Comments or suggestions: Gerard Van der Leun
An Open Letter to That Democrat Deadbeat Who Keeps Hustling Me for a Handout

Yo! BO! I'm a seeing your "Dinner with Barry" spam drizzle into the Email just about every four hours for the last week. So just Fucking STOP IT! (Strong letter to follow.)

Strong letter:

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 30, 2011 6:44 PM | Comments (7)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Despair: The Supreme Theme of Progressive Politics and Art
Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 30, 2011 12:18 PM | Comments (4)  | QuickLink: Permalink
President Dick Today: "What Oft Was Thought But Ne'er So Well Expressed"
Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 30, 2011 9:13 AM | Comments (21)  | QuickLink: Permalink
"Encounter" by John Ciardi

uk-riots.jpg

"We," said my radical young neighbor, smashing my window,
"speak the essential conscience of mankind."

"If it comes to no more than small breakage," I said, "speak away.
But tell me, isn't smashing some fun for its own sake."

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 29, 2011 8:52 PM | Comments (10)  | QuickLink: Permalink
"What’s going to happen to the children when there aren’t any more grown-ups?" Noel Coward's Question for the 21st Century

abastard-stamp.jpg

"Illegitimi non carborundum!"

If you're getting the impression that we've got a lot more little bastards scampering about these days, you're right.

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 29, 2011 8:56 AM | Comments (9)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Bible Stories by Barnhardt

1111978_Chrysler_Newport_4-door_hardtop_f.jpg

Powers, Principalities, Prayer & ’78 Chryslers:

I am NOT in a state of superior grace from you. In fact, I am almost certain that I am a complete wreck compared to you. I’m the ’78 Cordoba. You are the Firehawk. Here, I contend, is the difference. As much of a piece of de-tuned MOPAR crap with a bad carburetor as I am, I actually put the tranny in gear and GO. Most Christian folks in the U.S. have the SLP Ram-Air 5.7 liter V-8, but never take it out of park. Hmmm. So if what I did, and what I’m doing, constitutes sputtering, crippling along, dying at every light and having to throw it in neutral and get out and push a 4000 pound, 18 foot long monstrosity through the streets . . . just imagine what y’all Firehawks could do if you would JUST. PUT. IT. IN. GEAR. -- Ann Barnhardt



Posted by Vanderleun Jun 28, 2011 7:31 PM | Comments (3)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Chowing Down with Dumbth and Dumbther!
Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 27, 2011 11:27 AM | Comments (14)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Something Wonderful: Cause summer's here and the time is right for slip-sliding on the grass!
Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 26, 2011 9:24 AM | Comments (8)  | QuickLink: Permalink
The Public Evisceration of Al Gore: "It is hard to think of any recent failure in international politics this comprehensive, this swift, this humiliating."
Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 24, 2011 7:35 PM | Comments (12)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Something Wonderful: To Seek A Newer World

... Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

-- Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson



Posted by Vanderleun Jun 24, 2011 12:02 PM | Comments (4)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Just a Couple of Rollicking Seattle Terrorists Called "Joe" and "Fred"
Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 23, 2011 2:41 PM | Comments (19)  | QuickLink: Permalink
BikeNaked: Seattle, the Solstice, and Bare Naked Ladies (and Gents))
Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 23, 2011 8:22 AM | Comments (56)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Who else had a ping pong ball gun?

{ED: Twist again like we did last summer....}

annettecute.jpg
Were they real and were they spectacular? Youth wanted to know!

Rodger @ the everCurmudgeonly & Skeptical posts "My Youth in one E-Mail."

Mine too. I once rode my bicycle five miles and back on the rumor Annette Funicello was staying at a house in a neighboring suburb. (My friends and I knew, just knew, to a certainty that Annette had [whisper]breasts[/whisper] that were being held down by skillfully deployed Ace athletic bandages. I was going to go for an off-camera sighting to confirm or deny once and for all. Alas, the house was curtained and nobody went in or came out for hours and I was under strict standing instructions: "Home before dark."

Even if this wasn't your youth how many of these 36 items and images do you recognize?

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 22, 2011 8:33 AM | Comments (52)  | QuickLink: Permalink
"I'm phobia-phobic:" Mark Steyn on Free Speech

Mark Steyn on Free Speech at the IPA from Institute of Public Affairs on Vimeo.




Posted by Vanderleun Jun 22, 2011 7:41 AM | Comments (11)  | QuickLink: Permalink
The Earth Is Flat and Here's the Map to Prove It

a2-Orlando-Ferguson-flat-earth-map.jpg
[Click to see a really big enlargement so you can real the "proofs" of scripture]

Library of Congress gets unique flat earth map

Don Homuth, a former North Dakota state senator and current resident of Salem, Oregon, will donate the sole complete copy of the Map of a Square and Stationary Earth by Orlando Ferguson to the Library of Congress. Homuth was given the map by his eighth-grade English teacher John Hildreth who had received it from his grandfather. He didn't realize it was the only one left intact until he contacted the LoC to arrange for the donation.



Posted by Vanderleun Jun 22, 2011 5:42 AM | Comments (6)  | QuickLink: Permalink
SAVE THE TUMOR! Ann Barnhardt on the Raw Truth About Social Security & Medicare


If you didn't like the Health Insurance videos, you'll hate these. The truth hurts sometimes.




Posted by Vanderleun Jun 22, 2011 5:18 AM | Comments (7)  | QuickLink: Permalink
How to Sell Very Expensive Real Estate in a Down Market

Speaks for itself. If this was the prize from a Lottery Ticket I might buy several thousand.

Australians: Not yet ready to geld themselves and hand their balls over to Michelle Obama for the pickle jar.



Posted by Vanderleun Jun 20, 2011 6:32 PM | Comments (12)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Jon Stewart: Schmuck, Putz, Liar, Fraud or All Four?

I always love the moment when the carefully constructed media mask slips off and we get to see the "star's" real face. Jon Stewart, long a staple of the "too cool too fool" generation of know-nothings had his moment this weekend when we saw emerge from his carefully constructed schtick his more carefully hidden ugly face:

jonstrwart.jpg

Jon Stewart loses his cool with Fox News host Chris Wallace: 'You are insane'

After repeated prodding, Wallace then played a clip of Mr Stewart comparing a video of Sarah Palin's recent bus tour to a herpes commercial.
Mr Stewart erupted: 'You're insane... Here's the difference between you and I.
'I'm a comedian first. My comedy is informed by an ideological background, there's no question about that. But the thing that you will never understand...is that Hollywood, yeah, they're liberal, but that's not their primary motivating force. I'm not an activist. I am a comedian.'
Addressing issues of bias in the main stream media, Stewart responded: 'Do I want my voice heard? Absolutely, that's why I got into comedy. Am I an activist, in your mind? A partisan ideological activist.
Well, yes Jon. Now that you ask. You know it and we know it and now, if they care, the world knows it.

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 20, 2011 10:21 AM | Comments (19)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Blogging Quote of the Decade (So Far)

Sippican hits it with his nail gun. A tough man but a fair man:

There's a dead spruce that an enormous pileated woodpecker is disassembling. He's as big as a toddler and as dumb as a blog writer, with much the same method -- constantly bashing his head on spots that appear rotten looking for juicy grubs, destroying the whole thing in the process. -- Sippican Cottage: Garden Of Unearthly Delights



Posted by Vanderleun Jun 18, 2011 10:56 AM | QuickLink: Permalink
Stuxnet:One Very Scary Virus

Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus from Patrick Clair on Vimeo.

