5-Minute Arguments
Because "It's not about me." Gibbs: Obama 'not watching returns' (via POLITICO 44)
I grew this once in another life. It was a frightening experience.
If it wasn't for Halloween, this grotesque and useless vegetable would be extinct. And good riddance.
Let's review.
Somewhere dotted about the fruited plains of America something like lebenty-leben gazillion acres of pumpkins are planted every damn year. Then care and water and chemicals are slathered on these fibrous tumors causing them grow big. Some very big. Some so big that they can be hoisted into the air and dropped onto a car and obliterate said automobile.
Many are midget pumpkins. This year I'm seeing teeny-weeny baby pumpkins ripe for pumpkin abuse. But most are middle to large hunks o' pumpkin by the time they are "ready for harvesting."
Sounds so pastoral, doesn't it? "Ready for the harvest." Except that when you actually "harvest" a plant the assumption is that, somewhere, somehow, some people are actually going to eat the thing.
Continued...Please take a couple of minutes from your day to watch this touching message from the folks at the top of the power pyramid.
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.
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...."
Let's review:
By Jim Treacher @ Jim Treacher's Blog That Is on the Internet. Suitable for printing out and distributing far and wide.
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!"
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.
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...
Dear President Obama,
I am writing in response to your demand for additional money via the "WTF!? Re-Financing America's Health Care Through Gentle Extortion Act." I wish I could help you. God knows I need medical care now. Repeated exposures to you, your "speeches," and your policies have left me with an extreme case of "Spontaneous Projectile Vomiting" which I desperately would like to shake. Still, as much as I need it, I find I cannot pay for your "Free" Health Care.
In previous years I might have been able to pay doctor's a reasonable sum for curing me, but now my tax advisors tell me I can't even afford to pay you to get the "Free" kind of health care. I find I have neither the resources nor the complexion to benefit from your visionary. In short, in the middle of your term I find myself, along with 150 million other Americans, caught in an "Out of the Money Experience."
In my last letter to you I put "Poor Planning" as the cause of my overnight insolvency. You asked for a fuller explanation and I trust the following details will be sufficient.
I am a taxpayer by trade. During the last year of our recent national mortgage "accident," I was working alone on the roof of a broken-down six-story building in West LA, laying down slate shingles and edging it with solid copper gutters, hoping to flip it to "Flip This House" at the Steal It Yourself cable franchise, or to palm it off on the wise Latina down the block until she got a job with the government and moved to Washington. (Thanks for that one, Barry.)
Once again my vision for a new green America takes a giant step thanks to the current government of "really smart people:" Cash for Clunkers May Cost Up to $45,354 Per Vehicle. Sooner of later, the Obama Administration is going to have to implement my fiendish plan from 2005:
Hybrid government issue hybrid cars for all Americans, Free! (Well, almost)
The Didik: Rejoice! Your Government's Car is Here to Help You Kill Global Warming. Varoooonk!
I know saturation pollution first hand. I was born in Los Angeles in the smog of the late 40s. Electric cars were either long forgotten or not yet envisioned.LA was Smogville for Angeleans at that time. I can remember walking to school in smog so thick it seemed that my father would march in front of us with a machete. Black flakes of soot settled on the white enamel of my mother's stove as she cursed the black streaks in the collars of my father's starched white Hathaway shirts. The air, on the clear days, was best described as "ocher."
Now a haze still lingers over Los Angeles, but you need distance and elevation to make it out. There are days when the wind and weather collaborate that shine crisp and clear. Even though the automobile population of Los Angeles has quintupled since my childhood, a great deal of progress has been made in smog control and reduction. Compared to my childhood, the air of Los Angeles is now pure and pristine.
Alas, to Progressives, this progress is no progress; any improvement shy of perfection is no improvement at all. Automobiles remain. Pollution remains. Los Angeles remains. Curses, foiled again!
Worse still, the middle class remains. It grows larger, more affluent and greedy for the good life than ever. None of this is "A Good Thing." To Progressives, seeing Utopia forever just out of reach, and locked in the immortal dystopia of the now, only perfection persuades. Anything less is just not good enough. Ever.
They are driving Hummers."
Cash for Clunkers? Not. Good. Enough. Ever. For the Priests of Perpetual Perfection, it never will be. For the carping Friends of the Sierra Club's Earth and the jet-owning Hollywood Hypocrites, the situation remains drastic. Petroleum-Armageddon is always just one tank of gas away from destroying Earth. Every tank of gas bought and burned threatens life as we know it on every mile of every road, urban, suburban, and rural, in these states. The Four Horseman are on cruise control. They are driving used Hummers.
A savior is at hand, however, in the new hybrid vehicles popping up like dubious
Continued...
No longer a problem in the way-new America.
We are a "Can-Do! Yes, we can." society. One of the really amazing upticks in American society, as I noticed in a brief walk around various neighborhoods in sodden Seattle, is that we have almost completely cleaned up the streets of our cities.
How well I remember those tours through the various skid roads** of the cities I have lived in -- Los Angeles, New York, Boston, and San Francisco --in days of yore. Gone now. All gone. And their wretched refuse along with them.
Take a walk yourself and you will see that it is true.
Nowhere in today's brighter and more-caring American cities will you see those terrible social wrecks on the streets. Yes, no longer will you find "Bums," "Junkies," "Drunks," "Bull-Goose Raving Lunatics," or "The Hard Core Unemployed" on our sidewalks. They are all gone, a fading memory.
Indeed all that are left, strangely rising up from the background noise of the streets, are the blameless and harmless "Homeless."
They are the last social class to be saved by our loving and caring society and their continuing expansion in our cities is a mystery which yearns for a caring social solution.
My own is simple and solves two lingering social problems at once: "Feed the homeless to the hungry."
Problem solved and it is a two-fer. Paging Dr. Swift!
**The first skid row was Skid Road (Yesler Way) in Seattle, where logs were skidded into the water on a corduroy road for delivery to Henry Yesler's lumber mills.
"Check out this image: see that tiny speck of light, inside the blue circle? That's Earth, as seen from the vantage point of Saturn. We are so much smaller even than that." -- Discovery Space: Twisted Physics: In Praise of Insignificance
Continued...
Text via anonymous email this AM. First two already checked off. More to come. Keep track. There will be a test.
(X) -- Government takes control of the banks
(X) -- Government takes control of the car companies
Presented for your consideration, a two minute slice of what listening to poets who meant what they said and said what they meant must have been like. These are the opening lines of the oldest English epic poem*, Beowulf, declaimed in the style popular at the time of their origins. Beowulf, written in England, but set in Scandinavia has variously been dated to between the 8th and the early 11th centuries. Take two minutes to listen to this vanished art brought back to fitful life.
The clip begins in an intentionally disarming fashion which, I think, helps us to make a leap of imagination from the present day to the night gatherings around bonfires and flickering torches in which these tales of love and death were told. Attending what can only be a recreation of these arcane styles of declamation seems an effete ritual these days. I'd submit it seems so onl¥ because we have grown so used to "all-entertainment all-the-time everywhere," we cannot imagine the impact of these original entertainments when they were the rarest thing in a human life bounded by works and days.
Part story, part panegyric, part worship, the reciting of an epic was an event that could span days, even weeks. How the earliest bards held all of the poem in memory is still somewhat of a mystery, but the rhetorical structure of the poem, known set-pieces played much as jazz would be played centuries later, and various methods of loci, or "Memory Palaces" probably all played a role. No matter how it was done, the fact that it could be done with Beowulf, which runs to nearly 3,200 lines remains impressive. Other epics loom larger than that.
And it wasn't enough to declaim the epic, you had to provide a few musical bridges, many voices, and a lot of acting. For this reason, as well as their rarity, Bards were held in high esteem. Later poets would try, on paper at least, to recapture this sort of esteem but, except for a period in Soviet Russia, poets and poetry have fallen on hard times in recent centuries, becoming an art esteemed slightly above ceramics.
"I don't get no respect" is a common plaint of our contemporary "poetic" poets attached to their various academic sinecures like stunted embryos on withering umbilicals. About once every twenty years, you'll hear the barbaric yawps of spoken word poets try to cut their way through the petrified forests of the groves of academe, but most are quickly subsumed back into the dusty compost of poetasters and poet poseurs.
The Beats had a run at it in the 1950s, but slumped back into their own comfy berths in the spiritual opium dens of what used to be the "counter-culture." Now the well-codified hipster poet is content with his underwritten "job for life." The Beats went on the road with a Howl but have ended in the cul-de-sac of Maya Angelou.
The "singer-songwriter" poets of the late 1960s / early 1970s had their run powered by the advent of Bob Dylan, who still can impress when he comes to work. But money changes everything and most of them soon vanished into Hotel California.
Currently, there's a craze for Poetry Slams that manages to produce some arresting, if not memorable, work in an environment more conducive to what was once "a battle of the bands." At this time, Slams are touted as "bigger than ever," a sure sign this phenomenon, famous for having fewer formal rules than Rap, has passed its peak.
Ah, but then there is Rap, you say. And in a sense you'd be right since Rap certainly fulfills the aspect of declamation and can even gesture towards length. It is also energetic in terms of its heavy reliance of percussion and a vocal range from shouting to shrill. Rap also benefits from scenting itself with Eau de Hood and delivers a simulacrum of the real. But Rap has been heavily ossified for well over a decade and may soon find itself with more than its share of petrified forests and post-mortum effects. It's hard to imagine people in more than a thousand years gathering to hear some android with an attitude running the changes of Wu-Tang Clan's Forever.
You'd think -- with the advent of the Internet and the much heralded (Global) (Hive) Mind -- it would be easy to jump start epic poetry again as a major art form, but you'd be wrong. One element is missing from the mix of low barriers to entry, cheap recording and distribution, and an audience in the millions for any sort of dreck that manages to be cranked out from the star-making machinery. Poetry today has everything it needs for an epic to bloom except the ability to declaim in the affirmative voice.
Poetry today is, for the most part, deeply embedded in the secular culture, and there is no affirmative available to that culture, since the affirmative depends on a belief in something other than, larger than, the self. Today's denial of the spirit and celebration of the now and the now alone blocks any ability to sound the affirmative, to strike the strings that soul sing, and higher sing. It's the solution that Wallace Stephens sought but could never attain, as he notes in The Man with the Blue Guitar
I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.
I sing a hero’s head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,
Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.
If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,
Say it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.
Poetry can't matter as it once mattered because the base ground of being has been yanked out from under the culture, leaving it stranded in mid-air, unable to ascend, having only the fall before it.
Still, we can hear the echoes of what that more heroic and poetic age must have been like, at least at festival time, in the brief two minutes in the clip above. In a way, it's a good thing that it is only two minutes. Most can spare that but would find themselves at sea if anything much longer would be required of them.
As the poet says, "Humankind cannot bear / very much reality."
(HT: Myth & True Myth @ Belmont Club)
*Oldest in the sense of an epic poem, not a collection of songs as in The Book of Taliesin.
A slight variation on Naked Lunch, the classic addiction novel/autobiography of William BurroughsThis is from the Introduction "Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness."
If you wish to alter or annihilate a pyramid of numbers in a serial relation, you alter or remove the bottom number. If we wish to annihilate the Liberal pyramid, we must start with the bottom of the pyramid: the Liberal in the Street, and stop tilting quixotically for the "higher ups" so called, all of whom are immediately replaceable. The Liberal in the street who must have Liberal policies to live is the one irreplaceable factor in the Liberal equation. When there are no more Liberals to buy Liberal policies there will be no more human traffic in Liberalism. As long as Liberal need exists, someone will service it.
