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January 31, 2011

Why Obamacare Was Ruled Unconstitutional

Posted by Vanderleun at 7:36 PM | Your Say (0)

"Egypt: The Porn Revolution"

Works for me:
"What would an argument for calling it the "Porn Revolution" consist of? Well, to take a stab in the dark, I suppose it might start with the observation of these young idle men all over the streets, young men with (evidently) nothing to do, and yet (I imagine) with as much knowledge of the decadent, wonderful West as the rest of us, through the globalized media (as symbolized in particular by -- that's right -- the internet porn that (I assume) they surf), men who are unmarried and unmarryable due to the inequality of their society, who there suffer and seethe at the dishonor and indignity of being under the Mubarak yoke, etc etc etc. And so, they riot, inchoate." -- « Rhymes With Cars & Girls
If true, China's got one big day of reckoning baked in and on the way.

Posted by Vanderleun at 7:28 PM | Your Say (1)

Katie Couric: The Early Clueless Years -- "She thought it was a bowel vowel"

Today Show January 1994...What is the Internet?!

Posted by Vanderleun at 11:41 AM | Your Say (5)

Tales of a Lost Free America

We'll probably be telling our grandchildren about how the free internet used to be.
Just as we can tell the unbelieving that it used to be legal to smoke cigarettes, drive without a seatbelt, or ride a motorcycle, bicycle or skateboard without helmets, and full body armor. Will anyone believe us when we tell them we could go to any old burger stand, and order a bacon n' cheese double without having to sign a waiver releasing the restaurant from liability should we have a heart attack twenty years down the road? That you actually had salt shakers on the table? -- JWM commenting @ Sigh... Republicans... BLAM!... @ AMERICAN DIGEST

Posted by Vanderleun at 11:11 AM | Your Say (6)

Lady Gaga presents "Eau des AIDS"

According to sources in the fragrance industry hired to develop Lady Gaga‘s first fragrance, the pop star has requested that the scent “smell of blood and semen.” -- Fashionista

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:59 AM | Your Say (5)

The Blob

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For the last four or five years, The Blob has been in overdrive.
It’s not getting stronger exactly; it’s just spread out more thinly over more acreage. It’s been both amusing and mortifying to watch the President change careers more often than an alcoholic brother-in-law, trying to find something he’s good at besides blowing the rent at the track after a liquid lunch. First he was a shady car salesman, but instead of the old trick of hiding your keys while the finance guy works you over, they took your trade-in out back and poured sand in its engine. He took a flyer on light bulb sales. His short stint as a Real Estate agent was a hoot. -- Maine Family Robinson: Yer Doin' It Wrong!

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:50 AM | Your Say (1)

Palin pre-emptively accepts blame for Egypt

"There's a lot of chaos in Cairo, and I can't wait to not get blamed for it--at least for a month." --Sarah Palin's Gun Control Warnings At Safari Club International - The Daily Beast

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:34 AM | Your Say (1)

We're all Tea Partiers now

71% of Americans now believe the Tea Party's ideas are crucial to Republicans. -- Don Surber

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:12 AM | Your Say (0)

Timely Question: "Who is the god of the Muslims?"

We often hear that Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship the same God. This is obviously false.
As described by the Koran and other Islamic sacred texts, Allah, the god of the Muslims, is the complete opposite of the God of Abraham and of the Triune God. The God of Abraham makes the Israelites, later called the Jews, his chosen people, while Allah in the fiercest terms commands Muslims to kill all the Jews. Indeed, Allah commands even the forces of nature to assist in killing all remaining Jews on the Last Day. As for Christianity, the Triune God tells us to love our neighbor, while Allah commands Muslims to kill or enslave all non-Muslims who refuse to submit themselves to Islam. Clearly, then, Allah is not God as far as Christians and Jews are concerned. Who, then, is Allah? -- Who is the god of the Muslims?

Posted by Vanderleun at 9:35 AM | Your Say (2)

Why the iPad is dumber than "will.i.am joins Intel as "director of creative innovation.""

Apple is successful not because their products are "insanely great."
No matter how good they are, their products are obnoxious and way overpriced. $499 for an device with a 1024x768 screen, no ports, no accessible filesystem, graphics from the first Bush Administration, and a 1GHz CPU? That's not overpriced? Yes, yes, we all enjoy the pinching and zooming on the iPad, that multi-touch return-of-the repressed masturbatory ritual that only crudely and temporarily substitutes for real satisfaction. But the thing is so crippled by design you can do nothing with it but consume. Oh, look streaming episodes of Glee. Wicked. -- The Last Psychiatrist: Tech Sunday: Will.I.Am Gets A Job At Intel

Posted by Vanderleun at 9:26 AM | Your Say (2)

Our Home-Grown Internet Kill Switch

The U.S. government has plans for its own Internet Kill Switch.
The legislation was first introduced last summer by Sens. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), and the former has promised to bring it to the floor again in 2011. It isn't called anything as obvious as the Internet Kill Switch, of course. It is called the "Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act." Who could be against that? Anyone who's watching the news on TV today, that's who. -- Egypt Flips Internet Kill Switch. Will the U.S.? | News & Opinion | PCMag.com

Posted by Vanderleun at 8:00 AM | Your Say (2)

China has blocked the word “Egypt” from the country’s wildly popular Twitter-like service....

... A search for "Egypt'' on the Sina microblogging service brings up a message saying, "According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, the search results are not shown". == Egypt not trending in China - Asia-Pacific - Al Jazeera English

Posted by Vanderleun at 7:45 AM | Your Say (0)

January 30, 2011

Mooseual Assured Destruction

Snowmobiler, Moose Perish In Collision | The Rumford Meteor

Posted by Vanderleun at 12:02 PM | Your Say (0)

Top Banana in a Very Rotten Bunch

The United States is a rich country whose people are patriotic and hard-working.
It is disoriented and very corrupt, and all its elites have failed. And yet it has no real rivals. Europe is crumbling, even more idle and debt-ridden than the United States, and withering demographically, almost comatose after generations of paying Danegeld to the urban mobs and small farmers. Japan is a geriatric workshop; Russia is an alcohol-sodden, self-depopulating gangster-state; and India, China, Brazil, and Indonesia comprise over three billion people, more than two-thirds of whom live as they did 3,000 years ago. They are putting up good economic-growth numbers, but China’s inflation rate is now in double digits, and all of those countries are largely dysfunctional and will require decades to have any chance of seriously rivalling America. -- Can America Pull Out of Its Nose-Dive? - January 30, 2011 - The New York Sun

Posted by Vanderleun at 11:27 AM | Your Say (0)

"Remember the lesson of the Iranian revolution:

One person, one vote, one time.

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:35 AM | Your Say (1)

"The Scale of the Left's Folly"

Events are unfolding, but they have not yet run their course; things are still continuing to cascade. If the unrest spreads to the point where the Suez and regional oil fall into anti-Western hands, the consequences would be incalculable. The scale of the left's folly their insistence on drilling moratoriums, opposition to nuclear power, support of negotiations with dictators at all costs, calls for unilateral disarmament, addiction to debt and their barely disguised virulent anti-Semitism should be too manifest to deny. -- Belmont Club サ The King's Speech

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:26 AM | Your Say (0)

Jack Nicholson Starring in "Good Interview. Bad Haircut."

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Jack Nicholson: 'I used to feel irresistible to women. Not any more'
I’m not worried about wrinkles, in myself or in women. I find them interesting. I can’t see so well, so sometimes I look in the mirror and I see how I was as a young man. But a few years back I noticed I don’t have any hair below my sock line, and I thought to myself, “Jackie, that’s an old man.”’

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:18 AM | Your Say (0)

Internet Money for "Me" but Not for "Thee"

"Will the Internet usher in a new economic growth explosion? Quite possibly, but it hasn’t delivered
very good macroeconomic performance over the last decade. Many of the Internet’s gains are fun — games, chat rooms, Twitter streams — rather than vast sources of revenue, and when there have been measurable monetary gains, they often have been concentrated among a small number of company founders, as with, say, Facebook. As for users, the Internet has benefited the well-educated and the curious to a disproportionate degree, but apparently not enough to bolster median income." -- Incomes Are Stuck on Technology’s Plateau - NYTimes.com

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:07 AM | Your Say (0)

January 29, 2011

Exit Stage Right

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George W. Bush: "I'm done with politics, fundraising for GOP, campaigning and appearing on TV
"I don't want to go out and campaign for candidates," he said in an interview that will air on Sunday. "I don't want to be viewed as a perpetual money-raiser. In spite of the fact that I'm now on TV, I don't want to be on TV. I don't want to be on these talk shows, giving my opinion, second guessing the current President. I think it's bad for the country, frankly, to have a former president criticize his successor."

Posted by Vanderleun at 4:51 PM | Your Say (7)

At home in Malibu, Barbra Streisand installed a shopping mall in her basement.

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Along a cobblestone-paved, antique-lantern-lit “street,” a collection of turn-of-the-last-century-style shops beckons “customers” to step inside.
Traffic is heaviest during screening parties, when the Sweet Shop does brisk business dispensing licorice, frozen yogurt, and popcorn to guests. Before going out to a dinner party or a friend's birthday, Streisand likes to duck into the Gift Shoppe to pick up a present—a soap dish or a pair of candlesticks—and tie it up with pretty ribbons at the wrapping table. Other emporiums include the Antique Shop, the Antique Clothes Shop, and Bee's Doll Shop (in front of which she thoughtfully installed a bench for men to sit while the ladies are inside). The only items missing are the cash registers. -- Barbra Streisand's House - Barbra Streisand's House Interview - Harper's BAZAAR

Posted by Vanderleun at 11:28 AM | Your Say (7)

January 28, 2011

Mushy Wimp Breaks Peggy Noonan's Heart. Again.

Is it just me, or is Peggy Noonan sounding more and more like the crazy-girlfriend-dowager who just can believe the lean poltical machine she lusts after in her heart, is just a putz?
"I actually hate writing this. I wanted to write "A Serious Man Seizes the Center." But he was not serious and he didn't seize the center, he went straight for the mush." -- An Unserious Speech Misses the Mark - WSJ.com

Posted by Vanderleun at 8:26 PM | Your Say (4)

Thailand's PC Air to Offer New Options in Mile High Club

PC Air, new airline in Thailand, claims to be first to hire transsexual flight attendants

Posted by Vanderleun at 7:28 PM | Your Say (2)

Fisking Clinton

Moldbug has the outside track on reality in Unqualified Reservations: Egypt: US foreign policy at the nadir

Here's a brief excerpt:

Washington can do nothing to undermine the dictator Assad, and the dictator Assad makes sure it stays that way. If this strikes you as an incentive for signing up with the axis of evil, you're not exactly wrong. Mubarak is no doubt kicking himself for not being evil enough, and signing up or at least flirting with the Iranians. But alas, it's almost certainly too late. Thus, the daily bread of the "international community" is destroying herbivorous autocracies, harmless to the American taxpayer, in order to create carnivorous ones which justify more diplomacy. And this, of course, with your tax dollar.

