SelfAdoration.com

Here’s my quick take on the presidential election, one day prior to the event: Mitt Romney is going to win an Electoral College landslide. My state-by-state prediction is shown below, but it’s not based on any sort of arcane science. I’m just betting that married people with kids and jobs will vote to fire Barack Obama for gross incompetence.

Note that this is not an expression of racism, as you will surely hear from the perpetually-sore-losers of the chattering classes. I’m just betting that the people with the biggest stake in the game of human life will vote against the most perniciously anti-life candidate ever to seek the office of the presidency.

But at the same time, Romney’s win will not be any sort of repudiation of Marxism, contrary to Michael Walsh’s claim at National Review Online. It’s just the correction of a bad hiring decision.

In this week’s video, I argue that the self-loving thing for you to do is to accept that fact that each human being is sovereign and indomitable, and that, therefore, self-control is all the control that can ever exist among human beings. In the course of that argument, I cite an essay of mine, Meet the Third Thing. I also recite an old poem, which I will transcribe here for what may be the first time it has ever appeared in print:

What if I’ve been wrong?
What if I’ve been wrong all along?
What if everything I’ve said,
everything I’ve done,
everything I’ve thought about is wrong?
What if I’ve been wrong all along?

Here is this week’s video:

As always, the audio-only version of this video is linked below, or you can find the SelfAdoration.com podcast on iTunes.

What do you do about 100 million would-be first-graders world-wide with no access to schools? Give ’em a tablet computer and let them learn on their own:

With 100 million first-grade-aged children worldwide having no access to schooling, the One Laptop Per Child organization is trying something new in two remote Ethiopian villages – simply dropping off tablet computers with preloaded programs and seeing what happens.

The goal: to see if illiterate kids with no previous exposure to written words can learn how to read all by themselves, by experimenting with the tablet and its preloaded alphabet-training games, e-books, movies, cartoons, paintings, and other programs.

Early observations are encouraging, said Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC’s founder, at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference last week.

[….]

After several months, the kids in both villages were still heavily engaged in using and recharging the machines, and had been observed reciting the “alphabet song,” and even spelling words. One boy, exposed to literacy games with animal pictures, opened up a paint program and wrote the word “Lion.”

[….]

Earlier this year, OLPC workers dropped off closed boxes containing the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. “I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.”

[….]

Giving computers directly to poor kids without any instruction is even more ambitious than OLPC’s earlier pushes. “What can we do for these 100 million kids around the world who don’t go to school?” McNierney said. “Can we give them tools to read and learn — without having to provide schools and teachers and textbooks and all that?”

The human mind is a thing of wonder, a race-horse weighed down the world over by in-born ignorance and carefully-indoctrinated stupidity. Children don’t need teachers and schools, they (more…)

This is a three-minute clip from my presentation at The 21 Convention in Austin earlier this year:

I’ve seen the full video, but I don’t know when that will be available for sale. You can buy an audio MP3 of this presentation at The 21 Convention Store. It’s about an hour in length, and it’s rife with sex, subversive politics and philosophy like you’ve never heard it before, so it’s definitely worth your two bucks.

Shop around while you’re there. Anthony Johnson recruits some very interesting speakers for his events.

Here’s an idea fit for tonight’s debate: The purposes of U.S. foreign policy are these, in ascending order of importance:

3. To defend the “interests” of American investors overseas who should be paying their own way or doing business here instead.

2. To establish a vast jobs program for Republican legislators and rent-seekers to counter-balance all the Democratic jobs programs. (This is the notion that got me thrown off of FreeRepublic.com, BTW.)

1. To expend munitions supplies, thus to prompt re-orders from arms-makers — which is to say reliable campaign donors.

Assassination of truly psychotic trouble-makers is fast and cheap, but it leaves the arsenals full and the Pentagon empty.

The Broken Window Fallacy is a useful lens when you are thinking about a (fictional) economy-as-a-whole. But the glazier’s pecuniary interests run so far the other way that he might hire a secret squad of vandals if he could get away with it.

