They call it "Rain City" but sometimes it feels like I'm doing time in Oz, and I don't mean the Emerald City. Exhibit A:
Seattle Turns off the Lights To Fight Global Warming
Cities worldwide flip the switch at the same time on March 29SEATTLE - Mayor Greg Nickels announced today the city of Seattle will participate in Earth Hour this Saturday, joining dozens of cities across the globe that are encouraging people to turn off the lights and consider the small steps that can reduce climate pollution. On Saturday, March 29, from 8 to 9 p.m., Seattle City Hall will go dark, along with the Seattle Municipal Tower, the Central Library and Seattle Justice Center, except for those areas that must remain illuminated for emergency and public safety reasons.
Well, my little house is going to remain illuminated for public sanity reasons. In fact, I'm going to make sure that for that one little hour tonight, every single bulb in my place is turned full on. Damn the dimmer switches, full speed ahead.
For one hour, it will be dead easy for spiritual search and rescue craft high overhead to spot my house. It'll be that single dot down there in the pool of dark, dark Kool-Aid being slurped by the privileged citizens of this city who never met a nanny-state stipulation they didn't like.
And yes, at times like this, Seattle is like doing time. Last week I talked about it with a native who had been here for 20 years. "Exercise. Brisk exercise and vitamin D3. That's the answer," he told me. Sounds like a prison regime to me, especially when the exercise yard is drenched with slush and rain most hours of most days.
Most mornings you wake up in your house that has become your cell and you look out the window with the last shreds of hope and.... nope, the damp gray canvas has been nailed to the sky again.
One of the items on my ever-lengthening list of things I hate more than life itself is ineradicable nature of the PR phrase "We are very excited." as in
We are very excited about having the 1st event management company in the North Okanagan!
Somewhere in the dawn of time an extremely retarded writer in "the PR game" got the brilliant idea to put this phrase into the mouth of every executive that was ever so dumb as to actually hire a PR firm in the first place. It was the beginning of one of the worst memes ever to infest the mind of man.
Like the needles into the arm of a meth freak, once this phrase was put into a press release it never came out.
Style ....
.... or stupidity?
You can choose which model to sink your money into. Will you choose the one that makes the most sense in terms of fuel efficiency, or the one that lets the world know what a really good person you are?
On their trip from London to Geneva (plus 100 urban miles), the BMW pictured above played music and ran air-conditioning while the Prius driver turned off both as he tried to drive very carefully. Nevertheless, the BMW consumed 4.7 liters per 100 km (41.9 mpg) while the Prius has burned 4.9 liters per 100 km in average (40.1 mpg). Subtle BMW gadgets to save fuel seem to be more important than the hybrid core of the Prius as well as its 500 missing pounds. - BMW 520d: more efficient than Toyota PriusChoose carefully because you have to remember that, deep down, most people know that:
Dateline: AmeriKKKa, 1968 -- 2006
WHEN I WAS VERY YOUNG, majoring in marijuana at the university, hanging out with the Progressive Labor Party, and skipping through the clouds of tear gas on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, I was convinced that any war that would send my long-haired, sensitive, poetic and acid-tripping self off to wade through rice paddies in Vietnam just had to be wrong, wrong, wrong .
In those years it was easy to see the United States through red-tinted glasses. All you had to do was load a Chillum , roll another Giant Doobie, put "Blonde on Blonde" on the turntable, plug in the Bongomatic and light everything up. Like so many others in that long ago land of Nod-Out, this ritual was my major course of study.
Once this gentle ritual sufficiently soothed my tortured soul I'd often make my way (s l o w l y) to the daily Vietnam Day Committee meeting for a righteous rap session on how "the man can't bust our music or our movement." Then I'd float my way back home to listen to my hot red-diaper girlfriend rhapsodize about her Worker's Party parents and natter on about old Progressive Labor Party parties in New York that seemed to center not on politics but on heroin suppositories. She thought "those were the days."
First they take away your secretary and assistants and give you voice mail, email, and a Blackberry. Then they take away your office and slap you in a cube about the size of a hamster cage. Then they attach a keystroke recorder to your computer to monitor your "productivity." Then they put you on-call 24/7 and even on vacation. Let's see, what's been left out of your productivity profile? Yes, the ability to get work done while exercising! Fear not. That too has now been overcome.
Meet the workplace Focker called The Walkstation
"The Walkstation is the combination of a fully integrated electric height-adjustable worksurface with an exclusively engineered, low speed commercial grade treadmill. At a maximum speed of 2 mph, the Walkstation lets you walk comfortably, burn calories, feel healthier and more energized... all while accomplishing the work you'd normally do while seated. No sweat!"
