THE CLASSICAL THEMES of art have always been -- virtue, nobility, patriotism.
Since I practiced none of these in my youth, and throughout much of my career worked actively or passively to under-mind them, I came -- at last -- to yearn to discover what they could possibly be in this blighted age. After all, I was not alone in my abnegation. My entire generation, one way or another, had tossed virtue, nobility, and patriotism over the side of our Ship of Fools thinking to lighten the vessel and keep it upright and afloat. As the Not-So-Great Generation, we did not understand the physics behind removing the ballast when all aboard were struggling to climb over each other to get as high as the very top of the top gallants.
Since the beginning of this century, the more I surveyed the vast and troubled social sea on which I had finally awakened adrift with the rest of the wreckage, the more I saw that these virtues -- in a shriveled and shrunken form -- seemed only to be found in the scattered sanctuaries of the Church and what remained to the Republican
Continued...
IT IS SAID, for either comfort or confidence, that God so orders the world that there is "someone for everyone." It is said, by some latter-day Calvinists, that God has assigned this selected one to you from the master moment of Creation; that you will be taken to cleave to them, and only to them, if only your faith allows His will to be done.... on Earth as it is in Heaven.
On our Earth, however, it seems that a power other than God has intervened in this order. It seems that now a different metric is in play in our lives with the advent of the new and updated Devil's workshop made modern, the Internet.
Here, should you wish to push through the endless forms, filings, fittings and radio
Continued...
"Original Dating are holding another speed dating event at Oblivion Bar on Monday the 27th June. You will meet up to 20 new people in one great night out! Dates last just four minutes each. Long enough to work out if you want to
see someone again and not too long if you don't!" -- Announcement, June, 2005
[with apologies to Alexander Pope]
WITHIN OLD GOTHAM'S canyons there dwells a shallow race,
That is only moved to mark and then pursue the face
Whose pursed lips promise much, and yet deliver little,
Except more cash and fame to the various lickspittles
Whose manipulation of the young is really quite refined,
And whose underwear is personally hand-signed by Calvin Klein.
Presented daily with an echo shrouded in a choice,
It surprises none among us that some presume a voice
That yaps and apes authority, and urges happiness
Can be possessed by the possession of a new designer dress
Designed and sold by Donna, or her many fawning friends,
That such a tiny swatch of fabric may yet cover bigger ends.
Armed with such frail weapons, these creatures nightly strive
To convince themselves and others they're vibrantly alive
To life and wit and wealth, and not just sunk in shame,
As in the bistros of the night they play the dating game.
This game is played by two who always seek to measure
The shortest distance now between self-esteem and pleasure.
The entrance fees are steep, yet still these fools rush in --
Each to take their turn, each to have their spin,
Upon a wheel of fortune made of money and of mist,
Matt Harding of Seattle made this: Where the Hell is Matt?
[Note to self: write something here about the indomitable nature of the human spirit. On second thought, just watch it again.]
But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;
-- Matthew 5, 44
DON'T LET ANYONE TELL YOU the spirit of Christ is not being made manifest in American media today. If you wish to see it in action pick up almost any newspaper on any day. Reading the headlines and the editorial concerns, you will be able to discern a core Christian precept in every edition.
Nearly four years into a war that began with the death of 3,000 of our fellow citizens, a situation has evolved within these United States that is without precedence in the annals of war and religion. It would seem that, even with our troops engaging the enemy wherever he can be found, and even with our troops dying daily from enemy action, that a large and substantial portion of the American population has learned to truly "love thy enemy."
Continued...
THEY SAY IT IS AN INTELLECTUAL FLAW to let things go "in one ear and out the other," but at my age it is merely a question of deciding what to admit onto the hard drive of my brain. It's a limited drive and at this point it is pretty much full. To write something new to it means I often have to delete something else. So I don't view this in one ear thing as a flaw but a necessity.
A much more common variation of this phenomenon is the deplorable habit of letting something go in one ear and out your mouth without first striking either a reflective surface or being passed through a BS filter -- preferably both. Once you realize that "in-ear-out-mouth" (IEOM) is an affliction of epidemic proporations in contemporary America you can spot it maiming and killing brain cells everywhere.
Continued...#1: On The Doctor Is In
DURING THE YEARS I SPENT AS A MAGAZINE AND BOOK EDITOR, the most rewarding and exciting moments were when I'd open a manuscript by someone I'd never heard of and find a new and compelling voice. Over time I got so I'd know that voice was there within the first three paragraphs. I was never disappointed. Once I knew it, I would do everything in my power to see it was published and in this, I don't think I ever failed.
I knew it when I first read the manuscript for a short story called "The Ledge" by a young guy named Steve King. I knew it when I read an essay on the cell by a doctor
Continued... In the hayed field thick with dusted mist,
As the noon whistle of the village hissed,
We noted how the dead were neatly placed,
How all lay labeled, how all were given space.
We remarked the craft of marble wreath,
And supposed that those who lay beneath
I'M CAPTAIN KINK. I'm Mister Scratch.