In case it isn't obvious how this policy could be changed, let me briefly juxtapose Secretary Clinton's paragraphs with the words that would emanate from Secretary Moldbug's office:

Clinton: I would like to say something about the unfolding events in Egypt. We continue to monitor the situation very closely. We are deeply concerned about the use of violence by Egyptian police and security forces against protesters and we call on the Egyptian government to do everything in its power to restrain the security forces
.
I would like to say something about the riots in Egypt. We are watching this on TV like everyone else, but we are deeply concerned about the threat to public order. Egypt is a foreign country, nowhere near America and of no economic or military importance to us. Its legitimate government for us - in the words of President Monroe - is the government de facto. At present there seems to be only one government operating in Egypt, the existing Mubarak regime. A stable, orderly world is the only interest of our foreign policy. We hope the Egyptian security forces can suppress the riots quickly and with minimum bloodshed.

Clinton: At the same time, protesters should also refrain from violence and express themselves peacefully. As we have repeatedly said, we support the universal human rights of the Egyptian people, including the right to freedom of expression, of association, and of assembly.

We call on the rioters to obey all official instructions, and return to home and/or work. The United States no longer practices democratic imperialism. We have returned to our historic foreign policy of continental neutrality. We do not believe that political power is a "human right." We are not the "leader of the free world" - free nations need no "leader." We do not export revolution, we do not operate satellite states or amuse ourselves with puppets, and we deeply regret having played this game in the past.

The rest is at Unqualified Reservations: Egypt: US foreign policy at the nadir

Posted by Vanderleun at 1:40 PM | Your Say (2)

Egypt: The Farce of Power

Hamlet can be played by pygmies, and history rhymes even as farce.
Mubarak can play Nicholas II, Mohammed El-Baradei can appear in the role of Pavel Milyukov, Charles R. Crane can be performed by George Soros, and Hillary Clinton (who has as I write just knifed Mubarak in the back, a deed which can surprise no one over the age of three) does a marvelous Sir George Buchanan. All the details are different, of course; the thing is the same. -- Unqualified Reservations: Egypt: US foreign policy at the nadir

Posted by Vanderleun at 1:31 PM | Your Say (0)

Mime

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Created by No Sheeples Here

Posted by Vanderleun at 8:40 AM | Your Say (6)

January 27, 2011

Not a Clue in the Carload

Obama's State of the Union Was Tantamount to Plagiarism
It would appear that the only president of note whose imprint was absent in Obama’s long awaited and much-anticipated speech was Obama. This was supposed to have been the moment when the nation found out whether he was at the core a Rooseveltian liberal of a Clintonian centrist. What it got was a cut and pasted version of great and not-so-great State of the Union and other addresses of the past.

Posted by Vanderleun at 5:59 PM | Your Say (6)

Obama Seen as the CEO of a Failing Company

What do those CEOs do?
They spend a lot of time talking about their company's proud history, even if that history only stretches back a few years. They lavish extravagant praise on their awesome, dedicated workforce. And they deftly avoid talking about the big problems, for which they have no solutions, by talking about strategic areas for potential growth ("green jobs"), and going over a laundry list of new initiatives that do nothing to solve any of the core problems. I once listened to the head of a biotech company which was burning cash every quarter, had no good research prospects in the pipeline, and had already capitalized (i.e. sold) the income streams from their existing intellectual property. Despite the fact that this was obviously patently insane, he spent quite a lot of time detailing his plans for the future of the company. -- The President as Micromanager - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic

Posted by Vanderleun at 5:43 PM | Your Say (2)

Sound Familiar? "Failing systems are sumps of bad ideas"

The rot, you see, was not in the heaps but elsewhere;
less in the scavangers than in the heart of the dictatorial system. Failing systems are sumps of bad ideas, which have for a long time been subsisting on rent-taking and cronyism. Regimes which are about to fall can never get rid of all the toxic ideas circulating in its memory space, like a bad operating system that is full of memory leaks and dysfunctional background processes. At some point you either reboot or face the Blue Screen of Death. Until then such regimes are happy to occupy themselves with irrelevant trivia. -- Belmont Club サ Dustbins I Have Known

Posted by Vanderleun at 1:42 PM | Your Say (0)

Security Threats Continue

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New entrant into the "Security Theatre Kabuki Hall of Fame" @ Quotulatiousness
Airport officials ordered a holidaymaker carrying a toy soldier onto a plane to remove its three-inch gun -- because it was a safety threat. Ken Lloyd was stunned when he was told he could not go on the plane with the nine-inch model soldier because it was carrying a "firearms."

Posted by Vanderleun at 12:03 PM | Your Say (7)

WHAT REALLY MAKES AMERICA EXCEPTIONAL

What made America 'exceptional'
is the moral and political vision of its Founders, who clearly understood that a country established on the principles of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' was, not only an historical anomaly, but also represented the embodiment of the highest values to which mankind could aspire. What continues to make America exceptional is the extent to which we still live up to those same values bequeathed to us by a group of exceptional and extraordinary men. -- Dr. Sanity:

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:23 AM | Your Say (1)

January 26, 2011

He's a Real Nowhere Man

Henninger: A Presidency to Nowhere
If the State of the Union disappointed policy wonks, it's because the Obama presidency has entered full campaign mode. His State of the Union was a road map to a second term. Draw the Republican Congress toward the post-November spirit of reform on spending, entitlements and taxes, let these ideas twist in the wind of endless negotiation, pocket the "bipartisan" effort, and run out the clock to a three-point November victory.

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:56 PM | Your Say (2)

Makes you ask, "Hey, do we have any B-52s we're not currently using overseas?"

U.S. missionary shot in Mexico, dies in Texas | Reuters An American missionary was shot by a gunmen in northern Mexico and died shortly after her husband raced her back across the border into Texas seeking emergency treatment, authorities said on Wednesday.

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:54 PM | Your Say (0)

A Putz and His Pit

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Soon to be gerrymandered out of his Ohio House seat,
Rep. Dennis Kucinich shows a group of lawyers the olive pit that attacked him in the House cafeteria. The winning bidder, Andrew R. Young, from the firm Nurenberg, Paris, Heller & McCarthy, promised Kucinich a $150,000 judgment, and a Waring blender, while charging just a 30% champerty fee. A lot of this is hearsay, but Kucinich is such an asshat it's hard to know which part. -- Curmudgeonly & Skeptical presents Boned Jello

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:41 PM | Your Say (2)

I Betcha

Even under ideal conditions people have trouble locating their car keys in a pocket, finding their cell phone, and Pinning the Tail on the Donkey - but I’d bet everyone can find and push the snooze button from 3 feet away, in about 1.7 seconds, eyes closed, first time, every time. -- KA-CHING!

Posted by Vanderleun at 7:58 PM | Your Say (3)

"Take a school" Any School. Well.... maybe not that one

"Take a school like Bruce Randolph in Denver," the president said. "Three years ago, it was rated one of the worst schools in Colorado. Last May, 97 percent of seniors received their diploma."
Bruce Randolph was a middle school when it opened in 2002. In 2007, Denver Public Schools gave Bruce Randolph School permission to operate autonomously. It was the first school in the state to be granted autonomy from district and union rules. Each teacher then had to reapply for his or her job. A published report said only six teachers remained. -- Denver School Praised In President's Speech - Denver News Story - KMGH Denver

Posted by Vanderleun at 5:09 PM | Your Say (2)

Investing in Spending

Hope, Change, and 'Invest' - HUMAN EVENTS
Obama said, "We are the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook." And then the government outlawed Edison's great invention, made the Wright brothers' air travel insufferable, filed anti-trust charges against Microsoft and made cars too expensive to drive by prohibiting oil exploration, and right now -- at this very minute -- is desperately trying to regulate the Internet.

Posted by Vanderleun at 4:45 PM | Your Say (1)

In the 8th Circle

We find Muhammad in HellTo one of the lowest circles of Hell and one of the most grotesque of Hell's punishments Dante consigns the "sowers of discord"
--those souls who, as translator John Ciardi puts it, rend asunder what God has intended to be united. Their punishment is to be hacked and torn through all eternity by a great demon with a bloody sword. After each mutilation the souls are compelled to drag their broken bodies around the pit and to return to the demon, for in the course of their circuit their wounds knit in time to be inflicted anew. Thus is the law of retribution observed, each sinner suffering according to his degree.

Who are the sowers of discord in our time? They are the people who divide what was meant to be united, the people who turn marriage, the fundamental institution of human society, into a battleground over homosexual "marriage"; the people who bring millions of unassimilable immigrants into a once harmonious country and thus divide that country forever; the people who accuse all Republicans and conservatives of being accessories to murder simply for being Republicans and conservatives; the people who call white Americans guilty racists just for existing; the people who have turned our country against itself.

Posted by Vanderleun at 1:59 PM | Your Say (3)

Why Is Congress Requiring Poison Light Bulbs?

Isn't it perverse that Congress is requiring the abolition of perfectly good incandescent light bulbs,
and their replacement by fluorescent lights that contain mercury, one of the deadliest substances known to mankind? (Mercury, as you likely know, is what made hatters mad.) How does requiring the introduction of poison into every home in the United States improve the environment, the stated purpose of the legislation? -- Power Line -

Posted by Vanderleun at 1:56 PM | Your Say (4)

First wiseguy to call him "Hockey Putz" also gets sued

Jewish hockey player sues Anaheim Ducks, alleges discrimination

Posted by Vanderleun at 1:43 PM | Your Say (3)

Imus: Maddow is "the worst kind of coward and gutless, sniveling worm"

Imus derides Maddow’s (lack of) Olbermann defense: ‘ | The Daily Caller - Breaking News, Opinion, Research, and Entertainment

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:58 AM | Your Say (0)

The New Non-Citizens of the World

The Rise of the New Global Elite - Magazine - The Atlantic
What is more relevant to our times, though, is that the rich of today are also different from the rich of yesterday. Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth. Its members are hardworking, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats who feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economic competition—and many of them, as a result, have an ambivalent attitude toward those of us who didn’t succeed so spectacularly. Perhaps most noteworthy, they are becoming a transglobal community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home. Whether they maintain primary residences in New York or Hong Kong, Moscow or Mumbai, today’s super-rich are increasingly a nation unto themselves.

Posted by Vanderleun at 9:29 AM | Your Say (3)

Bathroom Reading

UP OR DOWN? A MALE ECONOMIST'S MANIFESTO ON THE TOILET SEAT ETIQUETTE - J. P.CHOI - 2010 - Economic Inquiry - Wiley Online Library
This paper develops an economic analysis of the toilet seat etiquette. I investigate whether there is any efficiency justification for the presumption that men should leave the toilet seat down after use. I find that the “down rule” is inefficient unless there is a large asymmetry in the inconvenience costs of shifting the position of the toilet seat across genders. I show that the “selfish” or the “status quo” rule that leaves the toilet seat in the position used dominates the down rule in a wide range of parameter spaces including the case where the inconvenience costs are the same.
If the author's name began one letter to the left, the comedy would be complete.

Posted by Vanderleun at 9:23 AM | Your Say (4)

January 25, 2011

When you get right down to it

the problem with wind energy is that it sucks much more than it blows.

