You gotta believe!
0r - The Not-So-Pretty Perversions of Patrick Goldstein and Friends
Patrick Goldstein, Testing Pos for Perversion
The arrest of Roman Polanski for his repulsive crime has caused an eruption of foul-smelling gas bubbles in the media slime ponds where many of what passes for America’s public “intellectuals” wallow.
Foremost among these sources of stench is the chancrous Patrick Goldstein who, like many others who are “intellectually insane” sucks his pay-check out of the fetid swamp of the Los Angeles Times. Like many ill-educated and under-read third-rate scribblers, Goldstein thinks it’s the mark of a “writer” to throw a “lit’ry” reference into his prose slop from time to time. That he either has not read or comprehended the work he cites escapes his notice as he hopes it will escape his readers.
For many years, there's been one group in the American melting pot that has consistently underperformed in terms of productivity, intelligence and moral behavior.
Yearning for the Mud @ AMERICAN DIGEST
The French have an idiomatic phrase nostalgie pour la boue which means, roughly, "yearning for the mud." "Yearning for the mud" in America is a compulsion that comes over people when they have, for complex reasons, a need to immerse themselves in self-degradation. It's usually a mix of drink, drugs, and weird sex until the soul is obliterated by the abused flesh. The obliteration of the soul and the abuse of the flesh is one of the central tenets in many of our post-modern, secular lifestyle religions.
Most people try this sort of thing a time in their youth, but soon grow out of it when time and experience get the upper hand. Others grow out of it via deep psychoanalysis and a few trips to the rehab clinic. Still others are simply killed by it, their lives bracketed by dates that are far too close together.
Many, however, never kick it and were, in the past, thought of as "perverts" but are now more kindly seen as "differently minded." They live in those urban cores of the soul we now esteem as "Alternative Lifestyles." Once there they busy themselves in making bad design, bad decisions, bad art and bad politics. We are rich and kindly as a culture so we generally let them be. Once comfortable in their redoubts they think it their duty to sally forth from time to time and infest the rest of the nation.
A minority of the last group make a career of nostalgie pour la boue and are generally known as "pundits," "media personalities, or "celebrities."
There's a lot of cross-over of all kinds between celebrity culture and media culture. Indeed, at a lot of levels, it is becoming hard to tell them apart. Both live, for the most part, in an insulated bubble that is impervious to personal moral, psychological, or political change and ruthlessly exacts the penalty of expulsion from the bubble in the event of such change.
I'd like to suggest that there's another kind nostalgie going around in this hybrid culture that glories in the mud:Nostalgie pour la defaite -- "yearning for defeat."
Nostalgie pour la d馭aite is that state of the soul when an American, who either came of age in the Vietnam era, or who was taught and mentored by many leftists or liberals of that vintage, yearns for the defeat of America, and acts accordingly in word and deed. This compulsion is not only required to keep their residency in their subcultures, but to keep their status as well. The more virulent their articulations of hate, the higher their regard by their peers. Neither children nor even infants are safe from their depravities.
It is a perverted form of "confirmation bias." In a way, joining this group is like joining a gang -- once you're in, getting out is not an option unless you seek social and political death. Once articulated, this state is then seen as confirmation that his or her world view and social milieu is the correct view and correct milieu. To operate otherwise would throw not only all the professional views and actions of the last thirty years into question, but the entire structure of the afflicted personality as well. It is life in the lie and Palin, as an example and a symbol, puts the lie to this lifestyle.
An America that is ascendant rather than retiring, an America whose policies are aggressive and not apologetic, is an America the People of the Lie are simply unequipped to inhabit or report on. They have, quite frankly, an empty tool box when it comes to this task and no raw materials with which to build. The only America they can support is one that supports them without question. They want one thing and one thing only -- a blank check for money, means, unceasing regard and opportunity.
Our current infestation of American media personalities and American celebrities with Nostalgie pour la defaite rises from decades of beliefs in an America that is best as a "pitiful, helpless Giant;" a kind of "Nostalgie pour la jeunesse perdue" -- nostalgia for lost youth. It is literally the only America they know and their entire professional and personal lives, from the New York Times to the Los Angeles Times, from the Hamptons to Beverly Hills are based on this grand assumption. They've had Presidents and Presidential candidates that, commuting to and from these locales, have confirmed it to them. Their coworkers in their jobs confirm it to them. Their significant others, drawn from the same ranks, confirm it to them. The parties they attend, the awards they give and receive, the places they vacation, the books they read and the films they make and see, all confirm it to them over and over again. It is not only the only America they know, it is the only America they can know.
Anything that confirms the Nostalgie pour la defaite is news they can use. Anything that confirms American exceptionalism is not, by definition, news at all. Anything that actually represents American exceptionalism -- as the candidacy of Sarah Palin does -- is bad news and must be crushed by any means necessary.
These afflicted Americans are raised and trained to desire that, in all things, America should always lose and become less of an important force in the world. The results of a weaker America do not concern them. It is only important that America become and remain weak and hamstrung. Only then will Europeans and others say nice things about them as they flit about the world.
If America is to become weak, what do they propose in its place? The short form for their vision of the future is "an empowered United Nations."
At which point they step from their Nostalgie pour la dfaite back into nostalgie pour la boue -- the yearning for the mud. In the final analysis, it isn't that big a step. It's where they feel most at home.
They didn’t want to turn her on but they did. I never want to turn her on but I do. After they had turned her on for awhile they grew tired of listening to her. After listening to her for even ten seconds I’m enraged by her. Somewhere along the long road to their duck hunting camp they named her “The Bitch” and turned her off. At random points on any road I drive I want to throw “The Bitch” out the window and run over her until she’s nothing but a flat black splotch on the asphalt.
“The Bitch” has her uses. She’s helped me find my way to unknown destinations and out of places where I’m hopelessly lost. It doesn’t matter. I hate the very thought of her. She’s the worst nag since Eve made Adam slap on the fig leaf and remarked on how small it was. She’s Lilith and Delilah and the “What-ever Girl.” She’s the most passive-aggressive talker since the last speech by Barack Obama. She’s “The Bitch.”
Continued...Every so often I stumble across something that intersects with something I've written long ago. Case in point, photographer Kate Peters' 'home' and a long forgotten poem from 1992:
Homestead
It was found in the fog that shivered
the slivers of glass in the windows.
It was seen in the sheen of the moon
on the unworn wood of the floor.
It spoke with the slow, patient clutching of light
and tapped out the unknown codes of the flesh,
the indistinct worm of the years and the shapes
of desire, possession, and fate.
It was mute.
It was stitched in the spaces
of the wind's alphabet.
It was clothed in cool hands
gloved in wet weather.
It appeared on the paths
that admitted no passage.
It's rachety rhythms
were all made of match sticks.
It waited.
It's slashings were tattooed
on drapes of dank velvet.
It's gibbering laughter inserted itself
between doorway and jamb and continued to carve.
It's snickering plumbing
rotted the dinner.
They had left, they had left.
Indeed, they had left.
Of that all their objects would clearly attest.
WARNING! That which is seen cannot be unseen.
Continued...Barack Obama's amazingly consistent smile from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.
If you're not creeped out, you haven't been paying attention.
Ladies and gentlemen, your President is a robot. Or a wax sculpture. Maybe a cardboard cutout. All I know is no human being has a photo smile this amazingly consistent. On Wednesday, the Obamas hosted a reception at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, during which they stood for 130 photographs with visiting foreign dignitaries in town for the UN meeting. The President has exactly the same smile in every single shot. See for yourself — the pictures are up on the State Department’s flickr. And, of course, compressed into 20 seconds for your viewing pleasure.
Discussing this astounding series with a friend who noted the iron control that has to be maintained not only in expression but in body by people who are fakes, I was reminded of The Mechanical Turk
Continued...
Something wonderful is being posted in episodes at Sippican Cottage. Sippican, not only a star-class furniture maker, has also put in his time in contracting. The current series, part memory, part imagination, part reportage explores money, position, status and a host of other elements seldom seen. It's a kind of extended "This American Life" in prose.
I've arranged the episodes so far in a normal order so you don't have to. It's continuing on Monday. You'd best catch up now.
Some Enchanted Place "It was all you could do to keep yourself from tugging your forelock when you talked to the owners, if you ever even saw them....
So you'd walk like a shade through the byzantine halls, looking for the right door out of the hundreds, to fix something that would stay unfixed for a thousand years in a normal person's house."
Some Enchanted Place, Part Three "No house is an inanimate object....
They all have the same stuff, these people with a vapor trail of names and numerals appended to their names and phalanxes of zeroes marching to the horizon in their hidden bank accounts. They have gravel that must be gathered from a riverbank in Elysium. It doesn't even look like little stones."Continued...
Graven Images: Racist Fundamentalist Churches of America @ AMERICAN DIGEST
I am a minister's daughter. I attended more than "my share" of church and church programs when my father pastored churches in KY, TN, and NC. All were open to people of all races and each congregation had members of different races.
I attended my denomination's church schools through my freshman year of college. Again, all were attended by children of all different races.
I knew about racism only as a subject touched upon in classes I took (such as history classes) and from what I heard on the news. But, it was not something I really experienced first hand.
