You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We'd all love to see the plan
-- The Sacred Book of Beatles
You'd love to see the plan? Okay, here's mine. And, yes, I am a "sooper-genius" for coming up with it. If you think about it you'll know it's not only right, but that -- with a little of that all-American hope for change -- Americans will all say,"Yes, we can!"
Look, we all know where this campaign is going and it's not good. It hasn't been good for a long, long time and it gets worse by the day. But with a little creativity among the surviving candidates we can still snatch victory from the jaws of wingnuts and moonbats.
My plan is simplicity itself as expressed in the bumper stickers above.
Step 1: Hillary crosses over and joins McCain as veep.
Continued...
I don't have a lot of arguments with the Lord. I expect Him to be capricious, irrational, and possessed of a mind and purpose beyond the comprehension of the smart monkeys. Why? Because, as God, He can.
I don't expect Him to answer my prayers because it is a very big universe and He's got a lot on his plate -- even for a Supreme Being. Imagine, if you will, being God in His office and deciding to step away from Your desk for a minute to get Yourself a beverage from the Holy Vending Machine (No charge). You're away for about 45 seconds but when You get back there are 25,345,654 "While You Were Out" slips on your desk along with about 100,000,000 items of Spam from Tibetan Prayer Wheels. What could You do, even if You were God. You'd just answer as many as You could at random, and then break early for a long lunch.
I've been enjoying a correspondence with a young poet of late. There's nothing like writing to someone else who shares your interest in an arcane subject to draw out your own thoughts or reflections on that area. He recently finished a long work in which a number of formal issues regarding sestinas and sonnets arose. He asked for help on these problems and I agreed to help. Not because I know more, but because I've seen more.
For those who don't pay a lot of attention to the technical aspects of poetics, I can only assure you that if you commit yourself to a long poem with a number of its elements cast in classical forms ( Instead of just spewing your immediate issues across the page and breaking the lines at an arbitrary point.), the job of "getting it right" increases exponentially. The only poets who do not know how hard this is are those that have never attempted it. And they are legion in this blighted age of writers' workshops and writing an inchoate slab of feelings down the bones.
The poet in question had finally come to the first end point of the work, submitted it to a publication, and was burned out. This is not uncommon. This morning he wrote, "May it be months before I ever write another d**m poem."
If only it were that easy. When you permit yourself to seriously attend to this faded art, you'll find over time that you are only finished with poetry when poetry is finished with you. That does happen. Sometimes for months or even years. This I know.
Continued...
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people march:
"Where to? what next?"
-- Carl Sandburg: The People Yes
IN THE DAYS AFTER THE TOWERS FELL, in the ash that covered the Brooklyn street where I lived at that time, in the smoke that rose for months from that spot across the river, when rising up in the skyscraper I worked in, or riding deep beneath the river in the subway, or passing the thousand small shrines of puddled candle wax below the walls with the hundreds of photographs of "The Missing," it was not too much to say that you could feel the doors of history open all about you.
Before those days, history happened elsewhere, elsewhen, to others. History did not happen to you. In your world, until that day, you lived in the time after history. There were no more doors in front of you, all history lay behind you. It was a given.
You would have, of course, your own personal history. You would live your life, no bigger or smaller than most others. You would meet people, have children, go to the job, enjoy what material things came your way, have your celebrations, your vacations, your possessions, and your dinner parties. You would hate and you would love. You would be loved and betrayed. You would have your little soap opera and the snapshots and emails to prove it. At some point or another you would die and be remembered by some for some time. Then it would all fade and the great ocean would just roll on. And that would be fine.
"The question is, O Daddy Warbucks of the World, 'Will you drill?' And the answer is, 'Why bother?'"
Then Duke stands up and beats his chest,
Says "I made it. Why can't all the rest?