When I was a I lived in one room in the Native Quarter of Washington, DC, I was fashionable in the Liberal way. I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a Liberal politically correct thought every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of terminal Liberal addiction. I never cleaned or dusted the room. Somebody paid by Liberals was supposed to come and do that for me. But they just took the checks and did nothing. Like me.
Empty promises for a utopian world and other mental garbage piled to the ceiling. Light and water long since turned off because everyone was getting a check and didn't have to work at the power plants or waterworks. I did absolutely nothing. It was the Liberal dream of paradise.
I could look at the end of my shoe for eight hours. I was only roused to action when the sand in the hourglass of Liberal promises ran out.
If a former friend who was not a Liberal came to visit - and they rarely did since who or what was left to visit - I sat there not caring that he had entered my field of vision - a grey screen always blanker and fainter - and not caring when he walked out of it. If he had died on the spot I would have sat there looking at my shoe waiting to go through his pockets because since he was not a Liberal he might just have some money. Wouldn't you?
Because I never had enough Liberal ideology -no one ever does. Thirty grains of Liberal heroin a day and it still was not enough. And long waits in front of the White House.
Delay is a rule in the Liberal business. The Man is never on time and the check is never quite big enough. It's the Methadone of political philosophies: You don't get high. You don't kick it. You just stay on it.
This is no accident. There are no accidents in the Liberal world. The Liberalism addict is taught again and again exactly what will happen if he does not score for his Liberal ration and vote for the Liberal pushers. Get up that slavish belief up or else.
And suddenly my Liberal habit began to jump and jump. Forty, sixty grains a day. And it still was not enough. And I could not pay. Because I had no money. Just Liberal Government script, which the Liberal government was not accepting. They knew what it was worth.
A universal expression of rueful remose is the phrase, "Jesus wept." I think we need to shelve that expression for the duration and swap it out for, "Jesus laughed." As in, "You want to amuse God? Tell him your plans."
Jesus laughed this morning as I read that the US government has gone into the used car repair business when Obama sez:
If you buy a car from Chrysler or General Motors, you will be able to get your car serviced and repaired, just like always. Your warrantee will be safe.It is for statements like this that the world "risible" was created. And for attitudes such as that that the word "hubris" was so prized by the Greeks. The government as grease monkey. The government as the entity that is going to fix your car. Or, rather, the government as the entity that will be working with, and overseeing, car repair shops from sea to shining sea. Oh yes, this will end well.In fact, it will be safer than it's ever been. Because starting today, the United States government will stand behind your warrantee.
I submit that this is not so much about cars as about pose; the pose of a new Messiah. And this new Messiah doesn't know squat about fixing cars, his ambition instead is to reduplicate an ancient miracle. Please to consult Matthew 14:
24But the ship was now in the midst of the sea, tossed with waves: for the wind was contrary.Be not afraid, it is I, thy President, and I shall walk, not just upon water, but upon the thick oil of charm. As in
25And in the fourth watch of the night Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea.
26And when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, It is a spirit; and they cried out for fear.
27But straightway Jesus spake unto them, saying, Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid.
"Oozing charm from every pore, he oiled his way across the floor." — Alan J. Lerner, My Fair LadyNow that we see the hubris of the man extend itself into the crankcase of your care, we can only wait for the first model out of the new, improved Government Motors: "The 2010 Nemesis."
For when the government is in control of warrentees and car repairs, the catch phrase at the Indianapolis 500 will be: "Gentlemen, just try to start your engines!"
For all the aggravation and daily doses of "Duh" emitted from the current Training Wheels Institute at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (or perhaps because of it), we've overlooked an unexpected pleasure of these last fifty odd days. This is the steady increase in moments of silence from of the Obamatrons. Although the O-ratings remain high, the breathless blather and spittle-flecked spew of the ravening hordes of recent memory has increasingly fallen from fortissimo to pianissimo.
Yes November's bestial yawps of "Neener... neener... neener" that swept across our fruity plains and, on January 20, 2009, crashed like a tsunami of political orgasm on the steps of the Capitol building, has waned like the fading grunts of some spent great dane on an x-rated Animal Planet special leaving only bones of promises broken and used rhetorical prophylactics bobbing in the spume.
Whoa, dude, shut up, already! You've lost that loving feeling. You are bumming us out, harshing our mellow, killing our buzz and, in general, just bringing us down every time you open your mouth.
Here's a hint. Stay in the House. Kick back, take some deep hits on the clue bong, and chill out, dude. You're supposed to be cool, right? Right. So, hey, like be cool okay?
I don't know who's pumping the toxic text into your teleprompter, but get that guy on some pharmaceutical grade meds stat. I suggest 50 grains of Seconal IV twice daily. Anything to get that kid down from his high-grade Acid Flashback involving outtakes from Halloween IX. Too scary for the average American, don't you know?
Next thing up on your ever-expanding To-Do list is a Zen task: Practice doing nothing, zero, zip, niente, nada. For about two weeks. Stay at home and spend some quality time with your family that doesn't involve taking the wife out for dinner at a cost of around $10 million in air and limo charges after we warm up Air Force One and put the country's biggest SUV on the road.
Yup, do nothing except, well, get up in the morning and, like millions of others who still have a job, go to the job. Go to the office. Sit in the big papa bear chair behind the new sign that reads "The Buck Would Stop Here If We Had A Buck!" Close the mouth, open the mind, fo-cus and get some work done.
Enough with the skipping around the country like some Nordictracked male model hot for the next photo-op. Let the people see the President at work doing the People's business instead of on the road doing monkey business.
Continued...
Money, money, money. That's all you hear these days. Hundreds of billions, working on a trillion. Banks need a bailout. Cars need a bailout. Housing needs a bailout. You need a bailout. I need a bailout. Even President Obama needs a bailout from his bailout. Everywhere you go we're tapped out, busted, broke. Let's face it, we need money. It's time for tough choices and tougher love.
Where, oh where, shall this money be found? It is to be found, it would seem, far out on the ocean of the future dead center in the Sargasso Sea of debt. But why borrow from the future when you can simply liquidate under-performing assets in the present? Isn't it better to turn useless stuff you've got just lying around into cash than to take on new debt? Especially if a lot of the new debt is going to pay off the old debt? Of course it is.
The rush to borrow from the future ignores some very tangible assets here at home that could be used to give us all, citizens and government alike, a very nice hit from the money machine.
Traveling through Florida, as I have been for some weeks, you see these underutilized assets all about you. They are everywhere, like rich, virgin topsoil ready to be planted and then harvested. What's more, harvesting these assets to put some real money into circulation does not go against the core values of the ruling Democratic majority. It merely extends them to the logical conclusion. Like the culling of the herd before birth through the use of abortion to get the nonproductive out of the way before they can consume resources, it is time our older citizens -- far past their usefulness, their productive years, but likely to consume lots of resources for decades to come -- were, quite simply, liquidated.
Yes, it's time for mom and pop and granny and grandpop to go. All 37 million of them must be transformed from codger to compost if the American dream is not to become a new-age nightmare. It's time for a government program from coast to coast to make sure that every American over the age of 65 takes one for the team -- in the form of a government approved and delivered .22 bullet in the back of the head.
Now I know that some may think me harsh in my prescription for continuing prosperity among the Baby Boomers and their offspring, but hear me out because, to coin a phrase, "There's gold in them thar grannies."
[Note: One of the men and writers I admire most, Victor Davis Hanson, recently observed: To meet a young American male about 25 is to hear a particular nasal stress, a much higher tone than one heard 40 years ago, and, to be frank, to listen to a precious voice often nearly indistinguishable from the female. -- Works and Days Ten Random, Politically Incorrect Thoughts And so, from February 2006, here are my own, similar observations. ]
Joel Stein, "Humorist"
Dr. Filth, he keeps his world
Inside of a leather cup
But all his sexless patients
They're trying to blow it up
-- Bob Dylan: Desolation Row
LIKE SOME HAGGARD CRACK WHORE banging on the door of a dealer's den willing to do anything , the hapless Joel ( "I despise our troops." ) Stein has been passed randomly about the blogsphere in the last couple of days.
Continued...
In the strident and petulant gay protests that erupted after California's Proposition 8 passed I can't be the only one who noticed the broad yellow streak in the crowds. What we've seen in the last couple of weeks is a long, long way from Stonewall. Indeed, if most of the protestors ganging up on the Mormon Church weren't gay, you'd be allowed to call them sissies.
An editorial in The National Review this morning notes,
It’s also worth considering that, while gay-rights advocates cannot discuss same-sex marriage for more than 30 seconds without making faulty analogies to Jim Crow-era anti-miscegenation laws, some 70 percent of blacks voted for Proposition 8. While there have been a few ugly racist statements by gay-rights supporters, such vile sentiment has been restricted. Not so the hatred directed at Mormons, who are convenient targets.
"Convenient targets" is too soft a term for what's up in these cowardly protests. A more accurate term is "safe targets." And, as has been shown again and again over years, Christian churches and beliefs are the safest and most non-threatening targets of choice for twisted ideologues throughout the United States. There is one fact which has not escaped the notice of those who would jam their agendas down the throats of those who disagree with them: there are no consequences -- ever -- for attacking a Christian church or beliefs. None. Zero. Nada.
Continued...
Newt Gingrich, along with the ten thousand other Party Leaders idiots who sleep with the fishes, declares Palin won't be future GOP leader. Instead, the Newt instructs the rest of his walking dead to throw their skeletal shoulders to the wheel and roll the stone of other Republican governors up the hill. He, along with many trepanned others today, likes neophyte governor Jindal: “If you want to understand healthcare, you can do a lot worse than to bring in Bobby Jindal who may well know more about health policy than any other elected official in America and is doing an extraordinary job in Louisiana.”
Illustration via Jaded Haven
With the endless argument in California still without an end the moralists among us are moving faster than the speed of blather in repeating the notion that gay marriages in the chapel will let polygamy come out of the closet on a rocket. As that serial monogamist Scarlet O'Hara would say, "Well, fiddle-dee-di."
I'm with Dorothy Sayers on this one:
As I grow older and older
And totter toward the tomb
I find that I care less and less
Who goes to bed with whom
We've got a lot of problems with marriage in this country, but can't we take a step back and draw a deep breath, smell the winds of change and admit that Gay Marriage is a done deal? It's here. It's queer. So what?
OKAY!!!! LET’S GET ONE THING STRAIGHT!!!!
AS OF THIS MOMENT 2008, HAS OFFICIALLY BECOME THE ALL CAPSLOCK ELECTION!!!!
AWARE OF ALL, AND THE SOUCE OF SOME, INTERNET TRADITIONS, I HEREBY DECLARE THAT WE ALL ENGAGE THE CAPSLOCK KEY AND REFRAIN FROM RELEASING IT UNTIL NOVEMBER 5TH!!!! AFTER WHICH YOU CAN
release it if your side won.
If your side did not win,
YOUR CAPSLOCK SHALL MUST REMAIN DOWN FOR AT LEAST 4 MORE YEARS!!!!
PLUS ALL SENTENCES MUST END WITH AT LEAST 4 EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!!
ONE FOR EACH YEAR YOU HAVE LOST!!!!
READY!!!!???
ENGAGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
INSPIRED BY THE ANCHORESS!!!!
[Illustration by Doug Ross Click to scare yourself.]
On Monday James Bennet, editor of The Atlantic, ate piping hot crow during his required ritual humiliation segment on Fox. [*Scroll down for video clip.] He did so as The Atlantic, in full-damage control mode, strove to underscore that The Atlantic did not know what it was getting when it hired Jill Greenberg to defraud Senator McCain. What he says makes a certain amount of sense -- "We didn't know the gun was loaded!" -- but not complete sense. Especially if you know a bit about how magazine issues are planned.
