The true size of Africa

Reginald Bassey posts an enlightening map and chart. (Click to biggify.)

The most common system for drawing maps is the Mercatur projection which makes the land masses of the northern hemisphere look larger than they really are. Africa is actually larger than the USA, China, India, Japan and the whole of Europe combined.

The total land area of the world is 148,940,000 sq k (57,510,000 sq mi.)

Africa is 11,668,598 square miles or more than one-fifth of the earth's landmass.

Don't you hate it when Walmart starts selling Christmas stuff before Halloween? I don't

We just watched our first Christmas movie tonight and it made me feel all warm and cozy. That's why I like to start my Yuletide season as soon as the nights get cold.

I was just thinking how politics (and reality in general) is pretty cold, merciless and unfair and how nice it is to feel all warm and cozy, full of goodwill to all men. That's why I love Christmas.

But there's a time and place for everything. That's why we don't celebrate Christmas all year round. Problem is that liberals want Christmas all year round while conservatives know that the bills for all that abundance must be paid sooner or later and, while liberals think that money grows on Christmas trees (well, any tree for that matter), conservatives know that it doesn't.

Politics is about money and conservatives prefer to pay for the party beforehand while liberals party and run up debt like there's no tomorrow.

And politics (and economics) are divisive. So it's nice to have a nice warm and cozy Christmas as a break from the harsh reality. As it's written in Ecclesiastes:

To everything there is a season, and
a time to every purpose under heaven:

A time to be born, and
a time to die;
a time to plant, and
a time to pluck up
that which is planted;

A time to kill, and
a time to heal;
a time to break down, and
a time to build up;

A time to weep, and
a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and
a time to dance;

A time to cast away stones, and
a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and
a time to refrain from embracing;

A time to get, and
a time to lose;
a time to keep, and
a time to cast away;

A time to rend, and
a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and
a time to speak;

A time to love, and
a time to hate;
a time of war; and
a time of peace.

If you get more from the government than you pay in taxes, you can't vote

Over at The Corner there's been some discussion about not allowing government employees to vote. Of course it's all been on the level of "If I were Queen for a day..." or "In a perfect world..."

But, if you're interested in contributing to the discussion about what our future will be like - increasing enslavement to Big Brother government or increasing individual freedom and sovereignty - then it's a worthwhile thought exercise.

The way I see it is simple. If you contribute more taxes towards government services than you receive from government, then you can vote. That means that not only can recipients of government handouts NOT vote but neither can government employees. And that includes Congress, POTUS and SCOTUS.

The problem of parasites voting themselves more and more of other peoples' money is thereby solved.

The "Great American Novel" vs a good movie

It was always my dream to write a long complex novel full of wonderful characters, lots of drama and scintillating conversation but...the fact is that it seems not only contrived but unnecessary. Real people are so much more interesting than the fake people in a novel. And fact, as the truism says, is stranger than fiction.

Don't get me wrong. I love a good story. It's just that I'd sooner watch a movie than read a novel. (And I prefer movies based on true stories.) I know that the same amount of writing (mental effort and imagination) goes into a good screenplay as a novel but I just like my stories to be less than two hours long and - and this is the clincher for me - I don't like to spend too much mental energy on fictional characters. A movie puts fictional characters in perspective. A novel blows them out of proportion.

Just 2% of gay people have 23% of the total reported gay sex

From one of the guys who runs the dating site OKCupid:

We run a massive dating site and therefore have unparalleled insight into sex and relationships. Here's what we've found, in numbers and charts.
...
First of all, gay people are not sexually interested in straights.
...
Gay people aren't promiscuous. Another common myth about gay people is that they sleep around, but the statistical reality is that gay people as a group aren't any more slutty than straights.

