There was never a great character who did not sometimes smash the routine regulations and make new ones for himself. - Andrew Carnegie
Enemies, Foreign & Domestic
Andrew Sullivan: The Atlantic's Breast Expert?
More and more it's becoming clear that Andrew Sullivan must have been abused as a child by some woman in his life at the time. Following that I guess it was open season on the young and unfortunate lad. Still, the child is father to what passes for the man in Andrew's case, and I guess he has to get his six of the best sans safeword daily or he doesn't feel "normal."
The Atlantic's star-class misogynist reveals his bad craziness today in Palin's Triumph. By any measure, it's a masterpiece of psycho-sexual projection. See if you can even begin to comprehend the diseased brain that can blurt out:
She can electrify a crowd. She has the kind of charisma that appeals to the sub-rational. and she has crafted a Peronist identity - utterly fraudulent, of course - that is political dynamite in a recession with populism roiling everyone and everything. She is Coughlin with boobs - except with a foreign policy agenda to expand Israel and unite with it in a war against Islam.
Do not under-estimate the appeal of a beautiful, big breasted, divinely chosen warrior-mother as a military leader in a global religious war.[Emphasis added]Whew! Even for the accommodating Andrew that's quite a mouthful. One hardly knows where to begin in this paragraph where Sullivan's nature wars with his nurture with an assist from his dubious education. To begin with you've got to love the Father Coughlin reference in which Andrew, a severely lapsed Catholic, grafts breasts onto a dead Canadian priest who promoted Hitler. That's the sort of high and hard inside referencing that signals we're dealing a writer that's "smar-r-ter than the av-er-age bear." Then there's the "Peronist" gambit in which one might think of the historic Evita Peron, except for the fact that when it comes to Andrew the tres-campier Madonna is no doubt first in his mind. (Especially she of the Truth or Dare period.)
Not content to try and get a hand on something with which he's had limited experience, Sullivan stumbles more deeply into the morass of his own mind with a completely phoned-in meditation on Ms. Palin's endowments. I hate to break it to the inexperienced eternal British boy within whom Mr. Sullivan is trapped, but Ms. Palin is simply a normally and pleasantly proportioned female. As such she is, coupled with her other many positive attributes, very attractive. There is nothing either petite or grandiose about her figure. Anyone who has seen a photograph of her in her running gear knows this to be the case. With Lycra all things are revealed. The only place "big breasted" comes into play is on the darkened soccer pitches of Sullivan's own sexual hell. When it comes to an estimate of Ms. Palins conformation, I am confident when I note Sullivan literally "does not know what he is talking about."
Of course all of this is just the standard, factlacking, residual flotsom that bobs about in the drug-laced soup simmering in poor Andrew's seething cranium. But rejoice for it is from that corrupted soup that we get such startling eructations as "divinely chosen warrior-mother as a military leader in a global religious war."
"Dinvinely chosen" is it, Andrew? Boning up on ye olde Joan of Arc, are we Andrew? Out-pythoning ye olde Monty, unfortunate lad?
"Warrior-mother" is it, me boy? I trust she who once and future must be obeyed is long dead. You know that she would have to punish such a naughty boy, don't you?
But lest you think Andrew's little red choo-choo has gone completly round the bend, he pulls it out with the always riveting "military leader in a" (Dare he say it? He do!) "global religious war."
There you have it. Sarah Palin as some armored Carol Doda Amazon singing "Onward Christian Soldiers" as she, along with millions of Israeli cohorts, scales the Western Wall to take back the Temple Mount once and for all. Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition!
All that's lacking to make this "classic" Sullivan dementia is something about his true Moby Dick, Abu Ghraib. But wait. There it is, just below with a Bush reference -- "what happened at Abu Ghraib was wrong." Ah yes, Abu Ghraib. That other attractive/repulsive Sullivan bete noir in which powerful women humiliated naked groveling men. There's something in that scenario that says to Sullivan, "I just can't quit you." It's an implant that needs to be extracted, but that's a job for psychiatric professionals. It would be a long job and I'm willing to bet a shrink could build a beach house for helping Sullivan finally understand the roots of his malignancy and quit inflicting it on the world at large. If I was a rich man I might underwrite it just to spare suffering humanity, but alas I am not. One man, however, could. But should he? He's this man:
Atlantic Owner David G. Bradley:
Believe it or not, this man actually pays Andrew Sullivan. For what is not exactly clear.
David Bradley is the uber-rich DC publisher of the money-hemorrhaging Atlantic who signs Sullivan's paycheck, so I guess he's okay with the constant perverted hate-sotted spew of this pustulant toad. How much longer before Sullivan becomes an out and out embarrassment to Bradley's social and political climbing efforts is anybody's guess.
For the present it's enough to say that as long as Bradley keeps doling out the dosh to Sullivan for his jihad against women and children who plunk his magic twanger, Bradley obviously approves. And that's a perversion that I really can't understand. Maybe he'd do better just paying for Andrew, at long last, to get well; to get clean.
But not in the Hitler Bunker Downfall scene you're used to seeing. (We note that the use of this new scene now means the number of forthcoming Hitler / Downfall parodies has gone from extremely large to virtually infinite.)
Continued...This gets my vote as the anthem for all those from those years who had the vision and the guts to uncolonize their colonized minds.
My Back Pages
Crimson flames tied through my ears
Rollin' high and mighty traps
Pounced with fire on flaming roads
Using ideas as my maps
"We'll meet on edges, soon," said I
Proud 'neath heated brow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.
Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth
"Rip down all hate," I screamed
Lies that life is black and white
Spoke from my skull. I dreamed
Romantic facts of musketeers
Foundationed deep, somehow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.
Girls' faces formed the forward path
From phony jealousy
To memorizing politics
Of ancient history
Flung down by corpse evangelists
Unthought of, though, somehow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.
