The Top 40

« May 2011 | Main | July 2011 »

June 30, 2011

Intellectual Pick-Up Lines

• "Society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable." -- Scott Adams, Pegs and Holes

• The Heated Genre of Blood, Tits and Scowling The beauty of Blood, Tits and Scowling as a genre is that, when you put them all together, it creates a perpetual engine for drama.

• American race panic, if you’re not raised with it, seems a bit odd, like the Chinese obsession with “face” or Muslims fretting about women showing their hair—a quirk of the national character.

• Modern paganism is not paganism at all , but postchristianism, a corruption of a higher thing falling, not the innocent early growth of a low thing rising.

• I've had the phrase 'Weaponized Bio-Whore' stuck in my brain for weeks and finally photoshopped it out of my head where it can cease wreaking havoc on my gray cells.

• World's biggest jigsaw puzzle is put back together "We were facing a three-dimensional puzzle, a 300,000-piece puzzle to which we had lost the picture. And that was the main difficulty of this project."

• “Democracies endure until the citizens care more for what the state can give them than for its ability to defend rich and poor alike; until they care more for their privileges than their responsibilities; until they learn they can vote largess from the public treasury and use the state as an instrument for plundering, first those who have wealth, then those who create it” -- Jerry Pournelle.

Posted by Vanderleun at 7:32 PM | Your Say (1)

The Deeper Signal Inside the Dick Slip

If there is any long term significance to the Halperin story it is a possible indicator that the governing narrative is weakening.

Sovietologists have long known that the first, and often fatal signs of a factional distress are the unguarded lapses in "reliable"€ organs of information. A political enterprise is in real distress, not when it is attacked by its enemies which is normal, but when it can no longer be praised by its friends. And when those friends must deliver praise or respect through gritted teeth then the incipient trouble is all the greater. -- Belmont Club » The Seven Second Solution

Posted by Vanderleun at 12:06 PM | Your Say (3)

June 29, 2011

QOTD File Under: "What oft was said but ne'er so well expressed."

"Most "pro-choice" folks seem to be against individual choice in essentially everything outside sex and drugs." -- The Fourth Checkraise: 150 million times zero equals zero

Posted by Vanderleun at 8:08 PM | Your Say (0)

Intellectual Garage Sale

• Killing The Mark Twain Moron Society Dead:Sippican Cottage: The Autocoprophagy Of Mark Twain

  Why, oh why was Twain's unpublished work turned over to these jackanapes to paw through like illiterate raccoons looking for rancid bits to eat? Yes, yes, I know they style themselves "The Mark Twain Project," and have devoted their mortgages, if not lives, to Twain, or at least to raiding his intellectual larder to stock their shabby ivy-stricken midden over at Berkeley. So what. The mental contortions needed to adduce that their name and their sinecures makes them capable of understanding such a writer is like saying that a dog has ticks so the ticks should inherit the dog's estate.

• Targets:

  We as Jews are targeted. We as infidel Americans are targeted. We are the ultimate prize as the Big Satan — although Jewish blood is the best for the West’s contemporary adversaries. We do not grasp the mental universe of our enemies. Their obsession with our blood, their obsession with butchering us. They are like an army of vampires. They actually want to suck our blood. Especially Jewish blood. We in the West have not a clue. They do not just want to kill us any old way. Poison gas will not do. They want to spill our blood. I could never make this stuff up. That is what I was trying to sort out with the Daniel Pearl incident, but my friend tried to put a stop to my thinking by calling me a racist. -- A Leftist Feminist’s Journey Out of the Political Faith | FrontPage Magazine

• Our Lord’s great commissions to us are earthly ACTIONS.

  DO THIS in memory of Me. GO and MAKE disciples of all nations. LOVE one another as I have loved you. It is our ACTIONS on this earth that will be the basis of our judgment. Hence, it is completely illogical to argue that nothing that happens on this earth or how we engage it matters. Of course it matters. What we DO will determine whether we end up in heaven or hell. Prayer is the spiritual fuel that enables and fortifies the person to GO and DO the right. -- Ann Barnhardt

• "I like to say that for the black community, nothing will change until we learn to love our children more than we love the Democratic party.” -- Sarah Palin’s Unlikely Supporter - The Note

• The Amazing Flying President Squeaks:

  The man who flies anywhere he wants, anytime, cost-free, complained at great length that other people’s private jets are insufficiently taxed. Tomorrow, Obama will fly on Air Force One to Philadelphia, Pa., to attend two DNC fundraisers, where he will probably again denounce the current tax rates on corporate jets, without anyone remarking on the irony. -- Obama: Still Getting the Hang of Answering Questions - By Jim Geraghty

• The Unreality Principle | John C. Wright's Journal

  The central tenant of the cultic and hysterical called Leftism is what I call ‘the unreality principle.’ This is the principle, baldly stated, that reality is bad and unreality is good, therefore unreality is real. The second tenant coming out of this first principle is that anything one would like to believe about Leftism is real, and the that facts are not real. Hence, the Leftist believes his cult is not a cult. To the Leftist, the Christians are cultists; but the Leftist and his fellow are merely awake and aware people in a land of foggy sleepwalkers. He and his are the only people who see the true danger from Global Warming, the danger of Zionism, the danger of Theocracy, the danger of Capitalism, and the danger from racism, sexism, and homophobia. All these threats are clear, present, impending, terrifying and justify any action, from simple suppression of the truth to riots to state-sponsored mass murder, that the imagination of man can conceive in his dark heart. Leftism is scientific and enlightened. The third tenant is that there is no war, there is only rebellion.

• Principles Of A PreserverThere is no social justice through mechanical leveling, but rather the reverse.

  There is an asymmetry in how progressives view justice. Those not having are seen as suffering more intensely than those who have what they have taken forcibly from them.

• "When advocating some societal change in which you stand to reap all of its benefits while some other group gets to shoulder all of its costs, a fun way to sprinkle insult to the injury is to dismiss the latter group by saying that it just "hates change". -- The Fourth Checkraise: Sup, sub

• Old Fink: John Turturro on Random Roles

  The only movie that the Coen Brothers have ever said that they want to make a sequel to is Barton Fink. And you’ll have to wait another 10 years for that, at least. It’ll be Old Fink. He’s going to be a hippie. I’m gonna have a big Jewfro and be at like Woodstock or something. Maybe he sold all his friends out, who knows. I don’t know the story. All I know is that he’s going to have a big Afro, and I think it’s going to be in the ’70s.

• SNUL; a bunch of bloggers singing a commonly-motivated, but disconnected, chorus of Sorry No Updates Lately. -- House of Eratosthenes

• Mark Twain: Bra Patenter

  Samuel Clemens (1835-1910), who became Mark Twain in 1863 and then mostly stayed that way, had a great mind and was a superb writer and story teller--he wasn't necessarily a great inventor, however. In the ear;y sea of his great achievements, in 1871--just after the publication of his first real best-seller, Innocents Abroad, 1869)--Clemens applied for and was granted a patent for a bra clasp. I don't know if it is the bra clasp, or not, but for whatever reason Clemens pursued this interest all the way to the end.

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

June 28, 2011

Intellectual Remant Sale

• It's always dawning just before the dark:

  "Life seemed to be going well after the war, then things got strange. One evening, right before sunset, large packs of well-groomed, standard poodles sporting massive, translucent pink wings, flew low over neighborhoods throughout the land. As we gathered in the streets to watch this barking nightmare descend, the dogs spoke to us in arrogant, clipped tones, "Once you've grown fat, we'll dine on your flesh again. You'll never be anything more than fodder for our feast." -- Nightscapes « Jaded Haven

• Is there a new geek anti-intellectualism? Does it really matter that much if geeks are anti-intellectuals?

  Well, the question is whether the trend will move on to the population at large. One does not speak of "geek chic"these days for nothing. The digital world is now on the cutting edge of societal evolution, and attitudes and behaviors that were once found mostly among geeks back in the 1980s and 1990s are now mainstream. Geek anti-intellectualism can already be seen as another example. Most of the people I've mentioned in this essay are not geeks per se, but the digerati, who are frequently non-geeks or ex-geeks who have their finger on the pulse of social movements online. Via these digerati, we can find evidence of geek attitudes making their way into mainstream culture. One now regularly encounters geek-inspired sentiments from business writers like Don Tapscott and education theorists like Ken Robinson -- and even from the likes of Barack Obama (but not anti-intellectualism, of course).

• Larry Sanger Blog » Geek anti-intellectualism: replies

  What about books, and classics in particular? Well, geek anti-intellectual attitudes here are easily explained as a combination of laziness and arrogance. The Iliad takes a lot of effort, and the payoff is quite abstract; instead, they could read a manual or write code or engineer some project, and do a lot more of what they recognize as "learning." The advent of new social media and the decline of the popularity of books are developments that only confirm their attitude. It doesn't hurt that geek is suddenly chic, which surely only inflates geek arrogance. If they admit to themselves that there is something to philosophy, history, or anything else that takes time, hard study, and reflection to learn, but which does not produce code or gadgetry, then they would feel a little deflated. This doesn't sit well with their pride, of course. They're smart, they think, and so how could they be opposed to any worthwhile knowledge?