I am White and cannot speak for any of the Asian, Black, or Hispanic people I have known through my church. But, as an overly-sensitive type, I do not recall witnessing anything of that nature.
This is what I know: there are so many myths about "fundies," about our intelligence, our academic achievements, and our private thoughts about people who are "different." The reality from inside is this: members of my denomination, compared to the general population, have a higher percentage of advanced degrees; our test scores in church school were higher than those of our public school counterparts (I personally scored a 1400 on the SAT); I see more marriages of couples of different races inside the church than outside the church (I think this is because our religion is a stronger identifying factor for us than our individual races).
I could ramble on and on forever but I guess my main points are this:
A. "They" (liberals? mainstream media?) have no clue about religious people or what drives them. B. It is possible for groups of people to find common ground that transcends their outward appearance (race) that binds them together in common purpose.
C. No one can force "B" on other people and make it stick. You can force them to behave in a certain way but it only works if they are converted.
D. To quote my father, "the ground is level at the cross." A truly Christian church is the truest democracy there is. There *can* be true love among its members because each member recognizes they are a sinner who deserving of hell but is saved through the sacrifice of a sinless Savior who took our punishment upon Himself. When Christianity is at its finest is when the members of a church body put aside judgment of each other and turn that onto themselves. It's the recognition of what Christ did for ME, knowing my own sins all too well, that we can overlook faults in others. We are human too and no church is perfect (meaning the members attending it) but at least we strive for something better than this evil world has to offer, strive to live holy lives pleasing to God. A church such as J. Wright's is of this world and not of God.
And, coming back to my point "A," I have concluded that this is why the media/liberals/whatever, will never have any true understanding of the mindset of Islamic fundamentalism. While I do not, obviously, agree with the religion of Islam itself, any religious person can probably at least understand the what it is to be a BELIEVER. That should not be passed over lightly - a true believer who is a Christian is instructed in the Bible that they may be persecuted to death. One must be willing to die for the sake of Jesus' name. No political talks in this world will change that mind. This is why I pray for conversion of individuals who adhere to the Islamic religion. That is the only lasting path to peace.
Posted by: Karen at September 24, 2009 11:27 AM
Sometimes, very rarely, unpatriotic actions in the United States actually have, gasp, real consequences. Freedom's Lighthouse brings us this example of a 21st century "Ducting Stool." "Flag Burner" Duct Taped to Flag Pole as Punishment by VFW Commander
Continued...Why do we have that pants-suit load of a Secretary of State roaming about the world, when we could have people like John Hargrave on the case to bring nations, hot dogs, and buns together?
"He that has been refused
a reasonable, or unreasonable request, who thinks his merit underrated, and sees his influence declining, begins soon to talk of natural equality, the absurdity of "many made for one," the original compact, the foundation of authority, and the majesty of the people. As his political melancholy increases, he tells, and, perhaps, dreams, of the advances of the prerogative, and the dangers of arbitrary power; yet his design, in all his declamation, is not to benefit his country, but to gratify his malice." -- The Patriot, by Samuel Johnson
File under: "I try to become more cynical every day, but lately I just can't keep up."
Remember is little gem the next time the teachers in your community say they need to be paid more money.
With Castro and Gaddafi rolling out the love for Obama at the UN, here's a third tin-pot dictator with a mental state that further enhances the reputation of the current president of the United States. Obama sure can pick 'em:
TEGUCIGALPA -- It's been 89 days since Manuel Zelaya was booted from power. He's sleeping on chairs, and he claims his throat is sore from toxic gases and "Israeli mercenaries'' are torturing him with high-frequency radiation.... Zelaya was deposed at gunpoint on June 28 and slipped back into his country on Monday, just two days before he was scheduled to speak before the United Nations. He sought refuge at the Brazilian Embassy, where Zelaya said he is being subjected to toxic gases and radiation that alter his physical and mental state. -- They're torturing me, Honduras' Zelaya claims - Honduras - MiamiHerald.com"Torturing?" Can't have that. Send in the attorney general.
Remember this the next time somebody says, "The science is settled...."
[Note: The following was written by FrankP of England in a comment on Quisling Time: I've said it before and I'll say it again, "The Road to a Democrat Led Defeat of America Goes Through Afghanistan" . I thought it perceptive enough to republish here.]
You simply cannot have a Marxist in the Oval Office and lead the world in a fight against a combination of covert communism and the rise of militant Islam - a very unholy and, to the uninformed, incredible alliance. Never before have the Left used such a powerful 'useful idiot' as militant Islam to further its cause, but it is doing it apparently without realizing that Islam may consume it also, eventually.
We in the UK have experienced the worst decline in our culture and standing in the world following a a similar event in 1997, when a cabal of Marxists led the Long March of Antonio Gramsci's game plan into No.10 Downing Street. Blair conned the British electorate; Obama has conned the American electorate. Both were Trojan horses. The triumph of the heirs and successors of Gramsci; the Frankfort School; Alinski; Ayers et al means that the Long March has now penetrated the very heart of Washington, giving impetus to the Marxist dictators around the world who see America on the backfoot.
You either get rid of your current POTUS and his political thugs soonest, by electoral demand, or all the blood and treasure spent during World War II and the various engagements to contain and defeat communism since then will have been in vain.
Britain is already down the pan. Its sovereignty has been severely dissipated by the EU and unelected bureaucrats in Brussels; its Capital has been dubbed Londonistan because of its infiltration by Islamic subversives. A predicted change of government from New Labour to 'New Conservative' (probably infiltrated by Gramscian disciples also) will make very little difference. Our currency is under threat and may soon fall to the Euro - a Mickey Mouse currency. The financial and fiscal system has already been destroyed from within. We are no longer a reliable ally of the US.
You have time to rescue your country from a similar disaster to the one that has befallen ours. For God's sake get moving. It needs more than Glen Beck, who has (with a little help from his friends) made a good start. It needs gravitas, analysis and public explanation. As the MSM is part of the problem it can only be done on the blogs. Fox TV is having some success as the only outlet in that medium that has exposed some of the truth about Obama and his roots and even they are holding back much of what could be exposed, presumably because Murdoch wants to keep a get out card just in case the wind blows against him.
I posted messages like this on blogs various during the Presidential campaign, particularly on Melanie Phillips blog who is a prolific writer on the subject and as an apostate of the leftist creed knows what she is taking about. But I have been blogging about the counter culture threat since 2003.
In fact I have been a close observer of Communism on the move since 1952 when as a radio intercept operator in the British Army (the "Y" Service - now known as GCHQ), I listened to the military, diplomatic and agitprop press propaganda spewed out by the USSR and its satellites. I later served in the London Metropolitan Police throughout the 1950s - 1980s and saw at very close quarters the organized subversion that took place through the counter-culture war that still thrives today.
The message must be sounded and writ large: Marxism is still on the move. It is Western Civilization that is crumbling through the death-watch beetle of covert communism and the death-wish spider of the jihad that is rampant throughout its pillars. When the Iron Curtain was torn down, it provided opportunities for Marxism that were undreamed of throughout the cold war.
The British experience must be regarded as a terrible warning, my American friends. Heed it or follow us into the abyss. You have many fine writers and researchers over there who have exposed the truth of the Leftist threat: heed their words and use your votes in the mid-term elections to start the fight back. Time is short, use it well.
Proving that the ruling maxim of modern advertising is, "When in doubt, morph."
For a chain of stores in South Africa. From Ads of the World
Leslie Gelb is "lost" and thinks Americans are "confused" about the stalling policy of Obama on Afghanistan:
Nothing significant has changed to account for the shift from Mr. Obama's confident policy proclamations to his temporizing statements of recent days. The president certainly understood before last week that the situation in Afghanistan was deteriorating. And he knew when he was inaugurated and when he first uttered his colorful "war of necessity" phrase that his party, and the public generally, were increasingly opposed to the war. == Leslie H. Gelb: Obama’s Befuddling Afghan Policy - WSJ.com
I'm not: The Road to a Democrat Led Defeat of America Goes Through Afghanistan @ AMERICAN DIGEST
Afghanistan deserves to be fought and won on its own terms, not as a stealthy way of retreating from the field altogether. Anybody who tells you the Iraq war is useless and Afghanistan is the "real" war is really telling you Afghanistan is just the long way home. Wagging our tails behind us.In the Obama book still unpublished but being written day by day with the working title, Dreams of Myself, it's not enough to "transform" the American giant into a compliant second-rate nation, it must be gelded as well.
First published October 4, 2008.
"Then from there the only way to go to this place is by a boat. Armed native individuals can offer you a "cheap" $500 trip on a small boat, so in three days you can be on spot. They can show you the fields of wild hemp flower around which, as some tourists say, often can be picked up by your guide while you are exploring the stone forest, and then boiled together with some milk to meet you when you are back in camp with some mind blowing mixture. And they are all armed there, those natives...."More photos at Oddity Central
Where in the world is it?: Location via Google Maps
[Note: It's now clear that "racism" has somehow not been eliminated with the election of an African-American as president but exacerbated. It has now drenched our discourse with its stench. But from what dark wells is this poison water being drawn? Qui bono? Perhaps it's time we looked a little more closely at places where it still is to be found. And not just at "the usual suspects" which now seem to have been broadened to include all those who do not agree with the program being proliferated by the president. In that spirit I am republishing this essay from March of 2008.]
