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February 29, 2012
"This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:"
Correction: March 30, 2011
A previous version of this article misstated how many of the president's proposals to reduce the country's reliance on imported oil were new in his speech on Wednesday. None of them were, not one of them. -- Obama Lays Out Plan to Cut Reliance on Fuel Imports - NYTimes.com
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:02 PM | Your Say (0)
Threat Bats
This was the question posed to 10 leading designers taking part in the American Design Club's upcoming show Threat: Objects for Defense and Protection. Using a raw wood XBat baseball bat as a template, each designer reached deep into their imagination—or nightmares—to envision how they would respond to a home invasion. -- Threat: Name That Bat[Personally I reach for Mr. Mossburg, but that's just lazy old me.]
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:29 PM | Your Say (5)
Happy Leap [of Faith] Day
We should leap every day.
Once in four years is a travesty,
A sin of ingratitude
Against the
Crazy liberation of
Bottled-up
Being.
Today of all days --
Today is the day to shout:
We are!
We are!
We should leap every day --
Mr. Gobley: In praise of Leap Day
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:23 PM | Your Say (1)
"The Pre-persons"
"The Pre-persons" is a science fiction short story by Philip K. Dick.It was first published in Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine, October 1974 .... It was a pro-life response to Roe v. Wade. Dick imagines a future where the United States Congress has decided that abortion is legal until the soul enters the body, which is specified as the moment a person has the ability to do simple algebra. -- Wikipedia [HT: Harry]Why is it, he wondered, that the more helpless a creature, the easier it was for some people to snuff it? "Because of energy and fuel shortages," Ferris was saying, "population must be radically cut. Or in ten years there'll be no food for anyone…" -- From "The Pre-persons"
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:58 PM | Your Say (1)
How New York Pay Phones Became Guerrilla Libraries
is that New Yorkers will pick up unfamiliar titles while running their errands and then, perhaps, replace them the next day with favorite books of their own. That's in an ideal world. Of the two guerrilla libraries that the artist has fashioned, one has been used properly while the other has had its entire collection repeatedly ganked by sticky-fingered pedestrians. Its shelves were also stolen. --Arts & Lifestyle - The Atlantic Cities
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:50 PM | Your Say (0)
"In the American system, the people grant powers to the government, but no rights."
Yet we still have to endure and rebut idiocy from people such as Geithner and Franks,who believe that the government is the fount of all things good in America, including our very rights. In fact, the First Amendment, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution as a whole give or grant no rights at all: all rights automatically are always held by the people in the first place. The Bill of Rights was intended to restrict the power of the government -- to make sure that government apparatchiks didn't step on the rights of the people. -- Sense of Events: The "privilege" of being born American
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:12 PM | Your Say (0)
"Where are the uppity, liberal writers making condemnations of people who actually deserved it: Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, etc.? "
Hanna Rosin cheers the death of Jan Berenstain, the second half of the couple who wrote the Berenstain Bears series. Rosin despises the puritanical message which, according to Rosin, is devoid of humor. She writes:The world today brings news thatJan Berenstain, co-author with her husband Stan of the 45 years and runningBerenstain Bears seriesfor children, has passed on to a better world. As any right-thinking mother will agree, good riddance.-- Stuff ｫ Gucci Little Piggy
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:18 PM | Your Say (5)
It's "Rare Disease Day"
Over at the site devoted to continuing education: Facts and Chicks Dot Com
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:51 PM | Your Say (1)
"It is beyond irony and parody"
to take in again the fixation with Heartland's tiny $4.4 million budget last yearnext to the recent news that the Climate Works Foundation, one of the major climate campaign organizations, just got another $100 million fillip from the Hewlett Foundation. This brings the grand total of Hewlett grants to Climate Works to nearly $600 million. I believe this one grant history to just one organization rivals the total combined assets of all the main conservative foundations. And these folks get their knickers in a twist about Heartland and the Koch brothers? The paranoid climateers make the cliché Victorian woman standing on a chair afraid of a mouse look like a Spartan warrior by comparison. I repeat: what a bunch of losers." -- The Unbearable Gleickness of Being: An Omnibus Climate Update | Power Line
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:53 AM | Your Say (0)
Epoch
"One day in the distant future the century from 1914 to 2014 will be known as The Fall of Europe." --Comment on Belmont Club ｻ The New WorldPosted by gerardvanderleun at 10:43 AM | Your Say (1)
Why Bother?
After September 11 the reasonable thing to dowould have been to take steps to save ourselves from Islamic terror, instead we went on a crusade to save Muslims from themselves. The latest stop on that crusade is Syria, where the foreign policy experts responsible for decades of horrifying misjudgements tell us that we are duty bound to save the Syrian people from their dictator. Rarely do we ask why it is that Muslims so often need saving from their dictators. Or why a party that campaigned on improving America's reputation by promising not to bomb Muslims anymore, is now improving America's reputation by bombing so many Muslims and so often that it makes George W. Bush look like a tie dyed hippie. -- Sultan Knish a blog by Daniel Greenfield
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:29 AM | Your Say (1)
Museum Muddle
Everybody is hushed, like in church or in a library.People whisper, if they speak at all. Nobody laughs. Nobody talks to strangers. As on NYC sidewalks, eye contact is forbidden.It's a reverent but unfriendly atmosphere. Nobody looks as if they are having fun, all so somber and serious. When I have my earphones on (I enjoy the audio guides) and end up making some wisecrack comment to Mrs. BD, she frowns and says I am talking too loud. A few times I have made comments to people who werelooking at what I was, and they look at me as if I had produced a loud fart in church. -- Thoughts about a museum visit - Maggie's Farm
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:50 AM | Your Say (2)
February 28, 2012
Mitt Romney Reveals the Inner Workings of His Fiendish Plan
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:04 PM | Your Say (7)
The Scum of the Earth Are Quite Naturally Found in the Academy
Sense of Events: First, we kill all the newbornsThe academics argue that killing a newborn should be legally permissible because the baby could have been aborted and even if not, there is no "personhood" distinction between a fetus and a newly-born infant.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:47 PM | Your Say (12)
The Hinge of Fate.
Probably no one could see the new world coming in 1940because one more thing was lacking. In the period between the collapse of an era but before the birth of a new one comes a peculiar phase which Winston Churchill called The Hinge of Fate. It is a curious, shockingly rapid period. Before the Hinge things run predominantly in one direction and afterwards they run entirely in another. The current crisis has not yet reached the Hinge, but the sands are slowly shifting for those with a mind to notice them. 00 Belmont Club ｻ The New World
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:42 PM | Your Say (1)
Old Feminist Joke: "What would a world without men be like?" "It would be full of fat, happy women."
New Post-Obama reality: Washington Post: Black women fat, happyPosted by gerardvanderleun at 4:32 PM | Your Say (4)
How Cool Is Freddie Tavares?
Freddie was a well-regarded steel guitar player, born in Hawaii. How cool is Freddie Tavares? He played the big glissando that opens every Looney Toons cartoon. That makes Freddie Tavares cooler than everyone you ever met, and everyone they ever met. -- Sippican Cottage: Minor Seventh Heaven -- 1959 Fender Factory Tour
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:23 AM | Your Say (3)
Ebony and Ivory
a white Aryan Nations member joined forces with a black gang member to distribute methamphetamine in Missouri, according to federal investigators. -- The Smoking Gun
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:05 AM | Your Say (2)
"The typewriter is a mechanical device with keys that,"
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:01 AM | Your Say (8)
February 27, 2012
Look -- they haven't even started up the racism stuff.
The class division stuff -- you think they have? Not even close.Gonna be a whole lot more of that sh-t comin' by summer. The Occupy crap -- they are still working that out. How they wanna use that thing. Axelrod is -- he had a meetup with some of that â some of them -- a bit back. About a month ago -- a few weeks ago. Yeah -- keepin' tabs on the mustache. -- Race Wars, Assassination Attempts and the Return of Occupy (Insider Related) - The Ulsterman Report
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:21 PM | Your Say (1)
This version of high and low culture speaks to the ghettoization of the industry
which sighing deeply shovels out 88 minutes of explosions for the peasantry,while speaking earnestly to the people who share its values. The Oscars are a time to reward the latter, which is why directors and producers of popular movies generally need not apply. This is a time for elites to pat each other on the back for being artistic, and yet this artistry is equally forgettable. Twenty years from now, how many people will be watching Slumdog Millionaire, Frost/Nixon, Milk, The Reader or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button? For that matter how many people would watch them now? If you are wondering what that list is, it's the Best Picture nominees from 2008. The nominees from this year will be equally obscure a few years from now. -- Sultan Knish a blog by Daniel Greenfield
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:59 PM | Your Say (0)
The Very Last Picture Show
Movie attendance in 2011 hit a fifteen year low and while the industry isn't doing as badly as its counterparts in the music industry, beneath the greasepaint and glamor, it is panicking every bit as badly. There's still plenty of money to be made, but the industry has the clear sense that it has lost its audience. And it has. -- Sultan Knish a blog by Daniel Greenfield
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:54 PM | Your Say (2)
A Dialogue About Syria
"Everyone is killing each other in Syria and some other places in the region, and the conflict might spread. What should we do about it?" "How much does this cost you?" "Nothing at all," I answered. "Then let them kill each other as long as possible, which is to say for 30 years or so. Do you know," the ghastly Cardinal continued, "why really interesting wars last for 30 years? That has been true from the Peloponnesian War to my own century. First you kill the fathers, then you kill their sons. There aren't usually enough men left for a third iteration." "We can't go around saying that," I remonstrated. --Asia Times Online :: Conjuring the ghost of RichelieuPosted by gerardvanderleun at 5:52 PM | Your Say (2)
Floral X-Rays
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:32 PM | Your Say (0)
Race is the final refuge of the incompetent.