• In living black on white: The Racism Everyone Pretends Doesn't Exist

• The "Missing" Women of the World:160 Million and Counting - NYTimes.com

  Twenty years later, the number of “missing” women has risen to more than 160 million, and a journalist named Mara Hvistendahl has given us a much more complete picture of what’s happened. Her book is called “Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men.” As the title suggests, Hvistendahl argues that most of the missing females weren’t victims of neglect. They were selected out of existence, by ultrasound technology and second-trimester abortion.

• CONELRAD Adjacent: AN INDELIBLE COLD WAR SYMBOL: THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF THE FALLOUT SHELTER SIGN

  Walk around any major American city today and you will still be able to see at least a few rusty Fallout Shelter Signs attached to buildings of a certain vintage.[iii] These distinctive metallic, reflective signs remain the most durable—literally and figuratively—symbol of the Cold War. But how did the sign come to be and who exactly was responsible for its creation?

• Why Cities Keep Growing, Corporations And People Always Die, And Life Gets Faster

  When manufacturing companies are on a down turn, they decrease research and development, and in fact in some cases, do actually get rid of it, thinking this is "oh, we can get that back in two years we'll be back on track." Well, this kind of thinking kills them. This is part of the killing, and this is part of the change from superlinear to sublinear, namely companies allow themselves to be dominated by bureaucracy and administration over creativity and innovation, and unfortunately, it's necessary. You cannot run a company without administrative. Someone has got to take care of the taxes and the bills and the cleaning the floors and the maintenance of the building and all the rest of that stuff. You need it. And the question is, “can you do it without it dominating the company?” The data suggests that you can't.

• The Argumentative Theory | Conversation | Edge

  "Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments. That's why they call it The Argumentative Theory of Reasoning. So, as they put it, "The evidence reviewed here shows not only that reasoning falls quite short of reliably delivering rational beliefs and rational decisions. It may even be, in a variety of cases, detrimental to rationality. Reasoning can lead to poor outcomes, not because humans are bad at it, but because they systematically strive for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions. This explains the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and reason-based choice, among other things."

• Automation will make you obsolete, no matter who you are

  Surely, we won’t replace politicians by robots? We may not replace them, but they will become obsolete anyhow. I believe that computers enable a different from of government altogether where we have little need for politicians. In most of the western world, we use representative democracy, with local politicians being elected and sent to a central government, where they form the ruling class. Yet with an entire population having Internet access, we don’t need politicians to represent the people, people can speak for themselves. Most politicians are already more or less powerless since nobody really believe they represent their people. You think that government without professional politicians would be chaos? I am sure there are people who think that without newspapers, individuals cannot be informed.

• The Return of the Barbarian

  One-on-one, a lower barbarian can outthink, outfight, and out-innovate a civilized citizen any day. But a settled civilization at its peak can blow a lower barbarian civilization away. Not least because at the very top, you still have Veblen’s “uncivilized” higher barbarians (or, to use the Ribbonfarm term, sociopaths). But once it begins its decline, the greater live intelligence of the barbarians begins to take effect.

• Declinism Should Always Strive To Be More Funny

  Declinism, however, strikes me as springing from that very same impulse, a longing for chaos, for drama, for "interesting" things to be happening. This explains why wealthy, coddled entertainers without cares in the world can pop up (when the leaders have the wrong letters after their name) spouting declinism, conspiracy theories and the like. They have literally nothing else interesting in their lives to be going on about.

• Not just because you can't scribble notes in the margin either: 5 Reasons Why E-Books Aren't There Yet

• More Gore Slop: Bad to the Bone at Hildegarde

  There is an enormous, gaping disconnect between the book’s central thesis (we aren’t using reason and logic anymore because we don’t read enough, but watch television instead) and what the book actually does. Or, rather, doesn’t do. And what it doesn’t do is make an reference to books.

• "It's a cosmic rule that hippie action is always met by the equal and opposite force of unintended consequences."Hippies Heathrow Horror ｫ The Daily Bayonet
  

  Posted by Vanderleun at 10:57 AM | Your Say (1)

  June 27, 2011

  Intellectual Head Shops

  
  • Al Gore, Sooper-Genius! The Failure of Al Gore: Part Deux | Via Meadia

    Gore's failures are not just about leadership. The strategic vision he crafted for the global green movement has comprehensively failed.That is no accident; the entire green policy vision was so poorly conceived, so carelessly constructed, so unbalanced and so rife with contradictions that it could only thrive among activists and enthusiasts. Once the political power of the climate movement, aided by an indulgent and largely unquestioning press, had pushed the climate agenda into the realm of serious politics, failure was inevitable. The only question was whether the comprehensive green meltdown would occur before or after the movement achieved its core political goal of a comprehensive and binding global agreement on greenhouse gasses.

  • "Ephesians 12: For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."

    Next are the Archangels who are the guardian angels of nations and countries and are concerned with politics, military matters, commerce and trade. What? You think they aren’t involved in those things? You think they just fly around and play with each others’ hair? Remember once again that there are demonic counterparts here as well - as there are in the last group, Angels, who are our personal guardian angels. It is comforting to think that we have a super-awesome celestial being covering our six, but this also means that we have at least one demon working on us too. My guardian angel probably wants to turn me over its knee and give me a good spanking. He’ll have to get in line. -- Barnhardt.biz - Commodity Brokerage

  • Scott Adams proposes "Author by Relocation"

    It's the literary version of "You break it, you bought it." If a piece of writing causes little or no harm for its intended audience, we can assume the original author did his job. But if the work is relocated, and/or carved into quotes out of context, that becomes a case of Author by Relocation, and the carver/mover takes on responsibility for the message at that point. This model maintains complete freedom of expression, including freedom to quote material and to criticize. It simply recognizes that moving and changing a message makes you the Author by Relocation.

  • Web and Computers Now Finished:

    Web browsers are done. Feature-complete. No one can think of anything to add that anyone wants, because there are no more features to add. Sadly, this happens to product categories. It happened with word processors twenty years ago. Spreadsheets, around the same time. Windows was done when XP shipped. Mac OS, yeah it's done too. I haven't used any of the new features. And by "new" I mean features introduced in the last eight years or so. -- Scripting News: Mozilla == Osborne?

  • Yet Another Unglamorous Hollywood Scandal

    Unlike our rulers, our entertainers and their packagers and parasites cannot delude themselves into thinking that what they do is essential to the common good. One way to quiet the roar of internal self-doubt and guilt over high wages is to plunge into “good causes,” sane or otherwise. Another is to indulge oneself however one is bent—be it sex, booze, drugs, or even gambling.

  • Worldviews are philosophical in origin,

    but usually created by culture and stories, by emotion and experience than thought. Worldviews are the mental patterns by which we understand the world around us, but they are rarely examined and understood, we don't tend to think through why we hold the presuppositions and presumptions that we do. -- Word Around the Net: THINKING AND NOT DOING

  • Michelle Obama's Mirror: Our Transparent Safari,Troop Withdrawal and Release of Strategic Reserves. TWF. WTF?

    On Thursday, Big Guy was busy in New York raising about a gazillion dollars at 4 DNC fundraisers in New York City in order to “Win The Future.” BTW, I note in our Big White Blog that we are now changing our campaign 2012 slogan up from time to time with “The Way Forward” or “TWF.” Nice, but it doesn’t have quite the same panache as “WTF” does it?
    

  • Everything You Think You Know About the Collapse of the Soviet Union Is Wrong - By Leon Aron | Foreign Policy

    Every revolution is a surprise. Still, the latest Russian Revolution must be counted among the greatest of surprises. In the years leading up to 1991, virtually no Western expert, scholar, official, or politician foresaw the impending collapse of the Soviet Union, and with it one-party dictatorship, the state-owned economy, and the Kremlin's control over its domestic and Eastern European empires.

  • William M. Briggs, Statistician » TSA And German Jokes

    Koshetz defended the agency that boldly pats down infants, nursing mothers, buxom blonds, and other would-be terrorists -- how heroic! -- €”and said, "The procedures are the same for everyone to ensure national security." That is false. There is no reason in the world to have searched and humiliated that gentle old lady. National security was not helped in any way. Not only that, security was actually harmed. To my knowledge, there has never been a terrorist meeting the dying lady's description. By humiliating her in the name of 'We were just following orders'€ is to allow those much more likely to cause harm to slip through security unimpeded.

  • "Success" In Science:The perils of filter-then-publish

    You know how you succeed in science these days? Take a few ideas, then try every small variation of these ideas and make a research paper out of each one of them. Each paper will look good and be written quickly, but your body of work will be highly redundant. Instead of working toward deep contributions, we encourage people to repeat themselves more and more and collect many shallow contributions. We sacrifice scholarship for vanity.

  
  

  Posted by Vanderleun at 11:38 AM | Your Say (3)

  June 25, 2011

  Intellectual Sandwich Shop

  
  • Only Real Photograph of Billy the Kid Sells For $2 Million

    William Koch (one of the notorious conservative donor Koch Brothers) bought the 2×3" ferrotype taken by an unknown photographer in Fort Sumner, New Mexico in late 1879 or early 1880 at a Denver auction last Saturday.

