Did you ever have to make up your mind
Pick up on one and leave the other behind?
It's not often easy and not often kind.
Did you ever have to make up your mind?
-- The Loving Spoonful
BACK AT THE BEGINNING of this whole mess in the early 60s, Mario Savio got a lot of things wrong, but he got one big thing right. Mario peaked when he stood on the Sproul Hall steps in Berkeley in December of 1964 and said to me and a few thousand others, "There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part..."
Now I'm pretty sure that if Mario were alive today he'd be among all those other Berkeley lifers who no longer speak to me other than to police my brain at a distance, while contemplating perfect organic vegetables in a perfect world where all the bongs have brimming bowls and cats and dogs sleep together in perfect harmony and all is, at last and finally, really copacetic in the world; that world where everyone gets a big fat check from the government, unless you are oppressed -- in which case you get two.
Ah, well, that was all long ago and all their town and colleges are all a crapulous shambles so let them go, let them go, God bless them. I come not to bury them, but to take inventory.
For here on the last day of a shabby year, it comes to me that I have passed, probably long ago, the "point of fulcrum" that John Fowles speaks of in The Magus: There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.
It is my habit to take an inventory of my life on the last day of the year. Sometimes it is just a mumbled conversation with myself, other times it assumes more concrete lineaments. It is usually in two parts, the public and the private and, as is the nature of such things, the public is both more superficial and more interesting. This is that section of this years testament. The private may or may not be along later.
Day One, September 11,2001: +/- 3,000 Deaths from Enemy Action
September 12, 2001 to Present: +/- 2,000 Deaths from Enemy Action
Total: +/- 5,000
Days of War: 1519
Average Number of American Deaths Per Day in the First Terrorist War: 3
Forward Projection: That depends on just what kind of a day we have, doesn't it?
Final Fears Confirmed: Being a Brief Summary of the 2005 High Crimes and Misdemeanors of the Great and Powerful Bush. It's not only worse than you imagine, it's worse than you can imagine.
January 20 - George W. Bush is inaugurated in Washington, D.C. for his second term as 43rd President of the United States, and immediately begins sucking down one to two bottles of wine a night in order to tool up for a year of using his new Godlike superpowers to, dare I say it?, rule the world.
January 25 - Warming up his vast telekinetic powers, Bush, like Mandrake the Magician, gestures mystically at the globe in the White House war room causing a stampede at Mandher Devi temple in Mandhradevi during a religious pilgrimage in India that kills at least 215, mostly women and small children. While doing so he sips a superb Pinot Noir and consumes an entire tin of Altoids to keep his wife in the dark about his comfortable return to his own private alcoholism. "I just can't keep going out to the White House garage after dark," he reflects.
January 30 - After making sure that the fix is in with millions of Iraqis in the form of free Happy Meal coupons, Bush allows the first free Parliamentary elections in Iraq since 1958 take place. To stain the fingers of the electorate purple, Bush orders Francis Ford Coppola to dump thousands of gallons of substandard Merlot in that desert vastness.
February 6 -In a cynical move to prepare the United States to accept an eternal extension of the Patriot Act, Bush causes the New England Patriots to defeat the Philadelphia Eagles 24-21 in the Super Bowl. As his co-wizard-in-waiting, Karl Rove rubs his hands chortling, "This year the people will think anything with the word 'patriot' in it is a winnah."
February 16 - Reflecting that hockey is not only a native sport of Texas but is boring to boot, Bush calls in some markers and makes the National Hockey League cancel its 2004-2005 season. "Who cares," he mumbles while tossing back his sixth 'Wine in a Can,' "it's just more panty-waist figure skating with clubs."
SWIFTLY REPLACING THE WEEKLY WORLD NEWS as the most hallucinatory magazine on the planet is the New York Times Magazine. Exhibit A is this exchange sans a shred of intellect from What's the Big Idea? wherein the clueless editors of the Times Magazine interview an even less clued Peter Watson, author of the unfortunately titled "Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, From Fire to Freud."
On the other hand, not all big ideas are good ideas. In fact, most big ideas are probably terrible ideas. What do you think is the single worst idea in history?Really? Let's review the ancient world of, say, Mesopotamian cosmology before the advent of the concept of monotheism.WATSON: Without question, ethical monotheism. The idea of one true god. The idea that our life and ethical conduct on earth determines how we will go in the next world. This has been responsible for most of the wars and bigotry in history.
