The Reality of SATC

Oh, fate.  How cruel thou art!

Ladies, despite what you might think, the Sex and the City fantasy world that has attracted so many of you to move to New York and live in crappy studio apartments in Brooklyn or with 6 people in some crumbling building 22 blocks away from the part on Manhattan is a deceptive, criminal fraud that will rob you of the best years of your life.

Sarah Jessica Parker, whom I consider to be one the ghastliest of hags despite the desperate pleads by the MSM and the E! channel to convince me that she is sexually attractive, is now in her 40’s – or is it 50’s?  She and her beta boy husband can’t have any more babies thanks for 35 years of birth control and the ravages of STDS, UTIs, bing drinking, and the other biological consequences of partying like you’re 19 when you’re 26, 29, 32, 36, and 39.

Oh, the irony!  If only we had told Matthew Broderick where he’d be 25 years after Ferris Bueler’s Day Off.

Unless you want to have your babies through a “surrogate”, take SATC for what it’s worth: a lesson in the most worthless way to waste your life in a string of shoe stores, bars, and one night stands.

Fuck you, Sarah Jessica Parker.  You’re ugly and sterile.  You fail.

Mental Cancer

Roissy was recently the victim of some worthless slut’s diatribe in defense of her lifestyle and attacking Roissy’s critique thereof.

This passage on her shitty blog caught my eye:

So look, fucktards. Here is the thing: I will take your slut label and I will wear it with pride. I reclaim the word from your patriarchal oppressive horseshit discourse. I refuse to allow you to tell me who and what I should be. Because that is what that discourse does, it tells me how to be a woman. You know what? I am my own woman and I really, really like the woman I am. The woman I am enjoys her sexuality, but she is not defined by it. Yes, I talk about it – but I also talk about my kids, my school, my job, my house – all of these things are part of me but not one of them defines me. So, yes, I will wear your label in mockery of your beliefs…but I will wear it on my terms, as part of me, not as my defining characteristic.

These words describe everything that is wrong with this bullshit concept of peace, understanding, non-judgmental moral relativism that somehow mainstream America has adopted as a legitimate mindset.  Our children are taught to think this way in public schools.  We might as well feed them cyanide.  They’ll endure less pain.

What this dumb slut fails to understand – and indeed, what many people fail to understand – is that when your teachers in junior high school were trying to raise your self esteem by telling you that your own opinion of yourself is the only one that matters, they were telling bold faced lies.

Mrs. Errant Wife wears the label of slut in mockery of my beliefs, does she?  Good.  If ever I should be around when she’s trapped inside a burning building, I’ll remember that to ease my conscience when I choose to let her fry.

Your own opinion of yourself is far less important than everyone else’s opinion of you, for two reasons.  First, if people think you’re a dumb slut, they’ll treat you like one.  It doesn’t matter what you think about the morality of spreading your legs for as many men as possible (in violoation of your marriage vows, which apparently mean nothing to you).  You can only control your own actions and your own reactions.  You cannot control mine, or anyone else’s.  So, if you choose to behave like a slut, you can proudly declare that you are taking back the label and “wear it on your terms” but that won’t change how anyone else views you.

The second reason that other people’s opinions matter more, especially when taken en masse, is that other people are significantly less likely to make up bullshit belief systems to justify your behavior than you are to make up bullshit belief systems to justify your own behavior.  As Roissy correctly observes, this woman’s sluttery is driven by some core emotional need that has overtaken her intellect to the point where her emotions have instead commandeered her intellect to invent bogus reasons why her actions are okay, such as, for example, that her slutty behavior is not a poor reflection on her but is instead “patriarchal oppressive horseshit discourse.”  Did she learn that phrase in her woman’s studies classes?

If society has judged you as a worthless slut, then chances are you’re a worthless slut.  Our culture judges you even if you refuse to judge yourself, and a cultural referendum has consequences whereas your own contrived notion of self worth has essentially no consequences except that you might be driven to suicide when the truth about your failings as a member of our society finally enter your consciousness.