  • Take the pledge!

    Here is a simple pledge that will save you a lot of wasted time and brain cells over the next six months. Pledge not to read about or pay any attention to any poll related to the 2012 presidential contest until January 1, 2012.

  • Feed Your Head:

    I rarely watch television, read newspapers, or listen to the radio. I read books by dead persons, pretty much. I have little use for 99.9 percent of the Internet, because it's just people telling me that they can watch TV and read the newspaper harder than me. The average intellectual's head is full of tapioca. On the Intertunnel, it's rancid tapioca. -- Sippican Cottage: Electric, And Electrifying, Edwardians

  • Tom Nelson. Best Climate Blogger in History:

    Tom is way too humble and too little recognized by his peers. He's been at the climate blogging scene about the longest of anyone (since 2005) scouring the web for global warming and climate articles. His blog is a must read and source for many skeptic bloggers (including 'C3') and none of us shower the accolades on him for his dedication and persistence. Tom's blog has had a major impact on the climate debate, and he doesn't do it for the money or the publicity. -- C3: Did Blogger Tom Nelson Defeat The "Climate Crisis"?

  • "In the age of super-speed broadband, we need dead trees to have fully living minds. "

    A book has a different relationship to time than a TV show or a Facebook update. It says that something was worth taking from the endless torrent of data and laying down on an object that will still look the same a hundred years from now. The French writer Jean-Phillipe De Tonnac says "the true function of books is to safeguard the things that forgetfulness constantly threatens to destroy." It's precisely because it is not immediate – because it doesn't know what happened five minutes ago in Kazakhstan, or in Charlie Sheen's apartment – that the book matters. -- Johann Hari: How to survive the age of distraction - Johann Hari, Commentators - The Independent

  • Name One:

    I cannot for the life of me think of a winning argument for making taxpayers fund a private enterprise. Of course Planned Parenthood is just one of several billion such leftist organizations we keep afloat. Can anyone think of a private organization backed by conservative - like say the NRA - that is publicly funded? I'm sure there must be; I just can't think of it. -- Curmudgeonly & Skeptical

  • The science is settled: US liberals really are the dumbest creatures on the planet – Telegraph Blogs

  • Time magazine’s current cover is a picture of the Constitution with the phrase “Does it matter?” I’m going out on a limb and saying it matters a lot more than news weeklies. --IMAO

  • First! It’s all about accountability | Monday Note

    The absence of a merchant relationship also plays a significant role in the dilution of responsibility. In the digital cauldron, free is too often associated with a permission to be sloppy. A compulsive tweeter or blogger, propagating whatever s/he is able to grab, without any commercial relationship with readers, will feel no obligation whatsoever to quality. Being first becomes the main goal.

  • The Crack in the Wall.

    Google saw that smartphones were destined to be bigger than PCs. Android is a Google-scale success that shows what the company is capable of. But Google’s failure in social networking as Facebook and Twitter succeeded shows that you can’t man all the crenels in the fortress wall. Whatever the reason — management bandwidth, cultural deafness, lack of attention, arrogance as the toxic waste of success — Google either didn’t see Facebook or failed to develop the right service at the right time. And now Facebook has more than 750 million users worldwide. It’s become a kind of black hole sucking in Web traffic -- Google’s SOE (Strategy of Everything) | Monday Note

  • National OCD:

    Gender studies permeate academic life in Sweden. Bergkvist noted on her blog that the state-funded Swedish Science Council had granted $80,000 for a postdoctoral fellowship aimed at analyzing "the trumpet as a symbol of gender." -- No "him" or "her"; Preschool fights gender bias - CBS News

    
    

  Posted by Vanderleun at 4:02 PM | Your Say (2)

  Intellectual Bitshops

  
  • Let's beat up smokers and feel good about ourselves

    Need money? Increase the cigarette tax with the ironic excuse that this is to get smokers to quit when you know not many of them will. The federal government alone makes $1.01 a pack from smokers. States now average $1.45 a pack. Add in the tobacco settlement — a de facto tax on smokers — and you have smokers shelling out $3 a pack just in taxes. R.J. Reynolds estimated its profits are 30 cents a pack. For besides the money, there is a psychological reason we need smokers in America: They make good punching bags.

  • I'm going with "malice" on this question:

    Obama? The majority of Americans can’t imagine Obama really wants to hurt the US still more. If he doesn’t accept severe cuts in government spending, and the projected economic disaster hits, the dollar devalues fast, most believe his reelection chances are zero. But on the other hand, a majority of the Americans is now convinced Obama made the economic situation of the US much worse during his two and a half years in office. Everything he touches becomes a mess. Since most also believe Obama is an intelligent man, the question is raised why he continues his disastrous policies. Is he able to learn from his mistakes, or does he have malicious ambitions? -- America’s Fork In The Road. | The Brussels Journal

  • Let one kid be allergic to peanuts and some federal agency will want to ban all of us from eating them in public. Let one kid get hurt trying to catch a Jart with his head, and "Banned in the USA!" Let a kook walk through a Long Island commuter train and shoot defenseless passengers, and ban-ban-ban the guns! But, when it comes to crimes committed by guys named Joe, oh-noooooo.
    • Major Joe Smith screamed 'Allahu Akbar' before slaughtering 13 at Ft. Hood
    • Joe Smith killed two CIA employees and wounded three more at a stoplight outside of CIA headquarters in Langly, VA.
    • Two men named Joe and Fred Smith arrested in a plot to attack a Seattle military recruiting station, reports the U.S. Justice Department and FBI.
    • And Blah-Blah-Blah-Blah, Joe Smiths -- Curmudgeonly & Skeptical

  • "Hoard gold. Amalgamate pixels. Cultivate politicians. Mine clauses. Weasel patents. Stripmine people..."Sippican Cottage: Take Another Bite Of Your Apple Economy

    I can spot no class of squalid self-interested behavior that hasn't been perfected, never mind tried, by the legions of invertebrates, possessed of no souls and negligible intellects, that lord over our affairs, great and small -- affairs they should be ashamed in their ignorance and sloth to even comment upon. They know nothing of steel and wood and earth and sweat, just the faint yellow musk of ink and paper and the weight of the great, stolen seals of an empire gone shabby in their pockets.

  • Protest kitsch: "The helium balloon, which has somehow stayed inflated for more than four months after being released by protesters, has become a symbol of sorts."It now has its own 'Capitol Balloon' Facebook page and 'The Heart Balloon.'

  • Nerd, Nerd, Nerd, NERD!

    I saw the news about the straightlaced physics professor who ran a large online prostitution ring, and didn't even make any money out of it, but merely ran it as a hobby... or at least that is what he is now telling the law. Now that is some true engineer and nerd mindset for you. -- The Fourth Checkraise: Next time, use quantum encryption

  • Liberal American Jewish suckers by Caroline Glick

    From abortion to socialized medicine to free passes for illegal immigrants, to opposition to the Iraq war, liberal American Jews are ready to go out on a limb for every cause the liberal media supports.... Aside from being morally inconvenient, the other problem with admitting that Obama is anti-Israel is that it requires his Jewish supporters who are unwilling to consciously abandon Israel to contemplate the unattractive option of voting for the Republican nominee for president. And this is something that their liberal conceit cannot abide.

  • Ess-A-Bagel: Holey Matters by Stefan Kanfer - City Journal

    Historians trace the bagel’s origins to Krakow, Poland. There, in 1610, it was created as a Jewish version of the bublic, a small, slender bread designed for Lent. The holey product immediately caught on in shtetls. A few years later, peddlers put bajgels on a stick and hawked them on the main streets of Polish towns and cities. By the end of the century, their wares had become a vital part of the national diet.

  • Animals Being Dicks Now THIS is entertainment!

  • San Francisco, the City of Dicks:Cruel Cuts by Stephen Schwartz - City Journal

    The rise of “intactivism” in San Francisco has run roughly parallel with a revival of nudism in the city. Naked people occasionally parade through the Castro district and unclothed bicyclists appear at AT&T Park, where parents and children wishing only to watch a baseball game become victims of exhibitionism. The “intactivists” and the nudists are more or less allied.

  • Smart answers to stupid questions: Define the Ratio of People to Cake UBS: If we were playing Russian roulette and had one bullet, I randomly spun the chamber and fired but nothing was fired. Would you rather fire the gun again or respin the chamber and then fire on your turn?

    I’d rather get the fuck out of your office and run away very fast. What the hell are you people on? Haven’t you heard of email? Or official dispute procedures? Jesus.

  • Make Culture, Not Think Tanks

    While the brightest and most talented conservatives pour into DC and pump out one study after another, endlessly debating arcane policy with a handful of other pinheaded intellectuals, the left has been busy consolidating their iron grip on the real reins of power -- movies, TV, music, art. If half the conservatives who pine to work at Heritage or Cato would only turn their ambitions to moviemaking and showrunning, conservatism might have a fighting chance.