There's a constant passion for increasing our work day that's particularly evident here on the web (See Merlin Mann's self-worshipping and obsessive 43 Folders and the thousand of spin-offs from this site), but it all strikes me as so much overkill. Indeed, it strikes me as a serious variation of my favorite quote from Time Bandits
Supreme Being: Dead? No excuse for laying off work.
It's all really an extension of the common fear that "The hurrier I go the behinder I get." And with job cuts likely as we chat ourselves deeper into economic trouble, people are only going to become more obsessed with proving to their Corporate Overlords that they really do have value.
Of couse, the truth is that -- for the vast majority of people working in corporations -- their jobs do not make them nearly as busy as they could be. Much of the work that gets done in offices, the real work, gets done.... Tuesday, after lunch. The rest of the week many, if not most, of our current crop of office workers spend a lot of time padding out their tasks and just goofing off at work. Indeed, the Web itself is the greatest work goof-off invention ever made. Right? Right.
Now get cracking like the little corporate hamster you are!
"These days, the streets of San Francisco resemble the streets of Calcutta." -- Cinnamon Stillwell "Homeless by the bay"
San Francisco, America's top open-air exhibit of failed social policies, never fails to illuminate the lies of social utopianism. Although large sections of this city still retain their charm at a distance -- the swooping helicopter pan shot in from the Golden Gate; the brightly painted Cable Car cresting against sunset -- most soon lose all charm in close-up. Instead, strolling through this city has become like taking a long walk through an endless parking lot at The Homeless Depot.
Scene: A clear and crisp dawn in a small side street near Laguna and Hayes. Plantings in all the window boxes on fussily painted facades. A few very small well-kept front yards. Clean curtained windows. All in all a pretty and quiet moment in the city's morning.
Then, between two of the cars on the street and a bulging shopping cart on the curb, I notice a man who has obviously slept rough for at least 200 consecutive days. He is, like some haggard Tai-Chi dancer, turning in a slow pirouette and gazing intently at the ground. Then he lowers himself delicately down into a squat between an Audi and an SUV.
Seeing no real reason not to stroll past, I do and see that the man, pants to his ankles, is slowly relieving himself onto the curb. I note that he has no plastic bag which dog owners use to deposit the deposit. I was to see this behavior twice more in a single day in San Francisco.
And I was in the better neighborhoods.
As friend of mine recently pointed out, "Women shop. Men resupply."
Too true. Whenever I find myself in one of our current Cathedrals of Food (AKA: "Whole Foods -- Why Pay Less?"), I tend to purchase not meals, but components. Even though I have lived alone for some time, I buy like I am still supplying a small tribe. I've tried to control this by selecting the "little" cart. You know, that half-pint shopping vehicle, that grocery sports car, that let's you believe you're not really buying as much as you are. It doesn't work. I often come home, unpack my "kills" -- at about $69 a bag -- and wonder, "Who's going to eat all this?"
I get around this problem when I have house guests. House guests are the ultimate answer to "Who's going to eat this?" They are. That's okay. I love to cook for people. I'm good at it, but it gets boring cooking for one; expensive too since I loathe leftovers.
The problems start when your house guests are stealth eaters. You know who I mean. Yes, you. They are the people who never, ever overeat -- except on the sly. People who are the Merrill's Marauders of the post-midnight refrigerator.
When I hear a politician say,
"Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America's improbable experiment in democracy."am I entirely alone when what I hear echoing in the background is
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal?"
Now I don't know about you, but I much prefer the beginning of Lincoln's speech to the dissembling appropriation of his tone adopted by Obama. Not that it is wrong to echo great men, but it is dubious when you do so for the ends of personal ambition. It becomes more dubious when Lincoln could get his task of binding up the nation's wounds done in about 270 words while Obama's "guilty but with an explanation" plea is pushing 5,000.
It is even less appealing when, to make your case, you have to go on and on about the original sin of America -- still not paid off, dammit! And then haul in your grandmother muttering racial epithets, and close with a poignant anecdote about a beleaguered young girl struggling with a mother who has our time's favorite poignant disease -- cancer. No speech it seems is complete without the appearance of a cancer sufferer, unless it is a cancer survivor.
In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear.
-- William Blake
It seems to me that when visiting the left-leaning sites of the web one is forever bumping into a virulent fear and hate of Christianity. It sometimes is couched in an insecure, buffoons' atheism, but more often than not takes aim at the biggest boogyman the American Left can think of -- Christian Fundamentalism. These rants are not hard to find. They are legion.
