Perhaps The Outgoing Pope Did More To Clean Up The Catholic Church Than We Realized

http://www.ewtnnews.com/catholic-news/World.php?id=7089

Not being intimately familiar with the actual, as opposed to theoretical Catholic hierarchy, I'm not certain how big a deal removing 2-3 bishops a month is by modern standards, but I wager it represents a good fraction of the Pope's energies over an extended period of time.  I think most of us are going to miss Benedict when he resigns this week.

Administrivia: Comments

I've had a user or two report difficulties with embedded comments.  Accordingly, I'm going to try using full page comments instead.  Apparently blogger has issues with some browsers with embedded comments.

Philanthropy Actually Worthy Of The Name

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/feb/20/breakthrough-prize-silicon-valley-entrepreneurs

Curing diseases and extending human life has always been something that Christians have worked towards.  It's nice to see some philanthropy actually going towards that purpose as opposed to primarily being employed to dispossess the demographic hegemony of me and mine.  Life extension research is pretty seriously undersubscribed from a societal point of view.  It needs a higher fraction of talent, preferably drained from the FIRE sector.

The Hunger of the Blood

My oldest of late has started nearly incessantly asking me for stories about one of his great-great-grandmothers.  I find this interesting because I've never terribly encouraged this, having only mentioned her obliquely a few times in his presence, and he doesn't know my mother all that well, having seen her only a few times given her geographic separation from him.  His knowledge of my mother's mother is even more tenuous, having seen her only once, and the great-great-grandmother passed away more than a decade before he was born.

But the hunger is there for stories and to feel some sort of connection to his ancestors.  I'd say the ancestor story is up there with the Bible story in terms of his favorite types.  From my experience with other little ones around his age---make no mistake, it appears that pregnancy is contagious within social circles as much or more so than is divorce---this doesn't seem all that unusual.  The stories don't have to be terribly unusual, or even funny, or heaven forbid, heroic to delight the little ones.  I suspect that there's a lot of 'blood and soil' built into every new child---even to the extent of a fairly strong attachment to the old house we brought him home to after he was born, from which we've moved so as to have adequate space for children to play and for his second little sister to arrive.  I am coming to believe this is at least part of the human 'firmware' which our present diseased society is trying like Hell to beat out of us.  Hopefully it won't succeed.  I don't think it will--I'm betting this impulse is at the root of ancestor worship and that's pretty perennial.

Spam, Spam, and More Spam

Minor rant here---I hate that there's no ready option in blogger to allow anonymous comments without moderation or captchas if and only if they have no links attached.  An awful lot of stuff lately is leaking through the spam filter.  I really don't want to disallow anonymous commenting, I hate captchas, and I don't want to moderate most things.  For the time being I've enabled moderation on posts older than 3 weeks or so.  Hopefully the Great Flood of spam is a transient thing.

Immigration is Not Enough, Manufacturing Yet More Anti-Semitism Through Gun Control

http://chariotofreaction.blogspot.com/2011/12/manufacturing-anti-semitism-in-senate.html
To revisit an old topic, breakdowns by religion of voting habits of US elites, we consider the case of gun control, presently a fairly hot issue.

Current Jewish Senators
From Wikipedia
Current Senators Name Party State
Carl Levin[1][2] Democratic Michigan
Frank Lautenberg[3] Democratic New Jersey
Dianne Feinstein[4] Democratic California
Barbara Boxer[5] Democratic California
Ron Wyden[6] Democratic Oregon
Chuck Schumer[7][8] Democratic New York
Benjamin Cardin[9] Democratic Maryland
Bernard Sanders[10] Independent Vermont
Al Franken[11] Democratic Minnesota
Michael Bennet Democratic Colorado
Richard Blumenthal[12][13] Democratic Connecticut

Brian Schatz[14]

Democratic

Hawaii

Grades from the NRA
http://www.margieroswell.com/map_of_nra_grades_for_senators
Levin-F, Lautenberg-F, Feinstein-F, Boxer-F, Wyden-F, Schumer-F, Cardin-F, Sanders-D, Franken-F, Bennet-C, Blumenthal-F . Schatz-C

So you have 2 Cs, a D, and 9 Fs.

By comparison, nearly half of the Senate have A ratings from the NRA. 
Jews would be well advised to note that the branding they're getting here is NOT favorable to them in the eyes of large sections of the population, and perhaps most ominously, the section with the most military potential.

It is difficult to get this through the heads of most Jews.  The Holocaust does NOT immunize you from criticism.  Repeatingly playing as if it does generates tremendous animosity.   If you don't get control of your brand you won't like the ultimate outcome.  As always, I recommend working on your plan B through Z.

Never Let It Be Said That Wiki Doesn't Have a Lot of Good Red Pill Material

Your friendly neighborhood Dark Lord over at heartiste.wordpress.com writes today to gloat on how his view of neurotypical psychology just keeps getting confirmed over and over again in the scientific literature, despite the conventional 'wisdom'.
After looking over his article, I consulted Wikipedia to see what they had to offer, and its quite a bit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Franklin_effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot-in-the-door_technique
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compliance_(psychology)

I've talked in some detail about all of these three areas here at the Chariot, but Wiki provides nice summaries of how the security flaws in the neurotypical psychological architecture are exploited again, and again, and again, and how the one having the exploits run on them likes it.

One technique that uses all of these effects on steroids is to have your lover, be she your wife, girlfriend, or whatever, pose for you on her digital camera.  Camp it up, use a bogus German or Russian or French accent, whatever strikes your fancy and is fun.  Make it as tame or as risque
as is appropriate given your relationship, and give her back her camera containing all the pictures when you're done.  She'll have a blast.  You don't need to be a good photographer, just point and shoot and give lots of directions and 'photographer-speak' encouragements.  But, be warned---you may find that your very conservative wife, girlfriend, or whatever pushes matters a bit closer to the risque end of the spectrum as she gets into it.