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, buffoon's 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.
"Obama is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is the Obama interest." -- Apologies to Churchill
First impression of this new roll-out of corruption from Big Government? Compared to the shattering revelations of the ACORN tapes, this one is small beer on short legs.
Now I detest the NEA for a lot of reasons and have for a long time, but a story on Big Government » Blog Archive » How to Corrupt Artists in One Quick and Easy Telecon strikes me as one that only the elites on both sides give a tinker's damn about. The lead virtually says it with,
If you've ever wondered -- and worried -- about where government support of the arts leads, look no further than the full transcript of an August 10 telecon between an official at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and a group of "independent artists from around the country."
Well, okay, I have "wondered and worried" about the NEA, but I also know that most people in the country don't spend more than a minute a year at most wondering or worrying about the relationship of the NEA and "independent artists from around the country." The only thing they think about if they think about our current crop of "independent artists" is why there are so many of these parasites around and why most of what they "produce" is either disgusting, depressing, ugly or the usual combination of all three.
Add to that the fact that the evidence behind the story, damning as it is, is not exactly compelling. Not only that it's radio, not television. While nothing says "corruption" more clearly than a video of ACORN employees revealing their real agenda by abetting the establishment child sex salons, nothing numbs you more than having to listen to recorded phone calls from White House arts dweebs begging for another HOPE poster.
I salute what Breitbart did last week, but in the game that Obama's playing, last week is last year. It would have been better to release the NEA tapes last week as a warm-up and the ACORN videos this week. As it stands, this is a weak Act II.
Last Week in Newsweek and Next Week in Newsweek.
Racist Baby? authors Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman clairify the Baby bit in NurtureShock : How We Got Pulled Into a War Between Rush Limbaugh and Maureen Dowd
Third, we never meant to provide any fodder for the divide between Republicans and Democrats, or liberals and conservatives. The science suggests liberal white parents are just as guilty of speaking in code to their children about race as conservative white parents. This is a concern that ought to be owned up to equally, on both sides of the aisle.Perhaps with their groundbreaking research on the President Racist? cover story they will fill us in on whether or not "liberal black parents are just as guilty of speaking in code to their children about race as conservative black parents."
A concerned Newsweek readership of 5 breathlessly awaits.
Or, "The Ninja Nibbler of the Night"
As a 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 don't buy meals, I buy components. Though I've lived alone for some time, I buy like I'm supplying a small tribe. I've tried to control this by selecting the "little" cart. You know, that half-pint shopping vehicle, that grocery Miata, that let's you believe you're not really buying as much as you are. It doesn't work. I come home, unpack my "kills" -- at about $69 a bag -- and mumble, "Who's going to eat all this?"
House guests are the God's answer to "Who's going to eat this?" They are. That's okay. I love to cook for people. I'm good at it and it gets boring cooking for one; expensive too since I loathe leftovers.
Problems return when your house guests are stealth eaters. You know who I mean. Yes, you. Stealth eaters never, ever overeat -- except on the sly. They are the Merrill's Marauders of the post-midnight refrigerator.
Ordinary stealth eaters can be dealt with because the damage done by their pillage is obvious. You had half of a banana cream pie in the frig at sunset but by dawn it is gone. Vanished. Evaporated. Kaput. Never to be heard from again. Not so much as a ransom note, just a crumpled tin husk folded and stuffed down the side of the garbage bag beneath the camouflage of a crumpled milk carton.
Not pleasing, especially when you were planning on banana cream pie for breakfast. Still you suck up your sorrow, move on, and resupply.
No so with the worst sort of stealth eater -- the dreaded food eroder.
The food eroder is so stealthy he or she can even conceal their eating from themselves. The food eroder wishes to eat but not be seen eating nor to be known to have eaten. The food eroder can make your entire refrigerator into a Potemkin village where you think you have a LOT of food, but actually have almost none. A food eroder deals in cuisine disinformation.
Case in point:
Some weeks back I had a house guest. This house guest was a very careful eater -- someone cognizant of the fine points of nutrition; someone who knew the calories in a twice-baked potato down to the last bacon bit swimming in a dollop of sour cream. This nameless but shameless someone also had a finely tuned economic indicator and never met a leftover that was not loved, caressed, and consumed -- even when the original meal was lost to recorded history.
I once had a kind of grudging respect for this guest who was so much more disciplined about food than I could ever hope to be. But that was before I discovered -- after the guest's departure -- that I had been sharing my home and sacred refrigerator with a food eroder, a late-night Ninja nibbler.
You see, in order to fulfill my male mission of re-supply, I need to know what supplies are actually on hand. With a food eroder, this cannot be known since -- if you do not actually hand inspect every item in your larder -- you can never be sure of the quantity. What you can be sure of, I now know, is that a food eroder will guarantee you have less than you think.
The clearest example of this is -- as I have discovered today -- the most often decimated target of any self-respecting food eroder, ice cream.
About a month ago I noted that the house had no ice-cream in the freezer. This is not good -- especially should an after-midnight-ice-cream emergency break out while watching, say, "I Got the Hook-Up."
To prepare for such an emergency, and thus avert an ice cream crisis, I resupplied the freezer with a full half-gallon of French Vanilla. Since my house guest was looking a bit peckish at the time I offered to make a couple of sundaes (carmel sauce, shaved almonds, etc.). My guest gracefully accepted and the half gallon of ice-cream supply was reduced by perhaps a pint overall. This left around three pints. Such was the state of the ice cream three weeks ago at last check. Need for resupply? Negligible.
Fast forward to today when I was suddenly stricken with an ice-cream-emergency (While watching, yet again, "I Got the Hook-Up.") and staggered to the supply in the freezer. As I removed it I noted it felt strangely light for a container that should have contained about three-pints. You can only imagine my shock when upon opening it I discovered that it contained only about a half-inch thickness of ice cream covering the now far distant bottom.
But that was not the worst of it.
On closer examination, the surface of that razor-thin level of ice cream was scored by a series of small parallel grooves across it from side to side. It was as if somebody had gone back and forth over the ice cream with a teaspoon like a lawn mower.
I knew then I had been hit by the food eroder. I knew that, over several nights, my ice cream had be hit again and again and again.
Just a little this time. Just a little more that time. Then a bit again when the compulsion struck. And all, it was clear, in a shameful and furtive way as I slept.
This degradation probably went on and on until the food eroder could no longer avoid the terrible truth that nearly a half a gallon of ice cream had been consumed whilst standing at the refrigerator with spoon in hand. At that point shame overcame the eroder and the container was placed carefully back in the refrigerator so that it would appear to be undisturbed.
The food eroder escaped without ever having to face the shame. I'm off to resupply and thus avoid a post-midnight ice cream crisis. My only solace is that I know that the food eroder, now back home and faced with a refrigerator stocked only with the desiccating remnants of cantaloupe and celery is still having to walk an extra two miles every day in penance. Ice cream giveth, but ice cream doth not taketh away.
Meanwhile, my stock is back to normal. But I am taking steps to avoid future shock. I'm installing a state of the art motion-sensing alarm on the refrigerator instead of my previous sign that said, "Too late. Already here."
Outside Penn Station, New York City
Click to enlarge
Inscription: "I want to be like Jesus. I want to live a long and healthy life but I will rather die on the cross like Jesus than to be any criminal. I want to be like Jesus."
Morgan notes a curious imbalance in the touted lifestyle of Potus and Flotus:
Not that I mean to insult vegetable gardeners, but it seems to me an imbalanced lifestyle has been embraced, one devoted to the lifestyle of a vegetable garden who possess vast holdings of land, but is obsessed only with that one damn garden. Pull the weeds, spray the weeds, fertilize the vegetables, plant the vegetables, harvest the vegetables…from the moment the gardener rises in the morning, until he puts his weary head down for the night. Just stay fixated on image, image, image the way the gardener remains fixated on the garden.Hasn't he noticed that Miracles Grow in Mrs. Obama's Neighborhood: And All the Good Little Children Say "Yes"?Elsewhere, there are bridges that need mending…and fences too. There are taxes to be paid on owning the land. There is a house to be painted with a roof that needs patching. Babies with dirty wet butts that need changing. Meals to be cooked, and after that’s done, dishes to be washed and ovens to be cleaned. And on the far corner of the property a pack of wild coyotes is making inroads, doing their scavenging and fornicating and pooping and yelling. As they get bolder, they’re going to start carrying off things like kittens and puppies, then work their way up the babies.
There’s shit to be taken care off. All over that spread.But no. Nothing matters except the vegetable garden of public image. -- House of Eratosthenes
THE CONQUEROR WORM.
LO! 't is a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.
Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither flyâ
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
Invisible Woe!
That motley drama!âoh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased for evermore,
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness, and more of Sin
And Horror the soul of the plot.
But see, amid the mimic rout,
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes!âit writhes!âwith mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And the angels sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.
Outâout are the lightsâout all!
And over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
And the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy "Man,"
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.
Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) heavy tanks prepare to make their way on to the main east-west thoroughfare, the Avenue of Heavenly Peace, in Beijing on September 18, 2009, as the government rehearsed for a huge October 1st parade that will mark 60 years since the founding of Communist China. Security swarmed the Avenue of Heavenly Peace, shooing citizens away from what will be the parade's route through the heart of the city and past Tiananmen Square. Many more striking images @ China prepares for its 60th anniversary - The Big Picture - Boston.com
Let's review:
By Jim Treacher @ Jim Treacher's Blog That Is on the Internet. Suitable for printing out and distributing far and wide.
I don't know whether Scott at Powerline is being coy, obtuse, otiose or all three when he writes,
"To be charitable one might say that the Obama administration does not know how to help friends or to hurt enemies. Yet this seems to be the way they like it."They do know, Scott. And they are, relentlessly, helping their friends and hurting their enemies.
And by the way, Powerline's on that list, just way-way-way-way down. It's a long list they've been making for years, but they've got plenty of time.
Spare a moment for Mary Travers, 1936-2009. We shall not see her like again.
She could touch your heart...
and she could turn you on with a signature hair flip. (:32)....
Continued...YouTube - "'Charlie Rose' by Samuel Beckett"
Andrew Flippone observes: Something has happened to PBS favorite "Charlie Rose." The erudite conversations and sober intellectualism have been replaced by an absurd world where illogic, inane dialogues, and open hostility rule. The one-on-one interview between Charlie and his guest begins as usual but quickly goes awry, so much so that Charlie is warned that, somewhere, a man named "Steve" is "not happy." But who is "Steve" and why is he angry? And why does the mere mention of his name stop Charlie cold?
Midway | Puyallup, Washington | Saturday September 12, 2009 8:08: 30 PM
Updated....
Continued...
THIS JUST IN:
SEPTEMBER 16, 2009: FBI agents with bomb-sniffing dogs Wednesday raided the Colorado apartment of an Afghan national linked to Al Qaeda and a plot to attack the New York City subway system.... In the past three days, the NYPD increased its attention to the subway system and its 5.2 million daily riders. Officers were warned to keep an eye out for vans near transportation hubs such as Grand Central, police sources said. The safety zone around subway and commuter stations also was expanded by two blocks, the sources said.-- FBI unit set for more anti-terror raids in Queens; Colorado home raided
LEADS TO THIS:From the AD Archives, Written March 13, 2004
In the wake of the Spanish outrage, [11 March 2004] an email asks what it would take for the Islamic terrorists to take the next step in the United States.
It turns out that, as in Spain, it wouldn't take much at all. Here's what you'd need and how it could be done. But it is just one way. There are many.
The Elements:
One City: New York
Three Locations: The Brooklyn Bridge, Union Square, Penn Station
Terrorists: 4
Equipment:
Plastique explosives (15 pounds)
Backpacks: 2
Ten penny nails and ball bearings: 4 pounds
Anthrax: 2 Liters
Machine Guns: 4 (Small) with 2 extra clips each
Time: Late September to Early November when the weather makes wearing coats common.
Intellectual Equipment: An understanding of the New York subway and bridge system, an understanding of symbolism in America, a willingness to die.
The Method:
Continued...
Andrew Sullivan reacts to the unseemly demands of 67% of the American public
I say again, "A raaaaacist is anyone who's winning an argument with a liberal."
It pains me to have to take (mild) issue with other members of the Founding Bloggers, but it does seem to me that today's hope that the Race Card will be tossed out onto the waters of oblivion along with slavery, the Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and Affirmative Action. Simply put: It. Ain't. Gonna. Happen.
Why? Because when it comes to the defending the Obama administration's current dog's dinner of legislation, the race card is not just the strongest card in the left/liberal/progressive deck, it is the only card in that deck.
When all you have in the deck is the Race Card, the name of the game is "52-Pickup." The technique then is similar to a spastic Ricky Jay trying to decapitate a duck or penetrate a water melon. For example:
Continued...Because it's so normal, it's weird.
WARNING: SENSITIVES STRONGLY CAUTIONED. YOU CANNOT UNSEE THIS.
Presenting the unsung masterpiece Jenny Carter by solocosmo in "High Def!"
Don't you just love saying "High Def?" It's so modern and cutting edge, but it's also just fun to say. Sort of like the Seinfeld riff on "Sal-sa!"
GEORGE: Salsa is now the number one condiment in America.JERRY: 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?"
Be that as it may, by popular demand, here's that Jenny Carter illo in "high def!" Click on the itsy-bitsy image at your peril. But save it for the next time we have that cracker raaaaacist Carter to kick around.
Don't say I don't do nothin' to keep the level of Carter criticism as high as the ex-President deserves, because I just did.
Christopher Merola : A Republic, if You Can Keep It - Townhall.com
This Thursday, September 17th, 2009, will be the 222nd anniversary of the signing of the US Constitution. We have come a long way as a nation in that time, but have we gone the way our founding fathers intended us to go?
Had enough? Oh yeah? Here's more. I'm proud that the Establishment Media, in cahoots with "the Most Media Savvy White House EVAH" is joining me in my quest to give America More Obama I Say. MORE O!-BA!-MA! Jake Tapper (surely in the Top 10 of the Current White House Enemies List) asks, Obama Over-Exposure?
This Sunday, President Obama will be interviewed on five shows -- ABC News’ “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” CNN’s “State of the Nation”, CBS’s “Face the Nation”, NBC’s “Meet the Press” and Univision’s “Al Punto with Jorge Ramos."It's a rare feat called "the Full Ginsburg." In modern media lore, the first time someone pulled a five-show feat was 11 years ago, in 1998, when Monica Lewinsky’s attorney William Ginsburg made the rounds to defend his client. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, did a Full Ginsburg in 2007 after launching her presidential bid....
Continued...
Citizen and patriot Andrew Brietbart, the man behind Breitbart News, Breitbart.tv Big Hollywood, and now Big Government.
The Always Trenchant Jim Treacher commenting on the four-day-old Big Government: "I don't want to say Andrew Breitbart is a genius, but the last guy with a launch this successful was Neil Armstrong."
Andrew Breitbart: Hear him now and hear him later.
Now the wintertime is coming,
The windows are filled with frost.
I went to tell everybody,
But I could not get across.
-- Bob Dylan | It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry
Chico, CA: 2007
This September, as in most Septembers, the days have been hot and parched here in the upper reaches of California's Imperial Valley. This year, as in most years, wildfires have been stalking the region sealing the old folks, the ecosensitives, and the ever-proliferating hyper-allergenic inside behind their oxygen canisters, filters, and mounds of medications. The local TV weathermen make much of little, delivering the particulate count as if every second carbon atom spelled doom for untold numbers of weakened and afflicted Americans. It's all part of the shameful litany of vulnerability chanted so often that many previously tough Americans come to believe they are as insubstantial as moonlight at noon. It's how they live now.
Continued...Place: Southport, Connecticut. Time: Somewhere in the late 1980s. Status: Pissed off.
It was one of those arguments that, if they don't end a marriage outright, threaten it with premature extinction. Like most, it was my fault. Like most, it probably started over a small thing in the way that explosions start with a spark in a primer. Whatever it was, like an explosion, it quickly escalated to the well-worn phrase that those who are wrong always use at the end, "Okay, that's it. I'm out of here!"
And out the door I went. Down to the driveway I went. Into the car I went. Out of the driveway and into the road I drove taking a hard left that would lead me down the right curve, then the left curve, then onto the main road. Halfway down this road I pulled the car over, turned off the engine and sat there listening to the crickets in the summer evening. Well, I thought, that'll show her. I'm gone.
At which point it dawned on my small reptile brain, as it must have to countless husbands, that although I was gone I had no place to go.
Of course that wasn't quite true. In theory I had everyplace to go. Everyplace except back to where I'd just left. I was parked close to the I-95 and the the Boston Post Road on coastal Connecticut. I could go west-north-south wherever.... but I couldn't go back. At least not right then. That would be too humiliating.... too much like a Monty Python sketch. So I chose the solution that countless husbands have taken, I headed to the nearest hotel/motel.
Continued...
(JOHN F. KENNEDY) TYPED LETTER AS PRESIDENT
Here we see another example of the famous "Kennedy wit." It was real and it was genuine. Can anyone imagine a collection of the witty sayings of Barack Obama coming out unless it is ghost-written. I, for one, don't recall the current President as being particularly witty in unscripted situations. But I'm willing to take pointers.
- Fascinating and illuminating: One year after Hurricane Ike - The Big Picture @ Boston.com Collected here are a series of before-and-after photographs - which (starting with the second one below) will fade between "before" and "after" when clicked.
- Shannon Love on the Acorn child prostitution scandal. Three Times is Slavery and Treason
"Acorn was promoting slavery. Sexual slavery. The sexual slavery of children. Is that overwrought? Well, it isn’t in my book but then I have a low tolerance for the sexual enslavement of children."
- No jobs? Get used to it. Adviser: High unemployment for years “The level of unemployment is unacceptably high,” National Economic Council Director Larry Summers said Friday. “And will, by all forecasts, remain unacceptably high for a number of years.”
- The Mandate of Heaven "is a traditional Chinese philosophical concept. Tian would bless the authority of a just ruler, but would be displeased with a despotic ruler and would withdraw its mandate. The Mandate of Heaven would then transfer to those who would rule best.... The Mandate of Heaven had no time limitations, instead depending on the just and able performance of the ruler. The Mandate also does not require that a legitimate ruler be of noble birth...."