The name for that squad: The Few. The Proud. The Duped.

My book Man Alive! is six months old today. I celebrate this auspicious occasion by defending the undeniable ontological fact of human free will while dismantling two specious arguments on the subject.

The first, put forth by an academic completely out of his philosophical depth is discussed in some detail in a post I wrote earlier today. The author’s claim is yet another instance of the Dancing Bear Fallacy, the insistence that human behavior can be understood by drawing analogies from animal behavior.

The second, drawn to my attention by Kathy Shaidle, is a bogus argument for the existence of god disguised as a defense of free will.

Both of these arguments are specious for the same reason: Each advocate is attempting to draw an invalid inference from the putative facts offered up as evidence. The first claim is that free will does not exist in humans because some insects get brain diseases. I am not making this up! The second is that god exists because so far no one has come up with a reductionist materialistic explanation for human will. In both cases, the authors insist that ignorance equals knowledge, and it is no surprise that each one of them arrives at an obvious error, even though their errors are mutually contradictory.

Volitionally conceptual free moral agency — human free will — exists. This is a statement of ontological fact. For now at least, no one knows why free will exists, but no human being ever actually doubts the factual existence of human free will, regardless of what any one of us might say he believes. I like to use the argument of luggage tags, but in fact every purposive human action and every concept in the uniquely human notation systems I call Fathertongue presupposes the undoubted factual existence of human free will.

My take is that arguments against free will and/or arguments for the existence of a god are alike and equally attempts to gull ordinary people into denying or frustrating their own will to the benefit of the person making the specious argument. The purpose of dead-end teleologies, always, is to induce you (more…)

I borrowed the public library’s copy of Sam Harris’ “book” denying free will by upholding it. I’ve tried to read it several times, but every time I pick it up, it falls open to Harris mocking the idea that the reader is the author of his own life. I look at the words and mutter, “Who is the author of this fucking book?” Then I throw it back onto the pile of useless wastes of perfectly good paper.

The New York Times wastes quite a bit more paper than Harris on any given day, but Sunday is the day set aside at the Times for wasting human minds. This has always been the case, going back decades. Sunday’s paper is filled with huge department store ads, and the Times elects to “cover” those ads by giving space to the most pernicious sorts of anti-human ideas.

This Sunday’s paper features an amazingly stupid Dancing Bear Fallacy from an academic named David Barash:

Voluntary actions are, we like to insist, ours and ours alone, not for the benefit of some parasitic or pathogenic occupying army. When we fall in love, we do so for ourselves, not at the behest of a romance-addled tapeworm. When we help a friend, we aren’t being manipulated by an altruistic bacterium. If we eat when hungry, sleep when tired, scratch an itch or write a poem, we aren’t knuckling under to the vices of our viruses.

Get it? Free will is just a disease and you are nothing more than a zombie robot hewing mindlessly to the genetic predispositions of nefarious micro-organisms.

What is Barash’s evidence for making this absurd claim? You have to pay attention to his “defenses,” but what you end up with is a very simple answer: Nothing. He makes one analogy after another from diseases among other species of organisms, then uses those stick figures to construct this straw man:

Here, then, is heresy: maybe there is no one in charge — no independent, self-serving, order-issuing homunculus.

The idea of the homunculus is itself absurd. If a “little man” inside your brain is the source of your will, what is the (more…)

Public opinion is a fancy expression for the assiduous tabulation of mindlessness. Many Americans caught their first true glimpse of Barack Obama last night. People who attend to objective reality, rather than to “trusted” interpreters, have known for years that Obama is a fatuous, lazy, smug, smirking malignant narcissist — precisely what we saw on television last night. Those who yearn to see with their ears and to know with their intestines had a rude awakening as the curtains were finally drawn on the man behind the curtain.

