To protest a bill that would require women to undergo an ultrasound before having an abortion, Virginia State Sen. Janet Howell (D-Fairfax) on Monday attached an amendment that would require men to have a rectal exam and a cardiac stress test before obtaining a prescription for erectile dysfunction medication.

Shouldn’t the rectal exam be directed solely toward the partners of gay men, because they are the only ones who could be injured there with a misdirected and extended erection? In this age of debt it is important to cut cost.

Men, argues McGill University professor Paul Nathanson and his colleague Katherine Young, suffer from the myth that they are the gender with the power and therefore cannot be damaged by criticism and ridicule. The physical, political and economic power that a small percentage of men do wield renders women, they believe, “either unwilling or unable to see men as fully human beings, people who can indeed be hurt, both individually and collectively.”

Nathanson and Young have written five books chronicling the rise of misandry, the hatred of men, which they view as a culture war being fought because of the feminist activism that led to the changed role of men.

“The primary race leaves me despairing. While Romney has the proven record to be an effective administrator, a quality lacking utterly in the White House now, his campaign has been inept and tone-deaf. I had hoped he would refine his economic message after New Hampshire by taking up Santorum’s down-to-earth pitch to Reagan Democrats but he has come across as only more vague.

“I have followed Newt Gingrich since I was in university. He has an impressive intellect and is a lethal opponent in any debate. He is also a wilfully destructive narcissist, as demonstrated over several decades of professional and personal misadventure. The capacity of politicos and primary voters to ignore that is disturbing. As I mused to a friend, do we really want to replace Obama with a latter-day Ludwig II?

“Gingrich is punching the right red-meat voter buttons: indignation at an ineffective Obama and a callous media elite, contempt for Washington, and praise for self-reliance and common sense. Indeed, any decent GOP candidate should be embracing these. Sadly, it is being done by a preening ego with a volume of baggage befitting a traveling Saudi prince.

“I suspect that Romney is going to lose Florida and then we head into the territory of a brokered convention. Let’s just pray for a result such that we can say of the White House, like Tangina the psychic from “Poltergeist”, “This house is clean.”"

For myself, I look forward to the possibility that Romney will find some passion, but I doubt it. I have met several old-stock Mormons, and to the extent one can generalize about the personality type summoned forth by a religion, Romney’s WASPy blandness seems altogether typical. Good citizens, but bland by choice.

In his challenge, issued in a Time Magazine interview last week, Buffett promises to match voluntary contributions aimed at reducing the deficit by “all Republican members of Congress, and I’ll even go three for one with (Senate Minority Leader Mitch) McConnell.”

Unbeknownst to him Rep. Scott Rigell, a Republican representing Virginia, “makes it a practice to donate 15 percent of his Congressional salary ‘to pay down the debt.’ That amounted to $23,103.33 in 2011 and about $26,100 in 2012.” So Warren Buffett, who made $62,855,038 in 2010 the last year for which the data is available,  will be writing a check made out to the United States Treasury for 0.00078% of his 2010 income.

What happened to the “match voluntary contributions”? Oh don’t be silly, he is matching the dollar amount, not the percentage amount. Just remember the drill, as a Democrat when proposing higher taxes you compare the percent amount between different tax brackets but when you have to pay up you compare the dollar amount.

No word  on when Buffett will send a cheque for the remaining $9,379,052.37, so that he can match Rep. Rigell’s contribution. No word either if Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathway, which owes just over $1 billion in taxes going back to 2002, has decided to help out in reducing the deficit by paying up.

What I want is an end to the hysteria, Stalinism, group rights, suppression of free speech, oppression of the ordinary person, oppression of the gun-owner, oppression of the store-owner, oppression of the ordinary citizen of all races and colours against the depredations of the indigent, the mad, the over-privileged mascot groups of the Left, the police – yes, the police – the do-gooders, the thugs, the professional protest groups, and the damage done by the chattering classes who undermine society like termites.

This is why I read with some sympathy an article by Barry Rubin in Pajamas Media about the distinction between liberals, as he describes them, and the left.

