SelfAdoration.com

That would be my wife, of course. I think every form of extra-marital sex is enduringly self-destructive. I have nothing to do with any of it, and my advice to everyone is to hew to my good example. I do like pornography, though, as I’ve discussed in print and on video.

Why am I telling you this? So you’ll know.

I got an internet shake-down letter yesterday from someone who has apparently bought some hacked passwords. My pasty-faced blackmailer threatens to expose me to my contacts list – today – with a webcam-captured video of me watching porn unless I pay him $2,900 in Bitcoin.

Wow…

In the third place, I find the threat hugely implausible. The password referenced is an antique, not that I’m terribly good at that stuff. My current password solution is to register for nothing – not because I fear exposure but because I hate having to memorize login credentials. In any event, my webcam has been taped over since long before Ed Snowden made that a fad, so my half of the movie is likely to be pretty boring. I can’t guess what the porn half might be, but I’ll look at pretty much anything, so that much might be edifying.

In the second place, I don’t care. I think internet privacy is a bad joke, and I’ve been saying that in public for more than ten years. Most of what people dread having exposed is universal and ubiquitous. Can it come as a revelation that I, too, move my bowels periodically? Big frolicking deal. If it comes as news that I masturbate when my smokin’ hot blonde of a wife is unable to come hither for me, you are now in possession of a banality of no cash value.

But in the first place, my attitude toward every attempt to dominate me is: Molon labe, mofo. I am indomitable. I have been for my entire life, but I’ve spent my adult life proving – as philosophy – why (more…)

Saturday marks the six-month three year anniversary of the release of the first of the Planned Parenthood infanticide-mining videos. In all that time, the Ayn Rand Institute has had this to say in defense of it’s puerile argument for abortion:

Blank-out.

This is me fisking the arguments for abortion set forth in The Ayn Rand Lexicon. I don’t consider these very good arguments, so if there’s something I’m missing, send me a link and I’ll take a look.

Why bother with this? Because abortion is the hook on which the pro-liberty movement is snagged. Worse, if liberty-seeking people do not correct this awful error, the utilitarianism undergirding their political arguments will lead them, in due course, to complicity in mass murder.

Rand is quoted in bold with the > symbol, Usenet style. All quoted italics are in the original.

> An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being.

I’m not quarreling with Rand’s arguments of rights here, though those claims are also poorly defended. The assertion quoted here fails because an intrauterine Homo sapiens is already a real existent, not a product of the imagination. A is A. A thing is itself. This is simply Rand defining an inconvenient fact out of existence.

> A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born.

How then? What in the essence of the entity has changed, as a matter of identity?

> The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn).

Utilitarianism defended with a false representation of fact: The baby is a discrete living organism at the instant of conception. Just as a heads-up, when people start talking about which life takes “precedence,” it’s a good bet your life doesn’t. The purpose of utilitarianism is to rationalize your eventual murder, should that prove necessary.

> Abortion is a moral right – which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what (more…)

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

July 3, 2013

“What if…” I posed, “you had a skateboard you loved more than all the world?” I was talking to The Skatepunk, of course. He and My Lady Disdain, his sharp-tongued girlfriend, had met me at Duffeeland Dog Park in the late afternoon. They were snuggled into each other on the bench across the walk from mine. Naso was slowly meandering behind a dog she fancied, I hope immersing herself in a scent that smelled like home to her, a long-forgotten aroma of everyday perfection.

“When you skate on that board, every move you try comes easy. And when you compete, you always win. You tinker with it constantly, always keeping it tuned to perfect performance. You love it so much you have dreams about it.”

“You think you’re joking,” said My Lady Disdain, “but he has that skateboard.”

The Skatepunk smiled, half proud, half bashful. “I only bring it out for big events.”

“Can I borrow it?”

“Hell no!”

“I’ll take good care of it.”

“You can’t even skate.”

