Truth @ Slant
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.
Of course the number-one-with-bullet Frequently Answered Question® in today's post-racial America is:
Are you a racist?
Well, if the truth were told, who isn't? But say either "No," or "Who you calling a racist?" or "Get out of my face you dumb chunk of human garbage!"
As we all know, this question is never answered in the affirmative -- except by white liberals seeking to curry favor, get a date, or be declared legally black.
Indeed, this question doesn't have to be answered. The fact that you are being asked the question establishes that you are, indeed, a racist. This is primarily true if you happen to be of the white persuasion, but can also be true is you are of a member of a majority-minority. This means any minority which is larger than any other minority present.
Hence, a Native American gets to ask an African-American if he is a racist because the Native American is from a minority-minority (unless the encounter is happening in a Casino). However, the "once-was-a-slave" rule comes into play here since the minority-minority was only conquered and subjugated, rather than captured and subjugated and made to take a long, unpleasant sea voyage. By invoking the "once-was-a-slave" rule an African-American, even if one of the majority-minority, can reasonably deny racism since, having invented the "Are you a racist?" gambit, African-Americans cannot, ipso facto, be racist. Got it? Good. There will be a spot quiz on this question when you least expect it for the next 50 years so you'd better get crisp about it.
Was George Bush legally elected president the first time?
Only ask this question if you've got the next five hours to burn.
Is it still George Bush's fault?
Silly Rabbit, studies have shown that everything since and including the Crucifixion of Christ is George Bush's fault.
Have you lost weight?
Always an excellent question to ask. The answer doesn't matter and the asker really doesn't care unless he or she is about to hit you up for a loan.
Do you want fries with that?
Hey, if you wanted fries with that you'd have ordered the Happy Meal.
Do you love me?
Three answers only are allowed: "Yes. Of course. Yes, but..." Be careful with that last one.
The caption at NASA's "Astronomy Picture of the Day" page reads: "Atlantis to Orbit."
The filename of the picture reads: nightlaunch.
And I am moved by the poetry of this most modern of images, not by the triumph of Reason which it seems to enshrine, but by that which is beyond Reason yet within it all the same.
In thinking about this brief essay I could not help but think of a longer one by Doctor Bob at The Doctor Is In about a "civilized" European nation that cannot stop itself from taking the next step down into the pit; its people driven, as "reasonable" people always are, by the inexorable demands of "what is reasonable."
In the work of Goya we see how that great soul, having walked the carnage cloaked landscapes of his era, came to understand the deepest cry of the Enlightenment: El sueño de la razon produce monstruos. ["The sleep of reason breeds monsters."]
Ah well, the bones of the Enlightenment lie buried in a shallow grave somewhere along the Western Front. It had some nice ideals, but left us living rapt in the spell of Reason.
And now we are a "reasonable" society. Now we are a "scientific people" swaddled in a million theories of management -- convinced that all of creation can be, somehow, managed through the limitless employment of Reason. Many of us, as we have seen in the past month, worship "intelligence uber alles," that strange and deadly viral god of the mad mind that kills the soul long before it kills the nations that embrace it. We see the apotheosis of this worship leap up from the dazed lands of Europe. We see it arc across our own skies. We feel the sting of its acid rain on our upturned, stunned faces.
Continued...
"You know what blood looks like in a black and white video?
Shadows, Shadows..."
-- John Prine
The pictures stream as always. The suffering they display, like meat in a butcher's window, is as it always is. A people with measly mean nothing at the beginning of their day greet the night with less than nothing.
The disaster is so perverse that the shabbier your dwelling was the safer you were. Those that lived in walls of sticks driven into mud and roofed with leaves had a better chance at life than those who dwelt in concrete and brick or wattle and daub. When the tremors stopped the hut dwellers dug out those who were at least one rung up on the ladder of what passed, until just the other day in Haiti, for "the good life."
Within the electronic stream of reports, the reporters report as they always do. The albino wraith of Anderson Cooper gestures in the dust, shining white and well-coifed against a sea of black survivors. Cooper and his colleagues lack the soul necessary to narrate what is unfolding before their eyes. Instead they stumble towards a hyperbole commensurate with what they see and smell as they glide through the rubble in their bubble of privilege.