A self-ordained professor's tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty
Is just equality in school
"Equality," I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.
In a soldier's stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not that I'd become my enemy
In the instant that I preach
My pathway led by confusion boats
Mutiny from stern to bow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.
Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking
I had something to protect
Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.
When they tell you the Earth is warming, send them this link.
5-Minute Arguments
Let's review: The Pam & Tim Tebow in Focus On The Family Commercial was, if you had the sort of insect soul that put credence in such things, supposed to be some sort of knife in the gut of a woman's "right to choose." The 30-second-spot was played up to be the most heinous, knuckle dragging chunk of pure Conservative propaganda ever to be foisted on a gullible American public. It was proclaimed to be something that could return all American women to the age of coat-hangers and back-alley abortionists.
Well, here it is. Judge for yourself...
...and now, judge the critics of this ad for yourself.
Speaking just for myself, of course, it seems to me that what most threatened the hordes of transcultural cretins in their hatefest was the simple decency of the ad and the two people in it. The ad gives us a glimpse into a real where decent people make hard choices and it turns into something wonderful. It seems that there are among us those to whom real decency is the light that reveals not only the good among us, but the twisted dark nature of the realm in which the shameless among us dwell. Those that cannot see this for what it really is are seeing instead some dead darkness they've allowed to dwell inside them. I pity them.
Click-Pix: Blogs on a Roll
It is the privilege you have when you own your own land, your own house, and you have enough Dosh to handle your business and that of your offspring. So you can ignore the rest of the world. I'm striving to be that kind of ignorant, so I don't have to fill my head with other people's news to feel at home in the world....
"I don't want to share the bonds of the bondsman, and though my conscience recognizes his predicament, I don't want to be a part of it. I want to be a freer man than my father and my son to be a perfectly free man. I want that my daughters would marry such men. Let my drama be the human drama of the ordinary sins of ambition in men of ways and means, not the acts of desperation of those migrant prisoners. A free man never becomes a suicide bomber, but he'll try for your wife all the same. The more free men we have, the better our prospects for justice." -- When You Don't Care Enough To Care - Cobb
Enemies, Foreign & Domestic
Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded. -- Gertrude Stein
Atheists, like songwriters, are always seeking lines more glib than true. Glib is golden because it obscures the fact that deep down atheism is, like a pop song, shallow. One of the more tedious quips, oft repeated with a tone that oozes ‘What a good boy am I,’ is "God is just an imaginary friend for adults.”
The possibility that God may have given glib atheists everything – space, time, a planet, evolution, and free will – that allows this bromide to roll trippingly off their tongues is something they will not and can not conceive. Their wetware is not evolved enough to perceive God should He deign to reveal himself. God is not finished buffing out their fatal flaw, although He will be, by and by. Until then they cannot grasp that, in some cases, “imaginary friends” can be as real as their friendship is illusory.
Exhibits A, B, and C today are the Virginia and New Jersey elections last fall and especially the Massachusetts senate election of Scott Brown. These established the new truth of contemporary American politics, “Barack Obama is the imaginary friend of Democrats.” This dovetails well with another of his many roles: Stand-in lower-case god for the vast majority of American atheists.
If there were still any doubt he's only an imaginary friend, last week's run-in between the President and panicked members of his party removed it. The depth to which Obama is willing to betray Democrats is trouble was summed up by a Washington Post writer, PostPartisan in Obama dismisses Blanche Lincoln's plea to be more centrist:
The pivotal moment came when Sen. Blanche Lincoln of deep-red Arkansas, a centrist who’s on her way to defeat in November, practically begged the president to repudiate “extreme” liberals -- a clear reference to the Nancy Pelosi-led House -- and tack to the center. Arguing that the Democrats’ ambitious legislative agenda was sowing job-destroying “uncertainty” in the business community, she asked: “Are we willing as Democrats to push back on our own party?”This was summed up memorably by Ace at Ace of Spades withObama’s reply, in a nutshell: Sorry, Blanche.
If the price of certainty is essentially for us to adopt the exact same proposals that were in place for eight years leading up to the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression -- we don’t tinker with health care, let the insurance companies do what they want, we don’t put in place any insurance reforms, we don’t mess with the banks, let them keep on doing what they’re doing now because we don’t want to stir up Wall Street -- the result is going to be the same. I don’t know why we would expect a different outcome pursuing the exact same policy that got us into this fix in the first place.
Still, give the president credit: No one can accuse him of bending his principles to politics. Of course, if there’s a price to be paid for that this year, he won’t be the one paying it. Blanche Lincoln, among others, will get to do that.
Blanche Lincoln: Please Moderate Your Course So You Don't Get Endangered Democrats Like Me Booted Out of Office.
Obama: FYNQ.
and by one of his commenters as:
Barrack Obama: Do you know what real love is, Blanche?
Blanche Lincoln: No.
Barrack Obama: [whispers in her ear] Sacrifice...
Even as Obama’s methods grow more radical, his means more aggressive, and his motives darker, and his ideology more naked, most Democrats polled persist in their belief that he really is their friend. It’s entirely imaginary, of course, since we see with every passing day that the “friendship” of Obama only lasts as long as it is needed -- by Obama. When the need is no longer there, the friendship fades like the Highland mist at dawn. The now tattered and overused phrase “Under the bus” has become code for “Any speed bumps on Obama's road will be steam-rolled to a flat black stain on the pavement like an armadillo on an Arizona highway in August.”
And yet, if we are to believe the polls, Democrat love for Obama endures in many even as the pain from his policies grows. The tryst that was consummated in the soft and moonlit honeymoon suite in January 2009 by February 2010 seems more and more like a long dark night in Michelle Obama's Dominatrix Dungeon with no safeword. Incomprehensible as it may seem to any neutral observer many Democrats continue to believe, in the face of stark facts daily seen, that Obama is indeed their friend. It has to be tiring because this fantasy -- now entirely a product of the imagination -- requires that greater and greater energy is expended on the part of the believer in "Keeping it real."