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:51 PM | Your Say (1)

The SOTU Address: All ye know on earth and all ye need to know

"Honestly......
I have never heard so much lying BS since I was sitting in a Deputy's patrol car, handcuffed and pants around my ankles trying to explain why the Sheriff's daughter was in the backseat of my car nekkid from the waist up!" "-- Diogenes' Middle Finger:

Posted by Vanderleun at 9:25 PM | Your Say (0)

"We’ll invest in biomedical research, information technology, and especially clean energy technology"

You blew your Sputnik moment, Barry
We've been spending money on research for 50-plus years now. We wind up with bureaucrats running science departments into the ground. Where are the patents? Where are the innovations? The Internet had help from DOD, true, but Brits and the Swiss had a hand in it as well and when it took off, venture capital, not government grants, fueled it. For 30 years and $30 billion a year, we have grown more dependent on foreign oil under the Department of Energy.

Posted by Vanderleun at 9:22 PM | Your Say (2)

The Role of t/ruth at The New York Times

I have no idea if it's true, I only know that the NYT wants me to believe it's true,
which makes me more suspicious than 6 clear vesicles on both labia. The one thing I know for sure is that the New York Times-- throw in The New Yorker and The Atlantic, too-- hates its readers. It wants them, of course, but see them only as organ donors. The Times is accused of being a leftist/socialist paper, but that's not true, their collectivist perspective comes from assuming all of you people are free range cattle. -- The Last Psychiatrist: Are Law Schools Lying To Their Applicants?

Posted by Vanderleun at 12:01 PM | Your Say (1)

Defining ownership down.

The downward spiral of ownership and value « The Thingology Blog
We used to own our books. With most ebooks we own them in name, but effectively we lease them. As Jane documents, the slide toward more and more attenuated concepts of ownership continues. The process is gradual. Mental models change slower than technology. If the Kindle had debuted with an access-based "faucet" model, it would have failed. Consumers would not have traded true ownership for a tethered, metered and monitored product. But we'll get there soon enough, as each step away from ownership makes the next step more acceptable. Once you realize your Kindle book is not fully yours, you'll accept it being mostly not yours. Google Ebooks are a further step away from ownership. Eventually you get to a faucet model, as music has done, either low-price (Netflix) or free (Pandora, YouTube).

Posted by Vanderleun at 11:57 AM | Your Say (0)

Just imagine a Nation Without Abortion

Imagine a nation that loved all its children so passionately
that it built an entire social and economic structure around protecting them, nurturing them, fostering their growth, and supporting their every stage of life. The logic of this care for children would, of course, extend to the conditions by which those children entered the world. The nation would first care about young adults and their sexual choices.... The citizens of this nation would learn the terrible stories of cultures around the world that did not support children, and weep at how these societies sold children into slavery, slaughtered newborns, forced sterilizations, and subjected marginalized women to dangerous back alley abortions. They would study the slow march of responses to these violent acts: from orphan trains that moved children off city streets to farms, to different kinds of foster care and orphanages, to the paradox of medical abortion. At each stage they would recognize the desperate cosmetic fixes to the larger social problem: these cultures thought only some children were worth caring about. They did not have their best and brightest using their most significant resources to care for mothers, fathers, and children. -- Imagining a Nation without Abortion

Posted by Vanderleun at 11:54 AM | Your Say (2)

The Devolution of Davos Man

Davos as a method of informal global governance is anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic, in-just, illegitimate, etc. It certainly isn't peer to peer. What is it?
It is a collection of elites generated by the antiquated, hierarchical systems of the 20th Century -- akin to a collection of corrupted inebriated noblemen from depleted, inbred bloodlines discussing the future of war, peace, and prosperity during the post fox-hunt feast. Regardless, Davos is an important gathering. What they do there does have an impact on our future. However, given its provenance, the chance that it will have a beneficial impact on our future is close to nil/zero/nada.-- JOURNAL: On the Arrival of Neo-Feudalism - Global Guerrillas

Posted by Vanderleun at 11:14 AM | Your Say (1)

Speaking of Politics...

... President Obama's State of the Union speech tonight will focus on Democrats and Republicans working together to ensure that America is competitive in the world when it comes to education and business. Then he'll close with his proposal for using unicorns and leprechauns to fix the deficit. -- Shoebox サ Newsdroppings

Posted by Vanderleun at 11:06 AM | Your Say (0)

"In God We Trust"

The One Thing You Won't See on TV at the State of the Union - Dennis Prager
Here is the one thing you will not see and probably have never seen. You won't see what is behind the president and above the vice president and the speaker of the House. And because you won't see it, you won't know that you are missing something of surpassing importance.

Think about it for a moment. Why do television cameras never pull back and give a wide-angle view of the president delivering his speech?

Posted by Vanderleun at 11:01 AM | Your Say (1)

California: Gilded Horse Apple of a State. In you can... GET. OUT!

22 Facts About California That Make You Wonder Why Anyone Would Still Want To Live In That Hellhole Of A State

Meanwhile, the standard of living in California is going right into the toilet. Housing values are plummeting. Unemployment has risen above 20 percent in many areas of the state. Crime and gang activity is on the rise even as police budgets are being hacked to the bone. The health care system is an absolute disaster. At this point California has the fewest emergency rooms per million people out of all 50 states. While all of this has been going on, the state legislature in Sacramento has been very busy passing hundreds of new laws that are mostly about promoting one radical agenda or another. The state government has become so radically anti-business that it is a wonder that any businesses have remained in the state. It seems like the moving vans never stop as an endless parade of businesses and families leave California as quickly as they can.

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:37 AM | Your Say (5)

In the tradition of Jackie O, that tailored look isn't tossed off

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Since it was a last minute decision, she had our newest sponsor, Walmart, sent over something from their current collection. And the Big White seamstress, because we so rarely use her,had gone on vacation so we had to go “off the rack.” -- Michelle Obama's Mirror: Movin’ to the Center

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:12 AM | Your Say (5)

Within a Forest Dark

Even outside the forest, the darkness of the premodern world was unimaginable for us.
But inside the forest it was even darker. At night, you wouldn't have been able to see your hand in front of your face. There is an evolutionary reason why children are afraid of the dark, because darkness is where the monsters literally dwelt. You wouldn't even know what ate you. Thus the old adage, he who hesitates is lunch. The little clearing of civilization is where things are illuminated. But this area of light is a hard-won prize, surrounded by darkness. No wonder people cling to their stupid cultures, since they are preferable to living in the dark. -- One Cʘsmos: Middle Age Crazy

Posted by Vanderleun at 9:20 AM | Your Say (0)

January 24, 2011

Descent into Drivel: Affordability is Key!

Sometimes sorta smart Joel Kotkin phones it in with this thumbsucker: Why Affordable Housing Matters

So what does this tell us about future growth? Clearly affordability matters. Areas that combine strong income and job growth, along with affordable housing, are poised to do best.
Zzzzzzzz....

Posted by Vanderleun at 3:02 PM | Your Say (6)

Descent into Drivel: "He had me at "mountain-breasted"."

Global warming hoax promoter Pieter Tans: One of our guiding principles has to be "Oh Mother Earth, ocean-girdled and mountain-breasted, pardon me for trampling on you.”

Posted by Vanderleun at 3:00 PM | Your Say (3)

Sentence of the Week (So Far)

Lance de Boyle brings it with How to be a progressive ed perfesser @ Jaded Haven
After analyzing the data with a hammer, I and my research assistant —Mandy and Candy––known across campus as the Ever-Ready Twins–– identified factors that strongly predict a successful run as a progressive ed perfesser -- to wit, ensuring that new teachers have no idea what knowledge is; no idea how to design logically coherent instruction; no skill at communicating information; no idea how to build fluency, generalization, and retention (and no idea that these even exist); and little knowledge of any subject -- but heads filled with progressive dogma (“Students must construct their own knowledge”; “Do not use commercial programs, even if these have been tested with thousands of kids. Make up your own materials.”; “You must adapt instruction to your students’ learning styles” [even though there is no such thing]; “America is a racist, sexist, oppressive society. Your job is social justice.”) and treacly platitudes (“All students have a right to read. Sadly, I have no idea how to teach them to read.”).

Posted by Vanderleun at 2:50 PM | Your Say (0)

Conservative Panty Moistening Continues With Peggy Noonan

She's in love again and now maybe those state-dinner invitations will start to flow her way! How to Continue the Obama Upswing - WSJ.com
He is a president with everything to gain from shrewd decisions, moderate thinking, and respect for the center. He seems to have learned that wanting popularity and public approval is not, actually, below him. In fact, it's part of his job.
The other part of his job is fooling aging school-girls like Peggy again and again and again. More gush at the link.

Posted by Vanderleun at 2:34 PM | Your Say (3)

Conservative Panty Twisting Continues Over Piano Tune

Go ahead, ask me how little I care that some half-assed Chinese piano player banged out a tune at the the White House dissing America. Evidently many empty skulls (Power Line - Unintentional Triumphalism?) have it whipped up into a Jesus-H-Crisis. More power to them as they create the blogosphere equivalent of hitting the snooze alarm.

Posted by Vanderleun at 2:28 PM | Your Say (0)

Going Dutch vs Going on a Diet

Republicans and Democrats are disagreeing on spending.
Apparently the Democrats want to split the bill 50/50, even though they had the full buffet while the Republicans only had a side salad and a glass of water. -- Shoebox サ Newsdroppings

Posted by Vanderleun at 2:16 PM | Your Say (0)

"I think I'll just lie here and let the next train run right over me."

Posted by Vanderleun at 12:40 PM | Your Say (5)

"They may not agree with what you say, but they'll fight to the death for your right to remain silent."

Advocate of Violence - WSJ.com
The Center for Constitutional Rights. Its press release announcing the effort accomplishes a Times-like inversion in the very headline: "CCR Appeals to Fox News President for Help in Silencing Glenn Beck Misinformation Campaign Against Progressive Professor."

Posted by Vanderleun at 11:56 AM | Your Say (0)

"I want to be left alone"

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Greta Garbo by George Dudognon «

The above picture, was taken at the Club St. Germain in Paris sometime in the 1950s by George Dudognon, a noted chronicler of the Left Bank. Although Dudognon’s photo was more incidental than stalker-like, many paparazzi, avant le lettre, would continue to follow Garbo. Fascination with her was such that in 1976, People magazine published topless photos of then 71-year old actress, taken with a long-range lens during her vacation in Antigua. Even in her evening years, this woman, who once famously said, “I never said, ‘I want to be alone.’ I only said, ‘I want to be left alone.’ There is a whole world of difference”, couldn’t escape the media hounds. (via Iconic Photos)

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:09 AM | Your Say (0)

Limbaugh Forecasts Media Reaction to the SOTU address

"It's going to be 'Slobber City 2.0.' "

Posted by Vanderleun at 9:44 AM | Your Say (0)

Wag the ER team: Notes from "Post-Partisan" America

Bring them out for a "victory lap!" Giffords' Medical Team will Attend State of the Union
ABC News has learned that several members of the Tucson medical team that treated Gabrielle Giffords after she was shot in the head will be in Washington this week to attend President Obama’s State of the Union address.