President Obama has done nothing but spend, spend, spend and blame Bush.After 3 years of this, the American people are sick of it. Disgusted. Barack Obama is seen as a nice guy, but incompetent. President Obama's response may be to simply play the race card -- the race deck -- the race casino. Obama may have decided to become the most race-obsessed major presidential nominee since George Wallace. -- Is Obama losing his mind? « Don Surber
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:23 PM | Your Say (5)
The Three
There are only three areas about which the ancients still speak to us-- intimately, profoundly, universally. These would be in the domains of truth, of virtue, and of beauty; or, how to know, what to do, and why to create. -- One Cʘsmos: I Was So Much Older Then...
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:32 AM | Your Say (0)
"n modern Western societies, both ‘the Left’ and ‘the Right’ consist of liberals, only they come in two flavours: radical and less radical. "
Triumphant liberalism is made possible by conservatism, while triumphant conservatism leads eventually to liberalism.Anyone dreaming of ‘taking back his country’ by supporting the conservative movement, and baffled by its inability to stop the march of liberalism, has yet to understand the nature of his cause. The brutal truth: he is wasting his time.... I describe eight salient traits that define conservatism, explain the long-term pattern of conservative defeats, and show how liberalism and conservatism are complementary and mutually reinforcing partners, rather than contrasting enemies. --Why Conservatives Always Lose
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:21 AM | Your Say (3)
Apologizing to the Afghans
You don’t apologize to these barbarians, you simply shoot them....Let's try imagining the Roosevelt Administration, during WWII, apologizing to the German Reich for confiscating and burning copies of Mein Kampf used by members of the SS detained as prisoners of war to forward communications of National Socialist ideology. -- Never Yet Melted
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:32 AM | Your Say (1)
Global warmers $600 million, skeptics $4.4 million
The Climate Works Foundation, though, is of special interest as it was in 2008,awarded $460,800,000 from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, a grant-making organization with assets of $7.2 billion, which disbursed $353,400,000 in grants in 2011. It has made another grant to Climate Works only last week of $100 million -â bringing the total grants to this organization to just short of $600 million. -- « Don Surber
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:15 AM | Your Say (0)
February 26, 2012
Schmuck or Putz? Reasons abound to be turned off by the New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof
and they are a perfect fit. Here he is squatting and grinning at black children, or trying to balance a basket on his head, and there he is with his arm over Mia Farrow's shoulder in the desert. Here he is beaming down at obedient-looking Cambodian girls, or smiling broadly beside a dour, unclothed black man with a spear, whilst there he is with Ashton and Demi, Brad and Angelina, George Clooney. He professes humility, but his approach to journalistic advocacy makes himself a celebrity. He is the news story: Kristof is visiting, Kristof is doing something. -- The Soft Side of Imperialism @ Counterpunch
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:42 PM | Your Say (2)
D.W. Griffith
"What the modern movie lacks is beauty, the beauty of the moving wind in the trees.”Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:52 PM | Your Say (1)
"You know, there really isn't all that much history,"
If you're talking only of civilization. Twelve thousand years ago, there was a wall of icethick enough to cover the highest mountain in Maine sitting where I am now. There's still a wall of ice outside my door, but it's on the porch roof and we don't trouble one another. My father was a WW II veteran, and his father was a WW I veteran, and the last veterans of the Civil War were wandering around, albeit rather slowly, less than a decade before I was born. -- Sippican Cottage: I Imagine She Smelled The Same The Day After As The Day Before
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:27 PM | Your Say (0)
Wings and The Artist
the unlikely audience favorite The Artist swept up ten Oscar nominations, including Best Motion Picture. If it wins it will be only the second silent film in history to win in the category. The other was Wings, a war film by William A. Wellman, which won Best Picture at the very first Academy Awards. --Paris Review – First in Flight, Perrin Drumm
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:26 AM | Your Say (1)
The Nose Knows
Sometimes they describe smells in terms of sound: a disappointing masculine is “flat, in the musical sense” while oppressive feminine florals are often “hissy” “screechy” or “nasal-voiced.” Sanchez leans more towards narrative than Turin: Ormonde Woman “has the haunting, outdoors witchiness of tall pines leaning into the night—a bitter oakmoss inkiness, a dry cedar crackle, and a low, delicious, pleading sweet amber, like the call of a faraway candy house.” -- On the Scent, Emily Gould
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:18 AM | Your Say (1)
"Today slavery goes on in the name of civil rights."
We have done an excellent job of creating a society where people can be judgedon the color of their skin, not on the content of their character. And the judging is being done by the Federal government to a greater degree than it was before the Civil War. This has not led to the great prize of integration, rather it has deepened the balkanization that the Democratic political machine has always set as its objective, from the days when their thugs were storming black orphanages to when their pet banks oversaw the ghettoization and later the destruction of neighborhoods along racial lines. -- Sultan Knish a blog by Daniel Greenfield
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:00 AM | Your Say (1)
Oscar Blahs: "Aren’t you excited? No? Why not? Can’t you sense the excitement in Hollywood?"
Consider this year’s nine nominees for best picture, expanded from five several years ago by the bean counters in the business: The Artist, The Descendants, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, The Help, Hugo, Midnight in Paris, Moneyball, The Tree of Life, War Horse. They’re allowed up to ten, but apparently couldn’t find a tenth. Now consider the best picture nominees for 1939: Gone With the Wind, Stagecoach, Wuthering Heights, Dark Victory, Love Affair, Ninotchka, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Of Mice and Men, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Wizard of Oz. -- Hooray, but not quite, for Hollywood | Power LinePosted by gerardvanderleun at 8:52 AM | Your Say (1)
"A great intellectual con job is unraveling."
Perhaps we should stop accepting the term, "skeptic."Skepticism implies doubts about a plausible proposition. Current global warming alarm hardly represents a plausible proposition. Twenty years of repetition and escalation of claims does not make it more plausible. Quite the contrary, the failure to improve the case over 20 years makes the case even less plausible as does the evidence from climategate and other instances of overt cheating. -- Had Enough Therapy?: The Scientific Truth About Climate Change
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:37 AM | Your Say (0)
"It is now time for Western Christians and non-Christians alike ..."
to acknowledge that men such as Alexis de Tocqueville were correctand various concepts such as free expression, freedom of association, and other hallowed concepts of Western civilization simply do not translate outside of Western Christian culture. What was once theoretical is now empirical thanks to more than sixty years of evidence that strongly suggests that human liberty is simply not compatible with non-Christian, non-Western culture. -- Vox Popoli: The chickens begin to roost
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:16 AM | Your Say (5)
February 25, 2012
Why Aren't There Many Brown Oscars?
Black achievement in less glamorous Oscar categories has been more modest,but that doesn’t raise much interest. For example, after blacks garnered seven Best Score nominations from 1961-1987, none has been nominated in almost a quarter-century. (That might imply that black musical competence has been declining in the hip-hop age, but nobody wants to talk about that.) -- The Great Hollywood Brownout - Taki's Magazine
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:56 PM | Your Say (1)
Breaking!
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:58 PM | Your Say (0)
"And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it."
is build on porous foundations. The higher that skyscraper rises, the bigger the strain. Sooner or later, something will give. -- Is China Sinking? | Via Meadia
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:26 PM | Your Say (0)
Don't Look Now But...
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:12 PM | Your Say (0)
Don't Look Now But...
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:12 PM | Your Say (1)
"The Audacity of Fraud:" Even Obama’s poster is fake
From a political career that began in the living room of Bill Ayers and was built on a book inspired by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright that led to an improbable presidential campaign funded by such people as Good Will, Derty West and Jgtj Jfggjjfgj, comes the latest revelation: The fellow who came up with those HOPE and CHANGE posters lied in court about using an Associated Press photograph. -- Don Surber
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:10 PM | Your Say (0)
Zzzzzzz..... Joe Biden Can Really Put 'Em to Sleep!
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:46 AM | Your Say (1)
Remember WMDs That Weren't in Iraq When We Got There? They're BACK!
Exclusive: State Department quietly warning region on Syrian WMDs | The CableSyria is believed to have a substantial chemical weapons program, which includes mustard gas and sophisticated nerve agents, such as sarin gas, as well as biological weapons. Syria has also refused IAEA requests to make available facilities that were part of its nuclear weapons program and may still be in operation.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:22 AM | Your Say (4)
February 24, 2012
"If you haven’t figured it out yet, the Republican primaries...."