How can Democrats continue to "feel the love" even as the whip comes down? Yes, it's perverse but they have no choice. Those that believe Obama is their friend find it necessary to believe. Why is Obama the imaginary friend necessary to them? Because, regardless of their age, all Obama acolytes and most Democrats are children. They need to believe in Obama like Virginia needs to believe in Santa Claus, and like a beaten woman needs to believe her man really loves her. These are immature attitudes but in the USA of the 21st century “childishness” is what we do. It's the one sector of manufacturing in which we still lead the world.
We’ve been producing the manchild, the femchild, and the girly-boy in this country for decades. What the Chinese emperors once did to women's feet we can now do to human souls and we're not outsourcing. The binding that cripples the soul begins in the early indoctrination of kindergarten, where they learn all they need to know and then stop learning much of anything else. To make sure it sticks, the indoctrination is repeated for as long as they remain soaking in the thick multicutural, transnationalist, progressive soup of our educational system:
“The New York Times, Grievance Groups, Government, Diversity = Good” vs “The Great Books, Individualism, Responsibility, America = Bad.”That’s pretty much it these days. Rinse and repeat that mantra like a Hari Krishna on crack and you too can actually succeed in school right up to a Ph.D. in “Diversity Studies.”
It’s Big Education’s formula for stunting spiritual growth and producing Peter Pans and Pams that won’t and can’t grow up. As a result the liberal Democrat's capacity for sustaining imaginary friends never really abates. Indeed, with some many Baby Hueys living well into their fifth and sixth decade the imaginary friend demand was exceeding the supply. This was all solved by Big Media’s manufacture and distribution of Barack Obama as a kind of “Barabi Doll – The Only Imaginary Friend You’ll Ever Need!”
As some have gotten chary of pointing out, Obama was tailor made (by an as yet unknown tailor in an as yet undisclosed location) for rich and/or liberal white people. It was a classic example of branding a substandard product in such a way that it gained major market share in the target demographic. Without them, Obama was nothing. Without Obama, they were less than zero.
What was the product? It was “Your New Best Friend in the White House.” It was “President Jed Bartlet, But Better Because a Bit Blacker.” To underscore this point comedian and soothsayer Chris Rock has a routine in which he relates,
“These days black folks have a LOT of white friends and white folks all have ONE black friend.”This has, he notes, been a trend for quite some time and, given the relative population percentages of African-Americans versus Americans of the Caucasian persuasion, it was only a matter of time before there was an African-American/Caucasian friend gap.
Obama seems to fill that gap providing “a friend in need.” He’s cool. He’s slender. You not only want him to come to dinner, but to stay for the long weekend and bring his family. His family is picture perfect in a Tiffany frame. You want that framed picture with you in it to hang on your ego wall. Obama knows you want that photo-op more than anything. He also knows what you like to hear, and he knows how to say it when he’s doing just the opposite. His stiletto is so smooth you hardly feel it going in.
Obama is a better liar than most politicians because he’s far beyond shame. Shame was stripped out of him as a teenager. Shame is for sissies. Truth is not the tool of tyrants.
Most of all Obama knows how hard it is to stop loving someone even when you see them buying lap dances from Nancy Pelosi night-after-night in the champagne court at the back of the DC titty bar. Like all abusive spouses, Obama knows that once he can get you to stick around after he’s been unfaithful and knocked you around, you’ll stay around for even more abuse and infidelity. Why? Because you’ve come to need the abuse more than the love; you’ve come to want more than anything else to just spend more time close to him in the hope that he’ll change and finally feel your pain and feed your needs.
The problem is your needs may be real, but Obama’s got a full schedule when it comes to his “Let’s wreck America as quickly and completely as possible” needs. He just doesn’t have time to hang out with you. So you’ll just have to imagine the love.
Where did this compulsive need for an imaginary friend come from? A 2006 study of the phenomenon of imaginary friends by Dr. Louise Newman, child psychiatrist and the director of the New South Wales Institute of Psychiatry , sheds a glimmer of light:
Most children grow out of imaginary friends, Newman says. But in some cases an imaginary friend can emerge in adulthood, usually in response to trauma, inability to cope with stress and sometimes psychotic illness.In rare cases some adults develop what's known as Doppelganger syndrome, which occurs when they believe a twin or invisible friend accompanies them.
Seen in that light, it’s easy to understand why so many folks retain the impression of Obama as their imaginary friend. It is, as it always is, the fault of George W. Bush. What was once the mental disease that crippled tens of millions of American minds, "Bush Derangement Syndrome" (BDS), has morphed into "Obama Arrangement Syndrome" (OAS)
which requires that people interpret or ignore events in a manner that reinforces their preconceived, and rigid, notions about Obama.
If Bush Derangement Syndrome needed a 12-step program, Obama Arrangement Syndrome is going to need a 13-step program. It begins with, “We admited to ourselves and others that the idea Barack Obama was our friend was utterly imaginary, and no matter how many times he promised it we were never going to be sharing long, hot showers into the wee hours of the morning.”
Last night upon the stair
I saw a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
I hope he never goes away
-- Variation on a nursery rhyme
[Rewritten, updated, and republished from November 4, 2009]
InVerse
They expose the unwanted infant
On a hot flat stone, or throw it
Whirling head over foot into the ravine
For the raven's obscene brunch,
And walk back down
Their barren blasted Hill
To their village of rocks,
Hearing the mother’s moans,
Approving the father's stern smile.
All male, the state demands,
And sound.
Critical Mass
Mark H reports: Hasn't been officially announced yet, but there's a new recall on electric mowers made by a Toyota subsidiary....