Median Reported Sex Partners

* straight men: 6
* gay men: 6
* straight women: 6
* gay women: 6

* 45% of gay people have had 5 or fewer partners (vs. 44% for straights)
* 98% of gay people have had 20 or fewer partners (vs. 99% for straights)

It turns out that a tiny fraction of gays have single-handedly two-handedly created the public image of gay sexual recklessness—in fact we found that just 2% of gay people have had 23% of the total reported gay sex, which is pretty crazy.
...
Straight people have gay sex, too.

Another inquiry that had unexpected results: we asked 252,900 straight people have you ever had a sexual encounter with someone of the same sex?

Almost a quarter answered 'yes'.

As for straight men, a surprisingly high 13% have had a same-sex experience, and another 5% haven't yet but would like to.

Using the incredible power of computers, we were able to break down this question geographically. Here are straight people who either have had or would like to have a same-sex experience in the continental U.S. and lower Canada. You can see some sharp geographic divides.

Awesomely, the mountain West lives up to its Brokeback reputation, and Canada is orange nearly coast-to-coast. Even in the yellow and blue areas, you can see pockets of gay curiosity in interesting places: Austin, Madison, Asheville. Anywhere soy milk is served, basically.

[Red is "more gay curious" and blue is "less gay curious" and yellow is in-between. What's up with Oregon? Maybe it's because our women are so butch and they can't tell the difference between their wives and their local lumberjacks.]

Guns and roses vegetables?

At the Phuket Vegetarian Festival:

A devotee of the Chinese shrine of Samkong, pierces his cheeks with toy guns during a procession of the Vegetarian Festival on October 11, 2010 in Phuket, Thailand. Ritual Vegetarianism in Phuket Island traces it roots back to the early 1800s. The festival begins on the first evening of the ninth lunar month and lasts for nine days. Participants in the festival perform acts of body piercing as a means of shifting evil spirits from individuals onto themselves and bring the community good luck.

Are "Small-Government Americans" incoherent?

James Poulos:

Americans want to break our national addiction to entitlement spending. But they know that'll restore some burdens. And they're already feeling pretty burdened. It's not incoherence at work. It's a recognition that things have gotten so bad that it's going to hurt to steer our federal governance back toward our founding principles. Who wants to volunteer to feel that pain?

It's not easy to turn back the clock 100 years to pre-Woodrow Wilson days.

I hate Woodrow Wilson

John Moser:

Today’s New York Times features a roundtable called “Hating Woodrow Wilson,” in which a number of scholars address the fascination certain conservatives such as Glenn Beck have with America’s twenty-eighth president.

Once we see that Wilson was the first president openly to repudiate the principles of the Founders, and sought to replace the notion of limited government with an expansive administrative state, it becomes far easier to understand why conservatives dislike him.
...
Once we see that Wilson was the first president openly to repudiate the principles of the Founders, and sought to replace the notion of limited government with an expansive administrative state, it becomes far easier to understand why conservatives dislike him.

Recipe: Pumpkin Cheesecake with Pecan Penis Topping

Of course it's really "Pumpkin Cheesecake with Pecan Praline Topping" but the photo was rather suggestive. Actually it sounds delicious.

Naked redneck chick post: chickens used to eat our ancestors

Oops! Our ancestors used to eat chicken? Nope I was right the first time:

The discovery of multiple de-fleshed, chomped and gnawed bones from the extinct primates, which lived 16 to 20 million years ago on Rusinga Island, Kenya, was announced today at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's 70th Anniversary Meeting in Pittsburgh.

At least one of the devoured primates, an early ape called Proconsul, is thought to have been an ancestor to both modern humans and chimpanzees. It, and other primates on the island, were also apparently good eats for numerous predators.

Geert Wilders' "Islamophobia"

This is from an article titled Mainstreaming Hate that would like to paint Wilders as a hater but fails.

Geert Wilders is slowly but surely making Islamophobia an accepted element of political rhetoric in the Netherlands -- and he's got his eyes on the United States, next:

Wilders's success rests almost entirely on such strident rhetoric. To give an idea of the tone of his discourse in the Netherlands, he has called for a "head rag tax" on women wearing headscarves. He favors banning the Quran, wants to close Muslim schools but not equivalent Christian or Jewish ones, wants to force immigrants to sign "assimilation contracts," and wants to include the "Judeo-Christian character" of the state in the constitution.