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 17, 2011 3:50 PM | Comments (6)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Fathers Day: Steak, Beer, Card, Chair, Remote -- That's It. You're Done. Thank You for Playing.

fathers%20day.jpg

Think about everything that the real daddy does: pay the bills, buy the food, put a fucking roof over your head. Everything you could ever ask for. Make your world a better, safer place. And what does Daddy get for all his work? The big piece of chicken. -- Chris Rock

Let's quit pretending, okay? It's not that big a deal and "the day" only reminds us that you don't think it's that big a deal either. Check out the Google numbers to confirm: "Mothers Day," 163 Million; "Fathers Day, 38 Million." Case closed.

But no stress. No blame. Be happy, keep healthy, and stay out of prison. Do those three things and we're generally fine with the rest. Unless you ask us about the details" and then we might tell you. But only if you ask us. If you don't ask us we take that as a sign you don't really want to find out the truth, because the truth is more than your heart can hold. So our policy as dads is, "You don't ask, we don't tell." Even today which, you would think, would be the day when we can say and do anything we want and get flowers and chocolates in return. But we don't. Because what real father really needs a "Day?"

The only people that seem to really need a "Fathers Day" are those in the stores since they don't really seem to have that much else going on in June. And even in the stores, "Fathers Day" is really sort of lackluster, isn't it? No big display build-up, pretty skimpy Hallmark section, no real cascade of ads and "buy it now or else" banners overhead, no huge point-of-purchase end-of-row displays once you get out of Power Tools ("Wow, a Makita Cordless Sawzall wrapped in a tie with a frog pattern! Hold out the hand that has offended me!"). Not even ProFlowers sends you heavy breathing last-minute emails about this day. Like I said: Steak, beer, card, chair.

Good fathers are like deep wells of cool water and, as the song says, you never miss your water until the well runs dry... or is bricked-up, or sent away from the home, or just wanders off due to lack of interest on the part of the other half of your parentage. It's hard to say how that last thing happens, and you'll never get anything other than the victim story from your mom. But if you ask us (and you better not) it often happens that the shit gets so deep he just wakes up one morning and hears in his head, "Just hop on the bus, Gus. / You don't need to discuss much." It can happen and it does happen more and more frequently as the critical role of the Father is more and more devolved by the culture into that of sperm donor.

Today we hear the complaints of more and more kids failing to thrive in a culture that fills their cups with self-esteem instead of guidance, with sand instead of water, but we never seem to connect that failure to thrive with the drive to reduce the Father to a fool and a cash machine. Well, you get what you don't pay for.

What we don't hear much about any more is "the deadbeat dad." The "deadbeat dad" had a long run during the Bush years when the President came from a family with, to say the least, a strong father model. It was as if large sectors of the culture wanted to underscore not the innate decency of most fathers, but the failings of a few fathers. In the present, now that the president of the United States is the disposable son of the world's most famous deadbeat dad, we don't hear so much about that type any longer. It is at if large sectors of the culture wanted to underscore that its better to have dreams of a father than to actually have a father.

Of course the truth is more complicated than that. It could well be that if men, even those who support the president completely, were to know what it was like to actually have to live with the president's odd and disturbed mother, they would all look at the president's absent father and say, "Whoa, I'd split too if I had to wake up next to her for the rest of my life." And in that we'd see that not all deadbeat dads are cads. Some are just trying to save their own life and are in flight from women whose one goal in life is to sell crazy in their homes every single day. Sometimes even the strongest of father has to hit the road.

But for those who have not and for those that will not and even for those who are on the road and never coming back... hey, this is your day. Rejoice and be glad in it and try not to strangle any kid who gives you a tie.



Posted by Vanderleun Jun 17, 2011 9:44 AM | Comments (16)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Creation and Evolution Together At Last!

It's just this simple:

evolution2.jpg
Click to embiggen

Spread from "Science Made Stupid" by Tom Weller



Posted by Vanderleun Jun 16, 2011 10:56 AM | Comments (5)  | QuickLink: Permalink
On Fortitude, Honor and the Arab "Spring": A comment by RedCarolina...

...in response to an item cited in Side-Lines: Intellectual Stakeout

Re: Tolkien and Beowulf, fortitude and honor are ideals, beacons for the "lost" and standards for the "found", regardless of the god.

An argument for Creationism is that God designed us to need Him, to seek Him. And, ironically, it is the new church godlessness and/or the new church of Environmentalism which feels the need to snuff out Christianity to make room for their own god(s).

The reason Christianity is treated with less respect than it treated paganism is because we are witnessing a religious coup, a devolution set into motion by The Left, for The Left. Devolution of man, devolution of civilization, devolution of the very constructs of natural selection... The Left believes in man-made selection so long as they are in power.

In the conquering of one faith, insert a new god, complete with a new image, new powers, new rules and new "good guys" and, subsequently new "bad guys" as a means to a political and financial end.

Greed and power. It's the same old story repeated over and over again. Every new faith deems its god and people supreme, but the struggle to achieve fortitude and honor is universal and never ends well except in fiction.

In reality, the cycle will continue and the baby will be thrown out with the bath water until the earth finally stops spinning.

Westernized Muslims long to see their faith brought into "modernity". Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser is one of the outspoken leaders in this weak movement, a movement that has been upstaged by The Arab Spring.

And how does the American Left react? By enabling the most violent Muslims the world has to offer. Why? To conquer Christianity, full stop.

Devolution. Devolution of Muslims, devolution of Christians, devolution of Jews.

Ah, American Jews who remain loyal to the Democrats, the party which actively participates in Israel's destruction. If that isn't an example of human devolution, then I don't know what is!

Christian Europe is dead and Christian America is under full assault.

Israel is just Israel. It would simpler to answer the question "When haven't Jews been under attack?"

And Muslims... well.. they've had 1500 years to modernize. I think it's safe to say they are not only devolving, despite The Arab Spring, but they are demanding the rest of us devolve along with them.

Regardless, it is safe to say, that the concept of individual liberties endowed by a creator and protected by The United States Constitution had to have been inspired by a loving god, not a tyrannical god. And lucky for us, our God-given right to choose our god is also protected by the same document.

How tragic, how ungrateful how blasphemous to such a good God and how collectively suicidal it is that we would throw away the most perfect agreement in the history of mankind for the sake of destroying the very set of virtues that bore it, that being the enlightenment of the Protestant Reformation.

Arab Spring, my ass.



Posted by Vanderleun Jun 16, 2011 10:51 AM | Comments (11)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Take Two Viewings and Call Me When Your Mind Clears

The Anchoress says this is One GREAT Commercial! and, by God, she's right.

"You are not old until your memories are more important than your dreams." -- Donald



Posted by Vanderleun Jun 15, 2011 11:14 PM | Comments (8)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Global Cooling Redux or "I said oh no no I been through this movie before"

IceAgeEnding.jpg

This is the point where everybody says, "Oh just shoot me." Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade • The Register

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 15, 2011 8:24 AM | Comments (10)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Overseen in the Library

icarus.jpg
"Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky..."

Libraries are levelers. Like home, when you go there they have to take you in. Libraries collect the affluent and the indigent, the young working on assignments that will make them ready for life, and the old catching up on knowledge that they've missed. From time to time I go there to see what's new in the world of books and what's old in the realm of the classics.

My library is a brick building, cool inside on hot days and warm on cold days. Its facade and interior speak to the elegance of a former age that today's public works cannot hope to emulate. Inside books line the walls and stretch back into the stacks. It's staffed with bright and helpful souls known as "librarians," and they are a special and wonderful breed. It's a bit disappointing that all of them now seem to be women, but that's the way it goes in the realm of high security jobs with good pensions and low pay. It's hard to imagine a man taking the job, especially now that the profession has devolved into a world of women.