You got nothing to lose
But the shine on your shoes"
-- Steve Strauss, Wolfgang & Strauss
I'VE KNOWN MORE THAN A FEW very rich men. Some of them came by their wealth via a win in the sperm race. Some of them got a very big hit from the money machine in the first Internet Bubble lottery. Some of them married or divorced into it. Some of them got gobs of greenbacks the "old fashioned way, they worked for it."
Let's say you're one of these. Let's say you are so wealthy that, as one said to a friend of mine, "I no longer need a 'rate of return'." You've got ALL the stuff you will ever need and the dough just keeps piling up. You've got the private plane and your advisors keep saying you need the private helicopter "for tax purposes."
Therefore let us choose life,
that we and our seed may live,
by obeying His voice and cleaving to Him,
for He is our life and our prosperity.
Sometimes a small notion indicates issues of larger moment. In the discussion of a previous post, a commenter delivers a vest pocket critique of America seen from abroad. The salient part reads:
As for the last paragraph - well, personally, I don't give a damn whether Americans kill themselves through gross overeating and under-exercising, filling their food with chemicals for short-term profit or turning their cities' air into poison gas - not to mention handing terrorists billions of dollars to kill Americans (and others) with.What I do mind is that Americans are setting a bad example for everyone else; as a small example the streets of Britain are filled with grotesquely large 4x4s. I am quite sure the fashion comes from across the pond. As another, the Chinese might well ask why they should restrict their economic growth when America already uses many times more fuel than they do - and they'd be right.
What I do mind is various American corporations not only trying to foist their Frankenstein food on us, but trying to make it impossible for us to tell that they are doing it - did you know that Monsanto are claiming in various court cases that labelling of food containing GM soya is against free trade treaties?
I could go on - but I won't, except to say two things. Americans' bad habits are a poor example for everyone else - and America's gluttony for oil in particular, and their actions to make sure it gets fed, and the money transfers resulting from it, make the rest of the world much more dangerous.
The "My country wrong or wrong" crowd
Some of this man's observations strike me as fair, others as dubious. Most strike me as those an otherwise reasonable man might form if feeding on a daily diet of the American media melange. The American major media serves from a self-poisoned menu. It is a dangerous diet; a diet rich in junk and toxins. In large doses it might make your thoughts fill with harmful fat.
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Human Vs. Zombie Tag A Growing Trend On College Campuses, Having Sex Declining
"Whether we are obituary notices, hallucinatory giant rabbits, or strings of random keyboard strokes, it's time for the chimera community to stand up and claim our rights as citizens," said ASDFG. "We will no longer be silent and invisible. Okay, maybe invisible." - iowahawk
Fools rush in where fools have been before:
FolioMag.com
Omnipotent and eternal God, the everlasting Salvation of those who believe, hear us on behalf of Thy sick servant, Dean Barnett, for whom we beg the aid of Thy pitying mercy, that, with his bodily health restored, he may give thanks to Thee in Thy church. Through Christ our Lord.Amen.
"Iran's hardline Islamic government encourages gender separation, and last year backed a proposal to create a womens' bicycle which covered the rider's legs and upper body. A women-only taxi service, with female drivers, has been launched in the country's main cities and buses and underground trains are segregated." - Women's car with electronic parking aids unveiled in Iran
"You should not be loading up on stocks now, because you’d be paying the historically average price of a stock which is $16 in stock price for each $1 in earnings. You’re not getting a deal, you’re paying retail. People should wait for the market to REALLY go on sale, and with a recession guaranteed, it’s almost a surety it will. You laugh at Cramer suggesting a 7,700 Dow, just like my big time former employers laughed at me when I said there was a housing bubble (and an Asian currency crisis and a Dotcom Bubble), but you might just want to (for a change) listen."