How sad for them. Wishing failed them yet again, even though they have been wishing really, really hard, for every moment of their benighted lives, for a way to make crime pay. If the Great Multicultural Hope has failed them, some of them might actually take the trouble to think about the world around them — but please don’t hold dinner waiting for this to happen.

Meanwhile, as big a loser as Obama finally exposed himself to be last night, we discovered in consequence two even bigger losers among big name politicians: John McCain and Hillary Clinton. How could both of them turn out to be even more empty than the empty suit now posing as president of the United States?

Which is not to say that either would have been better as president. McCain never met a principle he would not betray for three more minutes of Sunday-morning TV time, and, as vicious a harridan as Hillary has proved herself to be, her Arkancide strategy has nothing on the Chicago Outfit’s tactics. Don’t believe me? Ask Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts — twenty years from now, assuming he finally feels safe enough to talk by then.

But, of course, the biggest loser in last night’s debate was you. Hillary loved her kneecaps too much to send Obama back to the classroom, where he actually fits in. And McCain is congenitally incapable of discovering his own shortcomings, to the extent that Obama actually looked good to voters by comparison.

It remains to be seen if Mitt Romney can improve on their lame efforts — which is not (more…)

That’s Kathy Shaidle at Five Feet of Fury. She’s been blogging for twelve years, and her writing is sharper than ever. Like Steyn and Mencken, she is interesting by default, content be damned. Little minds would call this mastery amid the mundane, not knowing — not knowing how to know — that to the master nothing is mundane. The world is made fascinating by a focused fascination, and Shaidle distills her fascinations into a potent liquor. I commend you to savor her writing — if you can stop yourself from guzzling it instead.

Bloomberg:

An Iranian cleric said he was beaten by a woman in the northern province of Semnan after giving her a warning for being “badly covered,” the state-run Mehr news agency reported.

Hojatoleslam Ali Beheshti said he encountered the woman in the street while on his way to the mosque in the town of Shahmirzad, and asked her to cover herself up, to which she replied “you, cover your eyes,” according to Mehr. The cleric repeated his warning, which he said prompted her to insult and push him.

“I fell on my back on the floor,” Beheshti said in the report. “I don’t know what happened after that, all I could feel was the kicks of this woman who was insulting me and attacking me.”

I love it. Here’s Tom Petty to celebrate this spark of human life in a desolate anti-human darkness:

One more for good measure:

Each one of us is born a rebel. When someone tries to tell you to toe his line, a very American girl in Iran has shown you what you need to do.

We just lost our house to foreclosure. Negotiations with the bank fell apart and we spent the last seven days bugging out. This was our third Notice of Trustee’s Sale. We had managed to redeem the note twice before, and we thought for sure we could thread the needle a third time. No joy. We didn’t know until yesterday morning that the bank had actually foreclosed, but we had to operate on the assumption that we could lose our pets and our personal property without notice.

That’s bad, but it’s not the end of the world. We are solvent even if we are not terribly liquid just now. We have business assets, art and artifacts and intellectual property, all of which we were able to conserve by acting quickly. Was I the bank, I would have hung in there for another month or two, taking account that we live on a cash-flow roller coaster and that we had managed to cling to the home twice before.

Over the past three months, we have cut our monthly nut by two-thirds, so we are well-situated to weather the economy we are living in. Had we done this seven years ago, things might be different, but we live with the consequences of our choices. We loved our home and we are sorry to have lost it, and sorry, too, to have defaulted on our promise to the bank, but life is suddenly a lot more joyous without that anchor around our necks.

Our real estate business is secure and solvent. All of the rental properties we manage are leased to solid, performing tenants, and our corporate bank accounts are all in good order. Our personal finances might be chaotic — this for many years, alas — but this has had no impact on the funds we hold in trust for our landlords and tenants.

And our marriage is stronger than it has ever been — literally as the consequence of these events. Cathleen had some teary moments, because we loved the El Caminito house, and because we spent many happy, loving years there, minus a few rough spots. (more…)