But more than it's bricks, books and librarians, a library is made of its patrons. Because it is free and is open and warm and comforting it gets its share of people who, in the middle of the day, have no real place to go. Since it has put in a number of free machines with free internet hookups it also draws in those who have no home computer but who still maintain, through the miracle of Google gmail and online document storage, a way to connect to the wider world of the internet. They come to the library to work with their email and their writing since the expense of a computer is, temporarily or forever, beyond their means in this slow rolling depression.

In many ways, the library is a means of seeing what's going on in the lives of your fellow citizens. I've gotten into the habit of using my visits there to take a kind of core sample of what our democracy is doing at this moment. I tend to notice what others are reading and writing and checking out. It's not really that I'm nosy. I'm just interested.

Today in a nave filled with free computers there were six women, all facing the screens and all searching, or typing emails, or scanning jobs on Craigslist and sending out the 500th copy of their resumes to the scant jobs listed that they might be suited for.

All except one. She was a woman working at her screen and it was open to a page that said, "MAKE A NOTE." I saw this in a glance as I was browsing the shelves nearby that offered hardcovers and paperbacks for sale at very reduced rates. Her back was to me but she had the size of the font turned up large and was still squinting at the screen as she slowly typed her note into the frame provided.

My glance lingered and a phrase caught my eye. It was rude to look longer but I was curious and I foolishly indulged myself in a brief moment of reading over her shoulder.

I wish I hadn't.

What she had written began, "It has been two weeks since I lost my precious baby boy. The pain that I feel is unbearable. I never knew a heart could break like...."

At that I broke away, ashamed I had allowed myself to intrude on this moment, and left the area. At some remove I glanced back and she was still typing slowly, intensely focused on the screen, writing down the bones of her life and saving her pain and her memory as a note, a terrible footnote to her life. Perhaps by making it a note and saving it somewhere in cyberspace she was putting the pain and the loss away. It would be in the world but, at the same time, it wouldn't. I prayed it would help her find peace.

A bit later in a large box store where I'd gone to get some meaningless object I imagined I needed, I looked around at the others in the store pushing their carts around in the daily ritual of getting and spending. I wondered how many there had a similar "note" stored with faded photographs in the shoe boxes of their lives. Quite a few I decided since time and chance happens to all. Still I was struck by how, even faced with deep and scaring tragedies, we pick ourselves and go on, even if it is only to go shopping, or to the library, where the computers are free and you can, as they say, come as you are.

When I got home I turned on the news. It was a program presenting the circus of "candidates" currently "running" for the Republican candidate for president in 2012. They didn't seem to be saying anything to me. I turned them off. Turned them all off.

None of them had anything to say to me. None of them had anything to say to the woman in the library whose screen I had overseen.

Earlier today, for what were flimsy reasons, I attached the opening of Auden's Musee des Beaux Arts to a brief blog item about Tiananmen Square. It didn't seem to fit so I removed it later. But it did fit what I had overseen at the library,

About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position: how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

... Or seems to be just typing a note on a screen.

A note that contains a terrible memory. A note I didn't need to read but, at the same time, did.



Posted by Vanderleun Jun 13, 2011 7:00 PM | Comments (12)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Ann Barnhardt On Health Care and Health Insurance in America Now (Updated with Full Transcript)

More sense about health insurance in 15 minutes than you've heard from politicians of all parties in the last 15 years.

Barnhardt from the prologue: "I would like to restate for the record how disgusting it is that I am the person apparently who has to be the voice of logic and reason and obvious common sense for a nation of 310 million people....

"Who the hell am I? I am not well educated. I have an undergraduate degree in Animal Husbandry which I consider to be nothing more than a formality. My real education consists first and foremost of real life experience and the responsibilities and performance demanded therein, which is nothing rare, along with an Amazon.com Prime account.

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 13, 2011 4:15 PM | Comments (14)  | QuickLink: Permalink
The Lesbian Syrian Fat White Male MidEast Activist of Damascus, Scotland, or "On the internet nobody knows if you are really a dyke"

Tom-Mcmaster--007.jpg
"Is that you, Amina, or just a brilliant disguise?"

In this new double-entendre world into which we have drifted, the Washington Post is to be forgiven for headlining the story,‘A Gay Girl in Damascus’ comes clean. Not so the fat fake lesbian named Tom MacMaster who hoodwinked untold thousands by giving himself an online sex change for (Isn't it always?) 'the greater good.' It ended (Doesn't it always?) in tears at bedtime:

In a posting on her blog, “A Gay Girl in Damascus,” a cousin said Amina had been hauled away by government security agents. News of her disappearance became an Internet and media sensation. The U.S. State Department started an investigation. But almost immediately skeptics began asking: Had anyone ever actually met Amina? On Wednesday, pictures of her on the blog were revealed to have been taken from a London woman’s Facebook page.
Regardless of the "news" frisson surrounding this -- Howard Stern learned long ago that the word or even vague concept of "lesbian" brought in the rubes -- this is one of the oldest cons on the internet. So old and musty that I was already writing in 1993 about a 'naked lady' whose book I'd published in the late 80s.

Oldest con on the net, kids. And yet it survives because it works. And it works not because fat white male "Mideast activists" are so clever, but because many thousands want, really, really, really want there to be, deep in Damascus in the midst of the shooting and the repression and the tyranny and the killing, one still small voice for freedom who is not only nice but, better yet, gay and, best of all, female. It makes for the double-hero sandwich of online existence. And it is not even the revelation of the fat white male activist that is the big let-down here. The big bummer is that there is no heroic lesbian in Damascus after all. And there should be, by gum, there should be.

The fantasy for these supporters of "A Gay Girl in Damascus" is that somehow a 'gay' girl exists that is brave and forthright and willing to speak "truth to power" from within the belly of the beast. It's a leftoid fantasy and that's why so many bought it. The reality is something else again.

The reality is that, along with the rest of the population, those who are gay inside rabid dictatorial regimes such as Syria and Iran are not safe from repression, imprisonment, torture, and execution. And those who are gay inside these regimes know this to a fare thee well. They might be willing to speak out but typically only after they get out. To someplace safe in the ever more tolerant west. Someplace like, say, Edinburgh, Scotland. Someplace so free that even a fat, white, male "mideast activist" can change himself into a young, dusky, slender hot lesbian.... and get away with it because, well, people just "want to believe" in six impossible things before breakfast.

On his/her blog page (Previously called A Gay Girl in Damascus but now titled A Hoax: Apology to readers the arguably masculine author drops the butch and goes deep fem with the winsome statement: "I never expected this level of attention."

As my gray haired mother would say, "Yeah. Right."



Posted by Vanderleun Jun 13, 2011 7:25 AM | Comments (3)  | QuickLink: Permalink
The Story of Owe

41ySeF%2BVddL._SS500_.jpgHot, very hot, off the Kindle press , it's... Emily's Debt

"In the very near future, where failing to pay debts was a crime, Emily is in big trouble. She has a large student loan and no job. She's heard, of course, that debtors weren't sent to jail. Instead, they're rented to corporations and businesses so that their work can help pay off their debts. But renting becomes purchasing, and crafty lawyers and greedy companies turn debt bondage into slavery with hardly anyone paying attention. Now, sold to a former classmate, a sadistic lawyer eager to test the boundaries of the law, Emily is a non-person, purchased property. And if her owner wants her to be nude in public, wants to walk her on all fours on a leash, well, it's not like she's a person any more. Not according to the law. And if he wants to whip her in public, well that's all right, too."
Well, you can't say it's not topical. Practical too.