Doctors Randall Friese, Michael Limole and Peter Rhee of Tucson’s University Medical Center, along with intensive care unit nurse Tracy Culbert are scheduled to attend the Tuesday speech, according to Giffords’ spokesman C.J. Karamargin.

In olden days, this kind of political circus was called Waving the bloody shirt

In the history of the United States, "waving the bloody shirt" refers to the practice of politicians referencing the blood of martyrs or heroes to criticize opponents. In American history, the phrase gained popularity with a factitious incident in which Benjamin Franklin Butler of Massachusetts, when making a speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, allegedly held up a shirt stained with the blood of a carpetbagger whipped by the Ku Klux Klan.[1] (While Butler did give a speech condemning the Klan, he never waved anyone's bloody shirt.)

Let's see, congresspeople sitting here and there on the "buddy system," and the hauling in of EMS heroes as political pawns. Noted.

As we read in the book of Bob Dylan, "The beauty parlor's filled with sailors. The circus is in town."

And,

"Is used it is plain
For the politician’s gain
As he rises to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game."

Posted by Vanderleun at 9:34 AM | Your Say (6)

January 23, 2011

The Right Stuff

Sullivan says,
She has muscular dystrophy, or maybe cerebral palsy, I'm not sure which. Her limbs do not entirely obey her commands, and her speech is very slurred. In the summer, we used to see her riding a big tricycle up the hill and down to town, returning with groceries in a basket in the back. She can still drive, but I think she likes the exercise. Unlike people without a care in the world, she always appears to be happy. -- Maine Family Robinson: Winter In America | RIGHTNETWORK

Posted by Vanderleun at 3:11 PM | Your Say (0)

Handy Card for the Coming Uncivil War

Maggie's Farm is becoming my institutional memory. I'd clean forgotten I made this awhile back. Here it is again. Click to embiggen and print up several dozen for your personal use. You'll need them if you go talking politics with the colonized minds of America:


racecardvander.jpg

Posted by Vanderleun at 2:37 PM | Your Say (1)

Howie Carr Delivers Teh Funny

Fish. Barrel. Bang!: Rachel Maddow — you’ve seen her crewcut type before, in Jamaica Plain, driving around a beat-up Volvo with a bumper sticker that says, “Hatred is Not a Family Value.” -- ‘Countdown’ finally runs out for Keith Olbermann - BostonHerald.com

Posted by Vanderleun at 2:16 PM | Your Say (1)

"True dat." " No doubt."

"The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn't do, what Jim Crow couldn't do, what the harshest racism couldn't do," Mr. Williams says. "And that is to destroy the black family." -- The Weekend Interview with Walter Williams: The State Against Blacks - WSJ.com

Posted by Vanderleun at 1:59 PM | Your Say (1)

More news notes from "The Religion of the Submission to an Insect God"

Teen 'electrocuted' by family: News24: World: News
Relatives of a teenage Pakistani girl have apparently electrocuted her for falling in love with a man they did not approve of, police said on Sunday.
I for one yearn to return to a foreign policy of "More rubble, less trouble."

Posted by Vanderleun at 1:07 PM | Your Say (4)

A farmer against more mush from the food nazis

Blake Hurst, Missouri Farmer, on Our Real Food Problem @ The American
Miller spends a lot of time talking about nutritious food, but we don't really have a nutrition problem. Beri-beri and scurvy are not endemic in American society. We don't really have a hunger problem, either. Some 6 percent of American households are what the U.S. Department of Agriculture calls "very low food security." That's a problem, but one extraordinarily difficult to solve with traditional food assistance. What we have is a fat problem. It matters not whether doughnuts made from industrially grown, highly processed wheat flour and fried in genetically modified soybean oil, or French pastries made from whole organic wheat and lightly sautéed in organic canola oil are a staple of one's diet, if we insist on eating so many of either that we gain weight. We don't have a food system problem, but a problem of self-control. We can't solve that with quinoa or locally grown, free-range chicken breasts.

Posted by Vanderleun at 12:19 PM | Your Say (9)

Questions that contain their own answers

What is it about writing for The New York Times that makes people stupid? -- JamesBowman.net

Posted by Vanderleun at 12:01 PM | Your Say (1)

First Draft of Obama's SOTU Speech,

as edited by the White House communications team:
My Fellow Americans,

I have a plan, but I can't tell you about it because you are worried about jobs.  If I really cared what you thought about jobs, I would have focused on jobs from day one instead of Obamacare.  But one of my jobs was to transform the nation regardless of what you thought, so your jobs really didn't matter to me.



Talking about jobs, the Stimulus Plan saved or created millions of jobs, but the jobs now are gone because the federal funding of the jobs is gone.  And now that the Republicans control the House, the loss of those jobs will be blamed by my campaign team on Republicans, who not only want you to die quickly, they want you to lose your jobs quickly.

Read it all at: Leキgal Inキsurキrecキtion: Exclusive -

Posted by Vanderleun at 11:49 AM | Your Say (0)

What's in a name? An Obama by any other name would smell the same.

President Soetoro? « Don Surber
Hillbuzz states, "The fact that Obama was adopted by Indonesian Lolo Soetoro in the 1970s, and his name was legally changed to Barry Soetoro at that time, is most likely the reason he is spending millions of dollars to hide his birth certificate. He never filed the papers to change his name back to Barack Hussein Obama, Jr." so any birth certificate produced by the state of Hawaii would list him as "Barry Soetoro" Surber: "I am still wondering how Obama Senior could marry the president's mom when he already had a wife and Barack Jr. in Kenya at the time.

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:01 AM | Your Say (0)

January 22, 2011

Auster's Dangerous Notion

The Big Truth
Just as the Big Lie is a lie so outrageous that people can't believe that someone would tell such a lie, and so they believe the lie, the Big Truth is a truth so threatening to both left and right that both left and right reject it. The Big Truth is threatening to the left, obviously, because it shows what the left's projects really consist of and where they are really heading, which, if people understood, they would stop going along with the left's projects and start seriously resisting them instead. The Big Truth is threatening to the right because the right is invested in the basic goodness and harmony of our existing society and in maintaining a general consensus concerning that goodness. A dawning understanding of the true radicalism of the left would force the right to fight the left, it would lead to civil war and counterrevolutionary struggle, bringing to an end our current system based on toleration and consensus.

Posted by Vanderleun at 7:04 PM | Your Say (1)

Auster somewhat out of the loop

The otherwise astute Larry Auster has A good word for Keith Olbermann, on his departure from MSNBC
"At least he was one grey haired political talk TV host who did not surround himself on his every program with dyed-blonde, half-naked "legal consultants" half his age."
True, but only because surrounding himself with half-naked folks one fifth of his age would have been illegal.

Posted by Vanderleun at 3:26 PM | Your Say (2)

Since the Great Wheel has no beginning or end, democracy too must go under the bus.

Indeed in Europe it is already a speck in the rear-view mirror.
The idea that spontaneous popular sentiment should influence public policy is, on the Continent and increasingly in England, a fringe belief. On its face it seems absurd, as of course it is - just as if Prince Charles were to demand his titular authority. As with anything, the capacity for government is the combination of aptitude and experience. Quite plainly, Prince Charles has neither the aptitude to rule, or the experience. His coup would therefore be a joke. Just the same can be said of the modern democratic electorate. Across centuries of throne and altar, the People grew strong; their princes, sapped by luxury, flattery and philosophy, weak; the strong seized their chance; the People pulled their princes down. And grew weak in their turn. Now the course of empire proceeds without them - to an extent they can barely imagine. By far, the American voter is the strongest left. But this isn't saying a lot. -- Unqualified Reservations: Your goverment in pictures, 1954

Posted by Vanderleun at 3:17 PM | Your Say (3)

You don't often see the insect souls among us displaying themselves....

but every so often one lets the mask slip. Like this one:
I've scooped brains out of buckets, I've counted dendrites in slices cut from the brains of dead babies. You want to make me back down by trying to inspire revulsion with dead baby pictures? I look at them unflinchingly and see meat. And meat does not frighten me.
Sociopath PZ Myers is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris. With his harvested human skin pulled over his carapace he looks like this:
pzm_london_lg.jpg

Vox Popoli sums this "thing" up with: "This is the naked face of atheism, ladies and gentlemen. Look on it well and remember it, because it usually doesn't dare to show its disgusting and anti-human nature so openly."

Posted by Vanderleun at 12:23 AM | Your Say (31)

Oh Lord Hear My Prayer

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My Lord, I know you don't hear from me often and you know I don't like to bother you. I know that, having all of Creation to oversee, that you are a very busy Supreme Being. I am conscious of my shortcomings and my many sins and how unworthy I am to even think to speak to you out of selfish motives. But I ask you, Dear Lord, not just for myself but for a long-suffering people in need of all the political comedy we can find during these dark days, to please grant this tiny plea to let Keith Olbermann take up the soon to be vacant post of White House Press Secretary. Thank you for listening.

Posted by Vanderleun at 12:01 AM | Your Say (5)

January 21, 2011

Door. Ass. Bang. Olbermann resigns MSNBC to spend more time with his penis

keithout.jpg
Say good night, Keith. "Good night, Keith"

Who says there's no good news?
Keith Olbermann Out At MSNBC, Final ‘Countdown’ Broadcast Is Tonight "MSNBC and Keith Olbermann have ended their contract. The last broadcast of “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” will be this evening. MSNBC thanks Keith for his integral role in MSNBC’s success and we wish him well in his future endeavors."
Rumors that Olbermann will form the distaff side of a "Palin-Olbermann, 2012" ticket are being neither confirmed or denied by both parties.

Posted by Vanderleun at 7:02 PM | Your Say (3)

Not in it for the footnotes: Godwin's Law and Van der Leun's Corrolary

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Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
Van der Leun's Corollary: As global connectivity improves, the probability of actual Nazis being on the Net approaches one.
GodwinsLaw.jpg

Source:Wired Magazine 2.10, 1994: Meme, Counter-meme

Posted by Vanderleun at 4:09 PM | Your Say (1)

Not in it for the attention but I'll take it if it comes my way

The Kraalspace: Vanderleun's Law"Oh, by the way, see those people over there? Yes, the ones who had nothing to do with it. They did it."
Let's call it Vanderleun's Law: the principle that every stinking blossom and rotten fruit that comes forth from the tree of Liberal Socialism is to be blamed on Conservatism.

Posted by Vanderleun at 11:30 AM | Your Say (0)

Idiot Investor Watch of the Pacific Northwest

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"Humor is probably the first language of the Internet," owner Ben Huh says.
His network of websites attracts more than 16.5 million unique visitors and 375 million page views per month. All of this, from a guy who admits he's personally not that funny. "I was actually not always the funny guy in the crowd. I'm more of a pretty serious business guy, but I also recognize that humor is an important part of every day life," Huh says. -- MyNorthwest.com
I can has loldot.com bust?