Click-Pix: Blogs on a Roll
Vultures of a feather! “To his eminence the Grand Mufti, 4 VII 1943, in remembrance H Himmler”
The Watcher @ Watcher of Weasels notes that both, though separated by time, distance, and death have sided with Palestinians against the Jews; as shown in two pieces of original research that have won this week's contest.
First in the Council category is Mere Rhetoric's deeply researched and illustrated - Yahoo Wipes “Ariel, Israel” Off The Map, Replaces It With “Jenin, Palestinian Occupied Territories”. It's an article that will make you regret you ever Yahooed:
Apparently someone has convinced Yahoo to go into their News Weather data, erase “Ariel, Israel” as a valid location, and replace it “Jenin, Palestinian Occupied Territories.” The 20,000 residents from Ariel, where the relevant weather station is built, apparently don’t deserve their own weather. Yahoo has decreed that it belongs to the residents of Jenin, which is 25 miles north and 850 feet lower.
Paired with Mere Rhetoric, is Pamela Geller's article @ Atlas Shrugs - historical investigation, From Himmler with Love: “His Eminence, the Grand Mufti, In Remembrance”.
Here the tale of two monsters gets personalized. The captured files of the German High Command in Flansburg at the war’s end reveal that the Arab riots of 1936 in Palestine were carried out by the Mufti with funds supplied by the Nazis. The report states: “Only through funds made available by Germany to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was it possible to carry out the revolt in Palestine.”History that many have forgotten and are, as a consequence, on the verge of repeating.
In my own idiosyncratic "Best Headline" category, best in show has to go to Wolf Howling - The Three Stooges Meet Al Qaeda In Undiegate.
After Obama has had a full year in office, and after he had inherited a functioning system from the Bush administration, this is truly scandalous - not to mention incredibly dangerous for America. Call it Undiegate.
And my own "Oh, This Is Going to Be No Fun at All" category choice is J. E. Dyer's description of the grand SNAFU that will be the elimination of the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy, Commentary Contentions - When the Telling Starts.
The issue will be forced by lawsuit if by no other means. A 20-year veteran with combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan may not be comfortable, for example, endorsing “Gay Pride Month” or participating in scheduled military celebrations of it. He may be charged by a gay subordinate with creating a hostile work environment or ordered by a senior officer to get onboard with gay-pride celebrations. Perhaps his chain of command would back him up and force the issue to a higher level. The serious question remains: what does this have to do with warfighting readiness?
The complete listings of the awards follows:
Continued...Grace Notes
It's a cloudy rain day here in Seattle. Ditto Nashville. "Listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go."
Dated? You bet. But update the hair and the clothes and you've got a Tea Party anthem for 2010 right there. Better still, everybody knows the words.
Continued...This May Be the Greatest Campaign Web Video of All Time
"In California’s GOP Senate primary, Carly Fiorina released a web attack ad against Tom Campbell that is being called “psychedelic.” I think it’s destined to be remembered as a classic. It combines what sounds like the soundtrack to “The Exorcist,” a narrator who sounds like he's imitating Morgan Freeman with the stratospheric dudgeon of Keith Olbermann’s “Special Comments,” and then the grand finale: evil, menacing, vaguely cybernetic sheep with glowing red eyes. Two minutes and thirty seconds into the video, you will be screaming, “What the hell is that?!?” and reaching for any available firearms." -- Jim Geraghty
[Original image courtesy of Insty. ]
Drool-Cup Award
From Curmudgeonly & Skeptical -- Your go-to source for demented insanity that somehow makes sense.
What can I say? Around here, it's just all videos all the time lately. It's a great thing that folks everywhere are starting to use original videos as the attack dogs of alternative media. Keep it up and it won't be so "alternative" any more.
Come to think of it, it's not. It's "Citizen Media."
The Post-American Bandstand with Pat Boone. Yes, Pat Boone.
In which the Founding Fathers rock the house world! Amazing.
And just when you think you've got it, they kick it into the 21st century. Created by Tim Alden Grant, one of the brilliant folks at Soomo Publishing.
HT: Daphne.
Professor Beck schools Arianna ("Zsa Zsa") Huffington to a fare-thee-well:
Next step, find someone who will flame Huffington hairless.
Drive-By
Cobb takes a look at this Hollywood warhorse and goes someplace unique:
In the genre of "wow check out these weird African animals and tribes" flicks, I'm not very savvy. And for the sake of stating the obvious, you can clearly see why the African nations involved did their best to get whole villages decked out and put all in frame for the sake of the whiteys on and off camera and in posterity. Pictures of elephant are a dime a dozen, but native dance on that scale just doesn't play very often here in the States. I was flat mesmerized, especially for the final shindig. I actually got into that sentimental zone where I'm thinking - maybe we've lost something extraordinary here. I don't know. Have we? It does get back to the question of what a free man does on the daily. After all, it's the Left who wants everyone to have a state guaranteed minimum wage, affordable housing and a small, fuel efficient car with airbags. The Watusi don't want that, do they? So who is going about destroying indigenous culture? It's the socialist, because he can't leave anybody alone. Not in Darfur, not in Somalia, not in Haiti. Everyone must be rescued. Everyone must have health care. Everyone must have instant citizenship in the comfiest nation on Earth. You know, before it warms over. -- King Solomon's Mines - Cobb
Enemies, Foreign & Domestic
Obama's agenda in one sentence: I made this brief confessional clip because I know it will come in very handy over and over again. Bookmark so you can refer to it whenever you ask yourself, "But... but... why?"
Glenn Beck is good on TV but his real genius blooms on the radio. Here he takes on Chris Matthews' racist statement,"I forgot Obama was black for an hour," and riffs it into shreds.
"Boy this surgeon that was doing the surgery on me was so unbelievable I forgot he was black for an hour."
"I was talking to my pharmacist behind the counter, and he was such a nice guy I forgot he was black for an hour."
