Monthly Archives: January 2012

Japan is Dying.

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Slowly.

The current population will shrink from the current level of 128 million to 86.74 million, as the graying nation’s aging accelerates and the birthrate continues to stay low.

Stay low? It’s going to get lower:

The fertility rate, which is currently at 1.39 per woman, will continue to fall, says the institute. The rate by 2060 is expected to fall to 1.35 in 2060. The country’s population decline would slow if the birth rate rose to 2.07.

Ah, but they’ll have robots to pick up the slack. In fact, if they keep it up, they’ll have an all-robot society before too long. Wonderfully efficient, and the environmentalists will be pleased.

 

Remember, they're all about love...

Meanwhile, in the GOP Primary, the Madness Continues

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I don’t share the panic over the continuing Story of a Primary Gone to the Dogs. In 2008, we spent the entire winter and spring watching Hillary and Obama slug it out.  Limbaugh encouraged conservatives to register as Democrats to keep it interesting. Everyone got tired of the drama, and assumed that the winner would be weakened for the general.

How’d that turn out again?

The GOP is changing. What was acceptable pre-2009 is now
RINO-hood. Obama has done that. By ballooning the size of governmhet and the debt, The president has pushed us out of the small-ball, incremental conservatism that Gingrich worked in the 1990′s. The base wants to go big, or stay home.

Unfortunately, the right candidate has yet to emerge. The experienced candidates are tainted by their insufficiently tea-party past, and the ideologically acceptable candidates can’t convince voters that they have the chops. The only candidate with both experience and ideological suitability, Rick Perry, did not bother to prepare himself to be a candidate on national television.

So here we are, and where we go, no one knows. The fight between Romney and Gingrich isn’t over, no matter what happens in Florida. Meanwhile, Rick Santorum’s First Second Look is in full swing. And Ron Paul is still there. Whoever wins is going to have convince the base that he wants what they want, and convince the Establishment that he knows what he’s doing. I don’t know if any of them have figured that out. But I figure by spring, one of them will.

And all the frustration will find its new and proper outlet.

I Agree With E.J. Dionne

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And the angel opened up the fourth seal, etc…

Speaking as a Catholic, I wish the Church would be more open on the contraception question. But speaking as an American liberal who believes that religious pluralism imposes certain obligations on government, I think the Church’s leaders had a right to ask for broader relief from a contraception mandate that would require it to act against its own teachings. The administration should have done more to balance the competing liberty interests here.

I am also a Catholic, but I understand the Church’s reasoning behind the contraception teaching as published in Humanae Vitae in 1968, even, as a husband and father, I understand the difficulties in complying with it.

But to expect Obama to wade through the morass of regulatory fineness to secure for Catholic institutions the liberty to be Catholic strikes me as adorably naive. To support the rights of the religious rhetorically wins plaudits, even from the agnostic left. To support them with the weight of the law, well, that takes work.

UPDATE: The Church says “We Will Not Comply” (h/t: KatyPundit).

In it, Catholic leaders went on to say that the Church “cannot—we will not—comply with this unjust law,” as it violates the Catholic conscience. Additionally, the church says that it is faced with a difficult decision — either comply and violate its faith or drop coverage for employees and suffer the consequences. The letter urges congregants to take action and to call Congress in an attempt to overturn the regulation.

Yeah, this will end well.

The 90′s are Back, Baby

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And apparently, downloadable for free.

I shouldn’t hold it against Hear, Hear! that he can’t identify “That song the Pixies play at the end of Fight Club” should I?

UPDATE: Hear Hear’s! page has a link to the song “Where is My Mind.” I failed to note the Irony, so the Ignorant Girl image has been replaced with one more appropriate.

Rick Santorum is Mad

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Can’t say I blame him.

It deserves pointing out that Santorum is the only one whose hands are in any way clean on this issue. Gingrich’s are not clean, and all great Neptune’s oceans will not wash Romney’s.

Look, I like Newt Gingrich. Always have. He’s got fire in the belly, and he’s smart. But I too wonder if the Presidency requires some stability, and Santorum has that in spades.

We shall see.

Bob Dole Stumps for Romney, Denounces Gingrich

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The former Senator from Viagra claimed that nominating the Newtzilla would result in a “sweeping victory” for President Obama.

There are two reasonable responses to this information.

  1. Bob Dole is still alive?
  2. What the *$^% does Bob Dole know about sweeping victories?

Maybe the guy who ran a colorless, gutless campaign against the Man from Hope in 1996 shouldn’t be consulted on behalf of the man laboring to run a colorless, gutless campaign against Hope Made Flesh.

And yes, I voted for Dole.

The Death of Postmodernism?

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Saw this over at Ace’s, and will probably have to read it again soon. I have always found post-modernism transcendentally irritating, because it always seemed the desparate decadent cry of the self-hating honky. It was a fundamentally nihilistic riff of of ideas first played with by the Sophists, as I came to notice when I did my paper on Gorgias.

And typically, the comments section is an irruption of enraged how-dare-you from every nerd who ever tried to read Baudrillard, non of whom can apparently see the contradiction in arguing on the “meaning” of post-modernism.

Post-Modernism:

There are No Universally Valid Statments.

Except that one.

 

What the Hell is a Moon Base For?

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If there’s an economic reason to go to the moon, then private companies should finance it. If there’s not an economic reason to go to the moon, then what — aside from sci-fi frisson – is to be gained by going there?

I’ve heard it as a practice run for Mars. Bollocks. Mars is an entirely different situation than the Moon: different distances, different environment, different mission altogether. If we want to go to Mars (assuming there’s some purpose for that), let’s go to Mars. Why the pit stop?

A view of the earth and moon from Mars, courtesy of NASA

Meghan McCain Illustrates What is Wrong With White People

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The existence of Meghan McCain, like that of the Jersey Shore, stand as reminders of the truism that ignorance is bliss. Bliss indeed it would be to remain ignorant of both. Yet I cannot, and so find myself wearily faced with the addled thoughts of this un-celebrity.

“I prefer people with personality and swagger as opposed to people that did really well in college and can now spout boring facts on command.”

The worst thing in this is the universality of it; how common and derivative an idea it is. I take it as another sign of how knowledge-averse a culture we have become. To know things, to have actually taken the time to acquire knowledge, is considered by many to be a dastardly act. These usually come in two varieties:

  1. The Invincibly Ignorant, who regard education as torture and are content to remain stupid. They hate and fear the learned.
  2. The Mal-Educated, who regard themselves as intelligent, but don’t actually know anything. Any conversation on the subject of history, economics, science, or philosophy any deeper than your average stand-up comedy routine leaves them confused and contemptuous. They are sheep to be gathered by whatever rhetorical shepherd wanders by.

I suspect McCain to be of the second variety, as the Invincibly Ignorant do not usually take the time to write painfully written books or place themselves as leaders of non-existent movements.

Stacy McCain perceives in McCain’s insipid ignorance the collapse of American culture. He follows that down the long road through his own career and continuing support for Rick Santorum, who has at least as much claim to be an educated man as Newt Gingrich. By all means, Read the Whole Thing.

Meanwhile, Instapundit links Charles Murray’s new Book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, the premise of which is:

The top and bottom of white America increasingly live in different cultures, Murray argues, with the powerful upper class living in enclaves surrounded by their own kind, ignorant about life in mainstream America, and the lower class suffering from erosions of family and community life that strike at the heart of the pursuit of happiness. That divergence puts the success of the American project at risk.

I love it when a plan comes together.