We're told, over and over, that Christian Fundamentalism is the single greatest threat to the American way of life; that it is, among many other evils, a breeding ground for race hate. We are reminded of the virtual descendants of Simon Legree among the Baptist Republicans of the Caucasian persuasion. We are harangued without end about their ceaseless lust for power. Baptist Democrats, it would seem, possess a "Get Out of Racism Free" card. Not because of their religious belief, but because of their party affiliation. It is a strange religion where sanctity is determined by politics and not by faith, but that seems to be the case.
This afternoon on the lawn my gardener asked me if I have given myself up to God yet. He is a devout believer, a Christian Fundamentalist with a paperback bible in his back pocket. It's new this year because he gave his well-worn one last September. He is concerned for my soul. And he has reason to be. I confessed I had not but was still searching, as indeed I am.
Born and baptized an Episcopalian, I am a member of no church. I feel this as a nagging lack in my soul and my weak response is to, well, "look around." As the old song goes, I'm always "window shopping, but never stopping to buy."
[Republished from last year at this time.]
Five years in. An inch of time. Five years in and the foolish and credulous among us yearn to get out. Their feelings require it. The power of their Holy Gospel of "Imagine" compels them. Their overflowing pools of compassion for the enslavers of women, the killers of homosexuals, the beheaders of reporters, and the incinerators of men and women working quietly at their desks, rise and flood their minds until their eyes flow with crocodile tears while their mouths emit slogans made of cardboard. They believe the world is run on wishes and that they will always have three more.
Like savages shambling about some campfire where all there is to eat are a few singed tubers, they paint their faces with the tatterdemalion symbols of a summer of love long sent down to rot with the worms. They clasp hands and sing songs whose lyrics are ash. "We shall... over... come." Overcome what, overcome who? Overcome their nation? Is that their dream? It is the lifelong dream of those that lead them. That much is certain.
Five years in and we see these old rotting rituals trotted out in the streets like some pagan procession of idols and shibboleths, like some furred and feathered fetish shaken against the sky by hunkering witch-doctors, to hold back the dark, to frighten off the evil spirits and graven images that trouble the sleep of the dreamers.
Five years into the most gentle war ever fought, a war fought on the cheap at every level, a war fought to avoid civilian harm rather than maximize it. Picnic on the grass at Shiloh. Walk the Western Front. Speak to the smoke of Dresden. Kneel down and peek into the ovens of Auschwitz. Sit on the stones near ground zero at Hiroshima and converse with the shadows singed into the wall. Listen to those ghost whisperers of war.
Continued...
"Just when you think you're out... they pull you back in."
Whether you tuned in to television, radio, or the internet in the last few days it was impossible to avoid the sight and sound of Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright.
Much has been said about Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, but what has not been fully voiced is the gratitude felt by many Americans freshly exposed to his oratory.
So, in my role as a voice for the voiceless, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright for his selfless service to the country.
Seldom in my memory has one man with one single, unwavering, and forceful train of thought done for America what Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright has done.
Almost alone in the 21st century Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright has brought back to life and given voice and face to something most of use believed was lost with the 20th century -- the stone cold stereotype of the angry, bitter, racist and crazy African-American.
So thank you, Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright....
Continued...
It's late in the winter of 2005. Hillary and Obama are having lunch in the Senate Dining Room, brainstorming campaign ideas to pitch to the Democratic National Committee.
Obama: Why don't they have salsa on the table?
Hillary: What do you need salsa for?
Obama: Salsa is now the number one condiment in America.
Hillary: You know why? Because people like to say "salsa." "Excuse me, do you have salsa?" "We need more salsa." "Where is the salsa? No salsa?"
Obama: You know it must be impossible for a Spanish person to order seltzer and not get salsa. (Angry) "I wanted seltzer, not salsa."
Hillary: "Don't you know the difference between seltzer and salsa?? You have the seltzer after the salsa!"
Obama: (Just throwing it out there): This should be the campaign.
Hillary: What?
Obama: This. Just arguing. Arguing about nothing.
Hillary (Dismissing): Yeah, right.
Obama: No I'm serious. That sounds like a good idea.
Hillary: Just arguing? What's the campaign about?
Obama: It's about nothing.
Hillary: No real policies?
Obama: No, forget the policies.
Hillary: You've got to have policies.
Obama: Who says you gotta have policies? Remember when we were voting for... for that Senate resolution that proclaimed 'making good people feel good is a good thing' that time? That could be a whole presidential campaign.
At tent revivals they often pass the basket around exhorting the faithful to "Dig deep brothers for the good work!"
