A RESPONSE TO DANIEL HENNINGER'S :"Ghost Busters" in the Wall Street Journal:
"Iraq is just like Vietnam except: We occupy Hanoi. We've captured Ho Chi Minh.
The North Vietnamese have just held a free and democratic election. The North Vietnamese are working on a new constitution. Yes, Iraq is just like Vietnam." -- Art Fougner - Flushing, N.Y.
Pointer from The Anchoress.
AS PROMISED on Monday, I've posted the interpretations of the questions asked in The Landscape Game at the end of that item.
AT SOME POINT THIS WEEK, my trusty Site Meter will register 2,000,000 visits to this page since June 9, 2003. This point will be reached about a fortnight short of the second anniversary of American Digest. I don't really understand 2 million anything other than, while it is not a lot of money any longer, I could certainly use the dollar version in order to devote the rest of my life to finishing my decades long argument with Dante. (Don't ask. You don't want or need to know.)
A previous version of this page -- ( American Digest - Dispatches from the New America) was begun in early 2002 in reaction to the events of 9/11, but the only extant pages from that in the at the Way Back Machine date from May of that year. It is
Continued...Once Only
almost at the equator
almost at the equinox
exactly at midnight
from a ship
the full
moon
in the center of the sky.
--- Gary Snyder, 1958
I DON'T REMEMBER WHO FIRST PLAYED "The Landscape Game" with me. It would have been many, many years ago. I also don't remember what my answers were to the game's ten questions, but I wish I had written them down. Played once the game is played forever. Once the first answers are lost, they are lost forever.
You can only play The Landscape Game once in your life. Once you know the questions and the interpretations any chance of replying honestly and openly is gone. It is one of those things that, if you know the "solution," makes any further revelation impossible. "The Landscape Game" is true once and once only.
In a day or so you will see why.
The good thing about the game is that once it has been played with you, you can then play it with others. The only provision is that those you play it with can never have played it before. If that has happened, the game is not just spoiled, there's no real point to it.
Continued..."Star Wars ROTS!... Slowly I turn... step by step... inch by inch..."
I CAN'T BE THE ONLY ONE IN THE WORLD that is ready to take up a large, sharp, double-edged broad sword, and wade into the clots of lines, flailing randomly, until all about me are reduced to quivering gobbets of bloody flesh if I hear, read, or see one more item about the aptly acronymed Star Wars ROTS.
THERE'S REALLY NO ESCAPE from the abiding stupidity of what currently passes for "Western Culture." We have, it would seem, crossed some ghastly Rubicon of sensibility in which many among us have no frame of reference by which to measure evil. Instead these stunted souls seem determined to wallow in the banal and the trivial, asserting that only these tiny concerns have any meaning. It is the zero-sum "philosophy" of moral relativism branded into actual lives. And the afflicted seem to enjoy running the red-hot iron of nullity into their brains over and over. An addiction to absolute zero that no drug other than Nihilism can sate.
Today's exhibit #1 of our decline in which our fellow Westerners seem to rejoice is the utterly fabricated hue and cry over some snapshots of a monster in his underwear.
HAVING ONCE SEEN THE AGED NORMAN MAILER NAKED, any subsequent appearance by the befuddled sage of Brooklyn Heights brings that image back and causes my brain to cringe. It's hard to take a once admired writer seriously after a glance at the wreck time has made of his body, but usually the wisdom that comes with age overcomes the multiplying flaws of the decrepit container.
Alas, as we have seen often in the past, and now again in the present, wisdom has not seen fit to visit Mailer, the aging hipster. Instead we are reminded again of the dreadful toll taken on the old by creeping senile dementia. How else can we explain Mailer's dreadful tour de drool on the execrable The Huffington Post? Long gone is any effort to
Continued...In which it is demonstrated the Dick Durbin is not an exception, but the rule.
OVER THE WEEKEND it was impossible to miss that, with Michael Jackson on extended leave in his own private Thailand, Dick Durbin had become the current media boy-toy in America. This because of a simple statement he made. To wit, or sans wit if you will, it was "If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime - Pol Pot or others - that had no concern for human beings."
