So I’ve been giving a lot of thought to hipsters, wiggers and goths. I’ve concluded that these groups exist on a continuum, with small overlaps in between. Let’s explore each of these groups, their overlaps, and then conclude with a Venn diagram.

Let’s start with hipsters. Deliberately ironic, mustache wearing PBR drinking cool kids, generally insufferable, and generally white. Wiggers, of course, are white kids who try to act and dress like black inner city rappers. Their overlap? Well, one ironic overlap is that the word “hipster” was the 1940′s equivalent of the word “wigger”. But the real overlap? Nerdcore of course, white hipsters rapping about things like math and dungeons and dragons. It’s a small contingent, obviously, but there they are.

Goths claim to take everything so seriously that they are depressed all the time. Wearing all black and often black and white makeup to emphasize just how depressed they are. They seem to believe that they are the only authentic voice in a world of phonies. They are, in effect, Holden Caufield in makeup. But combined with wiggers and who do they become? Juggalos, wiggers in black and white clown makeup obsessed with the Dark Carnival, a sort of purgatory.

But what happens when you cross Goths with Hipsters? I struggled with this for a while, because Goths are so deadly serious, and hipsters, well, not so much. But after a while I realized that combining the two creates the Steampunk, a guy obsessed with esoterica from a more gothic age. The Steampunk gets to dress up like a goth and act serious, but about totally frivolous things, imagining a world where everything is run by steam. It is the ultimate hipster/goth fusion.

Which of course brings us to the final combination, the so-called theoretical Steampunk-Nerdcore-Juggalo. What is this creature exactly? Does he sport a mustache? Does he homebrew? Does he rap? The one thing we can be absolutely certain of with respect to this person:

He is white.

So Daylight Savings Time has occurred again. Even earlier this year. It seems that they keep pushing it back further and further. I suppose some form of energy savings is the so-called goal. But it’s not spring yet, either according to the solar calendar or even just colloquially. It’s still cold out. Daylight Savings Time seems to take up 9 months of the year now making it the norm, and Standard Time the interlude. That was never supposed to be the case. My feeling is always been that if people want to get up earlier in the summer, then just go ahead and do it. There is no need to mess with everybody’s clock to get up earlier. But the powers that be keep pushing and pushing. Soon enough we’ll barely have a few weeks of standard time between Thanksgiving and New Years. It’s unacceptable. We need an alternative to the desire to keep pushing the envelope of Daylight Savings Time.

The answer, I think, lies in an additional Daylight Savings Time.

That’s right. We have Daylight Savings time from before the Spring Equinox until after Halloween now. But what we really need is a second daylight savings time, one in which we move the clocks forward a second hour, between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Look, two daylight savings times isn’t going to be significantly better than one, but if we don’t give the daylight savings time fanatics something else to mess with, eventually, they’ll keep pushing the boundaries of daylight savings time, until they cross over in the other direction, with daylight savings time ending before it even begins. That concept is entirely intolerable.

So let’s give them another hour in the actual summer. Keep them busy with something else. What do you think?

So due to my previous status as interim pope, a number of readers and friends have contacted me to ask if I intended to become pope again, and if I had any thoughts on the resignation of Pope Benedict. Well, I finally have a few minutes to myself uninterrupted, so I thought I would address these concerns.

First of all, I am now married with children, which I believe precludes me from becoming pope of any sort, interim or otherwise. But even if I were able to become pope, there is no need for an interim pope because the current Pope will apparently reign until the new pope is selected. So the question itself is moot, unless I suppose Benedict dies suddenly.

The larger question is what to make of the resignation of the Pope. Many people have conspiracy theories, mostly revolving around blackmail about what Benedict knew about the child rape scandals that have plagued the church in recent decades. I doubt that these theories have much merit. I suspect that Benedict is old and tired as he says. But his resignation goes deeper than that. His resignation directly involves the Prophecy of St. Malachy.

I have written previously about the prophecy. Let us review:

It’s gotta be tough predicting the future, via psychic means, that is. I mean surely, the further out into the future you try predicting, the more hazy the future must become. No wonder so many prophets use coded language like quatrains to try and describe what they’re seeing. It’s because they’re not really sure what they’re seeing in the first place. It’s no different than trying to gaze over long distances, where two objects standing next to each other may appear to be one.

And so undoubtedly it was with St. Malachy, who famously prophecized about every pope from his own time until the last pope ever. The funny thing is that his list has basically run out. Going sequentially from his time forward, Pope Benedict XVI is the penultimate pope, the so-called Olive Pope.