But religion has also been responsible for investing countless lives with meaning and inner richness.
I lead a perfectly healthy, satisfactory life without being religious. And I think more people should try it.
In this first known stab at civilization a rapacious slate of rulers hosted, for their own benefit, a whole raft of cheap tin gods coming at you from every direction. A god of the fire, a god of the mud, a god of the liars, a god of the crud. For all we know, a god of the excreta of the nose. Each one was as shiny and worthless as a commemorative quarter from the U.S. Mint. Over and over for all your days these paltry gods hectored you/ each one demanding their little altar, their little ritual, and their little donation, without let up and without number.
The streamlined and stylin' modern version of this sort of theocracy was known, until quite recently, as Tibet, and no matter how colorful the Potala might seem after a serious bong hit in Katmandu, the realities of the modern era have not exactly treated Tibet kindly. In general it is better to have one God and an army on your side than a thousand gods and no army.
Omnitheism was the model for much of the world from prehistoric times until just an inch of time ago. You had to put up with a god running every little aspect of human existence. You had to accept that every single one of those niggling and irritating gods was ready, at any moment and for no real reason other than malice, to destroy
Continued...She was cruising down the Big Sur coast,
Looking for a little romance.
I was walking the edge of Highway One,
Hoping for a second chance.
She pulled that Ford to the side of the road.
I opened the door, got in.
Said, "My name's Adam, baby. What's yours?"
She said, "They call me Original Sin."
She didn't look like no high-school sweetheart.
She was no obvious beauty queen.
But she had something every man knows,
That fire that's felt not seen.
We coasted down that seaside highway
Until the evening fog rolled in,
Then checked ourselves into the Pines Motel,
Where I first knew Original Sin.
When I awoke the next morning
Continued...Throughout the night, the cold loomed close,
And wrapped the house in shrouds of ice.
Within, four candles lent us light,
And returned to us all that was lost.
Around us, all the village slept.
Our children safe, their breathing slow.
Four candles gleamed beside the tree,
Their flames burned long, burned low.
Then all fell silent round the house.
The snow shown blue, the shadows, slate.
You could almost hear the planet turn.
I stood alone beside my gate.
NO CHRISTMAS (SORRY, "HOLIDAY") SONGS OF CHEER for the New York Times as it rounds out a year of leading its braying band of defeatists and appeasers. Whatever the extended and dysfunctional family and friends of the Times may think, the market this year "thought different."
Watch the numbers. They tell a story:
NEW YORK TIMES STOCK PRICE, 2005
52 Week
High 41.21
Low 26.50
As one wag pointed out, "Their current stock price is way below Bush's current poling numbers."
As they say, "So long. Thanks for the fish wrap."
BY MARK HELPRIN IN Herd Animals
"Irrationality on a political level from these quarters has never been a shock. On a personal level, however, the predominant response of the intellectual Left was a mystery. It was as if the thousands of crushed and incinerated men, women, and children—those who threw themselves into a quarter-mile abyss rather than have the flesh seared off their bones as they stood in the wind at glassless walls, the small children who died in terror after watching hysterical fanatics slit the throats of screaming stewardesses, and so on, for there are almost three thousand stories—simply did not exist. How does one explain such an egregious absence of sympathy (much less assertions that "they" deserved it, or that it was a work of art) among endlessly self-proclaiming empathetics whose stock in trade is to milk compassion even from the Rock of Gibraltar? This is a real rather than a rhetorical question, because it is significant of a great division."
SHOJI:"... a deft and subtle aesthetic experience."
TREES in the south of England.
FINEST AMERICAN WINES OF 2005
THE PAST FROM ABOVE.
THE AURORAS OF MARS.
THE ANCHORESS: At Vespers, Tonight
NEW YORKERS TO TRANSIT WORKERS: DROP DEAD!
DAVID WARREN LOOKS AT THE MODERN MEANING OF TOLERANCE: "It is one of the "thought-killer" words for the politically correct mind; "tolerance" is to be accepted uncritically as a word for all seasons and reasons, and thought must stop the moment it appears. As ever, we find even postmodernity is not without a history -- it is the carrying forward of a loose idea hatched during the Enlightenment, into the realm of dementia."