But some Dutch analysts warn that it is a mistake to "blacken" Wilders's name too much or lump him with fascism or Nazism. "For one, he's not anti-Semitic," says Alfred Pijpers of the Clingendael Institute of International Relations in The Hague. Israeli officials have indeed privately commended him as "a friend of Israel." Pijpers says that Wilders has more in common with the Tea Party activists in the United States than with any old-style European right-wing party, because he can't really be classified as either right-wing or left-wing. His party has also embraced a left-wing populist defense of the Netherlands' besieged welfare system, and he scores points with his tough stance against crime, which he often links to immigrants.

His outspokenness has made him a hated figure for some Muslims, and he lives under constant police protection. Recently, an Australian imam called for his beheading, the last in a long line of threats. Wilders himself argued in July on the website muslimsdebate.com that he does not hate Muslims -- he just opposes Islam and wants Muslims to liberate themselves from its shackles.

Science And Poetry

Stuart Kauffman:

In my years at the University of Calgary, I came to know Canadian poet Christian Bok, who, to the amazement of all, published a book of poetry that became a best seller both in Canada and the UK. Prior to that, Christian did his Ph.D work on the long relation between science since Newton and poetry. His is a subtle understanding, mine a more roughshod version of what I learned from him.

Soon after Newton, with the Anglo-Continental West stunned at the success of Newtonian mechanics and celestial mechanics, Alexander Pope would write: “God said let there be Newton and All was Light.” His generation of poets celebrated Newton and the new physics and felt that beauty lay in rendering to metaphor what was true in the scientific world view that was rapidly emerging.

But Newton’s physics is a physics of Actual happenings.
...
This determinism led 18th century scholars and many lay people to abandon the theistic God that acts in the universe, in favor of a deistic God who created the universe to run with Newton’s laws, wound up the clock of the universe, and let it go. The deistic God had no further role in the deterministic unfolding of the universe.

In response, Bok told me, the English Romantics arose in rebellion. Keats wrote of science with its “rule and line,” denuding us of our humanity and, spirituality in face of a deistic God, and wrote with Shelly, Coleridge, and others who were dismayed at science and determined to do battle to regain ground for our deepest humanity.
...
Then in the 1950s, C.P. Snow wrote his famous essay, The Two Cultures, decrying the fact that the then dominant literati and the lesser esteemed scientists lived in two worlds that could not talk to one another.
...
On the dominant view of the mind, the mind is a Turing machine. A Turing machine is utterly definite. Given a position of the reading head, the symbols on the tape, the rules in the machine for moving or not moving on the tape, erasing symbols on the tape depending upon the definite discrete state of the head, and moving to a new state among the discrete states of the head, the Turing machine is an abstraction of Descartes’ animal body as a machine, clockwork in the visions of his day. Our minds are algorithmic. Artificial Intelligence is the offspring of this view. On it, science itself is an algorithmic activity needing no metaphor, the signal case of the fully definite, the mind is nude of rich non-computable allusions, notwithstanding the very interesting connectionist strand in AI.

But is the mind algorithmic? I think not, and think we need poetry to unite the Two Cultures and rediscover our deeper humanity.

I advance two reasons among many.

Click to read the rest.