This slut’s lies about her self and her own sluttiness is morphine for the truths she knows but refuses to admit.  Her denial is as much a survival mechanism as the reflex to breathe.  She has failed at marriage - unable to keep her husband interested in her, perhaps unable to reconcile that she married the wrong man.  Chances are she’s also a horrific mother, especially if she is teaching her children to self medicate the same way she does by ignoring any cultural judgment that doesn’t suit them.  The only thing she can do right is spread her legs for random men who treat her like the worthless slut she is and value her as nothing more than a cum recepticle.  This is hysterical considering the blatant feminist undertones and stock mantra she repeats ad nauseum in defense of her “claims to her own sexuality.”  She has reduced herself to a big, aging fleshlight.  Congratulations, womyn.

Reality check: if you find yourself disregarding other people’s judgements in favor of some arbitrary justification you’ve invented to qualify any action for which you’ve just been criticized by another member of society, take a moment to consider the fact that you might be full of shit.  Sometimes you aren’t, but don’t trust yourself.

To Catch an Imaginary Predator

The problem I have with NBC’s To Catch a Predator (and its muscle arm, Perverted Justice), is that these men were not talking to children.  Thus, what crime has been committed?

To me, this is first rate entrapment.  How can we charge men with soliciting sex with a minor through chat logs on the internet when the people they were chatting to are not minors?

The argument is simply this: if the man in question thinks he’s talking to a minor, then it displays intent, so it is irrelevant whether the person he is actually talking to on the internet is actually a minor or not.

Now, let’s explore the converse: suppose an adult man is on an internet chatroom and he talks to a girl online who tells him that she is 18 years old.  She gives him directions to her house, he comes over, and they have sex.  But in reality, she’s only 14 years old.  Guess what happens?  The man is arrested.

Do you see what’s not fair about this?  If believing a person on the internet is underage makes you guilty of a crime, shouldn’t believing a person on the internet to be legal make you innocent of that crime?

And what about the person on the other end?  Should Perverted Justice be charged with perjury?  What aabout a 14 year old girl who tells a man on the internet she’s 18?  (Or 28?)

This whole thing is a total sham.  No actual crime has been committed because no actual child has been endangered.  If these men had actually had sex with the person they were talking to on the internet and met in these homes (who were all paid actors over the age of 18), no crime would have been committed – it’s two consenting adults.  What they told each other on the internet is immaterial.

These cases have been thrown out in many of the districts targetted by Perverted Justice for this exact reason.  If you live in a place where these charges were upheld, I’d seriously consider moving away.  Intention without action is a crime where you live.  Good thing you don’t fall into a group the government defines as sick.  You have nothing to worry about… yet.  That is, until the government broadens its definition of “sick” to include you.

Idealism Hurts

Last September I started running again pretty seriously – in fact, more seriously than I ever did even during my brief stint in high school track and field when I was 16.  I still haven’t beaten my age 16 speed record (6:04/mi) but I have greatly improved my distance running.

I encountered every type of running pain.  It seemed like every week, a new part of one (or both) of my legs would start to hurt.  First it was my left hamstring.  Then it was my right anterior shin.  Then it was my ankle.  I ran through it all, because why not?  I’m still reasonably young.  I am not a perfectionist, but I do set the bar extremely high.  I don’t do anything half-assed, and running was no exception.

I was running 6 days a week.  Over the course of about 4 weeks, I moved up from about 10 miles a week to 25 miles a week.  By the middle of November, my weekend long run had moved up to 8 miles.

It was during that 8 miler that I felt a rather odd sensation in my right ankle.  It wasn’t a particularly shap pain, just a strange feeling.  Almost tingly.  My leg was pretty sore for the rest of the day.  I ran twice more that week, on Tuesday and Wednesday, 4 miles each time.  Neither run was comfortable, but as with all previous pains and strains, I figured I could run through it.  By Thursday morning, it became clear to me that this was more than a simple pain or strain.