HT: Volkh & Fourth Checkraise



Posted by Vanderleun Jun 12, 2011 7:34 PM | Comments (10)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Rant O' the Week: You know what I can’t stand to hear about anymore? That we Americans are addicted to oil.

[Bumped due to popular demand]
marko2_s.jpg"I'm not addicted to oil.

I'm addicted to being able to drive into town on my own schedule. I'm addicted to being able to haul home a week's worth of groceries with two little kids in tow without having to wait for the fucking bus with eighty pounds of filled plastic bags in my hands. (That's disregarding the fact that I live out in the sticks, and the nearest bus stop is four miles away, which is one hell of a hike with the aforementioned two little kids and week's worth of groceries.)
"I don't give a shit what kind of substance I have to put in the tank of the minivan to feed that particular addiction. I don't care about oil. If my minivan ran on distilled cow piss, I'd fill up with distilled cow piss. If they ever come up with an electric minivan that goes the speed limit on the Interstate, accelerates to highway speeds in less time than a geologic epoch, and doesn't need to be recharged every fifty miles with electricity that comes from a coal-powered plant anyway, I'll gladly buy one of those and deep-six the old combustion engine. -- Marko @ the always entertaining and often correct munchkin wrangler.



Posted by Vanderleun Jun 12, 2011 3:33 PM | Comments (47)  | QuickLink: Permalink
"Every child is created special, with awesome purpose and amazing potential:" The Sarah Palin Email to Read When You're Reading Only One

palinandtrig.jpg"He that hath ears to hear, let him hear."SARAH PALIN'S COMPLETE LETTER TO HER FAMILY ABOUT TRIG:

In April 2008, two weeks before Trig was born with Down's Syndrome, Mrs Palin sent the email to her friends and family from her official government account. In the touching message, Mrs Palin writes from the voice of God, as 'Trig's creator, your heavenly father'.
Please read it all and forward to those you think could benefit from reading it.

To the Sisters, Brother, Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles, Cousins, and Friends of Trig Paxson Van Palin (or whatever you end up naming him!):

I am blessing you with this surprise baby because I only want the best for you. I've heard your prayers that this baby will be the happy and healthy, and I've answered them because I only want the best for you!

I heard your heart when you hinted that another boy would fit best into the Palin family, to round it out and complete that starting five line-up. Though another girl would be so nice, you didn't think you could ask for what you really wanted, but I knew so I gave you a boy.

Then, I put the idea in your hearts that his name should be "Trig," because it's so fitting, with two Norse meanings: "True and "Brave Victory" ...

Then, finally, I let Trig's mom and dad find out before he was born that this little boy will truly be a GIFT. They were told in early tests that Trig may provide more challenges, and more joy, than what they ever may have imagined or ever asked for. At first the news seemed unreal and sad and confusing. But I gave Trig's mom and dad lots of time to think about it because they needed to understand that everything will be OK. ...

This new person in your life can help everyone put things in perspective and bind {you} together and get everyone focused on what really matters. The baby will expand your world and let you see and feel things you haven't experienced yet. He'll show you what "true, brave victory" really means as those who love him will think less about self and focus less on what the world tells you is "normal" or "perfect."...

Trig will be his dad's little buddy and he'll wear Carhartts while he learns to tinker in the garage. He'll love to be read to, he'll want to play goalie, and he'll steal mom's heart just like Track, Bristol, Willow, and Piper did. And Trig will be the cuddly, innocent dependent little brother that his siblings have been waiting for... in fact Trig will - in some diagnostic ways - always be a mischievous, dependent little brother, because I created him a bit different than a lot of babies born into this world today.

Every child is created special, with awesome purpose and amazing potential. Children are the most precious and promising ingredient in this mixed-up world you live in down there on earth. Trig is no different, except he has an extra chromosome. Doctors call it "Down syndrome," and Downs kids have challenges, but can bring you much delight and more love than you can ever imagine! ...

Trig's mom and dad don't want people to focus on the baby's extra chomosome. They're human, so they haven't known how to explain this to people who are caring and are interested in this new little Alaskan. ... Some will think Trig should not be allowed to be born because they fear a Downs child won't be considered "perfect" in your world. ...

Many people will express sympathy, but you don't want or need that, because Trig will be a joy. You will have to trust me on this.

I know it will take time to grasp this and come to accept that I only want the best for you, and I only give my best. Remember though: "my ways are not your ways, my thoughts are not your thoughts... for as heavens are higher than earth, my ways are higher than yours!"

I wrote that all down for you in the Good Book! Look it up! You claim that you believe me - now it's time to live out that belief!

Trig can't wait to meet you. I'm giving you ONLY THE BEST!

Love, Trig's Creator, Your Heavenly Father



Posted by Vanderleun Jun 12, 2011 11:11 AM | Comments (15)  | QuickLink: Permalink
"WORD. The West, This Nation, Are All Built on a Man's Word. His Oath, His Honor, His Character."

The always brilliant but today luminous Chris Muir explains the deeper meaning of the latest sex scandal at Day by Day Cartoon by Chris Muir. Like Sarah Palin's letter this is well worth sending around.


Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 12, 2011 9:51 AM | Comments (2)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Passover Syndrome’s most prominent behavioral feature consists of whites projecting historical blame onto other whites and hoping that nonwhites will see them as not-so-white for doing so.
What drives this syndrome is the delusion that collective historical ethnic guilt is a real thing rather than a pseudo-religious abstraction. Passover Syndrome’s sufferers tend to believe that all whites, by dint of skin color alone, are indelibly stained with guilt for unsurpassed historical atrocities and that their debt to nonwhites won’t be repaid until the very concept of “whiteness” ceases to exist—if not white people themselves. -- Diagnosing “Passover Syndrome” Among White Liberals - Taki's Magazine


Posted by Vanderleun Jun 12, 2011 8:57 AM | Comments (9)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Nuclophobe: "In a rational world, we would look at anti-nuclear activists with the same pity we give to homeopaths and astrologers."
"We ought to take the page out of the left's standard playbook and coin, analogously to the utterly meaningless terms "homophobe" and "islamophobe" (in fact, these terms are so vague and all-encompassing these days thatyou have to beone or the other by sheer logical necessity), the word "nuclophobe" to mean a person who is afraid of nuclear power and therefore opposes it emotionally, even though he (well, usually she) is completely ignorant of even the basics of radiation, or how a nuclear plant works. Actually, scratch that: we might as well define this word to mean anybody who opposes nuclear power for any reason, period." -- The Fourth Checkraise: Perhaps too late for DSM-5


Posted by Vanderleun Jun 11, 2011 3:47 PM | Comments (5)  | QuickLink: Permalink
"This is Main Street, Obamaville: All bumps, no road."

kamasutra-condoms-speed-bumps-small-85780.jpg

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 11, 2011 10:23 AM | Comments (3)  | QuickLink: Permalink
"The liberals are taking a HUGE gamble that a majority of Americans will throw in their lot with the party of immorality."

Zombie: Why the Hypocrisy Defense is political suicide for liberalism
hypocrisydiagram2.jpg
"Not quite so effective an argument when seen this way, is it?"



Posted by Vanderleun Jun 11, 2011 12:11 AM | Comments (6)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Whale Ho: In Which Walter Russell Mead Seems to Be Reading from the Same Text I Am

whalewhitedickboats.jpg

Walter Russell Mead is a distinguished historian and that rarest of all American academics, a genuine intellectual. I've been reading his books and columns for well over ten years and find him to be always insightful, informative, or inspiring. Often all three.

