A Cheap Shot at Academia

The goal of liberals in general is to take control of other people's lives. It's manifest today by their push to remove toys from McDonald's children's Happy Meals. We see it in the way they want to regulate the temperature of coffee served at Starbucks and in the radical, nonsense of the Global Warming campaign, necessitating regulations as to the temperature of your home, whether or not you should be able to drive a car and so forth. They absolutely need the environment to be on the verge of catastrophe; just as they need victims for whom they can champion so that they can keep this image of themselves as being heroic, compassionate, champions of the oprressed (including the oppressed planet). They simply cannot accept that they desire power; that they want to control others; that, from a psychological perspective, they are not much different than any other dictator or authoritarian ruler who sees himself "above" the common masses. ("All pigs are equal but some are more equal than others" - Orwell)

We see this same psychological pathology in academia's bizarre justifications and rationalizations as to why their ranks are practically devoid of conservatives. Liberals, who are usually quick to assume that underrepresentation represents some form of discrimination--structural or personal--suddenly become fierce critics of the notion that numerical representation means anything when the scarcity of conservatives in their ranks is challenged. Moreover, they start generating explanations for the disparity that sound suspiciously like some old reactionary explaining that blacks don't really want to go into management because they're much happier without all the responsibility. Conservatives are too stupid to become academics; they aren't open new ideas; they're too aggressive and hierarchical; they don't care about ideas, just money. In other words, it's not our fault that they're not worthy.

The social/psychological delusionist chooses to remain delusional in order to protect their self-image or their hidden motivations or to preserve an ideology that does not work in the real world. They do not want to accept reality and prefer instead to claim their dysfunction is the only reality.

New Book

Bloody Mexico: A Novel of Cartel Wars hit the ether for Kindle today. The print version will follow. The book will also be translated into Spanish - likely release date for the Spanish version in June 2011. When it makes it to the Spanish market it will also be available on Kindle/e-books, etc.

LINK TO AMAZON - KINDLE VERSION

The tide of publishing and the preference of readers seems to be headed in the direction of electronic media. As an author, I can track my sales nationally and internationally. There are different markets for books (both electronic and print) and the commission structure varies to some extent based on geography. To put it kindly, the profit associated with a book isn't all that great unless you're somebody in the limelight selling a million copies of your biography, or if you are Stephen King or a major author. 

Publishers like a sure thing. Niederhauser Andwendungen (Asia) Ltd., my publisher, is a subsidiary of a Swiss company, doing business in Hong Kong. So I'm clearly NOT top tier... And to make it worse, it's a family owned company (Niederhauser is a family name and we're from Switzerland originally). It makes me look like a fifth rate writer, which is precisely what I am. 

I can only hope that the books themselves bring entertainment... bringing the thought to mind of the feature film GLADIATOR, where Maximus (Russell Crowe) asks the crowd in the small colosseum in Africa, "ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?"

Utopian Fantasy

Social Justice  -  Human Nature  -  And the Pursuit of Happiness

Who wants to be a utopian socialist?

The idealistic and progressive intellectuals of the left as typified by Barack Obama, consistently refuse to acknowledge the reality of human imperfection. The squalid utopian fantasies of socialism, communism--or any variant of Marxism for that matter--appeals primarily to people who refuse to acknowledge their own human imperfections (narcissists), and hence their own capacity for evil. They don't want to admit it, but those who are drawn to the leftist view of the world, tend to see themselves as superior; above all the other boring, ordinary human beings around them; more virtuous, more compassionate, smarter; and of course, much better qualified to decide what's best for lesser beings like you and me.

It is extremely ironic, considering the left's rhetoric to the contrary, to realize that it is conservatism and its underlying priniciples that fundamentally embrace the awful truth about human nature; and understand that the reality is closer to your average selfish, lazy, superstitious, and money-grubbing con artist than to that utopian "ideal" or "new" man--so prominently promoted in the rantings of communists, socialist, or any collectivist or totalitarian. 

As a consequence of understanding that fundamental truth about human nature, conservatism and its economic policies (i.e., capitalism) are able to harness even the most negative aspects of human nature to bring positive good both to the individual and to the larger society as well. Yes, that means allowing people to pursue their own selfish happiness (without initiating force agains others); as opposed to "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Benevolence toward others is up to the individual and a voluntary matter in the former system; but it is forced upon you by the omnipotent State in the latter. 

Next, the idealistic and progressive intellectuals of the left also refuse to acknowledge the reality of how wealth is created and how capitalism is able to produce it so well and their systems are not. 

The left's fundamental economic assumption is that the only way to get wealth is to steal it from someone else, because they simply cannot imagine how to go about creating it. It is a zero-sum game for them; and thus, all their political policies are imbued with an infantile economic primitivism--of the sort a caveman, whose only strategy is brute force, would come up with: Ugg hits Grog over the head with his big club to get his "rightful" share of nuts and berries--and that's the only economic theory they can understand.