I'm your smiling, deathless dentist, Doctor Pain.
I've owned the Earth since Adam's birth,
And co-authored the book on raising Cain.
Michael Bowen @ Cobb wisely points to this insightful article at Stratfor New Orleans: A Geopolitical Prize, which establishes that there are other, deeper reasons for valuing New Orleans beyond the oil industry.
A city is a complex and ongoing process - one that requires physical infrastructure to support the people who live in it and people to operate that physical infrastructure. We don't simply mean power plants or sewage treatment facilities, although they are critical. Someone has to be able to sell a bottle of milk or a new shirt. Someone has to be able to repair a car or do surgery. And the people who do those things, along with the infrastructure that supports them, are gone -- and they are not coming back anytime soon.It is in this sense, then, that it seems almost as if a nuclear weapon went off in New Orleans. The people mostly have fled rather than died, but they are gone. Not all of the facilities are destroyed, but most are. It appears to us that New Orleans and its environs have passed the point of recoverability. The area can recover, to be sure, but only with the commitment of massive resources from outside -- and those resources would always be at risk to another Katrina.
The displacement of population is the crisis that New Orleans faces. It is also a national crisis, because the largest port in the United States cannot function without a city around it. The physical and business processes of a port cannot occur in a ghost town, and right now, that is what New Orleans is. It is not about the facilities, and it is not about the oil. It is about the loss of a city's population and the paralysis of the largest port in the United States.
.... at 4:13 PM Pacific Time, June 4, 2005. The IP address locater tells me this visitor came from Calgary in Canada via Shaw Communications.
Continued...JUST BACK FROM THE GULF COAST, presents a Lt. Gen. H. Steven BlumDefense Department Briefing on the Ongoing National Guard Response to Hurricane Katrina. Up to date numbers and plans for mitigating the disaster. And this exchange which puts a little reality back into the picture:
Q: Across the disaster zone our reporters have consistently run into people over the past week, victims who have asked where's the National Guard, why aren't they here, why aren't they helping us? I know it's not your job to decide where and when aid is delivered. You have to provide these forces. But as a general who's been there and a commander with a can-do reputation, I just wanted to ask your opinion. Do you think in retrospect that more creativity, more ingenuity could have been employed early on to use the military to deliver more aid to people sooner?[Emphasis added.]GEN. BLUM: It would be easy to draw that conclusion, Jamie, but if you've ever been to Gulfport, remember the highway that runs along the coast was a four lane super highway. It was impassable. So where you could -- if a normal infrastructure existed, no question, you could have saturated the area with more, faster. But we were putting forces in in very degraded infrastructure. Airports had reduced capability. Roads, in some cases we had only one road in because of lack of bridges, flooding, loss of infrastructure, or the structures were too unsafe to cross or we would become casualties ourselves.
So we couldn't rush to failure on this thing and we had to take a more measured approach than any of us wanted. But to call this response late to need, if you're talking about the National Guard response, that would be a low blow to some incredible individuals who were on watch before the storm, harbored during the storm, on the scene immediately after the storm cleared. Just think about it. When was the storm? When did it hit? How many days ago?
Q: Early Monday.
GEN. BLUM: And today is what?
Q: Saturday.
GEN. BLUM: In that short time we're talking numbers of 40,000. This is just military. You're talking about being able to provide food, fuel, water for an unknown number of people that we have to first fine and discover in lots of cases, and then immediately care for with extremely high expectations.
I think the response of the National Guard is nothing less than unbelievably sensational. It's actually better than any planner could ever expect.
When I first laid out the numbers of reinforcements that would be coming into theater and then I went down there to ensure that they arrived so that the plan was in fact being executed, I was very surprised to find that every single projection that we had made had been exceeded because of the magnificent response that we're getting from all over this nation. Puerto Rico, in the height of hurricane season, is sending 1,000 soldiers to the relief effort. Think about what that means. One of the first forces in there were coming in from Oregon, Washington, Alaska. Forty states have soldiers there. Others are lined up to come in later because they have different skill sets that we think we'll need down the road, particularly as we get some of these roads uncovered and we have to start with reconstruction and rehabilitation of the area, rather than just getting in and getting the necessities in, the essentials.
DAVID WARREN tracks the evolution, or rather 'devolution' on really bad ideas in Bad Gumbo:
"To be honest with you, people who are oppressed all their lives, man, it's an opportunity to get back at society," said a certain Mike Franklin, glibly explaining the scene before the cameras to the Associated Press.How wonderfully that sentence encapsulates the spirit of postmodern liberalism. In complete ignorance of his intellectual ancestry, this simple clod repeats an idea that has descended from arcane roots in Descartes, to Rousseau, and through Marx, to Frantz Fanon, and through the sociology departments of the universities, to daytime television, and out into popular cliche, till it has finally settled in the sewers of New Orleans. It is the idea of "victimhood"; the idea that a man is not responsible for his acts; that he is instead a victim of the oppression of some abstraction called "society" -- because he is black, or on welfare, or whatever. And everyone who isn't can be held guilty, regardless of how they have actually behaved.