In today's new essay at Via Media, When Government Jumps the Shark , Mead takes us on a metaphoric ride through the blasted landscape of contemporary America and how we have arrived at this point. Towards the end he goes beyond "The Shark" and to the very Whiteness of the Whale:

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 10, 2011 8:56 PM | Comments (2)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Do they know something we don't? "Is there some special reason the federal government is arming up its agencies?"

What does the Railroad Retirement Board need side arms for? That's what Christian Adams wants to know, because its one more federal agency that's getting weapons based on Obama administration requests. Other armed agencies, courtesy Quin Hillyer at the Washington Times:

* Department of Education
* Small Business Administration
* Departments of Health and Human Services
* Agriculture, Labor, and Veterans Affairs
* Bureau of Land Management
* Bureau of Indian Affairs
* Environmental Protection Agency
* Fish and Wildlife Service
-- Word Around the Net



Posted by Vanderleun Jun 10, 2011 4:03 PM | Comments (24)  | QuickLink: Permalink
"Then there is feminism. If one looked just at "the women's movement" itself, who could possible resist the conclusion that women are intellectually inferior to men?

"The feminists have yet to produce a single piece of writing, devoted to their cause, which any rational creature could attach importance to....

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 10, 2011 11:04 AM | Comments (9)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Hard books are on their way to extinction.

Books%20as%20Art2.jpg
The Technium: When Hard Books Disappear

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 10, 2011 9:40 AM | Comments (11)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Dope-Smoking, Menstruating Monkey Study Got $3.6 Million in Tax Dollars (Not About Code Pink)

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 10, 2011 7:16 AM | Comments (6)  | QuickLink: Permalink
A Warning: "A corrupt republic is tainted in its blood, and bears the seeds of death in every pulsation."-- 1857

6883422-corruption-in-the-government-in-a-corrupt-system.jpg
Noted in Life and liberty in America: or SKETCHES OF A TOUR IN THE UNITED STATES AND
CANADA IN 1857-8:

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 10, 2011 2:43 AM | Comments (1)  | QuickLink: Permalink
We have been paralleling a line of Level Six thunderstorms for hundreds of miles and it appears to stretch all the way to the Rockies.

betweenstorms.jpg

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 9, 2011 9:56 PM | Comments (2)  | QuickLink: Permalink
California, rich in everything from oil and food to international trade and technology, but still skimming along the bottom of the national economy.

deadcaifornai.jpg
deathvalley.jpg

America to Californians still possessed of a brain: GET! OUT! California’s Green Jihad

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 9, 2011 7:04 PM | Comments (9)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Time to bring in the Apache attack helicopters to remind the Mexicans to mind their manners

Texas agency: Authorities take gunfire on border

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 9, 2011 4:14 PM | Comments (8)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Digital Killed the Photography Star: A photograph that is a photograph of photographers photographing the most photographed barn in America.

photographedbarn.jpg

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 9, 2011 4:11 PM | Comments (3)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Cybersex 27 Years Ago In the Dawn of the Internet: "This Is A Naked Lady" Wired Magazine #1, 1993

anakedlady.jpgBack in the dawn of online when a service called The Source was still in flower, a woman I once knew used to log on as "This is a naked lady." She wasn't naked of course, except in the minds of hundreds of young and not-so-young males who also logged on to The Source. Night after night, they sent her unremitting text streams of detailed wet dreams, hoping to engage her in online exchanges known as "hot chat" - a way of engaging in a mutual fantasy typically found only through 1-900 telephone services. In return, "The Naked Lady" egged on her digital admirers with leading questions larded with copious amounts of double entendre.

When I first asked her about this, she initially put it down to "just fooling around on the wires."

"It's just a hobby," she said. "Maybe I'll get some dates out of it. Some of these guys have very creative and interesting fantasy lives."

At the start, The Naked Lady was a rather mousy person - the type who favored gray clothing of a conservative cut - and was the paragon of shy and retiring womanhood. Seeing her on the street, you'd never think that her online persona was one that excited the libidos of dozens of men every night.

But as her months of online flirtations progressed, a strange transformation came over her:

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 9, 2011 4:04 PM | Comments (7)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Statism never sleeps.

Those bitter clingers seem to be holding out on Jefe Obama and his gang of Frito Banditos: AP 'Scoop,' Naively Reported: WH to Form 'Rural Council' -- As If Help Is Needed | NewsBusters.org

The Obama administration has apparently identified a significant constituency it hasn't been able to buy off, and is attempting to do something about it.

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 9, 2011 7:14 AM | Comments (5)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Something Wonderful: American Dream By Emily Louise Smith

evansphoto.jpg

By the time Walker Evans arrived, there wasn’t much

besides the shrug of a tenant house,

sun-stiff shirts hung like paper-doll garland.

Red-clay road, a gash in the earth. Come evening,

an oak limb strew a negligee of shadow

across the barn. He’d never seen light

touch things like that, nearly prayerful,

the way it blotted roofs and wood floors.

It would prove as impossible to capture

as the odor of smoke, lye soap, and sleep

the children carried like clouds in their pockets.

He tried leaving them out, but to photograph

a field is to hold a mirror to longing.

Even cutlery kept between a board and wall

reminded him of them wedged in the single bed

Years later, a potbelly moon would spit stars

across Massachusetts, and he’d remember

the baby napping at Mrs. Field’s breast.

How, just before he made their picture,

she stroked a lock of blond hair and

launched, in the child’s dream, a paper boat.

There is in every photograph a secret

that implicates the viewer in someone else’s memory

of a pasture, a rusted sign, a dress pattern.

It’s what love does: makes room

for a boat on a tenant farm in Alabama.

All day he’d wait for the right light

on a stove, by which he meant to say

the effect of them on that place. Even long after

the grown child inherited his forbearers’ sleep

like the emptiness under the belly of the house.

Discovered by Daphne who says, correctly, This talented woman writes like a well hung, glossy shutter: true, tight and gorgeously smooth.


Posted by Vanderleun Jun 8, 2011 8:32 PM | QuickLink: Permalink
Dear Mrs. Obama, Shut. Up. Seriously. Just Shut Your Big Fat Mouth. Please temper your condescension.

When it comes to tone-deaf DC twit of the year, she really has no equal except when her husband is talking: Party time again: Michelle Obama explains the Angela Merkel state dinner for you guys without invites

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 8, 2011 6:54 PM | Comments (7)  | QuickLink: Permalink
It is going to cost Al Gore’s Current TV $30 million to air Keith Olbermann’s new show. In order for it to be profitable, the show needs to generate more than $1,304 in revenue from every one of Current’s 23,000 viewers.

That is not a typo.

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 8, 2011 2:31 PM | Comments (6)  | QuickLink: Permalink
F.L. Lucas: The destiny of mankind is not governed wholly by its “stars.”

It is unlikely that many of us will be famous...

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 8, 2011 8:54 AM | Comments (5)  | QuickLink: Permalink
“I’m targeting this paper because, no offence intended, the readership may be in need of some simple material to assist them in understanding better the debate.”
Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 8, 2011 8:23 AM | Comments (9)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Preparing for the American Political Priesthood

priestbanner.jpg

Across the street they've nailed the curtains

They're getting ready for the feast

The Phantom of the Opera

A perfect image of a priest



-- Bob Dylan


The Weiner Self-Fornication Festival currently climaxing throughout the nation instructs us yet again in what our media (online and offline) expects of candidates and holders of office: pseudo-moral celibacy in thought, word, and deed stretching from the cradle to the grave.

Our sermon for today is "What doth it profit a man to gain the office of dogcatcher or above, if he must bid adieu to his sexuality in late childhood?"