Jack Kerouac: "Life is too sweet to waste it on self propaganda"

Ouch! I guess this applies to mini-bloggers in spades:

Among the items sold at the literary auction at Bonhams and Butterfields on Monday was a 1961 letter from Jack Kerouac to two friends, Jacques Beckwith and Lois Sorrells. Kerouac had been typing on the page, got a letter from Sorrells then switched gears, abandoning his thought (mostly) to write a letter to them. This is what he typed at the top of the page, before the letter:

I can just see the shabby literary man carrying a "bulging briefcase" rushing from one campus to another, one lecture club to another, nodding confirmation with his hosts that he is right, hurrying to the next town ... a whole gray career of proving himself to others, to as many as can hear him, that he was right ... till finally people say: "Here comes the self-prover again, O dear ... bring out the papers and the canapes." This my friend is what I will become if I accept all lecture offers, TV appearances, radio interviews and start arranging with reviewers and critics who want information and my books through me, a great long lifetime in a briefcase proving my work and my work itself stopped dead at the level where I took to proving myself. So, I say, life is too sweet to waste on self propaganda, I quit self promotion, I enter my page.

This was four years after the publication of Kerouac's greatest work, "On the Road." None of his other books would have the reach or impact of that book -- few do -- but he'd been publishing regularly in the years after. There was a 1958 follow-up, "The Dharma Bums," and "Lonesome Traveler" in 1960.

If you know Kerouac's biography, you know that in 1969 he died of internal bleeding associated with cirrhosis, brought on by years of excessive drinking. It is easy to look back at this refusenik Kerouac, the one crying against self-promotion, as the one who would hear the call of self-destruction, who was resigned, miserable, dissipated.

And yet.

Kerouac was only 47 when he died. Click to read the rest.

A useful new site announcing new releases

When it drops.

This Brit understands and loves the USA

Daniel Hannan talks with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez about his new book, The New Road to Serfdom - A Letter of Warning to America:

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: [You write that] “The United States is becoming just another country.” How far along are we?

DANIEL HANNAN: The abandonment of American particularism started with the first Roosevelt but really took off with the second. Like most bad things, it happened from good intentions. FDR saw himself as the champion of the masses against the lobbies. Convinced of his moral rectitude, he tolerated no constraints on his power. He sidelined the legislature, ignored the conventional two-term limit, ruled by executive order, tried to pack the Supreme Court and constructed a massive federal bureaucracy, much of which is still in place.
...
Other countries are defined by territory, language, religion, ethnicity. Yours is defined by a constitution, and the dream of liberty that found form in that constitution. You don’t have to be American to share that dream, which is why the world has a stake in your success.

Dog post of the day

Saturday house

When I see a house like this, it makes me want to start posting Saturday houses again.

Quentin Crisp - the quintessential queen

Tonight we watched the 2008 movie An Englishman in New York about the last 20 years of Quentin Crisp's life. The actor John Hurt plays Crisp. (Hurt played the role of Crisp in the 1975 movie The Naked Civil Servant based on Crisp's memoirs published in 1968.)

Quentin Crisp was the quintessential queen but he was a brave man and a true gentleman. He was born Denis Charles Pratt on 25th December 1908 in Surrey:

Crisp was an English writer and raconteur. He became an icon of homosexuality in the 1970s after publication of his memoir, The Naked Civil Servant, brought to the attention of the general public his defiant exhibitionism and refusal to keep his sexuality private.
...
After leaving school in 1926, Crisp studied journalism at King's College London, but failed to graduate in 1928, going on to take art classes at the Regent Street Polytechnic.

Around this time, Crisp began visiting the cafés of Soho – his favourite being The Black Cat in Old Compton Street – meeting other young homosexual men and rent-boys, and experimenting with make-up and women's clothes. For six months he worked as a male prostitute, looking for love, he said in a 1999 interview,[citation needed] but finding only degradation.
...
Crisp attempted to join the British army at the outbreak of World War II, but was rejected and declared exempt by the medical board on the grounds that he was "suffering from sexual perversion". He remained in London during the 1941 Blitz, stocked up on cosmetics, purchased five pounds of henna and paraded through the black-out, picking up G.I.s, whose kindness and open-mindedness inspired his love of all things American.

In 1940 he moved into the bed-sitting room he would occupy for the next four decades, the first floor apartment at 129 Beaufort Street. Here he stayed until he emigrated to the United States in 1981. In the intervening years he never attempted any house-work, saying famously in his memoir that "After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse".