DAVID WARREN says it best in "New Orleans:"
In the end, of course, we all die. And all our cities will disintegrate, and their ruins finally dissolve like sugar. As Prospero puts it in the Tempest, "The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, and leave ... not a rack behind."But that is to get ahead of the plot. It is for us to be creators not destroyers, and to build and rebuild against the impossibility that anything we touch can outlast time. And this is something that cannot be argued with: the immutable command of our Maker.
"There are two things cowboys know nothing about. Cows and horses."
IN 1982 THE FIRST BOOK I EVER EDITED AND PUBLISHED during my career as a book editor at Houghton Mifflin Company was publishing consultant Leonard Shatzkin's In Cold Type: Overcoming the Book Crisis. I loved working on this book and working with Shatzkin, but others around me were growing colder to the project as it progressed.
THIS WEEK'S EDITORIAL FROM The Federalist Patriot / Top of the Fold is one of the best overviews on the New Orleans disaster to date.
Continued...The Kevin Roderick says, "Guests at Wednesday night's fundraiser for Sen. Hillary Clinton at the Hollywood Hills home of producer Roland Emmerich are being warned not to speak with any reporters. It's part of their written instructions."
The P.J. O'Rourke says, "I suggest a Celebrity Tax with a low-end base rate of, mmm, 100 percent.... Given the modest talent of current celebrities and the immodest example they set for impressionable youth, we'll call it a 'Value Subtracted Tax.' "
Continued...
Photo by Michael Yon
IN OVER TWO YEARS, I HAVE NOT ASKED FOR ANYTHING FROM MY READERS. That changes today. Today I want you to do something right now.
Continued...MORE FIRSTHAND REPORTING from Indictor at Outpost Crystal in New Orleans:
====quote====
"Bigfoot" is a bar manager and DJ on Bourbon Street, and is a local personality and icon in the city. He is a lifelong resident of the city, born and raised. He rode out the storm itself in the Iberville Projects because he knew he would be above any flood waters. Here is his story as told to me moments ago. I took notes while he talked and then I asked some questions:
Three days ago, police and national guard troops told citizens to head toward the Crescent City Connection Bridge to await transportation out of the area. The citizens trekked over to the Convention Center and waited for the buses which they were told would take them to Houston or Alabama or somewhere else, out of this area.
It's been 3 days, and the buses have yet to appear.
Although obviously he has no exact count, he estimates more than 10,000 people are packed into and around and outside the convention center still waiting for the buses. They had no food, no water, and no medicine for the last three days, until today, when the National Guard drove over the bridge above them, and tossed out supplies over the side crashing down to the ground below. Much of the supplies were destroyed from the drop. Many people tried to catch the supplies to protect them before they hit the ground. Some offered to walk all the way around up the bridge and bring the supplies down, but any attempt to approach the police or national guard resulted in weapons being aimed at them.
There are many infants and elderly people among them, as well as many people who were injured jumping out of windows to escape flood water and the like -- all of them in dire straights.
Any attempt to flag down police results in being told to get away at gunpoint. Hour after hour they watch buses pass by filled with people from other areas. Tensions are very high, and there has been at least one murder and several fights. 8 or 9 dead people have been stored in a freezer in the area, and 2 of these dead people are kids.
The people are so desperate that they're doing anything they can think of to impress the authorities enough to bring some buses. These things include standing in single file lines with the eldery in front, women and children next; sweeping up the area and cleaning the windows and anything else that would show the people are not barbarians.
The buses never stop.
Before the supplies were pitched off the bridge today, people had to break into buildings in the area to try to find food and water for their families. There was not enough. This spurred many families to break into cars to try to escape the city. There was no police response to the auto thefts until the mob reached the rich area -- Saulet Condos -- once they tried to get cars from there... well then the whole swat teams began showing up with rifles pointed. Snipers got on the roof and told people to get back.
He reports that the conditions are horrendous. Heat, mosquitoes and utter misery. The smell, he says, is "horrific."
He says it's the slowest mandatory evacuation ever, and he wants to know why they were told to go to the Convention Center area in the first place; furthermore, he reports that many of them with cell phones have contacts willing to come rescue them, but people are not being allowed through to pick them up.
I have "Bigfoot"'s phone number and will gladly give it to any city or state official who would like to tell him how everything is under control.
Addendum: Bigfoot just called to report that "they" (the authorities) are cleaning up the dead bodies at the Convention Center right now.
THE ONLY GOOD REASON to abandon and flood New Orleans so that it can return to nature would be if we were going to give it back to the French.
Jesse Jackson Dear Sir: Respectfully, I submit that you should shut the hell up. Looting and lawlessness IS the problem. The National Guard choppers are BEING SHOT AT. The NOPD are BEING SHOT AT. You want to focus on the levee? So do they, but check this out: THEY CAN'T UNTIL THE MOB STOPS ATTACKING THE RESCUE OPERATION.Somewhere tonight, Al Sharpton is abusing his staff for letting Jackson get from South America to New Orleans before him. After the ditch in Crawford, below sea-level is the only new low left to him.I know you're looking at this situation with concern for the racial implications of the deterioration of civilization out here, but this is bigger than whether people are going to be racists after this is over. This is about rescuing the masses i.e. life and death.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and blame your stupid comments on your lack of knowledge of the situation. Don't prove me a fool for doing so.