...are pure theater designed to serve as a distractionfor the intellectual caste one step above the American Idol and Ballroom Dancing crowd. It is all bread and circuses, just with 15-20 more I.Q. points. If you are falling for any of it, and are on “So-and-so’s team” as opposed to “Whosis’ team”, you should be embarrassed. Especially you Ron Paul people. Your faux-savior and Mitt Romney fall asleep in each other’s proverbial embrace with Paul looking up at Romney and whispering, “Make Rand VP and I’ll do . . . anything.” And then Mitt kisses him on the temple and they giggle and have a ticklefight. Yeah, that’s your savior of the Republic. -- Ann Barnhardt @ Barnhardt.biz
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:50 PM | Your Say (3)
"Obama’s a fucking girl scout compared to progressive mayors and their demented minions holding sway on city councils across the country."
Living in a liberal city run by elected officials motivated by wet dreams of high-speed rail,cloth grocery sacks, million dollar benches for bums and bike share programs (full of stolen ten speeds six weeks after inception) damps my enthusiasm for climbing on the Obama, Evil (possibly muslim) Socialist Overlord in charge of the End of America as We Know It bandwagon. --Liberal Pandemonium ｫ Jaded Haven
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:22 PM | Your Say (2)
Who says there's never any really, really, really GOOD! news?
You will never see John Edwards' sex tape.Like John Edwards political career, his sex tape with mistress Rielle Hunter is doomed to wallow in obscurity. The court has ordered the only copy(s) destroyed.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:06 PM | Your Say (9)
OK, Here's My Plan: Joan of Argghh actually thinks that a smart, experienced au pair would trump a young, Swedish au pair with commodious breasts
I found myself mulling all of my own fine recommendations for the job of au pair.I raised one fine son, why not another’s? Music, art, and classical literature, bi-lingual, up-to-date on computer technology (except for BlackBerry. Crap!) and a more-than-casual Judeo-Christian theological background. Why not rock another’s cradle and raise up a leader or at least a voter? --The Audacity of an Au Pair Insurgency | Primordial Slack
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:48 AM | Your Say (4)
Another Brick in the Road
apparently suffer from a severe limitation that can largely destroy the value of the vehicle. If the battery is ever totally discharged, the owner is left with what Tesla describes as a "brick": a completely immobile vehicle that cannot be started or even pushed down the street. The only known remedy is for the owner to pay Tesla approximately $40,000 to replace the entire battery.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:33 AM | Your Say (7)
Obama's aunt, Zeituni Onyango, finally finds work supporting her nephew's new energy policy
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:08 AM | Your Say (1)
February 23, 2012
Welcome, Obama Suckers, to The Dollar Store Economy
Over the past few years, arguably no retail faction has experienced as much success as dollar stores.Dollar General has just about doubled its number of locations in the past decade. There are now more than 9,800 Dollar General stores nationwide, making it the country’s largest retailer by location count. Dollar Tree opened its 4,000th store in 2010, after hitting the 3,000 mark four years ago. Family Dollar, meanwhile, has about 7,000 locations in North America, and expects to add 450 to 500 more this fiscal year. -- In Down U.S. Economy, Dollar Stores Increase in Popularity, Number of Outlets Across CountryOh, yeah, recovery is just around the corner.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:42 PM | Your Say (6)
Lock. Key. Throw Away
as he was removed yesterday from a plane that was forced to make an emergency landing due to his unruly behavior is a 19-year-old Saudi Arabian who was arrested Sunday night after he led Oregon police on a drunken car chase that saw him ram two cop cars and attempt to run over pedestrians. -- Saudi Teen Caps Wild Week With Airplane Bust | The Smoking Gun [The trouble with flying today is that you can't lay your hands on a chain saw when you really need one.]
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:01 PM | Your Say (1)
Good enough for me. I'm outta here.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:18 PM | Your Say (1)
The Idiot Cousin Theory of Government: "We have been throwing idiot cousins are the war on poverty, at discrimination and at overeating. And now we're poorer, more bigoted and fatter than we used to be. "
The modern nightmare begins and ends with the question,"What if we can't stop what we're doing?" While this question has been applied to such diverse areas as factories, nuclear weapons and mass culture, it's rarely directed at government. Not government as a vehicle for exploring the bomb, the surveillance state or any of the trendy abuses of authority-- but government itself. What we might ask will happen if the machine doesn't turn off, if government just doesn't stop growing? --Sultan Knish a blog by Daniel Greenfield
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:18 PM | Your Say (0)
#1: It's a make-or-break week for Europe.
#2: They say that every week...The EU has more rescue plans than Obama has vacation days. -- GS Elevator GossipPosted by gerardvanderleun at 12:15 PM | Your Say (0)
My only real concern about Romney is that he doesn't drink.
How can we trust him? -- GS Elevator GossipPosted by gerardvanderleun at 12:09 PM | Your Say (2)
"Everybody in my area was ready to go"
"When you board a domestic US airline flight and stand in the aisle, screaming "Allah is great!" after takeoff, understand that since 9/11, the other passengers will not be passive." Film at Sense of EventsPosted by gerardvanderleun at 11:52 AM | Your Say (7)
"Hurts. Hurts! Make. It. STOP!"
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:42 AM | Your Say (2)
The First Sleep and the Second Sleep
- "He knew this, even in the horror with which he started from his first sleep, and threw up the window to dispel it by the presence of some object, beyond the room, which had not been, as it were, the witness of his dream." Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge (1840)
- "Don Quixote followed nature, and being satisfied with his first sleep, did not solicit more. As for Sancho, he never wanted a second, for the first lasted him from night to morning." Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote (1615)
- "And at the wakening of your first sleepe You shall have a hott drinke made, And at the wakening of your next sleepe Your sorrowes will have a slake." Early English ballad, Old Robin of Portingale
- The Tiv tribe in Nigeria employ the terms "first sleep" and "second sleep" to refer to specific periods of the night -- BBC News - The myth of the eight-hour sleep
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:19 AM | Your Say (5)
Dear Neutrino, Slow Down You Move Too Fast
Oops: Not so fast: Scientists rethink stunning, faster-than-light particle findingA loose connection between a timer and a computer led some of the world’s smartest particle physicists to conclude that certain tiny particles called neutrinos moved faster than the speed of light -- a declaration that shocked the science world and would have called into questions Einstein’s theories.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:47 AM | Your Say (1)
"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man."
Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then— are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as “bad luck.” -- Robert Heinlein as quoted @ Dr. Sanity: THE DEMISE OF OF SOCIAL LIBERALISM?
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:32 AM | Your Say (0)
"Stall, stall, stall, stall!" It gets your attention.
The aircraft starts to fall toward Kansas dirt, nose oscillating a few degrees above and below the horizon, wings still level. I push the stick forward and force the nose sharply down to break the stalled condition. The terrified digital voice goes quiet ... Flight Level 390: Old Dog Training
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:56 AM | Your Say (3)
February 22, 2012
Deep down, he's just a shallow asshole.
My biggest problems with Obama, I’d still have if I agreed with Him about every little observation.
He just plain sucks. He goes on vacations, plays a lot of golf, comes back, He raises funds for His political party, He appears now & then in some forum in which He can be assured the questions are purely softball. If He gets a question that’s the least bit hostile, or even unanticipated, He throws this kind of a hissy fit as if the problem all belongs to the person who asked the question that shouldn’t have been asked. Then He pops up somewhere else, drops some rehearsed speech full of meaningless tidbits like “millionaires and billionaires flying around on their corporate jets,” then hauls His millionaire ass onto, uh, what could be called a corporate jet? — and disappears again to go play some golf. -- House of Eratosthenes
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:41 PM | Your Say (1)
Some people's lives are just far too busy
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:34 PM | Your Say (0)
Well, there goes my neighborhood.
I just saw this random pig snuffling around on the corner of Garfield St w. and 1st Ave W. No sign of an owner at about 1.10pm today. Seemed like a nice, friendly pig, certainly well fed!Probably belongs to the Vietnamese family that's turned their front lawn into a chicken coop. In fact, as hard times lengthen it seems to be the case that even up here in the affluent Seattle neighborhood we're seeing more yards turned over to gardens and orchards and more rural animals and crops.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:56 PM | Your Say (4)
Betrayal and heartbreak
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:00 PM | Your Say (3)
Obama is aging fast enough
for Morgan Freeman to play him in a movie.Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:56 PM | Your Say (2)
Advanced Moral Idiocy
You "mandate" all Orthodox Jewish restaurants to serve ham, bacon, and pork chops. And they tell you to take a hike,and everyone gets excited, and it starts to look like you might lose even the Reform Jewish vote. So you come up with an "accommodation." Orthodox Jews don't have to put any of these items on their menus. A Gentile will come in with a cart and offer them to all customers, free of charge. The restaurant owner need only pay this caterer whatever he's charging for the blintzes and latkes. -- David Warren from Canada
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:42 PM | Your Say (2)
Everything Has to Have A Fat Dim Sum Dumplingful of Racial Rectitude
"Use caution when discussing Lin's physical characteristics, particularly those that feminize/emasculate the Asian male (Cinderella-story angles should not place Lin in a dress). Discussion of genetic differences in athletic ability among races should be avoided. In referring to Lin's height or vision, be mindful of the context and avoid invoking stereotypes about Asians."
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:35 PM | Your Say (7)
"If there is one constant to Barack Obama's life, it is his lack of a work ethic."