As a result, I'm not buying the Bennet/Atlantic line that the magazine did not know what they were getting. Indeed, his argument pretty much boils down to a plea of "Guilty -- but with an explanation." I can accept that Bennet himself may not have known about Greenberg's peculiar political pretensions. (Note that he is careful to use "I" throughout the clip below -- as in "I have not had any correspondence with her..."), but Jason Treat, the art director of The Atlantic must have known. And it is Treat that's probably in the hot seat at the present time.
Jill Greenberg's politics and style are well-known to any one who pays attention to the work of "editorial" photographers. They are especially well-known to the art directors of magazines since it is their job to know. It is a very small world.
[Personal Note: A shout-out to my Harley-dude brother Tom and his sidekick Kim in Grass Valley -- and his pals at the secret Peets' coffee shop. Guys, for all you do, this Harley Babe's for you!]
HT: Media Blog
There is only one man in this election who has ever really fought for you ... in places where winning means survival and defeat means death ... - Sarah Palin's Address to the RNC
Is Obama's courage limited to talking? I've been reading a number of quotes from Senator Obama over the past 24 hours that have to do with fighting. He's not taking things lying down. He's not going to be "bullied." That the sort of tough talk that's pretty much par for the course in political metaphors these days.
Last night, for instance, while getting paid a hundred grand and change for having dinner, the Obama scene went like this:
Bon Jovi [once a well-known rock star] and his wife, Dorothea, hosted more than 100 people for dinner on their mansion lawn by the Navesink River in Middletown, N.J. The price was $30,800 a person, to be divided between the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee.Sounds tough, doesn't he? And in the pure political sense of Chicago machine politics, he probably is."When I look at Barack, I see an old man," Bon Jovi said in introducing his guest. Obama is 47, Bon Jovi is 46.
Obama spoke for about eight minutes before greeting guests individually. He vowed to fight Republican attacks on his character and background more fiercely than John Kerry did in his losing campaign four years ago.
"We're not going to be bullied, we're not going to be smeared, we're not going to be lied about," Obama said. "I don't believe in coming in second." - Obama At Bon Jovi Event: 'We Won't Be Bullied'
Obama's also known for shooting hoops. As one of my commenting readers put it:
Obama, after Governor Palin's speech: "I've been called worse on the basketball court." My fantasy reply from Governor Palin: "I'm a runner and a basketball player. I don't think he can beat me on the court. I don't think he's got the stamina."That's amusing because, as most people can sense, it has more than a grain of truth in it. Stamina is more than simply making campaigning for President your day job, stamina comes from doing a tough job in crisis mode, day after day. Sort of like, say, being an infantry soldier doing a tour of Iraq. Or flying jet fighters into places where they have a lot of anti-aircraft guns and missiles.
All of this leads me to a question for which I do not have a ready answer: "How much personal courage does Senator Obama possess and when has he demonstrated it? Not talked the talk, but walked the walk.
Surely we must have some examples of this somewhere but I don't recall any.
Why is this important? Because, as is obvious, there are times when courage, real courage in the personal, the physical, the spiritual, the moral or the political sense, is called for from a President.
We have numerous examples of these sorts of courage in the life and political career of John McCain.
What has Obama done that demonstrates real, classical courage? I would really like to know.
To my mind, courage is a far more necessary element for a leader of the United States to possess than any other. It even trumps experience. I've heard a lot from Obama and his supporters about it taking "courage to vote for Obama." But really all it takes to do that is to get to a polling place in November, go into a voting booth, and pull a lever, push a button, or mark a paper. It takes no courage at all.
Leading the country to safety and security after it has been attacked and 3,000 citizens killed in a morning -- that takes courage and we've only seen that in one man. The next President had better possess that sort of courage as well.
So again, I ask, when have we ever seen Obama demonstrate real courage?
Any Questions?
You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We'd all love to see the plan
-- The Sacred Book of Beatles
You'd love to see the plan? Okay, here's mine. And, yes, I am a "sooper-genius" for coming up with it. If you think about it you'll know it's not only right, but that -- with a little of that all-American hope for change -- Americans will all say,"Yes, we can!"
Look, we all know where this campaign is going and it's not good. It hasn't been good for a long, long time and it gets worse by the day. But with a little creativity among the surviving candidates we can still snatch victory from the jaws of wingnuts and moonbats.
My plan is simplicity itself as expressed in the bumper stickers above.
Step 1: Hillary crosses over and joins McCain as veep.
Continued...
I don't have a lot of arguments with the Lord. I expect Him to be capricious, irrational, and possessed of a mind and purpose beyond the comprehension of the smart monkeys. Why? Because, as God, He can.
I don't expect Him to answer my prayers because it is a very big universe and He's got a lot on his plate -- even for a Supreme Being. Imagine, if you will, being God in His office and deciding to step away from Your desk for a minute to get Yourself a beverage from the Holy Vending Machine (No charge). You're away for about 45 seconds but when You get back there are 25,345,654 "While You Were Out" slips on your desk along with about 100,000,000 items of Spam from Tibetan Prayer Wheels. What could You do, even if You were God. You'd just answer as many as You could at random, and then break early for a long lunch.
"The question is, O Daddy Warbucks of the World, 'Will you drill?' And the answer is, 'Why bother?'"
Then Duke stands up and beats his chest,
Says "I made it. Why can't all the rest?
You got nothing to lose
But the shine on your shoes"
-- Steve Strauss, Wolfgang & Strauss
I'VE KNOWN MORE THAN A FEW very rich men. Some of them came by their wealth via a win in the sperm race. Some of them got a very big hit from the money machine in the first Internet Bubble lottery. Some of them married or divorced into it. Some of them got gobs of greenbacks the "old fashioned way, they worked for it."
Let's say you're one of these. Let's say you are so wealthy that, as one said to a friend of mine, "I no longer need a 'rate of return'." You've got ALL the stuff you will ever need and the dough just keeps piling up. You've got the private plane and your advisors keep saying you need the private helicopter "for tax purposes."
One of the items on my ever-lengthening list of things I hate more than life itself is ineradicable nature of the PR phrase "We are very excited." as in
We are very excited about having the 1st event management company in the North Okanagan!
Somewhere in the dawn of time an extremely retarded writer in "the PR game" got the brilliant idea to put this phrase into the mouth of every executive that was ever so dumb as to actually hire a PR firm in the first place. It was the beginning of one of the worst memes ever to infest the mind of man.
Like the needles into the arm of a meth freak, once this phrase was put into a press release it never came out.
In my email this evening, a retired top executive from a major multi-national corporation looks at the laboring of our political mountain that has, again, brought forth midgets. He is not amused.
What a dreadful situation. The whole process has perplexed me for years.We often hear someone put forth the premise that the U.S. President is "the most powerful person in the world" (However arrogant that may be.). Yet we require very little of the actual candidates for the office.
No major corporation would hire most of the individuals that have run for the U.S. presidency in my lifetime - at least not before they became President.
On top of that, our political dialogue is not about the kind of person a candidate should be, and the basket of traits that a candidate should possess, but focuses on all manner of irrelevant crap.
Continued...
Fiery the Angels rose, & as they rose deep thunder roll'd
Around their shores: indignant burning with the fires of Orc!
-- America A Prophecy by William Blake
Meanwhile in Milton's Paradise Lost, the war in heaven is between the angels loyal to Satan and the angels loyal to God. We all know how that turned out. Something similar is burning out of control with the raising of John McCain to the godhead of the Republican Party. It didn't take long to acquire a name, a flip of the right's favorite moonbat diagnosis, "BDS -- Bush Derangement Syndrome." Of course, you had to know that that phrase -- a personal favorite of mine -- would come back to bite the presented posterior. And it has in less than a month with "MDS -- McCain Derangement Syndrome."
This catchphrase has legs....
"Trusted" "Independent" "Objective" Yeah, right. Next.
In what is now a common collection of bitching and moaning wafting out of newspaper editorial rooms, The Seattle Times published a cri de coeur Sunday in The Handoff: Newspapers in the Digital Age that quotes this sad bastard child of Prince Don De Lusion:
"While the newspaper is expendable, the tradition it represents and the information it supplies are not. The evolution from Gutenberg to Gates may be irreversible, but as new media replace the old ones there's no official passing of the torch of responsibility, no automatic transfer of the sacred trust the First Amendment placed upon the free press and its proprietors." -- Hal Crowther, columnist, The Independent Weekly (North Carolina)The always unctuous James Vesley of the ST uses this to end his "editorial" because, I guess, he couldn't come up with a zinger for the standard "O woe is us at the newspapers because the Internet ate our lunch" blatherfest. It's the sort of thumb-sucker you see all the time in newspapers from clapped-out hacks who are goin' down slow. They all seem to think that because "they" care about protecting, in the words of Governor William J. Le Petomane, their "phony baloney jobs" that we care if they are employed as a "journalists" or as an overfed hamsters in an Eastern Washington windfarm.
Vesley's chief villain in all this is craigslist:
"I see Craigslist as a negative-editorial product. Why? Because it claims the profits normally shifted to the newsroom. Without the obligations of journalism, e-commerce becomes the anti-newspaper."
Well, God bless Craig Newmark's little cotton socks say I. Long ago, when I and Newmark were both members of the WELL, Newmark took a bare bones budget, an idea, a crappy but now classic interface, and a couple of insights into the uses of the net and the elements of trust in online relationship and built them out into something that performs real and vital services for millions of people every day. And for the most part for free. It is now hard to think of a world of transactions of all sorts between individuals that would operate smoothly without craigslist.
"We're becoming a nation of whining, braying weenies on all sides of the political spectrum." -- Webutante
Left: What goes into your mouth can kill you.
Right: What comes out of your mouth can kill you.
"Dueling blondes," that's what you gotta think, as Anna Nicole is shipped off to be planted at last, and Anne Coulter is set-up to be planted real soon now.
Continued...
This isn't a very tricky web site. No endless webby bells and whistles, no tagclouds, no popups to elsewhere when you mouse over a link, none of the endless widgets that like the spider swallowed by the old lady "wiggled and jiggled and tickled inside her." It's about as basic as I can stand -- write/read, read/write. But it does have one little bit of automated tomfoolery.
Inspired by the NY Times story written about HERE.
Everywhere you go you see "Frequently Asked Questions" scattered about to help you find out what everybody else apparently knows. Nobody, as far as we know, is helping you with the essential questions of life, the Frequently Answered Questions ®.
These are the questions you ask or answer hundreds of times in your life? But do you answer them correctly? Sadly, millions of people do not.
As a public service we present the first in our ongoing series of answers to Frequently Answered Questions ®. If you have any Frequently Answered Questions® you'd like help with, pop them in the comments and our crack staff of out-of-work philosophers, professional wise-guys, cut-rate gurus, and grief counselors between assignments will be happy to enlighten you.
Was George Bush legally elected president the first time?
Only ask this question if you've got the next five hours to burn.
One of the small, but continuing pleasures of being out of Manhattan is that one no longer risks reading the emissions of the ever-smarmy Joe Conason in those defenseless moments when, having devoured most of a New York Observer, you are still stuck between subway stations, and are forced to choose between reading Conason and watching the rider across from you drool onto the floor. And that is a close run thing, I'm here to tell you.