Regards,
Michael Barnett @ the Survival of New Orleans blog
ANN GERHART reports in'And Now We Are in Hell'
Level 1: "On the artificial-turf field and in the lower-level seats where Montrel sat sweltering with her family, a form of civilization had taken hold -- smelly, messy, dark and dank, but with a structure. Families with cots used their beds as boundaries for personal space and kept their areas orderly, a cooler on one corner, the toys on another, almost as if they had come for fireworks and stayed too long."
Level 2: "In the men's, the urinal troughs were overflowing. In the women's, the bowls were to the brim. A slime of excrement and urine made the walkway slick. "You don't even go there anymore," said Dee Ford, 37, who was pushed in a wading pool from her flooded house to the shelter. "You just go somewhere in a corner where you can. In the dark, you are going to step in poo anyway."
Level 3: "Within the skyboxes, on the third level of hell, life was dark 24 hours a day, a place for abandonment and coupling. Also up there was "a sort of speakeasy," said Michael Childs, who had some beer in an empty Dannon water bottle. "You got to know where to go," he said, and grinned."
Level 4: "On the fourth level, the darkest and highest of all, the lurkers lived, scary in the shadows. The fourth level, people explained, was for the gangsters and the druggies. The rumors sprang from there: Two girls had been raped; one girl had been raped and one killed. Someone was abducting newborns. A man had jumped from there and died. A murder had occurred."
The Forces of Decomposition and The War on Terror
By William J. Bennett
A grievance culture has taken hold in the West, both in England and America-and at exactly the wrong time. Where not long after 9/11 we were angry, we now have become sad, or depressed and confused; and too many have replaced our concept of evil with all manner of diagnoses of syndromes and root causes. We are at war, and yet we are indulging a culture of grievance. My friend Debra Burlingame -- whose brother, Chick, was the pilot of flight 77 that was hijacked and smashed into the Pentagon -- was recently asked if she missed the post-9/11 commonsense. She answered: "Truthfully, what I miss the most is the anger." I do too.
OUTPOST CRYSTAL aka "THE SURVIVAL OF NEW ORLEANS PAGE" is posting in real time from New Orleans and issues this call for help:
If it hasn't already begun, the shooting of looters is right around the corner. Or, if reports are correct, the shooting back at looters is right around the corner. Faster please.
In case anyone in national security is reading this, get the word to President Bush that we need the military in here NOW. The Active Duty Armed Forces. Mr. President, we are losing this city. I don't care what you're hearing on the news. The city is being lost. It is the law of the jungle down here. The command and control structure here is barely functioning. I'm not sure it's anyone's fault -- I'm not sure it could be any other way at this point. We need the kind of logistical support and infrastructure only the Active Duty military can provide. The hospitals are in dire straights. The police barely have any capabilities at this point. The National Guard is doing their best, but the situation is not being contained. I'm here to help in anyway I can, but my capabilities are limited and dropping. Please get the military here to maintain order before this city is lost.
UPDATE FROM OUTPOST CRYSTAL
Situtation is critical.I'm not leaving, so stop asking. I'm staying. I am staying until this shitstorm has blown itself out. Period. End of discussion.
Now for some updates:
1. Been too busy to debrief the police officer, so that will come later. Low priority now.
2. Buses loading people up on Camp Street to take refugees to Dallas, or so the word on the street (literally) is.
3. Dead bodies everywhere: convention center, down camp street, all over.
4. National Guard shoving water off the backs of trucks. They're just pushing it off without stopping, people don't even know it's there at first -- they drop it on the side in debris, there's no sign or distribution point -- people are scared to go near it at first, because the drop points are guarded by troops or federal agents with assault rifles who don't let people come near them, which scares people off. It is a mess. When people actually get to the water, they are in such a rush to get it that one family left their small child behind and forget about him until Sig carried him back to the family.
5. Lots of pics coming soon when Sig has time to update.
It's raining now and I guess that's a relief from the heat. It's hot as hell down there in the sun. Crime is absolutely rampant: rapes, murders, rape-murder combinations.
UPDATE 2 FROM OUTPOST CRYSTAL :
"THE REAL MILITARY IS NOW FLOWING IN. National Guard is being replaced before our eyes. Watch the feed.Word is that the Marines are at 1515 Poydras where our OC4s are. I think we're coming back online in force shortly.
On another note: I've just been told that we're being monitored in Iraq! To all the troops there, from one soldier to another, we're hanging tough here and you hang tough too. No matter what you're hearing, we love you guys and want you to know that we know how hard you've got it. Stay strong!"
VIA A FRIEND'S EMAIL comes a pointer to Michael Tisserand's moving personal memoir of New Orleans, "Submerged."