Now he watches Spongebob Squarepants and Hannah Montana -- albeit with his daughters (a fact that calls into question his fathering ability but it is a step above having them hear Jeremiah Wright's racist and anti-American rants). Alas, how true Barnett's prophecy regarding Obama's ignorance and inability to govern has been. -- Articles: How Obama Makes Decisions
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:07 PM | Your Say (1)
"Long before they love girls, they love war"
That men are drawn to war is no surprise.How old are boys before they turn a finger and thumb into a pistol? Long before they love girls, they love war, at least everything they imagine war to be: guns and explosions and manliness and courage. When my neighbors and I played war as kids, there was no fear or sorrow or cowardice. Death was temporary, usually as fast as you could count to sixty and jump back into the game. We didn't know yet about the darkness. -- I Miss Iraq. I Miss My Gun. I Miss My War. - Esquire
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:03 AM | Your Say (3)
After careful consideration I've decided to stick with the 1%
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:27 AM | Your Say (2)
Can we review the "George Bush is such a warmonger" meme one more time?
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) -- U.S. troops helping in the fight against a brutal rebel group called the Lord's Resistance Army are now deployed in four Central African countries, the top U.S. special operations commander for Africa said Wednesday. -- News from The Associated Press
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:24 AM | Your Say (4)
February 21, 2012
Projectile Vomiting Alert
A “Women for Obama” gathering is basically my idea of hell. I cannot think of a better punishment for my sinsthan being forced to sit with a group of self-important “professional” white women dressed in Lululemon athletic wear, munching on vegan snacks and talking about how important it is that we be compassionate to the poor while planning their first-class European vacations. The smug alone would be enough to kill me. But it wouldn’t kill me because this is Hell and I must have done something truly horrible to deserve this. But this fall, these gatherings will be happening across the country. -- She just called to say she loves you. And birth control. But mostly you. :: Naked DC
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:25 PM | Your Say (1)
"The focus is Obama. Always. Focus. Focus. Focus. Stop takin’ your damn eye of the ball."
Insider: Yeah -- that stupid sh-t your put up on the blog. Knock that sh-t off. Like right now. No more of it.I don't wanna see no more of it. Obama is the target. Go after Obama and stay the f-ck outta messin' with the other ... the primary stories. At least don't go pittin' one candidate against the others -- media doin' enough of that. Don't need you and everyone else like you falling right in line and doin' the same like a bunch a braindead liberal bloggin' fool soldiers. Focus everything --and I mean everything, on messin' with Obama. The other stuff ... the Republican primary ... they are running a classic pump and dump. Been doin' it against them for months. I warned you about it -- sh-t -- how long ago now? Were you not listening to me? -- WHITE HOUSE INSIDER: âPump and Dumpâ - The Ulsterman Report
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:50 PM | Your Say (1)
"People, you don’t ask the President of the United States OR ANYONE ELSE to “let” you practice your faith."
Do you understand? Do you understand what the martyrology of the Church is all about now?Do you understand what the words “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” means? Are you ready to accept the massive responsibility of your personal sovereignty bestowed upon you by God Almighty Himself? Are you ready to look the crack-addled, homosexual imbecile-puppet Obama and his cabal of satanic puppet-masters in the eye and say, ”You’re going to have to kill me” and MEAN IT? Because THAT is where we are. Or are you, like this pathetic, whipped, cowardly priest going to look to the imbecile-tyrant Obama and ask his PERMISSION to LET YOU practice your faith? -- Ann Barnhardt @ Barnhardt.biz - Commodity Brokerage
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:33 PM | Your Say (3)
Americans’ New Retirement Plan Is A Bed With A Lid
Five years from the age when people once retired, she laughs when she describes her future plans.“I’ll probably just work until I drop,” she says, a sentiment expressed, with varying degrees of humor, by numerous members of her age group. -- | The Rumford Meteor
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:19 PM | Your Say (4)
Give the Moron a Second Chance!
PRESIDENT OBAMA: "Re-elect me and I'll put a windmill in every backyard and a union-made electric car in every driveway.I'll have anybody smoking a cigarette in the vicinity of a child arrested. I'll guarantee all 13 year-old girls 24 hour access to abortions up till the moment of birth without parental consent. Under my administration we'll have the first transgender space station and unless you're a criminal, I'll make sure it's impossible to own a gun." --Hope and Change For Real This Time | The DAILY RASH
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:16 PM | Your Say (0)
Big Gay never sleeps.
After he joked that “rehearsal is for fags,” Brett Ratner lost his job directing the Oscars.As penance, he’s been roped into directing a new video campaign for, why yes, GLAAD as a matter of fact. --This Week in Atonement - Taki's Magazine
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:11 PM | Your Say (4)
Republicans Are Idiots. PS: Know what else is destined for the dustbin? Conservatism.
You owe it to yourself to read the complete It’s Dead, Jim. [Prediction made Nov. 6, 2008] @ Primordial Slack Excerpt:Nothing, not even skin color, is more feared and hated than the label, “stupid.” Chris Rock says not one white person would trade places with a black man. I’ll go him one further: not one black man would trade his place for any color if he had to carry the label, “stupid idiot” around with him.
Nobody wants to be seen as stupid. Not even people with very high I.Q.s can quite shake themselves from the fear of being perceived as one point less than they possess. Mensa membership is soaring!It gets better/worse after that.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:46 PM | Your Say (1)
February 20, 2012
Like
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:41 PM | Your Say (2)
Budget 2 Million and Spend 2.7 Billion
Canada's Gun Registry DiesLast Wednesday, the Canadian Parliament voted to end the Registry of long arms. $2.7 billion later, it was concluded that the Registry had never resulted in the solution of a single murder.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:27 PM | Your Say (1)
Fairy tales can come true,/ It can happen to you /--If you're Dem-o-crat.
Meanwhile, in keeping with the magical thinking of the new-left's theology,believers hold onto the idea that doing nothing but listening to Obama's regular chants and incantations on the debt crisis, is a safe strategy (and it might well be from a political perspective in an election year); but reality probably isn't going to agree with the true believers for very long. -- Dr. Sanity: SPEAKING OF PHONY THEOLOGIES...
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:37 PM | Your Say (0)
"We have chosen to be a socialist nation, whether us conservatives agree or not. "
Having made that choice, we have also chosen to share the costof the pathologies of lifestyle, whether drugs, gluttony, laziness or even hazardous sports activity, seat belts and helmets. The logical outcome is that we all get to legislate on your freedom to use recreational drugs. Like it or not, the choice of socialism gives us the power to overrule your freedom. -- Why not? - Ricochet.com
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:26 PM | Your Say (0)
"1. ALL MEN ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL."
"Equality is a concept which nearly everyone believes but no one has bothered to prove.The unassailable notion of blank-slate cognitive and physical equality, despite all contrary evidence, is the fat stump rooted deep in the soil from which all the other modern taboo branches sprout. The sweetest fairy tale ever told is the one where God made everyone equal. -- Seven Ideas You Can Never Discuss on Television
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:48 AM | Your Say (6)
"When you tilt your chin skyward like that, you remind me so of the Italian heart throb Benito
Leni Riefenstahl: Congratulations on the HHS Regulations
Schatzi, I forced myself to endure the scorching temperatures and pitchforks to congratulate you on those brilliant HHS regulations forcing people to fund insurance coverage for abortions, sterilizations and birth control against their consciences. Darling Adolf just loved to do that sort of thing. Remember -- are you old and well read enough to remember? He figured out that if he could get people to operate against their conscience on small things, big things like Judenrein would be easier. Of course, that was just a start.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:29 AM | Your Say (3)
"“[M]y Situation has been such that I have been obliged to use art to conceal it from my own Officers.” "
you will render that service to the cause of liberty, and to your country, which you probably can never do under any other circumstances.” The drummers drummed; the men spoke low to one another; a few stepped forward, and then nearly all did. The choice cost almost half of them their lives. --When George Washington Became Great by Myron Magnet, City Journal
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:56 AM | Your Say (2)
"It was all done with the best of intentions"
Greece has provided a preview into what happenswhen a welfare state model can no longer be sustained. The first to fall will be the weak, as the stimulus money wears off and its toxic aspects become evident: competitiveness has been destroyed, the inability to sustain itself with stimulants, the loss of the ability to heal itself. All the signs will be there. The emigration of the working age population; capital flight; corruption, which rather than abating, intensifies; the political elites, who rather than reforming, double down. -- Belmont Club ｻ Bad Habits
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:39 AM | Your Say (0)
February 19, 2012
"Teaching everyone to make do with less of everything is just step one."
Break down the family, religion and the nation. Teach people to stop being possessive of the old structures. Wipe out the tribal and national bonds so that there is no longer any war or jealousy. Eliminate marriage and stable parenthood to end possessiveness. Leave people as isolates, individual units, citizens of the state. It's an old program. The Nazis made some slight progress on it. Various leftist movements and regimes have flirted with communal arrangements, but no one has made an entire society work that way. Yet. To people who think that way subsidized birth control is very important. -- Sultan Knish a blog by Daniel Greenfield
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:10 AM | Your Say (2)
Memo to Jews: After They Come for the Catholic Church, They Will Come For Us
Today it is contraception and the morning-after pill.Tomorrow it will be kosher slaughter, or matrilineal descent, or circumcision, or other matters of existential importance to Jewish observance. If the Obama administration gets away with forcing Catholic institutions to step across lines of life and death in the name of "health," the federal government will have a precedent to legislate Judaism out of existence -- as several other countries have already tried to do. -- Spengler
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:23 AM | Your Say (2)
February 18, 2012
"Ideology ... is now not to be taken too seriously—not in this age of global leisure and affluence."