That simple statement has been parsed from here to eternity so I'll spare you the footnotes. Simply put, as an American today, you either jump into Durbin's rhetorical mosh pit and root about in the muck with him and his fans, or you stand on the heights above and wonder why you don't have some hefty boulders to heave into it. It's a love it or hate it kind of thing.
But whatever it may be on Durbin's part, it is not a mistake, an error, a foolish quip, or a prematurely senior moment. It is, in short, nothing less than a politician doing what politicians do best: following the lead of his masses.
There's been some huffing and puffing in Washington and elsewhere in what is left of the amazing shrinking Democratic Party. This blather usually takes the form of 'the Durbin statement really does not reflect the immense regard and esteem in which the Democrats hold the American troops.' But that's all rank nonsense.
Continued...FOR REASONS OBVIOUS AND NOT SO, I'll be moving to Seattle in September. Quite a change from my perch here high above the Pacific in Laguna Beach, and not without its drawbacks -- moving itself, for starters. Still, this beach idyll, if you don't ride the wild surf, is not without its drawbacks and I'm yearning to find myself back in a Hive of sorts. Those who know Seattle know its shapes and attitudes and lifestyle. For those who don't, here are a few "Postcards" by my friend, Robert Fulghum, who knows the city in a broader and wiser way than most.
Continued...
Wolcott:"Bring out your dead! "
THE DIM DEVOTEES OF James Wolcott gnawed today on a fresh chunk of gristle from their master of disaster as he drove onto his website in his Blue 1968 Huff. After several days of quoting from others, Wolcott squeezed off one of his own -- if a bit early. In doing so he established once again that it's safer to point than to pontificate.
The hurricane-worshipping Wolcott is clearly disappointed that his hopes for a floating abattoir in New Orleans are not likely to fructify. In the self-referentially titled From Blame Game to Numbers Game, Wolcott bemoans the fact that we are not, after all, going to see deaths from Katrina on or above the levels of 911. Why? Because if we had, Wolcott surmises, we would be shaken from the deadly spell that the RoveBushCheney wizards have had us under for four years.
"Casualty figures are often high-ranged at the outset, dropping as the smoke and water clears. But any number substantially higher than 3,000 dead presents a political and symbolic dilemma for the most avid advocates of the War on Terror (or World War IV, if you're a Norman Podhoretz devotee)."
Stepping quickly around Wolcott's Stop-Me-Before-I-Reference-Again slight against Norman Podhoretz's correct estimate of the situation, its clear that Wolcott's Upper West Side dinner parties are going to be in deep mourning for the thousands of Americans that didn't die in New Orleans.
"If only," they will say, "some of those poor, black people could have taken one for the team and cast themselves into the sewage for
Continued...SEPTEMBER, 2005: MARK STEYN notes in Terror war all but forgotten on home front
"Four years ago, I thought the "war on terror" was a viable concept. .... Of course, since then we've had the shabby habit of presidents declaring a "war on drugs" and a "war on poverty" and, with hindsight, that corruption of language has allowed Americans to slip the war on terror into the same category -- not a war in the sense that a war on Fiji or Belgium is a war, but just one of those vaguely ineffectual aspirational things that don't really impinge on you that much except for the odd pointless gesture -- like the shoe-removing ritual before you board a flight at Poughkeepsie. The "war on terror" label has outlived whatever usefulness it had."
OCTOBER, 2003: AMERICAN DIGEST notes in The First Terrorist War
"To say we are "involved" in a "war on terror" and to repeat this phrase ad infinitum extends our decades old infatuation with euphemism
Continued...ACROSS FROM MAIN BEACH IN LAGUNA BEACH is a coffee shop with outdoor tables. They are the best places in town to have coffee in the afternoon. Lots of people think so and come to the shop for coffee and stake out their tables.
One man and his mission are there daily. His is the table with the sign "Bible Answer Stand, How May I Pray for You?" I think about that question and decide to ask him for a SpeedPrayer.