Together that night, we watched the same show that all who'd gotten out were watching. The straight line for our city. The familiar "Cat-4" and "Cat-5." And for those of us who thought we'd seen this before, the much-hoped-for right turn.It didn't matter. It hit. Even those who could read the tea leaves in John McPhee's Forces of Nature or John Barry's Rising Tide, or who had seen the diagrams of a bowl-shaped city, are in disbelief. New Orleans is gone, along with the newspaper where I work, the home where I live, my kids' beloved school, my neighborhood sno-ball stand, my neighborhood anything.
Cubist speed sculpture by nature in Laguna Beach
Slide Area via Mapquest
Area from orbit via ACME mapper
Google Satellite Shot of Area in Color
Topographical map of area via ACME Mapper Yes, it is that steep.
FIRST IT IS JUST ONE HELICOPTER HOVERING, then two, then four, then seven. Up over the house here on Arch Beach Heights above Bluebird Canyon in Laguna Beach.
The choppers are all set on hover and they are not going away. How annoying. Call the police department to complain. "Why in the devil are there all these helicopters over my house?"
"Bluebird Canyon's had a major landslide. 20 homes wiped out. We're evacuating the canyon. Turn on your TV."
"Which channel?"
"All of them."
===
Disaster zone is about 400 yards away from this house.
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"With grim crocodile tears, grim the MSM grimly reported that the grim United states grimly passed the grim milestone of grimness in the grim war in grim [Afghanistan] as grim American grim casualties of grimiosity grimly reached the grim number of [500].
"When grimly asked why the grim MSM grimly gives grim front (grim) page grim-prominence to such an out-of-grim-context number while grimily ignoring non-grim grim-type other grim news about grim-positive grim developments since the grim surge grimly started working with grimness or, indeed, why the grim MSM never reports on grim grim milestones of any other grim conflicts or grim armed grim forces (especially those of the grim enemy), the grim MSM just looked grim." - Ephemeral Isle: Grim Reporting
"I'm not home a lot, so Michelle is usually willing to give it up." - Barack Obama in Entertainment Weekly
Michelle Obama ... on their upcoming vacation: "We're going to Hawaii to visit Barack's grandma" -Playbook 24/7 - Politico.com
"When Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats spent a week holding the people's chamber under house arrest, they made plain a political vulnerability beyond drilling. To achieve greenhouse gas goals in the out-years, they are willing to risk a slowdown now in the American economy. How else can you interpret what happened this week? These Democrats aren't environmentalists. They're enviromaniacs." -Wonder Land - WSJ.com
Academy award winning actor George Clooney is set to host a fundraiser for Barack Obama in Switzerland next month. - CNN
Giving you the skinny on race:
"White people spend a significant portion of their time preparing for the moment when they will be offended. They read magazines, books, and watch documentaries all in hopes that one day they will encounter a person who will say something offensive. When this happens, they can leap into action with quotes, statistics, and historical examples. Once they have finished lecturing another white person about how it's wrong to use the term "black" instead of "African-American," they can sit back and relax in the knowledge that they have made a difference." - Being Offended - Stuff White People Like #101
We Believe in Offshore Drilling and Fares from $9* Each Way
"The Chronicle's announcement pushed the number of layoffs and buyouts this year above 7,000. (There are more, of course, because some papers have not said how many people have been laid off or have accepted buyouts.) Adding in the cuts at the Chronicle and the Modesto Bee, about 17 percent of all layoffs/buyouts this year have been in California."File under "Who says there's no good news?"
"The shamans of contemporary linguistic taboos have adopted nigger, faggot, cunt, and the other forbidden words as passwords, emblems of group membership -- and membership, as American Express has been at pains to remind us, has its privileges. No one outside the shamans' circle is permitted to speak the password; it's an arrogation of a jealously guarded status. He who dares must be cut down, ground into the dust, and forbidden ever to speak at all, to any effect, in any context. For as in all systems of nymic magic, the word is deemed congruent with the thing: the taboo words are at the root of the shamans' power. Failure to enforce the taboo would risk the loss of the group's privileges and immunities, laboriously amassed over the decades of exploitation of others' guilt." -Francis W. Porretto - Eternity Road
The two women married in Canada, obtained identical tattoos and picked out adjoining burial plots with the expectation that they would be together till death and beyond. Then one of them fell for someone else, and without getting a divorce, entered into a Vermont civil union in Stowe with the new woman. Now the woman who says she was left behind -- Laureen Wells-Weiss -- is alleging that her estranged spouse committed bigamy.
"On the official website of the United Church of Christ, where there's something called UCC FIRSTS: A Journey through Time -- a list of the historic achievements of the various Congregationalist and German Reformed churches that joined to form the denomination in 1957. The items run from John Winthrop's 1630 prayer that the Massachusetts Bay Colony "be as a city upon a hill" to the 1995 publication of "the only hymnal released by a Christian church that honors in equal measure both male and female images of God." - The Death of Protestant America: A Political Theory of the Protestant Mainline by Joseph Bottum
HOUSTON -- Gasoline prices rose to a record-high four expletives per gallon Monday, a rate of fuel-price-related cursing not seen since the 1979 energy crisis sparked a nationwide obscenity boom.