MEANWHILE THE MANOLO FINDS one style of female life that cannot be tolerated.
TOLERANCE AT WORK. A restroom available to men and women. And very tiny crippled people.
DAVE SIFRY ANNOUNCES yet more "cool" features destined to make Technorati even more undependable than it already is. Robert Scoble plugs in the term "Microsoft" and finds no mention of it in the blogosphere. Sifry responds that this a mere "glitch." Right. Next.
THINKING OF WORKING FOR GOOGLE? THINK TWICE: "Every month, aspiring workers deluge the popular Mountain View search engine with up to 150,000 resumes, equivalent to a stack of paper at least 50 feet high."
HOMELESS HOMES -- or --Intellectual Insanity in Architects.
BILL GATES. He's rich, but is he smart? Ole doesn't think so.
"I happen to think Bill Gates is incredibly overrated as a smart guy. He is a lousy presenter, and really smart guys give good, focused presentations that make you realize they are really smart. Steve Jobs would be an example. Kip Thorne - now he's a smart guy. Or how about Richard Feynman; in addition to being interesting, he exuded intelligence and deep understanding. Bill Gates may be a great businessman, but he is not a great technologist. And he is not a really smart guy. Sorry."
THE ALWAYS ASTUTE NEO @ neo-neocon has just published her reflections on the political ramblings of that old war horse "intellectual" Harold Bloom. He comes out of the experience looking rode hard and put away wet.
The essence of Bloom's attack on George Bush is that the President is... wait for it... stupid and doesn't read books. There's a fresh assertion from a clod sharp and tenured academic mind. It doesn't take Neo many words to dissolve Bloom's clod into thin mud since Bloom ignores the facts about Bush's real reading habits before bloviating. As usual no fact ever penetrates Bush hate for reasons explained below. I won't comment upon Bloom's assertion about Bush's intelligence and reading habits. That's done ably by Neo. What struck me is a remark Neo highlighted :
"Bloom doesn't think much of Americans, either:
"All of this is extraordinarily blatant, yet the American people seem benumbed, unable to read, think, or remember, and thus fit subjects for a president who shares their limitations."
The assertion that "the people" are dolts for electing a dolt is heard more and more often from those who consider themselves as the only class fit to vote, fit to win, and fit to rule; the American "intellectuals." Or, as was once said with aplomb in Blazing Saddles, "You know. Assholes."
Now that the vast majority of what passes for intellectuals in America live in a reality distortion field as substantial as that great gas giant Jupiter, there's no escaping its pull. Over the decades "Professional American Intellectuals" (PAIs) have managed to so secure their sinecures in Academe and the Media that they are impervious to any shock that shake them out of their delusion short of a thermonuclear explosion. And for many that wouldn't do it either -- unless they happened to be in the city at the time. We've already established that the destruction of 911 was not enough to penetrate their shields.
Existence within this reality distortion field is similar to, and overlaps, the effect that sudden wealth has had on young entrepreneurs in our time. It's not a new phenomenon, but the endless fast and immense wealth for little effort that our fat system throws off allows it to happen with greater rapidity and intensity today. I think of it as "The Bubble."
IN THE KEY OF "You can't make anything foolproof because fools are so creative" comes this selection of subject lines from my Spam catcher. You've probably seen something like these subject lines in your own Spam Filter, but did you ever notice how, taken together, they make a kind of poetry that almost makes sense. It's like what might happen if Maya Angelou shared her crack pipe with e.e. cummings and opened her commodious capture buffer.
Here's a brief example of how to make Spam subject lines add up to a poem even Teresa Heinz Kerry would have been proud to have written after two bottles of Pinot Noir. All I'm doing is cutting a pasting and putting in a little punctuation. I call this soupcon of poesy,
"Not read of Genius"
Her lose the collate,
Or ask on provocative.
He start or latchkey,
Or lumber downriver the bitwise.
Ice try scurry.
Angelo try crotch.
Clarinet try remediable accretion again.
Subliminal may Edwin, may sooth.
Now some may believe that the origin of this poesy is a 'bot, but I demure. It seems to me that someone is coming up with these gems. Someone who once was a writer for either captions on porn thumbnail sites or foreign policy papers churned out by the Democrats. Either way, he's come up in the world.