Still, the persistence of this scribbler on the Net means that you will, sooner or later, have a lapse into intellectual masochism and dial the doofus up. Earlier today, since much of the news seemed to be
Continued...It is quite simple and easily done. What's more a simple pledge by the major networks, CNN, The New York Times and its assorted camp followers traipsing down the path towards circulation zero, could assure the Democratic Party's hegemony for at least a decade. All these bozos have to do is run front page, top of the news slot, pledges that if we allow the Dems to win they will, once and for
Continued...
There's been plenty of chit and more than a lot of chat in the last week over Congress and the Burning of the American Flag.
What strikes me about the whole debate that swirls about this issue is not whether it should be legal or illegal, but the over-riding tone of, 'One way or another, who really cares?'
Continued...AS DIFFICULT AS IT IS TO IDENTIFY with the hamstrung, sold-out, and Gobstoppered Republicans currently dissipating electoral power in Washington, it must be much more difficult to be a classic Democrat these days. On some level it has simply got to literally make you sick.
The Democrat Disease has many manifestations but now most often presents as "Semantic Dementia " -- progressive and with no known cure. No telethon long enough and no condom thick enough. And as
Continued...Why look at reality when the diversity BS smells so good?
Continued...Signs 10 to 3: The obsession with the firing of 8 US attorneys in Washington that will now spin off into the Suponena/Congressional Investigation Parallel Reality : Panel OKs Subpoenas in Attorney Probe
Sign 2: Replacement of US Soldiers Killed in Iraq Body Count with Washington Fired Attorney Body Count as NY-WashPo-Times obsession. (The "It's more important to "Get Bush" than win the war" syndrome.)
And the number 1 sign that the Surge in Iraq is working is.... Hillary's going to stay in Iraq if we'll only elect her President (Clinton Sees Some Troops Staying in Iraq if She Is Elected ) and that's a promise! She was for the war in Iraq before she was against it and that was before she was for it... or was it after? ... or last week? ... or tomorrow? Hard to keep track.
You know, for somebody with a "smart" political attack team, and who claims to be "web-savvy," she doesn't seem to have gotten the YouTube memo.
THE PRESIDENT MISSED THIS GOING IN, and he continues to miss it going out: Bush concerned about message to Mideast over ports.
"I'm concerned about a broader message this issue could send to our friends and allies around the world, particularly in the Middle East," Bush said.
I, for one, am not concerned about the message. Bluntly put, the message is that Americans -- through their elected representatives -- are, for once, united. They are united around the fact that, when you get right down to the nub of it, they simply do not trust Arabs and Muslims. We are, after all, at war with the culture and the religion.
Is it an irrational and emotional position? Of course it is. Wars bring out the irrational and emotional. Is it any the less true? No.
Continued...I love gloating little news squibs like this:
GUATEMALA CITY - Mayan priests will purify a sacred archaeological site to eliminate "bad spirits" after President Bush visits next week, an official with close ties to the group said Thursday. "That a person like (Bush), with the persecution of our migrant brothers in the United States, with the wars he has provoked, is going to walk in our sacred lands, is an offense for the Mayan people and their culture," Juan Tiney, the director of a Mayan nongovernmental organization with close ties to Mayan religious and political leaders.That's a classic bit of blather served up by the guileful for the clueless.
The takeaway is that it would be an 'affront' and somehow 'unclean' for the President of the United States to place his feet on the "sacred lands" of the Maya; that to do so would somehow imbue such sites with "bad spirits."
Oh really? Let's review....
Ode to a Robe by Robert Fulghum. Alas, it happens to be my robe and I miss it.
Really Great Moments in Photography: What happens when you take a photo at the right angle? - A Slideshow (Scribd)
Everyday in every way, Wonkette brings new meaning and depth to the C-Word.
Kudlow to Hillary, It's the Economy, Stupid: "Try to imagine the United States imposing capital controls. And try to imagine the United States trying to deglobalize from the world economy. That’s as dumb as well, nationalized, socialized healthcare, or seizing oil company profits." (Kudlow's Money Politic$)
"The first time I got blown up, I had to remind myself to get up and look around for the trigger man or possible gunmen set to take advantage of the confusion. I felt like I was floating through a world where time stood still. There's something about looking directly at an artillery shell and seeing it vanish with a sharp crack and rush of dust and debris that changes you." (More @ Acute Politics )
Evil Fiction: Orson Scott Card eviscerates Steve Berry's The Alexandria Link: "What Berry is providing is pure propaganda -- the propaganda created by terrorists and murderers to 'prove' that Jews 'deserve' to be blown up by suicide bombers." (Civilization Watch)
My Back Pages: David Goines wraps up his memoir of the seeds of protest in the 60s. " I learned that the only way to get power is to take it. Nobody is going to give it to you willingly, no matter how nicely you ask. The law changes to recognize shifts in political strength; it does not promote those shifts. Had we stayed within legal avenues—avenues defined by our adversaries—we would never have gotten anything in the Free Speech, civil rights or antiwar movements. There is no redress of grievance for those whose only remedy is the law."
He was looking kinda dumb with his finger and his thumb
And the shape of an "L" on his forehead.
Well the years start coming and they don't stop coming.... -- Smashmouth, AllStar
Probably the only person that doesn't know John McCain will never be President is John McCain -- and that includes his campaign staff and his family.
He showed up smiling at David Letterman (who looks more and more like "The Joker" without the makeup with every passing week) to "announce" that he was indeed running for President just as he has been every day for decades. Large applause followed by a national shrug. "Never happen. Vote him off the island. Next."
But yet he once had everything going for him, didn't he? What happened? What happened is that the country, as far as John McCain goes, woke up and took a long look. It has had a long chance to take this long look and decided, "Nope." But was too polite to say why.
Well, maybe not the pictures, but certainly the Oscars are getting smaller.Marketwatch reports that, "If the past two years is any indication, it won't be good for Oscar viewer-ship and may cut into future revenue. For
Continued...
Given Obama's successful raid on the Clinton rice-bowl in Hollywood last night, auto-beclowning was only a matter of time. But in this day and age, "a matter of time" is measured in minute fractions of a news cycle. This is not always "good" for the candidate on the "reactive" part of the current kerfuffle since taking a few deep breaths in politics is probably the wisest course of action.
No such luck for the Clintons who have, again, beclowned themselves by taking David Geffen's characterization of Hillary Clinton as "ambitious" as a personal insult against their sainted candidate. There are few things that strike me as genuinely "non-partisan" in this day and age, but saying Hillary is "ambitious" has got to be one of them. It is a statement well within the range of factual observations bounded on the one side by 2+2=4 and on the other by the Pythagorean Theorem.
THIS INCIDENT FROM Aaron Hopkins at die.net -- Best Buy Receipt Check -- suggests it is time for honest people to stop going along with the proliferating "receipt check" routine.
So when I'm faced with the prospect of standing in a long line at the exit to have yet another person rifle through my property, I dodge the line and head for an unused automatic door, countering an insistent "Sir, can I see your receipt?" with a polite "No, thank you."He's right. This retailers' move is odious. Even more odious that making the receipt checkers into the people who "Welcome" you to the store. Oh, wait, they're usually one and the same.I've gotten so used to this trick at Fry's Electronics that I don't really think twice about it. You see, Fry's doesn't trust their underpaid staff manning the cash registers to actually do their jobs right, so they post a door guard to ask people walking away from the registers carrying plastic bags to let them verify that all of the items in the bag were rung up on the receipt.
But this verification step is purely voluntary. Merchants basically have two rights covering people entering and exiting their stores. They can refuse to let you enter the premises and/or to sell you anything, and they can place you under citizens arrest for attempting to leave the premises with any property that you haven't paid for. But the second you hand over the appropriate amount of cash, they lose all rights to the items. They can't legally impair you from leaving the store with your property.
A FINELY DISTILLED VINTAGE RANT from AskMom: Freedom, per Gallon
Here's but a small sip:
Continued...
I hate to think what could happen when the New York Times lets out.
[Courtesy of the ever-vigiliant Tom Parker, who is also armed.]
I lived out the Stone Age of the Internet "blind as a cave fish" in the depths of that prototype of all subsequent online communities, The WELL. I was there for over 10 years during the time when it was more balanced than unbalanced.
ONE OF THE SMALL ECONOMIES about living in New York City for years and relocating to Southern California is to be had in clothing costs. If one of your jobs in New York was being a men's fashion editor for a magazine, you find that you don't buy clothes so much as have them.
In any case, I dumped clothes by the cartload before I moved, and I still had far too many when I arrived. Since I don't ski, the usefulness of items that would put Nanook of the North into a sweat during January in Greenland are pretty dubious when every day can be a day at the beach. As a result, I've been pretty much out of the clothing shopping cycle for years and I find it, to say the least, refreshing.
In Laguna Beach if you hold two pairs of shorts, a couple of swim suits, a few Hawaiian Shirts and two pairs of jeans for "formal occasions," you're pretty much done. But "wear happens" and I've noted that my Levis have been getting -- even for Levis -- fairly grotty in the last couple of months. Yesterday, I decided they about to be redefined as "rags," and I so set off to purchase my first new pair of jeans in at least six years.
Since I'm a hit-and-run shopper I did what any American male in search of jeans-to-go would do, I turned left into the parking lot of the first Gap I saw and sauntered inside confident of my mission. Unlike my wife who tends to shop like a wild gazelle grazes -- a nip here and graze there and, presto, six different designer shopping bags -- I knew what I wanted. I also knew how much I was going to spend. Unlike my wife who never really spends any money on clothes, but only "saves" money on clothes. [ Me: "You look great in that new outfit with the shoes and the hat. How much did they cost?" Her: "Would you believe I saved over $800 on this? How great is that?" Me: "That's really great."]
I firmly believe that if you have to spend more than 15 minutes in a clothing store, you don't need what you think you need. My list was short. I wanted one pair of five pocket denim jeans, blue, crisp, and coming in at no more than $50. The Gap was the place for me.
Fool. Yes, fool. For if you want to find a pair of crisp, new blue jeans in trendy deco SoCal, you'd better pack a lunch, because you are about to find yourself trapped inside an episode of "Shop Trek."
Continued...
Evil Genius and his mole, Sooper Genius
VODKAPUNDIT Stephen Green notes in One-Party System the ominous and mysterious rise of the Koz to prominance:
I think Kerry (or some other Democrat) will position himself to be a mouthpiece for the DailyKos '08 bid to finally and fully take over the Democrat Party. Markos can rally the troops and raise lots of money, and it would take a stupid pol not to at least take a look at what Kos has to offer.All of which gives rise to this one single and telling question: "Why is it you never see a picture of the Koz with Karl Rove?"Wow - from blogger to kingmaker in six short years. That's quite a feat for Kos, and a disaster-in-the-making for the Democrats.
My sources tell me that there was a shot of them laughing and sharing a tree at the Bohemian Grove in early 2000, but that the photographer and his negatives both perished in a suspicious fire on November 4, 2000.
Plus both names contain a "K."
A NEW ARRIVAL IN THE SYCOPHANTS' HALL OF FAME TODAY IS Markos Alberto Moulitsas ("Screw 'Em") Zuniga, the hyperthyroid Janitor and lead ranter at The Daily Kos. (Am I the only one who thinks that "The Daily 'Koz' " sounds like some sort of rough and clensing Serbian high colonic? )
Kos has recently scored what must be a fluffy feather in his commodious backside with the advent of John Kerry starring in "I, Blogger". Of course, the question of whether or not the functionally illiterate John Kerry is actually pounding out the keystrokes for this Kos "Diary," or if that is left to a lackey or other low functionary is not entirely beside the point. My money is on a web monkey of some sort since the laying in of links and the terse paragraphing simply shrieks "staffing." Besides, how would an "important" man like John Kerry have time for blogging, what with his duties of not drafting legislation in the Senate, mapping out his plan to rule the world in 2008, and his decanting of his wife's third bottle of wine before tiffin all competing for his precious seconds?