"My point is that any discussion of Obama's "skinniness" and its impact on the typical American voter can't avoid being interpreted as a coded discussion of race." - When "skinny" means "black." - By Timothy Noah - Slate Magazine
"If Senator Obama is as exercised about "outrageous" profits as he says he is, he might also have to turn on a few liberal darlings. Oh, say, Berkshire Hathaway. Warren Buffett's outfit pulled in $11 billion last year, up 29% from 2006. Its profit margin -- if that's the relevant figure -- was 11.47%, which beats out the American oil majors. Or consider Google, which earned a mere $4.2 billion but at a whopping 25.3% margin. Google earns far more from each of its sales dollars than does Exxon, but why doesn't Mr. Obama consider its advertising-search windfall worthy of special taxation? - What Is a 'Windfall' Profit? - WSJ.com
"It's clear that in Marin and its environs, Republicanism has become thoughtcrime. This is serious stuff. This is -- if I may use a phrase that has become tainted with controversy -- Un-American. And the only way I can think of to combat it is for individuals to speak out and come out. They may find, as I did, that there's some unpleasantness but that the vast majority of friends and family stick by them, and the ones that don't aren't the finest of the lot. - neo-neocon - A plea to the closet Republicans of Marin: come out, come out, wherever you are
1. The bank account is about to be overdrawn. We can't deposit our way out of this problem.
2. Your bedroom is a mess. You can't tidy up your way out of this problem.
3. I'm hungry. I can't eat my way out of this problem.
4. We're out of food. We can't go grocery shopping our way out of this problem.
5. We are disgusting, fat tubs of goo. We can't exercise our way out of this problem. - Etcetera and so forth @ House of Eratosthenes
"When we are incapable of finding "one good thing" to say about Bush or Pelosi or even someone in our personal lives, we've surrendered reason to repellent hate; the hate owns us. At that point, we are no better than the person we abhor; we may be worse."- Eizabeth Scalia Let's Debate, Not Dehumanize
"When such an overarching absolute standard is rejected -- as it has been by aggressive secularism, atheistic, reductionist, and materialistic to the core -- we can only enforce a form of unity through coercion and power. Inner moral dictates must be subjugated to coerced conformity. It is "acceptable" to hold "values" which are at odds with the secular societal standard -- as long as these "values" are never acted upon in speech or behavior. We may believe abortion to be morally abhorrent -- but must never act to restrain it; we may hold homosexuality to be morally wrong and believe gay marriage to be a threat to a core foundational institution of society -- but to verbalize thus is "hate speech", and "intolerance", and "ignorance." Our unity is the unity of the gag, a multicultural muzzle which celebrates the superficial, elevates the insignificant, tolerates the intolerable -- and punishes the moral. Our unity is the unity of relativism, a superficial solidarity where everything is acceptable but absolutes, where anything is tolerated but truth. Such unity strives for the lowest common denominator, maintaining its forced cohesion by the will to power, destroying in its enslaving solidarity the very soul of freedom and the heart of true human harmony." - The Utopia of Relativism | The Doctor Is In
More to this than meets the eye. Much more. Zombietime took a little stroll through a San Francisco Street Fair and reports back with many pictures from Up Your Alley 2008. So, if you wish to see what passes for acceptable pubic display in San Francisco these days, click the link. Warning. Not work safe. Not child safe. Not safe at all. It is far beyond anything you can imagine. Pretty damning, actually, on all levels: Up Your Alley 2008
"You might not think that dealing with the ongoing plague of disintegrating parachutists might not be the most important problem of our modern age, but it is one that will grow in size and intensity as the baby boom generation ages. This generational cohort, stuck as it is in a perpetual adolescence, will refuse to grow gracefully as previous generations did and will spend an inordinate amount of time doing things any normal person would think beyond the physical capacity of someone of that advanced age. But the baby boom, for whom life means never really having to grow up, will try to deny the biological effects of time passing and as a result of this denial the skies over this our Great Republic will soon fill with dentures, limbs, pacemakers, walkers, bifocals, AARP membership cards, and the occasional veteran of the Summer of Love raining down upon an unsuspecting populace like so much unwanted space debris. Things will definitely get uglier hereabouts before they get any better, folks." -The Passing Parade: Cheap Shots from a Drive By Mind
"Obama should know that for all his own talents, it is rare to have someone with his meager law record selected as Harvard Review Editor, or hired at the University of Chicago Law School, or after a mere two years in the Senate, a presidential candidate. The point is not that his race explains his success, but in America alone it either was irrelevant to it, or, more likely, a great force multiplier. - Works and Days
Calif. Prison Giving Inmates Free Condoms A union representing prison guard supervisors is opposed to the distribution of condoms. The union said that condoms can be used as places to hide drugs or weapons. "They can put stuff in them and use them to throw at staff or other inmates," said Chris Gold of the Prison Supervisor's Union." Ah, isn't that sort of the idea?