I began to do some research on the web.  I suspected this was just a particularly nasty manifestation of shin splints.  I had gotten them before, in high school, but never quite this bad.  I couldn’t walk without a rather intense pain in my shin.  It was bearable, but I relied heavily on pain medication over the next two weeks.  I concluded based on the severity of the symptoms and the fact that I could easily narrow in on the exact point of pain using the “knock test” (where you knock your leg bone with your knuckles until you find a spot where in so doing causes very sharp pain) that this wasn’t shin splints, it was a stress fracture.

Crap.  Just plain crap.  A typical person can recover from garden variety shin splints by staying off the road for about 2 or 3 weeks.  A typical person can recover from a tibia stress fracture in 3 to 6 months.

And so, from November until just recently, I have been more or less unable to run.  I have finally gotten to the point where I can run without pain and I have begun to increase my mileage again.  I am back up to 5 mile “long” runs on the weekends.  No post run pain.

I have, however, learned my lesson, and I give myself at least 2 rest days a week.  I feel no pain at all in my leg today, but I am resting it anyway, because I don’t want to be sidelined for another 6 months.  It wasn’t the worst thing in the world because I was down and out during the winter months.  But now the weather is beautiful.

What does this have to do with idealism?  Well, simply put, I am very pragmatic about virtually everything.  This makes me a conservative.  But when it came to my own physical abilities I was optimistic to the point of idealism.  I thought way too much about what I could do and I ended up seriously injuring myself.  Had I merely been realistic about how many miles I could take in a week without damaging my legs, I would probably be up to 10 or 12 comfortable mile runs on the weekends by now.  But instead I let my idealized view of my own capabilities get in my way and I paid for it.

As in everything, forget how it should be and concentrate on how it is.  Otherwise, you’ll hurt yourself.

Liberals Don’t Believe Their Own Lies

This will be a World of Warcraft story.

One of the principle activities in World of Warcraft is raiding.  A raid is a group of people (these days, either 10 or 25) who enter a dungeon filled with monsters.  Those monsters must be killed.  They drop items which enhance your character.  These dungeons can be completed once a week.  In the past, they were very hard – only the top 10% of a server’s population typically could muster a group capable of killing the bosses who drop items.  These days it’s easier, but it’s still an accomplishment that takes some personal skill, coordination, cooperation, and good leadership. 

Also, because World of Warcraft has an emphasis on items and equipment, before you enter these dungeons, there’s a certain minimum threshold of equipment you really need to have or else you just won’t be able to contribute.  For many of the boss encounters, all 25 people must be contributing or the group will fail.

There are various objective ways to measure a person’s readiness to raid.  One of those is something called a “gear score.”  Each item in World of Warcraft has an item level.  The sum of all item scores for items you are wearing is your gear score.

Generally, you belong to a guild.  It’s kind of like a company.  You generally raid with them every week.  You share a guild bank where you can share items that help each other during the raid, you have a private chat channel, and most guilds have someone who pays for a voice server we can all use to chat on headsets rather than type.

The guild I joined is a casual group.  We only raid a couple nights a week, and we generally only do it for about 3 or 4 hours per night, like 8 to 12 or so.  Most of the guild is married adults with jobs and families.  Many have small children.  We have a good time.  Everyone is mature.

Recently, we started advancing into harder dungeons and we created some rules about who gets to come to our raids.  Although we usually don’t have 25 people online and have to recruit some non-guild raiders to join us, we apply the same rules to everyone who comes to our raid.  The rule is simple: unless you have a gear score of 1800 or higher, you won’t get invited.  A gear score of 1800 is respectable, but not hard difficult to obtain.  You can achieve such a gear score without doing any raiding at all.  You can achieve it with small group play (5 man dungeons), by buying the items from people with spare gear, or by crafting it (or by gathering materials and having your friends craft it for you).  I could probably achieve an 1800 gear score on a brand new level 80 character in about 20 hours played.  That’s about 2 weeks playing only 90 minutes a night.