Blessed by the news stars' presence "the Get" in Haiti streams up to the satellites and out over the roof of the world. Especially gripping footage taken from above or from a passing jeep is looped over and over to add images to the reporters' reports of the unimaginable. The frantic digging in the rubble with hands and sticks. The dead limbs and faces mottled with blood and dust. The child with the makeshift bandage wrapped around her jaw. The father carrying the limp young boy in his arms along the shattered street. The grainy 30 seconds of surveillance footage in which the earth begins to bob and leap and jump about as small human figures scuttle towards any place other than where they are; towards someplace safe when nowhere is safe.
The prayers and pleas are prayed and pled as they always are. "Give till it hurts." "Give until you drop." "The need is without bottom." "These are the charities with 'good track records' at getting the most of your dollar to those in the most need." These are the voices that remind Americans about "how generous Americans are; how generous Americans always are."
The president, grateful that the story of the day is not about him, stands with his strange and useless vice-president and his stranger still secretary of state, and promises that America will assist, as America always assists, and that Americans will give as Americans always have given. His factotums on either side bob their heads up and down in assent like two drinking birds over the glass.
We know the drill by now and we know what we shall see. Large airplanes landing and taking off. Perhaps a carrier task force and a landing that doesn't look too much like an amphibious invasion by the Marines. All these will bring in aid and help and comfort and, after a time, all these will leave. And after some time later, America will be back to being hated by all those in Haiti and elsewhere who have always hated it and who have no ability to alleviate suffering themselves, only extend it.
That's how it will be and how it always is. Still, a certain tomorrow is not reason not to act today to stop the suffering in the ruins of yesterday. And so we shall go on until this particular task is done. We're Americans. It is what we do in these times of crisis. It is what we do while working hard to reduce ourselves to the status of the third world where, no nation being exceptional, all nations shall be equal in squalor and suffering.
Before then, there will be a point when -- if the numbers killed are as we have been told -- the dead will be stacked like cord word somewhere in the deforested fields of Haiti. Then they'll be soaked with diesel fuel and burned like so much trash. You'll smell the smoke for miles. Footage of these "funerals" will most likely not be streamed but clips will find their way to LiveLeak or other sites of dubious distinction. At some point fairly soon, cholera will appear and there will be more fuel for the pyres. This will go on until the dead are burned out.
And then, in a few months, the world will again forget about Haiti. It's a place long beyond recall and it takes a disaster this size to make the world remember. The impulse then is to "fix" Haiti as soon as possible and then return to the forgetting.
This morning I saw, as did you, the whole cascade of horror streaming from the television. I stepped outside into a crisp and clear winter's morning and saw in the high blue above a jet climbing towards mid-heaven with a long white contrail slashing behind. Somewhere, I thought a surviving Haitian may have looked up and seen, high overhead, a jet trailing contrails across the blue heading out from somewhere near to somewhere very, very far away. How much would he pay to be on that jet on this morning? Everything he had and more. And when this is all over you can sense that the soul of such a man caught in his deathtrap nation would fill with either despair or a terrible resolve.
The Washington Post finally catches up with.... me. Today the very slow to get a clue Reliable Source runs "Furor Over an Obama Puff Piece" in which they report that not-new news that Barry O was a viper. The item is based on the photos released of a photo session Obama had back in his college days; a photo session that seems a little less straight that might previously have been thought:
The folks at the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws got there first. For their annual conference poster, they took an old photo of cool-dude college freshman Obama puffing away -- on a regular cigarette, mind you -- and tweaked it just ever so slightly to fit their message: "Yes We Cannabis."I regret to inform Reliable Source that, had they been reading American Digest they could have see this coming in the middle of last December. December 18 to be precise.
[Published: 2008-12-18 01:14:25] Continued...
When cutting a porn film for maximum impact, there's an old bromide that the folks in the editing room know only too well: "Cut to the f**king." It seems to me that getting from here to there is taking entirely too long for this adminustration. It's time they quit diddling around will bailouts, TARPS, and Zombie banks, and just give the people what they want -- money machines that will never, ever, run dry.
You may be worried about your 501K. I may be concerned about my position in US steel. But the hard core of the Obama constituency is fretting over one thing and one thing only, the terrible specter of a Government check that hits the bank but doesn't come out the business end of an ATM.
You think you've seen trouble when the stock market augers into the ground like a poleaxed pigeon? Wait until a day arrives when the ATMs don't stand and deliver. That's when canned goods and ammo will seem like manna from heaven.