Jobless rate rises to 4-year high of 5.7 percentStill somewhat behind the 75 year unemployment high of 24.9 percent set in 1933. But where there's Obama there's hope.
"Here comes the orator! With his flood of words, and his drop of reason." -- Benjamin Franklin 1735
"When the young leader spoke eloquently and passionately and denounced the old system, the press fell in love with him. They never questioned who his friends were or what he really believed in. When he said he would help the farmers and the poor and bring free medical care and education to all, everyone followed. When he said he would bring justice and equality to all, everyone said "Praise the Lord." And when the young leader said, "I will be for change and I'll bring you change," everyone yelled, "Viva Fidel!" - Letters To The Editor - Letters to the Editor - inRich.com
A man who was found with his head severed by a chainsaw was fighting to stay in a block of 70 flats in Hampshire cleared for redevelopment. David Phyall, 50, was the last tenant at the Atlantic Housing Ltd housing association flats in Eastleigh. His body was found by police on 5 July, who said his death was not suspicious.
"You have your sub-bullshit, your opti-bullshit and your supra-bullshit. We get snookered by this blend time and time again, because we have a tendency to say: I know the sub-bullshit is true; I do not agree with the supra-bullshit, but compared to that the opti-bullshit is believable. And so we believe the opti-bullshit, the bullshit calibrated to the optimum degree of self-reproduction. We will repeat the opti-bullshit to people we know. And if anyone dares challenge it, we will treat the challenge as a challenge to the sub-bullshit. Anytime the sub-bullshit is demonstrated to be true, which it will be, we will take that as further proof of the opti-bullshit, and become more convinced of the validity of the opti-bullshit ... which we haven't even tested, or observed anyone else testing." - House of Eratosthenes
"As much as legislators and founders of states ought to be honoured and respected among men, as much ought the founders of sects and factions to be detested and hated; because the influence of faction is directly contrary to that of laws. Factions subvert government, render laws impotent, and beget the fiercest animosities among men of the same nation, who ought to give mutual assistance and protection to each other." - David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, Part I, Essay VIII, OF PARTIES IN GENERAL
Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards is pulling the plug on a scholarship program he started at an Eastern North Carolina high school -- a program he once promised would be a model for the nation under an Edwards presidency. - newsobserver.com | Edwards ending college programNow we know he knows he's kaput. No use throwing good money after good.
"Obama Launches LowRoadExpress.com" - Advertising Age - Campaign Trail
Time managing editor Rich Stengel said he was proud of the Obama puff piece, and that he hoped it would help to redefine the boundaries of journalistic drivel. "When the American people cast their vote this November, this is the piece of fluff they're going to remember," Stengel said. "Not the ones by Newsweek, Harper's, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Economist, Nightline, The Wall Street Journal, or even that story about lessons Obama learned from his first-grade teacher we ran a month ago." -'Time' Publishes Definitive Obama Puff Piece
"I don't share the beautiful people's revulsion for suburbia. It's just decent people making a living for themselves, and maybe having a patch of grass to play touch football on. Many people do hate suburbia, the whole idea of it, and wish we were all living in concrete urban human dovecotes, where they can keep their eye on us." -Sippican Cottage: Gettin' Used To It
"What we're looking at, essentially, is the beginning of food zoning. Liquor and cigarette sales are already zoned. You can't sell booze here; you can't sell smokes there. Each city makes its own rules, block by block. Proponents of the L.A. ordinance see it as the logical next step. Fast food is bad for you, just as drinking or smoking is, they argue. Community Coalition, a local activist group, promotes the moratorium as a sequel to its crackdown on alcohol merchants, scummy motels, and other "nuisance businesses." An L.A. councilman says the ordinance makes sense because it's "not too different to how we regulate liquor stores.... Supporters of the moratorium call this state of affairs "food apartheid." - Banning fast food in poor neighborhoods. - By William Saletan - Slate MagazineRich whites to poor blacks in South Central L.A. - "Shut up and eat your vegetables."
"Not a few designers are pushing men to expose more of the bodies that they have spent so much time perfecting at the gym. "We have all these self-imposed restrictions" about our dress, said Ben Clawson, the sales director for the designer Michael Bastian. "As men's wear continues to evolve and becomes a little more casual without becoming grungy, it's not impossible anymore to be dressed up in shorts.... "The idea of being threatened by the objectified male body has gone, the process is complete," explained Aaron Hicklin, the editor in chief of Out magazine. "Men are the same as women now."" - Shorts Crack the Code - NYTimes.com
"Come to think of it, maybe the best status for Obama would be that of monarch, of the type reigning in present-day England. After all, it's the ultimate symbolic position: no accomplishments necessary, no policy commitments involved, once you're in you're in for life, you get to go on all those fine world tours, the clothes are classic, and speeches are heavily featured." - neo-neocon - On acting Presidential (or kingly)
"Republicans have been in control of either Congress or the Presidency for eighteen of the twenty years since I left office, and yet in that short time you've managed to double the size of the federal budget, add hundreds of new federal agencies, and destroy the optimism of the American people," ranted Reagan. "Good going, geniuses."