    
    
  
  

  Posted by Vanderleun at 11:42 AM | Your Say (2)

  June 24, 2011

  Man Apron

  
  Summer Must Have: Tactical Grilling Apron

  Constructed of 1000D Cordura in Universal Digital Camo, MultiCam, Coyote, MARPAT Woodland, or NAVPAT, the Tactical Grilling Apron features three rows of modular attachment across the waist and two rows across the chest. These PALS/MOLLE compatible attachment points allow your Tactical Grilling Apron to accept any of your current kit, whether it be a holster, mag pouches, general purpose pouches, or a med kit, the Tactical Grilling Apron can fit your mission requirement: Steak or Stakeout.

  Posted by Vanderleun at 7:08 PM | Your Say (4)

  Intellectual Pitstops

  
  • It's hard to tell parody from earnestness

    in the era when people, apparently unaware of the concept of "false savings", breathlessly argue that it makes good economic sense to import truckloads of illegal immigrants to toil and moil in fields and factories for substandard wages because the farmers and industries that employ these illegal immigrants don't need to pay for the negative externalities that these illegal immigrants impose on the surrounding community.-- The Fourth Checkraise: Lettuceheads

  • Amusing, but not Surprising | John C. Wright's Journal

    According to orthodox Left dogma, the White Christian Hetero Males are bad, and four legs good. Hence both non-Christians, including Mohammedans of the new Wahhabi sect, terrorist fascist fanatics, must be good, and sexually disordered persons of various persuasions (provided only that they are not chaste nor decent) must be good. The problem is that the Mohammedans of this persuasion torture and kill sexual deviants of that persuasion, not to mention being the most cruelly misogynistic oppressors of women history has ever known.

  • Ritual is by nature incomprehensible to outsiders

    yet deeply meaningful to the insiders; it serves to express the group spiritually, morally or socially. It is a demonstration of belonging -- or respect and submission -- of affiliation, of social acceptance or approval for some event. At the height of its potency national symbols do not have to be explained. Everybody gets it. But in dying civilizations ceremony finally becomes an quaint entertainment whose origins nobody can quite place. -- Belmont Club » Pageantry

  • The more writers skip the usual editorial/publication process and go to e-books,

    the more this will become a problem, I fear. Without that step to cut back on the creator's imagination and love of their work, the worse the product can get: witness ten thousand "director's cuts" and movies that prove even great directors need editors. -- Word Around the Net: WRITING FOR READERS

  • First Ice Age engraving of trunked animal found in US

    An engraved fossilized bone fragment discovered by an amateur fossil hunter in Vero Beach, Florida four or five years ago is at least 13,000 years old and is thus the first, and so far only, Ice Age image depicting a trunked animal ever found in the United States. The engraving is of a mastodon or a mammoth and was done on a bone that once belonged to a mammoth, mastodon or giant sloth.

  • » Obama Afghanistan Speech in One Sentence

    "We got bin Laden, and our troops will be out early in my second term if you reelect me, because we got bin Laden, and I never will forget the sacrifice of the troops who helped me get bin Laden, USA USA USA!"
    

  • Moscow’s Wild Dogs Ride Subways To City Center In Search Of Food

    Each morning, like clockwork, they board the subway, off to begin their daily routine amidst the hustle and bustle of the city. But these aren’t just any daily commuters. These are stray dogs who live in the outskirts of Moscow Russia and commute on the underground trains to and from the city centre in search of food scraps. Then after a hard day scavenging and begging on the streets, they hop back on the train and return to the suburbs where they spend the night.

  • American Denial

    The Left is not alone in its acceptance of never-ending peace and prosperity. Many on the Right also subscribe to this mindset as they, in order to also acquire political power, do not point out the folly of this state of mind and what the Left preaches; but instead choose to proceed on a slower, but ultimately the same track in placating and abetting this belief that has become so ingrained in the American psyche.

    
    
  The First Barbie Doll Commercial

  Posted by Vanderleun at 8:11 AM | Your Say (1)

  June 22, 2011

  Intellectual Pawnshops

  [A Blonde Solves Global Warming. HT to Morgan]
  • You don't say? Quel suprise! Simpson, 'Of course I offed her. Bitch pulled a knife on me!' OJ Simpson to admit to murders? « Hot Air

    Simpson told the producer: "Tell Oprah that yes, I did it. I killed Nicole, but it was in self-defence. She pulled a knife on me and I had to defend myself," the insider was quoted as saying.

  • Ann Barnhardt on Uninvited Guests:

    I had another unannounced, uninvited fanboy show up here this afternoon. From what I can recall, this person emailed me a few weeks ago, declaring his undying devotion to me (Red Flag Number 1), attaching a picture of himself, or so he claimed (Red Flag Number 2), and essentially inviting himself to my office (Red Flag Number 3). I firmly but politely declined. There is a technical term for women who allow strange men who see them on the intertubes to come their home. They're called "CORPSES"

    .

  • Why the Jobs Situation Is Worse Than It Looks - US News and World Report

    The real job losses are greater than the estimate of 7.5 million. They are closer to 10.5 million, as 3 million people have stopped looking for work. Equally troublesome is the lower labor participation rate; some 5 million jobs have vanished from manufacturing, long America's greatest strength. Just think: Total payrolls today amount to 131 million, but this figure is lower than it was at the beginning of the year 2000, even though our population has grown by nearly 30 million.

  • Studies say! Blonde waitresses with big breasts get more tips, says study You don't say!

  • Don't know much about history: Fraters Libertas: How Do You Sleep?

    When asked what historical figure they'd most like to study this year, an astounding 22 of the 35 students in Ms. Ellingham's eighth-grade history class at Susan B. Anthony middle school in Minneapolis answered, "Yoko Ono" and/or "John Lennon."

  • Conan O'Brien Delivers Commencement Address

    Before I begin, I must point out that behind me sits a highly admired President of the United States and decorated war hero while I, a cable television talk show host, has been chosen to stand here and impart wisdom. I pray I never witness a more damning example of what is wrong with America today.

  • "Regrets. I've had a few...":

    I am now resigned to the fact that it will take the rest of my life to eradicate the secular indoctrination I assimilated through osmosis just by virtue of living in this time and place, but greatly exacerbated by my passage through the upper reaches -- or darkest depths -- of academia. ... So much of my life has involved a new appreciation of precisely those things I had previously devalued and/or dismissed with deep contempt. When I say that I was exactly like our predictable hydraheaded troll, Willionymous, it is no exaggeration. My mind was a vast and specious warehouse of alreadymade cliches about God, politics, science, gaia, and everything else the leftist Knows with dead certainty. Politically, all of them involved danger on the right! -- One Cʘsmos: Thinking About John Paul II: There But For the Goad of Grace Grow I

  • How To Not Die In A Plane Crash

    17. Don’t go to the bathroom. Getting out of your chair might set the plane’s balance off. Give other people who do get up dirty looks. Ask God to forgive them for being such terrible human beings.

  • Racial Intellectual Insanity:

    Intellectuals in America tend to lag behind society in understanding the changes taking place around us; race is no exception. When race was the great problem and source of evil in American society sixty and seventy years ago, the academy was largely segregated and most academics tended to give the subject a wide berth. As race has become less important and the risks associated with an anti-racist position declined, academia has jumped all over the issue and for some the question of race has become the central organizing focus for scholarly inquiry and social thought. -- Racial Sunset | Via Meadia

  • Out of Order the Blog: Operation Facetious & Spurious

    Champion of justice, Eric Holder is seen here, down Mexico way, getting rid of some junk in his trunk.

    
    
  
  

  Posted by Vanderleun at 5:51 AM | Your Say (4)

  Intellectual Toneshops

  
  • Ah, the good old days, when thugs at least had a decent fashion sense and knew how to pull their pants up. -- davidthompson: Ruffians and Ne’er-do-wells

  • Armed and Odiforous: Well, at least he remembered to put the seat down

    Police in Colorado say a woman who stepped inside a portable toilet at a yoga festival discovered a man hiding in the tank below when she lifted the toilet lid. Boulder police spokeswoman Kim Kobel says the woman told authorities she noticed something moving inside the tank and asked a man to check it out. The man reported seeing someone covered in a tarp inside the tank. A festival security supervisor said the suspect eventually emerged from the toilet—covered in human waste—and slipped away.

  • neo-neocon The Kennedy conspiracists' conspiracy

    What I've always wondered is, where did the conspiracy meet? I figure it must have been Madison Square Garden, because you had to have the entire Presidential Detail of the Secret Service, the entire Dallas Police Force, all of the doctors and nurses on the ER staff at Parkland Hospital (in each case, somebody might be sick at the last minute and call in a substitute, and you have to cover that possibility), the pathologists at Parkland (they have to cover up that one of the wounds was made by a Secret Service handgun), Earl Warren, Arlen Specter, the US Marine Corps (remember, they faked his marksmanship record, Bupkis) and a host of others. So Madison Square Garden it is.

  • The Real Story of America's Founding

    Soon, Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, which includes the famous line, "We hold these truths to be revealed after careful study by Ivy League-educated people, that all men are in need of constant care and supervision, that they are endowed by the highly-educated intellectual class with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are free Health Care, strict and expansive Regulations on all activities, and the pursuit of Big Government."