In this realm 'profit' seems to be spread around unevenly. At times the profligate survive and thrive, but mostly it is the cream of the celibate or asexual that rises. Asexual celibacy has profited Barack Obama since he has no clearly discernible, or deeply closeted, sexuality whatsoever.

Wrath would seem to be Obama's sin, but wrath well hidden. With no photos of his frothing Fuehreresque rages or tapes of his highly pungent obscenity streams this otherwise colorful sin gets a pass by the media. Thus another of Obama's flaws are submerged beneath the vast beige pond scum of his coverage. If the medium once was the message, today the color is the camouflage.

In general, to be elected and remain in office today a man (or a woman) must prepare at an early age to either leave no trace of a human existence, or determine never to have one in the first place. Hence, the strange paucity of former "girlfriends" of the current president. No People Magazine profiles. No "I remember the prom with Barack" books. Nothing. It is as if the man was with his wife twice, begot two daughters, and then dropped the whole subject.

This is purity perfected. Where there is no sex there can be no sex scandels. Like the pagan religions of antiquity or the cloistered Catholic orders that persist into our era, today's politicians must be -- according to our media -- the last surviving virgins over 18 in the United States of America.

Of course, they must also be married and have children, although these can, on occasion, be rented.

It would seem that for high office a married, virgin priest (of any one of the six genders) is the only sort acceptable to the mainstream media or the internet sources right and left and their co-conspirators; but only if they can be shown to have something that resembles a family in storage that can be attached for photo ops.

In addition to retrofitted virginity, such a person must be 'politically qualified.'
To innocent Americans weaned on the standard social studies classes served up in high school, these qualifications may seem to begin and end in the state of actually being a citizen. This is, of course, wrong. The actual path to power is to the side of citizenship and is marked "Rulership."

'Political qualification' begins in high school when the aspiring virgin moves towards the priesthood by running for class office in place of puberty. It continues throughout the ensuing decades as getting elected takes the place of getting laid. With luck, the qualified virgin climbs the fund raising rungs and learns how to pass the hat -- and take the soft funds within or without the unmarked "giving envelopes."

Along the way, the virgin priest learns to respect the deacons and bishops and cardinals of the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Patronage. In due course, he is rewarded with nifty clothes, drivers, security, free lunches, unctuous smiles, false friendship, and lessons in how to pawn any principle he may have for a mess of pottage.

Finally, sexless, graceless, bereft of conviction, with a hand full of gimme and a mouth full of much obliged, he has accrued enough markers to be boosted into office.

Much palaver ensues en route to his balsa throne. Much is made of his family, his upbringing, and little of his views and opinions since by then his views and opinions are what he is told to have. Indeed, they are what he has had since any vision or values or morals he once possessed were removed, along with his genitals, about the time he received the required advanced degrees in either accounting, social work, or law. (Pick one or all three.)

During the ritual of his ascension, he eats the ritual meals of rubber chicken and an endless spectrum of ethnic foods, for there are as many food groups as there are victim groups. At these ritual meals he pronounces the approved prayers over the congregation. He assumes ritual poses with the leaders of the congregation. He blesses infants with a kiss.

Various scribes examine his views via a ritual series of questions eliciting rote-learned responses surprising to no one. It is the call and response of the catechism. Should some small transgression (or even large ones) be discovered, mea culpas are extracted at lens point until all are assured the sexual organs have been sanded down to a nub.

Then he is placed on the sacrificial altar of the election and, if found, at last pure of any visceral or earthly taint he is elevated. Music is played. Balloons tumble. Hossanahs are raised. Oaths are administered. Some media acolytes even call him "a kind of god."

And then his reign begins. He finally ascends into the capitol to sit upon the right hand of the State, hence to judge the special and the not-so-special interests. A man so pure, so bereft of any soul, so pure and so semi-white, so in aspect like Mister Rogers, so empty of any sexuality, that it is all he can do not to begin screwing everyone in the state in the first 24 hours of his reign.

A priest to the downtrodden in the palace of the people. A man for all seasons. A man, in short, much like Barack Obama.



Posted by Vanderleun Jun 7, 2011 9:59 AM | Comments (11)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Scoundrel Time: Palin, “I don’t think there’s anything private in our family now.”

News outlets to scan Palin emails, post them in public archive | Poynter.

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 7, 2011 9:25 AM | Comments (6)  | QuickLink: Permalink
With Friends Like These Who Needs Enemas?

Weinergate: Barbara Walters Loses Reporter Cred In passing while finally touching the Weiner story, the Anchoress has a universal observation:

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 6, 2011 10:39 PM | Comments (6)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Two Chili Dogs and Fries for ChooseMyPlate.gov: Take My Wife's Diet, Please

chilidogobamapals.jpg

To be fair, on her it shows: Obama eats 2 chili dogs and fries day after wife Michelle unveils new dietary guide | Mail Online

When his wife unveiled the USDA's new nutritional plate yesterday, there definitely wasn't a space for chili dogs. But that didn't stop Barack Obama wolfing down two in Toledo today - with fries and an extra bowl of chili on the side. The president happily munched on the unhealthy meal before he visited the city's Chrysler factory, and even teased one of his hosts for ordering ketchup, a faux-pas in his home town of Chicago.



Posted by Vanderleun Jun 6, 2011 8:22 PM | Comments (8)  | QuickLink: Permalink
And this season's award for eviscerating eco-nazis goes to... Lynne @ Counting Cats in Zanzibar for wearing Dick Glover's guts as garters...

It's a fact that Nazi-creepy ecolunacy @ Counting Cats in Zanzibar is simply.... masterful. A small sample:

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 6, 2011 5:58 PM | Comments (7)  | QuickLink: Permalink
"Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?" The longer folks are out of a job, the longer it takes them to find a new one.

Chronic unemployment worse than Great Depression - CBS News

About 6.2 million Americans, 45.1 percent of all unemployed workers in this country, have been jobless for more than six months - a higher percentage than during the Great Depression.

Summer job bummer: Teen unemployment 24 percent -- CBS News
The latest figures show California's unemployment rate among teenagers is more than 34 percent, which is nearly triple the state's overall unemployment rate of 11.9 percent. In cities such as Irvine, California, job fairs have been canceled because few companies have agreed to participate.

Nearly 14 million Americans are looking for work - CBS News
The economic recovery seems to be losing momentum. In May, private companies hired 83,000 new people. But local and state governments cut 28,000 jobs - that's the biggest drop since last November. When all the other sectors are added in, there's a net gain of just 54,000 jobs.
For the United States to gain more jobs it is only necessary to fire one more person, the current president of the United States.



Posted by Vanderleun Jun 6, 2011 5:27 PM | Comments (4)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Two Skulls With But a Single Brain

Two-Headed-Gorilla-25908.jpg

Facepalm! Why, oh why, didn't anybody see this coming? New Yorkers Sotomayor and Kagan are Supreme Court's newest voting bloc, agreed in all cases so far

The newest members of the nation's highest court -- local Obama appointees Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan -- have agreed with each other in all 23 cases they've voted on, which is a supreme rarity, observers said.
'Observers' fail to observe that all colonized minds are the same. The Operators have their hooks driven deep into these two Things.



Posted by Vanderleun Jun 6, 2011 3:50 PM | Comments (4)  | QuickLink: Permalink
On Courage: "I don't want your son to end up laying on some city street with his legs blown off by a Marxist-Islamist-Obamaist RPG bleeding to death because he had to shoulder my personal failure in courage."