HT: The Morgan.
Enemies, Foreign & Domestic
Ask Alice: Originator of the Tea Party idea, Keli Carender, in a brand new Wonderland. April, 2009
In my mail this morning from NPR.org was a request for permission to use my photograph above from Don't Tread - Seattle Tea Party, 2009 @ AMERICAN DIGEST.
Hello, I work for NPR.org and I am preparing a Web page for tomorrow’s Morning Edition story about Keli Carendar. I found a photo of Carendar on americandigest.com that we would like to use to accompany the story. The specific photo is this one: http://americandigest.org/eatpartyorganizer.jpg. My story is due today at 4 pm Eastern time. Thank you so much for your time and help.Having seen how NPR operates during the recent "How To Speak Tea Bag" episode, I felt I had to reply as follows:
I regret that I must decline permission for the use of my photograph in the forthcoming NPR. org story. Although I was once a contributor to NPR and worked for several years as a broadcaster for Pacifica Radio @ KPFA, I no longer trust either organization as a source. As a result I cannot, in good conscience, support them.I'll be watching how they treat Carendar @ Morning Edition.
Grace Notes
How, when my emerald voices pray
In the crystal heart, and the bright chimes
Sound along the shoals of day,
Shall I not hunt among the stones
To touch your shadowed silent lips,
And listen in my vaults of bone
For those wave-shattered psalms of sea
That promise soon, O my bright shade!,
The flame that bends my soul to thee?
Grace Notes
Dave Brubeck Quartet, Live in Belgium 1964. Cool, blue, black and white. Jazz doesn't get better than this. It just gets more elaborate.
[HT: Butch Bornt. Clip From Stephen Worth's Excellent YouTube Channel. His "Adventures in Music" series is highly recommended. ]
Grace Notes
"God is my co-sniper." -- Velociman
Click
U.S. Army Sgt. Daniel Alonzo, of the 177th Field Artillery Regiment, 172nd Brigade, allows an Iraqi police officer to look at his M-4 carbine assault rifle at a post in Hayy, Iraq. Light-enhancing combat rifle sights made by Trijicon for U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan carry an ID number on them like the one pictured above (top center): "ACOG4X32JN8:12" - which reads as "Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight, 4x32, John 8:12", referring to a Bible verse with the last six characters. That verse is "Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, 'I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life'". After concerns were raised about about whether the inscriptions break a government rule that bars proselytizing by American troops, Trijicon has now announced that it will no longer imprint the verses on the sides of scopes intended for the U.S. military. -- The Big PictureIt will come to a Crusade. Depend upon it.
Spirit rover landed on Mars in January of 2004 to take a look around and show us what it saw. Its 90 day mission is still extending itself, even if Spirit is currently stuck, over six years later.
From the consistently brilliant xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe
Click-Pix: Blogs on a Roll
First Place, Council: Wonderful: Iraqis Permanently Scratch Out Ancient Hebrew Inscription On Biblical Prophet's Tomb @ Mere Rhetoric
Let's put the Palestinian Authority in charge of Jewish and Christian holy sites. Sure they're actively destroying Jewish artifacts on the Temple Mount and in Hebron, to say nothing of how they desecrated Joseph's Tomb and turned it into a mosque. In fact this "tombs to mosques" thing is in danger of becoming something of a pattern. But respect for non-Islamic faiths is an integral part of practicing "real Islam." I read that somewhere. So let's take a chance.
First Place, Non-Council: The Post-COIN Era is Here @ zenpundit.com
Spending $60 billion annually on Afghanistan, a nation with a GDP of roughly $ 20 billion, for the next 7 years, is not going to be in the cards. Not at a time of 10 % unemployment, when the Congress will be forced to cut Medicare, education, veteran's benefits, eliminate COLA's on Social Security or raise the retirement age and income taxes. Who is going to want to "own an ambitious "nation-building" program at election time?Complete results below: Continued...
What's Just So Wrong With This Picture?
Don't say your government's plans for "stimulus" and "recovery" can't get worse. They can. Those who do not remember the past are condemned to be building roads in Alaska.
The road runs for over two thousand kilometres through the wildest terrain of the Asian continent, connecting Magadan and Yakutsk, and making an enormous loop through the Siberian mountains in order to reach the hundreds of gold mines that once operated there.
Forced labour was used to construct every inch of this incredible project -- at first by inmates of labour camps, but later by the unfortunate denizens of the gulags that began springing up all over these near-uninhabitable provinces of Stalin's Soviet empire. Many were Russian POW's, banished to the region after being labelled German "collaborators". Many were Russian Christians who refused to renounce their faith under the Communist regime. Prisoners were chained except when they were working their twelve-hour shifts. Many died during transport alone, and thousands were shot by the officers for not working hard enough. And any worker who died during construction of the road was buried where he fell -- survivors' reports indicate that bodies were as common a sight as fallen logs.-- Stalin's Road of Bones
Happy Workers Camp with Pictures of Dear Leader
Grace Notes
'Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. and I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye. I know it; I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy.' -Holden Caulfield
There will be a lot of comment coming our way today and tomorrow on the eccentric life of J. D. Salinger. And it will all fade into the blathering brainfuzz of the forgettable carpers and critics and other associated craphounds of our blighted culture. They all will fail, fall, and be erased by next weeks whining. What will remain standing will be The Catcher in the Rye.
The blunt fact of the writing life is that if you can write one --just one -- book like The Catcher in the Rye, you don't have to do anything or or be anything or explain anything to anyone ever again. Period.
American Studies
[Note: I'll be traveling for a day and so, in light of the SOTUS last night, I am reposting this from October of 2008. That's before the election, before the anointing, and before the fall. Nothing I have seen since that October has dissuaded me. And I still pray he is never really tested. The Cowardly Lion makes for great fiction but not as a leader in the real world. That's a recipe for disaster.]
