For your reading pleasure

I have replaced the About page with Five things the Den loves.

The sanctity of marriage is safe

Thanks to the brave men who defend it for us. Brave men like him.

Better Know a Lobbyist pt 1

Better Know a Lobbyist pt 2

Be sure to watch both videos.

Jennifer Lopez hates the environment

Scientific research has revealed that divorce is harmful to the environment (in more than one way):

“A married household actually uses resources more efficiently than a divorced household,” said Jianguo Liu, an ecologist at Michigan State University whose analysis of the environmental impact of divorce appears in this week’s online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

More households means more use of land, water and energy, three critical resources, Liu explained in a telephone interview.

What can we do about this? The first step is to recognize the problem.

“People have been talking about how to protect the environment and combat climate change, but divorce is an overlooked factor that needs to be considered,” Liu said.

How about assembling an international panel to draft a protocol to regulate divorce rates in each country? Of course we’ll go easy on less-developed countries that may just be getting around to discovering how annoying it can be to live with the same spouse for over a year.

By the way, gay marriage is good for the environment!

 

 

What are you doing for ‘sex day’?

From BBC News:

Russian ‘sex day’ to boost births 

The governor of Ulyanovsk region in Russia is offering prizes to couples who have babies in exactly nine months – on Russia’s national day on 12 June. 

Sergei Morozov wants couples to take the day off work to have sex. If a baby is born on national day, they will receive cars, TVs or other prizes.

Mr Morozov has declared Wednesday “family contact day” as part of efforts to fight Russia’s demographic crisis.

The population has sharply declined since the Soviet Union collapsed.

This is the third year that Ulyanovsk, in central Russia, is offering prizes for babies born on 12 June.

This year, a couple won the grand prize of a sports utility vehicle (SUV).

When you think about it, offering SUVs as incentives is a stroke of genius.  If we can get enough CO2 out there into the atmosphere to warm up the planet’s surface, the Russia climate might get cozy enough for people to actually want to have sex on their own.

Assault on the family

And now, my fellow primates, I must bring to your attention some disturbing reports. No, I do not speak of another bamboo shortage. Ample bamboo is expected this season so you needn’t itch your hairy rumps on that score. It is a far weightier topic that I feel constrained to warn you of today.

There are some out there who, fancying themselves open-minded, have fallen prey in their minds to perilous notions. Deceived in their own pomposity, or perhaps not knowing any better, they have gotten in their heads that these ideas picked up from dark, liberal sources we shall not speak of here, are the correct way to “think”, are “rational”, or “enlighted”, and that they ought to be implemented in our society. If allowed to succeed, these progressive trouble-mongers would bring down the most fundamental of our institutions. Yes, I’m speaking about the harem.

The family unit you and I were raised in, as we all know, consists of but one male and between two to thirty females for him to mate with as he pleases. This traditional social structure has not only served our species well for centuries upon centuries, it is also damn sexy.

My fellow knuckle-walkers, we are not like a certain distant relative of ours who goes around wearing other dead animals on its body, polluting the environment with “popular” music, building extravagant skyscrapers, constructing extravagant airplanes, destroying its own extravagant skyscrapers with extravagant hijacked airplanes, watching Days Of Our Lives reruns, and engaging in inter-species violence on a continental scale. This relative of ours, widely monogamous (except for in various predominantly Arab regions), may share 97% of our DNA, but this does not excuse us becoming like them.

My fellow turd-chuckers, we are animals. We are not men. We must not act like men (except for those living in various predominantly Arab regions).

The liberals will have you believe that a family with one man and one woman only is perfectly acceptable. “What harm does it do?”, they will ask. As if one woman to screw with could ever compare to having thirty!

One man and a couple dozen or so women is the only right union for a gorilla. It is the only natural union for a gorilla. If any of you are entertaining any inclinations to be faithful to one mate only, I urge you to repent and purge such dangerous ideas from your heart. Hoard your women. Hoard more women. Challenge and threaten male neighbors so that you can steal from their harems. The gorilla society did not get where it is today by following anything other than this time-tested pattern.

The Matchmaking Manifesto

Face it, most people are ugly. The result of an uneven distribution of good looks, or good personality for that matter, across the social landscape is that most people end up frustrated, lonely, miserable. They end up alienated.

Think of all the people you know who can never find their true love because all the hot dates are going to either Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie. (in the year 2005, dates between either one of those two with another member of the sexually attractive elite accounted for 25% of all dates nationwide) And among those who do manage to settle down with someone, disappointment will claim the better part of these relationships; it is statistically manifest that most relationships do not last.

The free market of romantic attraction does a *horrible* job of making people happy in relationships — this is an indisputable fact. All of this will change when the revolution begins.

It was necessary for an unregulated economy of social hooking-up to precede this next phase in history which we will soon see. A centrally-planned system of matchmaking will put an end to the suffering that inevitably results from an uncontrolled market of sexual attraction. All romance will be regulated by the dating proletariat themselves, and each person assigned a romantic partner according to his needs. This may require that some of the more attractive people be assigned as partners to people they would otherwise not choose, but everyone will be happier in the end, you will see.

With the means of attraction removed from the control of the reigning bourgeoisie of good-looking gals and dudes, the class society we now live under, in which some people have an easier time finding love than others, will be abolished, and we will have entered the final phase in history. No longer will Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie be allowed to exploit the rest of us!

