Sadly, No!

Bellini, The Virgin and Hen and Two Saints, 1490 (oil on panel)

Rod Dreher, Science, Religion, Markets and Bullshit
How Does Benedict Fix This Mess?

• It’s totally unfair for liberals to blame the Pope for the current pederasty kerfuffle because the Roman Catholic Church is just so enormous that, in fact, the Pope has absolutely no power over it and can’t do anything to discipline pedophile priests no matter how hard he tries.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

ABOVE: Olympic Athlete and Baseball Expert Jimmie Bice, Jr.

Shorter (But Not Thinner) Jimmie¹ Bice, Jr., The Sundries Shack
The Stories of His Athleticism Appear Grossly Exaggerated

• Obama is a bad president because he is a bad athlete. Athleticism is something that I feel very strongly is an important indicator of good character, competence and manliness. Myself, I demonstrate my devotion to manly athletic pursuits by watching Bowflex infomercials on late night teevee.

Another Shorter (But Still Not Any Thinner) Jimmie Bice, Jr., The Chocolate Sundae Shack
President Obama’s Favorite Baseball Player Is…Well, Bring A Lunch. This May Take a While

• When a sports reporter asked Obama who was his favorite Chicago White Sox player when he was a kid, it was not acceptable for Obama to say that he wasn’t a White Sox fan when he was a kid living in Hawaii.² This just proves that Obama is a poseur and that, like everyone born in Kenya, he knows more about cricket than baseball.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

Political Economy is the basis of all good government. The wisest men of all ages have brought to bear upon this subject the —

Bryan Fischer, RenewAmerica:
Thank you, Bill Clinton: cancers of head and neck spike due to oral sex

[Um…]¹

Above: Birchin’ for the mainline, couldn’t hit it sideways^cf.

---

According to a story in Reuters, the number HPV-induced head and neck cancers spread by oral sex is rising sharply, particularly in what is supposed to be the enlightened West. And it is particularly prominent among the young and employed.

What we’re getting out of this isn’t the shudder and ick that Fischer wants,² because greatly already have we shuddered and icked this day, and let’s be clear in any case: If the Reuters story in question were to begin, “Despite an overall slight decline in head and neck cancers in recent years” then we would have crossed at that green light and would be walking on the laughier side of the street.

What we have gotten from it is a hypothesis that thinkers on sexuality such as Fischer and Kathryn Lopez achieve such a high rate of double-entendres — or even one-and-a-half-entendres, such as when comments on the K-Lo-commissioned ‘Getting Serious About Pornography‘ piece kept “coming into [her] inbox” — because they reason associatively rather than according to the method long assumed: flailingly in a bucket-headed and roller-skated fashion, orienting prevailingly stairsward. That assumption hasn’t explained how they get so often onto the highway, or are so often spotted transiting I-beams at high-rise construction sites.

Proposed: Once Fischer decides to reënrobe the sexual in columnar opprobrium, or in other words write one of those moth-to-candle sex columns of his, he will never in such case fail to type meaningless yet strongly allusive combinations of words such as “oral sex is rising sharply,” perceiving correctly that the words go together in some way, yet being senseless of their effect, i.e. that of razzing out at people with a Sousaphone of browed seriousness from the head of a circus parade, i.e. mirth. To a thing also hypothetical to Fischer, i.e. wit:

President Bill Clinton, in his sordid affair with Monica Lewinsky, convinced an entire generation that oral sex wasn’t really sex. Now the bill has come due, as…

Never mind the silly argument, although it’s worth mentioning that the crackpottery rises to a daredevil height as the column goes on. Note the phrase, “now the bill has come due,” and notice what would happen with just a quick shave on the hinder end:

President Bill Clinton, in his sordid affair with Monica Lewinsky, convinced an entire generation that oral sex wasn’t really sex. Now the bill has come, as…

Indeed, apropos Lewinsky, ‘bill’ has finally ‘come,’ and we are Xenophanes in the Parian quarry. “Yeah, no, that’s just it,” we think, being all ‘yeah, no’ like Xenophanes was. “How did that petrified anchovy ever get embedded in that stone?”

