Crowhill Weblog

Next to my office in D.C. is a building that used to be called “The Bachelor.” It had small apartments with no kitchens.

The history of “The Bachelor” was discussed briefly in a meeting and was met with moans from the women. Those moans signified (I’m pretty sure) disgust that men were such pigs that they couldn’t cook and expected women to do it for them. Or, more generally, disgust with a time when men weren’t expected to be able to cook.

I suspect that at about the same time these bachelors were living a Holmes-and-Watson kind of existence you’d be hard-pressed to find a woman who could clean a gun, shoe a horse or fix a carriage wheel. But imagine the reaction if some historical detail implied that and the men moaned in disgust that women lacked such skills?

You see, when men lack skills and rely on women, that’s the evil patriarchy rearing its ugly head, and when women lack skills and rely on men, that’s the evil patriarchy again — holding the women back.

The death of the printed word seems certain to be just a few mouse clicks away. Newspapers are hemorrhaging money. Readership is plummeting. Advertisers are heading for the exits.

The era of the “new journalism” has arrived and bloggers rule the universe.

Imagine it is far in the future and you are a high school teacher. You have assigned a class of sophomores to write a paper on the history of wind power with emphasis on technological, political and economic developments which made it feasible. They are to document their authorities with footnotes, endnotes and hyperlinks.

Books, newspapers and magazines are readily available to cover the early period, but for the later years everything is digital. Students quote authorities nobody ever heard of, possibly writing under phony names in blogs of unproven reliability. Two students quote supposedly authoritative points from Wikipedia but they push opposing views. Which to rely on? The daily newspaper is one sheet, two pages, of one-paragraph summaries with URLs for more details, but many of the URLs generate a 404 Error message. Several servers have disappeared.

Will it ever get that bad?

(That’s from St. Paul for those of you who aren’t up on such things.)

According to Carl Anderson, “the Catholic vote” could be very important this fall.

According to me, the bishops are doing their normal thing and confusing people.

‘And at the top of the list of Catholic moral convictions, the bishops put “defending the inviolable sanctity of human life from the moment of conception until natural death.”‘

I suspect that Obama is against the death penalty and for “choice,” while McCain is for the death penalty and against abortion. So, going by the alleged moral guidance of the bishops, Catholics hear the bugle making an uncertain sound.

Was that “advance” or “retreat”? Are we supposed to fight those guys in red, or those guys in blue?

First of all, I don’t see why taking political advice from bishops makes any more sense than taking religious advice from politicians, but secondly, there’s simply no need for this.

The church’s position against abortion is clearly moral, long-standing and Very Serious. When you contrast this with the bishops’ rant against capital punishment — which is recent, political/practical (not moral), in some ways inconsistent with Catholic moral teaching and generally confusing and stupid — … well, there’s simply no comparison.

But the two have been put on seemingly equal footing with this “from the moment of conception until natural death” business.

The bishops have committed a standard error. They have allowed “good” to get in the way of “best.” (That is if we give them the benefit of the doubt about their death penalty argument and call it “good” — just for the heck of it.)

He says we’ve been the world’s scold, moralizing left and right, encouraging others to action on pretense that we’ll help them and then failing to help, and generally speaking loudly while carrying a little stick.

It’s time to shut up already.

Georgia On Our Mind

Along similar lines, Pat Buchanan says the fight in Georgia is none of our business. Who Started Cold War II?

The media, Hollywood and academia, all of which are mostly liberal, like to portray liberals as tolerant, intelligent and caring people, as opposed to conservatives who are intolerant, stupid and greedy.

According to a new book that reviews actual studies (rather than anecdotes and snide comments from actors), the exact opposite is the case.

Makers and Takers: How Conservatives Do All the Work While Liberals Whine and Complain

“[T]he notion that conservatism is the result of everything from psychosis to stupidity to just general nastiness has been part of mainstream cultural conversation for years,” according to this review, which cites a summary of the premise from the book cover:

Why conservatives work harder, feel happier, have closer families, take fewer drugs, give more generously, value honesty more, are less materialistic and envious, whine less… and even hug their children more than liberals.

“In every major scientific social survey, conservatives know more, care more, give more, love more, and lie less, are less materialistic and self centered than liberals.”

The left likes to pretend that it listens to science. Let’s see.

… I’d certainly do just about the opposite of what the (no longer so big) Big Three do. Yesterday my wife and I saw a really cool looking 2-seater. It was a Saturn, so I wondered if maybe they had taken advantage of the small size to get some really first-class gas mileage out of it. Turns out, not so much. It gets worse mileage than the Kia I already own. (I own a Sephia, but this gets similar mileage to mine.)

So I looked to see what the smallest auto engine available was- how many cylinders, how much power, etc. I wanted to compare to get an idea of what is possible with off-the-shelf tech. I didn’t search extensively, because almost the first thing I found was an article about a car with a motorcycle engine. Of course, it’s the smart car. (Check out the second and third comments here)

So, unless corporate America has learned a lesson, (unlikely in the absolute lack-of-consequence environment they have lived in for a few decades) Detroit will whine and moan about how people won’t buy their pickup trucks and station wagons built on pickup truck frames. ( I saw an add that showed an SUV in profile and said “Come on, real men can tell a station wagon when they see it.” Very funny!)