Posted by Vanderleun at 8:16 AM | Your Say (1)

January 20, 2011

Idiot Watch in the Pacific Northwest

Burn Victims In Bellevue Car Fire Were Filling Gas While Driving - News Story - KIRO Seattle
BELLEVUE, Washington -- A fire that engulfed a van in Bellevue on Wednesday was caused by the passengers filling up the van with gas while it was being driving, Bellevue police investigators said..... The woman said she and her two friends had bought gas at a Factoria gas station, but were having trouble keeping the van running. She said they didn't have a gas can, so they filled an open bucket with two gallons of gas and put it in the van. The engine cowling -- a piece of metal that covered the engine and which was located between the two front seats of the van -- had been removed, the woman said. The passengers used a water bottle to transfer gas from the bucket directly into the carburetor in order to keep the engine running.

Posted by Vanderleun at 2:50 PM | Your Say (12)

Gosnell; Baby Feet Kick the Nation

Well, the story of Kermit Gosnell is about abortion; it’s about abortion in America.
And abortion in America is about a mindset, — even (or especially) among regulation-happy folk who will make a big noise about public safety on issues large and small — that will protect a Gosnell, and purposely turn a blind eye to abortion centers and practitioners and all of their lapses and illegalities, as long as the abortions keep on coming. If that were not true, if the blind eye were not being turned, don’t you think someone — before now — would have seen and been disgusted by Kermit Gosnell’s collection of severed baby feet? -- | The Anchoress

Posted by Vanderleun at 2:42 PM | Your Say (7)

Advice from Don Surber

Son of Tea Partiers saved Giffords'€™ life « Don Surber

My advice to conservatives today is simple: Don’t be defensive. Just:

Tell.

It.

Like.

It.

Is.

My version:

A pot-smoking, Bush-hater may have shot Democratic Congressman Gabrielle Giffords in the head in a failed assassination attempt, but a neurosurgeon whose parents are Tea Partiers was part of the team that saved her life.

Posted by Vanderleun at 2:28 PM | Your Say (3)

Fear of a Republican Uterus

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Such women are, however, usually skilled enough at math to recognize that their boutique babies -- usually just one, but never more than two --
will be vastly outnumbered by the offspring of women who aren't following the Modern Professional Feminist Career Woman Lifestyle. Those other women, with their non-elite educations and their unruly broods of children, inevitably appear to the feminist career woman's mind as The Problem. Then along came Sarah Palin, with a state-school education and five children, saying things like, "You betcha!" Some women who had been all in favor of the presidential ambitions of Hillary Clinton (Wellesley, Yale, exactly one child) were shocked into hysteria by the appearance of Sarah Palin on the national political stage. -- The Other McCain

Posted by Vanderleun at 1:10 PM | Your Say (3)

Powerline Publishes the Rebuttal

Palin for president? Michael Perry responds to the cowardly (no comments please) "John" ( 'I never run from a fight -- no comments please') @ Powerline:
Sigh! This running from a fight is why I consider myself an independent rather than a Republican. Republicans think like businessmen. "Ah, there's some fierce competition in this market. Some unpleasantness. Perhaps we ought to place our investments elsewhere." No, what you do is what I did in my copyright dispute with the Tolkien estate. You fight, you win and you leave the other side gun shy. It works. That's what the NRA has done with gun control. There's an unavoidable upside to these vicious attacks. They persuade some voters. You and I have the responsibility to make sure the downside is greater, that lies don't win, that those who lie pay a painful cost.

You could, of course, argue that Palin isn't qualified for the office, but the obvious response to that is "More qualified than who?" Than goofy Gore? Than spineless, no-one-ever-follows-me Kerry? Than posturing Obama? Palin's brief but obvious executive talent as governor isn't proof that she'll make a good President. But it easily trumps anything the most recent three Democratic Presidential candidates have demonstrated. And yes, there are probably people with greater executive skills that Palin, but they seem to lack the heart to fight as well as her communication skills. Never forget how she manages to drive debates after losing for the VP slot, while Gore and Kerry, former senators and Presidential candidates have virtually no impact on today's debates. In my mind, no one who's thought Gore, Kerry and Obama qualified is credible saying that Palin isn't.
P.S. John, Please note. Real Men enable comments.

Posted by Vanderleun at 1:01 PM | Your Say (17)

The Biden Toast

"We hold no hard feels toward China, no need to apologize for that Pearl Harbor thing." -- Diogenes' Middle Finger: Obamas have Chinese for Dinner

Posted by Vanderleun at 12:39 PM | Your Say (1)

Warming Melting Faster Than Colding

EurekAlert withdraws climate change paper - CTV News

A study warning that the planet would warm by 2.4C by 2020, creating deadly consequences for the global food supply, is being debunked as false and impossible.

The study came from a little-known, non-profit group based in Argentina, called the Universal Ecological Fund. An embargoed copy of the study appeared on Eurekalert!, a news service operated by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that's followed by many journalists....

The correction came after The Guardian newspaper in the U.K. published a reaction piece to the study. The paper said it had interviewed climate scientists who told them that rapid global warming at the rates projected by the study was impossible.

"2.4 C by 2020 (which is 1.4C in the next 10 years – something like six to seven times the projected rate of warming) has no basis in fact," NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt told the newspaper in an email.

Posted by Vanderleun at 11:11 AM | Your Say (1)

Paliinoia strikes deep. Into your life it will creep....

Palinoia, the Destroyer - WSJ.com She is also a highly accomplished woman, what in an earlier age would have been called a feminist pioneer:
the first female governor of the malest state in the country, the first woman on the presidential ticket of the party on the male side of the "gender gap." Having left politics, whether temporarily or permanently, she has established herself as one of the most consequential voices in the political media.

They say she is uneducated. What they mean is that her education is not elite--not Harvard or Yale, or even Michigan or UCLA. They resent her because, in their view, she has risen above her station.

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:20 AM | Your Say (1)

Why the Left Hates Sarah Palin

The progressives "joke" about gang-rape,
make pornographic movies about her, and leer at her legs. (Would any of this be tolerated against Michelle Obama?)

Palin's church was torched during the primary, a vicious crime that was hushed up by the MSM. And now, with the smears about Tucson, death threats against Palin have soared.

Yes, leftists attack Palin because they envy her beauty; and true, she's a political threat. But the main reason for the hatred is something deeper and darker.

Leftists loathe Palin because she has retained something that was stripped from them years ago: a wholesomeness, a purity of heart. People on the left despise Palin because she shines a bright light on their shame and unworthiness, which they try desperately to deny.

The progressives, like that brutal gang of abandoned girls, want to drag Palin down into the gutter with them; they want to spoil her. Of course, their efforts will be futile; Palin is fueled by a Spirit that isn't simply her own. -- Robin of Berkeley @ American Thinker

Posted by Vanderleun at 9:46 AM | Your Say (2)

January 19, 2011

California Brown: Same Old Shit, Greener Bag

Brown’s support for the state’s increasingly draconian green polices may prove more problematic.
As Attorney General, Brown played the bully in enforcing radical green measures that seek to limit developments — industrial and residential — suspected of creating greenhouses gases. Brown suggested during the campaign that such policies would help create an estimated 500,000 green jobs, but few outside the environmental lobby take this seriously. -- California’s Third Brown Era | Joel Kotkin

Posted by Vanderleun at 11:06 PM | Your Say (2)

Arnold. Terminated.

At the heart of the Terminator’s failure lies the politics of delusion,
perhaps not surprising for someone whose greatest success was based on fantasy. Traditionally California Republican governors focus on the hoary economic fundamentals. But Schwarzenegger’s main economic advisor, San Francisco investment banker David Crane, has clung to the notion that California’s creative skills would allow the state to flourish amid “creative destruction.” -- Hasta La Vista, Failure | Joel Kotkin

Posted by Vanderleun at 11:03 PM | Your Say (0)

Coming soon to a public radio station near you

Either this or Caligulism-- the love of a man for his horse:
Perhaps it won’t be long before NPR’s daily dose of stories about the suffering and heroism of homosexuals will turn to similar stories about the suffering that a father and his daughter, a mother and her son, or a brother and his sister are experiencing because society refuses to accept that their erotic love for each other is legitimate, if not perhaps even beautiful. -- The Imaginative Conservative: Homosexual Unions v. Incest - What's the Difference? (Part 1)

Posted by Vanderleun at 7:16 PM | Your Say (2)

How the yearning Right presurrenders to the schmucky Left

Perhaps the reason why the left is almost incandescently furious at Sarah Palin
is because she refuses to play their little game. Since she doesn't use their dictionary she is pilloried as illiterate. By using Oldspeak words she ipso facto gives offense. It is this stiff-necked refusal to get with the word program that may paradoxically give her the political strength. Those who've accepted the vocabulary of politesse, aka Newspeak, have unwittingly surrendered. Pre-surrendered, in fact, for the dubious honor of acceptance into quality society. -- Belmont Club サ Free the Dictionary

Posted by Vanderleun at 3:53 PM | Your Say (5)

Brown Appoints Linda Ronstadt Secretary of Song

As California's Secretary of Song, Ronstadt, the former Queen of Rock,
is now responsible for encouraging the use of singing in the workplace, the home, and at the opening of wind farms. "I will lead California to a new green prosperity," said the governor at a recent press conference, "while, at the same time, Linda will lead the state to a higher consciousness through pro-active melody." Brown defined 'pro-active melody' as "happy songs that make you glad to be paying some of the highest taxes in the nation." --Interesting News Items

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:23 AM | Your Say (5)

January 18, 2011

AD Comment of the Month (So Far)

All liberals that haven't changed their mind about liberal tyranny after Hitler, Mao, and Stalin are willfully ignorant.
All liberals that won't change their mind on socialized medicine, education, etc after the decline of the US and Europe are willfully ignorant. All liberals that refuse to change their mind about weakening the military after Sept 11 are willfully ignorant. It's not only a waste of time to argue with them it is a positive evil for it gets you wrapped up in their premise. The weaker among us will eventually modify their views or withdraw when they reach the limit of their facts or patience. -- ScottM @ AMERICAN DIGEST: Comment on Civil Myass: How About We DON’T Tone It Down for a Change?

Posted by Vanderleun at 2:27 PM | Your Say (3)

Look who wants to be president twice

Barack Obama: Toward a 21st-Century Regulatory System - WSJ.com
This order requires that federal agencies ensure that regulations protect our safety, health and environment while promoting economic growth. And it orders a government-wide review of the rules already on the books to remove outdated regulations that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive.

He ends with "we can strike the right balance. We can make our economy stronger and more competitive, while meeting our fundamental responsibilities to one another." But forgets to append, "Suckers."