No, the interesting tale of this tapeworm is not the actual blogging of the Kerrybot, but the fact that he's evidently been readmitted into the National Socialist Democratic Party of Markos Alberto Moulitsas ("Screw 'Em") Zuniga. It seems like only yesterday that Kos was calling out to have Kerry shot to death:
Daily Kos: What the hell happenedHey, come to think of it, it was only yesterday. Or at least, yesterelection.But what makes me angry was Kerry and his gang's inability to take advantage of the situation. I may regret saying this later, but fuck it -- they should be lined up and shot. There's no reason they should've lost to this joker.
Ah, how the mighty have fallen. From the standard bearer of the once mighty Democratic party, John Kerry -- presently less visible than Al Gore -- has been reduced to sucking up to Markos Alberto
Continued...THE CHRISTIANS
THE DARWINS
GETTING OFF ON THE CLUB FOOT: SPIEGEL Interview with Evolution Philosopher Daniel Dennett
SPIEGEL: Professor Dennett, more than 120 million Americans believe that God created Adam our of mud some 10,000 years ago and made Eve from his rib. Do you personally know any of these 120 million?Really? Let's see, there are currently 300 million Americans. The Spiegel's blunt assertion to which Dennet utterly agrees would mean that one in three American men, women, and children hold to the literal story of Creation -- mud, 10,000 years, case closed. One would assume that everyone would know someone at that ratio. But the number itself seems more opportunistic than true.
DENNETT: Yes.
Continued...
NO CHRISTMAS (SORRY, "HOLIDAY") SONGS OF CHEER for the New York Times as it rounds out a year of leading its braying band of defeatists and appeasers. Whatever the extended and dysfunctional family and friends of the Times may think, the market this year "thought different."
Watch the numbers. They tell a story:
NEW YORK TIMES STOCK PRICE, 2005
52 Week
High 41.21
Low 26.50
As one wag pointed out, "Their current stock price is way below Bush's current poling numbers."
As they say, "So long. Thanks for the fish wrap."
Pay no attention to the name behind the apple
ONE OF THE THINGS that escaped my report on the Pajamas OS Media convocation in New York a fortnight ago was that we decided, en masse and by acclamation, to change a blogger's name. For untold ages now, she has been known to the blogsphere as neo-neocon, but as we ascend upwards into the rarified realms of blogger celebrity this will no longer do.
Henceforth, it is a Law of the Blogsphere that neo-neocon will be called, simply, "Neo."
This adds instantly to the celebrity nature of blogging since we now have one of our own to rank with Cher and Bono.
And so it goes.
I DON'T KNOW ABOUT YOU, but I have a secret love for private emails so awful that they are copied anonymously about the Net that others may laugh and/or writhe at their innate cluelessness. It is an ancient, if not honorable, tradition and once involved flames, threats, and love notes rife with embarrassing details before people started being careful about those things.
The most recent missive to show up unbidden but cherished in my In-Box is a letter on "conflict" from some hapless dolt who has evidently been on a drip-feed of Political Correctness Kool-Aid for some decades now. This is a letter that reveals a soul teetering on the edge of catastrophic mental collapse as the liberal bromides, solutions and blather of the last few decades of academe devolve into an ever-escalating Tourette's episode from which there is no escape, only life in a strait-jacket and locked in a padded cells with hosts of fellow sufferers. All of whom have mysteriously received tenure.
Continued...OF THE MANY MILLIONS OF SONGS AVAILABLE ON ITUNES, it is more than just an accident that this one is being given away free at present in the "Alternative" category** : When The President Talks To God
When the president talks to God
Does he ever think that maybe he's not?
That that voice is just inside his head
When he kneels next to the presidential bed
Does he ever smell his own bullshit
When the president talks to God?
At the link above are the complete lyrics to this jejune and uninspired rant that catalogs the ever-revolving whines of the "oppressed" lunatics that pass themselves off as a genuine opposition party. We expect this from them. They literally have nothing else to offer other than unceasing blather in the same well-worn ruts. It's one thing to sell this song, but it is quite another to pander to these sentiments by giving them away in the midst of millions of others that you sell for 99 cents. That's not marketing, that's a statement of corporate policy.
Continued...A DECAFFEINATED MIND IS A TERRIBLE THING to use on the news. Scanning the headlines this morning I came across "Mexico Detains Man Thought Tied to Terror." On the first pass, the story brought me to a dead stop since I read the headline as "Mexico Detains Man Tied to Terror Thought."
Then again, I may just be having a moment of precognition. I think.
FROM A COMMENT added to The Oscar Encores @ AMERICAN DIGEST
"THREE 6 MAFIA: One oscar, Martin Scorcese: Zero"
When you think about it, that pretty much says it all.
JOHN STOSSEL ASKS THE BIG QUESTION AND GETS DUMB ANSWERS AT THE PUMP:
"By failing to account for inflation, the media have some Americans so alarmed that we can't think straight. "What costs more," I asked customers at a gas station: "gasoline or bottled water?" The answer I got from almost everyone was gasoline.
"At that very gas station, water was for sale at $1.29 for a 24 oz. bottle. That's $6.88 per gallon, three times what the gas station was charging for gasoline. "
I'M JUST WONDERING ( and I can't be the only one) how quickly Arianna Huffington's Huffington Post Buddy Blog will join Air America in the slaughterhouse holding pen labelled, "Liberal Media Irrelevant to Their Medium." Less than a month old and already the tedium is thicker than clotted cream from Devon, or the blood beneath the killing floor.
Continued...THERE'S SO MUCH GOOD SENSE in Peggy Noonan's And That's the Way It Was: How to revive CBS News, that it is hard to know what to highlight. So, at random, let's choose a pocket essay on exactly why The New York Times is very bad for broadcast news:
Ms. Noonan provides other measures for restoring the luster (and profitabillity) of network news. In fact, she draws those who manage it a road-map to success. Will they follow it? Not for a nano-second. They're too busy planning for their next off-roading expedition at Davos.If you allowed your fine and grizzled correspondents to find the answers and tell us, you would get a fresh and refreshing broadcast. But this does involve putting down your copy of the New York Times.
I worked at CBS 20 years ago and what was true of us then is true now, and true of every other network newsroom: They key evening news coverage off the front page of the New York Times. In Ken Auletta's piece in The New Yorker this week on Dan Rather's goodbye he has Mr. Rather in a "Front Page" mode, briskly asking his executive producer what the lead will be that night. Iraq, he answers, and part of the package keys off today's Times report.
Why do they do this? Is it because the Times knows everything? No. And network producers know it doesn't know everything. But the bosses of the producers read the Times. And the owners of the network read the Times. And the subordinates of the producers read the Times. They do this because it's there. If it's in the Times, it's real. This is a thought-hangover from 30 years ago, but it lingers.
Thirty years ago this thinking was more understandable. The Times, infuriating on any given day or not, was acknowledged as the nation's great newspaper. But the Times is now simply an esteemed newspaper. And more and more it plays to a niche, Upper West Side liberals wherever they are. It is not the voice of the age, it is a voice. So less reason than ever to key your coverage off it.
Worse, it kills creativity and enterprise. And it makes the news boring. Who wants a 7 p.m. newscast that reflects the newspaper that hit the Internet 18 hours earlier? The old excuse was, Yeah but we got moving pictures. Now however those pictures have been all over the news by the time it's 7p.m.
Turn this bad old habit on its head. Don't make "It was in the Times" the reason to do a story. Make "It was in the Times" a reason not to do it.
ISN'T IT REMARKABLE that one of our national political parties is out of power and yet strives daily to exercise it, while the other, which is in power, strives daily to avoid using it?
And it is even more remarkable that our third national party, unelected and self-selected, is our only political entity that has no problem at all with the exercise of its power.
If the Constitution is ever put up for revision, maybe we should take a long hard look at "Amendment, the First." Not to get the government into the business of the press, but just to acknowledge that the press is now in the business of government. That being the case, we'll want to revisit the parts about checks and balances.
I don't know about you, but I stand ready to sharpen my blue pencil.
A NEW POLL OUT TODAY CONFIRMS THE INEVITABLE Most Think Clinton Will Run in '08
Two-thirds of Americans believe Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton will run for president, but only one-third believe she can win, according to a national poll released Wednesday.The first is no surprise, but the mere 33% of people who even "believe" she can win has to be chilling for Mrs. Clinton's ambitions. To have come so far and yet fallen so low. How can she possibly recover? How can she have a candle's chance of grabbing the gold ring, of cashing in her big chip, of getting what is rightfully hers, of glomming on to the big one for which she has endured so much humiliation?
There is, my friends, only one way. Only one ticket will work for her and the Democrats: CLINTON-CLINTON in 08!
That's right. Hillary for President. Bill for Veep. After all, the XXII amendent doesn't say anything about the office of the Vice-President, does it? And Bill's never held that office even once. As far as Bill becoming the President again should anything happen to Mrs. Clinton, well the XXII amendment only forbids being "elected" to the office.
Say what you will, you've got to admit its a pretty slick ticket.
Many have taken and will take this theory as pure satire or, at best, a poor joke. Still others will note the Constitutional flaw, but deep within the heart of the Democratic Party you can be sure some solons will hear of it and go, "Really? Hummmmm... Well, all we'd have to do is repeal the 12th Amendment. They'd never see that coming."
[Ed. Note: American Digest would like to apologize in advance for any gastrointestinal upsets that this item may cause among its readers.]
PSEG, Exelon have a reason to keep nuclear plants: MoneyBut can we build new ones? Nope. That would be far too sane for this culture of, by, and for the Hybrid Buttinsky Caribou Love Party. After all, surely every single American can come up with $21,000 for a new Prius.Owning a nuclear power plant these days is sort of like having your own money tree. The plant pumps out cheap power, runs practically all the time, and rakes in big bucks in a time of skyrocketing electricity bills.
JAY ROSEN AT PRESSTHINK ASKS WILL COLLIER @ VODKAPUNDIT A QUESTION.
" Let me ask you something, serious question, Will: Is the point to have a dialogue with the MSM or cause its destruction?"
Much is then heard from those of us in "Commentariat." My own response was, in essence, "Quite frankly, my dear Rosen, many bloggers don't give a damn one way or the other. Dialogue or destruction aren't the only possible points.":
The point could also be to merge with [MSM] or supplant [MSM].Of course,[professional media] people could be getting upset because what used to a a single closed network of affiliations, social connections, professional associations, and a lot of nudge, nudge, wink, wink, now finds itself confronted with a much more open network of looser affiliations, social-network connections, and associations, that finds prating about professionalism without accountability noxious, with a lot of email, email, link link.
Another, perhaps deeper, source of unease among journalists collecting a check from a media company is the simultaneous revelation and discovery that there are a great many people who collect no check from any media company that are simply much better writers, editors, and checkers.
It was once the case that to assume the mantle of "writer" you had to get a job writing "for" something. Now all you need is a modem and a motive. And while I'll grant you that this means there is a lot of very bad writing swirling about, all that gets filtered out pretty quickly. What is astonishing to me is that, regardless of what subject you care to name, I can quickly discover a substantial number of people with a great deal of expertise in that area who are also quite good at expressing themselves.
And don't even get me started on the generalists....