  • The Ideological Turing Test

    If we did an apples-to-apples comparison, would liberals really excel on ideological Turing tests? Put me and five random liberal social science Ph.D.s in a chat room. Let liberal readers ask questions for an hour, then vote on who isn't really a liberal. Then put Krugman and five random libertarian social science Ph.D.s in a chat room. Let libertarian readers ask questions for an hour, then vote on who isn't really a libertarian. Simple as that.

  • Articles: Twenty-Nine Reasons to Be Angry And/Or Scared If you're not both angry and scared at the world's current situation, you're not paying attention.

    The changes will be massive and glacier-like in movement. No generation alive today will see the end of this massive secular change.

  • What Samuel Pepys's diaries tell us about healthy breakfasts – Telegraph Blogs

    “Either by physic forward or by clyster backward, or both ways, to get an easy and plentiful going to stool and breaking of wind.”

  • Barack Obama. Where to begin?

    The man is so much more popular, personally, than any one of His policies. And how could this not be the case? How could His policies not be wretchedly unpopular? The unemployment rate is officially tracked, and the under-employment rate is not — both are known, though, and both are unacceptably high. It’s only too obvious what is causing them. But Obama’s policies are not pondered in public and don’t appear to be thought out too well in private. They just sort of pop up. “I’ve decided X.” Everything that goes wrong, we’re supposed to blame on George Bush to prove we aren’t racists. But if you’re Obama, how do you go about not looking like the problem, when you pop up with these bad policies at random times throughout the week, month, year? Like a Pez dispenser. Just because you’re a cream-coffee-color Pez dispenser, doesn’t mean you get a pass! Looking for work is not a fun experience in any situation, but it is a whole lot less fun when the jobs aren’t there and aren’t coming. -- House of Eratosthenes

  • The American Spectator : A Comedian of Errors

    On Fox News Sunday, Jon Stewart repeatedly reminded Chris Wallace that he is a comedian. While I am pleased Stewart saw fit to show his enthusiasm for his chosen vocation with Wallace and the rest of the nation, it seems to me that if you have to remind people you are a comedian then you are probably not all that funny in the first place.

  • CARPE DIEM: Companies Leaving California in Record Numbers

    Based on the legislature’s recent rejection of business-friendly legislation and Sacramento’s implementation of additional regulations, signs are that California’s hostility towards business will only worsen.

  
  

  Posted by Vanderleun at 1:33 AM | Your Say (1)

  June 21, 2011

  Intellectual Boneshops

  
  • The Technium: Screening

    When I touch my chair, my room knows me, and all the screens in the room and on the table are ready for me. The eyes of the screens watch me closely as I conduct my day. After 16 years of watching me work, they can anticipate a lot of what I do. The sequence of symbols on the screens make no sense to anyone else, just as my colleagues' sequence baffles me. When we are working together we screen in an entirely different environment.

  • What most people don’t want to realize is that in a poor neighborhood, the entire economy is funded by the government.

    If the government put the Korean grocer on a state salary to operate a store on 63rd and MLK, the American public’s eyeballs would explode, but that is exactly what is happening anyway. And if the government sent a liquor store owner a monthly check to offer St. Ides at affordable prices, there’d be riots. But that’s what’s up. I haven’t looked through the financials, but I can say with confidence that all of the revenue generated by Popeye’s chicken is a wealth transfer from the U.S. government. -- Staggering Thought of The Day | Partial Objects

  • The Fourth Checkraise: Upstairs, downstairs, basement, closet

    I have noted before that in practice, white men are far more tolerant and open-minded than white women, yet they rarely get any credit or acknowledgement for this. For example, white men are less racist than white women in that they will, for example, happily pair up with Asian women, whereas white women tend to frown upon the idea of dating and marrying Asian men.

  • Regarding the troublesome subject of gay marriage,

    which is lately up for debate in the legislature of New York State where I live, making it the public's business. I have an unpopular view of it for men of my demographic (Democrat, Boomer). I'm not in favor of it. I don't think it is a good idea. I don't have empirical proof, but I suspect that unsettling such an age-old and fundamental social arrangement will produce strange unanticipated consequences that we are not prepared for. I don't believe gay marriage is a genuine social justice issue. I think it is a bid for a kind of broad social approbation which does not require ritual enactment in law, and would be socially mischievous to pursue. Civil unions would cover the necessary legal issues. Otherwise, it is a case of unwarranted relativism, a Boomer weakness. Not all conditions or states of being in this world are the same. Some things are on the margins because they are marginal. -- Man Down - Clusterfuck Nation

  • baldilocks: Sarah Palin Pwns The Media--Again

    The one big advantage Sarah Palin has over everyone else in the 2012 presidential field is that there will be no surprises. Every rock has been turned over. If she runs for the White House, you can be sure the media will keep digging into her past. You can also be sure that Palin will beat them more often than not. In a race that is certainly going to be a media-driven death march against whoever the GOP nominates, being a proven MSM slayer is no small thing.

  • And Lo! "a new work, Nexus Vomitus,":

    There is, after all, a difference between shock and awe, and a difference between wonderment and tedious disgust. Those who don’t know the difference, or who’ve chosen to forget in the name of transgression, are left with little to do besides screaming at passers-by and begging for attention. -- davidthompson: The Arts, They Ennoble

  • Daniel Patrick Moynihan

    ”From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future–that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder…are not only to be expected, they are very near to inevitable. And they are richly deserved.” -- Why Race Matters | FrontPage Magazine

  • Attention Musicians: Please Stop Using a Font Called Bleeding Cowboy

  • An idea whose time has come:

    I don't really understand why the cops don't bring snipers to these riots with the order to simply shoot anybody who is lighting up a Molotov cocktail, the same way they would shoot someone who is aiming a gun at cops and is ready to fire. -- The Fourth Checkraise: Smash and grab

  • "America is not going to hell in a hand basket.

    We have a few basket cases, for sure, but the sky is not falling. We are simply enduring some hard economic times, and we have a dud for a leader who is making it worse than it should be. With a decent leader and some common sense, this nation can be as great as it ever was. Choose good conservative leaders, not just at the federal level, but all the way down to the dog-catcher and you will see America prosper again. Banish the liberal nut-cases from your social circle and quit glorifying those whose only attraction is to spout profanity or some idiocy designed to shock normal minds in order to gain attention. Learn to admire Joe or Jane Smoe who get up every day and go earn an honest living for they are the real heroes; disdain those who do otherwise by taking advantage of public gimme programs or living off criminal activities. Demand decency and we shall have it. -- 18 Signs The Collapse Of Society Is Accelerating

  • Armed and Dangerous » Blog Archive » World Without Web

    The divergence point for this history is in 1983-1984, when the leadership of DARPA lied through its teeth to Congress about who was being allowed access to the Internet. The pretense being maintained was that only direct affiliates of government-sponsored, authorized research programs were being allowed on. DARPA knew very well this wasn't true; they had a broader vision of where the Internet might lead, one that wouldn't be realized for another ten years. They viewed the yeasty, chaotic culture of casual use by all manner of "randoms"(unauthorized people including, at the time, me) as what would later be called a technology incubator -- a vast Petri dish from which amazing serendipities would spring in due time.

    
    

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

  June 19, 2011

  Intellectual Breakout

  Style Bubble: Portraits Reinterpreted
  • Chicago Boyz Backing Up The Hard Drive Of Civilization

    Instead of all this artsy-fartsy crap about being kind to Mother Earth and melding human law with tolerance, someone who was actually interested in preserving culture, civilization, and lives would go about it in a different way. They would bury a large cache of seed corn, basic tools and the means to produce more, single-shot rifles and shotguns with ammunition, and a bunch of manuals printed up by 4-H designed to instruct young farmers in the details of their profession.

  • Mark Steyn: Why liberals fell for ‘Muslim lesbian blogger’ hoax

    For crying out loud. The assumption that "a young Pakistani Muslim" in Lahore or Peshawar shares your peculiar preoccupations is the most feeble kind of projection even by the standards of Western liberal navel-gazing. If doting progressives stopped gazing longingly into "Obama's face" for just a moment, they might notice that in Benghazi "democracy activists" have been rounding up Libyan blacks and immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa.

  • "How will pan-literacy and information change our society? Probably like the way Protestantism changed Europe."

    But I wonder if the next generation will use the media or be used by it. A book doesn't want to be read, just like a horse doesn't jump under you and take you somewhere. You have to expend a bit of effort to get into a book or break a horse, but the new media follows you around like latest story about Donald Trump. They are insistent and have been designed to be easier and more comfortable, accesible and ubiquitous. That's the whole point of their invention. -- Books & Horses - Cobb

  • Mad Dogs and Democrats

    At the very core of our national discombobulation, this very problem We no longer speak the same language. We don't recognize the same historical records. We don't share the same values, principles, hopes, dreams or morality. People like Maddow (as proxy for her ilk) are as fervent in their socialist dogma as we in our love of freedom. After years of agitprop by well placed activists, we're past any possible rapprochement. There is just a single treatment for a dog with cancer. Tell me how I'm wrong. Give me another solution. Please.