In this spirit the Obama Online store is now offering up a chunk of iconic propaganda by propaganda-ironist Shepard Fairey. Fairey got his start with stylized tagging and riffing off of Andre the Giant. He'd whack off a few of these images and then go out and stick them up on things. An "artist" with a message, you see.
Profound and edgy, right? With the added advantages of being inept and ugly. Of course, it was far too complicated for Fairey's street audience. It had too much information. There were too many words. There were too many fonts. There was too much bad drawing evident. Fairey needed instead one simple idea for the simple post-literate minds of his point-and-click generation. He needed an idea that looked tough and profound but, deep down, was comfortably shallow. He tripped over it with his global chunk of graffiti, Obey:
If you've seen this once, you've seen it a thousand times, and didn't even need to see it at all. There's a lot of the usual air-headed post-modern and passe pop-culture subtext lurking in this blight on our culture, but you have to have the taste of a true troglodyte to care. And trogs are what he had. Working diligently within the trog world, his dedication at sticking this chunk of gunk up on whatever blank and wretched bit of urban blight could be had gave Fairey a bit of a following. Which of course is all one needs to be an artist in today's slack society. Not talent, not ability, not skill, just dedication to blunt repetition is enough. Do something ugly once and nobody will care. Make your ugly thing universal and you'll get, as Fairey intuited, a posse that's grown fond of your particular flavor of grunge.
In concert with the other scant souls of the Skateboard Skool of Skribble, Fairey then went on to diminish his small gifts by aping the worst aspects of Socialist Realism (Drawing heavily on Soviet postage stamps and posters since they were easier to imitate than the paintings -- which required, you know, actual skill.). Like the other protected kids of his generation he was careful to lard his "art" with that ironic edge that the artists of slight talent of our age all employ to the point of entropy. This dull edge has two advantages for artists of small ability. First, it hides the fact that you can't draw. Second is discloses to all and sundry that you are part of the conformist cool set. It is the edge that says "Isn't it fun to play with fascism when you live in a country that keeps you forever safe from it?" It's a kind of Code Pink SteamPunk.
As you can see, Fairey's politics are, like his art, the usual foam of limp and simple-minded "America-Bad-One-Worldism" frothing atop a steaming latte of the liberal bromides of the age. In this he's just another artist self-hypnotized by a limited vision of the world. It is a vision informed only by a bottomless ignorance of history. If there were any evidence of depth to his art one might suspect it had true socialist anchors, but I suspect that Fairey has no immersion at all in that philosophy, and that the names of Proudhon, Saint-Simon, and even Debs are ciphers to him. Obama may well be all he knows. History, after all, is hard. If there's any real political pith to him it is more likely born of the MTV-Rock-the-Vote movement; an air-guitar socialism.
Art schools, like Fairey's own Rhode Island School of Design, pour out these hapless, uneducated graduates versed only in assimilationism year after year. After all, they never promised the parents of these half-talented kids a Monet, a Rubens, a Picasso... not even a Duchamp. Artists of talent and uncolonized minds such as R. Crumb do not come out of these art schools, only assimilationist parrots.
Like the other degreed drabs of his generation, Fairey is a one-trick pony. Lately, however, his trick has caused his pony to be pranced about the center ring of the Obama traveling circus and revival meeting. I've written about Fairey and his Sardonic-Socialist-Realism before in Obama: A Progressive for Progress! Now with Liberal Substance!
At the time, Fairey's folly seemed like a one shot deal. But to a generation historically ignorant of the inner meaning of Soviet Socialist Realism, Fairey's flavor of New Socialist Realism was tasty. It gave him a chip in the Obama game. And with his elevation to Chief-Propagandist-in-Waiting among the Obamaites it would seem that Fairey is on-track to bigger and better things at last.
Just as the Russian Socialist Realists had their Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, Fairey has found his own Big Brother. The result is that for a mere $70 you too can have an Obamicon for your wall, your office, or wherever the worship of Obama wants to happen. YES YOU CAN!
Fairey's done his iconic Obama hovering over the word "PROGRESS." Then he put his inconsiderable shoulder to the wheel again and forged an Obama hovering over the word "HOPE." Today he completes the Obama Trinity with an Obama hovering over the word "CHANGE."
"I wanted to make an art piece of Barack Obama because I thought an iconic portrait of him could symbolize and amplify the importance of his mission." -- "CHANGE" by artist Shepard Fairey
I love "the artist's statement" thing that artists these days feel they have to do. Don't you? There's nothing beats an artist just spelling it out in case his talent wasn't large enough for you to get it just by looking. It's good to know the portrait is "iconic," because if there's one thing Obama is short on lately it's deification.