Add to that the inescapable envy that must be felt by the "pros" as they note the vast number of online writers with solid skill sets who are also unconstrained by the "needs" and "policies" and "stylebooks" and all the other junk that media companies throw up around themselves to distinguish one apple from the next apple in the bin. Plus there's the freedom of telling it like you see it without worrying how this might affect promotion within or without the organization. On the one hand, yes, they do it for free, but on the other they are free to do it as they please. That's gotta grind like grit on the molars.
Put it all together and I don't think there's a drive to have a "dialogue" with MSM, because frankly dear Scarlett, most don't give a damn. I do think there's a yen to help MSM along to destruction but that's a fantasy ideology. MSM isn't going to any destruction that it isn't fashioning for itself. These little jabs may help it along a bit, but they aren't the determining factor.
What you've got is not some sort of battle to the death in a Hobbesian world, but simply a new species that is thriving in the online environment to an extent that MSM cannot possibly grasp, if for no other reason than that the people who still drive and direct the MSM from atop the corporations cannot, for the most part, type.
If you've ever seen the movie "The Forbin Project," you'll recall that it only got interesting when the rulers of the United States looked up and saw the message board above them begin to flash "THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM."
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UPDATE: Roger L. Simon has some parallel thoughts about writing and money at : Anonymous Grub Street
1) The meeting and the memo from Venus that decreed that a tattoo just above the butt cleavage was no longer an optional fashion accessory for females under 30, but was now mandatory.
2) The meeting and the memo from Mars that decreed that any and all hairstyles for men under 30 and costing more than $8.00 would, by law, be indistinguishable from the hairstyle all men get by sleeping on it for eight hours.
3) The meeting and the memo from The Democratic Party Headquarters on the dark side of the moon proclaiming proudly that, after many decades of pandering to and absorbing any and all minority groups (no matter how small and harebrained), the Party would at last become what it beheld and morph into a minority itself.
Filed under "You Snooze, You Lose Track."
Rev. Donald Sensing at One Hand Clapping points to a paper regarding "Intelligent Design," and does not buy in:Failure to explain the origin of species through natural causes exclusively does not mean that the cause is supernatural.
That's certainly correct as far as it goes. I'm not at all clear about "Intelligent Design," but I'm not sure that it requires that the cause be "supernatural." I understand that the proponents of ID assume or would prefer if the cause were supernatural, but I remain agnostic on that issue. It could be the workings of the hand of God, or it could be something as yet supraliminal to beings with the current set of firmware and wetware that we possess.
Continued...IF YOU ARE INTERESTED in reading some essays posted here over the years, I've got a little list here just for you. Just click ....
Continued...Does the whole Judge Alito kerfuffle already seem so last week?
The ancien regime of "Bush Lied" is back again.But then again they will always be back since, having been denied real power, they are -- for at least four years -- card-carrying members of the hard-core unemployed. Whether they are actually employable in the America that is now unfolding we will leave for another time. At present, however, we will be unable -- since so many of them are on the welfare rolls of MSM -- to avoid their fantasy reality.
Suffice it to say that we will be bombarded for the duration with a very limited stockpile of arguments. So limited that they become tedious. This week's stock of arguments past their shelf date include "Abu Ghraib, Man, Abu Ghraibi!" and the ever-popular "No WMD!" These gears will grind on until the last ding-dong of doom. But fortunately there is, every so often, a breath of sanity. In this case one Dr. Sanity, who disposes of the contemporary stains of American intellectual insanity with notable aplomb. As an example, here's something he baked up to work with the WMD delusionals.
Let's say that people in my neighborhood got together and voted (in the interests of neighborhood health) that I couldn't bake my "Death by Chocolate" cakes anymore (these cakes have been known to be lethally caloric). I reluctantly agree, and say I am complying with this order, but refuse to let anyone check by looking in my pantry.Dr. Sanity: WMD and Death By Chocolate CakeFinally, tired of being manipulated by me, and concerned that I might go ahead and bake one of those destructively high calorie cake things, my neighbors force their way into the house and find THAT I HAVE NO CAKE SITTING ON THE COUNTER WAITING TO BE EATEN! How foolish they were to doubt my word! How stupid they were to imagine I might be up to my old chocolate baking tendencies!
On the other hand, they discover while carefully going through my pantry that there are 2 boxes of devil's food cake mix; chocolate bars, cake pans, pudding mix, flour and sugar, mixing bowls and a number of other questionable items. They even find a recipe book which includes several variants on the "Death by Chocolate" Cake theme--muffins, breakfast loaf, etc. And, on top of that, they have a video showing me carrying a cake-like item out of the house the day before they barged in to verify my compliance with their silly order. They suspect that I took one of the cakes to work to share with my co-workers. I calmly refuse to tell them anything.
So what is the conclusion? That I had no pre-existing cake, waiting to be eaten? Or, that I had all the ingredients to make that cake at a moment's notice, despite my having said I wouldn't; and that I even made one just before they came to check, but had taken it somewhere else to eat?
I don't know about you, but I think if you conclude that I haven't been making my famous "Death by Chocolate" cake because one isn't sitting out on the counter for you to find, then you are more foolish than even I could possibly have imagined.
Should you feel that the swirling intellectual insanity all about you is becoming a bit too much, I suggest a session with the good doctor.
UPDATE: A reader in the comments protests, "That crazy chef did let people look in his pantry. That's why we know there were no ingredients for "Death by Chocolate" cake. The problem was the lunatic trying to lead the neighbors in a witch hunt when he realised Pantry Inspectors weren't finding anything."
To which we would reply that in the full post to which we linked, this objection -- oft repeated and repeated -- is false. Many many "ingrediants" were found and are listed at: AlphaPatriot: UN Admits Saddam Had WMD
Three little dots mark the hole in the American Civil Liberties Union's head.
You can find this statement at the top of the ACLU's web page:
It is probably no accident that freedom of speech is the first freedom mentioned in the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." The Constitution's framers believed that freedom of inquiry and liberty of expression were the hallmarks of a democratic society. [Emphasis added]Now I... love... a ... good ... elision... as much as the next writer. Those three little dots ... make it easy to leave out things that don't really buttress the case you are trying to make. But to try and slip a fast one over on people when it comes to the First Amendment is so low and craven and stupid you might think you were dealing with an organization like... well... the ACLU.
For the record, the actual text reads, in toto:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.So, using the ACLU's own metric the accurate statement would be: "It is probably no accident that freedom of religion is the first freedom mentioned in the First Amendment...." Then again, that might run against the ACLU's current message. Yes, just a tad.
One would hope that with the huge volumes of money siphoned from the credulous this year to try and put the right Democrat, with more money incinerated to try and make the wrong Democrat win, that there would not be a lot of sucker money left over for pumping into this long-running scam of an organization. But evidently they are still making enough of a payroll to continue in their disgusting little efforts to make life that much less free for anyone whose opinions they don't like. Well... okay.
But it occurs to me that a standard ACLU tactic is to both threaten and commence litigation that threatens to bankrupt organizations and communities and thus gain compliance with their demands through the kind of legal extortion that has become all too common a blight on our society. Indeed, you could say with some accuracy that the ACLU pioneered legal extortion in the United States.
That being the case, I occurs to me that somewhere there must be a group of lawyers with enough resources and time to start taking the ACLU to court. Yes, a full-court press on the ACLU. At the best, they could be denied resources they would otherwise use to advance their odious agenda. At the very least we would see how good their defense is. I think it is long past the time of trying to reason with these spiritually bankrupt bozos. Let's just bankrupt them ... period.
[HT: OpinionJournal - Best of the Web Today]
Apple machines just cost too much!
For $499 you get the Apple - Mac mini
The modular design of Mac mini lets you upgrade your current system to the elegance, simplicity and reliability of Macintosh. If you already own a monitor, keyboard and mouse, you can get up and running in minutes. Or choose any combination of new devices to meet your individual situation. And yes, Mac mini will take advantage of your two-button USB mouse with scroll-wheel and your favorite USB keyboard. Just plug them in.Over the years, I've developed a gigantic aversion to the use of the word "cool" to describe things, but I must admit that this is one time when no other word will do.
What's Apple up to with this, aside from making computers beautiful? Always hard to say what the workings of the devious Jobs mindmeld might be, but Cringely might have more than just a small clue:
Apple will take a big risk in 2005. This could be in the form of a major acquisition. With almost $6 billion in cash, Steve Jobs hinted to a group of employees not long ago that he might want to buy something big, though I am at a loss right now for what that might be. Or Apple might decide to throw some of that cash into the box along with new computers by deliberately losing some money on each unit in order to buy market share.We might see that as early as next week with the rumored introduction of an el-cheapo Mac without a display. The price for that box is supposed to be $499, which would give customers a box with processor, disk, memory, and OS into which you plug your current display, keyboard, and mouse. Given that this sounds a lot like AMD's new Personal Internet Communicator, which will sell for $185, there is probably plenty of profit left for Apple in a $499 price. But what if they priced it at $399 or even $349? Now make it $249, where I calculate they'd be losing $100 per unit. At $100 per unit, how many little Macs could they sell if Jobs is willing to spend $1 billion? TEN MILLION and Apple suddenly becomes the world's number one PC company. Think of it as a non-mobile iPod with computing capability. Think of the music sales it could spawn. Think of the iPod sales it would hurt (zero, because of the lack of mobility). Think of the more expensive Mac sales it would hurt (zero, because a Mac loyalist would only be interested in using this box as an EXTRA computer they would otherwise not have bought). Think of the extra application sales it would generate and especially the OS upgrade sales, which alone could pay back that $100. Think of the impact it would have on Windows sales (minus 10 million units). And if it doesn't work, Steve will still have $5 billion in cash with no measurable negative impact on the company. I think he'll do it.
UPDATE: We're having a small, polite religious skirmish of MAC vs. PC in the comments, but if you really want to get your geek on, try the comments at The Apple Mac Mini - Engadget - www.engadget.com
AT THE OLD NEW REPUBLIC Franklin Foer has actually jumped into the shark. This time so deeply that he can be seen emerging from the shark's anal pore. His "big idea" is that the reason the New York Times has zero credibility is because MSB "Mainstream Blogdom" has been picking on it.
Thanks to the MSB's sweeping, reckless criticisms, the Times has lost much of the credibility and authority that it needs to mount a robust defense. For this, the bloggers deserve some credit. Well done, guys.You know, even in a free speech utopia, some people are far too dumb to ever be given access to an internet connection and a keyboard. Back to the mailroom, Frank.
IN WHICH, having finally gotten my G4 back on line, I take a random walk through my Toolbar Times .
LADIES! WHY SPEND THOUSANDS ON MOOD-ENHANCING PHARMACEUTICALS when old fashioned semen exposure does the trick?
"Semen makes you happy. That's the remarkable conclusion of a study comparing women whose partners wear condoms with those whose partners don't.
"The study, which is bound to provoke controversy, showed that the women who were directly exposed to semen were less depressed. The researchers think this is because mood-altering hormones in semen are absorbed through the vagina. They say they have ruled out other explanations."
Here's one experiment many would like to replicate, and obviously calls for deeper research.
KOOKY KONSPIRACY KABAL KABBOSHES Dave Chappelle in The Chappelle Theory . Proving once again that if you have krazy ideas, the Internet is here for you.
On the other hand, it could be that he's just not that funny anymore.
MICHELLE MALKIN NAILS TIME'S LAME CHOICES to the mast with a marlin spike: "Interesting, isn't it, that Bill Gates didn't deserve the honor when he was actually creating something, but only earns Time magazine's highest praise when he's giving his money away." Why? Because if circulation keeps dropping for Time, they're going to need a billion or so from the Gates' Foundation just to keep publishing. That and the hopes of the top editors at Time for a cushy foundation job when they get booted.