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:43 AM | Your Say (8)

January 17, 2011

The Equality and Diversity Shop

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Check out the link --> “The Equality and Diversity Shop”, a “family run company”
there to “promote and celebrate the diversity of society in which we live. We aim to be the one stop shop for all equality and diversity needs, whether it is racial, cultural, religious, linguistic, ageist, gender, sexual orientation or disability equality. Whether it is in education, government departments, hospitals, public services or business.” Equality and diversity “needs”? As they explain: “Making equality and diversity central to employment and service delivery is not an optional extra. -- Telegraph Blogs

Posted by Vanderleun at 7:33 PM | Your Say (10)

Gutmenschen: The Affirmative Action Employees of Europe

Gutmenschen. What a wonderfully apt term for the self-righteous public servants for whom diversity really is enriching.
How many people in Britain make a living from multiculturalism and “community cohesion”? The number of taxpayer and partly-taxpayer funded government bodies, community groups, political organisations and “charities” devoted towards diversity and equality or race relations is certainly in the four figures, and the total cost to the taxpayer must be several hundred millions of pounds – all totally wasted. -- 'Germany Abolishes Itself' – the publishing sensation that challenges Europe's diversity consensus – Telegraph Blogs

Posted by Vanderleun at 7:29 PM | Your Say (2)

Open Seating at the SOTU

Just when the number of GOP representatives is about to dwarf the number of Democrats who'll be listening to the State of the Union address,
there's MSM momentum behind the idea that the parties should sit in an interspersed jumble so viewers won't be able to tell. Brilliant! Republicans are in a position to be mean to Democrats, and there's suddenly a campaign against meanness. What a happy coincidence! --Are We Sure 'Civility' Will Help the Democrats? - Newsweek

Posted by Vanderleun at 7:25 PM | Your Say (2)

This Just In: Krugman Erupts in Rage Over Hatred

Shocked patrons at the Pembroke Room had their power breakfasts interrupted after columnist Paul Krugman scrambled atop a table, denouncing the antique show American Pickers as a vehicle for “right-wing hate.” Waiters at the Manhattan eatery attempted to calm the fiery New York Times opinion writer but were driven back by a barrage of salmon quiche and a Kaiser roll. -- Krugman Erupts in Rage Over Hatred | RIGHTNETWORK| John McCann

Posted by Vanderleun at 3:46 PM | Your Say (5)

Times' gangrene spreads to head

P. J. O'Rourke notes the disease has progressed in The Times Loses It
In the matter of self-serving, bitter, calculated cynicism, there wouldn’t seem to be much left to prove against the Times. Judging by what I’ve heard from my fellow conservatives, the issue is decided. The New York Times is a worthless, truthless, vicious institution. But I disagree. I think things are worse than that.
A reaction so disproportionate and immaterial to a news story by a news organization is indicative of trouble in the body politic​—​trouble almost as severe as that which the Times claims the Giffords shooting indicates. I worry that in the tremors and hysteria of the Times we’re seeing the sad end of liberalism.
.... But liberalism, as personified by the New York Times, became a dotty old aunt sometime during the Johnson administration. She’s provincial, eccentric, and holds dull, peculiar views about the world. Still, she has our fond regard, and we visit her regularly in her nursing home otherwise known as Arts and Leisure and the Book Review. Or we did until Sunday, January 9, when she began spouting obscenities and exposing herself.

Posted by Vanderleun at 9:54 AM | Your Say (0)

Salvia, Schizophrenia and Psychopaths

"Several of Jared’s friends said he used marijuana, mushrooms
and, especially, the hallucinogenic herb called Salvia divinorum. When smoked or chewed, the plant can cause brief but intense highs.... He became intrigued by antigovernment conspiracy theories, including that the Sept. 11 attacks were perpetrated by the government and that the country’s central banking system was enslaving its citizens. His anger would well up at the sight of President George W. Bush, or in discussing what he considered to be the nefarious designs of government." -- Behind Jared Loughner’s Mug-Shot Grin - NYTimes.com

Regarding Salvia divinorum, Wikipedia notes There has been one report of salvia precipitating psychosis. However, the authors suspected that their patient was already genetically predisposed to schizophrenia.

Posted by Vanderleun at 8:33 AM | Your Say (4)

It’s time for the Bond films to become period pieces.

In my ideal Bond movie there should be vintage '50s era cars,
East Germany should exist, Bond (and all other adult males) should wear a suit and hat everywhere they go, his watch should have a radium dial that glows, the women should smoke cigarettes with filters, trains should be glamorous and mysterious, there should be secret codes or stolen plans on microfilm, his key field equipment should be a trick leather briefcase. -- Links « Rhymes With Cars & Girls

Posted by Vanderleun at 1:20 AM | Your Say (5)

January 16, 2011

Boyworld

Nice to know that somewhere out there the beat goes on:
The Heir had a happening at our house yesterday. He called, or texted, or Facebooked, or Skyped -- or some damn thing -- three of his friends, and invited them over to our hovel to take advantage of the eight inches of packed powder on our twelve-pitch unshoveled driveway. They assembled all sorts of slippery things and bombed down to the rocky three-foot drop into the back yard, over and over, and wouldn't rest until they fell over it into the thistles. Then they sat in the snowbank out front like off-duty Cardinals or mobsters and decided things. The Spare tagged along in glorious me-too fashion. -- Sippican Cottage: Welcome To The Buckets Of Blood, Son

Posted by Vanderleun at 12:41 PM | Your Say (5)

Yes, Virginia, there still is a countdown.

At 10 seconds out, we place our hands on a series of launch switches.
Contrary to popular myth, there is no red button. Four launch switches means it takes four hands to launch — it’s one of many safety mechanisms built into the system as a means of preventing unauthorized execution of missiles by a lone individual. At five seconds out, I start my countdown, commanding a final “3, 2, 1 — execute.” We turn our keys, and watch as the control screen flashes with missile-launch notifications. Some fly immediately, some with a delay to prevent nuclear fratricide when the bombs approach their targets in 20 to 30 minutes. -- In Nuclear Silos, Death Wears a Snuggie | Danger Room | Wired.com

Posted by Vanderleun at 8:13 AM | Your Say (5)

"If we feel that civility in public discourse is going to take away mass shootings we are mistaken,"

“It is vital at this point to focus discussion not on his agenda but on the heroism of those who saved lives and the utter meaninglessness and sadness of the deaths of those he murdered. I will mention his name as little as possible and would urge the responsible press to follow suit. Let others not identify with the attention he is gaining from nothing more than his capacity to ruin life around him.” -- Dr. Michael Welner, Forensic Psychiatrist at NYU viaThe Iconoclast

Posted by Vanderleun at 7:56 AM | Your Say (1)

January 15, 2011

An Excerpt from David Foster Wallace's last lost work SIGNIFYING RAPPERS, now long out of print

Everything the white rock listener pays to enjoy is black-begotten.
If today’s Top?40 environment seems bleak or befouled, imagine the present mainstream without its sweetest sourcewaters, without the King-Waters-King Blues trinity, the Brownian soul, the backbeat, cut time, blue notes, funky French curves of sax and brass, the guitar solo, call-and-response, the Cold Medina or Lucky Powder, those lithely syncopated quintets in pomade and linen suits, the single hand in the white glove holding Pepsi aloft in the shadow of accidental flames…. Black music is American pop’s breath and bread; and we, as both born audience and born salesmen, know it. -- The Essayist (borrowed from THE MISSOURI REVIEW)

Posted by Vanderleun at 12:57 PM | Your Say (0)

Lincoln on the blood libel of 1860

You charge that we stir up insurrections among your slaves. We deny it; and what is your proof? Harper's Ferry! John Brown!
John Brown was no Republican; and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harper's Ferry enterprise. If any member of our party is guilty in that matter, you know it or you do not know it. If you do know it, you are inexcusable for not designating the man and proving the fact. If you do not know it, you are inexcusable for asserting it. . . -- Power Line

Posted by Vanderleun at 12:04 PM | Your Say (1)

"He already knew everything, without actually knowing anything."

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Who the hell is this Paul Krugman?
I know well who he is supposed to be: a Nobel prize winning economist, a professor at Princeton, and multi-purpose talking head whose principal media platform is a column in the New York Times, the fish wrap of choice. And we know his kind: the ones who call out from their Ivory towers to us, the great unwashed. But seriously, for a supposedly deep thinking intellectual, Krugman just churns out nothing but boiler plate bien pensant waffle, week after week. There's no thinking involved. It’s more like a stimulus response: add Sarah Palin here and watch the head spin. Add Tea Party here for instant spittle- flecked rant. -- Diogenes' Middle Finger: American Asshat: Paul Krugman

Posted by Vanderleun at 11:49 AM | Your Say (2)

Mystique of Hair

As far as the feminine mystique…the 90s decade completely sucks ass.
Sorry, there’s no other way to put it. When it began, the big-hair look was still in vogue. When it went out, all the women were trying to cut their hair like Hillary Clinton. That, right there, is a flunk. I’d say that even if I thought Clinton’s politics were completely wonderful. That hair style, that “rodent with a bowl cut,” is not appealing because it isn’t supposed to be. It is inherently negative. It’s an I-don’t-do-anything-to-make-men-happy haircut. It imbues all of the anarchy in an open rebellion but none of the balls. It is the hair equivalent of a petulant child, maybe a slightly mentally impaired one, sitting in a corner and grumbling about something. Let’s not even get into the pant suits. -- House of Eratosthenes

Posted by Vanderleun at 11:37 AM | Your Say (3)

Man walks into a bar....

# Dan Brokaw says he would be afraid to walk into a bar in Arizona because of all of those people with guns. No problem. Nobody in a bar in Arizona particularly wants to have a drink with Brokaw anyway.

# If you're in a bar, and some deranged killer walks in with a gun ... do you want him to be the only one in that bar with a gun?

# Do you EVER want the only guy in the crowd with a gun to be the maniac?

-- RANDOM INTEMPERATE FRIDAY THOUGHTS - Nealz Nuze on boortz.com

Posted by Vanderleun at 11:08 AM | Your Say (0)

January 13, 2011

File Under: Sundance 2011 Films I Won't Be Seeing Unless I Need to Induce Projectile Vomiting

"At the club, the music thumps, go-go dancers twirl, shorties gyrate on the dance floor while studs play it cool,
and adorably naive 17-year-old Alike takes in the scene with her jaw dropped in amazement. Meanwhile, her buddy Laura, in between macking the ladies and flexing her butch bravado, is trying to help Alike get her cherry popped." -- : Pariah -- debuting at Sundance Film Festival 2011

Or this never-ready-for-prime-time piece of shit: Sundance Film Festival 2011 : Page One: A Year Inside the -i-New York Times-/i-
"Unprecedented access to the New York Times newsroom for a year. At the media desk, a dialectical play-within-a-play transpires as writers like salty David Carr track print journalism’s metamorphosis even as their own paper struggles to stay vital and solvent. Meanwhile, rigorous journalism—including vibrant cross-cubicle debate and collaboration, tenacious jockeying for on-record quotes, and skillful page-one pitching—is alive and well."