Recipe by Alaska Fisherman Sarah Palin Wasilla, AlaskaHT: Ninme
"Events may now be driven by forces that are beyond short term human control, as if some dynamical system boundary into nonlinear response has been crossed. In that chaotic environment, Presidential leads don't switch on things like "who won the debate" any more than the financial meltdown is responding to bailout packages. They respond to a combination of things which we don't understand, though we pretend to. So we pull back on the stick and stomp on the rudder pedals but the crate just has a mind of its own." - Belmont Club » The second debate
"Tom, listen to me. And yourself. You just admonished my worthy opponent for speaking longer than you want. And then you break the rules by asking another question instead of allowing these good people who waited in line to be part of this audience to ask their questions. And only a Washington-based journalist would ask about "a date certain." Setting a deadline to grapple with such a long-term problem is a recipe for a disaster. In one word, no. In two words, hell no." -Don Surber Just ask me
"If this financial crisis "proves" that capitalism and free markets just don't work, isn't the generally lower standard of living in nations with other systems a far more conclusive proof that other systems are much worse? Second, as the example of Zimbabwe amply demonstrates, it is not the zeroes in the end that matter but what those zeroes can buy. If the financial crisis makes everything cheaper the same percentage as my net worth goes down, I am no worse off than I used to be. " -The Fourth Checkraise: Purchasing power
"The whole election has become a surreal freak show; it's like watching a German game show with dancing monkeys and talking sausages and accordion music and sternly pursed lips. It's freaking me out! -Rachel Lucas
Sudan hit by Apollo Asteroid TC3 is estimated to be only two to five meters in diameter but exploded with the force of a one kiloton nuclear device. Asteroids of this size hit the Earth every few months according JPL scientists.
"Promise the American people that if he is elected, he will appoint Rudy Giulliani as Attorney General and his first order of business will be to investigate, indict and prosecute all those involved in any wrong doing in the sub-prime mortgage debacle, from Wall Street, to K Street to Main Street." -The AnchoressWill McCain be this smart? As LBJ once said, "I don't want to hold out any hopes for you I don't hold out for myself."
"When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you're really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you're in the right state of mind?" - Official Gmail Blog: New in Labs: Stop sending mail you later regretHummm, I wonder what other bits of your personal behavior the passionate butt-insky prigs at Google are going to try to "help" you with.
"The seismic jolt sent through global stock markets yesterday has ratcheted up the pressure on Fed chief Ben Bernanke, New York Federal Reserve Bank President Tim Geithner and SEC chief Chris Cox - three pivotal players who had hoped for a period of post-rescue bill calm in order to surgically attack the time bombs still ticking on their watches. Pulling the trigger first was Bernanke...." - BEN BERNANKE, TIM GEITHNER, AND CHRIS COX LEAD FIGHT TO SAVE MARKET - New York Post HT: Virtual Memories
"The political class isn't attracting the best talent in the nation. It's not even attracting the second-best." -Instapundit.com -
It gets put up, it gets yanked, put up, yanked.
Yank this, bitches...HT: Malkin
"Marxism, Freudianism, global warming. These are proof--of which history offers so many examples--that people can be suckers on a grand scale. To their fanatical followers they are a substitute for religion. Global warming, in particular, is a creed, a faith, a dogma that has little to do with science. If people are in need of religion, why don't they just turn to the genuine article?" -Paul Johnson, The Nonsense of Global Warming - Forbes.com
"From this side of the big pond, the US appears to be suffering from gout and totally self absorbed ignoring Iranian-Syrian-North Korean nuclear deals and Russian fleet deployments--as if they do not exist. The US election has become reduced to a variation of a "You ain't prejudiced, baby?" pick up ploy while Congress is frantic over reelections and Bush is reading retirement flyers." - Sense of Events: We ARE Meshuga
"The fact that the MSM continues to publish the lie about Palin's stance on matters such as the rape kit is unlikely to be due to either stupidity or ignorance. The rape kit allegation has been mentioned to me quite prominently by the women I know; it seems to strike a special chord and to provoke tremendous outrage. Even if the MSM knows it's a lie, it's just too valuable a lie for the MSM to give up." -neo-neocon Palin's women problem
Give me back my broken knife,
my mirrored room, my secret life.
It's lonely here,
there's no one left to torture.