Okay, I apologize for the long run up to the main point of this story.

The other night we encountered our first guild “drama”.  We started up our weekly raid and started the invites.  One player, a middle aged (30+) woman, whose husband is also in the guild, wanted an invite.  We didn’t respond to her requests in our guild chat channel, so she came on to our voice channel and started asking where her invite was.

One of our guild leaders very calmly explained to her that she did not have the required gear score, so we couldn’t invite her.  We recommended that she run a few small group dungeons that night instead, so that she could make the invite the following night.  (This dungeon takes 2 or sometimes 3 nights to clear entirely).  She was close.  I think she had about 1720 or 1730.  A few more pieces and she would have made the cut.

Instead, she launched into this escalating emotional tirade about how it wasn’t fair and she had run so many dungeons but no loot dropped for her (it is random, after all).  Essentially, her argument was, “I really did try.  Shouldn’t you invite me anyway?”

Not a single person in the raid, ranging in age from about 15 to 65 (seriously), stood up for her.  Not a single person said, “yeah, screw it, invite her anyway.”  No one.  Some of these people have said pro-Obama things in guild chat or on our voice chat server.

What does this have to do with liberals and lies?

Many people think World of Warcraft is a useless diversion, but the parallels between the game and real life are such that you really can learn a lot about people if you just pay attention.  Case in point.

The reality of the situation is that we’re all in this dungeon, cooperatively, to achieve a goal.  We have individual incentives and group incentives – we want to get loot ourselves, but if we don’t get it, well, at least someone in our small guild gets it.  They improve, so next week, it will be even easier to get items, so we’ll get the raid done in one night instead of two.  Even though it’s a game and raiding is fun, raiding content you’ve already beaten does feel like a chore often times.

We had 23 or 24 people in the group already, with one or two slots open.  We have someone in our guild we could take, but we’d rather take a stranger.  We’d rather take a stranger because even though she’s in our guild, she doesn’t meet or minimum criteria.  She is going to slow us all down, she is going to bog us all down, she is going to decrease our group’s chances of success.  We would rather take a geared, skilled foreigner than an undergeared, underskilled native.

There’s a very high chance that if we took this undergeared guildmate to the raid and maanged to succeed anyway, she’d probably get a lot of gear.  We routinely see items on bosses that no one needs, so we turn them into materials for the guild bank.  She could probably pick up those items.  Doing so would raise her gear score much more rapidly than she could do on her own, especially since items that drop in the raid have a score of 213, and the best she can get without raiding is 200.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds awfully similar to “spreading the wealth” around, doesn’t it?  A kind of guild welfare?

But when push comes to shove, these pro-Obama, presumably pro-socialist pro-welfare state people were not willing to impose a more difficult raiding evening, and a possibility of failure, on themselves to help someone they knew!  Someone who was part of our guild!  Someone who, by rights, deserved to be in our raid more than someone outside of our guild.

Not a single person defended her.  Her “I tried” routine fell on deaf ears.  Her appeals to justice and fairness fell on deaf ears.  Her appeals to being a member of the guild fell on deaf ears.  Nothing she tried mattered to any of us.  We wanted to win.  We wanted items.  We had no interest in propping up the weakest member of our guild at the expense of everyone else.

In fact, we didn’t even fill her spot.  We raided with only 24 people and killed the first 3 bosses.  Items that she could have used to upgrade her gear – thereby making her meet the requirements – were left to rot on the bodies of the bosses.  It would have been better for us to take her instead, because even subpar contribution is better than nothing, and it would have benefited her too.

But we all knew that once she got into the raid it would be much harder – and more cruel – to kick her later as soon as someone better came online to replace her or we started getting into deeper, harder bosses.  So instead, we just didn’t invite her to begin with.

In real terms, that translates to the feeling that it’s better to let a bum starve on the street than feed him for a while and then stop feeding him when we can no longer afford to do so, even if there’s a chance that by feeding him for a while we’d elevate him to the point where he would no longer need our charity.