- I don't want to know how they know: "[C]arrion appeals to those who hate waste and, as one prolific UK roadkill consumer puts it, out of 40 carcasses found here, 20 will be edible." -- davidthompson: Them’s Good Eats
- Mercer Caverns | Murphys, California | Atlas Obscura "Visitors should wear clothes which they never expect to wear to a wedding afterward. A candle is to be carried in one hand and it is prudent to have a supply or matches in one's pocket."
- Overcoming Bias: What Do Nature Lovers Love? "While nature shows and nature lovers often give lip service to the wonders of natural selection, in fact they mainly love the particular species alive now."
The Waking
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
-- Theodore Roethke | The Waking
"Well, it was only 3,000 people and we've moved on. Why can't you? Carpe diem, man."
Simon Dedvukaj, 26, Mohegan Lake, N.Y. janitorial, foreman, ABM Industries / Confirmed dead, World Trade Center, at/in building 2
The huge wound in my head began to heal
About the beginning of the seventh week.
Its valleys darkened, its villages became still:
For joy I did not move and dared not speak,
Not doctors would cure it, but time, its patient still.
-- Thom Gunn, The Wound
EVERYONE WHO WAS IN NEW YORK ON on "The Day" will tell you their stories about "The Day." I could stun you with an eight figure number by running a Google on 9/11, but you can do that as well.
"The Day," even at this close remove, has ascended into that shared museum of the mind to be placed in the diorama captioned, "Where Were You When." The site has long since been cleared and scrubbed clean. There is even an agreement on the memorial which will, I see, use a lot of water and trees. "The Day" has become both memorial and myth.
Less is heard about the aftermath. Less is said about the weeks and months that spun out from that stunningly clear and bright September morning whose sky was slashed by a towering fist of flame and smoke. You forget the smoke that hung over the city like a widow's shawl as the fires burned on for months. You don't know about the daily commutes by subway wondering if some new horror was being swept towards you as the train came to a stop deep beneath the East River. You supress hearing over the loudspeaker, always unclearly, that the train was being "held for police activity at Penn Station." Was that a bomb, poison gas, a mass shooting, a strike on the Empire State building? You were never sure. You carried a flashlight in case you had to walk out of the tunnels that ran deep beneath the river. Terror was your quiet companion. After the first six weeks you barely knew it was there.
Continued...Cornyn: Obama model of bipartisanship on war, not healthcare - TheHill.com
Yet the Obama administration – which has struggled recently to shore up support for its work in Afghanistan – remains open to the idea of additional deployments. So too are congressional Republicans, Cornyn said Saturday – evidence that the two parties could still cooperate on key issues, he added.
“On Afghanistan, President Obama has shown the kind of leadership he promised during the campaign – he’s built consensus and earned bipartisan support,” Cornyn said.
The wind at Ground Zero during the first memorial service, September 11, 2002
Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I.
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.
-- Christina Rossetti
10,000 FEARED DEAD
-- Headline, New York Post, September 12, 2001
AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY I lived in Brooklyn Heights in, of course, Brooklyn. The opening of the Brooklyn Bridge on May 24 of 1883 transformed the high bluff just to the south of the bridge into America's first suburb. It became possible for affluent businessmen from the tip of Manhattan which lay just over the East River to commute across the bridge easily and build their stately mansions and townhouses high above the slapdash docks below. Growth and change would wash around the Heights in the 117 years that followed, but secure on their bluff, on their high ground, the Heights would remain a repository old and new money, power, and some of the finest examples of 19th and early 20th century homes found in New York City.
When I moved to Brooklyn Heights from the suburbs of Westport, Connecticut in the late 90s, it was a revelation to me that such a neighborhood still existed. Small side streets and cul-de-sacs were shaded over by large oaks and maple that made it cool even in the summer doldrums. Street names such as Cranberry, Orange and Pineapple let you know you were off the grid of numbered streets and avenues. Families were everywhere and the streets on evenings and on weekends were full of the one thing you rarely see in Manhattan, children.
Continued...The jacket with every small identity device containable within.
Small footprints and dinky jobs
The no future 70s punks in britain
The flash-millionaires and the lack of morality that attends them.
Image from Day by Day Cartoon by Chris Muir
[What follows is a slightly edited transcript of what I saw and how I felt on the 11th of September, 2001 from Brooklyn Heights in New York City. On that day I was posting to a West Coast Computer Conferencing system known as The Well. As a result, even though I was writing from Brooklyn Heights directly across the river from the Towers, the time stamp reflects PST. Real time is +3 hours.]
Tue 11 Sep 01 08:07
Saw the first tower collapse from the Promenade across the river in Brooklyn. Fine white and pale yellow ash everywhere. Lower Manhattan covered in smoke with ash still drifting down.
Military jets overhead every five minutes or so.
Lower span of Brooklyn Bridge jammed with people walking out of the city, many covered with white ash. Ghosts. The Living Dead. BQE empty except for convoys of emergency vehicles.
Sirens in all directions. Ferry ships emerging from the smoke heading to the Brooklyn shore riding low in the water fully loaded.
This is monstrous.
Deaths in the thousands in New York.
My body is trembling with sorrow and rage. I saw the first tower fall. Everyone in it would have been killed. This, all this, must be stopped. Those who have done this must be wiped out to the last.
War with whom?
Continued...For well over a year after 911 I was able to provide funds and hosting for this site. I'm proud of that and prouder still that it still remains:
Visit this site and you will see why. It was a handmade flash site put together in the days immediately following 911. In a way, it's now somewhat of an anachronism but it remains because it has the terror and the hope of those days woven into its bones.
Yes, it takes awhile. But if I can take it so can you.
Their silence keeps me sleepless for I know:
Within that smoke their ash still falls as snow,
To settle on our flesh like fading stars
Dissolve into sharp sparks at break of day.
At dawn a distant shudder in the earth
Disclosed the flight of fire into steel,
The shaking not of subways underground,
But screams from inside flowers made of flame.
We stood upon the Heights like men of straw
Transfixed by flames that started in the sky,
And watched them plunging down in death’s ballet
Too far removed to hear their falling cry.
By noon that band of smoke loomed low
Upon the harbor’s skin and made us gasp;
A hand of smoke that in its curdled crawl
Kept reaching to extend its lethal grasp.
The harp strung bridge held up ten thousand souls
Who’d screaming run beneath the paws of death,
Like dusted ghosts that lived but were not sure
If they lived in light or only for a breath.
They’d writhed and spun within that storm of smoke
And stumbled out to light and clearer air,
To find upon the river’s further shore
No sanctuary other than despair.
The sirens scraped the sky and jets carved arcs
Within a heaven empty of all hope,
That marked its epicenter with one streak
Of black on polished bone where silver'd stood.
By evening all their ash had settled so
That on the leaves outside my window glowed
Their souls in small bright stars until the rain
Cleaned all of what could not be clean again.
We breathed that smoke that bent and crawled.
We learned to hate that smoke that lingered so.
We knew that blood could only answer blood,
And so we yearned to go but not to go.
Within the city shrines were our resolve.
We placed them where our grief would best anneal.
Upon our walls and trees their faces loomed
To gaze at us from time beyond repeal.
Their last lost summer faded into ash.
Their faces faded into name scratched stones.
Our years flowed into endless desert seas
Where warplanes prowl in search of bones.
In time their smoke and ash became but words
In stories told at dinner, told by rote,
Or in the comments made by magazines
For whom the "larger issues" were of note.
In time their faces faded with the rains,
The little altars thick with wax were scraped,
But still beneath clear plastic they endure
To remind us all that we have not escaped.
Their silence keeps me sleepless for I know.
It slipped past editors at the Boston Globe in 1980.... but all over the country tonight copy editors on suicide watch to make sure it doesn't happen again:
Best reaction to the speech? There are so many it's hard to choose, but this one from the self-serving David Corn's obamallation speaks multitudes:
Obama's Speech: The Doctor Is In | Mother JonesSubmitted by Michele (not verified) on September 9, 2009 - 11:20pm.
As a child of hippies, I just posted this plea on Facebook: Whatever happened to question The Man? Which starts like this:
"Oh wild-haired, anti-establishment flower children, where have you gone? Too tired to question the man? Too busy waving your AARP cards, having put down your freak flags? Given up, have you? Eaten the establishment crap? Don’t question, don’t protest, don’t worry about the generations to come. Rush through policies that congress doesn’t even have time to read. Just believe, believe... Government's the new religion."
And gets progressively more pissed off about the swill Obama-bots have swallowed without question. Where, I've been wondering, are all the intelligent people who I remember who didn't trust govt.? And here you all are! As goofy Biden would say, "God love ya!"
At the end of April in 2006 a couple of friends asked me to go with them to see "United 93," but I declined both offers saying I wasn't sure that I needed any reminders other than what I saw in New York on that day. In the end, though, I went to it as I went to the funerals, alone.
When people who were in New York on that day talk about it, it always seems to be focused on the day itself. Nobody talks much about the days and the weeks and the months that came after that day in New York City.