“You shouldn’t have to be a conservative to be horrified by the contemporary situation. But while conservatives and Republican are going to lead the opposition to the status quo, they should seek to build a broad front rather than wage a campaign against historical liberals.”

Historical liberals include people like Teddy Roosevelt, in that definition.  When the situation required intervention, Teddy Roosevelt intervened.  Think of food and drug safety as one of his major contributions to the public weal.

I once read a book Radical Son, by the former marxist, David Horowitz, who was editor of Ramparts magazine in the 1960s and early 1970s. I recommend it as one of the great memoirs of former totalitarians, up there with Arthur Koestler, Whitaker Chambers and the other departing communists of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Horowitz’ great observation is that, once he left the Left, he entered the land of freedom. There is just the Left: tight, hysterical, heresy-sniffing, unfree, and then there is all other political opinion, left, right and centre. Only once in the free air, outside the prison-camp of Leftism, did he find that people called “conservative” actually had vigorous disagreements with one another. And felt perfectly free to have them. Such is the nature of life in the free air. Let us keep it that way.

It is for this reason I hate, fear and despise what the Liberals tried to do to this country, that they tried to turn it into a leftist prison camp of controlled opinion, with the minds carefully masked by political correctness, which is just Leftism without the bother of Marxist central planning. So am I a conservative? or just a liberal?  I don’t know. But I am sure enjoying Harper putting a stake through their large-L Liberal hearts. Just to make sure.

Just days before Christmas, the Obama administration gave Bank of
America a big lump of coal, levying a hefty $335 million dollar fine
on the company for discriminating against minorities in its lending
practices.

Supposedly Countrywide, a mortgage company bought by Bank of America in
2008, had not given out enough low interest rate loans to minorities
from 2004 to 2008.

For these reasons we are considered conservative when what we really oppose is authoritarian leftism, based on group rights, a movement which has appropriated the word “liberal” in the United States and Canada, and is nothing of the sort.

For others of a particular religious or political clarity, such as David Warren, Barrelstrengthians would be found wanting in doctrinal rigor, and quite likely fatally infected with Enlightenment ideas, such as rationalism, progressivism, or deism. (I don’t think so but we stand on guard)

To our brethren of schools even more extreme conservative than us, we say: peace. We have no quarrel with you, though you, by rights, may find us wanting in faith, clarity, or political rigor. There remains so much aggressive anti-Christian, anti-male, anti-white political thought and agitation out there that I have no time for intra-mural vilification. Even within the Blogging Tories list, it is very difficult to have a frank argument about race, say, when one side of that debate (namely that it is real, politically and statistically significant, and that genetics matters) is declared by the ideological gatekeeper as cause for expulsion.

So if you would like to venture into the deeper realms of rejection of modernity, there are a few blogs by men whose rejection starts at the Reformation, or the Glorious Revolution of 1688, or the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and they are not kidding.

• Throne and Altar
• Stuff Black People Don’t Like
• View from the Right
• Steve Sailer 

Here are some examples of blogs taken to be conservative which are, in my view, simply dealing with matters from a liberal (meaning concerned with individual rights) commonsensical position. I am not intending to insult them for this reason. I agree with that perspective in many respects, and am not certain where I would disagree with it, or their authors.

• Steynonline
• Jihad Watch
• Vlad Tepes

In other words, you do not have to be a throne and altar conservative to oppose islamization or unsustainable public finances. You can simply say, as we do, that a great deal of what needs doing in modern North American society is to stop trying to engineer equality of outcomes, and to support reasonable limits on the power of the state to transform us in the name of silly nineteenth century ideas.

I would be interested in comments on the validity of this division among conservative blogs and in additions to the list of really out-there (but sane) conservative blogs. Which are your guilty pleasures?

But this week we read headlines which may be of fundamental importance. The second experiment has demonstrated that neutrinos have moved faster than light. If this proves to be true and not merely the artefact of the experiment or observational bias, then the foundations of physics have just taken a five megaton hit.

So what is staying the same this month?

Eurozone crisis - same, but worsening.