That's not to say Fairey is all idealism here. He's always been a hustler with an eye to the main chance. Nothing like hitching your palette to a man with a mission, is there? And, to be fair, Fairey's socialist symbolism does symbolize and amplify. Indeed, should Obama be elected I am certain that Fairey has already dreamed of being called to some future White House to do the official portrait of President Obama.
But he doesn't have to go. I've done his work for him. In the spirit of all of Fairey's work I've just made the one essential change that will sum up the achievement and the mission. Fairey can relax. He began with nothing to say and he said it. Now there is only the repeating, and repeating, and repeating:
Dead man walking.
They shouted at him, as the Spitzers split from the press conference, "Governor, will you resign? Will you resign?" Silly journalists. Any sharp pundit would have gotten up in Mrs. Spitzer's face and asked, "Does this mean you are going to run for the U.S. Senate?" I'm looking for Oprah to do that job when she has the Spitzers on to talk about "the healing process."
Free Hope Zone
Free Fire Zone
They say it is a mental 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. I don't forget a thing so much as I let it just "slip my mind."
A common variation of this slippage is our deplorable habit of letting something slip in one ear and out of your mouth without first striking either a reflective surface or passing through a BS filter -- preferably both. Once you realize that "In-Ear-Out-Mouth" (IEOM) is an affliction of epidemic proportions in contemporary America you can spot it maiming and killing brain cells everywhere.
Continued...
This morning at Maggies Farm, one of the most fascinating and inspiring articles in a long time.
"After several agonizingly long seconds, we made the turn and blasted toward the Mediterranean. 'You might want to pull it back,' Walter suggested. It was then that I noticed I still had the throttles full forward. The plane was flying a mile every 1.6 seconds, well above our Mach 3.2 limit. It was the fastest we would ever fly." - Major Brian Shul: "I loved that jet"I'd tell you to "read the whole thing," but you won't be able to stop yourself.
From Shape, a firm that manufactures Inflatable Military Decoys and Camouflage Dummy Targets
Our new great demographic divide is Walmart State vs Starbucks State.
These are maps derived from data on the respective locations and density of these two contemporary monoliths of applied capitalism.
Source: The aptly named Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science where they also deal in the cold, hard data of scatterplots.
What do we want? No violence! When do we want it? NOW!
How bad is it in the nation's schools? It is this bad:
Totem Middle School students protest lax rules
Everett WA:Totem Middle Schoolers call discipline weak, unfair. About 200 students walked out of classes on Wednesday, saying they often feel unsafe and want harsher penalties for drugs and fighting.
Tap... Tap.... Tap.... Tap.... sigh...
OK. Let's review.
After decades of "improvement" ... after decades of pumping more and more money into "fixing" the schools ... after decades of giving the Teachers Unions pretty much anything their little hearts desire ... after decades of catering to the least little desire for self-esteem... after decades of requiring less and less actual achievement ... after
Continued...It is war on YouTube, war! He's one lobbed right into the heart of the Obama videos. Check it out, dude.
[With the cowardly killings in Jerusalem today coupled with the parades of joy in Gaza, it's time to republish this "hopeful" memo first written in 2003. I publish it again in the fading hope that Israel will -- at some point -- wake from its pastoral stupor and make the elements of the memo a reality. The harsh truth is that it is going to take a lot of dead Palestinians to disabuse them of their habits. How much is a lot? Every time this sort of massacre occurs, the butcher's bill for the Palestinians just gets higher. And that bill is way past due.]
To: The Palestinian People
From: The People of Israel
Re: Final Notice Before the Termination of Our Relationship
Date: "To Be Determined"
(To be filed in your "Permanent Conduct Record")
AS YOU KNOW from our repeated meetings over many years, we have repeatedly done our best to accommodate your incessant demands regarding employment, compensation, housing allowances, health benefits, and other items of mutual interest as we have endeavored to work together on "Project Peace in the Middle East."
We have, with your agreement and assurances of a better performance, given you time, money, professional help, medication and a more than reasonable offer of land for you to live in while you work out "your issues." In the course of these meetings we feel we have been more than forthcoming in our attendance to your "special needs."
From time to time we have accepted your written word that, given adequate resources, you would be working internally to resolve "your issues." We note, for the record, that at no time has your word proven to be worth the paper which we both so ceremoniously signed. Indeed, it has been our bitter experience that the working out of "your issues" most often involves explosive episodes on the streets of our country.
It has come to our attention, through a continuing rain of the body parts of our citizens onto our streets, that "your issues" do not seem to be resolvable through considered and mutually agreeable negotiations. The outcome of these 'negotiations' in the recent past seems to us to be one of we give and you take and then you kill us. We have decided that this is not a peace project that we wish to continue.