D-DAY, JUNE 6

d-dayomaha.jpg

"Good will always prevail, but there is no limit to the amount of suffering that will be required for that victory to occur. If men stand up early on, the suffering will be minimized because it will be spread over many people. The worst that might happen is that some folks go to bed scared for a while, but widespread bravery will allow good to prevail without much suffering. If, however, there is a decided lack of courage displayed by a large group or society early on in an advance by the powers of evil, that aggregated courage requirement will be borne by a relative few at a later time. The longer this goes on, the worse it will be for the few who have to bear the weight of the cowardice of the broad society." -- Ann Barnhardt

"Full victory - nothing else." On D-Day, 67 years ago, this was what was done...

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 5, 2011 8:15 PM | Comments (1)  | QuickLink: Permalink
IT GETS WORSE: Obama's Enduring Monument to Himself -- "Look Upon My Works Ye Mighty and Despair"

drudgobamahead.jpg

How Bad Is The Employment Picture? This Bad

It’s been called the scariest jobs chart you’ll ever see, and every month it gets updated it just looks worse.

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 5, 2011 7:16 PM | Comments (9)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Parasite Bank Seeks New Hosts to Leech Off Of

It's "For the Planet!" World Bank to suggest CO2 levy on jet, shipping fuel | Energy & Oil | Reuters

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 5, 2011 7:09 PM | Comments (4)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Surely It's time for Richard Glover of Sidney Australia to Have His Head Forcibly Separated from His Neck and Jammed on a Stick

glovertattto2.jpg
YAAG [Yet Another Australian Gelding]: Strange, I thought Australia was still producing men.

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 5, 2011 6:32 PM | Comments (14)  | QuickLink: Permalink
"In order to prevent hurricanes in Florida, why not pay someone to shoot a camel in Australia? " -- Tom Nelson

Australia’s CO2 rules may lead to sinking of desert ships

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 5, 2011 9:27 AM | Comments (5)  | QuickLink: Permalink
10 As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.

cross_banner3.jpg

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 5, 2011 8:31 AM | Comments (3)  | QuickLink: Permalink
After we take over the United States, it is our plan to eventually take over the entire world so that all people everywhere can benefit from our perfected way of life.

"I'm not going to be that kind of Neo-Nazi. "

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 4, 2011 7:19 PM | Comments (4)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Scientists: Biodegradable products produce methane and carbon dioxide.

"I am laughing....

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 4, 2011 11:48 AM | Comments (2)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Miracles of Obama: "we need to measure Obamacare's effects against predictions, and this is clearly a significant win for proponents: over 95% of pre-existing conditions have already been cured. "

Why Hasn't Anyone Signed Up For the High-Risk Health Insurance Pools? - Megan McArdle - The Atlantic

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 4, 2011 11:27 AM | QuickLink: Permalink
There is no limit to how far the left will go in stripping us of our liberties and reducing us to Gandhian poverty.

evil22.jpg

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 4, 2011 8:01 AM | Comments (4)  | QuickLink: Permalink
"These Are Fundamental" 1956

fundamentalgraphs.jpg

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 3, 2011 9:04 PM | Comments (2)  | QuickLink: Permalink
"Here I Stand. I Can Do No Other:" Geert Wilders' Final Remarks at The Amsterdam Trial - English Subtitles

Geert Wilders (Dutch pronunciation:born September 6, 1963) is a Dutch politician and leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV), the third-largest political party in the Netherlands.

Background: Trial of Geert Wilders

As the spectacle of a man being tried for speaking the truth about Islam comes to its end in the Netherlands, the accused continues to assert that the accusations of “hate speech” that have been made against him are baseless — the problem is that Islam is an ideology of hatred.

Geert Wilders, leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV), has been on trial in Amsterdam on the accusation that he was “inciting hatred and discrimination” against Muslims. It appears, however, that not even prosecutors believe Wilders to be guilty of the charges against him. -- Trial of Geert Wilders Nears Verdict

Speech with Sub-titltes. Text in the continued section. HT: Ann Barnhardt.

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 3, 2011 4:56 PM | Comments (6)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Ann Barnhardt: "I know exactly what Donald Trump is doing and why "

TrumpTowerLifestyle.jpg
Trump Tower, Chicago

The Mother of All Conspiracy Theories:

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 3, 2011 4:41 PM | Comments (12)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Men Only

NoGirlsAllowed%21.gif

Nothing here for the tender and more sensitive sex. Just some Locker Room "issues." Move along.

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 3, 2011 3:53 PM | Comments (7)  | QuickLink: Permalink
DEAR AMERICAN SUBJECTS, GET USED TO EATING LESS FOOD! Here's Michelle O's New $2 Million Dinner Plate for Hers, Yours, and No Child's Fat Behind

It's just "work, work, work, work" when you are "Lady Numero Uno" and trying to cut the American lard from the center on out:

9656934-large2.jpg
[Yes, getting to this socko, memorable design really did cost $2M]

After turning out our $2 million dinner plate[***] at the Department of Agriculture yesterday, (Wow! even Big Guy’s fundraisers can’t charge that much!) in our summery, stripey topped frock we had to prepare for our next big event: this year’s Architectural Award Ceremonies. --- Michelle Obama's Mirror
Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 3, 2011 1:44 PM | Comments (8)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Congressional spending it differs in degree, but not kind, from that uglier part of our history where black people were forcibly used to serve the purposes of their slave masters.
Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 2, 2011 9:43 PM | Comments (9)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Something Wonderful: American Pie -- The Way It Is In Grand Rapids

GRAND RAPIDS HAS GOT THE GROOVE! Is this a great country, or what?

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 2, 2011 8:36 PM | Comments (11)  | QuickLink: Permalink
"Not for Hire:" Sarah Palin's Ride Photographed This Evening in Portsmouth, NH

"Every day you'll see the dust (Too much, the Magic Bus)
As I drive my baby in my Magic Bus (Too much, the Magic Bus)
I want it, i want it, I want it, I want it ..."

sarahpalinsridenotforhire.jpg
(Click all images to enlarge)

It was a darkening and stormy night in New Hampshire. As I was leaving dinner in Portsmouth this evening, I drove down a street and there it was, Palin's Ride. It was, as they say, hard to miss and I took the opportunity to pull over, get out, and take some close-up pictures to share with my readers.

Palin, as it turned out, was off somewhere on the New Hampshire seacoast at a New England clam bake -- or so it was rumored. In the meantime, her bus was sending out her message loud and clear: "One nation. Under God. With Liberty and justice for all."

This would be in stark contrast to the current message being broadcast from the White House: "Many diverse groups pretending to be one. Under someone who has no divinity but a lot of gall. With liberty and justice for a few favored groups and individuals."

I'd be proud to ride in Palin's bus.

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 2, 2011 6:32 PM | Comments (10)  | QuickLink: Permalink
KA-BOOM! Ann Barnhardt Lets Mitt Romney Have It

A new video on the heels of Romney's announcing he will run for President: "You've gotten through your whole life on your looks, money, and the ability to BS people. You lack that one quality we all insist upon. That quality is 'integrity' and you, sir, do not have it." That's in the first minute. There are 12 more minutes to come.

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 2, 2011 6:32 PM | Comments (26)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Public Service Tutorial: How To Open A Bag of Charcoal
Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 2, 2011 3:03 PM | Comments (5)  | QuickLink: Permalink
The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement.
Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 2, 2011 1:41 PM | Comments (4)  | QuickLink: Permalink
No reform can remove the bureaucratic features of the government. It is useless to blame them for slackness. It is vain to lament over the fact that the assiduity of the average bureau clerk is below that of the average worker in private business.
Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 2, 2011 1:39 PM | QuickLink: Permalink
If you think sending that special someone a photograph of your erect penis is a good idea, think again.