The pro-Palestinian European activist expects to stay at a comfortable Israeli hotel.The zealous supporter of affirmative action in row 22 on a transcontinental flight expects that tribal considerations will not adjudicate who is piloting his 747. The opponent of vouchers prefers his kids in Sidwell Friends to the DC public schools. The La Raza activist at the university does not really wish his tony suburb to resemble Oaxaca. Guantanamo is a horrific gulag in December -- and a reasonable solution to an intractable problem by January 21. -- Works and Days The New Commandments on the Barn Wall
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:22 PM | Your Say (0)
"People are nervous, jittery in this media climate of what if, what if, maybe, perhaps, could be…when there is simply no reason to feel nervous."
"Like a bearded nut in robes on the sidewalk proclaiming the end of the world is near,the media is just doing what makes it feel good, not reporting hard facts. We need to start seeing the media as a bearded nut on the sidewalk, shouting out false fears. It's not sensible to listen to it." -- Michael Crichton
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:08 PM | Your Say (4)
""We had Elementary Sex for the first forty minutes. But now it's switched over to Elementary Class Consciousness.""
I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able …" The Director pushed back the switch. The voice was silent. Only its thin ghost continued to mutter from beneath the eighty pillows. "They'll have that repeated forty or fifty times more before they wake; then again on Thursday, and again on Saturday. A hundred and twenty times three times a week for thirty months. After which they go on to a more advanced lesson." --Brave New World by Aldous Huxley : chapter two
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:46 AM | Your Say (2)
"Singapore has often produced over sixteen thousand five hundred;"
You should see the way a negro ovary responds to pituitary! It's quite astonishing, when you're used to working with European material. Still," he added, with a laugh (but the light of combat was in his eyes and the lift of his chin was challenging), "still, we mean to beat them if we can. I'm working on a wonderful Delta-Minus ovary at this moment. Only just eighteen months old. Over twelve thousand seven hundred children already, either decanted or in embryo. And still going strong. We'll beat them yet." -- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:24 AM | Your Say (1)
Win first. Govern later.
The media will not play fair. They will twist words and make conservatives look like theocrats -- the American Taliban as liberals like to put it.Conservatives cannot win at this game. Look what happened to Sarah Palin. Push the economy. Thatâs what will win. The Surber Rule: The economy will win the presidency for Republicans in 2012. Republicans should talk about nothing else, and should avoid troll questions by any reporter who tries to distract them. -- Trolled by Charlie Rose « Don Surber
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:46 AM | Your Say (2)
The Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect
In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say.In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia. -- Michael Crichton
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:21 AM | Your Say (1)
Rule 35:
If it is social media, there is porn in it. No exceptions.Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:40 AM | Your Say (2)
OF CONTROVERSIAL BENEFACTORS
After Sheldon Adelson, Gingrich's "controversial benefactor", meet Foster Friess, Santorum's "controversial benefactor".Oddly Obama's "controversial benefactor" who was a Nazi collaborator, a wanted criminal and a bigot never comes up when the media starts discussing those "controversial benefactors". -- Daniel Greenfield
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:21 AM | Your Say (0)
February 17, 2012
Headline of the Day
The White House: laser-focused on making condoms easier to get than jobsPosted by gerardvanderleun at 5:23 PM | Your Say (0)
Fragment of a Credo
I cannot know whether my life makes ultimate sense. But I can live as if it does, and if I do I will live better than if I live as if it does not. I cannot know whether my life is bounded by bodily birth and death. But I can live as if it is not, and if I do I will live better than if I live as if it is. -- Vallicella @ Maverick PhilosopherPosted by gerardvanderleun at 5:18 PM | Your Say (0)
War: An 8-Ball Prophecy
We have two: the bomb crafting Iranians, and the holocaust stung Israelis. If a war does break out, the Obama voters will flock back to vote for Obama, which does put a spin on the foreign policy of the world's smartest leader. Patriotism. No mention in the media of the support of the usual ex-Bolshevik powers for Iran. Any rail movements of munitions over their common border? Nary a peep: all is mourning for the latest crack pipe casualty in Hollywood. -- The Sleeping Sword
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:19 AM | Your Say (2)
"All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and infinite power."
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:57 AM | Your Say (1)
"Those white devils, they use lies and propaganda to spread their twisted view of the world.
"Just look outside at the Global Warming; if it was not for the propaganda lies of the Deniers we could have shut down electricity generation, the automobile, and smelters and be living in a normal snow filled winter." -- Mitchieville / White Atrocity MonthPosted by gerardvanderleun at 10:53 AM | Your Say (1)
"Funny how...
"no liberal complains about the runaway costs of public education, and the 45% increase in just 3 years in the cost of food stamps, too, is given little bad press. But heart surgery is somehow too expensive, as are treatments for cancer." -- Don Surber: Hey PolitiFact, here's your death panelPosted by gerardvanderleun at 10:28 AM | Your Say (0)
Fashion Week Is For Lovers
The models descended on the city, along with photographers, stylists, makeup artists, celebrities, editors and of course, fashion groupies during New York fashion week. And descend they did. You had models:
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:20 AM | Your Say (1)
The Tang Dialogues
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:56 AM | Your Say (1)
February 16, 2012
Continuing Education
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:20 PM | Your Say (3)
"Be wery wery qwiet. We're hunting wabbits."
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:14 PM | Your Say (10)
Eye. On Ball. Keep It There. Boot. On O's Balls. Keep It There.
Obama spent us into bankruptcy, most of the money went to cronies, and the job situation got worse. That's the real story, not a question of who pays for birth control, which doesn't cost that much anyway. -- Glenn ReynoldsPosted by gerardvanderleun at 2:19 PM | Your Say (0)
Oh yeah, pouring yet more money into the schools. That's the smart thing to do.
Q: “Can you name a country that begins with a “U”? A: “Europe?”Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:55 PM | Your Say (11)
What if a capitalist could somehow manage to sound like a Baptist?
Warren Buffett: Baptist and BootleggerWarren Buffett is very much a political entrepreneur; his best investments are often in political relationships. In recent years, Buffett has used taxpayer money as a vehicle to even greater profit and wealth. Indeed, the success of some of his biggest bets and the profitability of some of his largest investments rely on government largesse and “coddling” with taxpayer money.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:31 PM | Your Say (0)
Humiliation was, in fact, their only aim, and malice, their motive.
There can be only one reason why Sebelius, Pelosi, and Obama decided to proceed.They wanted to show the bishops and the Catholic laity who is boss. They wanted to make those who think contraception wrong and abortion a species of murder complicit in both. They wanted to rub the noses of their opponents in it. They wanted to marginalize them. Humiliation was, in fact, their only aim, and malice, their motive. --More Than a Touch of Malice - Ricochet.com
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:28 AM | Your Say (7)
Alas No Doom!
A year later, we have a more complete picture, and its not what many people think. So far no one has died from radiation leaks as a result of the plant's damage. No one has even been reported as becoming sick. In fact, no one has required decontamination except plant workers. -- Word Around the Net: NUCLEAR DOOM UNFULFILLED
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:24 AM | Your Say (2)
The "Wow!" signal has never again been found
causing the signal to surge and the computer to shift from numbers to letters and then keep climbing all the way up to "U," which represented a signal thirty times higher than the background noise level. Seeing the consecutive letters, the mark of something strange or even alien, Ehman circled them in red ink and wrote "Wow!" thus christening the most famous and tantalizing signal of SETI's short history: The "Wow!" signal. -- The 'Wow!' Signal: One Man's Search for SETI's Most Tantalizing Trace of Alien Life
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:01 AM | Your Say (1)
"For where your treasure is, your heart will be also"
How much is Sister Carol Keehan worth to the pro-Obamacare Catholic Health Association? Answer: $962,467.Who knew that lobbying for the corporal works of mercy paid so well? Of course, the dirty little secret of secularized "non-profit" Catholic hospitals is that they rake in enormous profits. Hence, some of its executives garner salaries/benefits north of $9 million. Obamacare will release another avalanche of federal government cash with which to feather their nests. --The American Spectator : The Little Sisters of Limousine Liberalism
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:46 AM | Your Say (3)
"The Obama budget is about an America whose path will be guided by the government far into the future."
No more certain sign exists that a nation has chosen to step off its historic upward path than the creation of wealth taxes. A nation imposes a wealth tax when it wakes up one day to conclude that it has become embarrassed, rather than proud of, its wealth, which is to say, its national success. -- Henninger: What Would Clint Eastwood Do? - WSJ.comPosted by gerardvanderleun at 9:41 AM | Your Say (0)
If the gas from these prophets were taxed, we would not need a gas profit tax.