Continued...
These men up north honey sure do make me tired
These men up north they surely do make me tired
They've got a mouth full of gimme, and a handful of much obliged
-- Ella Fitzgerald | Gulf Coast Blues
After hearing Michelle Obama's stump speech four times, New Yorker writer Lauren Collins offers this pearl:
"You're looking at a young couple that's just a few years out of debt," Obama said. "See, because, we went to those good schools, and we didn't have trust funds. I'm still waiting for Barack's trust fund. Especially after I heard that Dick Cheney was s'posed to be a relative or something. Give us something here!" -- Michelle Obama: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
"Give. Us. Something. Here!" -- The core Obama campaign slogan.
Can we get us something from the government? Yes we can!
Can we get us more from the government than we've gotten already? Yes we can!
Can we get us more of the same service that's given the country the USPS, the Social Security System, Medicare, and a tax code so complex it needs a semi-truck just to move it around town? Yes we can!
This may be the single most humane page on the Internet. It will relieve billions of humans of millions of hours of stress and fret. It answers one of the most critical and often uttered questions of the day, the week, the month. To wit:
Where's My Cell Phone - Find Your Misplaced Cell Phone Fast!
Does it work? I can only say, "In the bedroom, in the closet, in the clothes hamper, halfway down, in the left front pocket of my jeans."
Bookmark this now and don't say I never do anything for you. I just did.
Ah, the massed chants praising the leader rising in the background. The glazed eyes. The metronomic nodding. The sprinkling in of 3rd tier celebrities with ordinary people. The ritual gestures. The awestruck worship. The slickness. The repeating slogans. The slowly gathering masses.
When's the last time we saw this kind of popular delusion take hold of crowds?
And people like Ann Althouse are concerned with imagined letters in the night?
[HT: neo-neocon "A cult is born: they believe in him"]
Something, according to Ann Althouse, is hidden in this commercial. I'm not going to tell you what it is. You've got to see it. Can you see it? Ann Althouse did ... but only after one of her commenters told her to look for it.... Oh, wait, she didn't really see it, but she presumed it was there and wrote a carefully parsed and quotation-marked post about it.
(That post is HERE ... but no peeking. First play the Hillary's On the Phone commercial... once, twice, three times and see if you can spot it.) Answer after the jump....
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"Propaganda, only propaganda is necessary. There is no end of stupid people." - Adolf Hitler
If the Arctic should doff its polar cap
in deference to excessive heat,
Mother Earth will be up to her crack
in more H2o than tantalised
the Ancient Mariner. Yet some forecast
drought, Saharas, parched disaster.
Which fate awaits this spinning Ark:
death by drowning or dehydration?
There can only be one apocalypse.
For those who live by final warnings,
beware of hot air -
the true cause of global warming.
Only fools and fanatics claim
to know the Creator's mind;
without the cloudiest doubt
occluding theirs, they proclaim
the end of the world is nigh. Doom
even makes athiests believers of a kind.
"It is deceit that makes hypocrisy what it is. The true hypocrite wants others to think better of him/her than is actually justified. Absent this deceit, there is no hypocrisy, just error or human frailty. That's what the hypocrisy-excuse people don't understand - or pretend not to understand - about church people. What may appear to be church people's hypocrisy is almost always just simple failure to meet the standards of our faith rather than deceit. Why? Because the standard is so high...."
Mocking Obama - that's the last taboo.
"The price of abandoning myth in order to travel where No Man Has Gone Before, via our home entertainment centers or Internet terminals , is that we have lost our place in our own story." - Belmont Club - Who wants to know?