"Okay," he says, "I can do that. What do you need?"
"I'd like you pray that, soon, I get a call from God. I'm waiting by the phone but he doesn't call and he doesn't write. If you get through, tell him it is okay to call collect.
Continued...BACKSTAGE: A Preface to a Prologue
In response to yesterday's tale of "The Wedding Vows" a friend and alphablogger whose judgement I respect a great deal writes to ask that I write more about what I saw moving through the 60s like some long-haired WASP Zelig.
It's a popular thing to say that "If you remember the 60s you weren't there." My curse is that I was there and despite being a full participant with all that implied, I seem to remember everything. Worse still, the more I do remember, the more I can remember.
FILE UNDER "Our Pals, the Peace-Loving Germans" Minister: Bush must be 'shot down' - CNN Sep 8, 2005 : "A conservative German minister in a southern state has caused uproar by saying U.S. President George W. Bush should be 'shot down' for his handling of the crisis in hurricane-struck New Orleans."
It's always nice to know that under stress, the Germans still like to unwind with a little shooting spree. You would have thought that their last little experiment with der shooting of der political opponents and other unsavory sorts, having turned out badly for them, would have cured them. But, as we see, the virus -- once it finds traction in the host -- is almost impossible to root out.
If I were the Germans today, I'd be conserving my ammunition for threats a bit closer to home. Hamburg, for starters.
Now I know there are many good Germans who do not favor shooting the President of the United States for not waving his magic wand and making the Wicked Witch Katrina melt at the moment she was spied off the coast of Florida. There are many good Americans who also suffer from this mental disconnect from reality. Still, this should not blind us to the real potential of the German nation, as demonstrated twice in the last century, to go from Good to Goblin in a thrice whenever they feel their sausage is threatened. And, with their growing inability to buckle down to work, and their seeming inability to reproduce, coupled with the large influx of Muslims they've let flood their country to "do the jobs that Germans won't do," (Sound familiar?) it's only a matter of time before that "pacified" nation begins to feel a wee bit threatened.
The last time they felt threatened, in the wake of World War I and the Depression, the Germans had a bit of a problem in anger management and acted out. Could that happen again? Why, of course not. Everyone knows that the Germans take great pride in keeping everything under control and under surveillance. After all, they're the only country in Europe to invent and install toilets with little inspection shelves in the bowl.
Like I said, they like to keep "everything under control and under surveillance." With the single exception of their politicians. Still, what harm could that possibly do?
THERE IS NOTHING NOT TO LOVE ABOUT Newton Emerson'S Ill wind may not blow to the Whitehouse. Funny, furious and spot on, here's a sample:
As the full horror of Hurricane Katrina sinks in, thousands of desperate columnists are asking if this is the end of George Bush's presidency. The answer is almost certainly yes, provided that every copy of the US Constitution was destroyed in the storm. Otherwise President Bush will remain in office until noon on January 20th, 2009, as required by the 20th Amendment, after which he is barred from seeking a third term anyway under the 22nd Amendment.There is, you will be glad to know, more at the link.As the full horror of this sinks in, thousands of desperate columnists are asking if the entire political agenda of George Bush's second term will not still be damaged in some terribly satisfying way.
The answer is almost certainly yes, provided that the entire political agenda of George Bush's second term consists of repealing the 22nd Amendment. Otherwise, with a clear Republican majority in both Houses of Congress, he can carry on doing pretty much whatever he likes.
As the full horror of this sinks in, thousands of desperate columnists are asking if the Republican Party itself will now suffer a setback at the congressional mid-term elections next November.
The answer is almost certainly yes, provided that people outside the disaster zone punish their local representatives for events elsewhere a year previously, both beyond their control and outside their remit, while people inside the disaster zone reward their local representatives for an ongoing calamity they were supposed to prevent. Otherwise, the Democratic Party will suffer a setback at the next congressional election.
....Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
--- Shakespeare -- Sonnet 116.