Give me absolute control
over every living soul,
And lie beside me, baby,
that's an order!
Give me crack and anal sex.
Take the only tree that's left
and stuff it up the hole
in your culture.
Give me back the Berlin Wall.
give me Stalin and St Paul.
I've seen the future, brother:
it is murder.
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions.
Won't be nothing,
Nothing you can measure anymore.
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold,
and it has overturned
the order of the soul.
When they said REPENT REPENT,
I wonder what they meant.
When they said REPENT REPENT,
I wonder what they meant,
When they said REPENT REPENT,
I wonder what they meant.
You don't know me from the wind.
You never will, you never did.
I'm the little Jew
who wrote the Bible.
I've seen the nations rise and fall.
I've heard their stories, heard them all,
but love's the only engine of survival.
Your servant here, he has been told
to say it clear, to say it cold:
It's over, it ain't going
any further.
And now the wheels of heaven stop.
You feel the devil's RIDING crop.
Get ready for the future:
it is murder.
Things are going to slide ...
There'll be the breaking of the ancient
western code.
Your private life will suddenly explode.
There'll be phantoms.
There'll be fires on the road,
and a white man dancing.
You'll see a woman
hanging upside down,
her features covered by her fallen gown,
and all your lousy little poets
coming round
tryin' to sound like Charlie Manson,
and the white man dancin'.
Give me back the Berlin Wall.
Give me Stalin and St Paul.
Give me Christ
or give me Hiroshima.
Destroy another fetus now.
We don't like children anyhow.
I've seen the future, baby:
it is murder.
Things are going to slide ...
neo-neocon Politics as Scrabble
"Fifty-nine percent of those polled want to turn in their Congressional tiles and pick some new ones. Of course, when you do that, sometimes you get an even worse hand. But if the tiles you're holding are bad enough -- all vowels, for example - you're willing to get rid of them and take your chances. I suppose that's part of what makes some people want to vote for Obama. Especially those who see him as that magical blank tile that can be anything you want it to be."
that makes no sense, bucking tradition just so they can brag about doing it…showing off for each other. End times. They’re a-comin’. If frogs wuz raining down out of the sky, the signs wouldn’t be clearer." -House of Eratosthenes
"So I guess academia naturally goes to the lowest ethical level. Professors should be expected to support moral monsters and tyrants. Most of the tyrants of the 20th century had a lot of professors behind them. - The Dartmouth Review: TDR Exclusive Interview: Peter Kreeft
Why Some Women Hate Sarah Palin With all this extra baggage a female candidate has to bear, the chances of finding a woman whom other women won't hate seem skinnier than last year's jeans. But don't despair, if all else fails, we could just do what we always do and just vote in some guy. It's worked so well for us in the past.
"The Associated Press is wrong,” Palin said. “The comments are about an association that has been known but hasn't been talked about, and I think it’s fair to talk about where Barack Obama kicked off his political career, in the guy's living room.” -Palin
Female fan's kiss ends music concert in KuwaitAl-Adwani also said Sunday that the fan's behavior broke controls on public entertainment, which were imposed by influential Muslim fundamentalists after they failed in 1997 to ban concerts altogether. Concerts have to be licensed by the government, and monitors from the Information Ministry watch the crowd to make sure nobody stands up to dance.HT: The Hemmerdinger Report
Thus, we have one possible answer to the question: Who "sent" Obama? It was the Ayers family, including Tom, John, Bill and Bernardine Dohrn. It is highly unlikely that a 30-something second year lawyer would have been plucked from relative obscurity out of a left wing law firm to head up something as visible and important in Chicago as the Annenberg Challenge by Bill Ayers if Ayers had not already known Obama very well. One possibility is that Obama proved himself to the Ayers's in the battle for local school control when he was at the DCP in the 80s.
Speckwatch « Watts Up With That? The question now is: how long will the sunspeck last? Longevity has not been a virtue for similarly sized sunspecks this year.