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:16 AM | Your Say (6)

Nothing so tragic, nothing so solemn, nothing so serious that some morons in America cannot slather with some t-shirt bullshit

And here's your freebie gift at the Tucson memorial! Aren't you glad you came?
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Posted by Vanderleun at 9:48 AM | Your Say (25)

She Said, Times Said

"'A girl had written
a poem about an abortion. It was very emotional and she was teary eyed and he said something about strapping a bomb to the fetus and making a baby bomber,' Ali said." Here's the Times' version: "After another student read a poem about getting an abortion, Mr. Loughner compared the young woman to a 'terrorist for killing the baby.'" -- Ann Coulter: Liberals now seek ban on metaphors

Posted by Vanderleun at 7:30 AM | Your Say (3)

January 12, 2011

Nota Bene

When a man makes up his mind without evidence, no evidence disproving his opinion will change his mind. -- Robert A. Heinlein, 1978

Posted by Vanderleun at 11:17 AM | Your Say (3)

The Case for Home Schooling in One Paragraph

The snow is falling gently outside the window this morning.
My wife and I sat for a quiet moment in the crepuscular light and watched it slowly silt the walk. In a former iteration of our lives, we would have had to get up before dawn and hurriedly tried to figure out if the lamebrains running our kids' schools preferred a day off (for themselves) today or in the summer more and had decided to close school. The safety, never mind the comfort and convenience of the children and their parents never enters into it. We don't bother with any of that anymore. My wife teaches our kids at home. Our kids aren't rousted every morning like vagrants sleeping in a park for the convenience of people we have no regard for, aren't sick all the time, and can read and write. -- Sippican Cottage: The Quality Of Life

Posted by Vanderleun at 9:50 AM | Your Say (10)

Palin on the Media Blood Libel

Vigorous and spirited public debates during elections are among our most cherished traditions.
And after the election, we shake hands and get back to work, and often both sides find common ground back in D.C. and elsewhere. If you don’t like a person’s vision for the country, you’re free to debate that vision. If you don’t like their ideas, you’re free to propose better ideas. But, especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible. -- America's Enduring Strength

Posted by Vanderleun at 7:44 AM | Your Say (4)

Wasted Minds

The Marxist’s mind fossilizes with time; the leftist’s becomes soft and spongy. -- Don Colacho’s Aphorisms: #2,578

Posted by Vanderleun at 1:04 AM | Your Say (2)

January 11, 2011

MSNBC Warns Changing Programing could Spell Disaster for Network.

Network spokeperson Shadow Pierson-Finkelroy said not to underestimate the giant hole this would create in their programing. “MSNBC without inflammatory rantings would be like The Weather Channel without maps." The network has been in a tooth and nail battle with CNN at the bottom of the cable news ratings. -- Diogenes' Middle Finger:

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:33 PM | Your Say (3)

Revenge of the Ghouls: When Liberals Attack

Senior Raccoons will remember a time, not too long ago, that abnormal people in our culture actually felt abnormal. They were aware of their deviancy, and how this deviancy contributed to an unhappiness that no government has the power to eliminate.
But under the guise of "tolerance" and multiculturalism, we have deprived these poor souls of the feedback they need in order to know that they are not normal. This is not empathy, but cruelty -- like shielding someone from a cancer diagnosis on the grounds that it will make them feel bad, but depriving them of the chance to fight it.
In order to allow such people to feel normal in their abnormalcy, we have had to develop a deviant culture for them to live in, to such an extent that the normal are now made to feel abnormal.
This is one of the hidden influences of the Tea Party movement, and more generally the effort to take our country back from the deviant. Not surprisingly, this is enraging the abnormals of the left, as witnessed, for example, by the weird attempt to suggest that normal people somehow caused the patently abnormal Jared Loughner to open fire on a bunch of normal people. -- One Cʘsmos:

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:12 PM | Your Say (0)

Conversations with Liberals About Limbaugh

Bookworm transcribes two she's had. It works this way for me too. It's a fool's errand. No matter what you ask them, they simply can't front the fact that they're just mouthing talking points from the center of their fully colonized minds. Sad.


Posted by Vanderleun at 5:17 PM | Your Say (1)

The Obama Exception

Stay kool and keep your creases straight. The FDA’s power to ban menthol goes back to the 2009 “Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act” —
the law giving the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authority to regulate tobacco. That bill contained a provision barring all flavorings except menthol. At first glance, the decision to ban other flavorings may seem curious. After all, the only real player in the flavored cigarette market was, and is, menthol, which is smoked by about 30 percent of our nation’s 45 million adult smokers — and perhaps three-quarters of African-American smokers. -- Should menthol cigarettes be banned?

Posted by Vanderleun at 4:12 PM | Your Say (4)

Dr. Helen Knows the Cause and the Cure

As long as schools and society simultaneously place the rights of the mentally ill

above other citizens while refusing the mentally ill the help that they may desperately need, we will continue to see mass killings like the one in Arizona. People will seemed dazed and ask "why?" until they forget and another horrible killing takes place. The media will give the whole thing a political spin and indeed, perhaps there is one, but usually only in some idiosyncratic bizarre way that only the killer (or maybe a good therapist) would understand. And while the media uses the killings for political gain, another Jared is brewing, ignored, feared and filled with fury, rage and homicidal revenge. -- Dr. Helen: "If you see it on the news one night, know that I got out fast..."

Posted by Vanderleun at 2:03 PM | Your Say (0)

Politics and the Schizophrenic's Language

More often in this country, assassins are just plain crazy.
Maybe not legally insane -- few qualify for that designation -- but crazy in the vernacular sense of unhinged and obviously out of touch with reality. As disturbed individuals, their thinking is idiosyncratic and unpredictable, and their propensity for violence is sometimes telegraphed and noted ahead of time, although often formless and quite general. More importantly, what finally tips them over the edge into action can in many cases never be known, and appears almost arbitrary from the outside. -- neoneocon

Posted by Vanderleun at 12:39 PM | Your Say (0)

January 10, 2011

Unsung Hero

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Mavy and Dorwan Stoddard

Dorwan Stoddard, RIP
Dorwan Stoddard and his wife, Mavanell, grew up together as friends in Tucson, and were high-school sweethearts in the 1950s. The two parted, moved away, and married others. But 15 years ago, having survived the death of their spouses, the two were reunited — and then married — in their hometown. When Jared Loughner began firing on the crowd gathered around Rep. Gabrielle Gifford at the Safeway supermarket in Tucson on Saturday, Mavanell thought the sounds came from firecrackers. Dorwan knew otherwise and quickly pulled his wife to the ground and threw himself over her. Mavy — as she is known to her friends — was hit three times in the legs, and is now in stable condition and expected to survive. Dorwan was shot, fatally, through the head, at the age of 76. Dorwan was memorialized at the Mountain Avenue Church of Christ — a small Tucson-area church where he and Mavy had worshipped and served — on Sunday.

UPDATE: Much more on this remarkable couple is to be found at サ The Heroes In Our Midst NoisyRoom.net: The Progressive Hunter
Like many men, Dorwin Stoddard had stood before an alter and promised God and those present, that he would love, cherish and protect Mavy for as long as they both should live. On Saturday, he made good on that promise in no uncertain terms.

Posted by Vanderleun at 2:27 PM | Your Say (5)

Lest We Forget

We should remember, too, that there are places where mainstream political movements really are responsible for violence against their rivals. (Last week’s assassination of a Pakistani politician who dared to defend a Christian is a stark reminder of what that sort of world can look like.) Not so in America: From the Republican leadership to the Tea Party grass roots, all of Gabrielle Giffords’s political opponents were united in horror at the weekend’s events. There is no faction in American politics that actually wants its opponents dead. -- ROSS DOUTHAT United in Horror - NYTimes.com

Posted by Vanderleun at 2:08 PM | Your Say (3)

Endgames for Endtimes

Even if the government could censor the Internet,
they’re not going to make all the alienated people who read and are influenced by these blogs magically disappear or become un-alienated. They – and you – will find a way to make their lives miserable. No amount of censorship or coercion can stop a critical mass of intellectuals who are committed to taking down the society in which they live. And of course, the government-media complex is not going to suddenly see the light and start addressing the underlying problems. They’re just going to double-down on their shaming, intimidation and totalitarianism until their empire crumbles to pieces. Those tactics didn’t save the Soviet Union or East Germany, and they won’t save Barack Obama and Goldman Sachs. -- In Mala Fide: How Jared Loughner has pushed the West closer to Armageddon

Posted by Vanderleun at 1:11 PM | Your Say (0)

You know, when you think about it, it actually explains a lot

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Methinks "adamthinks.com" isn't really thinking this through.

Posted by Vanderleun at 12:29 PM | Your Say (2)

20 Ways To Be Popular At An Expensive Liberal Arts School

7. The more things you take offense to the better.
Throw terms like sexist, racist, and homophobe at everyone/everything that has the audacity to disagree with you. The more you use these terms the more valid they become, so try to squeeze them in every other sentence. -- Thought Catalog

Posted by Vanderleun at 9:58 AM | Your Say (3)

Deep Down He's Shallow

Obama reminds me of a lot of graduate school professors
who had no syllabi and no plan of instruction. Instead they would wing it, and lecture, sermonize, and remonstrate until about week six into the semester when the students started to rebel, wondering whether there were any real reading assignments, any tests, any papers, any rationale to grading -- as they waited for an intervention from a senior colleague to inform us that our professor really did have a course plan somewhere, really did know what he was doing. -- Works and Days サ Obama-- Making it up as we go along.

Posted by Vanderleun at 2:03 AM | Your Say (2)

Can't have one without the other.

The First Amendment is the singer on stage in front of everyone whose voice can not be ignored, while the Second Amendment is the individual in front of the stage making sure no one kills the performance. -- Straight Forward in a Crooked World

Posted by Vanderleun at 1:57 AM | Your Say (0)

On Demand

Human appetites are predictable.
What do we want? We want everything and we want more of it. We demand. And in demanding, we create reasons for others (who are ourselves) to make themselves useful. In the honest exchange is a circle of life. It is economical. It goes to the core of why we do things, the choices we make and our convoluted decisions. Our demands are real, and they form the essence of human necessity. It is the call that cannot be ignored and the service that cannot be refused. It is our way to satisfaction. It cannot be arbitrarily branded as evil simply because of the fractions of who demands and who supplies and from whence these human actions come. The only righteousness supply and demand require is an honest exchange and a fair price. -- Demand - Cobb

Posted by Vanderleun at 1:40 AM | Your Say (0)

January 8, 2011

Not your grandmother's dildo

Man charged with two felonies for making homemade explosive device
According to the criminal complaint, Lester had made some modifications to a sex toy. He put gun powder, BB shot and buck shot from shotgun shells into one with black and red wires that connected to a trigger with a battery port.

There was no battery inside the device.

The complaint went on to say that Lester planned on giving it to one of three women. In each of those cases, the relationship had ended badly.

Also left at the apartment were tools used in the construction of the explosive device, including cords, cables, a small tool kit and two other sex toys.