Human nature, exposed.

At an abstract level democrats love to talk about helping the common man and the war on poverty and blah blah blah… but, when they are faced with it themselves and are asked to sacrifice their own chances of self gain, their liberal ideals vanish into the ether.

Ladies and gentlmen, this is why I am a conservative.  I watch people every day, and I watch how they behave.  When I hear them talk about being a loving compassionate liberal who wants to prop up the non-producers at the expense of the producers and then turn around and completely betray everything they just talked about when they themselves are the producers and are at risk of sacrifice, I just can’t take them seriously.  Liberals themselves won’t even act out the fantasy world they talk about when you talk politics with them, so why in God’s name should I?

I have been in guilds where this underperforming woman would have been allowed in the raid anyway.  And do you know what happens to these guilds?  Their best players, the ones who prop up the raid group and perform at the level of 2 or 3 lesser players, get sick of propping up the lesser players (especially when talent is not taken into account when loot is distributed).  They get sick of losing fights against bosses they’ve killed before because a slew of new people have joined who don’t have the gear and don’t have the experience to beat the boss successfully.  They leave the guild for a better guild with a lower tolerance threshold for crappy players.

I’ve been in guilds that have a much lower tolerance threshold for crappy players.  You know what happens when crappy players slip under the radar and end up in guilds like these anyway?  (Usually because they’re real-life friends of high performer players in the guild, and get invited that way)  They don’t get invited into raids and get tired of sitting on the bench so they leave.

The end result is that, on World of Warcraft servers, as with life, a great split soon appears between players in high-end guilds with high-end players who get loot and players in low-end guilds with low-end players who can’t clear a dungeon to save their lives.  There is no WoW “middle class” because, as in nature, the better than average players gravitate toward better than average guilds, and the worse than average players gravitate toward worse than average guilds or they quit the game entirely.

As for our underperforming female guild mate, she quit the guild about an hour after we had to mute her on our voice chat server because she would not stop complaining that it wasn’t fair that we wouldn’t invite her even though she knew very clearly that she did not meet our minimum standards which we had publicly posted on our guild forums weeks earlier.  I estimate that it won’t be long before she quits the game entirely (or “rerolls” – meaning, creates a new character, often on a different server, which might as well be the same as quitting).

As for me?  I’m a conservative, and I donated 300 gold to her a few weeks ago so she could buy a fast flying mount.  (She did pay me back, though not at my request).  But I didn’t defend her when it came time to let her into the raid.  I knew, as everyone knew, that one weak link brings down the whole raid.  I admit openly that propping up the weakest members at the expense of the strongest hurts in the long run, because I’ve seen it happen again and again in guild after guild.  I don’t delude myself with fairytales about justice and fairness.  It is what it is.

Deluded by Luxury

The problem this world has is that it’s simply too luxurious.

I am busy watching Barack Obama and his cadre of congressional liberals completely ignore the philosophies of the men who founded this country, and totally abandon vritually every guiding principle on which America is founded.

And Americans don’t even care.  They’re going to let him do it.

And why?  Aside from the fact that very few Americans have even the slightest, dimmest understanding of the philosophical, moral, and political worldviews of the founding fathers, even those who do just don’t care.

When America was founded, life was much harder.  Life expectancies were shorter.   People – particularly people who did not work particularly hard – starved to death.  The world was so much more real than it is today.

It’s easy to strip the wealthy of their money because it is perceived by those who don’t have money that it was earned easily.  And, for the most part, that is true.  White collar jobs – in fact, virtually all modern jobs, even labor jobs – are so much easier today.  Most Americans will never see a real hard day’s work in their lives.  Even fewer will ever know what it feels like to go to sleep hungry and be uncertain whether they’d have a way to eat the following day.

I claim that in this modern era, it is simply impossible to get large portions of modern people to understand that even though our lives are easier and so many of life’s stresses are memories, the principles of the Constitution still apply, and the philosophies of the founding fathers are still just as true to life as they are now.