THE SINGLE MOST NEIGHBOR DEVASTATING CHRISTMAS DISPLAY EVER: Wizards of Winter.
If this was next door to you, the owner would have to stake you to Christmas in Vienna or risk having you burn his place to the ground and salt the earth.
Still, it is the most amazing Citizen Christmas Display yet achieved by the greatest nation of party throwers in history.
Watch the whole thing. The crescendo is worth waiting for. I guess next year all they can do to top it is to blow the whole house off the face of the Earth.
[Poiinter via The Wrightwing ]
THOSE PEOPLE EAGER TO DROWN THEMSELVES IN DEBT to be a "home owner" in the current housing market need to look at anotherf****dborrower.com for the lowdown on their new and continuing servitude.
Chilling tales and ripping yarns from someone on the inside of the lending industry about how fools got into and how some may get out of their engulfing tsunami of debt.
Fascinating insights. Just keep scrolling.
Another page covering the coming Tulipmania correction in real estate stupidity ("Ramifications Of Speculative Euphoria Materialize") is The Housing Bubble
No doubt about it, as ARMs adjust and appreciation slows or reverses, marriages for second incomes or big check books will increase. Along with amateur bank robberies.
ON A CRISP AUTUMN AFTERNOON last month in New York City, I went deep into the East Village to DL Cerney , a men's shop that I favor. It's a small shop right next door to the ancient and honored McSorley's Old Ale House Bar . The line of clothes it offers can be found nowhere else in the world so I always make time to shop there when I'm in New York.
On the afternoon that I went, there was only a woman minding the store and I was the only customer. She was a handsome woman with a sharp mind and attractive personality. We got to talking about New York "Then" and New York "Now," and the clothes, and other things. At one point she asked me, "Who's your favorite contemporary author?"
I paused for a moment and then said, "Victor Davis Hanson."
Her eyes widened in shock. She turned quickly and scanned the shop and the East Village street visible through the window.
"Victor Davis Hanson? I adore him. He's so brilliant and so prolific. You.... you must be one of us. It's so lonely for us here in New York City these days. Especially if you are an artist living in the Village like I am. It's horrible watching one friend after another become infected with Bush Derangement Syndrome."
"Do you think BDS is always terminal?" I asked.
"Still too soon to tell, but the smart money is betting that way."
--Or --
"Everything I need to know I learn from my toolbar"
SOMETIME AFTER THE NICHOLAS BERG BEHEADING was shelved to make room for the new major media show called TAAGAS ATTUYBE! ( "Torture All Abu Ghraib Apprentices/Survivors All the Time Until Your Brain Explodes" ), disgust with traditional media reached tsunamic proportions across the Internet, as well as in the population at large. On the Internet this revulsion was expressed by a plethora of commentary, fact-checking, and pointers. Still, it all has a "been there, done that, have the T-shirt" feeling to it. And it masks what the continuing failure of the major media are doing to themselves, every day in every way, as -- following their benighted blisss -- they become worse and worse.
There's another quieter way, in which users are, day-by-day, having their say about the sealed fate of the moral and ethically compromised major media, the evolution of The Toolbar Times. To paraphrase John Gilmore, "Users are seeing the work of traditional news media as system damage and routing around it." Like Scoop Nisker, we'd don't like the news so we're going out and making some of our own.
Somewhere someone is updating a graph. The graph has two lines. The first line depicts traditional media (a combination of audience numbers for television and radio news and the circulation of
Continued...BDS, OR "BUSH DERANGEMENT SYNDROME," has been an identifiable mental disease of the out-of-power political classes for quite some time. Like some heartbreaking psoriasis of the soul, BDS kills and cripples thousands of our fellow Americans' minds daily. Lately, however, the Tinfoil Hat set has added another style of dementia to its inventory-- PABS, or "Paranoia About Bush Syndrome."
Exhibit A is the woeful tale of "Emma" (Not her real name for reasons that will become clear). Emma's tale is the kicker for a popular story out of this weekend's Guardian, The Tickle Inside. The ostensible purpose of this article is that the writer sets out with a photographer to find out why people smile to themselves spontaneously on the street. In short, the writer sets out to find the source of those little moment's of private joy.