THE FIRST TIME I WAS MARRIED I was married to over 200 naked people. We weren't quite buck naked. The men had crudely made laurel wreathes on their heads, sometimes just a wad of weeds, while the women had wreathes of flowers around their brows and, for those old enough to have any, small bouquets of blossoms lodged in their pubic hair. All the men had large clubs and all the women large breasts. It was the butt end of the 60s and people in my set tended to have that kind of equipment. What children there were tended to be either infants or toddlers, all still nursing at will.
Continued...
To all those readers who have praised Gerard's writing and wondered why doesn't he do something more with this formidable talent?
Well, the answer is, he is. He has. And he will continue to do so.
What is expressed on this website is but a shard of what the man has to offer. I know.
He's too modest, surprisingly, to mention, so I must, that a poem he wrote was included in the highly revered anthology, Van Gogh's Ear, Best World Poetry & Prose, Vol. 4, published by French Connection Press.
Sandwiched between John Updike and Francois Villon, Gerard's moving and haunting Victims of the Plague is an homage to former mentor and friend Thom Gunn.
In the '90s, Gerard co-authored the amazingly prescient, for its day, Rules of the Net: On-Line Operating Instructions for Human Beings.
A few years ago, The Quotable Sherlock Holmes was published, edited by Gerard Van der Leun with a particularly engaging introduction by "John H. Watson III."
You'll find more biographic information about Gerard at the website I created for his photography exhibit, New York Life Images, Images After the Fall.
Finally, this is my favorite picture of my husband, taken in San Francisco, September 2002.
I love my husband, as I always have, perhaps more than ever, and I couldn't be more proud.
A TOUCHING PLEA: "You know, some people are stealing and they're making a big deal out of it. Oh, they're stealing 20 pair of jeans or they're stealing television sets. Who cares?... Maybe those people are so poor, some of the people who do that they're so poor they've never touched anything in their lives. Let them touch those things for once." -- Celine Dion
Continued...YES, FEARLESS VAMPIRE MULTIMILLIONAIRE AUTHOR Anne Rice seems to have had her brains Hoovered right out of her shrinking skull. Or perhaps she's been caught by the intellectual black hole of the New York Times Op-Ed and pulled over the event horizon and out of the universe all together.
After a banal 3rd grade history of New Orleans and a list of reasons to save New Orleans it in Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans? Rice reveals that she has absolutely no grasp or knowledge of the immense private and public relief efforts going forward second by second:
Continued...This morning I have been bedeviled by the hooks and heart tricks of popular music. I keep telling myself that most popular songs are not written to be true, but glib; that they run on what's call 'the hook.'
Distracted by numerous lyrics that all seemed to sending me a secret message, I decided to investigate the functioning of "the hook" and came in my Googling to a song by Blues Traveler from their album "Four." This is an album I've had for many years (A memoir of a brief, but doomed, May -- September romance some eight years back.) which has a song on it called "The Hook." Looking up the lyrics, I saw -- for the first time -- what the refrain actually says:
"Because the hook brings you back
I ain't tellin' you no lie
The hook brings you back
On that you can rely."
It's a common problem with the lyrics to pop songs that they are often misheard by the listeners. These ear blips are called "mondegreens." I have a old friend who has bought apartments in New York City by exploiting the phenomenon in books. Mondegreens are commonly explained by the facts of loose recordings, production choices, and the volume at which all the instruments play and the singers sing. It is more simply explained by the fact, as noted by my old friend Ethan Russell about Mick Jagger many years ago, "Well, you know, he does slur a lot." And he does, and they all do. Singing words requires, as we learn in the sacred book of Bob Dylan, that you bend and shape the words to the measure of the music. Success in pop music is found, after all, in the singer not the song.
The other thing that drives the hearing of a song is the mood of the listener. You hear things in songs that aren't ever there just as you see things about your house that are long gone. In each, what we hear and see in down times is essentially the ghosts of ... love, etcetera. And coming or going, love has a lot of etcetera attached to it that it pulls along behind it like the chains on Marley's ghost.