Because even though our technology has improved and we live in paradise by comparison even to the wealthiest 18th century Europeans, we are still human beings, and fewer than a dozen generations have passed since Washington’s time.  Our genetics – our nature – is still exactly the same.  Humans want a right to acquire, posess, and defend property regardless of how easy or hard it is to earn.

Obama wants to limit this right, and in some cases outright deny it.  These sentiments are codified – and in fact, explicitly written – in the two most important documents which are intended to guide the American nation – and they are ignored.  Americans are too preoccupied with granting new rights (such as gay marriage) which is not mentioned at all anywhere in our founding fathers’ writings, the Declaration of Independence, of the United States Constitution.

Liberals, does this even bother you at all, or do you just not even think about it?  Do you not care?  This is the United States of America, founded on a Constitution which I deeply admire and deeply respect.  You, on the other hand, keep electing people who seek to rewrite it in France’s image.  If you like European social welfare states so much, why don’t you just move there?  Let us have our Constitution, let France have theirs.

Mind Tricks

I named this blog An Exercise in Futility not because what I’m doing is futile, but because how I’m doing it is futile.

I am sick of liberal thinking in this country.  I think it’s doing our culture and our future a great disservice and I want to influence as many liberals as possible to stop politicking with their hearts and start politicking with their minds.  But I am never, ever going to be able to do it like this, and the reason is simple: both liberals and conservatives immediately attempt to assess the slant of the author before taking anything they write seriously.  All one needs to do is read my post titles and they know I’m a conservative.  If you’re a liberal and you’re reading this, you’re probably instantly skeptical of anything I write because I am “one of those conservatives.”  And vice versa.

The only way to change someone’s mind about something is to fly under their radar and slip my way of thinking into their consideration without them realizing that what I’m expressing is unadultered conservatism.

An analogy would be to make a medicine so sweet that the child doesn’t realize it’s medicine.

And how will I do that?  By using allegory and symbolism.  In short, by writing a work of fiction that expresses all of these attitudes in a way that would give liberals pause to question their worldview.

That task is very, very hard.  It is very difficult to write a novel that tells such a compelling story that it changes the way a person thinks about the world.  Most of the time, when this happens, the book wins the highest awards, and deservedly so.

Writing these lecturing essays is not going to get my points across because the people who I want to read them will simply ignore them at face.  My phasers of insight and my photon torpedoes of common sense will be brushed away by their deflector shields and they’ll remain as clueless and ideological as ever.

So why do I bother?  Well, it’s mainly for two reasons.  The first is the same reason that I voted for John McCain in the state of Maryland – futile, also – but at least I can say that I tried.  The second is that in order to craft my magnum opus, I need as much writing practice as I can get, and I also need to lay out as many of my ideas as I can so that one day I can pick and choose which ones I want to cram into my work of compelling fiction that kicks so much ass that the idiot liberals who buy it don’t even know they’re being indoctrinated.

I estimate a release date somewhere around 2040, provided that a civilization still exists when I’m that old.

My Sister is a Closet Liberal

Especially when I was younger, virtually all of my liberal peers would immediately conclude that I am a conservative for no other reason than that I was indoctrinated by a conservative parent as a child.  It was simply unfathomable to them that someone they knew to be intelligent – in many cases very provably more intelligent than they themselves are – could be a conservative by choice.

My father is a staunch republican, and he only became that way after trying his hardest to buy into the ideas that have become the foundation of the modern democratic party, birthed in the primordial soup of the late 1960’s.  My father is a scientist – he has a degree in chemistry and spent the first ten years of his career as a research chemist at Exxon.  His observations of the world did not match everything said about it by liberals.  He had no choice but to be a conservative, because conservative ideas are rooted in reality, not ideology.  Conservatism is more about how the world is, not about what the world should be.

I, and my older sister (who is smarter than I am), were raised by a conservative.

