5-Minute Arguments
The horns of our illegal alien dilemma are simple to state. Those who oppose the illegals among us insist that the bulk of them, being Mexican, be deported forthwith from the soil of the United States. Those who support the de facto presence of these 17 million human beings assert that it is not only immoral but simply impossible to deport such a number. Both these propositions seem a bit extreme to me as well as unimaginative. Applying a bit of imagination to this clefstick yields an acceptable compromise.
While it is clear that allowing 17 million residents to break the law is unacceptable if you wish to continue a society based upon the law, it is also clear that sending anybody back into the global chancre that is Mexico against their will is immoral. Sending anybody to Mexico forcibly should be reserved as a punishment in our penal system, and not seen as a part of our immigration policy.
Indeed, most of the illegal and legal people of Mexican descent among us are here because their were both astute enough to see Mexico as it is, and resourceful enough to get the hell out of there. When all is said and done, the primary "cause" of illegal immigration is not that the United States is so great, but that Mexico sucks about as deeply as a country can and still not blow up. For the most part we benefit by receiving the cream of the Mexican gene pool any way we can get them. I present the wide availability of a decent mole sauce as exhibits A, B, and C. But still, the law is the law.
Hence the problem becomes how to send 17 million Mexicans back to Mexico in a moral and humane fashion. (While keeping our strategic reserve of mole sauce high at the same time.)
Please do not tell me "It can't be done." It can of course be done. True, it will not be done overnight by clicking the heels of the ruby shoes of the Deportation Fairy and saying, "For 17 million of you there's no place like home." Nope. They got here in dribs and dabs, and back they shall go the same way. The underutilized Greyhound buses that are still networked throughout the lower 48 states will serve well for this purpose as well as giving a much needed boost to Greyhound's stock.
Getting the illegals back to Mexico will be a simple matter of rounding them up and getting them to the bus on time. The shuttling of the Mexicans to the border and beyond will take some time, but with half the energy the government devotes to scanning your ass at the airport, it can be accomplished in about 18 months tops once the system gets rolling. Do the math. It breaks down to about 31,000 one-way border deliveries a day. Well within the core competency of Greyhound.
Of course, the real problem of this is that, as alluded to above, sending anyone to Mexico against their will is immoral. Unless, of course, they are armed. Then it is not only moral but beneficial to humanity in general. For this I will suggest handing out, to our deportees as they depart, not only a little spending money but some critical "democracy tools" from "The Unwelcome Wagon of the USA" along with a breakfast burrito and a Pepsi.
The problem with Mexico is not that it is an oligarchy masquerading as a democracy (which it is). but that that the democratic/peoples component of the Mexican political equation is essentially unarmed. The Mexican oligarchy has, as oligarchies will, most of the guns and the lion's share of the ammunition in the form of the Mexican armed forces.
So it seems to me that if what we are up to is deporting illegal Mexican aliens back to Mexico, the least we can do is send them off with one of the true gifts of American democracy -- an assault rifle and a case or two of ammunition. Arriba!
This will solve one of the major problems implicit in the forced deportation of Mexicans back to Mexico, i.e. the forced destabilization of Mexico.
It is obvious that the opportunities and money available to illegal aliens in the United States is one of the few safety valves available to the ruling Mexican oligarchy. After all, if we didn't exist the ruling families of Mexico would have to either cut the wretched of Mexico in on the petroleum pie or face civil war. Remember that Mexico is a country in which one of the richest men has more money than 17 million of his fellow citizens put together. As long as we're covering the oligarchy's ass with our porous northern border, the steady state of Mexico's de facto dictatorship can survive. And who needs a dictatorship on our southern border?
We need to stop propping up Mexican fascists by importing their excess angst. We need to initiate a policy for illegal alien deportation that involves the importation of first rate American assault weapons. Once that happens the future for the ruling families of Mexico starts to look a little more sketchy than it has been up to now.
This compromise has two other benefits to America.
First, it gives our home grown armaments industries a much needed shot in the arm. After all, outsourcing the manufacture of your weapons to a foreign country (as has recently been suggested) is not always a cost-effective way of planning for your future as an independent nation.
Second, it gives a lot of repatriated Mexicans a shot (so to speak) at making their country a true democracy at last.