What an enormous number of sheaths!
Isn't the kernel soon coming to light?
I'm blessed if it is! To the innermost centre,
It's nothing but sheaths - each smaller and smaller -
Nature is witty!
- Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt, Act V, Sc.5
When you peel off the layers of signifying and symbolizing, of blathering and bamboozling, Obama lacks in the elemental qualities of manliness necessary to be President. Obama is like the onion in Peer Gynt. Take away the layers there's nothing at the core.
You’ll peel past many layers about helping people, about caring, about giving and devotion of the Obama onion. Those pungent peels taste good to the poor, the grasping, the gullible, the craven, and the rich-so-rich that nothing dents their days. The layers remain the common malarkey of the con-man who hopes that by stimulating your greed for grub or good feelings now, he'll be able to hoover your bank account later. It's an old con and it works. That's why con-men are always with us; not because they are so smart, but because so many are so stupid. Con-artists (and Obama is a brilliant flim-flam flinger) not only know this, they depend upon it.
Obama is very much a man with “a hand full of gimme and a mouth full of much obliged.” Just this morning, as he has for so many mornings, he wrote to me asking for five bucks. This after he squandered so many millions just last night with his noninfomercial for flaming narcissists of all five genders. It’s obvious the man and his minions can't handle money.
The money, however, is trivial. What is critical is whether or not the person for whom I'm voting has the right stuff to lead this country. Right up at the top of that list for me is manliness. And by that I do not mean a quality exclusive to men. Rather I mean the old-fashioned values of courage and the ability to do the right thing, the strong thing, under pressure - regardless of the consequences. Those who do not know what I mean by "manliness" by now will never know it, but by way of example I'll cite the most recent President to possess it, George Bush.
Enemies, Foreign & Domestic
Last night, Chris Matthews leg was tingling as hard as blue steel.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: You know, I was trying to think about who he was tonight, and it's interesting: He is post-racial by all appearances. You know, I forgot he was black tonight for an hour. You know, he's gone a long way to become a leader of this country and passed so much history in just a year or two. I mean, it's something we don't even think about. I was watching, I said, "Wait a minute. He's an African-American guy in front of a bunch of other white people, and there he is, President of the United States, and we've completely forgotten that tonight. Completely forgotten it." Via Newsbusters.
There's not a lot that is genuinely "interesting" about Chris Matthews. The albino schlub you see is the albino schlub you get. Of late, however, it is entertaining to watch him quietly triangulate away from the Olbermann-Maddow Axis of Idiots. I think that Matthews is struggling to put a palpable gap between himself and the Obamlatio twins but at the same time stay on the Obama administration's good side and preserve his access as a dependable tool. Why?
As some have noted, ownership of MSNBC has recently passed from GE to Comcast. Unlike GE for whom MSNBC was worth about a nickel, MSNBC is a much better fit with cable giant Comcast. And when it comes to reviewing their properties, Comcast may notice that Olbermann-Maddow, regardless of current abysmal ratings, actually inhibit the growth and success of the channel. Where GE thinks of "MSNBC" as some sort of "loss leader." Comcast thinks of it in terms of "How many subscribers does this channel attract or drive away?" Comcast is much more likely to be a harsh taskmaster in this regard and will look to cut losses.
When that happens, Matthews wants to be the "voice of calm reason and balanced bias" in the triumvirate of tripe that form MSNBC's "news" team. Matthews wants to be the survivor and is the only one of the three that has some room for maneuver. It's a game of "last man standing" and Matthews is a "playa."
Continued...
American Studies
Mr. Speaker, Vice President Cheney, Members of Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow citizens:
As we gather tonight, our Nation is at war, our economy is in recession, and the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers. Yet the state of our Union has never been stronger.
We last met in an hour of shock and suffering. In four short months, our Nation has comforted the victims … begun to rebuild New York and the Pentagon … rallied a great coalition … captured, arrested, and rid the world of thousands of terrorists … destroyed Afghanistan’s terrorist training camps … saved a people from starvation … and freed a country from brutal oppression.Continued...
Enemies, Foreign & Domestic
Too much obsession is a mistake.
"You see? You see? He beckons. He's dead but he beckons."
Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in the healthcare bill's whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal democrat could do, the solid white buttress of the 2,000 pages of the bill's bull smote the Democrats' port bow, till House and Senate reeled. Some in previously safe-seats fell flat upon their faces. Like dislodged dodos, the heads of the Congressmen aloft shook on their reed-thin political necks. Through the breach of Brown, they heard the raging flood waters of wee-weed-off voters pour, as mountain torrents down a flume....
Continued...Innovations
Oh Broth, Where are Thou? @ The Bold Italic is one of those rare web articles that merges design, type, copy, and subject matter that leaves you hungry for more writing and much more pho:
For many, “Bay Area cuisine” conjures up images of avocados, tacos, small plates, Alice Waters and disappointingly, for David Chang, the vision of a few balsamic vinegar-drizzled figs on a plate. But for me, San Francisco is all about the pho.YUM!™
Heroes & Hustlers
This Year
Ah, how the mighty have stumbled.... and even gotten their pants leg wet. Things weren't always so much in the "Hey, kids, let's dump on our cool president" mode that's become fashionable these recent weeks. Once upon a time, the kids all loved daddy cool. They even gave him a founder's wig to wear.... once upon a time....
✪ Thinking Right ✪
Are You Now or Have You Ever Been a "Denialist?"
Paul Dennis, Head of Stable Isotope and Noble Gas Geochemistry Laboratories at UEA, has produced studies in support of Global Warming, but this didn't stop him falling under the Inquisitors's suspicion. Police told The Guardian that Dennis had been questioned. Like witches in the old days, Dennis had apparently shown signs of aberrant or 'denialist' behaviour. He reportedly refused to sign a petition in support of disgraced CRU director Phil Jones, and had communicated with Lucifer Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre, who over the years has uncovered malpractice amongst the High Priests of Paleoclimatology. One of the Priesthood, NASA's Gavin Schmidt and Real Climate blog, tipped the wink to UK Police.