THE INFINITE ZOOM via Google Video'sPowers of Ten . A filmed version of the Morrison's classic 1983 book, : Powers of Ten: The Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero
THE HYPERORGANIZED MERLIN MANN CALLS FOR A Vote: alt or option? on Flickr. Much religious affirmation or bickering ensues between the Church of the Mac and the Church of the PC. Jeff Hedglin in the comments suggests we go further in extending our extended keyboards with new keys.
So far, our keyboards have seen "Escape", "Function", "Control", "Alternate", "Option", "Delete", "Home", "Pause", "End", "Insert", and "Enter".Can I suggest some new keys?
"Action" - just do something.
"Reverse" - back out of that dangerous "Action" you just took.
"Procrastinate"
"Hide" - always a good one.
"Find"
DEMONSTRATING ONCE AGAIN HOW THE HARD-CORE LIBERTARIAN ATTITUDE makes the "Party" marginal is this warm and welcoming lead from the dubiously named Hammer of Truth "Don’t bother reading on if you voted for either Bush or Kerry last time, as the material provided is either over your head or very likely to piss you off. " Well, okay, we'll just shuffle on off and leave you with one percent of the electorate, most of whom don't vote on "principle." Play nice, kids.
YOUR WEEKLY REALITY CHECK courtesy of the brilliant victor Hanson: Lancing the Boil
"Like it or not, wars are usually won or lost when one side feels its losses are too high to continue. We have suffered terribly in losing 2,100 dead in Iraq; a vastly smaller enemy in contrast may have experienced tens of thousands of terrorists killed, and is finding its safe havens and money drying up. Panic about Iraq abounds in both the American media and the periodic fatwas of Dr. Zawahiri — but not in the U. S. government or armed forces."
You've gotta love the Axis of Panic.
No sooner had I posted the item below than a reader noted in the Comments on Dear Seth, The First Thing to Know Is to "Enable Comments!" -- "Apparently the ethereal Seth neither eats, sleeps, nor braves the elements, since his lists don't include such red-state skills as cook dinner, make the bed, or wash your clothes. Are all our thinkers being raised by wolves these days?"
A fair question to which the answer, I suppose, is, "No, those who think that they're thinkers were probably raised by parents expecting the advent of ovine avialtion before the Second Coming." Looking over Seth's list and the one's that he's plucked out of his trackbacks, I'm seeing a slight trend towards the real world, but only as far as "The Real World via MTV."
All of which brought to mind the famous quote by Robert Heinlein in Time Enough for Love
A human being should be able toIt seems to me that the items on this particular list should be among the first given to children during their formative years and, with the exception of the last, none should be graduated from high school without demonstrating proven abilities in each of them.Specialization is for insects. - RobertHeinlein
- change a diaper,
- plan an invasion,
- butcher a hog,
- conn a ship,
- design a building,
- write a sonnet,
- balance accounts,
- build a wall,
- set a bone,
- comfort the dying,
- take orders,
- give orders,
- cooperate,
- act alone,
- solve equations,
- analyze a new problem,
- pitch manure,
- program a computer,
- cook a tasty meal,
- fight efficiently,
- die gallantly.
Are there others? I think it is the height of hubris to go for 1,000 unless, like Seth Godin, you're planning on picking other's brains to help you make a tidy little PDF book for free.
How many abilities should any person have in order to get through life in a reasonable manner?
Here, at least, comments are OPEN.
Here's a bit of surprising antisemitism hiding at Modern Marketing - Collaborate Marketing Services: FCUK Open Source
While following a link trail this morning, I called up the above article. A bit edgy that title. Flopping the UC to the CU.
What was disturbing, however, was not the title of the page, but the title of the link in the raw html address. This is (at least for now):
www.collaboratemarketing.com/modernmarketing/2004/11/fcuk_jews.html
This company bills itself as "Our specialism is planning marketing campaigns that respect this new world. We mix traditional marketing activities such as design, PR and advertising with new digital techniques to create powerful communications programmes."
I've written the site to ask: "Do you think this file name is proper for your site?"
I'll be interested in their reply.
===
REPLY, UPDATE AND CORRECTION: James @ collaboratemarketing.com talks about the background of the unfortunate filename in the comments to this item.
FCUK is a European brand name for a company called French Connection UK. They use the play on the name to appeal to an edgy teengae audience. In a conversation with a fellow UK blogger, we were discussing the possibility of brands being hijacked for evil reasons. I initially gave the post that title but then changed it thinking it was a bit much. However, the filename had been created. Once again apologies for any offence. (I am actually Jewish myself, thus my interest in my fellow bloggers comments.)That seems more than reasonable to me and I accept this explanation and apologize for taking offense so quickly at something that the software puts beyond his control.
Those of us who have cast the legacy media of printed newspapers behind can, for all the advantages of electronic news, miss out on certain crimes against the language that are being committed every day. Crimes so disgusting that I for one believe the perps should be sought out and given a long swing on a short length of knotted hemp.
This morning my wife, who for parenting purposes still believes in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and printed newspapers, brought a two disturbing examples of the Lost Angeles Times' continuing felonious assault on the English language to my attention -- a misdemeanor and a felony.
The misdemeanor headline can be seen online:
Bringing Serious Bling to Colorado Boulevard
But the deeper shame is on the continued or jump page from that story where the innocent and utterly unprepared reader is greeted with the overwhelmingly awful headline:
Rose Queen Will Bling in the New Year
I knew that there would be no stopping the penetration of the spoken language by "bling" more than a
Continued...Because nobody asked me, here are my current picks in the Wizbang 2004 Weblog Awards.
MOST IMPORTANT CATEGORY! Best Essayist: AMERICAN DIGEST aka "ME." Because I would like to get at least 2% of the vote. And by the way, why isn't The Belmont Club in this list? He'd give Hanson and Lileks a run for their money.
Best Overall: Has to be Glenn ( PostBot) Reynolds @ Instapundit. I know it was an election year. Oh, I do know. But look... Up every day at the crack of dawn for an email stack as tall as Jack's Beanstalk. Most important portal site in the sphere. All upside except for the infrequent slips back into the abyss of cat-blogging. (Hey, who's drug free these days?)
I would vote for The Belmont Club but it really is out of category here. Wretchard is one of our best essayists and that's where he should have been. Putting him here is inexplicable.
Best Group? : No contest. Winds of Change for reach and depth. Not to mention the spiritual edge on the weekends.
New Kid on the Block: INDC Journal For advanced moonbat research if for nothing else.
Big Yucks: protein wisdom. Because Jeff promised me three wishes.
It wasn't in what Bush said or how he said it. Nor was it in what he didn't say. it wasn't in the common touch parts, or the "Memo to America Re: My Upcoming Programs" part. It wasn't in the cheers or the protesters hustled out. It really wasn't in any of that because every part was what was expected, and what was practiced -- over and over again. Smooth and, you will excuse me, not entirely lacking in nuance. Yesterday was Miller Time. Tonight was a Noh Drama. It contrasted well with the D'oh Drama played out last month in Boston.
What it was in was the way in which the erstwhile "opponent" felt so behind, so defeated, so crushed that he felt he had to, he just had to, rush onto the airwaves and froth into the slipstream. Except for his dwindling pack of true believers, nobody watched, nobody listened --except to mock -- and nobody waved goodbye.
If I had any secret doubts that John Kerry has lost this election , and lost it big-time, they are now swept away by his blast of blather in the last hour.
I don't expect Bush or the RNC to back off of Kerry one centimeter for one nanosecond. It is important, for many reasons, that Kerry and the depraved version of the Democratic Party he leads to be crushed into compost so that a new party can grow back in its place. But I do expect Senator Kerry to sleep with Senator Kennedy's fishes.
Now, if we could just figure out how to start a recall election in Massachusetts.
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Protest!
ZZMike: "One of these day's I'll join a Wal-Mart protest. I'll carry a sign reading "Down With Low Prices!!! Down with Wide Selections!!!" -- AMERICAN DIGEST: Comment on The Enduring Greatness of Walmart
PermaLink"Hell, I even dislike their dislike of dogs."
I find myself increasingly repulsed by Muslim practices and beliefs. Middle Eastern, African, Asian, American, the country of origin makes no difference. Women and children treated as chattel, genital mutilation, child brides, honor killings, culturally accepted pedophilia, the black drapes and head coverings, no rights, no votes, little to non-existent educational opportunities, no voice, no choices, no recourse. Persecution of homosexuals. Imprisonment, stoning and whipping for morality crimes. Lack of free speech. The foul treatment of non-Muslims in Islamic countries. The demented hatred of Jews. Sharia Law. Wahhabism. Madrasas. Blind obedience to Mullahs. Praying towards Mecca -- a place on the map few will ever see. Individuality is shut down, originality and freedom of the mind discouraged. Islam pisses on human talents that fall outside the dark walls of its faith. Hell, I even dislike their dislike of dogs. -- Scheherazade Needs A New Tale « Jaded Haven
Dean Koontz on Frankenstein
s professors twist Mary Shelley’s themes—and even turn them upside down—to endorse this or that modern attitude or political viewpoint. Of the several reasons why the book is a classic, perhaps the most important is the portrayal of Victor Frankenstein as a compassionate utopian destroyed by hubris. The history of humanity is soaked in blood precisely because we throw ourselves into the pursuit of one utopia after another, determined to perfect this world that cannot be perfected.
Of all centuries, the 20th was the bloodiest because of Hitler’s National Socialism, Lenin’s and Stalin’s and Mao’s and Pol Pot’s and Castro’s versions of Communism; as many as 200 million were murdered or killed in war because of these utopian schemes. Victor Frankenstein, utopian of the first order, hoped to perfect God’s creation, to reanimate the deceased and thus defeat death, and his project could result only in calamity, for it was against the natural law and common sense.
Via KA-CHING!
Guess Who
The French think he’s rude. The Germans want him to stop spending. The Indians want him to mix his nose out of their environmental business. The North Koreans think he’s a joke. The Iranians won’t acknowledge his calls. And the British can’t even come up with a comprehensive opinion of him.
As for the Chinese, he’s too frightened to even glance their way. -- Editorial: I Told You So – Yes I Did - Galganov.com
Charles Johnson's Drool-Cup Runneth Over Even as His Site Empties
Lawrence Auster had Johnson's number 2 years ago:
"Basically LGF seems to consist of Charles Johnson consigning people to oblivion on the basis of no facts and no arguments, followed by Johnson's followers crying, "Yes, Charles, yes! LGF is the greatest website! I'm so proud to be at LGF!", along with various other grunts and one-line ejaculations that convey no intelligible ideas but only assent. So there is the marginalization of the Outsider by the Leader, and the mindless banding together of followers around the Leader based on such marginalization of the Outsider. Sound familiar? I can't say I have ever seen anything remotely resembling this kind of behavior at Brussels Journal. I have, however, seen it in abundance every time I've read "Little Green Footballs" in the few days that I've been perusing the site. Take a look at the current LGF thread, "The Mask Comes Off," and see the mindless, mob quality of it." -- The method of Charles Johnson
Cool Hats and Hollywood Communists
Dalton Trumbo wore very cool hats.
Dalton Trumbo may have been a good screen-writer. Dalton Trumbo may have been screwed by HUAC. Dalton Trumbo may still be a Hollywood darling and the subject of a recent hagiographic offering by PBS. But I am here to tell you that Dalton Trumbo was also a Communist acolyte of Joseph Stalin, a denier of the gulag, and a maligner of truth-tellers like Koestler and Kravchenko. He was in short a useful idiot member of the American Communist Party. -- Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche: Inbound, from the Internet
Gorism
Al Gore as our soon-to-be, first carbon billionaire.