Of course, you may say that a wise and far sighted Mexican oligarchy would simply shoot these repatriated citizens as they crossed the border with assault rifle and bandoliers. Well, perhaps, but I think we could counter that by using the US Army, Navy, and Air Force to provide safe passage, protected corridors, and air cover for all the armed Mexicans until they got back to the city or village of their choice. After that, they'd be on their own. Back in Mexico with a few bucks, a weapon, and more than a few rounds to go around.
An economic bonus to this is that it would enable the US to stop paying for security on the southern border. After the first 50,000 or so pistoleros repatritatos were walked back deep into Mexico courtesy of the 101st Airborne, Mexico would look to seal up the border all by itself. If they got too carried away with the 101st there could be an opening for a whole new political party in Mexico overnight.
Sounds revolutionary to me.
An item in my RSS feed that vanished on the site it came from:
"We in Denmark cannot figure out why you are even bothering to hold an election."On one side, you have a b*tch who is a lawyer, married to a lawyer, and a lawyer who is married to a b*tch who is a lawyer.
"On the other side, you have a true war hero married to a woman with a huge chest who owns a beer distributorship.
"Is there a contest here?"
Update: Originally seen at The Anchoress.
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."
Sippican Cottage: I'm The Only Serial Killer In Massachusetts
I've seen people painstakingly build Web edifices of large handfuls of monomaniac patrons, being counted over and over as they compulsively visit a page and yell stuff in the comments. Then the bloggers get a book deal based on the traffic numbers and no one buys it. It's as if you got every person that stands on a highway overpass and yells at traffic to sign off on your business plan. If I had to rename the Internet right now, "Potemkin" would appear somewhere in its new title.
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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.
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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....
[Note: Last seen 1 year ago this week. Still a plan I pray is put into place to save us from our fast approaching DOOM! ]
Hybrid government issue cars for all Americans, Free! (Well, almost)
The Didik: Rejoice! Your Government's Car is Here to Help You Kill Global Warming. Varoooonk!
"That we may once again breathe the clean, clear, and downsized air of freedom." -- Jenna Bush, 46th President of the United States
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."
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"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.
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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:
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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.]
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.
Once a blogpile of such mountainous proportions starts, there's little left to comment on in terms of the content of Stein's small dry excretion after the first five hours. By that time the whole quisling screed has been pretty much picked apart like a biology major dissects an owl's pellet and glues the contents to a board with captions.
Then it is time for the masters of the trade to go to work and perform, live and on the air, "The Final Evisceration." In this case, Hugh Hewitt comes forward with what is perhaps one of the best full flensings of his career. [Pointer and "flensing" courtesy of LILEKS (James) ]
If you have ever wanted to hear a classic radio interview cooly calculated to have the interviewee reveal himself in all his naked smallness before a national audience, you owe it to yourself to listen and read the audio and transcript of Hugh Hewitt interviewing Joel Stein. You owe it to yourself to listen to this segment -- and you'll need to listen in order to understand what comes next. You don't have to listen to all of it, although it is hard to turn the ear away. Just listen attentivily to the voice of Stein himself for a minute or so.
Go ahead. I'll wait here.
Back? Good.
What is of interest to me here is not what Stein writes or says. His own words damn him more decisively than a thousand bloggers blathering blithely What interestest me is how he speaks.
If you focus on it, you realize that you hear this voice every day if you bounce around a bit in our larger cities buying this or ordering that, and in general running into young people in the "service" sector -- be it coffee shop, video store, department store, boutique, bookstore, or office cube farm. It's a kind of voice that was seldom heard anywhere but now seems to be everywhere.
It is the voice of the neuter .
I mean that in the grammatical sense:
"a. Neither masculine nor feminine in gender.
"b. Neither active nor passive; intransitive,"
and in the biological sense:
"a. Biology Having undeveloped or imperfectly developed sexual organs: the neuter caste in social insects.
"b. Botany Having no pistils or stamens; asexual.
"c. Zoology Sexually undeveloped."
You hear this soft, inflected tone everywhere that young people below, roughly, 35 congregate. As flat as the bottles of spring water they carry and affectless as algae, it
Continued...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."
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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."
====
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