"Our democratic institutions today, though far more distributed and open than the systems of Goebbels or Vyshinsky, are basically designed to run on an information system that funnels truth down from the top of the mountain. This is a brittle design. If it breaks - if it starts distributing sewage along with the rosewater - it loses its credibility. If it loses its credibility, the government loses its legitimacy. When a government loses its legitimacy, you don't want to be standing under it." - Unqualified Reservations: OLXIV: rules for reactionaries
"To regain footing, remember that we were born not into death, but into life,- and that the journey continues after we have finished our days on this earth. We accept this on faith, but that faith is nourished by a conviction that stirs even within many non-believing hearts… an intuition that the gift of life, once given, cannot be taken away. Those who have been stricken enjoy the special privilege of being able to fight with their might, main, and faith to live fully, richly, exuberantly - no matter how their days may be numbered." - A Meditation on Life, from a Dying Man | The Doctor Is In
where the obvious is not an option. I heard more interviews with learned politicians informing me that "drilling for oil" will not affect anything, least of all the quantity of oil. We must apparently wait until 2015, when a magic engine that runs on unicorn flatulence is invented. I have to ask: why is anyone investing in unicorn flatulence today, when it won't make any difference for several years? The answer's simple: the engine will Appear at the chosen moment, borne from the clouds by starlings, but only if we have repented of our foul ways, and the last of the sinners has left the cul-de-sac to reside in a home located a sustainable distance from his or her place of employment. When the last suburban outlying development is empty, when the homes of whose size we disapprove has been abandoned, when the last citizen has been gathered unto the bosom of the urban center, where his profligate ways are sneered upon and the measure of his yard shall be no greater than the standard lot size decreed in 1902, then shall the magic engine appear. Until then, the wind and the sun will bear us onward." -LILEKS (James) the Bleat
NYT Co. stock took another nosedive today, dropping 2.73 percent to $12.85. That means in the last week, Times Company stock has fallen $2.21, or 15 percent. - The New York Observer
Every Obama's nut is unique with various properties and characteristics and has the ability to induce hope, as well as store, receive, and transmit energy. Other legendary properties include the ability to attract compassion and understanding of the media, reveal the location of other people's money, ward off unwanted inquiries, and prevent drug overdose.
"When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture." -Pauline Kael & trash cinema
"There are no turbines on my ranch, because I think they are ugly." - T. Boone Pickens to Newsweek
"Bush Says Drill, Drill, Drill -- and Oil Drops $9! -Kudlow
A nonscientific survey by the dating site Match.com found that 77 percent of respondents believe Obama would be a better kisser than the Arizona Republican. - Obama beats McCain in kissing contest
"Environmentalism is instinctively and relentlessly illiberal, and it is doing more to inculcate people with fear, self-loathing and a religious-style sense of meekness than any piece of anti-terror legislation ever could. If you believe in freedom, you must reject it." -Brendan O'Neill: Greens are the enemies of liberty
In order for "alternate energy" to become feasible, it has to satisfy all of the following criteria:1. It has to be huge (in terms of both energy and power)
2. It has to be reliable (not intermittent or unschedulable)
3. It has to be concentrated (not diffuse)
4. It has to be possible to utilize it efficiently
5. The capital investment and operating cost to utilize it has to be comparable to existing energy sources (per gigawatt, and per terajoule).
- Stephen Den Beste
"Mr. Obama recalled the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer, reciting them with a first-rate accent. In a remark that seemed delightfully uncalculated (it'll give Alabama voters heart attacks), Mr. Obama described the call to prayer as "one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset." -- Obama: Man of the World - New York Times
Global warming may raise kidney stone riskGlobal warming could do more than hurt polar bears: It could force a rise in kidney stones, scientists warned Monday. "We see a relationship between kidney stones and temperatures everywhere," says study co-author Margaret Pearle of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas. "Even in places with air conditioning, warmer temperatures mean more stones."
"But by my estimation, the Iraq War is over. We won. Which means the Iraqi people won. I wish I could say the same for Afghanistan." -Michael Yon: Dispatches
"The so-called strengths of Islamic terrorism: fanatical intent; lack of a centralized leadership; absence of a final authority and cellular structure guarantee uncontrollable escalation once the nuclear threshold is crossed. Therefore the 'rational' American response to the initiation of terrorist WMD attack would be all out retaliation from the outset.... It is supremely ironic that the survival of the Islamic world should hinge on an American victory in the War on Terror, the last chance to prevent that terrible day in which all the decisions will have already been made for us." - The 3 Conjectures @ Belmont Club
At the beginning of his remarks, Obama said, "I'm still looking for my mimosa," as many of the several hundred people in this ballroom were holding drinks. -Lynn Sweet: Obama, at fund-raiser in Newport Beach, Calif. takes one sip of a Mimosa.
"Our Unbreakable Umbrella has no unusual parts, no more metal than an average umbrella, it does not arouse suspicion, can be carried legally everywhere where any weapons are prohibited, unlike a walking stick it does not cause strange looks if carried by an able-bodied person, and it does protect from rain. Anyone who can use a stick for defense can use this umbrella." -The Unbreakable Walking-Stick Umbrella
"As well as the roads, Beijing has promised to repair 2,000 miles of largely defunct railways, build 32 hospitals and 145 health centres, install two electricity distribution networks, construct two hydropower dams and two new airports. In return, China has won the rights to five copper and cobalt mines in Congo's southern minerals belt which boasts some of the world's richest ore deposits. Victor Kasongo, Congo's deputy minister of mines, said: "To be honest, China was Plan B. We first approached the Europeans but they said they did not have the muscle to do what we needed. China has stepped into that opening, very quickly."" -China's 8 Billion drive to buy Africa's mineral wealth - Telegraph
"Climate change is a big scam, probably the biggest one ever successfully perpetrated. But California’s 'salary' is about to depend on the folks in charge never, ever figuring that out. Even though, in the hearts-of-hearts, they know it already." - 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."