Fair enough and fitting the season and all that. Of course, under the Guardian's iron editorial axiom of "All our writers must find new and unexpected ways of slamming George Bush at least once a day." it doesn't take long for the joy seeking writer to drop in a steaming hunk of Bushosis that breaks new ground in intellectual insanity. The method to the story is to catch somebody smiling, snap their photograph, and then interview them. Here's the kicker, oozing textbook paranoia from every pore:
She's American. I'll call her Emma. Today's the day, the papers are reporting, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, is to be arrested for his part in disclosing the identity of the CIA agent Valerie Plame.Emma emotionally extorts a promise not to use her photograph and to have her name changed. All for naught since I have it on good authority from a highly placed source deep within the top secret Karl Rove Concentration Camp Commandos that last night black helicopters lowered a strike team onto the roof of the Guardian. After disabling the Guardian's Guard by reading them a 2500 word Lewis Lapham Harper's Editorial, they obtained the photographer's full prints from the session and are , at this moment, hauling Emma off to a torture cell equipped with the woodchipper from "Fargo," and hidden deep beneath the Lincoln Memorial.Emma is laughing to herself because she's no fan of the Bush administration. I compliment her on laughing about politics rather than something more solipsistic. She thanks me and says goodbye.
Half an hour later, Emma has a panic attack. She rushes frantically around Liverpool Street trying to find us. Finally she gets hold of us on the phone via the Guardian.
"You can't use my photograph!" she yells.
"Why not?" I ask.
"Because if the White House reads what I've said to you, they might punish me with an IRS [the US tax agency] audit."
There is a silence.
"Are you connected to the White House or politics?" I ask.
"No," she says, "I'm involved in the film business."
"Then you'll be fine," I say.
"I'm serious," she says. "They're vicious. I heard they audited Sean Penn as a punishment after he went on a peace mission to Iraq before the war."
"But surely," I say, "they aren't going to go to all that effort of tracking you down to punish you just because you laughed to yourself about Lewis Libby?"
"They might," she says.
"We'll give you a false name," I say.
"They'll see my photograph," she says.
THE CULTURE WITH WAY TOO MUCH TIME ON ITS HANDS: SPEED LACES, shoe lacing system
"Ordinary laces are jammed up in a matrix of friction. We moved lacing to the surface of the shoe and eliminated the friction. Now your lacing is free to flow through your shoe."
And when the lacing is in the flowing within the shoes, all is of the best in Manolo World!.
Pay no attention to the name behind the apple
ONE OF THE THINGS that escaped my report on the Pajamas OS Media convocation in New York a fortnight ago was that we decided, en masse and by acclamation, to change a blogger's name. For untold ages now, she has been known to the blogsphere as neo-neocon, but as we ascend upwards into the rarified realms of blogger celebrity this will no longer do.
Henceforth, it is a Law of the Blogsphere that neo-neocon will be called, simply, "Neo."
This adds instantly to the celebrity nature of blogging since we now have one of our own to rank with Cher and Bono.
And so it goes.
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
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- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
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- June 2007
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- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
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- April 2006
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- February 2006
- January 2006
- December 2005
- November 2005
- October 2005
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- August 2005
- July 2005
- June 2005
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- January 2005
- December 2004
- November 2004
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- December 2003
- November 2003
- October 2003
- September 2003
- August 2003
- July 2003
- June 2003
"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
- On Fights in Which I No Longer Own a Dog
- The First Terrorist War's Daily American Casualty Rate (So Far)
- The Year in Bushlines
- "Last Week I Cud Knot Spel 'Historian,' Now I Are One."
- Closing Time
- Hanukkah Candles on Christmas Eve
- The New York Times' Christmas Grinch: Pieces of Coal and Dry Salami for the Gray Lady
- The Central Political Issue of the Day in One Paragraph
- Six Beautiful Things
- Pointers That Click
- Intellectual Insanity in American Life
- Spambox Poesy
- Not-So-Silent Night
- Bubble? What Housing Bubble?
- Speaking of BDS
- The Toolbar Times
- PABS (Paranoid About Bush): The New Deranged Liberal Syndrome
- InfoBahnside Attractions
- Vito's Place
- Daughter