Dems propose 'Reasonable Profits Board' to regulate oil company profits Six House Democrats, led by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), want to set up a "Reasonable Profits Board" to control gas profits.The Democrats, worried about higher gas prices, want to set up a board that would apply a "windfall profit tax" as high as 100 percent on the sale of oil and gas, according to their legislation. The bill provides no specific guidance for how the board would determine what constitutes a reasonable profit.Here directly from the proposed bill:
(4) REASONABLE PROFIT.—The term ‘reasonable profit’ means the amount determined by the Reasonable Profits Board to be a reasonable profit on the sale.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:22 AM | Your Say (4)
The Fifty
Its 14 major structural components, cast in ductile iron, weigh as much as 250 tons each; those yard-thick steel bolts are also 78 feet long; all told, the machine weighs 16 million pounds, and when activated its eight main hydraulic cylinders deliver up to 50,000 tons of compressive force. If the logistics could somehow be worked out, the Fifty could bench-press the battleship Iowa, with 860 tons to spare. -- Iron Giant @ The Atlantic
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:03 AM | Your Say (0)
Wake up! Time to replace me!
It’s an ugly old thing and I’d love to get rid of it and replace it with something with a white-noise feature, a sleeker look, better radio reception, a slot for my iPod, and so on. But the months and years go by and I never do. It’s not that I have a sentimental attachment to the old Sony box. It’s that a) it still works, and b) I know that anything new I buy is likely to die or become obsolete in a couple of years, and then I’ll have to buy yet another new device. And that’s just stupid. -- Obsolete! | The Daily Cannibal
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:32 AM | Your Say (3)
"Samsung's super-sized Galaxy Note changed my life"
a device the company promises will blur the line between smartphones and tablets. I had to have it, had to see what I’ve been missing with my laughably small, all-too-practical iPhone.... Afraid of the dark? Not with a Galaxy Note by your side. Samsung’s full-figured phone filled in for my nightstand lamp and ensured the sun never set in my apartment. And I could swear I’m slightly tanner. -- The TechBlock
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:13 AM | Your Say (3)
February 15, 2012
"One of the reasons conservatives do not as well as the Left"
in areas like Media Matters is that most of them have a life.You know, they want to go bowling or have a barbecue with the family or maybe get some sleep. But on the Left endless and tireless conspiracy is the staff of life. That is living. If you're not meeting, not connecting, not watching, then you're not alive." -- Belmont Club ｻ The Life of Ants
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:55 PM | Your Say (0)
My New Favorite Educational Web Site?
Ah, that would be Facts and Chicks . com, where the learning checks in but it doesn't check out:
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:00 PM | Your Say (3)
Welcome to fornication nation,
where the "right" to unfettered sexual gratification trumps all others,where the pursuit of happiness is no longer possible without "free" government-mandated contraceptives for all. And where the way to appeal to voters is to pretend that the opponent is threatening that sacred "right," and to deny the real rights, and even the existence, of dissenters. --Pundit & Pundette: Fornication Nation
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:24 AM | Your Say (1)
Catholics Capitulate
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:18 AM | Your Say (0)
"The Republican party has only rarely been the explicitly conservative party."
As such, just as liberalism is slow-motion socialism, Republicanism has tended to be slow-motion liberalism, or super slow-mo socialism. --One Cʘsmos: The Welfare State: Monument to a BarbarianPosted by gerardvanderleun at 10:12 AM | Your Say (1)
Made in the USA: Georgia factory exports chopsticks to China
On the site of a former auto parts plant in the small southwest Georgia town of Americus, a factory is turning the abundant local hardwood trees into chopsticks -- for export to China. --PhotoBlog [Taste the irony of the phrase "On the site of a former auto parts plant...."]Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:56 AM | Your Say (0)
February 14, 2012
Who Says There's No Good News?
Bangkok bomb: Iranian blows off his legs as grenade he hurled at police bounces back Stash of explosives blow roof off house occupied by three IraniansPosted by gerardvanderleun at 10:07 PM | Your Say (0)
Obama-rama-bo-bama
This power grab was evidently made not so much to control the birth of untermenschenas to assert the Executive's authority to order private citizens to buy Stuff the Executive thinks is Really Kool.... It has nothing to do with whether contraceptives are a good idea; nor with whether they are legal, nor with whether lots of people want them. It does have to do with the Omnicompetent State instructing a religious body as to which of its activities are "truly" religious and which are not. That is explicitly forbidden by the First Amendment to do so.... But this president said, long before his election, that the Constitution was an "obstacle" to doing the right thing and has on more than one occasion expressed the wistful desire to rule by decree.... The appeal of fascism did not die with the 1920s and 30s. -- The TOF Spot: Statistics, Obamas, and Internet Memes
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:52 PM | Your Say (0)
"Renouncing the honours at which the world aims,"
I desire only to know the truth, and to live as well as I can, and, when I die, to die as well as I can. And, to the utmost of my power, I exhort all other men to do the same. - Plato's GorgiasPosted by gerardvanderleun at 7:44 PM | Your Say (0)
The Three Most Terrifying Words In The English Language:
Naked Football CoachPosted by gerardvanderleun at 8:44 AM | Your Say (3)
"The biggest clown show in the world is in America."
Where SWPL yuppies in a never ending battle against “the wrong sort of White people”have imported a mass of vote-mercenaries who will assuredly kill their hipster paradises of Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Austin, and Ann Arbor, dead, dead, dead! Not too many working guys from Michoacan or their descendants are big into irony, feminism, gay rights, or saving the planet. Mostly, they throw trash out the window (as Victor Davis Hanson attests) and stage pit-bull and cockfights. People from Michoacan don’t ironically drink Pabst Blue Ribbon and get designated drivers, they drive drunk without a license and run over lots of kids, elderly, and each other. --Germans Are Weird, Part 5,699 as the EU Collapses | whiskeysplace
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:32 AM | Your Say (0)
Why Is the Government Subsidizing a $104,000 Car?
Ah, yes, the sunshine supercar!:The EPA rated the Karma's mileage at only 20 miles per gallon for its gasoline engine, but 52 mpg for full hybrid mode. The company offered rooftop solar panels that extend the range another four miles. --The American Spectator :
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:56 AM | Your Say (0)
"There is nothing in this world but to love,"
"and be loved in return. In a hundred years the most important man you ever met is anonymous.In a thousand everyone is. We cobbled together a life around the table where we break the bread, and for a few thousand times we were as one. I saw your face in our children's faces. You said you saw mine. The universe passed the plate, and we put in our offering. We are poor, but it's enough for anyone to give. No man could do more. No man could ask for more." -- Sippican Cottage
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:52 AM | Your Say (2)
"We Might Have Been Hauling Our Heads Around in Our Asses Forever, If the Obamas Never Told Us to Pull Them Out"
And it’s not like this sneering condescension is any kind of a new thing, it’s been on parade since the beginning of 2009,even before that really. Here we all are just fumbling and blundering and slippin’ and slidin’ like the Keystone Cops. Can’t do anything right! And here comes Barack, or Michelle, the new royalty, throwing out some statement of the form: “Hey [blank], quit [blank]ing.” Oh, my GOSH! Look at this silly dumb thing we’ve been doing just because that’s the way it’s always been done! Good thing the Obamas are here to think outside of the box for us. --House of Eratosthenes
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:45 AM | Your Say (1)
Some People
Some people spend a lifetime with one love, one spouse;plumbing the depths of that single human being and what it means to be in an intimate relationship with him/her. Others go from relationship to relationship, never alighting with one person for very long, craving the variety. It would seem on the face of it that the second type of person has the more exciting time in love. But it ain't necessarily so. -- neo-neocon On Valentine's Day
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:40 AM | Your Say (0)
February 13, 2012
I wasn't kissing her, I was whispering in her mouth. – Chico Marx
Think about it. If a spaceship full of aliens landed on earth to observe human behavior,how on earth would we explain the act of kissing? One person touches another person with their lips. Not, of course, lips to lips alone. Lips to cheek, lips to neck, lips to â well, just about any other body part can be considered. Imagine the polite but nevertheless obvious squirming with embarrassment that could be involved on either or both sides of the species divide: especially if they landed on Valentine's Day. --The Science -and Silliness - of Kissing ~ Kuriositas
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:09 PM | Your Say (0)
The Question
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:51 PM | Your Say (1)
When I say I think Chris Matthews has a brain tumor, I am trying to be charitable.
I dearly hope a Charles Whitman-type autopsy someday reveals that Matthews’s obnoxious manner and twisted worldviewwere the tragic side effects of a hideous growth the approximate mass of a Titleist. The alternative—that he thinks and speaks as he does of his own free will—is almost too depressing to contemplate. --Chris Matthews: A Tingle Inside the Skull - Taki's Magazine
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:49 PM | Your Say (2)
Racism is about many things but it isn't about race.
When the Democratic Party had its change of heart on raceall it did was take the same methods it used on German, Irish, Jewish and Italian immigrants and shift them to urban African-Americans who had come north and were living in the same neighborhoods formerly occupied by the immigrants. And so the party that during the Civil War orchestrated urban anti-draft riots by white immigrants targeting African-Americans was using the same methods to orchestrate African-American riots aimed at the second and third generation of working class immigrants that it had once fostered. What most people thought of as racial politics was just the Democratic Party doing what it had been doing all along. -- Daniel Greenfield
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:47 PM | Your Say (0)
"The Kremlin’s post mortem of the Cuban Missile crisis"
than any futile attempt to build a better navy or air force. The American military might be invincible, but Washington was eminently vincible. All it needed was a little more softening up, a little more undermining and they would have it. The way to fight the American giant was not to grapple with its adamantine arms and body, but to insinuate assets to the top. After all they would have known what Mimi Alford knew, but which was concealed from the American pubic until relatively recently. That there were monsters at the top with no more capability or character than that of a perverted circus clown. --Belmont Club / Mad Men
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:34 AM | Your Say (2)
February 12, 2012
Whitney Houston Dies, and Tony Bennett Calls for Drug Legalization
"Yes, legalized drugs would have killed her quicker." --Don SurberPosted by gerardvanderleun at 2:39 PM | Your Say (14)
What Do the People Want?