“But I’m going to Las Vegas when Naso dies. I think it would be cool to cruise down The Strip on a really bitchin’ skateboard…” I grinned so hard it hurt.

When he had stopped laughing, The Skatepunk said, “I don’t share that board with anyone.”

I nodded. “Now you understand extra-marital sex.”

WTF?! Both of them.

“Take that deck down to the skatepark, and don’t just share it, offer it up to anyone. Let anyone who wants to take a ride. If they scratch it, so what? If they beat it up, who cares? If they ruin it forever, what difference does it make?”

The horror on his face was a wonder to behold, and here’s why: You don’t understand something until you do, particularly if you’ve been (more…)

I’ve been writing here and there about President Trump’s foreign policy since last fall, but if you don’t get it on your own, you might not be getting it from me.

I wrote this little bit yesterday, for me eminently clarifying:

#Trump is not undoing @BarackObama. Not even #FDR, the Moby Dick of #ReaganRepublican dreams.

No, @realDonaldTrump is dismantling Woodrow Wilson’s legacy.

One hundred years of uninterrupted slavery to the rapacious, rent-seeking war machine is ENDING before your eyes.

What could be clearer? 😉

Okay, so I’ll do a little better here. The Trump Administration’s foreign policy is paleo-libertarian: Do as you choose in your own countries, but keep the trade routes open. All of this seems completely obvious to me, most of it foreseeable from the Neom announcement last fall. Trump’s plan is actually pretty simple:

Step 1. Obstacle removal.

Step 2. Incredible profits.

The obvious obstacle being removed is North Korea, but it’s really just one of three formerly-sysiphean boulders the president’s team is pulverizing. The chop for the remnants of the Axis of Evil was 70%/25%/5% – autonomy, survival and regime change, respectively. Saudi Arabia chose autonomy, hoping that Iran would get hind tit. North Korea toyed with snatching that booby prize, but managed to cling to a smiling survival instead. Iran will fall shortly – and Persia will rise again.

The incredible profits will result from a reordering of superpowers, adding an Israel-assisted Saudi Arabia as the fourth global policing power. The goal is unimpeded trade routes, with the world split into “streamlined” departments: To China go the Orientalists and their inscrutable ideograms, Russia and the U.S. will split The West by geography and the Saudis will contain Islam – and I expect Africa, as well.

My belief is that NSA or Five Eyes hacked the North Korea missile guidance systems – thus making Kim negotiable – which seems to suggest that Pakistan’s missiles may also be aimed only at Karachi. If that’s so, we can expect to see a denuclearized Pakistan sometime soon, (more…)

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

March 8, 1998

To be sung loud and fast, a sassy girl-group sound:

VERSE:
They say he’s a cruiser, a good-for-nothing user
They tell me he’s a tar-pit of deception and guile
But I can judge him better than the law of the letter
I sink into his wink because I’m stuck on his smile

        CHORUS:
        So I’m his co-dependent co-defendant
        Yeah, I’m the kind of girl he can count on
        I’m his co-dependent co-defendant
        He stands for everything I sit down on

VERSE:
He cheated on his wife but that’s the story of his life
But then he tripped on Linda Tripp and she pushed “record”
But they won’t take him to the cleaners for high crimes and misdemeanors
I don’t have Betty Currie’s worries, I’ll just fall on his sword

        CHORUS:
        And be his co-dependent co-defendant
        He’s finally found a girl he can count on
        I’m his co-dependent co-defendant
        He stands for everything I sit down on

    BRIDGE:
    My friends say, “Monica, Monica, you’re Betty not Veronica
    You need to have a practical plan!”
    I know it’s all true, but what else can I do?
    I’m just another little fish who’s been hooked by that man!