Body proves Bigfoot no myth, hunters say

Sounds like people are getting better at pulling off hoaxes.

A new eco-friendly Hummer.

Seriously, you’ve gotta wonder about a product that was marketed by essentially saying “When there’s a fatal accident, it’ll be the other guy that dies.” (I really read that a couple of years ago, but I’m too lazy to try to find a link)

A couple weeks ago I was driving around on a Saturday morning and heard a “top 40″ broadcast that turned out to be some kind of archive — a “top 40″ from the 70s. Of course I knew most of the songs, and they brought back memories. Mostly of stupid, gooey, drippy attitudes about love and relationships.

You can’t avoid being influenced by the culture you live in. Listening to those songs made me realize how much I soaked in that nonsense. Unfortunately, that slop seeped into my brain, and it took years to get it out.

I thought of this phenomenon as I read a review of a new movie remake of Brideshead Revisited. (I’m not exactly sure why this grabbed my attention. I tried to read Brideshead and hated it.) But I found this passage in the review …

The movie twists Brideshead from a complicated exploration of the workings of grace into a cautionary tale about the dangers of religion, and a surprising number of reviewers take for granted that this viewpoint and the plot changes it requires are original to the novel.

Of course they do. “The dangers of religion” is part of the cultural air they breathe, and the “workings of grace” is not. “The dangers of religion” is one of those things “everybody knows” — like that medievals thought the world was flat. (Which isn’t so.)

After watching this video, I can forgive people who think there is no gravity in space, people who think the blood in their veins is blue, people who think there is more crime during the full moon. But this woman is just too stoopid to live.

This is a good column by Dennis Prager.

Why I Am Not a Liberal

I agree with almost all of it. (I’m not so sure kids were benefited by a non-denominational prayer before the start of school, but otherwise I’m with him.)

Scandinavian males are trying to be the men the feminists say they want them to be. Apparently it’s gotten to the point that to pee standing up is taken as offensive (and possibly violent) behavior.

But (surprise surprise) this hasn’t worked out as well as they hoped.

See Where have all the Vikings gone? (HT: Vox Day.)

Men can’t be, and shouldn’t try very hard to be, the way women say they want them to be. (Some level of accommodation is necessary to make life possible, of course.) The reverse is also true.

Any such idealized transformation is doomed to failure for the same reason that Utopian ideas are doomed to failure — viz., that wishes, whether silly or sensible, stupid or profound, have no necessary relationship to reality, which is a hard task-master and tolerates no dissent.

Men and women may say they want the opposite sex to behave a certain way, but that’s just because they took a class from some idiot professor who convinced them of some gradiose theory, or because they listened to too many drippy love songs. What they really want is another matter.

So it turns out the mainstream media knew of the rumors of Edwards’ affair but decided it wasn’t worth reporting. Such things don’t matter, of course. Unless the rumors are about John McCain. Then they matter.

Pat Buchanan exposes Obama’s commitment to the Most Sacred Sacrament of Abortion in this piece: A Catholic Case Against Barack

I don’t think it’s a “Catholic” case. It’s just a human case.

Reasonable people can argue about abortion in the first trimester. If you don’t believe in a soul, it’s hard to see why a fertilized egg should be given legal protection.

But there can’t be any reasonable dispute about “partial birth abortion” or the practice of killing babies who were accidentally born alive. That’s simply barbaric, and Republicans should be all over Obama about this.

Occasionally we read about an astronaut who claims that the government has been contacted by aliens and the government is hushing it up. That’s pretty obviously silly, but it’s not completely ridiculous. You can certainly imagine circumstances where the government might want to hush that sort of thing up for a while.

When I was a young there was a T.V. show called “V” where some aliens came to earth and claimed that scientists had found a cure for cancer, but had kept it secret so they could continue to get cancer-research funding. Again, not true, but you can imagine the motivations. If there really was a cure for cancer, it would put a lot of people out of business.

And then there are those silly rumors about how Detroit has developed 100 mpg cars, but they don’t want to release them because they have a deal with the oil companies. Like most conspiracy theories it’s just silliness, but you can understand the motivations.

These things pale in comparison to the potential conspiracies over “fountain of youth” research. It seems we’re getting close to figuring out way to extend the human life span.

Yesterday I read an article about a study on long-lived mouse livers. Lysosomes (from what I read) are the garbage collectors in your cells. As you age they get less efficient so your cells get full of junk. If you keep the lysosomes happy and active, as they did in this study, the effects of ageing are diminished. (Or something along those lines. For the purposes of this post it really doesn’t matter.)

Now imagine the incentives for the government to suppress something like that! If somebody really did discover a way to, say, double the human life span (just pretend with me for a minute), think of the social effects.

What would happen to social security? Think of the population pressures. How would it impact health care, which is already a cripplingly large portion of our economy?

I don’t think the government is competent to keep anything secret for very long, so I don’t believe they could do it if they tried. But if anything would incent the government into a massive cover-up, this would be it.