Once again the age-old wisdom of the Judeo-Christian tradition is vindicated: sex is for marriage, period.

Yeah, no, that’s just it, Mr. Fischer.

If you purchased an iPad you are a conformist tool. Those who did should never comment here again, except to apologize.

Takapu, I choose you!

Yes, I’ve been drinking.

Newsblusterer Noel Sheppard is all blustered up because Chris Matthews called Rush Limbaugh an “underwater walrus.” The cause for Noel’s concern is not that Rush doesn’t indeed bear a striking resemblance to a drenched walrus in an open black shirt. No, Noel is clutching his pearls over this because he thinks that “underwater walrus” is an obscene reference of some kind.

Say what? Does he mean this walrus? Has Noel been sneaking onto the Urban Dictionary site again when his wife was out shopping? No, apparently Noel is thinking of this NSFW YouTube video which, surprisingly, was completely unknown to me until Noel was kind enough to point it out.

Of course, the real question is not whether Matthews was calling a Rush an obese, leather-skinned auto-fellating sea mammal, which, really, is far too kind given Rush’s two obvious physical impediments to auto-fellation. No, the real question is how the prissy-pants Newsblusterer himself knew about this video. Or why it was the first thing that popped into his mind when he heard the word walrus. And how often he’s seen it. And what he does while watching it. And whether Noel is this woman’s husband.

At least Matthews didn’t call Limbaugh an angry pirate.

Read the rest of this entry »

We make fun of McMegan quite a bit round these parts. So much so, that I personally visit the Fire Megan McArdle blog a couple times a week to steal ideas for my own posts.

That said, it can’t be denied that Megan seems to have some influence on policy debate, insofar as a distressing number of people seem to take her various pronouncements seriously, perhaps giving special consideration to her perch at the Atlantic, still a respectable journal in some circles.

So I’m going to put on my serious pants and challenge her to explain something that she has long maintained regarding the likely outcomes of health care reform. It’s been bugging me for a while that she continues to make statements like this:

– By 2030, there’s an 80% chance that the government will have imposed substantial price controls on pharma and other medical technology — and this will noticeably slow the rate of innovation.

Here’s my challenge to Megan — given her certainty that government intervention in health care is going to ‘noticeably slow the rate of innovation’, how does she explain Moore’s Law?

Now Moore’s Law is a specific prediction about the increasing density of computer circuitry rather than any sort of guideline for the pace of innovation in medicine. But it’s also perhaps the most testable prediction we’ve ever had for the future pace of ANY sort of innovation. Moore’s Law — briefly, a prediction that the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit will double approximately every two years — has held up since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 to today, and shows no sign of slowing down any time soon.

These days, we credit Moore’s Law for the fact that in 2010, the processing power of a mass-produced smartphone you can buy for $200 literally dwarfs that of the NASA computers used in 1969 to land a man on the moon. And Intel co-founder Gordon Moore’s elegant little observation from back in 1965 has spawned a number of corollary ‘laws’ regarding the pace of innovation in areas like energy efficiency in computing and ever-more intelligent and useful programming code.

What we don’t often think about re: Moore’s Law is just how damn accurate it’s been at predicting the future, despite the various ups and downs of the decades in which the prediction has been operative. Moore’s Law worked when Keynesian economics ruled government policy and it worked when we switched over to Thatcher rules and Reaganomics. It correctly predicted innovation during the Great Society — when government policies like affirmative action arguably represented far greater intervention in markets than HCR will ever do — and kept right on working through the past 20 years as we dismantled many Great Society programs.

Moore’s Law worked when the economy was booming and when it was struggling. It worked leading up to the dot-com bubble, through the bubble itself and on past the crash and its aftermath. It worked when billions of potential customers in Communist states were firewalled off from Western markets by their authoritarian governments. It kept working even when government regulators in the United States, Europe and elsewhere began investigating and penalizing certain high-tech companies for anti-competitive practices — including Moore’s own company, Intel.