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:26 PM | Your Say (8)
"Screw sustainable development."
"It's the same garbage from the same garbagemen. I'd like to say fool me once, but from nuclear winter to overpopulation to global cooling, they have yet to fool me." -- Global warmists throw in the towel -- Don SurberPosted by gerardvanderleun at 8:50 AM | Your Say (3)
Lincoln's Birthday
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:28 AM | Your Say (1)
February 11, 2012
"There are two paths! One is America, the other is Occupy! "
When I travel around the United States meeting people in the Tea Party who care -- black, white, gay, straight -- anyone that's willing to stand next to me to fight the progressive left, I will be in that bunker, and if you're not in that bunker 'cause you're not satisfied with this candidate, more than shame on you. You're on the other side." --Breitbart at CPAC: This Is Not Your Mother's Democratic PartyPosted by gerardvanderleun at 6:27 PM | Your Say (1)
A Dog House by Frank Lloyd Wright: "Yes, it does leak."
He had a paper route, he said, and hoped that the architect might design for Eddie, his black Lab, a house "which would be easy to build and would go with our house." His father had commissioned Wright to design a house in 1952, and would spend 20 years building it in San Anselmo, Calif. -- Architects and Artisans
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:57 PM | Your Say (2)
Don't Be Fooled, The Obama Unemployment Rate Is 11%
In the latest, much celebrated, unemployment report, the labor force participation rate had plummeted to 63.7%,the most rapid decline in U.S. history. That means that under President Obama nearly 5 million Americans have fled the workforce in hopeless despair. The trick is that when those 5 million are not counted as in the work force, they are not counted as unemployed either. They may desperately need and want jobs. They may be in poverty, as many undoubtedly are, with America suffering today more people in poverty than in the entire half century the Census Bureau has been counting poverty. But they are not even counted in that 8.3% unemployment rate that Obama and his media cheerleaders were so tirelessly celebrating last week. -- - Forbes
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:21 AM | Your Say (3)
"The bishops, nuns, and priests now screaming bloody murder have gotten what they asked for."
"The weapon that Barack Obama has directed at the Church was fashioned to a considerable degree by Catholic churchmen. They welcomed Obamacare. They encouraged Senators and Congressmen who professed to be Catholics to vote for it. --American Catholicism’s Pact With the DevilPosted by gerardvanderleun at 11:14 AM | Your Say (2)
The left uses "Galileo, a man who defied the "consensus" of his day, as a propaganda talking point to enforce the consensus of today."
RealClearPolitics - The Galileo of Global Warming
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:07 AM | Your Say (2)
Rimshot!
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:49 AM | Your Say (2)
February 10, 2012
"All legitimacy, even that of authoritarian regimes, is fundamentally based on an accepted belief."
In dictatorships, it is the belief that the secret police are all powerful.In the liberal West, it is the myth that the elites are the all-wise source of public approval. Just as Syria's Assad is suffering from a growing realization that he can't stop the rebels, the biggest danger facing the liberal orthodoxy is a growing awareness that they can't stop the heretics from speaking out in the public square. -- Belmont Club - Breaking Taboos
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:31 PM | Your Say (2)
"His Majesty "shall have full power and authority from time to time to visit, repress, redress, record, order, correct, restrain and amend all such errors, heresies, abuses, offenses, contempts and enormities, whatsoever they be.""
Mark Steyn: Obama goes Henry VIII on the churchIn my latest book, I cite my personal favorite among the epic sweep of Commissar Sebelius' jurisdictional authority: "The Secretary shall develop oral healthcare components that shall include tooth-level surveillance." Before Obama's Act of Supremacy did the English language ever have need for such a phrase? "Tooth-level surveillance": From the Declaration of Independence to dentured servitude in a mere quarter-millennium.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:47 PM | Your Say (3)
GET YOUR WAR ON
If you tune in to CNN you can see footage of adorable Syrian children, as reported by Anderson Cooper.Because we've got to get our war on in Syria and liberate the Syrian people on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood. No adorable Christian children need be shown because we might have to think about what's going to happen to them once the funloving Religion of Peace is in the driver's seat. -- Sultan Knish a blog by Daniel Greenfield
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:21 AM | Your Say (0)
Who Says There's No Good News?
Jellyfish are not taking over the ocean | COSMOS magazinePosted by gerardvanderleun at 10:06 AM | Your Say (1)
A Catholic himself, Leon Panetta asked: “What are we doing here? What’s the point?”
Allow me to explain this to the naif. The point is the same as the point about abortion-- which by the way is next on the list of things the Church will be ordered to provide. The point is the same about gay marriage, which priests will be forced to perform beginning with military chaplains. The point is the destruction of Catholicism in the name of "freedom." --Like making the Amish buy Chevy Volts « Don Surber
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:52 AM | Your Say (1)
Endtimes Watch: Clearly the Advent of the Antichrist is Upon Us
Satan's paw shows clearly with the arrival on the Internet of BreadedCats.com
1) Take a piece of bread
2) Cut a hole approximately 1 inch larger than your cat's head.
This trips some people up.
Remember: the bread has to fit around
not just the cat's head, but it's ears, too.
3) Gently place the bread around your cat's head.
4) Take a picture & post it! We love Cat Breading!
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:08 AM | Your Say (4)
February 9, 2012
"If people in the millions are as committed to their sacred principles as they claim, why do almost all of them fail to act? "
"If one truly believes that abortion is “murder” and there is a literal “murder factory” down the road,there is only one course of action an honest man could take. If one is adamant that an armed body is violently invading your homeland with government complicity, why is no one emulating Daniel Shays and his men? If a tyrannical judiciary is actively opposing the people by force or writ, why are the people not on the steps with tar and feathers? --United We Sit on the Couch
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:17 PM | Your Say (4)
"It's a dog-eat-dog world and I'm wearing beef underwear"
This valentines day give your significant other a truly unique gift. 100% edible and 100% meat, they are so easy to make a cavemen could do it! Sure, you could spend $140 for a pair of meaty briefs that are only partially edible, but who wants to work around all those metal shards and strings in the heat of passion? -- Instructables
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:32 PM | Your Say (2)
Kathleen Sebelius to those who do not believe in the church of Obamacare: "Fuck You"
"Practicing this kind of compulsion is routine and noncontroversial within Ms. Sebelius's ministry. That may explain why her staff didn't notice that the birth-control rule abridges the First Amendment's protections for religious freedom." -- ObamaCare's Great Awakening - WSJ.com UPDATE: Big Lizards:Blog:Entry “Let's Get One Thing Perfectly Clear...” The recent order by President Barack H. Obama (and Kathleen Sebelius at the Department of Health and Human Services) --that every employer must offer health insurance that fully covers birth control, sterilization, and morning-after abortion pills, regardless of any religious objection employers, including faith-based employers that are not actually churches, might harbor to those procedures -- is not an "unintended consequence" of ObamaCare. Its architects are not that stupid. Rather, that was one of the very reasons for enacting ObamaCare in the first place.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:54 PM | Your Say (5)
Death Thirst Still Not Slaked: In a paradigm shift, winning means losing!
If the goal is not beating Obama, despite the fact that the polls show he can be beaten, then I would say that the Republicans are simply victims of themselves....If winning is to be abandoned as strategy, and the Republicans lose, what is to be done in the next five years with a lame duck Obama who can do as he wishes? Whine and complain? Get even more sick and tired of ever-more-entrenched Obamacare? Start an armed revolution? Position another loser to head the 2016 ticket? I think a lot of Republicans will get tired of this new, losing paradigm. I know I will. --Classical Values
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:32 AM | Your Say (4)
Gays over blacks, Part XIV
A recent trend is prominent blacks like Kobe Bryant getting in trouble over remarks insensitive to gays.... I think it reflects a more general impatience with stereotypical black behavior. A lot of straight white people are happy to seize upon a different Official Victim Group as a club to justify finally upbraiding blacks to not be such knuckleheads. -- Steve Sailer's iSteve Blog:Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:15 AM | Your Say (5)
That was then (October 2011). This is now.
Back to a list of 2:"Some are simply universally admired for their activism, like Clint Eastwood (pictured), John Wayne and Bob Hope." -- Box Office Politics: The Movies and Stars Dems vs. GOPers Love (and Love to Hate)Uh, make that "John Wayne and Bob Hope."