All of this is a periphrastic way of coming to what I had heard sung in the refrain to "The Hook" for many years. I never heard the word 'hook.' Instead I heard the word 'heart,' as in:
"Because the heart brings you back
I ain't tellin' you no lie
The heart brings you back
On that you can rely."
I've listened to that song, with attention or just as background, probably around a hundred times over the years. I've even been to a Blues Traveler concert in New York City that had it on the set list. In all those iterations I've never heard 'hook,' but always heard 'heart.' Now I know, but not better.
Seen whole the lyrics to 'The Hook' are all about the plight and pain of being a pop star. One of thousands of such screeds in which our celebrities bemoan the curse of wealth and fame their rise has brought to them -- the endless angst of those who fear they had to 'sell-out' in order to 'buy-in.' I try, but somehow I just can't feel this pampered pain.
In the end, I really don't want the hook to bring me back. I want the heart to bring me back:
"Because the heart brings you back
I ain't tellin' you no lie
The heart brings you back
On that you can rely."
It might be a mondegreen, but it makes a much better song.
ABSENT BEING IN A COMA IN A CAVE somewhere on a high mountain in the middle of a cypress swamp, you cannot escape "The Runaway Bride." She is the plat du jour of our blighted age and the story of the decade so far this week. Now that she's back she'll be parsed and probed, drawn, quartered and eviscerated by the rapacious media until she's little more than a damp spot on some surgical sponge.
I hated The Runaway Bride from the first moment it was revealed she was safe and had simply freaked out and taken the geographic cure by getting gone to Vegas. Sane people have to hate Las Vegas too -- a place that advertises that when you do freak out, it is the psycho's vacation destination of choice. A pathetic reason for a town to exist, but cheap and low places need to work with what they have. After all, nobody would mistake Vegas for Vatican City until, of course, they build a 1/3rd scale model of Saint Peters and slam six thousand slots into the basilica -- something I am sure is in the planning stage.
Still Vegas is the perfect place for The Runaway Bride to select as the terminus of her
Continued...
- March 2008
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- December 2007
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"Children seem to be 'diagnosed' with lots of things lately. It has become customary for at least one of their parents to be somehow 'enthusiastic' about said diagnosis, sometimes even confessing to having requested or demanded the diagnosis. Said parent is invariably female. Said child is invariably male. The lopsided gender trend is curious, and so is the spectacle of parents ordering diagnoses for their children, like pizzas or textbooks." - House of Eratosthenes
Please study this evidence carefully. The saints of San Diego and surrounding areas in California NEED TO BE WARNED of the MAJOR JUDGMENT coming upon them that will be MUCH WORSE THAN 911. This evidence shows JULY 8, 2008 is hard coded in the Word of God as the next Major Judgment Date that will fulfill scripture just like the attack on the Twin Towers Sept 11, 2001 and Hurricane Katrina fulfilled scripture . It cannot be prayed away and It will not be delayed. -- !!! 2,492 DAYS !!!
"I'm surprised at how finely calibrated every single word was measured. I wasn't saying anything I hadn't said before, that I didn't say a year ago or when I was a United States senator," said Obama, who is still a senator from Illinois. -- Obama puzzled by Iraq comment frenzy
A woman fell into a tank of slurry as she tried to make "manure bombs" using her stockings, German police today said. The unfortunate woman stripped off her foul smelling clothes and fled the scene naked, along with a female accomplice wearing just her bra and pants, a police spokesman told Reuters. - Cow dung fate for 'manure bomber' | World news | guardian.co.uk
"As Marie-Antoinette is said to have remarked about her starving subjects who were demanding bread, "Let then eat cake," our elected Democratic members of Congress are in effect saying of Americans, "Let them ride bikes." -- It's Time for Rage - HUMAN EVENTS
"500 years ago, oil was not a resource. Neither was uranium. People around at the time didn't know how to use them. Things that weren't resources became resources. Our ability to use new resources made old resources obsolete. Now, no home in the UK needs to burn wood for heat, for example. Or, as Bjorn Lomborg has put it, the Stone Age didn't come to an end because we ran out of stones." - Climate Resistance: Infinite Regress
"Seattle Police opened fire on a suspect in Downtown Seattle this morning who they say robbed a West Seattle bank wearing black shoe polish on his face and a wig." - Police shoot bank robbery suspect Seattle, Washington
So there I was, in the lion's den, calling Joe Lieberman an asshole. And people applauded and cheered. - Kos: Into the tiger's den
Kaboom: A Soldier's War Journal: News Well, LT G got the order from his chain-of-command to delete his blog. I guess no longer posting wasn't good enough.Archive survives at the link.