In a way, that's understandable because what happened for days and weeks and months after was pretty much a slowly diminishing repeat of that day. Things got better, got back to the new "normal." The wax from the candled shrines was scraped away, and in time -- quite a long time actually -- even the walls and fences full of fading flyers asking if you had seen one or the other of those we came to call "the missing" were gone.
Hector-in-Chief
Off-Mike Moments....
... and tonight's most memorable on-mike moment:
Wise men and women will mix the martinis and pack the bong full. Here we go again....
Continued...
If Obamaspew be the food of fools, BRINGETH IT ON!
Give ALL excess of Him, that, surfeiting,
The Obamatrons may sicken, and so die.
That Hope and Change again! it had a dying poll fall:
O, his valved voice slurps o'er my ear like the sweet drool,
That cackles over another bank bailout,
Stealing my money while flatulating! Enough; no more;
His words sound not so sweet now as before.
O Story of O! how tired and boring art thou,
That, notwithstanding his venal verbosity,
Deceiveth as the devil, nought truth enters there,
Of what no validity soe'er,
But falls into debasement and low approval,
Even in a joint session bleat: so full of shapes is his fancy
That he alone is high and fantastical.
“I’m out! I’m free!” -- Farrell to Susan Chira, the foreign editor of The Times
....
No SUCH thing as TOO MUCH!
Phil Plait at the charming "Bad Astronomy" page has hit the big time today with his eructation on The mainstreaming of crazy. Phil, like all card-carrying scientists in search of tenure, grants, continued employment, and more book contracts, has decided, as is his right, that all those opposed to the President's address to school children simply, scientifically speaking, crazy and evil:
Continued...
Is that a pistol down my pants or.... BLAM!
Where to begin with this newsquib? It exceeds the mind's capacity for bogglement.
So much for packing a, um, rodThere's so much now normalized wrongness here that the only thing it underscores is "the banality of evil" in everyday life. But let's review anyway. Continued...A 15-year-old Brooklyn boy shot himself in the penis Sunday after fumbling with a gun that had slid from his waistband, authorities said yesterday.
Khamir Grant was then arrested for reckless endangerment and criminal possession of a weapon ... law-enforcement sources said.
Grant told cops that he was walking home from Amersfort Park at East 39th Street and Avenue J in East Flatbush around 1:30 a.m., when the gun began to fall into his pants, sources said.
When Grant grabbed for it, he accidentally pulled the trigger, firing a bullet right through his penis.
Grant staggered home and told his mom what had happened, sources said.
They took a livery car to Kings County Hospital, where Grant was released after treatment and then arrested by police.
Humanity on its raft. The raft on the endless ocean. From his present dissatisfaction man reasons that there was some catastrophic wreck in the past, before which he was happy; some golden age, some Garden of Eden. He also reasons that somewhere ahead lies a promised land, a land without conflict. Meanwhile, he is miserably en passage; this myth lies deeper than religious faith. -- JohnFowles, The Aristos
How fares the good ship America during this, the 233rd year of our voyage? Many would say that with its new captain setting a new course it sails on into fairer days and calmer waters now that our demons at home and abroad are being mollified and made more sociable. Many others, perhaps now more than half, would say that we tack between Scylla and Charybdis with a more than fair chance of being driven onto a lee shore by the gusting headwinds. All would agree our present position was unforseeable even two years ago and that our present passage is fraught with danger.
Dangerous passages are nothing new to the good ship America. She’s weathered many but never one quite so close run as that of 1860 to 1865 when fire in the minds of Americans burned so hot they required the blood of 620,000 to quench them. We did not sail into that maelstrom in a year or so. We were headed there, some would say, from the founding.
I think, however, that the Civil War first loomed on the horizon during the rise of Transcendentalism in New England. That period began in the early 19th century and flowered during the literary period of 1850 to 1855 that is known as the American Renaissance. Transcendentalism was the first secular Great Awakening and perhaps its most enduring. Emerson and Thoreau are the chief avatars of the movement as it is known today and much of contemporary American progressivism bears the marks of those two men.
I’m not interested in them at present. Once entrancing both Emerson and Thoreau have come to seem softer to me of late. Both have taken on the consistency of store-bought bread. Instead I’d like to look at the more rugged work of an outlier of transcendentalism, a prophet who came late to the dance, Herman Melville.
Continued...
From the dawn of diversity in 1969.
Once upon a time in the United States, someone somewhere in the government for the greater good asked, "What better medium to get across the message of benevolent government programs is there than comic books?"
The SSA certainly knew this and, along with other government agencies, has a long history of "getting the message out." Here are some samples from the Social Security Administration's Special Collections - Public Information Materials where you are warned, "This is an archival or historical document and may not reflect current policies or procedures."
Continued...
Aftermath: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
From AMERICAN DIGEST NEWS, October 26, 2004 September 7, 2009
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON LAGUNA BEACH, CALIFORNIA -- Doctors are blaming a rare electrical imbalance in the brain for the bizarre death of a blogger whose head literally exploded in the final week of the election "health care" summer!
No one else was hurt in the fatal explosion but a small room at the blogger's residence was sprayed with blood and brain matter when Gerard Van der Leun's head suddenly blew apart. Experts say he suffered from a condition called Hyper-Cerebral Blogosis or HCB .
"He was deep in concentration with his eyes focused on the screen and his fingers frozen over the keyboard," said early responder, Miguel Wilsonista. "He seems to have hit 'Post' for what had to be the 3,456,856th item of inept political photoshopping this year when the blast occurred.
Continued...
If you, like me, are subject to spontaneous head detonations when you hear those doleful words "health care," you'll find A Goy and his Blog's "Tilting At Mass Hysteria" soothing. But you'll have to put in some time....
Excerpts:
Go get a soda and stop in the restroom on the way back. This is going to take a few minutes.You know you live in a world where 2 2 = 5 when fact is ridiculed and fantasy is validated.
Welcome to America, 2009.
We have come to conflate health care and health care insurance so blindly that we can no longer conceive of getting health care without having insurance “coverage” for it.Follow on HERE. And yes, there are the helpful graphs.This is part of the mass hysteria that must be cured if we’re ever to get health care costs back under control.
The irrational misconception that health care and insurance for it are one and the same is, ironically, the biggest part of the health care problem. Why? Because it derails every substantive discussion on the topic and sends it off into the weeds where it has nothing to do with getting health care costs back under control. In the health care “debate”, everyone’s arguing over “how to cover the rising costs” or the availability and unfathomable actuarial and economic complexities of “coverage”, when the goal here is something completely different and far simpler. The goal is to get back what we once had: a health care market that supports affordable routine health care.
Leslie Gelb: "North Korea is Run by a Porn King" @ Big Think
Via Rethinking Security: And Now For Something Completely Different
It might be fun to take a victory lap over unseating a Green Munchkin, but there are plenty more where he came from and they've got money and men and material. As Napoleon forgot, remember that the road is long and the outcome uncertain -- especially when you invade Russia.
Source: Edward Tufte: New ET Writings, Artworks & News
Update: More wise caution at Riehl World View: Be Careful Conservatives
As for what comes next, remember that it's the health care debate that must come first. It's also what matters more to us and all of America in the end. So, don't get lost in what one Fox personality is picking up on that's going to boost his ratings. And don't get so giddy over one in the win column that you take your eyes off the ball. I suspect Obama would appreciate nothing more right now. Hitting a home run in a losing game isn't cause for too much celebration, after all.
Believe it or not, there is a classic Iowahawk 1951 Mercury coupe owned by Jesse James in this picture.
- Illegal Residents: Natural born and naturalized citizens of the United States who actively work to undo the nation while taking full advantage of the benefits.
- 1-Sentence Review, Inglorious Bastards: If once every two generations a film features a Jew emptying a machine gun clip into Adolph Hitler's face, I can't say I see the harm in that. -- Solomonia
- Baron Bodissey is updating Samuel Johnson: "The accusation of racism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."
- Please update your spell-checkers: There are five A's in 'raaaaacism'
Tom Curley: Head Muppet of the Associated Press
[UPDATE: Jules Crittenden today has an informed and balanced view on the entire issue at Jules Crittenden ｻ Professional Issues. I recommend it. ]
It was there only for a brief moment on Wikipedia before the editing gestapo got it, but the truth endures, for now, in the cache:Tom Curley - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Curley, an executive battening off the rotting hulk of the Associated Press, had ignored common decency and a direct appeal from Defense Secretary Robert Gates to refrain from publishing photographs of a dying United States Marine. Gates said,
“I cannot imagine the pain and suffering Lance Corporal Bernard’s death has caused his family. Why your organization would purposefully defy the family’s wishes knowing full well that it will lead to yet more anguish is beyond me. Your lack of compassion and common sense in choosing to put this image of their maimed and stricken child on the front page of multiple American newspapers is appalling. The issue here is not law, policy or constitutional right – but judgment and common decency.”Decency? For the chancre ridden media scum that infest our nation, Continued...
And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes - a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. --- Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Sometimes small notions indicate 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
Some observations strike me as fair, others as dubious. Most strike me as those a reasonable man might form on a daily diet of the American media melange. It is a dangerous diet; a diet rich in junk and toxins. In large doses it might make your head fill with harmful fat.