PermaLink
My "Miss Me Yet?" Memework is Bearing Fruit
Maybe they should just get a room and go fuck themselves...
The fear and farce of climate-change science - The Globe and Mail
Fear: “There were death threats,” Phil Jones said. “People said I should go and kill myself. They said they knew where I lived. I did think about it, yes. About suicide.”
Farce: The comic figure is Rajendra Pachauri, the 69-year-old chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. His fight to save his career over a faulty IPCC report about melting glaciers did not prevent him from publishing a novel – his first – that drips with sex and romance.
The Power of Palin
Write 3 words on your palm for question hour, and suddenly the entire drool-cup left and the crack-pipe media is giving itself a handjob for a long weekend.
Bump & Update: Palin Campaigns For Rick Perry– Writes “Hi Mom” On Her Hand! -- Gateway Pundit Game, set, match to Palin.
This Just In
"At the home of a prominent warmist"
Rodger the Real King of France Schools Newsbuster's Tim Graham
"I readily stipulate that the legitimate questioning of Obama's birth now serves as a distraction. Okay? Even though we birthers own 100% of the facts, agitpropped mistakes notwithstanding. But f**k you Graham! For equating us with racists. You've been hanging around Liberals too long. My advice: move to a farm in the Midwest and work out of the kitchen for a year. 'Till you get grounded. I hope we're still friends." -- Curmudgeonly & Skeptical[I readily stipulate that I snagged the quote partially so I could snag the illustration too.]
Odd Fellows
Darwin did not believe that his ability to know truth was limited by natural selection, any more than Freud thought that his ability to understand unconscious motivation was was limited by his own unconscious motivation. So we end up with Darwin and his spiritually and metaphysically retarded heirs, who devote (an interesting word) their lives to the purpose of proving that the world is purposeless, freely insisting that free will is an illusion, and absurdly affirming that only their opinion has the unique privilege of transcending their own paradigm and therefore being true.
What It Was, (And Should Be) Was Football
so one of the kids brings a football, and they play that. And football isn't banned, because no one thought of it yet. And the absurdity of allowing mobs of pre-teens to chase one another if one is holding a ball, but not if their hands are empty, seems to be lost on the school administration. At least for now. And I, for one, am glad of it.
"I'm not as worried about my son being injured playing football as I am in contemplating the little straitjacket world he's being fitted for. Those children decided on the rules, supplied their equipment --a ball-- and played their game without any adult supervision; and I saw a lot less kvetching among them than at any organized sporting event they participate in. I'm leery of them being told that someone will always tell them exactly what to do, and simultaneously unerringly protect them from not only from harm, but hurt feelings. One aspect of that tandem of supervision is repugnant, and the other unlikely. -- Sippican Cottage
Dis of the Day
Snowmageddon!
I was seriously rejected from a social situation once because I mocked global warming. You watch: there will be no apologies, no retractions, no gracious self-deprecation. Here's an alternative: I Thought of Killing Myself, Says Climate Scandal Professor Phil Jones." == Snowmageddon, Snowpocalypse, Gore Storm - Washington Rebel
Headline of the Day
Regarding His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales
is a well of pissulence that never runs dry. He truly is a twatmeistering cunt-bugle of the very first water. When he isn’t building Potemkin villages or talking to organic vegetables or wishing he was an unattractive woman’s tampon he is being over six feet (I never knew they stacked shit that high in Windsor) of national embarrassment in a double-breasted jacket..." -- The Prince of Darkness – Counting Cats in Zanzibar
The Rotting Souls of the Liberal Elite
by which the very rich, immune to both the realities of tough living and the hurt of high taxes, finds solace, self-worth, penance even, by sympathy for big government entitlement for the less fortunate whom they connive hourly to avoid. Prep schools are jammed with the children of those who damn charter schools and vouchers; environmentalism's most articulate advocates of small is better live in ways undreamed by the masses they wish to rein in. The greatest advocates of public expenditure, whether a Rangel, Geithner, or Daschle, are quite busy ensuring that they themselves will not have to pay for it all. -- Works and Days ｻ Civilization's Lies
"Ultimate Plane De-Icing"
Timelapse footage of crews removing US Airways Flight 1549 from the Hudson River
Global Dirting! Oh No. Here They Go Again.
[Updated and bumped.]
No sooner do we start to see the well-whipped backside of "Global Warming," then the bozos try on a little "Global Dirt Crisis!"Fertile soil is being lost faster than it can be replenished and will eventually lead to the “topsoil bank” becoming empty, an Australian conference heard. Chronic soil mismanagement and over farming causing erosion, climate change and increasing populations were to blame for the dramatic global decline in suitable farming soil, scientists said. -- Britain facing food crisis as world's soil 'vanishes in 60 years' - Telegraph"Scientists said" is becoming the numero uno phrase that gripes my ass. Would somebody just gather up these blathering scientists and bury them? Update: In a discussion in the comments, rainycityjazz makes this observation:
Soil does wear away, blow away, get depleted and washed away. Soil also deposits and builds up and is enriched and improved and created anew. In fact we know quite well how to make and retain soil, and have ample materials to do just that where needed.
Soil loss is not a magic catastrophe liberals can manipulate to guarantee them dictatorial control over everything and everyone else. It is simply a large but manageable scientific problem. Israel turned supposedly impossible land into an agricultural paradise. Eastern Washington State has been transfigured from high plateau desert to abundant food factory using not much more than alfalfa and irrigation canals.
Sorry about that, future Algores of the loam. We can, and will, fix our soil problems without you forcing re-education camps, draconian population reduction schemes or massive income and power redistribution on the rest of us. Nice try, though.
