The genus Rep. Anthony Weiner, an “engorged organism” indigenous to DC, has an exotic-looking, ravishing mate. (Full image posted below.) But men—at least American men—prefer what I’ve termed (in “Sluts Galore”) the porn aestehtic:

Ideas about feminine beauty are bust. The sublime 1350 B.C. bust of Queen Nefertiti showcases her fine cheekbones and graceful neck. Her Western contemporary look-a-like, down to the perfectly shaped dainty face, was Audrey Hepburn. Catherine Deneuve embodied the French ideal of female beauty, immortalized in the bust of Marianne.
But forget these regal beauties; they, apparently, have nothing on the double-chinned, large, flat expanses that make up Britney Spears’ crude mug. Nefertiti, Hepburn, Deneuve—your patrician pulchritude no longer excites the “porn generation”; the sly, weasel-like looks of a Paris Hilton do.
The culture’s aesthetic preferences are now shaped by the basest of instincts. I call it the porn aesthetic, another example of which is Hue Hefner’s harem of hos. The three kept creatures are currently starring in a reality show called “The Girls Next Door” …

MORE…

UPDATE: The addiction excuse is just that: an excuse and an error. (Read “Evil, Not Ill.”) The liberal establishment—it includes Republicans and Democrats—has accepted that all bad behavior is a disease. From lying to murder: every bit of human nastiness is said to be a biological-based disorder. The premise for this conceit is the Rousseauist notion that humans are all equally good and would remain pristine if not for external agents, namely biological or societal forces. The problem is, as I have shown in my writing, and Dr. Thomas Szasz has done over the course of half a century: there is no basis for this claim—not in biology, much less in morality.

I quote from “Mel’s ‘Malady,’ Foxman’s Fetish”:

The Delphic oracles of the disease theory of delinquency (the “experts”) have slapped all manner of misconduct with diagnostic labels. At the root of this diseasing of behavior is the eradication of good and bad. Placing bad behavior beyond the strictures of traditional morality, moreover, makes it amenable to external, “therapeutic” or state interventions.
Liberals first, and conservatives in short succession, have taken to the idiom of disease like ducks to water. Left and right now insist, based on wispy pseudoscience, that just about every human excess is an illness as organic as cancer or diabetes.

My colleague Vox Day takes a columnist’s number of “Likes” on WND as a proxy for readership of that particular WND column. The problem with this analysis in my case is this: Vox Day’s weblog doesn’t have Facebook interface. Mine does. Many of my readers come first to Barely a Blog and will click the “Like” on the column’s blog post, rather than (or in addition to) clicking on WND’s full version of the column on its site, which these readers still read on WND. Some read the column on both sites and don’t click “Like.” (All readers of this space are encouraged to click the “Like” icons on both the BAB and the WND posts.)

For example, on WND, the column “Is Ron Paul Good For Israel?” has earned 56 “Likes,” as Vox has noted. But on Barely a Blog the post excerpting the same column has garnered 100 “Likes.” To the extent that the reader’s propensity to “Like” is statistically significant—and I doubt it—BAB “Likes” go toward my WND readership, since blog “Likers” almost always read the column in full on WND. (I only post the column to IlanaMercer.com a couple of days after the WND posting.)

Given that my blog interfaces with Facebook, Vox would have to factor in the “Likes” a WND column notice gets on Barely a Blog before he makes a definitive statement about the “Likes” on WND as a proxy for the WND column’s popularity.

Of course, my column’s existence has always been in peril, so far be it from me to claim popularity for it. This is as good a time as any to remind readers to support “Return to Reason” by clicking on the “Like” icons both on BAB and on WND.com.

If you like posts about this stuff, check out my old Alexa debunk. Alexa would have become far more accurate since I wrote “RANK INTERNET RATINGS.” This is because most of us no longer dial up to get an internet connection and thus no longer receive a new IP address each time we click on a site. The same person dialing up many times daily, yet being reflected as a new IP address each time: that’s what made for the promiscuous early Alexa readings.

UPDATE: Robert is right: The reader’s “Like” habits are too full of statistical holes to indicate very much. I almost never click “Like” when I read a column.

Kerry, the other thing patrons of this site can do to support this writer’s work is to review “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” on Amazon.