Howard Dean in 2004: "Military experience is vital"
"Who would you rather have in charge of the defense of the United States of America, a group of people who never served a day overseas in their life, or a guy who served his country honorably and has three Purple Hearts and a Silver Star on the battlefields of Vietnam?" McCain, by the way, has been awarded the Silver Star, the Legion of Merit, two Bronze Star Medals, a Purple Heart and the Distinguished Flying Cross.
"All the News that's Fit to Print"? How about "Yesterday's News, Spun and Bent"? - Roger's Rules - The New York Times catches up with Mark Steyn (sort of)
"Let's assume that talking on a hands-free cellphone indeed leads to higher accident rates. So I ask: What is the difference between talking over a hands-free cellphone and talking to a passenger in the car? I say there is no difference; both can present distractions. Therefore, in the name of public safety, I strongly urge -- no, demand -- that state legislatures immediately act to prohibit all talk in moving automobiles." - Donald Pittenger
Washington DC - In a sweeping 4 1/2 to 3.14159 decision with 1.35841 abstaining, the United States Supreme Court handed down a ruling this morning in the landmark Abdul the Party Clown v. U.S case, recognizing the individual rights to gun ownership by child rapists and Guantanamo detainees. The decision was immediately hailed by international human rights activists and child rape organizations..... In his dissenting opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia said "I totally fucking give up." -- iowahawk: Court Okays Gun Rights for Detainees, Child Rapists
S+ = F- (More Safety equals less Freedom)
"In government economics, supply and demand are irrelevant -- what counts are the feelings of major campaign contributors and large voting blocks. In government economics, you take money based on rate of increase of profits, not on actual profits. In government economics, you claim that a program's funding was cut because you decreased its annual rate of funding increases. In government economics, forcing businesses to increase wages is improving the free market. In government economics, you repeatedly overestimate tax revenues and economic growth and repeatedly underestimate government expenditures, interest on debt, and future obligations. There must be some secret place where government economics is taught, since it doesn't appear in university catalogs. Maybe that's what goes on at Area 51." -- Dr. T @ Coyote Blog: Economic Morons in Europe, but is Congress Much Better?
Obama was introduced by Karen Bass, the California Assembly Speaker. Donors sipped wine and bottled water. Waiters wearing black vests, white shirts and black ties served hors d'oeuvres: endive spears of brie, toasted almonds and truffle oil; tuna tartare with passion fruit ponzu and macadamia nut on wonton crisp; beef short rib skewers with Asian flavors." -- Lynn Sweet: Obama Hollywood fund-raiser. Pool reports
"In many ways nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army." - Unqualified Reservations: OL4: Dr. Johnson's hypothesis
"It's also critical that you avoid the fatal mistake of getting creative and comparing people you don't like to other evil dictators, such as Joseph Stalin or Fidel Castro. With few exceptions, white people are actually fond of almost any dictator not named Hitler...." - Stuff White People Like
Power has all the usual reasons to hide. Power is delicious, and everyone wants it. To bite into its crisp, sweet flesh, to lick its juices off your lips -- this is more than pleasure. It is satisfaction. It is fulfillment. It is meaning. The love of a bird for a caterpillar is a tenuous and passing attachment next to the bond between man and power." - Unqualified Reservations: OL7: the ugly truth about government
"A listing of books, a Web site, movies and restaurants on Friday with the Weekend Explorer column, about sites in New York associated with the photographer Weegee, referred incorrectly to Lombardi’s Pizza, at 32 Spring Street on the Lower East Side, an area where Weegee lived and worked. It sells pizza only as pies, not by the slice." - Corrections - For the Record - NYTimes.com
"Here we stand. We have squandered great wealth to defeat death -- only to find ourselves impoverished, and turning to death itself for our answers. The succubus we sought to defeat now dominates us, for she is a lusty and insatiable whore. We have sacrificed our humanity, our compassion, our empathy, our humility in the face of a force far greater than ourselves, while forgetting the power and grace and the vision which first led us and empowered us on this grand crusade. Our weapons are now turned upon us; let the slaughter begin." - Crossing That Dark River | The Doctor Is InOn the Oregon Health Plan that will pay for cancer patients to die, but not to live.