Islamic inability to behave democratically? – same, but the evidence keeps coming in, all of which is ignored in the MSM picture of the world.

[Man-caused] global warming hysteria – the nails keep being driven in to that coffin, but the zombie keeps escaping.

My apologies to readers – job pressures have kept me from blogging lately. Happy is the blogger with a day job.

I was 13 years old, and we were about to leave Fairfax, Va., and drive to Carrollton, Ga., for the summer. My parents told my sister and me that they were getting a divorce as our family of four sat around the kitchen table of our ranch home.Soon afterward, my mom, sister and I got into our light-blue Chevrolet Impala and drove back to Carrollton.

Later that summer, Mom went to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta for surgery to remove a tumor. While she was there, Dad took my sister and me to see her.

It is this visit that has turned into the infamous hospital visit about which many untruths have been told. I won’t repeat them. You can look them up online if you are interested in untruths. But here’s what happened:

My mother and father were already in the process of getting a divorce, which she requested.

Dad took my sister and me to the hospital to see our mother.

She had undergone surgery the day before to remove a tumor.

The tumor was benign.

As with many divorces, it was hard and painful for all involved, but life continued.

As have many families, we have healed; we have moved on.

“There’s a reason Winston Churchill was a better wartime leader than Neville Chamberlain. There’s a reason why the Tea Party got itself elected in under two years, while Occupy Wall Street is kinda all over the place. There’s a reason why we have scores of environmental groups that often can’t see eye to eye. There’s a reason, as George Lakoff and others have noted, why Democrats (and scientists!) focus too much on policy facts and details rather than winning over people’s hearts (and winning elections).

“But when it comes to determining what’s true about complex, technical subjects—issues full of ambiguity and uncertainty, where you can’t just jump to conclusions and have to stay open-minded and tentative in your beliefs—I’ll take the scientific-liberal approach any day. And after reading the book, I think so will you.”

The “scientific-liberal” approach? Methinks something huge is being assumed here, that the scientific method is fully consistent with liberal political values, in the American sense of the word “liberal”.

As Geoffrey Miller wrote in his book Spent (worth a read), people have been found to differ along six different axes. These results are robust, and represent what psychological testing has been able to show in its century-long development.

One of the axes of difference is openness. It is generally true that people who identify with conservative positions will be less open to novelty than people who identify with left-wing positions. Likewise, conservatives will generally be found to be more sociable, or agreeable, than liberals (in the American sense of that term). Thus conservative people generally place a higher value of manners, and less on autheticity, than the expressive individualist.

The full range of differences is given by the mnemonic gocase:

• g for general intelligence
• o for openness
• c for conscientiousness
• a for agreeability
• s for stability
• e for extraversion

Each of this characteristics is fully independent of the other. A person can be thoroughly open, say, and highly disagreeable; highly conscientious, but psychologically unstable. For example, I am rather more open than closed to new ideas and hence should be a liberal, but score lower on the agreeability scale, so I don’t particularly want to keep quiet at the dinner party regarding say, the usefulness of Canada’s gun registration. So I can come across as an argumentative conservative while passing the joint, so to speak.

And you have your own balance of quirks that makes you who you are. It may well be that people who are conservative react more emotionally than people who call themselves liberals, and “liberals” (a most misleading term) may have greater capacity for dealing with ambiguous information. This is the thrust of one of Mooney’s guest columnists, Andrea Kuszewski.

“So—for liberals to make a case for an idea or cause, they come armed with data, research studies, and experts. They are convinced of an idea if all the data checks out–basically they assign meaning and value to ideas that fit within the scientific method, because that’s their primary thinking style. Emotion doesn’t play as big of a role in validation. Not to say that liberals are unfeeling, but just more likely to set emotion aside when judging an idea initially, and factor it in later. Checks out scientifically = valuable. Liberals can get just as emotionally attached to an idea, but it’s usually not the primary trigger for acceptance of an idea.”

Here is where the conflation of openness with scientific method comes in.

The conservative is the one being accused of emotional attachment to wrong ideas, in the case of resistance to man-caused global warming.