The point is, Moore’s Law seems like it could be evidence that there just might exist an exponentially increasing pace of human innovation that simply cannot be affected all that much by various tweaks — even fairly major ones — in government policy towards markets, or even regulation of specific industries.

If that’s true, then perhaps government policy can only do a few things with regards to an innovation cycle that appears to inexorably deliver progressively better and more varied technologies with each passing year. Policy may be able to point a segment of innovation in roughly the direction of some technological problem whose solution the policymakers consider would be socially useful. Policy may also be helpful in assuring that the fruits of innovation are enjoyed with prejudice towards the many instead of the few — for example, by means of regulation that encourages competition to produce lower-priced computer products for volume distribution and thus passes along innovation gains to consumers, while discouraging monopoly behavior or collusion to hoard Moore’s Law-driven gains by means of outsized margins that would not be possible in a legitimately competitive environment.

What any government policy — short of, perhaps, a Khmer Rouge-style outburst of Luddite insanity — cannot seem to do is to ‘noticeably slow the rate of innovation’ itself. So again, my challenge to Megan is to show that it can, with special attention paid to debunking the powerful counter-example of Moore’s Law.

K-Lo, like a traditional upstate New York roast-beef sandwich, is a bit soggy on the bottom though on a roll.

Anonymous [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

The piece we published today on the devastating effects of pornography has kept a steady stream of e-mails coming into my inbox.

Make that ‘a steady stream of e-males coming into my inbox,’ and it…uh, ooh, er, BHUU-AAARGHLPF [splattering] oh my god it’s GLAAA-UUUORP [splattering] all up in that FLAAA-ghnr-AAAAA-hkn-AAAAA-snkf-AAAAA-ALPHfspt [extended multidirectional splattering] ulp, cough, ah, heh.

Some telling devastating tales. Some confessions.

Make that ‘some telling of devastating people’s tails whilst hearing confession’ and HUUUOLP-glarf [splattering, clonk, bounce-bounce-roll-roll] Wow, I think I just coughed up my skull.

Some adamant defenses of pornography from frequent users.

re: pornography, hey k-lo, don’t drink don’t smoke what do you do? best wishes, Adam Ant

re: re: pornography, also k-lo, what do you fap-fap-fap-fap-fap-ahh! sorry, needed to squirt one out while thinking of myself in a big, fluffy pirate shirt. best wishes, Adam Ant

re: re: re: pornography, um k-lo, I think it’s BLAAAAA-oogah [splattering, clonk, bounce-bounce-roll-roll] heh heh now i can pee in my skull. no, that’s somebody else’s skull, wait, WTF? Adam Ant

re: re: re: re: pornography, hooty-hoo, me again. this skull has a mustache so it must be john stossel’s and i’m going to make it say the communist manifesto. that okay with you, stossel? oh hi adam, hey didjever notice clowns, in the beep-beep car? what a bunch of clowns! wakka-wakka hi i’m john stossel heh heh. well better get started. wakka-wakka, phil spector is haunting europe. later kid, Adam Ant
PS i’m worried about my nephew ike. he seems so defeated.

Bleg [Jonah Goldberg]

Hey, I need to research something for my newspaper column but don’t have time to look it up, so send what you’ve got via email. UPDATE: uh, I mean also send the name of the thing I need to research. there’s no time to look it up. it’s in that notebook over there marked…wow, gotta go, walking dog walking dog goin’ thataway dog dog
04/01 01:57 PM

Ergo bibamus [Victor Davis Hanson]

Say, Hanson here. Where might Jonah have gone so hasteningly, for he and I were about to catch a production of ‘Once Upon a Barstool’ if you know what I mean. Hmm, notebook. Says it’s a BHUU-AAAURGHLPF [splattering] uh, uh, ee, FLAAA-AAA-AAA- [splattering] -AAA-AAA-AAA- [360-degree roto-hurl barfnado] -AAA-AAAULPHsp mind erased go floor [plunk] eep
04/01 02:07 PM