  • Can This Presidency Be Saved? | Via Meadia

    While the President’s popularity is drifting lower, congressional Republicans have been losing ground to their Democratic rivals in recent polls, and the Republican primary field remains both uninspiring and polarized. Small government, libertarian and Jeffersonian Paulites, globalist ‘great nation’ conservatives, conservative social activists and Jacksonian hyperpatriots are united only in their antipathy to the Obama administration and it is not yet clear whether a GOP candidate can unify this agitated but inchoate mass of energy into a strong and focused campaign.

  • As in "Box of Rocks, Dumber Than:"Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: More evidence of Net's effect on the brain

    Using brain scans, the researchers compared the brains of 18 adolescents who spend around eight to twelve hours a day online (playing games, mainly) with the brains of 18 adolescents who spend less than 2 hours a day online. The heavy Net users exhibited gray-matter "atrophy" as well as other "abnormalities," and the changes appeared to grow more severe the longer the kids engage in intensive Net use.

  • TigerHawk

    There is no surer sign that a "scientific" study is actually propaganda than that the press release precedes the publication of the study, which forecloses confirmation of the claims of the release against the actual peer-reviewed study. It is, in effect, the implicit repudiation of the scientific method in the publication of scientific findings, and no respectable scientist should traffic in it.

  • RealClearPolitics - True Job Creators Need a Voice

    Regulations, on average, cost small firms $10,585 per employee each year: $4,120 to comply with economic regulations, $4,101 to comply with environmental regulations, $1,585 to comply with complex tax rules, and $781 to comply with OSHA and homeland security regulations.

  • David Warren [Is Back]

    In the 9th congressional district of New York (bits of Brooklyn and Queens in New York City), you can apparently run a giant hamster and get him elected, provided he is a Democrat. It is, in my reactionary view, one of those dark, dirty, densely sprawling urban places where people never see the light of day. Technically, the sun shines down from above, but nature is held at several removes by various foreground conditions, running interference on the human condition. People are born, live, and die in such environments, and I don't mean to disparage them for what is not a happy fate. I am simply trying to explain why liberal Democrats in the U.S.A., or the equivalent party machines in Canada, are able to harvest large and unthinking majorities in constituencies like that.

  • When a Marxist says "power to the people,"

    he isn't talking about actual people. In fact, so few actual people want what Marxists want them to want that the emergence of even one or two who fit the category becomes cause for universal acclaim and celebration. That's how so many earnest people, including the entire Nobel Peace Prize award committee, got taken in by the fabricated "memoirs" of Rigoberta Menchu. That's why the pages of Ms. are full of bright pictures of women's collective art projects in Central America and women's collective farming projects in Zimbabwe. It takes no time at all to realize that Marxists and their intellectual offspring have no use for actual people in general, and only one use for "actual people" who do want what they're supposed to want. They treat them like pets. -- Jane Haddam ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE...NOT

  

  Posted by Vanderleun at 10:45 PM | Your Say (0)

  June 17, 2011

  Intellectual Fakeout

  
  • The Technium: The Clock in the Mountain

    There is a Clock ringing deep inside a mountain. It is a huge Clock, hundreds of feet tall, designed to tick for 10,000 years. Every once in a while the bells of this buried Clock play a melody. Each time the chimes ring, it’s a melody the Clock has never played before. The Clock’s chimes have been programmed to not repeat themselves for 10,000 years. Most times the Clock rings when a visitor has wound it, but the Clock hoards energy from a different source and occasionally it will ring itself when no one is around to hear it. It’s anyone’s guess how many beautiful songs will never be heard over the Clock’s 10 millennial lifespan.

  • Climate Common Sense: They are sending these Turkeys out Again after This BS Report!

    I have never seen such an impressive report about absolutely nothing.... Report Translation : We didn't find anything but if there was something there it must have been caused by global warming !

  • Those Chinese, masters of imitation:

    First there was the replica of Lyons, France, being built in Dubai; it would be a replicant city "of about 700 acres, roughly the size of the Latin Quarter of Paris," and it would "contain squares, restaurants, cafes and museums." Now we learn that a Chinese firm has been "secretly" copying an entire UNESCO-listed village in Austria, called Hallstatt. Residents of the original town are "scandalized," Der Spiegel reports, by these "plans to replicate the village—including its famous lake—in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong." -- BLDGBLOG: City Double

  • One Cʘsmos: Economics, the Gay Science

    The market is the most complex structure in the cosmos because it is constituted of billions of the second most complex structure, the human brain, all linked together.

  • Another in an endless series of brilliant photo essays by Alan Taylor: The 125th Anniversary of the Death of King Ludwig II - Alan Taylor - In Focus - The Atlantic

    When his cabinet accused him of insanity, he was placed in custody after a brief showdown at Neuschwanstein Castle, and was taken to a castle next to Lake Starnberg. The following day, while out for a walk, Ludwig disappeared, his lifeless body discovered hours later. The death was declared a suicide, but many have rejected that ruling, and the demise of this popular king remains a mystery to this day.

  • Pat Condell - Islamic cultural terrorism

  Posted by Vanderleun at 10:51 PM | Your Say (5)

  June 16, 2011

  Intellectual Bakeout

  
  • What the Dad Wanted for Father's Day:

    “Nothing.” I insisted he must want something and he said, “I would be content in an abyss” before adding, “if there was a chair there, that would be great. If there was a six-pack, that would be good too, but an abyss is fine.” -- It’s Father’s Day: Do You Know Where Your Dad Is?

  • The Blind Girl by John Everett Millais

    Take a moment to study the blind girl. See how she seems to be trying to compensate her loss of sight through her other senses – the sense of touch. See how, with one hand, she grips the hand of her young companion and with the other she fingers a blade of grass.

  • Get Free Airline Miles By Buying Money It may sound like a scam, but it's actually pretty legit.

  • Instant artist statement: Arty Bollocks Generator Sample:

    "Ever since I was a student I have been fascinated by the ephemeral nature of relationships. What starts out as triumph soon becomes debased into a dialectic of lust, leaving only a sense of chaos and the chance of a new understanding."

  • You wanted to have it all? Now you've got it. You've come a long way baby.U.S. life expectancy: Women's longevity slips in some regions.

  • In which New York City becomes mysteriously.... cleaner:

    For years, warm weather in the East Village has been heralded by an influx of young, tattooed visitors carrying backpacks and bedrolls and wearing clothes so stiffened with grit that they have come to be known in the neighborhood as crusties … But this year, they have not materialized. -- SPECIES VANISHES | Daily Telegraph Tim Blair Blog

  • Text has killed the video star: Word Around the Net: VIDEO BLOGS

    Youtube and other uses aside, the Internet is still and likely will be for some time now, a text-based platform. And that's good; reading gets things into your brain better than video. You'll remember visually striking moments in video, but text gets the meaning and point to your memory much more effectively.

  • Finding Shade @ Jaded Haven

    The obese dwarf, a poorly torn t-shirt giving us an obscene glimpse of a crooked prison tat inked onto her lumpy chest, proclaimed she was Born To Be Wild. I have no idea if that's anywhere near true, but her three small children surely embodied the statement.

  • The Gershwins and multiple talents

    It is not unusual to be multiply-talented in linked fields -- such as, for example, music and mathematics. Music and painting are a more unusual duo, and Gershwin was somewhat unique in reaching such a high level in both. What's more -- and of special interest to me -- Gershwin had three siblings, all of whom were highly and often multiply-talented, despite the fact that their parents did not seem especially gifted in the arts at all.

  • Belmont Club » The Well of Holes

    It is a carrot and stick. The carrot, it must be said, is distinctly unappetizing. What sort of glorious dream is it that is in chronic need of a bailout? Why the European dream of course. So if the Eurocrats were honest, they would erect a statue to their real inspiration, the legendary J. Wellington Wimpy in central Brussels. There emblazoned on his monumental likeness should be the immortal words,"I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for hamburger today."

  • The Sorry State of Liberal Compassion

    For an even more personal view of the left's true compassion, pay attention the next time you fill up your gas tank. You will inevitably encounter the same heartbreaking scene I recently did. Standing at the pump, a disheveled looking man in an old Chevy Cavalier pulled up next to me, looking at the balance ledger of his checkbook as he got out of his car. Shaking his head, he wrote a check, walked in, paid the cashier, returned, filled up, and left before I had finished filling my own tank. Out of curiosity, I glanced at his pump and saw he had only been able to pay $5...enough to buy him just over a gallon of gas.

  • YouTube - This Machine Destroys EVERYTHING
    

  Posted by Vanderleun at 7:48 PM | Your Say (0)

  June 15, 2011

  Intellectual Stakeout

  
  • One Cʘsmos: Is Man the Problem or the Solution? One thing is certain: before the arrival of man, there were no problems in the cosmos, and therefore no solutions either. For roughly nine or ten billion of its thirteen or fourteen billion years, the cosmos was free of even the shadow of a hint of a problem, since it hadn't yet left mother nature's basement and gotten a Life.