So the Omen might as well "cut to the f**king" and get the ATMs firmly under government control. Once that happens, who needs banks?
As a result of my recent election to a high government post, I have come into possession of $3,550,000,000,000 ($3.55 trillion of U.S. dollars), that I wish to transfer to various agents in the states and abroad during the years 2009 and 2010.... -- LEAK: Budget Email to Obama’s 13-Million ‘Buddies’
HT: Sensing
John Derbyshire @ The Corner relates this sage observation:
I was giving him my usual rap about Caracas on the Hudson, and how cardboard box cities will spring up in Miami, Houston and Los Angeles over the coming decade. "It's the poor who always suffer worst from inflation." I said."Not in this case," said my friend, "because all the poor in this country are deeply in debt. They'll all have the relative value of that debt wiped away while the middle class will end up bearing the brunt of the burden. All Obama has to do is dilute the currency and he'll be responsible for one of the greatest transfers of wealth in human history without firing a shot."
I submit that there are elements lurking in the Obama legislative offensive even more craven and hypocritical than that. Smarter too.
Suppose, just suppose, you were a politician whose most fervent supporters were looking for a check, a fat check, from the government for wrongs done to their great-great-great-grandparents through slavery. This yearning for unearned money is what has been dubbed, Reparations. It's been a popular dream in and out of the surviving urban ghettos for decades. Nothing focuses the mind of the professionally indigent -- and those set up to serve them -- more than the vision of globs of money descending upon them from the Great Father in Washington.
But at the same time you are a smart politician. You know that just pounding a gigantic honeypot labeled "Reparations" down the throats of the taxpayers would create a firestorm of argument. Not only about the money but about the recipients as well. You want Americans to have a full and frank, no-holds-barred "conversation" about race? Just announce you're going to pay one race off.
The quest for reparations goes back long before the Civil War, and emerged after in the concept of "40 acres and a mule" that were given and sometimes taken back from freed slaves. It has been kept alive up to this day through a series of groups whose special pleading has grown sharper as the distance in time from slavery has increased. The issue slipped beneath the surface of American political life during the recent campaign as did so many others but that does not mean it has sunk. As a quest, reparations is always ready to resurface.
It's hard to encapsulate what is wrong, deeply wrong, with reparations, but Thomas Sowell comes close with:
Continued...
I'm Captain Kink. I'm Mister Scratch.
I'm your smiling, deathless dentist, Doctor Pain.
I've owned the Earth since Adam's birth,
And co-authored the book on raising Cain.
But you learned too well my old hard sell,
How I used to tempt your souls with sin and tonic.
And since out-of-date spells don't populate Hell,
I'm gone post-modern, solid-state, and ultra-sonic.
I'm that modern manufacturer
Who swung Liz Borden's ax for her.
I gave you Neutron Bombs and Asian Flu.
I've got old friends in the Senate
(Why, so many I may just rent it,
And, for my summer place, the Kremlin too.).
Just about this cold.
Fountain in the courtyard of Casa de Solana, St. Augustine, Florida. February 6 @ about two in the afternoon.
Do you fear "inflation?" Do you even know what it looks like? Here's a little photo-essay that brings the real meaning of government by printing press home. What the real crisis is like!
On the plus side, the use of this technique can mean that America can have just about as many billionaires as it has citizens.
Spreading the wealth!
What the spread wealth buys.
Paying for dinner. The tip is in there, somewhere.
Moral: Those who do not remember the present are condemned to pay for it.
- 1960s: The Population Bomb. Too many people yields global famines and cannibalism. [Long pig -- the other white meat -- still not on any local restaurant's menu, except for that movie joint serving Fried Green Tomatoes.]
- 1970s: No oil by 2000. [Still pumping and there's more wherever we look.]
- 1970s: The new Ice Age. Just when the oil wells ran dry, the glaciers would begin.... [Good thing the polar bears will thrive. We'll need the fur coats.]
- 1980s: AIDS. You're all going to die, YES YOU.... [Who me? Even if I don't share needles and body slam 15 guys a night at the bath houses which will never ever close? YES YOU-- and give us a lot of money too.]
- 1990s: BSE. Eat beef? You're going to end up a drooling victim of Mad Cow Disease. [Better that than a member of Daily Kos. Saner and healthier as well. Bring on the rib-eye and let's get this over with.]