Oh, there is one more thing.

In order to facilitate the coming of this revolution, it may be necessary to break a few eggs. Yes, I mean that all persons now involved in a romantic relationship will have to be separated. All existing couples will have to be split. All existing marriages will have to be broken up. This will all be for the best, you will see.

edit: changed the title

Virtual crime in virtual worlds

The following are excerpts from a recent Washington Post article by Alan Sipress, Does Virtual Reality Need a Sheriff?

1. “Earlier this year, one animated character in Second Life, a popular online fantasy world, allegedly raped another character.”
2. “Then last month, authorities in Germany announced that they were looking into a separate incident involving virtual abuse in Second Life after receiving pictures of an animated child character engaging in simulated sex with an animated adult figure.”
3. “In World of Warcraft… Gangs of animated characters have repeatedly preyed upon lone travelers, killing them and making off with their virtual belongings.”
4. “Two years ago, Japanese authorities arrested a man for carrying out a series of virtual muggings in another popular game, Lineage II, by using software to beat up and rob characters in the game and then sell the virtual loot for real money.”
5. “A participant in LambdaMOO, a community of users who congregated in a virtual California house, had used a computer program called a ‘voodoo doll’ to force another player’s character to act out being raped.”

Which of the above incidents warrant attention from authorities in the real world? Which would you criminalize?

I’m gonna go with none of the above.

The way I see it, the legitimacy of #3 and #4 depends entirely on what the rules of the game are as established by the private company that runs it, and is therefore under that company’s ‘jurisdiction’. There is nothing that prevents a player unsatisfied with the rules of a particular game from going off and playing a different game instead. (I recommend Solitaire!) And if a game loses players because the company has either defined poor rules or cannot enforce the rules that it has, it is entirely the company’s own problem and not society’s, is it not? (Unless the company has made false guarantees or falsely advertised, etc)

The article speaks of emotional distress the real person behind a character that is victim of a #1 or #5 may suffer. For such a person, the solution is absurdly simple–quit the damn program. Every PC is shipped with this nifty shutdown feature we should all learn how to use.

#2 of course is a joke since no real children are harmed by any of that.

Please do not interpret my dismissal of claims that any of the above behavior should be worthy of criminalization to be denials that such behavior may be, in fact, unethical. The frontier of online gaming is wild and lawless indeed.

H/T to CAD Developement

Parenting tip of the day

“And yet Democrats do believe in gun control… This is because Democrats believe that gun owners want to keep their guns mostly in case they need to shoot Democrats. It happened in 1861 and it could happen again.”

— PJ O’Rourke, source

Proposition: If you have conservative leanings, and if you have kids, and if you want to make sure your kids have conservative leanings, there is no more effective way to achieve this goal than to get them each a lifetime membership in the NRA as soon as they’re old enough to hold a squirt pistol toy.

Agree or disagree?

Religious education is no guarantee. Plenty of religious-types dive off the Left end. When they don’t there is still the good chance that your kids begin to catch on to how ridiculous your religion is.

Instilling hatred of communism in them may not do it. Communism has already been defeated, although possibly due for a revival. Also, you do want your kids to go to college, don’t you?

But get them hooked on guns…

Pro-life and Pro-Roe v. Wade?

There’s something I’m not getting here. A newly released Gallup poll shows that the American public’s views on abortion favor those who would like it to be less legal than it is.

26% think abortion should be legal under any circumstances
15% think abortion should be legal under most circumstances
40% think abortion should be legal in a few circumstances
18% think abortion should be illegal under any circumstances

The status quo since 1973 has been legal under most. Therefore, if this poll can be trusted, only 15% of us are satisfied with the law as it presently stands.

Here’s the strange part. The same survey asked respondents if they would like to see the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade. The “Yes, overturn” crowd, while up a few % from the previous year, numbers only 35%!

It isn’t surprising to find so many pro-choice people answering no to the above question, but it is surprising to find so few pro-lifers answering yes. Why are the 58% who think abortion should be less legal than it is now so reluctant to see Roe overturned? How do they expect to see the status quo change otherwise? Roe as much as made abortion into a constitutional right; it isn’t as if overturning it would then make abortion illegal. I would expect moderates to want to axe it and put something moderate in its place. If our views on abortion favor those of us who want change in the pro-life direction, then why are we so content with the present situation?

Interracial Marriages Steadily Rising

I can’t think of a reason in the world why this trend should cease in our lifetimes.

Factoring in all racial combinations, Stanford University sociologist Michael Rosenfeld calculates that more than 7 percent of America’s 59 million married couples in 2005 were interracial, compared to less than 2 percent in 1970.

It’s hard to believe that as recently as forty years ago, interracial marriage in much of the United States was not only taboo, it was illegal. That it no longer is testifies to the fact that taboos can and often should be tossed into the dumpster of history.

The struggle over which taboos still serve a useful societal function and which do not is the side of the culture war that is most interesting to me. Proponents of same-sex marriage, the current hot front of this war, have suffered both gains and losses in the last couple years, but I am putting my money on them winning in the end. Polygamy will be the next front I will guess, and after that incest perhaps. The taboo on those last two is still quite strong. Give complete erosion a generation or two.

I think I may be in that tiny minority who doesn’t particularly have an opinion about whether these changes will be for the better or for the worse. But I believe we’re going to find out.

(Hat tip to Axis of Right)