Hi Guys [Rich Lowry]

Hey, who threw up, erased Hanson’s brain, and left this notebook of aaaagh kerplunkity bounce bounce bounce roll roll stairs bunkita-bunkita-bunkita-bunkita-whappita-bunkita-bunkita-bunkita-plaf roll roll bunkita-bunkita-bunkita-bunkita-bunkita-bunkita-bunkita-bunkita-plat roll roll curb roll [truck horn] [unpleasant crunchy wet noise] [gasps, shouts, dog barking]
04/01 02:12 PM

Some cries for help.

elp [Rich Lowry]

hepl
04/01 02:14 PM

Please feel free to keep them coming.

Ooh, mine’s coming. …No, wait: She’s actually trying to run with it?

I’ll report back here before too long.

Oh come back, it’s ‘getting too long,’ woohoo.

Good night for now.

Well, if there’s a knock on our door, we’re feigning a stroke. Just saying.

Ladies and gentlemen … readers and friends. This is perhaps the most difficult thing I have ever had to do. I have maintained my anonymity on this blog for several years because it would have been extremely painful to people close to me to reveal my true name.

The time has arrived whence I am obliged — nay, compelled — to come clean.

My name is Daniel Riehl. Many of you may know me as a conservative blogger. Many of you have crossed swords with me in the blogospheric back-and-forth that has come to define our daily affairs. I never intended for it to be this way. In some ways, it was entirely out of my control.

But I have been living a double life. I’ve been blogging as both Dan Riehl, conservative nemesis of progressives, and as D. Aristophanes, happy-go-lucky mocker of ‘wingnuts’ on Sadlyno.com.

I did this to mask my true identity. And I did it to hide the shame of my decades-long love affair with Jeff Goldstein.

I’m not hiding any longer. Jeff, I know you’re not ready for this. But it’s time. I love you. I love your wit. I love it when you laugh in that delightfully manic way of yours. I love how you look when your head is resting on the pillow of our shared bed. I love it when you have me so energetically after a particularly strident blog post.

It’s just that — well, I simply can’t live a lie any more. I’ve been playing both ends against the middle for so long that I really don’t know where my lies end and I begin.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry for the illusion I’ve created. I can’t stress enough how awful I feel — how awful I’ve felt for the better part of a decade — to have perpetuated this sham, to have misled so many loyal readers of both of my blogs. It started out as fun. It’s ended in the kind of self-loathing that most of you will be blessed to never fully experience.

In the coming days, I pledge to answer all of your questions about my double life, as awkward and painful and accusatory as they may be. I owe that to you, all of you — readers of both RiehlWorldView.com and of Sadlyno.com.

You deserve to have answers.

But before that happens, I want to say one thing. I could have maintained my lies for much longer. The only reason that I felt compelled to confess, really, was the example set for me by my lover, Jeff Goldstein.

It doesn’t excuse my terrible shame, or the damage I have done to so many good readers with my duplicity, but I must admit that I do take some solace in the fact that I have had the singular pleasure of watching Jeff’s manhood swell to exquisite proportions in anticipation of my deflowering.

Jeff was always the more experienced one. More learned and sure in the ways of our forbidden liaisons. He taught me what it meant to be a true lover — rough yet eager to please … wicked yet possessed of a kind of formidable grace that words cannot describe.

I have these memories. I always will. They are mine.

I know that these words will do little to assuage the betrayal that I have visited upon my readers, both right-leaning and progressive. I share them only to offer some glimpse of my own pain over these many years.

And I ask your forgiveness.

Sincerely,

Dan ‘D. Aristophanes’ Riehl

ABOVE: Roger “Happy Bunny” Clegg

Shorter Roger Blegh, America’s Shittiest Website™
The Obama Administration’s Jihad against ‘Gender Stereotypes’

• I am completely against bullying in schools, except in the case of sissy boys who dye their hair and wear nail polish and who totally deserve whatever they get.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™