Accounts included both his earlier and contemporary angry denials that he was greedy, or had used his vast network of government contacts to influence public loans, contracts, and regulations, in parlaying a 2001 net worth of $2 million apparently into a green empire of several hundred million....
To distill Gorism is to live in a 1,000 sq. ft. solar house, bike to work, and take the train on long distances; but to promote Gorism, one lives in a mansion, jets on private planes, and is chauffeured from airport to conference center—a rather heavy carbon footprint indeed. I mention that because this week he has insisted that he only invested in what he believes in and is thus not a hypocrite—sort of like a 1990s Fannie or Freddie director saying he is only taking mega-bonuses because he believes in public support for housing.
Works and Days » The Discreet Charm of the Left-wing Plutocracy
Rush Limbaugh: The Interview
Worth listening to. Just click play and listen in the background. You'll come back to the foreground often.
Headslap
At their Monday night poker game in hell, I’ll bet Stalin, Hitler and Mao are kicking themselves: “ ‘It’s about leaving a better planet to our children?’ Why didn’t I think of that?” This is Two-Ply Totalitarianism—no jackboots, no goose steps, just soft and gentle all the way. Nevertheless, occasionally the mask drops and the totalitarian underpinnings become explicit. Take Elizabeth May’s latest promotional poster: “Your parents f*cked up the planet. It’s time to do something about it. Live Green. Vote Green.” As Saskatchewan blogger Kate McMillan pointed out, the tactic of “convincing youth to reject their parents in favour of The Party” is a time-honoured tradition. -- Gullible eager-beaver planet savers - Mark Steyn - Macleans.ca
Dr. Johnson on the dangers of drinking kool-aid on command
"Yes, Sir; and from what I have heard of him, one would not wish to sacrifice himself to such a man. If he must always have somebody to drink with him, he should buy a slave, and then he would be sure to have it. They who submit to drink as another pleases, make themselves his slaves."Paging Newt Gingrich.
In Real Times
The Tea Party world
is still that of genuinely funny things -- not the sour mordancy of Letterman; it is still one of basic fears and simple joys, of aching feet and a welcome ice-cream soda at the end of the day. Some people spend their whole lives trying to get away from it; to forget the memory of people sitting around a sunny porch eating peanuts, to try with various expensive unguents to wash the smell of new-mown grass and two stroke gasoline fumes from their hair. That is what "success" all too often means in certain circles. That and a line of white powder across a table. In the end they may arrive at a palace of chrome and glass, all cold air and ice at some dizzying height above the world. But they must always remember, or forget at their peril, that it is all upborne by truth and human love. -- Belmont Club » Bows and Flows
No PROBLEM. We've Done This Thousands of Times
of the old inboard motors in these vintage wooden boats you'll know what I mean when I say heads all over the marina snapped 'round when the twin Chrysler Hemi V-8's caught a spark and roared to life. Idling out and clearing the end of the marina, there was a small voice on one shoulder telling me to start slow and take it easy as the old power plants probably hadn't been run hard in who knows how long. On the other shoulder however was the slightly more insistent voice of "Old Vatted Demerara Rum" saying "Pour the coals to her!" Throwing caution to the wind, I pushed the throttles forward as far as they would go and the old wooden boat surged out of the water and was at top speed as I passed the last dock in the marina and burst into the open water of Lake Washington.
When something of a mechanical nature goes sideways on a boat running at speed.... -- The Demon Rum: « WESTSOUND MODERN
Another Burning Question of Life
"When was the last time you sat on a couch upside down and looked about the house? Kids do that all the time, and I have done it again and thought, "Whoa - I seriously need to vacuum." And "So that's where that [object/thing] went." -- Mikey commenting on Side-Lines: One of the Burning Questions of Life
Know When to Hold Them. Know When to Fold Them.
What happens next?
The President took a lot of the nation's hopes as political capital into the Big Casino. Now, after sitting at the tables for 9 months, there's only a small pile left of what was once a mountain of chips. Is the next hand going to win him big? Is he going to double down again? Or get up and catch a cab home, in case what's left in his pocket will cover it. Or will he write out a check on the basis of the family farm and spin the wheel of fortune again on the basis of his faith in the fundamental goodness of America's enemies? Order another round of drinks for everybody on the house? Go watch a play on Broadway and keep being Diamond Jim long after all the real diamonds have been hocked for paste? Is there a point where betting on hope means stuck on stupid? -- Belmont Club ｻ Another turn of the wheel
Great Question
Exurban Jon asks:
With all the advances in scientific knowledge why has no one designed a manlier Kleenex box?
One of the Burning Questions of Life
Here's a burning question I was reminded of by the video: do you eat your candy corn in sections? And, if so, do you consider the top to be the yellow part or the white part? I've always seen the little white triangle as the "foot" of the candy corn, but I learned when I designed my costume years ago that most people see it the other way. -- neo-neocon » Blog Archive » Get ready for Candy Corn Day
The Haywood Jablome Memorial Quote of the Day
Image via Wikipedia
Would Larry David Piss On an Image of Obama?
Image via Wikipedia
"Northwest Nap"
Urban DictionaryA very deep sleep where you are unable to hear telephones, text messages, and even the Air Force. Named to honor the two fine pilots from Northwest Airlines and there little "in flight snooze"
A Cow Is Born
Ms. McCain's failure to grasp that her prominence as a "writer," rather than as a Paris Hilton-style reality show performer, is owed first to her famous father, and second, to the fact that this is the Age of the Idiot.
Idiots have come into their own in a big way, courtesy of depraved consumers, and complicit TV producers and publishers, of pixel and paper alike. The duller you are and the louder you crow in contemporary America, the better you do. Clearly, Meghan McCain is not working with much ─ and is eminently qualified to dim debate in the Age of the Idiot. A familial predisposition, it would seem. John McCain finished 894th out of 899 at the Naval Academy and lost five jets. As IQ ace Steve Sailer once quipped, "To lose one plane over Vietnam may be regarded as a heroic tragedy; to lose five planes here and there looks like carelessness." -- By ILANA MERCER
Steve Jobs Hates Halloween
The next year, I get a bunch of guys from Pixar to come over and we make the most amazing Halloween lawn you've ever seen, with shitloads of stupid coffins and ghosts and a skeleton playing the piano. We have music, and lights, the whole works. Meanwhile, Larry comes over and brings a bunch of Navy SEAL type guys that he knows. In addition to all the stupid Halloween decorations, we rig up water cannons on the perimeter of the yard and up in the trees, loaded with a mixture of water, bleach and gasoline. We plant IEDs in the lawn, loaded with rock salt, and at each corner we put a dispenser that blasts pepper gel. We lay exposed wires across the lawn carrying enough current to knock you out, but not kill you. Then we put on our black commando outfits, and blacken our faces, and we wait. -- The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs
Hand me the gun. No, the bigger one.
Watching this will be either the funniest or most disgusting 2-minutes of your day.
Gearslamming Candidate Grabs Coveted Iowahawk Endorsement
"Canuck reader Maryann Crabtree forwards this photo of the candidate posing proudly in front of his Two Lane Blacktop - worthy 1955 Chevy 210 2-door sedan. Note missing rear bumper. Note radiused rear wheel well. Note nose-up gasser stance. Note the all-bidness custom paint, which appears to be a blend of Hugger Orange and Riverside Red. An educated guess tells me that lurking under the hood is a high winding destroked 301 small block, mating a 2-bolt main 327 with a 283 crank, with a set of Doug Thorley or Hooker headers huffing through glass packs. White ball Hurst shifter atop a Muncie 4-speed, natch. Visual cues indicate this photo was taken circa 1969; thus, while his Congressional cohort was tripping on brown acid in the mud at Max Yasgur's farm, Mr. Hoffman was gearslamming down the quarter mile at Fulton Speedway. (via iowahawk: Iowahawk Endorses ) @ Van der Leun
“Hey boys, We’re from Seattle and we’re lost…Can you help us out?”
filmed in and around these counties, understand that the foul mouthed, hot tempered, illiterate rednecks featured on this show are the creme de la creme of mossback society. Supported mostly by what is left of the logging industry in these parts, they live largely in dilapidated singlewides surrounded by clearcut woodlands and collections of the rusted remains of every car, truck, motor, transmission, and assorted piece of machinery or scrap metal that have been handed down through generations from father to son. To a city boy like I was at the time, they were suspect in every way. Which leads me to the proverbial hole in the donut of this tale. -- WESTSOUND MODERN
I'm slowly becoming convinced I have Attention Deficit Diso-look-a-puppy!
The Spirit Of Ecstasy
is the name of the hood ornament on Rolls-Royce cars. It is in the form of a woman leaning forwards with her arms outstretched behind and above her. The Spirit of Ecstasy carries with it a story about a secret passion between John Walter Edward Scott-Montagu and his secret love Eleanor Velasco Thornton, his secretary. -- Best of Wikipedia
Peggy Noonan Still Doesn't Get It...
What Noonan is so far refusing to understand is that, although Obama is narcissistic and likes adulation, he's not primarily interested in popularity -- except as a tool to policy. Policy is paramount, and his goal is not to be responsive to what the American people want, nor to hear their actual concerns and then to shape policy around them. His goal is to tell them what they want, to lie if required, to silence and ridicule and chastise and threaten the opposition, and if necessary to pull every political trick he can get away with in order to ram his agenda down our recalcitrant throats.Why neo-neocon is not writing a column for the Wall Street Journal is a mystery that passeth all understanding.
The Four Rules of Lying
That way even those who know he is lying will think he is lying in a “good” cause. If the last refuge of scoundrels is the flag, the ultimate protective banner is the Red Flag. Hannah Arendt once wrote “Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear.” Find the hole in your audience’s brain and drive your truck of manure through it.The second rule is to put forward the most extravagant claims.
Don’t be half-assed about lying. The more extravagant the fib the better. A sufficiently resourceful fraud clears his path of unbelievers by sheer audacity alone. Tell a big enough lie and no one would believe you could be so bold. As the fictional Rudolf Rassendyl proved in the Prisoner of Zenda that it is better to pass yourself off as King of Ruritania rather than a minor noble. A minor noble may be questioned, but the King will not be. It is all or nothing. And given that no one wants to tug at the Royal Robe to see if it is real ermine, the fraudster often gets it “all”.The third rule is that when questioned, destroy the questioner.
When impersonating the King be determined to have everyone who doubts your identity thrown in the tower for treason. Once you succeed in beheading the first challenger there will be no second challenges.The fourth rule is the most important. Avoid trying to bluff those who are too big to be faced down.
What undid both Fairey and Ward Churchill was that they didn’t know when to stop their imposture. They finally took it too far. Fairey, who had been successful up to that point tried to bluff his way past a major news organization and failed. Ward Churchill was already a professor when he made his “little Eichmanns” speech after 9/11 unleashed a tide of outrage he couldn’t outface. If Fairey had not launched his poster and Churchill had not made his “little Eichmanns” speech, they might still be intellectuals in good standing.
WH: 'If we've lost Anderson Cooper, we've lost one of our best tea-baggers."
I have an uneasy feeling only 10 months into the new administration that we're beginning to see the symptoms of this same kind of animus developing in the Obama administration. And as those of use who served in the Nixon administration know, that can get you in a lot of trouble... Don't create an enemies list." -- Anderson Cooper Compares Obama to Nixon, Spotlights Declining Approval Ratings | NewsBusters.org
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