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Dream date Terry Allen Lester

Posted by Vanderleun at 9:47 AM | Your Say (12)

January 7, 2011

Ace Shoots. Ace Scores. Nothing But Net

Ace of Spades lets them have it with The Illusion of the "Professional" Class and the Rise of the Liberal Aristocracy
If people typically heard the beliefs of other inarguable elites, perhaps there wouldn't be this bias in people's minds that liberalism represents the beliefs of the smart set. If people heard what engineers had to say, if engineers were on Letterman as much as Brian Friggin' Williams, perhaps their subconscious notion of the "elite" way of looking at things would change. But they don't hear from engineers. They just hear from David Letterman, Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw, and other, um, non-elites who just happen to be paid a king's ransom and be on tv all the frickin' time because that's their job, to fill up the space between commercials. Even when other elites are featured on tv -- they tend to be ones expressing the same ideas as the media. Al Gore gets on Letterman to talk up global warming, but Freeman Dyson -- an actual brilliant scientist -- doesn't get to say that he thinks global warming is overstated, half-baked, most-likely-wrong poppycock. Science popularizer Carl Sagan is on every network to talk about his "Nuclear Winter" theory, but father of the hydrogen bomb Edward Teller doesn't get to say that's all a bunch of well-meaning made-up political "science."

Posted by Vanderleun at 6:38 PM | Your Say (2)

Why the American left hates the American Constitution

Word Around the Net: ANTI-FOUNDER
For the left, the problem is what these men stood for, believed in, fought for, died for, and achieved is beginning to clash more and more with what the left wants to achieve. Their ideals and the constitution they wrote keeps getting in the way of the left's goals and ideals. I have waited for the left to start to turn on the founders because of this, but its taken a long time because frankly people weren't studying exactly what they taught and why for a long time.

Posted by Vanderleun at 6:08 PM | Your Say (2)

The Autism Scam: Why it should be springtime for exposing medical and scientific frauds

The Last Psychiatrist: Wakefield And The Autism Fraud-- The Other Part Of The Story Peer Review is a joke-- why do you call it that?
They're not my peers, they're my close friends or my mortal enemies depending on my/my department's relationship with the editor; and they're not reviewing it, they're writing asinine, self-important comments that will never be noted after publication. Why doesn't it change? The answer is precisely in what Wakefield did: he wrote a tiny paper that he hoped would not be scrutinized (or even read.) He just wanted to be able to say he wrote it, he wrote it not for science but for himself. Now pick up any journal. How many articles within are not for clinicians to act on, they're to put on a CV, get a promotion, get a grant, establish a name. That's why we have ten million journals, none of which anyone reads, ever.Fortunately enough good science gets done, loudly, powerfully, that medicine moves forward. But the amazement shouldn't be that Wakefield's study was a fraud, the amazement should be why we haven't discovered hundreds of studies that are frauds.

Posted by Vanderleun at 6:00 PM | Your Say (1)

Can I get an "AMEN"?

I couldn't agree more with this passage from Diogenes:
To Sean Hannity, Dude, expand your horizons to pick up more than six basic talking points to repeat every day and to use other guests than your usual ten who you seem to have on every week for one reason or another. Seriously. -- Diogenes' Middle Finger: If I May Be So Bold......

Seriously. I am sick of this schtick. That goes for you too, O'Reilly.

Posted by Vanderleun at 5:20 PM | Your Say (9)

Like the flu, this is going around.

Posted by Vanderleun at 1:47 PM | Your Say (0)

First the birds, then the fish, now the street clowns

Two street clowns were found dead in southeastern Mexico

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:45 AM | Your Say (4)

The Slime Also Rises

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You knew this was coming but it's still shockingly disgusting: John Edwards to Wed Rielle Hunter, Report Claims - The Hollywood Gossip "Report Claims," yes. But if not now, later, for John Edwards - Father of the Year 2007

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:13 AM | Your Say (4)

January 6, 2011

European nations begin seizing private pensions

The most striking example is Hungary,
where last month the government made the citizens an offer they could not refuse. They could either remit their individual retirement savings to the state, or lose the right to the basic state pension (but still have an obligation to pay contributions for it). In this extortionate way, the government wants to gain control over $14bn of individual retirement savings. -- CSMonitor.com

Think that 401K is safe? Think again.

Posted by Vanderleun at 8:26 PM | Your Say (3)

All buttoned up and ready to rumble!

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Along with a new chief of staff we'd suggest an new chief of stuff.

Posted by Vanderleun at 2:57 PM | Your Say (5)

By Jove I do believe he's got it!

I finally figured out why Obama picked him. Biden is like the fat girl women hang out with to make themselves look skinnier; he makes anyone look like a genius. -- Don Surber

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:54 AM | Your Say (2)

January 5, 2011

Be grateful for God's small mercies

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Posted by Vanderleun at 9:56 PM | Your Say (1)

The portents, we might say, are favorable. BUT... None of this will be enough.

Consider:
Left-liberals, who disdain most of the Constitution's provisions, will fight like rabid dogs to defend the welfare state on the basis of the "general welfare" clause. They'll also demand that abortion "rights" not be touched, as they're protected by a Supreme Court decision. Conservatives, who mainly favor limiting the federal government to its Constitutional preserve, will defend the Air Force and the War on Drugs with equal ferocity. If we take the Constitution as indivisible and not dismiss the parts we dislike, then all four of the above-cited activities of the federal government are out-of-bounds. -- Francis W. Porretto - Eternity Road

Posted by Vanderleun at 9:16 PM | Your Say (0)

Regarding California

Probably best for the rest of the country to back away from California slowly while avoiding direct eye contact. -- Guess they didn’t get the memo… | westsound modern

Posted by Vanderleun at 9:06 PM | Your Say (0)

Earth to Grandma: Sit Down and Shut Up

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Time for Whack-A-Mole, John. Please?

Posted by Vanderleun at 6:50 PM | Your Say (1)

Let's find the new, sekrit Journolist. You know it's out there.

Proof the prog-media-complex is a pack of perverts: iOwnTheWorld.comwraps it up with Good grief, now we are teabaggers with a fetish.

If you do a Google Search and plug in: Constitution, fetish, these are the headlines that are returned:

Slate-Read It and Weep How the Tea Party’s fetish for the Constitution as written may get it in trouble.

The Maddow Blog – Reading in: The new Constitution fetish

Salon- What’s with conservatives’ fetish for the Founding Fathers?

Talking Points Memo-The Right’s Phony Fetish

Huffington Post-How about that whole Constitution fetish you guys have?

Periscope Post- The GOP’s Constitutional fetish

Posted by Vanderleun at 12:00 PM | Your Say (7)

Hoping for Change

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I stood here for a while...nothing happened.

Posted by Vanderleun at 11:28 AM | Your Say (0)

20 Years with Reverend Wright and They Put You On the Day Shift

Obama unclear on the Bible:
U.S. President Barack Obama is reported to be attending church again, and shows a "fresh start," by persistently misquoting from the Book of Genesis, chapter four. "I am my brother's keeper; I am my sister's keeper," he suggests it says. Check out the original. It is a scene in which no sisters appear, and the brothers in question are Cain and Abel. In particular, the intellectual leap from "you must not murder your brother," to "you must create and sustain a vast and ponderous welfare system, that is funded by taxing him and borrowing the rest from China," is not Biblical. -- David Warren

Posted by Vanderleun at 11:03 AM | Your Say (1)

The Ongoing Crisis of Haves vs Have Nots

More marching moronism from England: davidthompson: New Crisis Detected “Those who insist on under-occupying their homes should be forced to pay for the privilege, or take in a charity lodger.”

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:54 AM | Your Say (2)

When the going gets tough, the schmucks get going

Gibbs is resigning as White House press secretary "The move allows Gibbs to leave the grinding pace of the press secretary's job, make money giving speeches and spend more time with his family" penis.

Posted by Vanderleun at 9:32 AM | Your Say (4)

Who says there's no good news?

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Via iOwnTheWorld.com サ Blog Archive サ Double Heh!

Posted by Vanderleun at 9:19 AM | Your Say (1)

January 4, 2011

There MAY NOT Always Be an England

What happens when, as a matter of state policy, you debauch your human capital?

The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe, the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease, the highest number of single mothers; marriage is all but defunct, except for toffs, upscale gays, and Muslims. For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what lbj’s Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population. One-fifth of British children are raised in homes in which no adult works. Just under 900,000 people have been off sick for over a decade, claiming “sick benefits,” week in, week out, for ten years and counting. “Indolence,” as Machiavelli understood, is the greatest enemy of a free society, but rarely has any state embraced this oldest temptation as literally as Britain. There is almost nothing you can’t get the government to pay for. -- Dependence Day by Mark Steyn - The New Criterion

Posted by Vanderleun at 1:26 PM | Your Say (6)

January 3, 2011

Now shown to increase it

"In the society that is starting to take shape, not even the enthusiastic collaboration of the sodomite and the lesbian will save us from boredom." -- Don Colacho’s Aphorisms: #2,534 [One word, "Glee." I rest my case.]

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:29 PM | Your Say (5)

Who says there's no good news?

Think about this ..... in less than 48 hours, Nancy Pelosi will no longer be 3rd in line for the presidency. -- Neal Boortz

Posted by Vanderleun at 6:32 AM | Your Say (1)

January 2, 2011

Why 2010 Made Us Sick

Things were even worse abroad.
North Korea continued to show why it is known as "the international equivalent of Charlie Sheen." The entire nation of Greece went into foreclosure and had to move out; it is now living with relatives in Bulgaria. Iran continued to develop nuclear weapons, all the while insisting that they would be used only for peaceful scientific research, such as -- to quote President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- "seeing what happens when you drop one on Israel." Closer to home, the already strained relationship between the United States and Mexico reached a new low after the theft, by a Juarez-based drug cartel, of the Grand Canyon. Dave Barry's Year in Review:

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:43 AM | Your Say (0)

January 1, 2011

Nerds: It's time for them to go

Nerdiness is, at its core, a manifestation of clever silliness.
Nerds and their fellow travelers conflate cleverness and intelligence and suffer – and make everyone else around them suffer – because of it. Being able to do complex math in your head or invent elaborate theories about the hidden meanings of Star Trek episodes does not make you smart, they just mean you’re good at wasting your brainpower on things that don’t matter. Modern society encourages cleverness and punishes intelligence, which is why Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner direct the American economy while the people who could actually fix the recession are virtual unknowns. -- Intelligence is for stupid people

Posted by Vanderleun at 5:53 PM | Your Say (3)

Time to Expunge the Nation of the Clever Sillies

Most of the people and cultures we think of as smart are merely clever.
The Chinese and Japanese are entire races of clever sillies, which is why China will never become a superpower (despite the braying of the self-appointed “experts”) and why Japan has been stuck in a recession ever since the 80′s, when those same “experts” said that THEY would take over the world. Clever sillies, or “clever morons” as AD calls them, are problematic because they justify the life-destroying, culture-wrecking idiocies they push with their “smartness.” Feminism, socialism, neoliberalism, multiculturalism, political correctness – all of them are pushed by clever sillies who are witty enough to implement a policy but too stupid to understand why it’s a bad idea. -- Intelligence is for stupid people

Posted by Vanderleun at 5:50 PM | Your Say (3)

Let's get Al Gore in there in a Speedo STAT!

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Ojmjakon, Russia will enjoy The Coldest Temperature Ever Recorded In The Northern Hemisphere on Wednesday -- KA-CHING!

Posted by Vanderleun at 3:30 PM | Your Say (1)

Let's Face It. Newt's Had This Coming for a Long, Long Time

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Posted by Vanderleun at 12:04 PM | Your Say (10)