Yet the case for or against man’s role in global warming is patently not about facts at all. It is a religious narrative. Conservatives can smell religion at a hundred yards. Liberals, to make as silly a case as Mooney’s, are less aware that they are gripped by a gnostic religious narrative.

Man is bad. He is destroying the planet. Something should be done. And we have the knowledge, intelligence and commitment to save the planet from those nasty people who are enjoying themselves as Gaia expires.

One of the most impressive features of any discussion with a warmist is their passionate belief that those who oppose them must be evil. They have perfect knowledge – it is undisputable. Hence those who oppose them must be either ignorant, and needing education, or knowledgable, and therefore consciously bad.

So don’t talk to me of liberals’ greater capacity for handling ambiguity and lessened emotional reaction to policy. If that is so, I have not met one in a long life in politics. They are passionately anti-factual on any issue of concern to them, because their (largely unconscious) religious narrative determines what is factual.

“The news about social policy, it’s worth noting, hasn’t improved. A recent report by Isabel Sawhill and Jon Baron for the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy—an organization very much in the Glazer tradition—observed that yet another negative evaluation of Head Start (it has “almost no effect on children’s cognitive, social-emotional, or health outcomes at the end of 1st grade”) was “the 10th instance since 1990 in which an entire federal social program has been evaluated using the scientific ‘gold standard’ method of randomly assigning individuals to a program or control group. Nine of those evaluations found weak or no positive effects.”

Copies of The Bell Curve are available from your bookseller and if you have not read it, you are woefully uninformed of the consequences of intelligence differences, which are not, repeat not, matters of social arrangements. Any reader of this blog can afford the $5.20 purchase price of a used copy. Still in print at amazon.com.

Our research shows clearly that the movement doesn’t represent unemployed America and is not ideologically diverse. Rather, it comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence. Half (52%) have participated in a political movement before, virtually all (98%) say they would support civil disobedience to achieve their goals, and nearly one-third (31%) would support violence to advance their agenda….

The author is responding to critics of the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of OWS, and he finds that the Journal’s reporting does jibe with the ground situation.

Nicholas Stix, Uncensored

Stuff Black People Don’t Like

But that will not change my attitude towards all the weedy and possibly well-intentioned protestors one iota.

Remember the Arab Spring? In Egypt it has become an occasion to murder Christians. In Libya, an inter-tribal fight. All the hype – and nothing. Same goes for Syria. As the Syrian marchers say in their signs: “Alawites to the grave, Christians to Beirut.” The Arab Spring is just another pretext for Muslims to massacre, humiliate, and deport their non-Islamic or heteodox minorities.

What really forms my views about the Occupy movement was the death of Princess Di. It is worth a story. We were gathered at a Canadian lakeside with a bunch of Liberals and like-minded bien-pensants for a friendly weekend of discussion of worthy issues. The day was progressing in its usual bland fashion when a woman Toronto journalist began a rant the likes of which I had never heard before or since. “Men don’t get it” she said. Here we were discussing reform of the politics of Canada, when the most important issue in recent human history was occurring – the outpouring of grief for Princess Diana – and all we were doing was showing our insensitivity. Like most canadian men, the gang at the lakeside did not think much of Proncess Di’s death, and we thought even less of the hysterical and largely bogus outpouring of emotion on her by the now deranged British. Regardless of political affiliation, the people at the conference were psychologically normal. They knew a bogus event when they saw one.

Clearly our sang-froid was not merely insensitive, it was offensive. The reporter went on at length with mounting outrage until, this being a liberal gathering, all the usual apologes were offered for our masculine insensitivity.

Yet we were right and she was wrong, and her outrage was a cover for the shallowness of her judgment. Ten years after, it has become clear that Princess Di was a trivial and passing phenomenon.

The economic crisis we are in is neither trivial nor will it be quickly passing. We have been accumulating problems since deficit budgeting became normal. Greece is a harbinger of larger policy failure. But this climb-aboard unfocused Occupy movement is the froth on the coffee. The crisis is real, the protesters are the standard assortment of leftist wankers.