- 1990s-present: Global Warming. Well, the Ice Age didn't emerge. [Good thing the polar bears are still thriving. We can feed the Eco-Nazi's to them.]
- 2000s: Terrorism. We're facing a 9/11 every week from bombers who plan to destroy planes with weapons hidden in shampoo bottles. [Not if we adopt the secret TSA master plan and all fly naked with a box of sanitary wipes for the seats.]
- 2000s: Bird Flu. [If the Chicken Blood Drinking Decathlon at the 2008 Beijing Olympics didn't spread this around the world nothing will.]
- 2008: The credit crunch. Recession, depression or financial apocalypse? [I'm going long on canned goods and ammo. Especially Dinty Moore Polar Bear Stew. Hey, you gotta cut somewhere.]
Outline expanded @ Seconds To Doomsday
10.
Thought provoking as always, the insightful Michael J. Totten writing on The Paradox of Terror tries to come to terms with an unsettling recent poll.
Three different countries were recently polled, and respondents were asked whether or not they were satisfied with their lives. The three countries were Israel, the United States, and Canada.Totten speculates briefly on why this should be so and reaches the conclusion that terrorism is an utter failure if it seeks to create unhappiness in a society.Now. Ask yourself which of these three countries is probably the happiest, and which is the most distraught. I would have guessed Canadians would be happiest, followed by Americans, and then Israelis. And I would have gotten it exactly backward.
In Israel 83 percent say they are happy.
In the United States 64 percent say they are happy.
In Canada only 45 percent say they are happy.
That is as it may be, but the item made me remember Louis.
Louis was a close friend in college when I was at Berkeley during the mid to late Sixties. And yes, it was all that you've heard about it and more. There are those that say that if you remember the Sixties, you weren't there. That is as it may be, but I remember them all too clearly. One of the things I remember is Louis' paranoia.
Louis was a radical. Louis smoked a lot of weed. Louis dropped a lot of acid. Louis started, and had no little success with, a publishing company that printed up a lot of radical images that proved very popular. As a result, Louis was paranoid. He was paranoid about his politics. He was paranoid about his stash. He was paranoid about his money. He was paranoid that "they must bust in early May,/ Orders from the D.A."
Louis was a history major, and Louis was an American Jew with communist parents. As Louis said, "I've got my reasons to be paranoid and they're not little ones."
These were paranoid times, with reason, but we all agreed that in terms of the Paranoia Olympics, Louis took the gold in a very crowded field in Berkeley.
Time moved on and, as usually happens, everyone in our little radical set drifted apart. I moved to New York and lost track of everybody. Then, one day at my magazine job, my phone rang. It was Louis, checking in after about 10 years.
We arranged to have lunch and catch up. "Where can I take you? I've got a killer expense account." "Doesn't matter," Louis said, "as long as it's kosher." "Kosher?" "Kosher. You know I'm a Jew, but now I'm really a Jew."
We met somewhere down near Hester Street at some blintz palace. Louis walked in looking tanned, rested, ready and decidedly unparanoid. In fact, he looked confident and happy for the first time in living memory.
He guided me through the menu and told me about his life since leaving Berkeley. In short, he'd gone back to Israel under the law of return and was living in Tel Aviv working for the Jerusalem Post.
I was flabergasted. "Louis,' I said, "let me see if I've got this straight. You are the most paranoid person I've ever known."
"Was."
"Okay, but you were, right?"
"Right."
"So, as a paranoid, pot-smoking, acid-head, radical communist Jew, you've moved to the one place in the world where it is most dangerous to be a Jew?"
"You got that right."
"Louis, have you gone finally insane?"
'No. I've gone sane. Israel is the best place to be if you're a paranoid Jew."
"Really. How come?"
"It's simple really. Isreal is the one place on earth where, if you are a Jew, you really KNOW who your enemies are. It's not vague. They're right there. You know where they live. At last, I'm someplace where I know what is what and who is who. Plus there's an extra benefit."
"Oh yeah? What's that?"
"They give you a machine gun."
[Republished from American Digest, July 29, 2004 as a Homage to Hugh "It's gonna be a blow-out" Hewitt]
Democratic Party Electorial Prospects Post-Convention: Pick One
I'M FRIGHTENED TO WATCH THE KERRY SPEECH TONIGHT FOR THREE REASONS:
Yup, it doesn't matter what he says or does from this point forward. Kerry and the Democrats are about to transform themselves from people into smouldering slabs of toast come November. The good part is that they're going to spend lots of money doing it.