Just as it was when the Soviet Union lived -- and is still to be found on the islands of socialist utopias still extant -- once the propaganda mills are relentlessly anti-American, a real picture is hard to come by. One is pretty much a slave to one's choices of input. Not much can be done to change a mind fed a constant drip-feed of plaint from the current America-based "My country wrong or wrong" crowd.
I can see how the commenter comes by his impressions. I grant that he comes to them fairly by using what he is given to draw his conclusions. They simply don't map well to my experience of ordinary life in America in 2007. As American life, or a simple driveabout will teach you, "the map is not the territory."
It is not my purpose here to flense his critique point by point, only to note that his intellectual malnutrition is, of necessity, determined by what he feeds his head.
By way of example, my day-to-day experience tells me that while the lumbering results of having "way too much food" are more than visible in America, so is the cult of "way too much exercise." The buffed anorexic and the wobbling obese are the opposite ends of the bell-curve. In the middle I see that most Americans are mindful of what they eat because they can afford to be. Making this possible is a system of food production and distribution that delivers such a wide-spectrum of food choice at cheap prices (organic, non-organic, and junk) to every niche of the landscape. Indeed, the system is so advanced and sophisticated that we have achieved a society in which one of the major problems among the poor that remain is obesity.
The impression that Americans are "turning their cities' air into poison gas" is likewise well meant but ill informed. It is demonstrably not true.
Continued...And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes - a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. --- Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Sometimes small notions indicate 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.
Some observations strike me as fair, others as dubious. Most strike me as those a reasonable man might form on a daily diet of the American media melange. It is a dangerous diet; a diet rich in junk and toxins. In large doses it might make your head fill with harmful fat.
Just as it was when the Soviet Union lived -- and is still to be found on the islands of socialist utopias still extant -- once the propaganda mills are relentlessly anti-American, a real picture is hard to come by. One is pretty much a slave to one's choices of input. Not much can be done to change a mind fed a constant drip-feed of plaint from the current America-based "My country wrong or wrong" crowd.
I can see how the commenter comes by his impressions. I grant that he comes to them fairly by using what he is given to draw his conclusions. They simply don't map well to my experience of ordinary life in America in 2007. As American life, or a simple driveabout will teach you, "the map is not the territory."
It is not my purpose here to flense his critique point by point, only to note that his intellectual malnutrition is, of necessity, determined by what he feeds his head.
By way of example, my day-to-day experience tells me that while the lumbering results of having "way too much food" are more than visible in America, so is the cult of "way too much exercise." The buffed anorexic and the wobbling obese are the opposite ends of the bell-curve. In the middle I see that most Americans are mindful of what they eat because they can afford to be. Making this possible is a system of food production and distribution that delivers such a wide-spectrum of food choice at cheap prices (organic, non-organic, and junk) to every niche of the landscape. Indeed, the system is so advanced and sophisticated that we have achieved a society in which one of the major problems among the poor that remain is obesity.
The impression that Americans are "turning their cities' air into poison gas" is likewise well meant but ill informed. It is demonstrably not true. It is not true from a look at the steadily declining levels of emission in a steadily increasing and mobile population over the decades. It is can be seen to be obviously untrue from the simple fact of living in America for six decades -- decades that have seen more deep and lasting social change than at any other time in the history of the country, perhaps the world.
I was, as constant readers may know, born in Los Angeles six decades ago. I remember the poison air of the 1950s. I remember the smog alerts, the soot that would settle on the windowsills and grind its way into the clothes. I remember the black smudge that would be visible within a block of my front yard. I saw it that same black smudge some three decades later, not in Los Angeles, but in London.
Today there is still a haze over Los Angeles on most days, but you have to stand back some to see it. You also have to stand back in your mind and know that Los Angeles, depending on how you define it, is now home to between 10 and 18 million people (Up a tad from the 4 million of my childhood when only every family and not every individual had a car). The only way that air in Los Angeles today could become perfect would be if you gave every resident a unicycle for transportation, a mandated vegan diet, and forbid flatulence under pain of death.
In short, the air in American cities is today more than acceptable and is not, by any stretch of an imagination not twisted by false impressions, "poison." And it improves daily. Could it be improved more? Certainly it could and inevitably it will.
The same observations hold true for our rivers, our reservoirs, our parks, our homes, our communities, and for all other nation-wide measures by which one might discover the true quality of life. We tolerate high gasoline prices in large measure because we will not drill and pump our vast reserves nor will we build new refineries. This indulgence can be reversed whenever the political will to do so arrives. And it will.
At the same time, as it would be in any imperfect human society of 300 million souls, it is perfectly possible to find the pockets of poison and the ghettos of despair in this protean country. Viewed over an inch of time you would note they are shrinking, but you could still stand on a street corner in South Central or Harlem and focus a camera in such a direction and frame the images in such a manner you could deliver the impression of a vile and selfish society in which the poverty-stricken obese were crushed under some corporate oppressor's boot.
You could, and many still do, ferret out an example of racism daily if you look hard enough. But it’s an evil juju only the most poisoned of our people waste their lives in pursuing. It is the witchdoctor’s feathered fetish shaken in America’s face daily by the race-hustlers and rent-seekers in the Democrat Party and the present administration in order to preserve their plantations of colonized minds. Free men know it is only skillfully shaped propaganda and does not represent anything close to the truth of the American experiment and environment in 2009. Here even our poor are filthy rich measured against the world's poor.
As is often the case in the envious world today, we encounter -- in my critic’s plaint and elsewhere at home and abroad -- a mindset in which "the perfect is the enemy of the good." It is a mindset that views anything less than some imagined perfect state as somehow failing and worthy of excoriation. It is a mindset in which, if the real world falls short of the imagined perfection, it is the real world that is ill rather than the mind of the imaginer. It is a mindset which finds nothing is impossible as long as others do the work and pay the price. It is a mindset forever doomed to disappointment; a doom in which it takes a strange masochistic pleasure. A country that permits all perversions will not shy away from perverted politics. Instead it will seek to fund them in perpetuity.
The commenter seems to feel that it is there is some implicit global responsibility of America to set a "good" example rather than, as he feels, its current "bad" example. He seems to feel that as America goes, so goes the world; that the Brits drive big cars in Britain not because they make that choice as free people but because some bizarre 'American mind waves' force them to do so against their will; that the Chinese, if impressed by some future America's return to some eco-idyllic state, will shrug off the desires that the increasing wealth and semi-liberty of their situation affords them and peacefully return to the days of the ox-cart, the rickshaw, and root-grubbing famine. In short he places too much power in the hands of America and too little in the hands of the human individuals in the rest of the world. To this way of thinking the example is all, and that only if the example is a "good" example can the world be perfected.
To a small extent he is correct. The global reach of American media is a force in the world, but a deeply confusing one. Our media's main export is a mixed message. It constantly tells the world about our shortcomings ("Alas, we have not yet perfected our country. Here's how..."), but at the same time shows the world our achievements ("Check out the good life, the very good life, and get some for yourself. Here's how..."). What he fails to note, or perhaps perceive, is that the American Story rises out not out of agreement but out of the American Argument, an argument that we've been having here in the land where men have been able to freely speak and vote their minds for well over two centuries. It is an argument we're not finished with yet.
There are many ways of stating the American Argument with itself -- indeed, it is many arguments -- but one of the most straightforward is "How shall men be free and how shall a society of free men then be structured?"
From time to time the passions that animate the American Argument run to blood, such as the era that led to the Civil War and, to a much lesser extent, our current era. At other times, the Argument is pitched at a much lower level of intensity. But the Argument is ever present and any number can play. If you can get here and become a citizen you can participate as well. Hell, we'll let you participate even if you are here and not a citizen. We might even allow millions of you to become citizens overnight in order to join the Argument. You don't even have to learn English any longer.
We just had a big argument over that last concept and, even though it's over for now, it's not over yet. Now we are on to arguing over matters of life and death and who will, in the end, pay the reaper's bill. Indeed, the great thing about the American Argument is that it is never over. The Argument will go on and on prompting every generation to add to it and shape it as that generation wills -- for good or ill -- and trusting that America will self-correct over time as long as the Argument endures and is not won by either side.
The reality is that the American experiment continues its pursuit of the good and its flirtation with perfection. In this pursuit of happiness the American experiment continues to demonstrate to the world what a real egalitarian and free society actually looks like and is. Not what such a society could be, but what one actually is here, now, today. And we arrive there by our constant political argument about "the perfect" vs. "the good;" a "utopia tomorrow" via government intervention in all aspects of life versus individual liberty and the best "possible" world here and now. It is an argument that seeks balance rather than predominance, but when one side of the argument seeks a permanent win the social fabric that binds the country begins to tear. When this happens good citizens of either side will endeavor to patch it once again and continue the Argument.
Indeed, for all intents and purposes, the Argument is the American Revolution today. The Argument is an artifact of the American Revolution. It endures because the American Revolution endures, 233 years later, as the most successful revolution in the history of the world. The American Revolution did not start in 1776 -- that was just the shooting phase. The American Revolution began when men from the Old World first came to the New World and decided to make it new; when men of that world set foot here and came “face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to their capacity for wonder.”