Nevertheless, I strongly suspect that my sister has become a liberal.  Of course, she does not talk about it because she knows that my father and I are both staunch republicans and she knows better than to out herself as a liberal, since in our family that is probably more traumatic than if she were to out herself as a lesbian.  In fact, although I am somewhat ashamed to say this, I would rather she be a lesbian than a liberal.

I can’t blame her, though.  First, she’s a girl.  Girls are naturally inclined to have liberal tendencies anyway.  Second, she works in the healthcare field, and Medicare/Medicaid pays her salary.  If those were to dry up, she would most likely be out of a job.  Third, she married a man who claims to be “independent” but I also am almost positive that he says that only because my sister instructed him to not be a liberal in front of her family.  She knows how we would judge him.  I would bet a respectable sum that the pair of them voted for Obama.

The reason it bothers me is not because she is a liberal per se.  I have thought a lot about this, and it isn’t that I lose respect for people who are liberals, it’s more like I pity them.  I think The Governator said it best: “I promised to love my wife in sickness and in health.  I consider liberalism to be a sickness.”

The reason it bothers me is that it means we are not similar people.  We have the same sense of humor, but it probably stops there.  We have already grown apart because we live 200 miles away from each other, but the fact that she has become a liberal only means that we have grown even further apart, since I have observed that the liberal/conservative axis is one of the easiest ways to predict how a person will think.  If she has, in fact, become a liberal, then it means we do not think very much alike at all.

I have written about my socialist cousin before.  Her mother is my father’s sister.  She is also one of those liberal anti-war pro-green wackos.  My father and my aunt have never gotten along, and their relationship today exists only because they are blood.  I don’t want my relationship with my sister to devolve in the same fashion, but if she thinks like a liberal, then it means we probably wouldn’t be friends if we weren’t related.  And when you’re only spending time with someone because it’s obligated by blood association, that’s not a real relationship.  It’s just serving the higher duty of family.

I hope I’m just paranoid.

North Korea, 2009

If you think North Korea is test launching a rocket for any reason other than to test Barack Obama, you’re clueless.

New president, new policies.  If the world knows one thing, it’s that every 4 or 8 years, the United States is a new country.  And like any new player on the field, he needs to be tested and observed.  Once you understand how he plays the game, you have a chance of beating him.

North Korea is shit testing Barack Obama.  George Bush made it clear very early in his presidency that he considers North Korea to be part of the Axis of Evil and wouldn’t take shit from them.  America ignored North Korea’s first missile test (which failed, by the way) and ignored its so-called nuclear bomb test.  The yield of their “bomb” which they detonated underground was less than our bigger conventional arms.  Plus, they have no delivery mechanism.  So, even if our military had been available, we wouldn’t have invaded them.

The poltiics of North Korea is tricky because of China, South Korea, Japan, and Russia – their neighbors – who ultimately have a bigger say in how Kim is dealt with than we do.  You may have noticed that Obama’s tactic was to announce that he would take this “to the security council”.  China immediately announced that they would not veto such a move.

What does this say?  It says that Obama understood the politics of the region, got China on board, and made a joint statement to Kim Jong-il along the lines of: if you fire the rocket, we’ll shoot it down, and China won’t help you.

Everyone knows that North Korea is not really a serious threat to anyone.  If we thought they were, we would do something about it.  Kim Jong-Il already has his answer about the Obama administration: he, like all his predecessors before him, will not put up with his shit.

Will Obama depose North Korea?  No.  Does Obama have to realistically worry about North Korea invading South Korea?  No.  North Korea can’t take any aggression without China essentially doing all the work for them, and China’s policy is, or appears to be, to side with us (and South Korea).

So it really doesn’t matter what North Korea says these “harsh consequences” are going to be if and when we shoot down their “satelite”.  They’re a mouse roaring at a lion.  I’m glad to say that Obama is putting our paw firmly on the mouse’s tail and is not impressed.  At least he’s doing one thing right.

I really think my head would have exploded if Obama responded to this North Korean missile launch with talks.  Maybe he’s learned his lesson with Iran and Russia already.  Wishful thinking?