EARTH—Former vice president Al Gore -- who for the past three decades has unsuccessfully attempted to warn humanity of the coming destruction of our planet, only to be mocked and derided by the very people he has tried to save -- launched his infant son into space Monday in the faint hope that his only child would reach the safety of another world.
"How many hours is Michelle Obama actually putting in at her $200,000 hospital administration job these days? Does she still work there? Or, let's not ask about "work" per se -- does she continue drawing a salary?" -AceAnswer: She's on Obamaternity leave!
One of the intrinsic problems in being a liberal is that you can never reveal your first principles, because if you explicitly articulate them, people will be repelled at what a contemptuous and supercilious asshat you are. Therefore, you must always couch them in terms of "compassion," or "helping the little guy," or "healing the planet," or "unity," or some other such blather. So in that regard, Obama is dealing with a more general problem that is intrinsic to liberalism, which is How to Fool the Idiots. One must be very cautious, because even the idiots are only so stupid. - One Cosmos: Evolutionary Creationism
"Housing students by race seemed to me an odd approach to ending racial division. During my freshman year, I lived two floors below the African American Theme Program floor. Other such floors included the Asian Pacific American Theme Program, the latino-centered Casa Magdalena Mora, and the Unity House, a gay-themed housing unit that allows you to have a roommate of the opposite sex. From what I remember, black students were the only ones participating in the African American Theme Program. Though students of all races and ethnicities are allowed to live in any of the available themed housing units, rarely did I see students living in housing centered on a culture different from their own." - Am I Diverse Enough Now? (Originals)
"The US Congress, which prevents the US , doubtless the greatest hydrocarbon province in the world, from producing much more oil, gas and coal than it does at present. The U.S. has the resource base, the capital, technology and management capability to increase oil, gas and coal production by 15% within 5 years and by 50% within 10 years. Such an increase would bring fossil energy and food prices down by a quarter to a third worldwide , greatly strengthen the dollar, create a boom in good jobs, generate a tidal wave of federal, state and local revenues, propel the stock market to new highs, more than restore housing prices, and substantially enhance national security. Congress is the friend of despots in Iran and Venezuela and the worst enemy of consumers, globally. It's not the fault of the speculators or the Saudis or the Chinese that Congress so likes to blame but of itself (i.e., Congress) and of course, We the People who vote Congress into power. Oil at $175 will not be imposed by some Other on us; it will be freely willed by us as a sovereign people. We are responsible for the consequences of our choices. We may not like them but we cannot evade them nor shift the onus on the Other." -Vinod K. Dar Oil Prices
"Carbon control is what the West talks about. Carbon consumption is what the Non-Western Nations seek. Electricity efficiency and avoided generation is what the West talks about. Electricity supply is what nations big and small outside the West seek. Transportation efficiency is what the West talks about. Increased, greatly increased, mechanized mobility is what the nations of Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America seek. The West wants to orate about wind, solar, geothermal and wave energy. The rest of the world wants more oil and natural gas, coal and uranium. The West worries about carbon control. The rest of the world, especially Asia, worries greatly about energy and food control. - Vinod K. Dar Earth Cools
"As for renewable energy to meet electric needs, the preferred technology for Eucaliyork is always one that is not commercially ready and as soon as it is ripe, it is no longer favored. The ideal project is an invisible windmill transporting power via buried, non-existent, superconducting cables." - Coal and Nuclear
"There are two parallel energy worlds today -- The world as seen from Eucaliyork (EU, California, New York) and RealWorld. Included in the former are New England, Eastern Canada and Japan while the latter embraces most of the U.S., India, China, much of the Pacific Rim, part of Eastern Europe, much of Latin America, Russia, Africa and the rest of Asia. About 600 million people live in the former world and about six billion in the latter. The RealWorld has 10 times as many people as Eucaliyork; it accounts for 100% of the world's population growth and, perhaps, 90 % of the world's economic growth; it has almost 100% of the world's reserves of conventional and unconventional oil and natural gas, coal and uranium, and much of the world's agricultural land." - Vinod K. Dar - Coal and Nuclear
"Conservative issues don't attract me as much as liberal idiocy repels me." - AVI: Postliberal
- The Political Art and the Art of Politics
- The One and the Many
- The Uptown Date
- Wonderful, funny, moving and deeply human
- Christians of Convenience
- Kids Today
- Let Us Now Praise Remarkable Bloggers - 1
- In the Town Hall's Graveyard
- The Resume of Captain Kink
- "And guess what, it's not about the oil."
- And the 2,000,000th Visitor Was Mr. or Ms. 24.81.141.73 ....
- 6 DAYS LATER: "We couldn't rush to failure..."
- The Excuse
- Renewing New Orleans
- In Coldest Type: Crack Addiction in American Publishing
- The Summing Up
- Drive-By
- Support Michael Yon in Iraq Today
- Bigfoot Talks About the Real Situation in the Dome
- Heard On the Radio