He left his job as engineer's tracer in 1942 to become a model in life classes in London and the Home Counties, and continued posing for artists for the next three decades. "It was like being a civil servant," he explained in his autobiography, "except that you were naked." Pamela Green, who went on to be a famous glamour model of the 1950s and '60s, remembers him at St. Martin's School of Art, as “very thin with a skin so white it almost had a greenish tinge”.

Crisp had published three short books by the time he came to write the The Naked Civil Servant.
...
When his autobiography was reprinted in 1975 on the strength of the success of the televisual version of The Naked Civil Servant, Gay News commented that the book should have been published posthumously. Quentin said this was a polite way of telling him to drop dead. Crisp was not sympathetic to the Gay Liberation movement of the time. "What do you want liberation from?" he asked in a 1974 chance encounter with Peter Tatchell. "What is there to be proud of? I don't believe in rights for homosexuals."
...
Crisp then took the show to New York [and] Crisp decided to move to New York permanently and set about making arrangements. In 1981 he arrived with few possessions and found a small apartment in Manhattan's Lower East Side.
...
Crisp remained fiercely independent and unpredictable into old age. He caused controversy and confusion in the homosexual community by jokingly calling AIDS "a fad", and homosexuality "a terrible disease". Crisp commented after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales: "She could have been Queen of England [sic] – and she was swanning about Paris with Arabs. What disgraceful behaviour! Going about saying she wanted to be the queen of hearts. The vulgarity of it is so overpowering."

Crisp returned to England to do a show but died soon afterward on 21 November 1999 a month before his 91st birthday.

He was always true to himself, a true individualist, a full-time satirist and a part-time philosopher. Some quotes:

Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.

For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook.

Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.

The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right.

The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.

The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.

I was amazed to receive later a substantial sum for sitting in my room and talking about myself. If only I could get some of the back pay!

There are girls [fag hags] who do not like real life... Some of these girls are innocent enough to think that these unreal friendships [with homosexuals] will lead to true love — a kind of sexual intercourse that will happen to them without their having to take too horribly much notice. Even those who are sufficiently sophisticated to know that this will not be so persist in these relationships. They provide an opportunity to lavish emotion on a pseudo-man without paying the price that in heterosexual circumstances would be inevitable.

I now know that if you describe things as better as they are, you are considered to be romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you are called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you are called a satirist.

It would be impossible to get through the kind of life that I have known without accumulating a vast unused stockpile of rage. Retaliation, though, was a luxury I could never afford. On the physical level I was too feeble. On any other I was not rich enough. I never dared to be rude to anyone. I never knew that I might not need him later.

It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom; it is the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect. Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom.

An autobiography is obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.

Life was a funny thing that occurred on the way to the grave.

Needless to say Crisp was hated by "gay activists" because he would not conform to their group-think or promote their agenda.

The opposite of sharia is liberty

Boortz:

This email finally made it to my inbox. A psychiatric rescue squad is on the way:

I am perplexed that so many of my friends are against a mosque being built near Ground Zero. I think it should be the goal of every American to be tolerant. The mosque should be allowed, in an effort to promote tolerance.

That is why I also propose, that two gay nightclubs be opened next door to the mosque thereby promoting tolerance within the mosque. We could call the clubs "The Turban Cowboy" and "You Mecca Me So Hot". Next door should be a butcher shop that specializes in pork and have an open barbeque with spare ribs as its daily special.

Across the street a very daring lingerie store called "Victoria Keeps Nothing Secret" with sexy mannequins in the window modeling the goods. Next door to the lingerie shop, there would be room for an Adult Toy Shop (Koranal Knowledge?), its name in flashing neon lights, and on the other side a liquor store, maybe call it "Morehammered"

Actually, the only reason that I posted this thing is to irritate some Muslims out there who see negative remarks about their religion as offensive but who have nothing much to say about the numbers of innocent people who are killed by this peaceful religion every year.