally, I am determined to use a new method of my own creation:

3) Cultural Persuasion.

This method relies on influencing the culture of the place you want to control. Fear and adoration are mere moods. But culture can endure indefinitely.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Behold! My Plan to Use Idiotic Overstatement to Explode Heads is Nearly Complete

of course government is involved
Granted I am still in the testing phase here. Information Week must have infiltrated my ranks. They broke the story how the Obama White House is going with my plan to use pure words to detonate craniums by creating a government bureaucracy charged with reducing the excesses of multiple government bureaucracies.


Okay. If your head has not exploded by now, congratulations. Good for you. Drats for me. I was really hoping that would work. I think the problem is people's expectations are too low. Ten years ago, this would have caused at least 50% head-explodage around the country. That was indeed the original plan:
1) Put out something completely incomprehensible.
2) Watch the heads of nearly half the population spontaneously explode.
3) Threaten the surviving population for control of the world.
4) Profit. And ...
5) Achieve world domination.

But you have to admit, the most anti-transparency government in all of American history suddenly creating a faceless bureau with the express intention of reducing government waste comes pretty close. The minions in R&D (the only department with the smart minions) assure me this causes 5% head-explodage and 13% head-fissuring. It may not sound like much, but I am new at villainy and I think this program is showing promising results at such an early stage.

I mean, check out this quote:

Spelled out in an executive order, the Campaign to Cut Waste includes the creation of a new Government Accountability and Transparency Board (GATB) that will do for spending across the federal government what the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board did for spending of recovery funds. 
"The online tracking of dollars … can and should be applied government wide," [Biden] said. "We're insisting that every federal agency is focused on transparency and accountability."

 Admit it. You had to put your hands to the sides of your head to keep it from going kaplooey there for a minute. The Obama administration is building on the "successes" of its recovery fund tracking. You know, the funds that ended up in countless boondoggles and created exactly no recovery.

But sadly, with every great plan, there are the unexpected side-effects that give one pause and makes one consider not going through with it. In addition to head-popping goodness, we have to say goodbye to one of my favorite government websites, the Fiddlin' Foresters.

We can't have nice things.

And by that I mean, we can't have nice things and world domination. Oh well. So long, nice things!

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Behold! My Hypno-Ponies Have Started to Yield Results (Finally!)

I am like, so fulfilled
This is a project decades in the making. I decided to market these stupid little cute ponies, see? They have hypno-jewels for eyes and were designed to enthrall young people and make them do my evil bidding. But wouldn't you know it, at the height of their popularity, the hypno-jewel eyes supplier in Northeast Malaysia was washed away in a Typhoon and all the shipments were sent with ordinary cute eyes. Cute eyes! Insert typical retort about good help here!

When the supplier got back up and running, the show was suddenly canceled. Without a cartoon show to market the product, the toy suffered the same fate as all other 80's cartoon-toy tie-ins: it tanked.

I was distraught: "What? Like nobody wants to play with cute ponies no more? Really?" It did not matter that they had exactly five billion point of articulation (all in the hair, to be sure, but that is a heck of a lot of articulation) people lost interest in stiff, unposeable pastel horses with eyes large enough to see into the radiowave spectrum.

Years later, enter the grown-ass man toy collector. Now suddenly, everything that ever existed on a toy shelf in history is known as a "collectable". And the idiot chicken has come home to its dateless roost.

Come to me, my darlings. Look deep into the horsies' eyes and do my diabolical bidding!
Your ass is mine!