  • Going, Going, Gone: Who Killed the Internet Auction? The more mainstream and popular eBay became, and the more familiar people became with auctions, the less exciting they seemed. As the novelty wore off, other factors, like convenience, grew more important. So, too, did things like shipping costs.

  • The Real Reason Gay Men Don't Get Fat There is only one thing that keeps gay men in shape: fear. Yes, every gay—at least those of the stereotypical abdominal-obsessed physique that populates Fire Island and Palm Springs—is brought about because gay men are afraid that they will be alone for the rest of their lives.

  • Animated Intelligence With such fare as The Simpsons, Family Guy, South Park, and the now-canceled King of the Hill and Futurama providing some of the most witty and insightful commentary available, modern society stands in a unique historic position—a children’s genre is now the only means through which adult themes are routinely expressed.

  • Belmont Club ｻ What Happened to Recovery Summer? If the society were like a human body, an observer from Mars would notice that government has been growing on it faster than anything else. Unlike other private companies, which have a season of growth and which eventually die or fade, Government Inc appears to be immortal. It has no self-destruct code in its DNA.

  • Confessions of an Apple Store Employee We get a lot of drug dealers who try to buy iPhones with fake IDs. You can tell them instantly just by how shady they act, and they know you know, but you obviously can't start accusing them of being drug dealers—they are customers, after all.

  • An Effort by Deep-Sea Divers to Repair a New York Water Tunnel All tunnels leak, but this one is a sieve. For most of the last two decades, the Rondout-West Branch tunnel — 45 miles long, 13.5 feet wide, up to 1,200 feet below ground and responsible for ferrying half of New York City’s water supply from reservoirs in the Catskill Mountains — has been leaking some 20 million gallons a day.

  • Tom Nelson: The Grey Lady parties like it's 2007: Well after most Americans have figured out the global warming hoax, in a single article, The New York Times is still blaming CO2 for allergies, Lyme disease, malaria, dengue fever, extreme weather, asthma, trauma, depression, high blood pressure, and heart disease.

  • It was fairly common in medieval times to put east at the top. Which has a logic to it: when traveling across open terrain, the one consistent thing you had to orient yourself by when you broke camp in the morning was the sunrise. In fact, that’s the source of the term “orient yourself”: it literally means to face east. -- timoni.org

  • From John C. Wright's Journal, Tolkien and Beowulf: In these modern times, when Christian and Postchristian struggle for the souls of men, and the popular picture of the Christian is of a book-burner rather than the preserver of pagan literature, it is often hard to recall the respect with which the Christian imagination held their pagan fore-bearers and preserved their works.

  Posted by Vanderleun at 6:42 PM | Your Say (5)

  Intellectual Takeout

  Illo via Curmudgeonly
  • Slutwalker-In-Chief:Obama on Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz “If you're in the foxhole, you want Debbie alongside you, because not only is she charming and has that dazzling smile, but she's tough as nails. And that’s what’s needed during challenging times.”

  • High Gas Prices = Low Regard for Rural Culture "The belief that $5 or higher gasoline will make us drive less, become more efficient, and convert to better fuels is a bitterly new flavor of anti-rural prejudice. The progressive intolerance of, and antipathy toward, rural people and their cultures reaches a new high when it insists we would all be better off if only we drove less. Ultimately, it implies that we should all move closer to the urban beehive or simply deal with our country perversity and stay on the porch out here in the sticks."

  • "Dialogue:" “Dialogue” means the party calling the dialogue wants to engage in endless, counterproductive, circuitous bitching. A perimeter is to be thrown down upon the matters to be discussed; nobody can venture out of the perimeter, not for too long. The perimeter is about as big as the cross section of a rake handle.

  • Michael Totten: After the Fall of the Pharoah MJT: Will Egypt go to war with Israel? Lee Smith: The rational calculation is that Cairo understands it would lose that war as well as the $2 billion dollars in US aid. The problem is that very little we have seen in Egypt over the last six months is based on rational self-interest.

  • The Simple Dollar ｻ 15 Shopping Rules of Thumb Pay for location, not square footage....

  • Daniel Rosenthal's answer to Why is U2 so popular? - Quora The harmonies soothe. The lyrics are straightforward. You recall a simpler time before car seats and prostate exams. The nostalgia is so thick you have to wipe it from your face. You haven’t looked at your phone in nearly 11 minutes. You arrive at the show and see yourself everywhere. Tasteful North Face and Patagonia jackets abound. The stands are awash in earth tones. No one is shoving. No one has a nose ring. These are your people.

  • “The Obama Administration” is on the road to becoming the most anticlimactic expression known to man. ... increasingly there’s another specter frightening the Obama administration: the ghost of Herbert Hoover.... despite his long record of progressive politics, his personal appeal and his sympathy for the downtrodden, President Hoover is best remembered for failing to master the Great Depression. -Is Carter A Best Case Scenario? | Via Meadia

  • Bookworm Room: It's not what you believe; it's what you do with those beliefs that countsAn expert consensus is not a fact. Experts used to think the sun revolved around the earth (wrong), that bad air caused disease (wrong), that spicy food and stress caused ulcers (wrong), that autistic people are mentally retarded because their mothers didn't love them (oh, so wrong), etc.

  • Tom Nelson: I hate it when this happens: Carbon dioxide emitted in Topeka causes rain in dry areas of China, which causes more vegetation, which causes more rats, which causes more fleas, which causes more Black Death

  • Vodkapundit » In Defense of Ferris Bueller In the 38 years since I learned to read, I have read some really stupid shit. But I have never read anything quite so stupid as Alan Siegel's article in The Atlantic, insisting that everyone "get over" Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

  • The double standards of prudish Slutwalkers | Abigail Ross-Jackson | spiked On the preciousness, and the social aloofness, of Slutwalkers: they seem to imagine that even on a public demonstration at which they have dressed in the most attention-grabbing way, it is somehow a violation of their person for someone to take a photo. Feminists are warping the word ‘consent’, taking it from the realm of rape and applying it to such everyday actions as chatting and taking photos in public. But if we had to seek consent for every form of human interplay, nothing would ever happen; it would be a boring world indeed.

  • Fascinating web "comic:" Ryan Andrews :: Our Blood Stained Roof
    
  HT: The Fourth Checkraise For many solid pointers.

  Posted by Vanderleun at 5:07 PM | Your Say (2)

  Yet one more reason the fully staffed headquarters of CNN needs to be hit with a low yield thermonuclear weapon stat!

  

  No, that's not a photoshop, yes that really ran on CNN. For those not familiar with American politics, "wingnut" is an insulting term used to attack conservatives. They later changed the term to "goofy." -- Word Around the Net: PICTURE OF THE DAY

  Posted by Vanderleun at 11:51 AM | Your Say (4)

  The Male Brain

  

  
  Timely comment on our current predicament from the source of all that is of questionable taste: Curmudgeonly & Skeptical presents Boned Jello

  Posted by Vanderleun at 10:36 AM | Your Say (9)

  June 14, 2011

  Playmate Crystal Stops Sniffing Crystal Meth. Decides Not to Marry Living Lizard

  Hugh Hefner dumped at the altar

  Hefner, 85, and Crystal Harris, 25, were due to tie the knot in front of more than 300 guests at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles on Saturday. It would have been Hefner's third marriage. "The wedding is off. Crystal has had a change of heart," Hefner wrote on Twitter.

  More likely a panic attack.

  Posted by Vanderleun at 12:41 PM | Your Say (6)

  Other Voices, Other Rooms

  • One Cʘsmos: The Dumbing-Down of Unbelief and the Ascent of Stupidity False philosophies are not just cosmic nul-de-slacks, but psychospiritual walls that extend as high as stupidity, but fortunately, are as weak as love.

  • "At this moment in time...." these are the top 100 cliches in the English language:The Banned List: Top 100 | John Rentoul

  • Duz Web Mak Us Dumr? Des hit duz!

  • It was a classic case of Vagueness, the linguistic virus that infected spoken language in the late 20th century. "And he was like, you know, 'Helloooo, what are you looking at?' and stuff, and I'm like, you know, 'Can I, like, pick you up?,' and he goes, like, 'Brrrp brrrp brrrp,' and I'm like, you know, 'Whoa, that is so wow!'"

  • First GOP presidential debate happened -- Next president didn't show up.

  • The 125th Anniversary of the Death of Mad King Ludwig II

  • Nympho Home-Wrecker, Jilted Leg-Breaker, and Lesbian Vagina-Inspector

  • The High Cost of Free Medical Care “Free medicine” really means that the transfer of money from patient to hospital is mediated by the state acting in the role of a megalomaniacal general contractor.

  • "Performance wants to be art, art wants to be performance, fashion wants to be fiction, or sculpture or architecture, and everyone wants to be philosophy–who only wants to be popular, so she squeezes herself into the constraining corset of catchphrases."Objets d′Art: Nothing More Than Objets

  • Goodyear Blimp Crashes in Germany, Heroic Pilot Killed - Telstar Logistics

  • Tim Blair: If it’s online and on-message, leftoids are guaranteed to fall for it.