The American Argument emerged from the impact of this land on the Old World. This impact is chronicled in the first visions that the New World could be more than the extension of the Old; that it could be truly New. The vision of a world made new is an ancient one in this land. It predates the Revolution and the formal founding of the United States. The roots can be found in such documents as "The Mayflower Compact" and most clearly in John Winthrop's 1630 sermon "City Upon a Hill."
Many consider the Declaration of Independence to be the key document in the creation of the American experiment, but the seeds of it are to be found in many earlier expressions of what it was like to be new in the New World. Of these, the closing words of Winthrop's "City on a Hill" stand for most of the others:
For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.
We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God's sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.
And to shut this discourse with that exhortation of Moses, that faithful servant of the Lord, in his last farewell to Israel, Deut. 30. "Beloved, there is now set before us life and death, good and evil," in that we are commanded this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one another, to walk in his ways and to keep his Commandments and his ordinance and his laws, and the articles of our Covenant with Him, that we may live and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God may bless us in the land whither we go to possess it. But if our hearts shall turn away, so that we will not obey, but shall be seduced, and worship other Gods, our pleasure and profits, and serve them; it is propounded unto us this day, we shall surely perish out of the good land whither we pass over this vast sea to possess it.
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.
"Therefore let us choose life...." That's pretty much what we try to do here in America some 233 years out. We try in our halting, shambling, faltering way to always choose life; life with all its flaws and complexities and victories and defeats.
We don't try to be perfect -- although there are many among us who urge it upon us and expect it from us in order to feel more perfect themselves.
At the same time I would not deny that we are by default an example to the world -- if not the perfect example so many would prefer. Instead we are simply, warts and all, the best society in all its multifoliate aspects that currently exists or has ever existed upon the Earth. We are a nation that has never been perfect but always, if you could walk the land and know the lay of it, the warp and the woof and the thought dreams of it, much better than we have any right to be. If you could look at the world from orbit and see the people of the world flowing over its surface in some sort of schematic, you would see, when you came to gaze at the borders of America, many footprints going in and few coming out.
That's why I am always amused by the exhortations from within and without to "get perfect or get gone." They always seem to me to be filled with spleen on the surface but with an incredible yearning on the inside; a yearning that acknowledges in its very bitterness; in its very existence that this country of all the others is still "the last best hope of Earth." America-loathing knows in its bones that, no matter how much it dislikes the world with America in it, it would be a much less perfect and much more dangerous world with America out of it. Then again, given the shape of the world and the nature of the American argument, perhaps this wish may some day be granted and the world can again sink back into the tyranny of individuals, faction, and totalitarian state-control.
Perhaps. But that day is not yet. With all the rancor now on display, I still believe that we've got about two to five more centuries left to continue setting our "bad example." Hell, give us one century more to argue and our "bad example" might even get you your "perfect world."
[Republished from September, 2008 before all this talk about rationing life became the stuff of our American dinner table conversations and nightmares. This was the habit of mind in Europe one year ago.]
Together at last: The Baroness and Dr. Joseph Mengele
"They told them they would be given medication
that would help them. Oh, yes, they were given
medications, medications of poison that gripped
their heart and closed their eyelids still;
that is the sort of medication they were given."
-- Colonel Leon Jaworski, 1945 **
An evil woman touted as "the influential medical ethics expert Baroness Warnock" says it's time for some tough love and hard death among the demented of England. Call it "the culling the herd to save some money" ethic. Warnock says, "If you're demented, you're wasting people's lives – your family's lives – and you're wasting the resources of the National Health Service."
Or, as Orin Judd so succinctly puts it: "Ever notice how "medical ethics" is nothing more than justifying murder.
We do and we also note how this is a rising trend in the "ethical" thinking of Europe. Or perhaps we shouldn't say "trend" as much as a nostalgic yearning for the past century where an interest in eugenics amongst the "leaders" of that civilization was part of the biggest butcher's bill in history.
Where have we seen this sort of "cost crisis" medical thinking in Europe before? Oh yes, that would be the Hadamar Hospital AKA the Hadamar Euthanasia Center
The Hadamar Nurses welcome you to their facility
Thus in 1906 the Korrigenden-Anstalt in Hadamar was converted to a mental institution. By 1930 the home contained 320 patients. As decreed by Nazi law, from 1934 nursing costs for mental patients were reduced. By 1936 the mental homes had become overcrowded, and conditions worsened as a result of the reduced quantity and quality of food supplies. The building had been designed to accommodate 250 patients, but by 1939 about 600 inmates were crowded into cramped quarters.That was only the first phase of the killings at Hadamar. Sloppy and very unscientific. They got better in the next phase.During late August 1939, following Hadamar's designation as a military hospital, patients were distributed to surrounding mental homes. However, between November 1940 and January 1941 the sickrooms were converted into quarters for the medical and administrative staff of the new T4 Hadamar euthanasia killing centre. The staff had been transferred from Grafeneck following the closure of that facility.
Rooms to receive arriving patients were located on the first floor. A gas chamber disguised as a shower room was installed in the basement of the building, together with a crematorium with two ovens which were attached to a chimney. Gas entered the chamber from an adjacent room through pipes with holes punched in them.
Killing at Hadamar recommenced in 1942 as part of the second phase of the euthanasia program, the so-called “wild euthanasia.” Now the victims were murdered by administering lethal doses of barbiturates or morphine-scopolamine injections. While initially there had been some pretence of medical deliberation before deciding on a patient’s fate, with the arrival of Polish and Russian workers in 1944, mostly diagnosed as “tubercular” despite a complete lack of medical examination until after their death, the killing became automatic."The killing became automatic." That's the phrase that pays these days, isn't it? If we can only get to the automatic killing phase of medicine, then everything will be copacetic... cool... "it's all good." Continued...
Michelle Malkin in The Beslan attack: 5 years later is linking current remembrances and updates. This essay was written September 4, 2004 -- In another place and time.
The boy that lies in his father's lap covered with crusts of blood gazing upward at nothing, nothing at all except his own pain.
The soldier with the unlit cigarette carrying the little girl in filthy underwear with a long smear of blood across her nose and down her chin.
The child's small hand with the dry pool of blood in the palm and the small gold crucifix lying in it.
The stretcher being run past the camera carrying what might, under the burns and the blood, be a young girl.... and another, and another, and another, and another, and another....
I began to gather these images yesterday, I think. Or was it the day before? I'm not really sure. The cascade of outrages, the piling of atrocity on top of atrocity, has become so unremitting that it is sometimes difficult to know where one episode of evil ends and another begins.
The waves keep coming and, because they are always to your back, they keep slamming you down into the hardpacked sand. You pick yourself up and spin around to face the next wave, but this sea of evil is cunning and the next wave will always come from behind your back no matter which direction you face. All you can know now is that there will be another one, and it will come at your back in the way the bullets came for the backs of the children in Russia.
Because I am both too old and too distant to either pick up a weapon to defend, or offer help and comfort to the wounded or the dying, I am forced back on silly, futile, small gestures such as gathering images of the atrocities. In this I disgust myself and, like those who did not stand with Henry V, hold my manhood cheap.
I thought that, perhaps, I could gather enough of them and arrange a kind of gallery as a testament, my own small memorial, to the children who were shot in the back or otherwise slaughtered by the diseased "militants" who thought nothing of these lives taken for their vile cause and their vile god. Somehow I would, I imagined, at least bear my own small witness among the millions of others doing the same around the world tonight.
And so I collected the images. I selected ones that showed the fascist smirk that always rises dark above any slaughter of innocents. I selected ones that revealed the courage of those who would try to rescue them. I found and saved some that revealed the chaos and sharp edge of the moment when all that a child may have in front of him is ripped out of him. I saved 10 images, saved 20, saved 40 and then came to the 41st photograph and stopped.
I stopped because in that one image, grainy, indistinct and from the far side of the world in a situation I could not imagine, I saw the one thing I was not expecting to see at all.
No, that's not it. It was not what I saw but what I recognized.
What I recognized was something that I could not see in the picture, but a recognition that came to me through the picture. I knew it immediately and at such a deep level that my first reaction was to look away, to go on to the next picture no matter what it was, to determine to never look at the 41st picture again.
But of course I did. I did because I had no choice. I had no choice because within this one picture I could see two separate episodes of my own life somehow together in one image that depicted an outcome that terrified me to the core of my being.
This is the picture I could not look at. This is the picture I must look at. I will try to explain -- not really to you, but to myself -- why it terrifies me more than all the other pictures.
Continued...
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- The Very Near Future of Literacy in America
- The Leap of Faith
- Mud Men: Polanski & Le Miserable Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times
- Andrew Klavan: Are You A Racist? A Frank Conversation
- Brutally Simple: My Current Exit Strategy for Iraq and Afghanistan
- The Mud
- The Bitch
- Homestead
- Manic Maniac Monday: Just When You Thought the World Was Safe from Tom DeLay
- The Mechanical Turk: That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain....
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The Birther, the Truther, and the Frogger @ LGF: Charles Foster
KaneJohnson Pwnd and Pied - "It was a routine job, really." The Serial Unfolding at Sippican Cottage
- Inside Christian Fundamentalism
- The Ducting Stool
- Advanced Hot Dog / Bun Diplomacy
- What's It All About, Barry?
- Suffer the Little Children -- Updated
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