This economic blindness about the creation of wealth is the origin of what Ayn Rand calls "the looter mentality." It is the mentality of the parasite who wants the benefits of wealth without the effort of having to create any; who is always demanding "his 'fair' share" of wealth without the necessity of providing any value to anyone. Looters are people who think that wealth just appears out of nothingness and that it is perfectly justifiable to steal it from someone else, since it is a zero-sum game; and therefore it is a matter of "social justice" to redistribute it according to their whim.

Capitalism does not pretend that those messy negative human emotions like greed or envy can be "stamped out" by the will of a tyrant or a "benevolent" State. It accepts human nature as a given and provides a system through which humans are able to pursue their own happiness which allows them to sublimate and redirect those negative emotions to better both themselves and incidentally the larger society. 

(H/T Dr. Sanity)

Game Day

At 3:00 pm Pacific Daylight Time, the only football game that really matters all year will be played. The reason that it matters is that if you're not first, you're last.

As the head of the house, I decreed by fiat that the Steelers would be the team everyone would cheer for as the Steel Curtain grinds the Pack under it's relentless attack. However I have tried to raise my children correctly, I have failed.

Emilie bought a Green Bay Packers jersey in support of her team. Which goes to prove that the apple does fall a LONG way from the tree from time to time. My oldest daughter, Amanda, is also a Packer's fan. Heather (25) backs the Steelers because she's a very smart girl. My grandson, Griffin, will be here clapping and cheering at every Steeler touchdown, field goal and conversion.

As to the decor, Emilie is standing in a corner of the living room (common rooms include a living room, parlor and family room). I do the decorating and you can see a framed piece of air-drop counterfeit Vietnamese currency, and the bust of Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, given to me by an old friend. My house does resemble a museum in small part because all of the pieces have a story behind them. Everything from the French Foreign Legion kepi to my Naval Officer's sword and the bottles of wine from the French Foreign Legion vineyard to the statue of Kwan Gong and my Hong Kong Police billy club.

In the same way, I follow the Pittsburg Steelers because they alone DESERVE the title of Superbowl Champions.

**********HALF TIME**********

UPDATE

The Steelers are down 10 to 21, but there is still hope.

Griffin is watching the game, concentrating as hard as his Grandfather is. (Taken from his mother's cell phone)

Don't be bitter, Race, because the Cowboys didn't make it to the Superbowl...

Opus, I have never opposed cheerleaders at a football game.

Innominatus -- The Steelers still have a chance to pull it out, but it will require some effort.
WoFat -- He's grandpa's little guy.

NOW, BACK TO THE GAME!

Fundamental 3D Matrix Calculations

The engineers at Ashima (a company I work with) are dealing with this problem in a flying platform that we're working on. I could explain it but it's easier to show you the YouTube Video.

It's not my bag...

This comes to you by way of bored panda and WoFat.

Advertising has to catch the eye and the imagination to be truly effective. We're subject to mountains of commercial propaganda every day. These are some of the more original entries:

Persuasive Postmodernistic Rhetoric

Obama, the perfect postmodern President is a master at the art of rhetoric--which is at the heart of all progressive postmodern leftist attempts to obtain and consolidate power. With postmodern rhetoric you can "talk" tough, but carry a limp stick. You can say whatever your audience at the moment wants to hear and still be philosophically consistent when you do exactly the opposite. Or you can say the opposite to a different audience since truth is not the objective; only manipulation and deceit to achieve the desired political effect. 

It's a sleight of hand known as using "contradictory discourses" and it is a political strategy where truth is rejected explicitly and consistency is an extremely rare phenomenon. What matters more than truth (or honesty) is achieving the desired political outcome (i.e., getting others to believe what you want them to believe about what you believe). 

For the postmodernist, language cannot be cognitive because it does not connect to reality, whether to an external nature or an underlying self. Language is not about being aware of the world, or about distinguishing the true from the false, or even about argument in the traditional sense of validity, soundness, and probability. Accordingly, postmodernism recasts the nature of rehtoric. 

This explains the harsh nature of much postmodern rhetoric. The regular deployments of ad hominem, the setting up of straw men, the regular attempts to silence opposing voices are all logical consequences of the postmodern epistemology of language. Stanley Fish calls all opponents of racial preferences bigots and lumps them in with the Ku Klux Klan. Andrea Dworking calls all heterosexual males rapists and repeatedly labels "Amerika" a fascist state. With such rhetoric, truth or falsity is not the issue: what matters primarily is the language's effectiveness.

In postmodern philosophy and rhetoric, the left and its mouthpiece Obama have found the perfect epistemological, ethical and political vessel to reassert their ideology--an ideology that requires the willing suspension of reality by its adherents to "win the future."