"There's a little black spot on the sun today
It's the same old thing as yesterday
There's a black hat caught in a high tree top
There's a flag-pole rag and the wind won't stop."
-- Sting, King of Pain
Big Bangs All the Way Down:
Big Bang or Big Bounce?: New Theory on the Universe's Birth: Scientific American
I NEED TO ASK YOU TO SUPPORT AN URGENT SECRET BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP WITH A TRANSFER OF FUNDS OF GREAT MAGNITUDE.
I AM MINISTRY OF THE TREASURY OF THE REPUBLIC OF AMERICA. MY COUNTRY HAS HAD CRISIS THAT HAS CAUSED THE NEED FOR LARGE TRANSFER OF FUNDS OF 800 BILLION DOLLARS US. IF YOU WOULD ASSIST ME IN THIS TRANSFER, IT WOULD BE MOST PROFITABLE TO YOU.
I AM WORKING WITH MR. CHRISTOPHER DODD, MILLIONAIRE SENATOR, WHO WILL BE MY REPLACEMENT AS MINISTRY OF THE TREASURY IN JANUARY. AS A SENATOR, YOU MAY KNOW HIM AS LEADER OF THE AMERICAN BANKING DEREGULATION MOVEMENT IN THE NINETIES. THIS TRANSACTION IS 100% SAFE.
THIS IS A MATTER OF GREAT URGENCY. WE NEED A BLANK CHECK. WE NEED THE FUNDS AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE. WE CANNOT DIRECTLY TRANSFER THESE FUNDS IN THE NAMES OF OUR CLOSE FRIENDS BECAUSE WE ARE CONSTANTLY UNDER SURVEILLANCE.
"Sure, we could sit around all day and argue the petty details, like whether or not it was a good idea to spend $600,000 on a 4-bedroom rambler in Renton on our family income of $35,000, or whether we should have given you children credit cards to buy lottery tickets."
"Kill them all. I am a dog owner and a dog lover, and as such, I say again, KILL THEM ALL. All current Pit Bull rescues or shelters or tenements should immediately be converted to crematoriums." - The Dipso Chronicles: First Installment of "Let's Get Rid Of"
"Sarah Palin saved John McCain again Thursday night. She is the political equivalent of cardiac paddles: Clear! Zap! We've got a beat! -Declarations - WSJ.com
"Alternative weeklies (such as our our Eye Weekly) are the most conservative form of all media, in the sense of there never is any dissent or change. Across the continent, all these independent weeklies are totally interchangable in that the "alternative" weekly of one city is identical to that of any other city, with the same scathingly left-wing columns, avant-garde comic strips and articles about local bands named Crank Shaft or Gutbucket." -The Fourth Checkraise: But does he shop at Brooks Brothers?
"Being a cowboy is the pinnacle of evolution. Once you’re at cowboy, there’s nowhere to go but down. Cowboys don’t look for fights, but they don’t run away from them either. They do what they have to do, when they have to do it. And they usually have to do it alone, because everyone wants Black Bart’s gang out of town, but no one wants to walk down the street alongside the sheriff and get shot doing it. " -Cowboys and Secret Agents by Bill Whittle on National Review Online
Philadelphia has had by far the steepest increase in home sales, with transactions more than doubling from the same time the previous year. Seattle marks the other end of the sales spectrum, having seen its transaction numbers drop by 43.7% from the previous year.
"They'd all smoke all the time around flammable things and never cause a fire. They'd drink themselves blind after work, but never miss the following day. They were late if they weren't 30 minutes early, too. They always carried a newspaper. If someone brought them a phone while they were working (It's for you.) there was someone dead on the other end of the line." -Sippican Cottage: It's (Still) Coming
The Army Sea-Smurfs Coming soon to a home town near you, the CBRNE Consequence Management Response Force, or CCMRF (pronounced “sea-smurf”)
“We’ve been all over the world during this time of conflict, but now our mission is to take care of citizens at home ... and depending on where an event occurred, you’re going home to take care of your home town, your loved ones.” -Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1
Prediction: Watch for a whole new, severe strain of Palin Derangement Syndrome to begin tonight. They hated her before tonight. They are going to pour on more unfathomable hate at a level we have never seen before. Sarah, we're praying for you.And so say we all.