So before the formal canonization of Kerry, I'd like to go on record as saying, along with a few other brave souls, that it is no longer a question of Kerry and the Democrats losing in November, but only one of how great and lasting their humiliation and degredation is going to be.
As far as I can see it is going to be massive: a Tsunami of rejection; a battering of the Bozos with no ref to stop the fight in the sixth round; a comet impacting dead center in the Democratic Fantasy World and smothering all but the deepest burrowing small rodents in a layer of ash half a mile thick; a landslide in which the entire north face of Mount Everest decides to take a vacation on the shores of the Indian ocean; a blowout equal to the hotspot under Yellowstone deciding to displace Krakatoa as the loudest implosion heard in recorded history; an "L" branded on the forehead of the Democratic party so large and so deep that travel agencies from Japan will divert a whole season of Grand Canyon tours to the nearest Kerry Compound just so they can marvel and photograph themselves standing at the brink.
Continued...
The 9/11 report catalogues, and embodies, the bureaucratization of that effort, its transformation into a defensive action in which vast resources are deployed to guard against the possibility of pinpoint strikes -- the expense further increased by the need to maintain legal niceties and economic normality while the country is under threat. The attempt to be simultaneously at peace, and at war, is not sustainable.
AS IS OFTEN THE CASE, DAVID WARREN, Canadian, is closer to the core of what the 911 Report actually exposes; a lack of resolve and a languid approach to what is a state of war.
Call Mr. Bush a war-monger if you will; in my eyes he's beginning to look like a wuss. His great strength to date has been doing what he says he will do, thus making his demands credible. In the immediate aftermath of the Iraq invasion, a much higher level of co-operation was obtained from Libya, Sudan, Pakistan, and even Saudi Arabia and Iran. But the advantage has been frittered away, as the Bush administration has gone "all multilateral" in response to continuing criticism over Iraq. I myself underestimated the ability of the Western media to turn the victory in Iraq into an apparent defeat through selective reporting and sheer verbiage.Continued...While the current relaxation of Washington's belligerency may be attributed to the U.S. election cycle -- in the absence of another huge terror hit on the U.S. itself, the voters are getting bored with foreign wars -- I detect a deeper pusillanimity. In retrospect, it took much too long to invade Iraq, and the
Tina in her signature "thoughtful
pondering hand hiding the double chin"
pose
Gothamist Interviews: Tina Brown, Editor/Writer/TV Host
Gothamist: Now you host a talk show on CNBC called "Topic A with Tina Brown." My question to you: Why television, why now?
Tina Brown: There is no magazine I want to edit now.
Translation: "After my professional sepuku with Talk Magazine, there is no magazine crazy enough to have me edit it. Most magazines still want to make money. And I have to do something to pass the time until Hillary is elected."
But the older I get the more I add to my personal list of things you just do, because you're supposed to. You dress up for church. You wear nice clothes on the airplane. You don't swear in public. You don't kick dogs. You fly the flag on Memorial Day and the Fourth. Is this so hard?-- James Lileks, Writer
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- Frequently Answered Questions
- On Advent: "We Are All Lying in the Mud, but Some of Us Are Looking at the Stars"
- In the Ruins of Yesterday
- Washington Post Late to the Party Yet Again: "I'm a Midnight Toker" -- Getting Stoned with Barry O
- Nationalize the Money Machines!
- My name is Barack Hussein Obama, one of the sons of Barack Obama, Sr., a Luo from Nyang’oma Kogelo, Nyanza Province, Kenya, and of Ann Dunham Soetoro.
- Stealth Reparations: "Mouth Full of Gimme and a Hand Full of 'Much Obliged' "
- Stimulus Economics Simplified
- The Resume of Captain Kink
- How Cold Is It In Florida This February?
- Zimbabwe: Hey, how's that wealth-spreading thing working out?
- The 9 Plagues of Western Snivilization
- Top Ten Reasons to Procrastinate:
- Happy at Last in Israel
- The Inevitable Bush Blowout
- The Coming Draft
- Bush the Wuss
- Special Offer
- Translating Tina Brown
- Why They Hate Us #12,435