VERSE:
Obstruction of justice may make people mistrust us
But that Nero is my hero and I love to feed him grapes
I know he’s gonna wail until they let me out of jail
We’re registered at Sak’s and mom is shopping for drapes

        CHORUS:
        ’Cause I’m his co-dependent co-defendant
        I’ll always be the girl he can count on
        I’m his co-dependent co-defendant
        He stands for everything I sit down on

        Oh yeah, he proudly stands
            He steadfastly stands
                He stands for everything I sit down on

I wrote a ton in 2017, lots of everything. Among other works, I published four new Willie books. They’re short – because I leave out all the boring stuff – but they’re cheap – because I want them to be read.

They’re cheap like greeting cards are cheap, and I wish y’all would deploy them that way: By sending my books as gifts to people who you know could profit by them. That kind of recommendation gets a book read – and that’s what matters.

These are the new books:

• Las Vegas Redemption: Pastor Trey Coyle and the reincarnation of Sarno’s Ghost. Jay Sarno’s Ghost takes you on a frolicking adventure in Las Vegas – with the world’s biggest televangelist, Pastor Trey Coyle. The yarn is pure farce, and it has nothing whatever to do with Pastor Joel Osteen.

• Traindancing: Bedtime stories for your inner child from The Mall of Misfit Families. Listen in on the thoughts of Loco Willie, the carney-in-kiddie-portions who runs the choo-choo train down at the mall: “Mock me if you like. I know I will. But this is loco engineering. This is how it’s done.”

• Dusty: An elegy of hope and love. Dusty is about a road trip – back from a funeral. And it’s a buddy story – about a dog. It won’t take you an hour to read, but it will breathe new life into your hopes – in languages living and dead.

• Bubba: How the Predator-in-Chief pulled it off. Watch as His Bubbaness, erstwhile Predator-in-Chief, takes you on a tour of the America he made for us: Sex scandals, political paralysis – Bush, Obama, Hillary, Trump – and more sex scandals.

Bubba is rough stuff, ideal for any political junkie still capable of laughter. The other three are benedies, redemption songs. They’re all built on Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie’s ham-on-wry sense of humor, and they’re peopled with peculiar people and precocious kids.

So: Please go buy, read, review and share some Willie today.

Mammalian empathy is evolution in action.

Want proof? Turn off the heater before you go to bed tonight. If you are lucky enough to be happily enspoused, you’ll find a way to stay warm(er). And even if not, you’ll still be better off than reptiles and bugs – who are freezing to death by the billions right now.

Wait… Warm-bloodedness is not empathy!

That’s correct. Warm-bloodedness is evolution’s answer to the mass die-offs occasioned by cold-blooded errors of judgement. Birds and non-human mammals aren’t any less clueless, mind you. They’re just better equipped to deal with the consequences of ineptitude.

By internal temperature regulation, yes, but also by the brand new type of empathy strategy engendered and made possible by homeothermicity: Sharing body heat.

Birds of a feather will huddle together, and you can’t keep mammals from cuddling. That’s the origin of mutually-reciprocal empathy – the Sociable strategy – which is itself the source of storgic love – the enduring love of families.

The give-and-take of mammalian empathy is there from conception, with sharing of resources being the sine qua non of the gestation of birds and mammals. We feed our young after birth in hugely empathy-rich ways, and for all of our lives, we live as a part of a pack or clan or family.

Warm-blooded creatures thrive by mammalian empathy. They all deploy reptilian empathy among strangers, but the existence and persistence of the storgic community is caused solely by mammalian empathy – by practicing give-to-get and by taking enormous delight in the opportunity to give-to-get.

This is what we are, too, regardless of what we say about it. That’s why Ci (“Transreptiles and Borgbugs unite! You have nothing to lose but your survival strategy!”) is doomed as a cultural strategy: Mutually-repulsive empathy is hysterically (ahem!) infecund.

Every other argument I can make for Ds and against Ci or Dc is trumped by that simple fact: Nothing attracts like mutual attraction, and only Ds is enduringly mutually-attractive at every level of social interaction, from strangers becoming friends to neighbors cooperating in commerce or defense to loving families (more…)