"The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren't sure if there is a country or that anyone is running it; but if so, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped minority feminist atheist dwarfs who also happen to be illegal aliens from any other country or galaxy, provided of course, that they are not Republicans." - Big Shot Bob in Texas
China Takes Dog off the Menu for Olympics
"Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Sunday that Israel and the Palestinians have never been as close to a peace deal than now." - CBS News
"I looked down at the loaf of bread and realized it is about two thirds the size it was last month. Then it clicked: All kinds of edible goods are shrinking in China these days. The rice crackers I like to nibble on at the office are in the same sized package as always, but the crackers themselves have shrunk dramatically." - McClatchy blog: China Rises
"The signature performance of the modern revolution is the irregular military parade. Ie: cars or pickup trucks full of well-armed youths in their colorful native attire, driving up and down your street while (a) honking, (b) waving hand-lettered banners, (c) chanting catchy slogans, and (d) discharging their firearms in a vaguely vertical direction. Occasionally one of the vehicles will pull up in front of a house and discharge its occupants, who enter the building and emerge with an infidel, racist, Jew, spy, polluter, Nazi or other criminal. The offender is either restrained for transportation to an educational facility, or enlightened on the spot as an act of radical social justice. Yes, we can!" - Unqualified Reservations: OLXIII: tactics and structures of any prospective restoration
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
-- Auden
"... our most successful politicians--human beings who can recognize or create popular appetites, recreating themselves as necessary."
YouTube - I'm Not Here to Make Friends! HT: Morgan (He whom nobody reads).
Today's warriors have a tremendous advantage over their antique brethren in the struggle for survival, however: the West's pathetic, if endearing, concern for human life, even when that life belongs to a murderer of epic achievement." - PARAMETERS, US Army War College Quarterly - Summer 1994
"In an age haunted by cataclysms real and imagined, in this era of disappointment and wracking international failure, men and women will prove increasingly vulnerable to anti-modern, anti-rational explanations for their misfortunes and their inextinguishable impulse to vanity. Even in the United States, many of those least able to keep material, intellectual, and spiritual pace with the demands of modernity turn to primitive or exotic religious forms, from revivalism to New Age God-candy. -- Vanity and the Bonfires of the "isms" by Ralph Peters PARAMETERS, US Army War College Quarterly - Autumn 1993
"A conservative estimate provided by Robertson Economic Information Services, a Southern African consultancy, says that prices are now three billion fold greater than seven years ago. That's right, billion. The exchange rate is currently an astronomical 90 billion Zimbabwe dollars to one U.S. dollar." -How Inflation May Topple Mugabe - WSJ.com
"After discussing famine in Africa, the peckish politicians and five spouses took on four bite-sized amuse-bouche to tickle their palates. The price of staple foods may be soaring, but thankfully caviar and sea urchin are within the purchasing power of leaders and their taxpayers - the amuse-bouche featured corn stuffed with caviar, smoked salmon and sea urchin, hot onion tart and winter lily bulb." - Just two of the 19 dishes on the dinner menu at the G8 food shortages summit (The Guardian)
"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
- Una Noche Oscura: Tonight I Shall Be the Only Point of Light In a Vast Sea of Darkness
- We Are Never Excited by "We are very excited..."
- BMW or Bigassed Prius? We report. You Decide
- Radical Roots and the Conquest of the Democratic Party
- Cube Hamsters of the World Unite!
- The Black Hole of San Francisco
- Attack of The Food Eroder
- Obama: A Mustard and Relish Sandwich of a Speech
- Graven Images: Racist Fundamentalist Churches of America
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FourFive Years In - Thanks of a Grateful Nation Go Out to Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright
- The Pitch *
- OBAMAGANDA: CHANGE AND OBEY. YOUR CHOICE?
- Spitzer's Wife Silda Joins Democrat Pissed-Off Wives Club, Plans Senate Bid
- Signs of Spring in Queen Anne, Seattle
- Kids Today
- American Digest Daybook #217
- Speed - Mach 3.5 Altitude - 80,000 Feet Over Enemy Territory
- A Tank That Cries Out to Be Blown Up!
- Red State vs Blue State is So 20th Century