The previous pope was “De labore Solis”, or “Of the Labour of The Sun”. This correlates to Pope John-Paul II because he was born and died on a solar eclipse. The penultimate pope is described as “De Gloria Olivae” or “glory of the olive”. This has been interpreted in a number of different ways, including that the pope would hail from an olive growing region of the world, or that he would be olive skinned or even black. None of these adequately describe the current pope, though he did place an image of a Moore on his papal crest, a piece of iconography that comes form his home town in Germany.

I went on to posit that Malachy got his final pope confused with that of the President of the United States, Barack Obama, who would, according to the prophecy, be overthrown by “Petrus Romanus”, or General David Petraeus. With Petraeus out of government entirely, it seems unlikely that he could conduct such a coup, though I suppose he could raise an army Aaron Burr style, theoretically. No, what I suspect is that Benedict, knowing the prophecy well, knew damned well that he wasn’t the Glory of the Olive, and decided to step aside to let the correct pope take his place.

Benedict’s only real connection to the prophecy is the Moor he placed on his papal crest, a weak connection at best. And his selection as pope was generally a surprise. In a Catholic Church that is now predominantly southern hemispheric, choosing an elderly German because he gave a nice funeral oratory for the previous pope hardly seems like a wise move. In fact, Benedict himself must have been surprised by it, and felt it impulsive. And after 5 years of it, at his advanced age, he could pretend no further. He was never meant to be pope, and so he called it quits.

In short, Rob Sama was never the interim pope, Benedict was.

And so I suspect that the Church will now obtain its true Glory of the Olive, a dark skinned pope from the Southern Hemisphere who will be able to address the issues most important to the majority of its congregants, whether it be Mormon and Evangelical encroachments into Latin America, or Islamic incursions into Africa. The new pope will be younger, more energetic, and attuned to the issues facing the Church in the Southern Hemisphere.

The bigger question, to my mind, is does Benedict get to participate in the new conclave, or does he sit it out?

And so it was, yea verily, when some 5,000 years ago, or so, as there are some disputed among theologians, the Earth was born. And some seven days after the birth of the Earth, all the plants and animals had been born. Mankind was vegetarian, of course. And by mankind we mean the only two of the human species who cohabited the Earth with every animal that ever existed, dinosaurs included. They lived in Missouri. At some point, the first man and woman decided that they wanted knowledge of how the world worked, which the acquired not by observation of the world around them, nor by hunting and eating meat and growing their brains, but rather by eating from a magic tree. And upon gaining said knowledge, they noticed that their genitals were exposed, and that they enjoyed eating meat. So they set forth, and populated the Earth.

A small tribe of people, who existed at the nexus of three major continents, Asia, Africa and Europe, was made up of some 13 tribes, some of whom departed from their homeland never to return. As it turns out, those very people were the original settlers of the American continents. In their homeland they were known as the Jews. In their new land, they became the Nephites and the Lamanites. One of them was white, and they got eliminated by the dark skinned Jews, who had completely lost their way with the Lord. At some point, the last white man alive in North America (before the arrival of Columbus) wrote down the history of these lost Jews on gold tablets, ad buried them in the hills of upstate New York.

Some 128 years after Columbus became the first non-Jewish white man to set foot in the Americas, religious zealots from England landed in Massachusetts. They nearly died in their first winter, but the Jews, who the pilgrims thought were from India, helped show them how to farm the land, and thus they had a bounteous feast that year. The centerpiece of their meal was a bird that the English speaking peoples had mistakenly named believing it has originated in the Ottoman Empire. This is the bird that we typically eat this time each year.

Some 210 years after the pilgrims arrived in North America, a man named Joseph Smith discovered the tablets buried by the last white North American Jew/Indian, and he launched the only true church according to the wished of Jesus Christ, all others being an abomination. Joseph Smith himself ran for President of the United States, as sort of a theocratic candidate. He lost obviously, but not before he made a prophecy: that someday the US Constitution would be “hanging by a thread” and that it would be a member of his Church who would become president, and set things right.

Almost 200 years later, the US Supreme Court declared that the power to tax includes the power to tax not for the purpose of raising revenue to act upon its enumerated powers (as the constitution says), but rather that it can be used to compel behavior in the citizenry. The case which was being decided was over a bill designed to eventually socialize the medical care industry, such socialism being well outside the framework of the Constitution or the thinking of any of the framers.