Then:
"How tough do we have it, really? Our most threatening menace is a gallon of gas that costs four dollars and sixty cents." -- House of Eratosthenes
Doing the Job American Journalism Won't Do By Counting the Jobs They Will:
Obama Media BJs To Date - "Not that there's anything wrong with that."
Marriage as it is known would have to end but couples could form mutually agreed unions. They would list their "desires, diseases, needs" on little cards and a central authority would decide who was fitted for whom. - Socialists made eugenics fashionable
It is weird how so many who claim to like Obama hope he is lying.
"And with the loss of transcendentals comes the loss of the human -- not to mention the hero, the saint, the sage. These are our fixed "vertical stars" that have always guided us up the ladder of ascent, but in the Darwinian paradigm, these are all illusions, pure and simple. Richard Dawkins is greater than Shankara. Chrisopher Hitchens is superior to Meister Eckhart. Ray Ingles is on a higher plane than Jesus. " - One Cosmos: Religious Humanism vs. Darwinist Animalism
"You know, I did not want Barack to go into politics because I thought politics was a mean business. And you know, I knew this man that I loved, he was sweet and pathetic, I thought. there was no way....... Lynn Sweet: "The View" ladies dive in to rescue Michelle Obama after she calls Barack "pathetic." UPDATE Obama spokesman Vietor said Michelle said "empathetic.""Empathetic" Yeah, right.
That punk Morgan over at House of Eratosthenes is "Hot Pants -- Upping the Ante". Oh, yeah? He says, "This can't possibly end well." Oh, yeah?
Dukes of Hazard
Wife #2
Wife #1
Girlfriend #49
wear them myself.
"I do have recollections of black women who aren't angry, and each and every single one of them is a person I know from talking face-to-face. Electronic media is a very different thing, because in that forum there are powerful nameless faceless people who get to decide what I'm ready to see. And for reasons I don't quite understand -- or maybe I do, and that's a loathsome thought by itself -- these nameless faceless people seem to think the black woman I'm ready to see has to be angry, or else I have little interest in seeing her." - House of Eratosthenes
This playset is one of the best purchases I have made for my three-year-old. In the past, when we have been stopped at roadblocks, or when during one of Daddy's arrests, he would start crying uncontrollably. Now, after playing with this for the past several months, he is perfectly docile. As an adjunct to this product, I would also recommend that you purchase the Playmobil Armed Standoff Playset, Fisher-Price Little People Battering Ram, and the Nerf Tear-Gas Canister Deployment Gun.
