The Smarmy Carny

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On May 31, the paperback version of Bill Clinton's My Lies was released. Instead of wasting your money on this fodder, why not get a hardcover book released on the same day. Instead of My Life, check out Their Lives: The Women Targeted by the Clinton Machine.

The blurb for this book mentions following "the lives of eight women who crossed romantic paths with Bill Clinton" (including Hillary, I presume). So, that means that Slick Willy had some seven women, and those are just the publicly acknowledged ones.

Seven women? I'm not sure about you, but I was raised to think that two women were sort of too many for a married man. After Wilt Chamberlain heard this, he decided to run for Presidential office in 2008! There must be at least one woman we don't know about because there are only seven women and there were eight years. And don't try to tell me that one year was for Hillary. We don't buy into that here!

Candice E. Jackson's Their Lives chronicles how the Bill and Hillary Clinton's inner circle bribed, intimidated, and harassed seven women who had once been the objects of Bill's lustful desires. The author — a feminist libertarian — does not condemn Bill's philandering ways, but rather in great detail exposes how the Clintons' liberal politics allowed them to justify their attacks against these individuals.

Kathleen Willey calls Their Lives "the most accurate portrayal of…the true nightmare Bill and Hillary put me through."

What has really gotten my goat about all this is that, if you remember the campaigns during Bill's first run, a huge issue during debates was "family values." I'm quite interested in reading about Bill's family values. Buy it today!

Buy Freakonomics at Amazon

The subject of economics is boring as far as I'm concerned . . . unless, of course, the subject is being discussed by Steven D. Levitt.

The first few chapters deal with questions like "What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?" "How is the Ku Klux Klan like a group of real-estate agents?" and "Why do drug dealers still live with their moms?" Levitt's answers will surprise you.

Whereas the vast majority of economists look for the simple, obvious explanation or solution, Levitt has the ability to think so far out of the box that he's thinking in a separate, correct box. He also seems to have a knack for pulling out the truly interesting examples that tend to spark one's interest.

Levitt brings some refreshing creativity to an age where scientists are too focused on empirical results.

All that aside, I am attracted to anything that includes "Freak" in the title. So, when I heard about a book titled Freakonomics , I simply had to give it a chance.

Stay tuned, as I will be posting a follow-up to this regarding Freakonomics in a few days.

Example of a Retard

A couple weeks ago, I wrote an article about Timothy Shortell. For those who don't know, he gained recent popularity after he became the chairman-elect of Brooklyn College's sociology department. Well, perhaps it was the fact that he also said that Christians will "just as soon kill you." When I wrote the article, I noted that Brooklyn College was tiptoeing around the issue.

Surprisingly, Shortell was pressured to drop his bid for the chair. According to the New York Sun, he "sent a bitter e-mail on Monday to several departmental heads saying he had decided to step down as chairman-elect and claiming he was a victim of a political attack."

The New York Sun article continued:

"If he's dropping his bid, it would be the first recent wise move on his part," a member of CUNY's board of trustees, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, said. "While he's entitled to his voice, the school is certainly better off served by a different chair."

Brooklyn College deserves some positive recognition for this. Despite my assumptions, the administration surprisingly took action and did what should have been done.

If you're interested in reading the piece that some of his most offending quotes came from, check it out. It is titled "Religion & Morality: A Contradiction Explained."

. . . and Padraig, don't bother posting any comments here. Your intentionally inflammatory comments and self-image of intellectual superiority aren't required here.

Which is it?

Moshe Koppel of Bar-Ilan University in Isreal has developed a program that can tell the gender of the author by the structure and words used in the text. It is about 80% accurate.

You may yawn at this. The interesting thing is what it tells us about the way we interpret and represent the world. You might still yawn at this, unless you're a sociologist.

What may interest you, however, is that someone has written a fun little script that takes the basics of the basics from Koppel's theories and program and allows you to test some of your writing samples. Of course, keep in mind that, despite the fact that Koppel's program is 80% accurate, this simplified program probably does not run at such efficiency.

I guess we can now replace the taunt "He throws like a girl" with "He writes like a girl."

Example of a Retard

This month, Brooklyn College's sociology department elected Timothy Shortell as its chairman.

Normally, this would be a case of "So What?" This time around, however, the chairman has caused an uproar.

As you read these Shortell quotes, keep in mind that, as chairman, he carries some weight when it comes to each professor's tenure at the college. I won't really comment much about this. I'll just let Shortell speak for himself:

On a personal level, religiosity is merely annoying — like bad taste. This immaturity represents a significant social problem, however, because religious adherents fail to recognize their limitations. So, in the name of their faith, these moral retards are running around pointing fingers and doing real harm to others. One only has to read the newspaper to see the results of their handiwork. They discriminate, exclude and belittle. They make a virtue of closed-mindedness and virulent ignorance. They are an ugly, violent lot.

In the heart of every Christian, though, is a tiny voice preaching self-righteousness, paranoia and hatred. Christians claim that theirs is a faith based on love, but they'll just as soon kill you.

Modern religion is a fundamental belief in magic.

I have been attacked recently in the New York newspapers. We laugh at our critics. We will behold with joy their silly tantrums.

This sort of fodder is expected when dealing with anonymous jerks on the internet, but not generally when dealing with people who are not anonymous and who hold a prestigious position at an educational institution. Furthermore, his pseudo-taunts in the last of the quotes sounds malformed and childish, much like the taunts we hear coming from the extremists in the Middle East. I was surprised that he didn't end that one with "the streets will run with blood." That would lower him to the literary genius of Assam the American.

If you're interested in reading the piece that some of those quotes came from, check it out. It is titled "Religion & Morality: A Contradiction Explained."

As usual, we're seeing typical unbalanced treatment of Shortell's comments. Not surprisingly, Brooklyn College seems to be tiptoeing around this one. I like this quote from The New York Sun:

If a professor had spoken of, say, gay persons or Jews as moral retards, it's a safe bet that things would not be dealt with quite so delicately as they seem to be on Brooklyn College's campus at the moment.

Remember, some children just demand more attention than all the others.