With apologies in advance to all non-human primates. In the quest for the lowest common denominator, mainstream American publishers will publish the musings of a monkey, or worse: a small boy. Colton Burpo, barely out of short pants, is the “author” of a best seller, “Heaven is for Real.” ALLEGEDLY, this “four-year old son of a small town Nebraska pastor, during emergency surgery, slips from consciousness and enters heaven. He survives and begins talking about being able to look down and see the doctor operating and his dad praying in the waiting room. The family didn’t know what to believe but soon the evidence was clear.'” Yeah, I kid you not.

The only scientific variable worth noting in this equation is the fact of a father with a vested interest in the belief system. (Hypothesis: Boys whose fathers believe are more likely to develop after-life ideation than boys whose parents don’t believe. Examine whether the difference between the groups is statistically significant.)

The same awe accorded to the Nobel Savage and to the natural world is accorded in American culture to The Child, who is seen as possessing uncanny prescience; a primordial, pristine, un-spoilt wisdom.

Heaven help us! Errant adults elevate infants as philosopher kings.

I love the free market, as was said here, but faith in the free market need not require a nearly equal faith in popular culture. Why does it follow that a product produced and exchanged in the process of making a living must inspire faith? More often than not, the marketplace doesn’t adjudicate the quality of art, pop culture, or literature. The market does no more than offer an aggregate snapshot of the trillions of subjective preferences enacted by consumers.

Aguilera (Christina) sells more than Ashkenazy (Vladimir) ever did. Britney and Burpo outdo Borodin. For some, this will be faith inspiring, for others deeply distressing.

Seriously, that America’s adults are reading this tripe (and bopping in front of a TV screen using Microsoft Kinect) goes a long way to explain a hell of a lot.

UPDATED: Guys, you’re missing the point: the problem here is not the issue of faith in the afterlife; it’s the publishing of this tyke. A nation that looks to kids for spiritual, intellectual, and moral guidance is a nation without any idea of ordered liberty, which demands a certain hierarchy in terms of age, intelligence, experience, knowledge, etc. It’s something the Japanese know about. Adults should not be reading books written by kids.

The following is from “Stoic, Heroic Japan Vs. Neurotic Nation USA,” my new, WND.COM column:

” … Our country’s edgy experts have ordered the evacuation of Americans in Japan within a 50-mile radius of the damaged reactors at Fukushima. Japan is being harangued to ape America. The Japanese have, so far, moved people from within a 20-kilometer radius of the power plant. Funny that. The Neurotic Nation, whose military personnel in Japan are popping iodine pills if they’ve so much as flown over, or visited, the vicinity, expects the country that is fielding “The Fukushima 50″ to do the same. …

… Judging by their bombast, you’d think that our experts have been to the site at Fukushima. Indeed, Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, asserted that the water meant to cover and cool the spent fuel pool at the No. 4 reactor had evaporated, leaving the rods dangerously exposed. They were overheating, he declared from ground zero … at the House Energy and Commerce Committee panel in Washington. …

Are the nuclear plants in Japan working the way ours do in America? MSNBC’s Chris Matthews asked one of the many American specialists to shamelessly share his findings from afar.

Hardball’s blowhard has a point. The USA’s stellar safety record—the best in the world, perhaps—is helped by the fact that we don’t have much of a nuclear power industry. Following the recommendations set out in ‘The China Syndrome,’ a Hollywood dramatization of the incident at Three Mile Island, the construction of new reactors in the USA was practically halted. Nobody died in that 1979 accident in Pennsylvania. Nobody but the nuclear-power industry. …

… The chauvinism with which our ego-bound elites are treating The Japanese Other continued apace. After all, this genteel, able people do not qualify as members of an easy-to-patronize, protected group, the kind so valued in the U.S. …”

The complete column is “Stoic, Heroic Japan Vs. Neurotic Nation USA,” now on WND.COM.

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UPDATE (March 20): Newsweak acknowledges Japan’s strengths: “In spite of monumental collapse and ruin, the Japanese politely wait in long lines for hours, without once complaining. Law and order are respected at every step. The Shinto-Buddhist tradition, which stresses social harmony and cohesiveness and looking out for your neighbor, is deeply ingrained in the culture. This stands in sharp contrast to some of the spontaneous reactions that have flared in the West. In the US, for example, a simple blackout back in 1977 unleashed an embarrassing wave of looting and mayhem, with marauding bands of thieves making off with anything they could carry.” …

But then, the reporter tries to blame Japan’s “ethical and social homogeneous” culture for the horrific monetary policies the country’s leaders have pursued, and for the country’s apparent paucity of “new off-beat ideas and technology, where the key is to be nimble and creative.” Any assertions will do when you are trying to redeem the morass and misery of official multiculturalism.