And so it came to pass that a Mormon was running for president, just at that moment, when the constitution was hanging by a thread. But alas, something was amiss. This Mormon had himself implemented a miniature version of this form of socialism in the state in which he was governor. And when running in the primaries, he had said that he didn’t want to repeal the offensive law, but just to fix the most offensive portions of it. And after obtaining the nomination, rather than going hard against the man after whom the legislation is colloquially named, he went hard after the most strict constitutionalist in the Republican party, the Ron Paul acolytes, who were playing by the rules to gain positions in the party to prepare for an eventual Rand Paul presidential run. Got that? Going against the man who is eviscerating the constitution, use kid gloves. Going against the Ron Paul folks, go for blood. Perhaps they weren’t white and delightsome enough for him.

Eric Fehrnstrom, the Mormon candidate’s campaign manager or whatever you want to call him, was so devoted to the Mormon candidate that he was fond of saying to the rest of the staff that they should all feel privileged, thankful even, to have had the opportunity to work with such a great man.

Whatever.

So what am I thankful for this year? That we’re rid of that douchebag once and for all.

If you’re wondering what this is about, watch here.

Please follow my new Twitter persona, @MrElectable

Some time ago, I posted a list of top-ten songs I wanted to see covered by Laibach. The time has come to amend said list.

The song I want to add to the list is the theme song to the show Super Why. You can watch below:

As you can see, it makes perfect sense that this song be added to the list. Moreover, It also makes sense that the song wasn’t on the list previously, as it didn’t exist at the time that the original list was published.

So cute…

So my oftentime muse pointed me to the following article today:

An actress has sued Amazon.com for more than $1m (£639,000) after her age was posted on its Internet Movie Database.

The unnamed actress says the website misused her legal date of birth after she signed up to the IMDbPro service in 2008.

She says revealing her age on the site will lose her acting opportunities.[...]

The actress – referred to in court documents by the placeholder name Jane Doe – lives in Texas, is of Asian descent and has an Americanised stage name.

My muse speculated that the actress in question was Lucy Liu. I suppose that’s a reasonable supposition. I asked him if I had ever told him my thoughts on Lucy Liu. He said I had not. So I shared them with him, and now I share them with you.

So, I always imagined that Lucy Liu had a porn double, a frumpy, dumpy British woman who would go by the stage name “Loosey Loo”. In British parlance, the “Loo” is a synonym for a toilet. Loosey Loo would engage in scatological porn, specializing in excreting loose poos onto her beta male British partners. She would have a horrendous cockney accent as well.

So I endeavored to find the right picture of Loosey Loo on the Internet. This was the best I could come up with (pic #2), but my muse found this news article, the subject of which makes for a much better fit.

I hope you all think differently of Lucy Liu from now on. Hopefully, I’ve opened your eyes to some alternate possibilities.

Postscript: Incidentally, when Googling around for “fat drunk British chicks”, I kept bumping into variants of this article, which read, “Are British women fat and unkempt? This American man says so …” I found that to be a strange characterization. It has always been my perception that British women veer towards the extremes of weight, both towards elephantine obesity and towards Biafran skeletal thinness. From Jennifer Patterson and Clarissa Dickson Wright on the one hand, to Princess Diana and Kate Whatshername on the other. To illustrate my understanding of weight distribution amongst British women, I have made the following handy graph:

I hope that clears things up a bit.

UPDATE: I have since been informed that the spelling is “Loo” and not “Lew”. The body of teh entry has been corrected to reflect this understanding.

Wanted to briefly respond to this post by Asteroid. I was originally going to do it in the comments, but now I think it warrants a post of its own. if you haven’t read Asteroid’s post, go do that and then come back.

Welcome back.

Asteroid begins by quoting the Bible and asserting that the “be fruitful and multiply” phrase in the Bible has been taken way too literally by too many religious nuts and that they have as a result overpopulated the earth. But to my knowledge, only the Mormons place a significant amount of emphasis on that phrase. And Asteroid is incorrect to assert that Christian proscriptions against the use of birth control stem from an edict to have children. Rather, Christian sexual mores come from St. Paul’s letters.

In his letters, St. Paul asserts the following “logic”: Because the Holy Spirit resides within the human body, the body is a temple. And just as it would be grossly inappropriate to have sex in a temple, so it is inappropriate to have sex with one’s body. This means that the purest of Christians lead celibate lives, as St. Paul himself was doing. But St. Paul also understood that most humans were incapable of living celibate lives, and that the human race requires sex to continue. And so he instructed followers that they should really only have sex for procreative purposes, and that all other forms/purposes of sex were inappropriate.