Employees AND Customers Must Wash Glands Before Returning
"We've always had little trysts in our bathrooms," says chef/co-owner Donna Dooher, pointing to lingering weekday lunches as a popular time. "We're taking it to the next level on Valentine's weekend." The restaurant's four bathrooms light up outside when occupied. Staff have learned to watch the light flicker twice when two customers enter the same bathroom, usually a few minutes apart.Ask aptly named Donna Dooher for the Blue Plate Special with Happy Ending.
Missing
Every parent's nightmare:
"Sound hurts your skin when your child's gone missing. Heightened senses cause every whisper to grate, the slightest aroma becomes nauseating, appetite is a remnant of some past life and the simple act of breathing becomes an ache of hard work. Sleep cannot happen, missing an hour on watch would be an unforgivable sin. You feel like the animal you truly are when your child turns up gone, reduced to little more than compulsive pacing or unnatural stillness and nothing, not a single blessed thing, exists except for his face and your need to hold it between your hands...." -- Cat's Cradle ｫ Jaded Haven
"Please don't wake me, no don't shake me..."
When I wake up early in the morning,
Lift my head, I'm still yawning
When I'm in the middle of a dream
Stay in bed, float up stream
Please don't wake me,
No don't shake me
Leave me where I am
I'm only sleeping
-- The Beatles
The Right Lawyers for the Right Job
Holder Seeks Help with Special Qualifications: "
The U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division is seeking up to 10 experienced attorneys for the position of Trial Attorney.... The Civil Rights Division encourages qualified applicants with targeted disabilities to apply. Targeted disabilities are deafness, blindness, missing extremities, partial or complete paralysis, convulsive disorder, mental retardation, mental illness, severe distortion of limbs and/or spine." -- U. S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE CIVIL RIGHTS DIVISION, VOTING SECTION TRIAL ATTORNEY, GS-14/15I wonder if absence of the sense of justice qualifies too.
Watermelon for Dessert Costs Extra
All the sign needs is Bill Clinton, asking for someone to fetch him some coffee. At least the sign is light-colored and not written in "negro dialect".The condescending racism of liberal institutions just never stops. I mean isn't it insult enough that they got the shortest month?
Best Picture: Nonexistent Congressional District 9
about an incompetent liberal progressive government that claims to have funneled $6.4 billion in stimulus money to 440 congressional districts, which creates or saves 30,000 jobs. Hi-jinks ensue when it is discovered that the districts don't exist. It's a great movie although the concept is difficult to believe, America would never elect such idiots -- Imaksim [HT: iowntheworld ]
On Dumbth
In recent years we have made something of a fetish
out of nuance. Especially when it came to defending political candidates who could not think clearly or could not make up their minds or who tried to straddle too many competing opinions at once. John Kerry and Barack Obama were widely proclaimed to be geniuses because they engaged in cognitive disfluency and low concept. -- Had Enough Therapy?: Cognitive Fluency
DADT: "Their opinion will become your obligation."
The national culture has subtly changed, and now the love that once dared not speak its name is all too happy and in fact compelled to trumpet itself from the parapets, desiring not merely tolerance but also approbation. Because of the peoplesâ need to know, or something. So tomorrow, or next week, or next month the law will change, the military will dutifully tack to the winds political, a half a dozen servicemen will announce that they prefer it this way rather than that, and their comrades will mostly say, "Yeah, I always kind of thought so," yawn and move on.
Which is where it will get interesting, because the bureaucracy is nothing if not persistent. Rules will be written to ensure that gays and lesbians in committed partnerships have precisely the same access to housing, medical care, insurance coverage, tax preferences and all of those cohabitational benefits traditionally assigned to those whose procreative potential serves to raise the next nation of tax payers. Which, you know, was rather the point of all those benefits, the next generation typically being troublesome beasts and tyrants until theyâve learned their manners, not to mention an enormous drain on the family fisc.
Military law is federal law, and can be cited in non-military federal courts as precedent. The militaryâs rules and regulations will be cited by an enthusiastic cohort of civil rights lawyers intent on reforming Alabama, Mississippi and anyone possessing antiquated, traditional or religious notions of the cornerstone importance of the nuclear, two-parent family until once again they are ground under the heel of a benevolent national government. Their opinion will become your obligation. The movie script writes itself.
Which was, I suspect, the point all along. -- DADT « Neptunus Lex
Vanderbilt chaplain agrees that homosexuals should be killed
"Let me be clear of my own position here. Asked a straightforward question, Mr. Binhazim gave an equally straightforward answer: This is what Islam says and I am bound by the tenets of Islam to accept it. I personally do not think he should be disciplined or fired for answering the question, even as bluntly as he did. But there is not the slightest doubt in my Vanderbilt-alumnus mind that a Christian chaplain would indeed be disciplined by the university. So what Vanderbilt will do now is something of a defining question for the school. It prides itself on being tolerant and inclusive. Well, let's see just how tolerant and for what it shall be.
Not Feeling the Love
One sign that Washington, D.C., had been home to Obama Mania was the number of independent retailers selling all sorts of Obama merchandise. Every street corner, it seemed, had Obama wares (or Obama wear) for sale. Now, however, most of the winter caps for sale are not emblazoned with the Obama logo. T-shirts depicting our president as a dunking Michael Jordan, a victorious Muhammad Ali, or saber-baring Luke Skywalker (yes, these shirts all existed) are nowhere to be found. This time last year, the Obama Store was teeming with customers. Ideally situated in the basement of Washington’s Union Station, the store was filled with consumers eager to buy anything with Obama’s likeness while others took pictures of the life-size cut-outs of the president and first lady. Now, the Obama Store is boarded up. -- USNews
Illustration via A Small Reminder - Cobb
The Watcher of Weasels Council