WaPo's Monica Hesse asked a few average, ordinary American women --

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 2, 2011 1:32 PM | Comments (5)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Trophies of Our Post-Racial Society

missenttexts.jpg



Posted by Vanderleun Jun 2, 2011 1:08 PM | Comments (4)  | QuickLink: Permalink
The River Rushes to Rise Inside the Wind: "When Winds take Forests in the Paws— The Universe—is still— "
Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 2, 2011 12:14 PM | Comments (4)  | QuickLink: Permalink
This isn’t the first time the American Dream has died. The old dream — your own farm rather than your own home — once dominated American culture, politics and family life as much as the family home ever did.

How our rulers make us accustomed to living smaller lives.

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 2, 2011 10:37 AM | Comments (3)  | QuickLink: Permalink
How do you photograph one of the most secretive countries in the world? For Charlie Crane the answer was simple, photograph what they want you to see.
Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 2, 2011 8:42 AM | Comments (5)  | QuickLink: Permalink
All Slices Are Equal, but Some More Equal Than Others: Michelle Obama's Pizza Wheel of Life!

The new food icon will be a "simple, plate-shaped symbol, sliced into wedges for the basic food groups.... "

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 2, 2011 8:32 AM | Comments (1)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Something Wonderful: "Twenty five days before my father died, on my birthday exactly six years ago, he gave me a present.
Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 1, 2011 7:09 PM | Comments (4)  | QuickLink: Permalink
The 100 Greatest Movie Threats of All Time

"Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time!" 11 and one-half minutes of some of the finest abuse ever put on film in which a large selection of oddly shaped objects are forced into a place where they are sure to be highly uncomfortable.

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 1, 2011 4:47 PM | Comments (1)  | QuickLink: Permalink
"NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States, by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim June 2011 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month."

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this thirty-first day of May, in the year of our Lord two thousand eleven, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-fifth. -- Presidential Proclamation| The White House

Commenter @ (Wizbang)

I understand that July will be "Straight, Old, Working In the Private Sector for the Last 40 years, Raised Good Kids, Still Married to the Same Woman for 30 Years, Balding, Bad Breath, Aching Knees, Skin Cancer, Always Irritated, Pays All His Bills, Can't Break 90, Never Broke a Law Americans" (SOWITPSFTL40YRGKSMTTSWF30YBBBAKSCAIPAHBCB90NBALA) Month.



Posted by Vanderleun Jun 1, 2011 4:18 PM | Comments (9)  | QuickLink: Permalink
"As a fun thought experiment, imagine the reaction if some nuclear plant killed thirteen innocent people" -- Ilka

An E coli outbreak that has killed 14 people ...

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 1, 2011 10:59 AM | Comments (3)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Welcome To The Lloyd Dobler Economy

Lloyd Dobler: I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career....

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 1, 2011 10:55 AM | Comments (11)  | QuickLink: Permalink
On Penthouse Letters and Conservatives Snorkeling in the Sewer: Take My Word For it, You Never Get Rid of the Stink

Toilet_snorkel.jpg

For many days now, the Right/Libertarian side of the blogosphere seems to be consumed and obsessed with 1) what may or may not be a Democrat congressman's underwear-clad penis and 2) to whom a photograph of it may or may not have been sent. It's an unseemly, distasteful, and an ultimately meaningless obsession. Yet it seems to be impossible for many otherwise smart bloggers to let go of this particular congressman's penis.

In addition it would seem that many people as commenters or bloggers risk having their "Conservative in Good Standing" Nametag taken away if they don't choose to swallow the tweeted penis whole and stay on it until they receive full satisfaction. Sounds a little messy to me, sort of like humping, pumping and dumping a stock, but what do I know?

At this point the drive to see who can be the bigger dick in the whole matter has come to the point where the following 'good question I just thought of' seems to be of such turgid moment that it is fit for an email blast:

" Did Weiner ever sext others, particularly minors like the high school girl he followed for a time?"

That's a very sleazy line and reveals just how deep into the sewer everyone seems to have submerged. It's become a game of political "gotcha" that has got out of control and has spattered sewage on all who have touched it.

Long ago and in another universe, I worked for Penthouse Magazine. Everyone, even those who never read it in its glory days, knows Penthouse rose to "fame" in large measure on the back of the "Penthouse Letters."

The classic question I am always asked whenever this part of my odd "career" comes up is invariably: "Are the letters real?"

My answer is, invariably, "Yes insofar as they are delivered to the magazine by an official member of the US Post Office. Whether or not they refer to sexual adventures that actually happened is something we didn't really know."

Except that in cases of "fads in the letters" we always knew. And there were fads.

There were fads in letters about three/four/five-somes. There were fads in letters about bondage and discipline and new saddles for pony girls. There was a very memorable fad for letters about "monopediamania," a term we coined for the strange attraction that growing numbers of readers/correspondents, even those in the prisons, claimed they had for women who were missing one or more limbs.

Yes, it was grisly. Yes it was distasteful. Yes it sold magazines. And so we just tossed all the letters into the tiny office inhabited by the newest and most junior editor and let her wade through them all and pull out the choicest, wettest, and most fetid giblets of prose for subsequent publication.

In like manner it would seem that, first for the right and then for the left, the endless "Just askin'" questions, the meticulously written out timelines, the intense examination of the penis in question, the returning and returning to the subject like a dog returns to his vomit, has become a kind of "approved by the Right" witch-dick hunt.

The entire penis pumping crusade is a classic case study in the devolution of discourse. It's a get-even moment. It's a "I'm not talking about the penis but about the HYPOCRISY!" moment! It's the always tiresome and been-done-to-death "If a Republican had done this..." moment. And it's utterly and continually revolting.

It began as a kind of sophomoric obsession by playing with the name of the congressman involved and it has ended with many otherwise sane and even-minded bloggers just fondling with each other's postings, coming up with questions they'd like to feed to the MSM since they have no power or access or stature to do it themselves, and drilling down into the mire well below snorkel depth. And every hour some one or another of these pearl divers seems to bob back up to the surface with some new semi-solid Baby Ruth-shaped object which they brandish in the air like a trophy.

The problem with the whole sordid and fetid mess is that no matter what the outcome it won't be possible to wash off the stink for a very long, long time.

What will these heroes of truth, justice and the American way have achieved from all their thrashing about in an onanistic daisy chain? The future of the republic will not be changed one whit. The congressman in question will go on being the congressman in question. The state of the world will remain as it was last week if only a bit worse for wear and a tad more slimey for all of their "efforts". They will not have improved the lot of their fellow Americans on tittle of an iota of a jot. Instead they will, at best, have gotten themselves and their readership off on a recurring session of the Two Minute Hate down in the sewer.

I feel sorry and disappointed with the right sphere over the last week. I was once a professional when it came to dealing with skeevy, sleazy, and turbid sexual fantasies and I know when a particular sexual fad is spent. Some one needs to tell them:

"You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"



Posted by Vanderleun Jun 1, 2011 6:41 AM | Comments (22)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Instant Tacofication: the great advances of human civilization, in everything from animal husbandry to mathematics to architecture to manufacturing to information technology, have all crescendoed with the Crunchwrap Supreme, delivered at pickup window

Taco Bell and the Golden Age of Drive-Thru:

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Jun 1, 2011 4:41 AM | Comments (9)  | QuickLink: Permalink
G2E Media GmbH

MONTHLY ARCHIVES


SIDELINES

FIND


BACKMATTER

RECENT ITEMS