WASHINGTON - As expected, a blue ribbon panel from the Ifill Center for Media Ethics cleared award-winning political journalist Gwen Ifill of all charge today, ending a lengthy 20 minute investigation into "ethics" charges that most observers believe were motivated by politics and racism. Ifill, like dynamic groundbreaking President-in-Waiting Barack Obama, is Black. The complete exoneration clears the way for Ifill to moderate the Vice Presidential debate tonight between respected Senate veteran Joe Biden and former beauty pageant loser Sarah Palin. -iowahawk
Speaking of starving the weeds, the New York Times has a circulation of 1,077,256 from info I found on the web (fortunately declining). I noticed that my local Starbucks (central valley California) carried the NYT. So I enquired with management who said they were required to purchase 10 copies a day it was part of Starbucks image I was told. We have four Starbucks and it was the same in all. If all US Starbucks stores are forced to carry 10 copies and there are 11,434 Starbucks in the US that alone represents 10.6% of the NYT circulation. If all stores world wide (16,226) were forced to carry the NYT it would represent 15.1% of their circulation. I don't normally agree with secondary boycotts, but if those who want to impact left wing media would write Starbuck about there policy, it might make a difference. I take my business elsewhere. - From a comment on a previous item
(Middletown, OH) -- Saturday night, people in the 3100 block of Wilbraham Road called police to report a woman wearing a cow costume was chasing kids, and blocking traffic. Michele Allen also allegedly urinated on the porch of one neighbor.
When officers arrived, they told her to go home. But later that night, they found her again, in the 2400 block of Verity, standing in traffic. This time, officers say, Allen smelled of alcohol and swore at them. [Additional details: Despite having two nights to sober up, Allen was in a foul mood Monday, yelling at jailers. "She was challenging people to 'suck her udders,'" Hoffman said. "I'm not joking."] She was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. Allen plead guilty, Monday morning, in Middletown Municipal Court, and sentenced to a month in jail. - The Big One
Obama worship: I don't care if it rains or freezes / As long as I've got my Plastic Jesus
On Biden: I think Team Sarah is petrified.
How to defeat the MSM:Starve the weeds, feed the flowers.
No Remote Fast Enough: Channel 073-00 on the Dish Network is now labeled OBAMA. The channel plays his two-minute ad laying out his economic plan on a loop, over and over. -Politico.com
American Thinker: Clowns in the Cockpit
Capitalism: the worst system except for all the others
Six Social Policy Myths: Most of these people believe similar things and think in similar ways. They were educated in the same kinds of degree courses, reading the same books and internalising the same basic theories and perspectives. They interact regularly at seminars and conferences where they reaffirm the core ideas they share. They referee each other’s writings, award each other research contracts, and evaluate each other’s job applications. They often live in the same neighbourhoods, send their children to the same schools, and read the same newspapers and periodicals. Collectively, they ‘know’ what our society is like, and they ‘know’ what needs to be done to improve it.
Kevin Kelly -- Narrow Gates of Inevitability My death is inevitable, but how I die is not.
WaMu moolah: CEO Alan Fishman may make $19 million for 17 days' work
Francis W. Porretto - Eternity Road It is worth noting that 90% or more of what the Federal Government does today is forbidden it by the Constitution.
The Little Death: Secular humanists often have no backup plan beyond the government saving their sorry backsides.... Fear is a big city menace, a symptom of the disease of liberalism.
- Dream Tickets 2008: McCain-Clinton, Obama-Obama
- What If Jesus Had Had Kids?
- The Arrival
- On the Return of History
- Got Gas Money?: Cashing In on American Oil in an Age of Scarcity
- America: Setting a Bad Example