  • Father's Day Gifts For Real Men
    
  • This Change is for Chumps: "In 2011, your federal government will spend $10.6 million a day on climate change." The Black Hole of Global Warming Spending

  • Can Heterosexuality Be Cured? - WSJ.com "It is as if a family-values conservative were caught in gay sex chats and announced that he was entering therapy to overcome his "sick" homosexual impulses."

  • "Don't you think it's time we moved in together?" 2nd lesbian blogger revealed as man

  • Excuse of the day « Don Surber McClatchy Newspapers says 9% unemployment is "the new normal."

  • Funny ha-ha or...? Is Anthony Weiner's Sex Scandal an Act of Conceptual Comedy?

  • Foreign Journalists in Tripoli: Drinking Cappuccino as the Bombs Fall
    

  Posted by Vanderleun at 7:40 AM | Your Say (0)

  Coming Soon

  

  Posted by Vanderleun at 7:20 AM | Your Say (0)

  June 13, 2011

  Hello Kitty

  "Peace through superior firepower"

  Too Cute! | The Firearm Blog

  Posted by Vanderleun at 9:26 PM | Your Say (6)

  Reason #5,682 Why Our Mortal Enemies Love American Politics Right, Left, Center, and Stupid

  

  Posted by Vanderleun at 3:49 PM | Your Say (0)

  That was then:

  This is now:

  Via BBC snowed by the whims of nature | Watts Up With That?

  Posted by Vanderleun at 12:02 PM | Your Say (1)

  June 12, 2011

  Glenn Reynolds: A tough man but a fair one

  SO I SAW THIS AT THE GROCERY STORE, and my first thought was “Monica Lewinsky’s got a new spokesmodel gig?” (via Instapundit) KA-CHING!

  Posted by Vanderleun at 11:53 AM | Your Say (2)

  June 11, 2011

  Blake: The Ancient of Days

  

  I was there when he set the heavens in place,
  when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep,
  when he established the clouds above
  and fixed securely the fountains of the deep,
  when he gave the sea its boundary
  so the waters would not overstep his command,
  and when he marked out the foundations of the earth.
  -- Proverbs 8 27

  Posted by Vanderleun at 4:16 PM | Your Say (3)

  "Let's End Dictator Bankerism!"

  

  Posted by Vanderleun at 4:06 PM | Your Say (1)

  Factory as Suburb

  Peek-A-Boo Hiding the Lockheed Plant during World War II During World War II the Army Corps of Engineers needed to hide the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant to protect it from a possible Japanese air attack.

  Posted by Vanderleun at 11:48 AM | Your Say (0)

  June 10, 2011

  The Four and Twenty Elders Casting Their Crowns Before the Divine Throne

  Because they literally have nothing better to do with their time. -- — William Blake | biblioklept

  Posted by Vanderleun at 1:54 PM | Your Say (2)

  June 9, 2011

  “Q’orianka Kilcher, known for her role as Pocahontas in the film The New World, protests at the White House in Washington.”

  

  "Obviously Pocahontas did not attend Poca Elementary School." -- Don Surber

  Posted by Vanderleun at 11:20 PM | Your Say (3)

  WAR4: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and now .... Yemen?

  
  So who's counting anyway?
  

  "The extent of America’s war in Yemen has been among the Obama administration’s most closely guarded secrets, as officials worried that news of unilateral American operations could undermine Mr. Saleh’s tenuous grip on power. Mr. Saleh authorized American missions in Yemen in 2009, but placed limits on their scope and has said publicly that all military operations had been conducted by his own troops."

  Oy! Such a warmonger this president has turned out to be already.

  Posted by Vanderleun at 3:59 PM | Your Say (2)

  Okay, that's settled. Next question?

  

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

  Be Excellent in All Things

  “The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.” -- John W. Gardner, Secretary of Health Education and Welfare under JFK [HT: RJL]

  Posted by Vanderleun at 7:50 AM | Your Say (5)

  Make that a very, very, very lengthy statement...

  "On the cold sleeting night of March 1, 1946, Atie Visser rang Gulje's doorbell in Leiden, and told his wife that she had a letter to give to her husband. When he came to the door she shot him in the chest. He died in the ambulance, the mayor said, reading a lengthy statement at a news conference. "-- 96-year-old woman confesses to 1946 murder
  

  HT: Lance

  Posted by Vanderleun at 7:46 AM | Your Say (0)

  June 8, 2011

  Asthmatics... Light Up!

  UPDATE: Lileks calls bullshit on this ad and he's right. "Aaron Howe on Mar 28, 2011 -- Just to let you guys know, I designed this image in Photoshop about 8 years ago. I used some wording from actual asthma cigarette advertisements, but made up the ‘Not suitable for children under 6′ tag line. I keep seeing it pop up online as an authentic vintage ad. Funny!!"

  Source: Cocaine Tooth Drops | HOW TO BE A RETRONAUT

  Posted by Vanderleun at 6:04 PM | Your Say (9)

  There is now the chance that cumulative economic and policy blunders of the Obama administration will cascade over the next months, leaving a trail of global destruction that will beggar the imagination.

  

  The deficit-accelerating Obamacare, the failure to drill, the obsession with Green Energy, the failed engagement policy, the pointless law-enforcement and apogoligia-based strategy in the War on Terror, quantitative easing, the operation in Libya, Washington's opportunism in the Arab Spring, to name but a few -- these are all -- all are coming home to roost. -- Belmont Club "Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans"

  Posted by Vanderleun at 4:47 PM | Your Say (0)

  Why Old Books Smell Good

  Molecular structure of Lignin

  "Lignin, the stuff that prevents all trees from adopting the weeping habit, is a polymer made up of units that are closely related to vanillin. When made into paper and stored for years, it breaks down and smells good. Which is how divine providence has arranged for secondhand bookstores to smell like good quality vanilla absolute, subliminally stoking a hunger for knowledge in all of us." - From Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez's Perfumes: the guide. The Green Apple Core: Drunk on books

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

  "THINNER THAN EVER" (click to enlarge):

  

  Barcepundit (English edition)
  

  Posted by Vanderleun at 12:17 PM | Your Say (4)

  June 7, 2011

  Nemesis is always hot on the trail of hubris, across time and space, and the goddess has been particularly busy in destroying the carefully crafted images....

  .... of Bono, John Edwards, Timothy Geithner, Al Gore, Eliot Spitzer, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Anthony Weiner, and a host of others. What do their tax hypocrisies, sexual indulgences, and aristocratic socialist lifestyles all have in common? Collectively, they represent a self-appointed or elected global elite that oversees, lectures about -- in a sanctimonious fashion -- the ethical responsibilities of the redistributive state. -- Works and Days » The Collapse of a Rotten Edifice

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

  A suggestion for the ages

  

  What should be done with German politicians in the ripe days following the end of WWI. This image, published aorund 1922/23, shows a decorated and fancy spats-wearing politician being booted into the hole of hell. -- Ptak Science Books: German Art Between the Wars

  Posted by Vanderleun at 11:55 AM | Your Say (0)

  June 6, 2011

  The Obama's as America's Food Nannies. Screw These Bozos. Seriously.

  Quit with the straight lines, Michelle: "I still don't know much comes protein comes in x-number of ounces."

  Posted by Vanderleun at 8:36 AM | Your Say (5)

  Hey Kids! Let's have a broken record party!

  by iMaksim, of course

  Posted by Vanderleun at 8:07 AM | Your Say (0)

  June 4, 2011

  Blue Notes

  

  Posted by Vanderleun at 8:00 AM | Your Say (4)

  June 3, 2011

  Damn!

  

  Posted by Vanderleun at 8:51 PM | Your Say (0)

  Adios, Marshall Dillon. James Arness Passes On

  Big man. Big life.

  

  
  

  Posted by Vanderleun at 3:07 PM | Your Say (3)

  June 2, 2011

  Old Blue Eyes Speaks

  

  Out of Order

  Posted by Vanderleun at 8:17 PM | Your Say (3)

  Mark Rothko Should Know

  Rothko, Black On Grey

  Posted by Vanderleun at 7:43 PM | Your Say (10)

  See...here's your problem, right here.

  

  Posted by Vanderleun at 1:02 PM | Your Say (6)

  Woodie Guthrie vs 10th Mountain: We'll leave it up to our readers to determine which machine most effectively kills fascists at home and abroad

  

  Posted by Vanderleun at 8:54 AM | Your Say (14)

  June 1, 2011

  We Hold These Culinary Truths To Be Self-Evident

  

  Posted by Vanderleun at 10:13 AM | Your Say (5)

  Endeavor: "It bugs me that some people are completely apathetic about these things: it's a SPACESHIP full of SPACEMEN going into SPACE, for crying out loud!"

  

  Photo from Swiss Cheese and Bullets

  Posted by Vanderleun at 7:46 AM | Your Say (0)

  E-Z-Fynd | More Faster Searching, Without All the Headaches!

  Order at EZfynd

  
  

  Posted by Vanderleun at 7:31 AM | Your Say (0)