"Looking at Germany, then, Iran sees a country with nothing to counter the pressure of merely an implied nuclear threat. Jihadists see the linchpin of Europe, easy of access and inadvertently hospitable to operations, that will hardly punish those who fall into its hands, and that can neither accomplish on its own a flexible expeditionary response against a hostile base or sponsor, nor reply in kind to a nuclear strike. Thus the German government should be especially nervous about cargos trucked overland from the east." - Mark Helprin - The New Soft Underbelly of Europe
"Spring is in the air! Its the time of year to release your gametes into the water and make baby barnacles. But wait a second, you are a permanent fixture on a rock. Can't move. What is a young, lovestruck sessile she-male to do? Well, if you are hung like a barnacle you don't really have to move that far." -Deep Sea News : Environment Shapes Barnacle Penis
"The easy story is the one right down the hall and the easy story that "speaks to the heart" is the one that speaks directly to the writer's heart. NBC News, I'm sorry you lost a skilled colleague and a well-liked friend but he is not the news. Report his death, cry in private and get back to work. -- And man up a little, willya? It's creepy to see grown up men blathering like schoolgirls. Ew." -- Roberta X
"I hope it was a good idea to appease those Hillfems by partnering with Elizabeth Edwards on my Health Care platform. I'll let you in on a little secret, the health care plan is one of those "throw away" platforms every candidate has. We never really plan on improving or changing it, it's what we call a "filler piece" we can fall back on if we hit a hard spot. See also the Environment. I gotta run Countdown is about to start, hit me back when you get a chance. I left you a message on myspace." - vksempireofdirt.com
"The sheer repetition of lies about Bush is wearing people down. There is not a liberal in this country worthy of kissing Bush's rear end, but the weakest members of the herd run from Bush. Compared to the lickspittles denying and attacking him, Bush is a moral giant -- if that's not damning with faint praise. John McCain should be so lucky as to be running for Bush's third term. Then he might have a chance." - Ann Coulter
In Bizarro World, illegal foreign combatants are granted constitutional rights; in Bizarro World, people react to high gas prices and energy shortfalls by refusing to boost domestic capacity. - LILEKS (James) the Bleat
"Do you really think most of the halfwit 'celebrities' who contribute to my blog even know how to write a complete sentence? So really, it's not like anyone noticed when I switched to AutoBlogger anyway."
"If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun," Obama said at a fundraiser in Philadelphia Friday, according to pool reports. Uh huh. I hope he also brings a gun permit, a trigger lock, and a good lawyer. And a health care plan. -- JustOneMinute: The Chicago Way
Yes. Hulk. Smash. Yes. Smash. Big Hulk smash. Smash cars. Buildings. Army tanks. Hulk not just smash. Hulk also go rarrr! Then smash again. Smash important, obviously. Smash Hulk's USP. What Hulk smash most? Hulk smash all hope of interesting time in cinema. Hulk take all effort of cinema, effort getting babysitter, effort finding parking, and Hulk put great green fist right through it. - Peter Bradshaw @ guardian.co.uk Film
"The Environmental Puritans agree with the ayatollahs on this one point: America is the Great Satan. And Obama echoes that view when he refers to our gasoline consumption, our eating, and our air-conditioning and heating as if they were sins for which we are accountable to the rest of the world.... Let me guess, though, where Obama's thermostat is set. You can't run for president and have people see you sweat."
The end. Who says scrolling is without rewards?
"I am going to stay optimistic. Chistendom can be revived -- not through political action, but by fulfilling the Great Commission with both word and deed. Good people create good culture, from which springs good government. By living the words of Our Lord, we have the hope of becoming good people; therefore, it is imperative that we concentrate all our energies on doing so. It's salt, light, and leaven that will defeat the Conspiracy."
"Pity the nation that reaches a point where it needs a Churchill to save it; but pity even more a nation that, needing a Churchill, fails to find one." - Adam Kirsch, The New York Sun
- Just Like Vietnam, Except
- Deciphering "The Landscape Game"
- Backstage: Thanks for the 2,000,000 Visits
- The Landscape Game
- Is It Just Me?
- The Unremitting Stupidity of 21st Century "Civilized" Man
- The Naked and the Senile Dementia
- Durbin: The Very Model of a Modern Major Democrat
- On the Move
- King of the Combovers Disappointed in Katrina Death Toll
- Right War, Wrong Name
- Free Prayers at the Beach
- Both Sides Now
- "Und Zen You Vill Be Shot, Mr. Prezident!"
- To the Full Horror, the Answer is, "Yes. Yes! YES!"
- The Wedding Vows
- Van Gogh's Ear, Best World Poetry & Prose, Vol. 4
- Compulsively Missing an Opportunity Shut Up
- Vampire Sucks Anne Rice's Brain Dry
- Delete "Hook." Insert "Heart"