It’s worth noting that this is quite different from the “be fruitful” line of reasoning, and from the “every sperm is sacred” line of reasoning made famous by Monty Python, which also derives from the Old Testament. In fact, St. Paul’s letters are, to my knowledge, the only source of sexual mores to be found in the New Testament.

And arguably, this is all beside the point, as Asteroid is more or less making a malthusian argument:

Even if you think we are not choking on our own waste already, how long do you think it will be until we do? How will you know? Think about it this way:

Say you have a jar. In this jar, you will be breeding some sort of organism (yeast or bacteria or something). Let’s say these organisms breed really quickly, with the population doubling every minute. You start breeding at 11am. By noon, the jar is full. Given that the population doubles each minute, what time is it when the jar is half-full?

People who don’t understand the problem (or exponential growth) will naïvely say 11:30. This is wrong, of course. What is not as obvious is that the mathematically correct answer (11:59, one minute before noon) is also wrong. It’s wrong because the population would never actually fill the jar at all. In the real world, the waste products produced by the existing organisms would kill the whole population long before the jar got anywhere near to full.

Now, imagine you are one of the organisms in this jar. What time would it be when you started saying to yourself “man, it is getting really crowded and smelly in here?” And once you notice, is there anything you can do about it? Or is it already too late?

I have two things to say about this, as to why Asteroid’s fears are unfounded. And then I want to talk about a population related fear that Asteroid has missed, but which is much more worrisome.

First I want to say that we will never reach the point where we poison ourselves in the jar because we humans have a natural population control mechanism built into ourselves. That is to say, the more wealthier we become, the fewer children we tend to have. In many parts of the world, most notably the white first world, birth rates are below that of replacement requirements. Why would that be? Well why wouldn’t that be? We have such great access to birth control and we basically have the ability to live vastly better than the royalty of years past. Even if we work too hard, we are having way too much fun to want to have too many children. So we don’t. So if Asteroid wants to decrease the rate at which we replace ourselves, his best bet is to spread Western capitalism and lifestyles far and wide.

Second even if we don’t believe that we will limit our own population by virtue of being rich, I believe that we will find other places to live by way of human ingenuity. Human ingenuity always overcomes malthusian math, and always in the nick of time. That’s why Adam Smith’s invisible hand and the pricing mechanism work so damned well. If life on Earth becomes expensive and miserable due to overpopulation in a world reminiscent of Soylent Green, then we will find other places in which to live. Terra-form Mars. Build colonies on the moon and under the sea. Melt the polar ice caps and live in antarctica. Who knows what we’ll think up. But we’ll do something. Humans are not bacteria sitting in a closed glass jar, and we will not be so limited in our options.

Finally I am concerned about our world population, but not about how many people exist per se, but how many men exist in relation to how many women:

In nature, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. This ratio is biologically ironclad. Between 104 and 106 is the normal range, and that’s as far as the natural window goes. Any other number is the result of unnatural events.

Yet today in India there are 112 boys born for every 100 girls. In China, the number is 121—though plenty of Chinese towns are over the 150 mark. China’s and India’s populations are mammoth enough that their outlying sex ratios have skewed the global average to a biologically impossible 107. But the imbalance is not only in Asia. Azerbaijan stands at 115, Georgia at 118 and Armenia at 120.

There are only three ways for these countries to deal with their sex imbalance problems, which stem from aborting girls for irrational cultural reasons:

1. Killing off excess males: This likely would involve war between China and India, both of whom have this same problem. This is convenient for these countries insofar as they share a border.
2. Opening free state run brothels: Ancient Rome did this albeit for entirely different reasons. But free public brothels is not without precedent. Such brothels will satisfy unmarried males, at least to some degree, and put off the violence and domestic insurrection that will ensue without access to women.
3. Exporting the problem: Send your young males overseas to other countries to live. Young men may be motivated to get advanced degrees and the like for the privilege of living in a country where it’s possible to find female companionship.

I think that option 3 is a very real possibility, and not a pretty one for us here in the west. I think we should impose new immigration laws, forbidding unmarried men from immigrating here without bringing a wife, unless they come from a country with a balanced male/female ratio. But young men from China and India should have wives they bring with them. You may argue that this policy discriminates against gays, but not really. They need only find a lesbian to immigrate here with. But no matter. The point is to not let other countries’ insane population problems be exported to our country. Because there is zero likelihood that we will open state run brothels to deal with the problem, and I doubt that we could or would press recent immigrants into service for a war that we enter into for the express purpose of thinning our artificially high male population. So barring either of those two options means we would see domestic violence the likes of which would make England seem tame by comparison.

Generally immigrants are a blessing. But they could become a curse.