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:45 AM | Your Say (0)
Widespread Dependence on Big Wind Will Bring Frostbite and Death
Did anyone even think of deploying our wind turbines to make good the energy shortfall from Russia?Of course not. We all know that windmills are a self-indulgent and sanctimonious luxury whose purpose is to make us feel good. Had Europe genuinely depended on green energy on Friday, by Sunday thousands would be dead from frostbite and exposure.... Somehow the reality of that situation should be impressed upon these green activists who have wormed their way into positions of control. It may be that they are merely pursuing the fastest route to the "great human dieoff," an issue dear to the hearts of large numbers of green activists and philanthropists. But those of us who actually wish to live our lives, must get in the habit of telling them: "You first!" -- Al Fin Energy
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:20 AM | Your Say (1)
"CIVILITY NOW!" In which Morgan soft soaps who he'd vote for before the current president
Road kill scraped off a randomly-selected backwoods highway comes next, followed by a gap,followed by the spider I killed last summer because it bit my girlfriend. Then the proverbial syphilitic camel, then a few randomly selected lunatics just sprung from the asylum, then we get into the presidents from history who were voted out because they blew it. I mean, the rancid ones. Buchanan, Tyler, Harding, Hoover…THEN we go overseas and look to some dictators who’d like to see us dead…THEN include Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars…THEN, after another gap, we loop back over here and pick up Jimmy Carter… Tyler Durden. The Wicked Witch of the West from the Wizard of Oz. A bucket of turpentine. An old sock someone used because they were out of toilet paper. A spitoon. Its contents. A booger. A mummified hemorrhoid.... -- Your 2012 Lineup @ House of Eratosthenes
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:17 AM | Your Say (0)
"Bad Boy. No gun for you:" Comment of the Moment
"I just figured out why he's got that stupid 4-yr old face. A case of arrested childhood development. HIs commie mommy never let him play with guns. He had a most unusual non-American childhood. He probably never had two cap guns with holsters, or a Johnny Seven shooting plastic bullets, or a wrist-rocket, or a super-soaker, or Daisy BB gun. Never got to build and launch rockets. Never went plinking with a .22. When he was in Indo, and he got the opportunity to play with other American boys (not often), he probably came home to mom and asked for cool stuff like the other kids had, and his mom sniffed, "No, they're not our people."
Guns are only for the Security Committee people. If the Party wants you to have guns, it'll give you one. He looks like that, because at 50-something years, he finally gets to have a little manly fun. All his life, mom, grandma, wife, have been telling him no, he can't go have fun with guns. Tragic, really.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:38 AM | Your Say (0)
Student, don't let the sun set on you here!
The Yorktown neighborhood of Philadelphia, immediately adjacent to Temple University,prevailed upon the city to create a special Yorktown Overlay in which "student housing" would no longer be permitted in its single-family zones... This is the first time that I am aware of that a city has taken the bold step of barring a certain class of persons, by name, from a neighborhood (at least since the era of racial zoning). --Old Urbanist: Tuesday Zoning/Takings Litigation Update
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:26 AM | Your Say (0)
February 8, 2012
PI PIE
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:31 AM | Your Say (6)
I’ll Be Knocking Out Beautiful Poetry This Whole Goddamn Flight
What will it be about? Anything.There are no limits to my subject material. I’ll write a poem about flowers. I’ll write a poem about dragons. I’ll write a poem about a flower that fights a dragon and you’ll be all smug and think, Well obviously the dragon would win. But don’t get too comfortable with that mindset because, like a stealth bomber ravaging your brainscape with heartfelt language, here I come out of the blue with all these poetic details explaining why the flower winning is not only plausible but necessary. -- McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Monologue:
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:19 AM | Your Say (0)
Koan for Our Era
If you enter “Dostoyevsky” into the search function of Twitter, you don’t come up with much interesting these days. --Dostoyevsky — Marginal RevolutionPosted by gerardvanderleun at 10:14 AM | Your Say (1)
Comment of the Moment
Clint is right. It IS halftime in America. We're down by about 5 trillion. Time to switch quarterbacks. -- Clint Eastwood's Chrysler Super Bowl Ad: The Untold Obama Connection - The Hollywood ReporterPosted by gerardvanderleun at 9:13 AM | Your Say (0)
"Get me re-right"
Everyday exciting things happen” to journalists, according to a third-grade textbook found by the Stuff Journalists Like blog. “A good journalist works very hard to make sure his or her stories are interesting and true.”
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:56 AM | Your Say (4)
February 7, 2012
Mitt did it all wrong
No matter who you support this year, you have to admit Mitt Romney went about becoming president the wrong way.Instead of wasting his time learning how business works and building a multi-billion-dollar company that really did save or create hundreds of thousands of jobs, Mitt should have lived off his daddy's fortune like Jack Kennedy. Chasing skirts and molesting teenage virgin is a lot more fun than figuring out how to revive an old business. Instead, Mitt Romney gave his inheritance to charity. Who does that anymore? -- ｫ Don Surber
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:11 PM | Your Say (4)
Yup, not a teaspoon of testosterone from toenail to topknot
Obama said, before energetically pumping a compressor and shooting the marshmallow gun, invented by 14-year-old Joey Hudy. Obama watched open-mouthed as the candy shot across the room before crashing into the wall near the entrance to the Red Room, an elegant state parlor which stuffed with rare 19th century French furniture.The man who "got" Bin Laden. Yeah, right.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:42 PM | Your Say (8)
Landlord's Nuts
I'm sure there will be a lot of takers to explain that house as mental illness, but like I said: I'm not buying.The person went feral. Back into a state of nature. It's the hunter-gatherer Eden ruined by Western Civilization that we're told we need to go back to that's on display here. She was living off the land. When the land is covered with stripmalls, pizza and Diet Pepsi represents the nuts and berries. --Sippican Cottage: So You Want To Be A Landlord
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:55 PM | Your Say (0)
The Vile Monsters of Planned Parenthood and Their Hostages
Planned Parenthood is very far from the uncontroversial organization the Susan G. Komen Foundation aspires to be. According to its most recent annual report, for 2010, Planned Parenthood sells abortions to nine out of every 10 pregnant women who come to its clinics.And it's known throughout the country as an implacable and aggressive opponent of any meaningful restrictions on deliberate feticide.... Breast-cancer victims are only the latest hostages taken by Planned Parenthood. Unless the organization is finally held to account, they will surely not be the last. --Robert George and Carter Snead: - WSJ.com
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:31 PM | Your Say (3)
A double whammy on the dumb class.
I still like the Charles Murray argument which is, basically, that the poor are increasingly populated by the cognitively inferior and that taking away certain social controls has lifted the lid off of the crock pot.The cognitively inferior need stringently enforced social codes in order to stay on the straight and narrow. So what has happened over the past several decades is that the cream of the crop are leaving the areas where dumb people reside, and the voice of morality has diminished. This is a double whammy on the dumb class. --Folgers ｫ Gucci Little Piggy
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:16 PM | Your Say (3)
Ten West of COFAX
At 1,000 feet above the water... 40 knots too fast with the glideslope full scale deflection below us. Obviously, this is not going to work.Me- Ok, this is not a stable approach. Let's go around and try it again. He says something that makes me laugh... Now? Me- Yes, now... Go around. -- Flight Level 390:
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:11 AM | Your Say (4)
View from the Land of NO-Money
There is not enough money in the world to pay back America's national debt.Total United States currency (paper and electronic entries in reserve accounts) sums to about $2 trillion. The national debt sums to over $14 trillion. If people ever really suspected that the U.S. monetary printing press was broken, there would be the mother of all bank runs. Bond holders would redeem their U.S. debt instead of rolling it over. Savers would hold tightly to any real currency. --Europe's Wile E. Coyote Moment
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:39 AM | Your Say (0)
February 6, 2012
Not a dry fly in the house
On the same day a report revealed the names of a number of top donors to presidential campaigns, President Barack Obama spent time with around 25 wealthy donors who paid $35,800 each to be with him behind closed doors at a Washington hotel. --President Obama Spends Afternoon With Wealthy Donors In DC ｫ CBS Washington
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:21 PM | Your Say (2)
The Choice: A Scion or a Bastard
Voters this year look set to continue an odd pattern that's prevailed in presidential politics for a quarter century.They will elect either a candidate with a famous father or with no father. The surviving serious contenders—Barack Obama, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney—all exemplify one of these two categories. For the seventh consecutive election, the winning candidate will be either a privileged prince with an adored, powerful patriarch, or an up-from-nothing scrapper with no relationship with his biological dad. -- Michael Medved: Presidential Fathers and Sons - WSJ.com
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:59 PM | Your Say (2)
Gay Choice? Yet More "Settled Science" That Is Becoming Unsettled
In 1993 geneticist Dean Hamer studied pairs of brotherswho were very loosely defined as “exclusively or mostly” homosexual. He claimed to find a pattern in a specific region of the X chromosome that such brothers seemed to disproportionately share. This was widely trumpeted in the media as the landmark discovery of a “gay gene.” But Hamer and others failed to subsequently replicate his results. In fact, a 1999 Canadian study contradicted them. Hamer is a gay man who has reportedly stated he hoped his research would help end intolerance toward homosexuals. He also later claimed he’d discovered the “God gene,” so take whatever he says with a grain of DNA. --Homosexuality: What’s Choice Got to Do With it? - Taki's Magazine
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:48 PM | Your Say (1)
Beardski: Just the Thing for the Coming Global Ice Age
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:31 PM | Your Say (2)
Have you ever wondered where your Flying Car is, now that you live in the Age of the Jetson’s, dear reader?
Answer: you sold it for a mess of pottage.When civilization abandoned institutional Christianity for liberalism, then abandoned Christian notions of decency and individualism for socialism, and then abandoned Christian notions of chivalry and truth for political correctness, and then abandoned Christian notions of the objectivity of truth, beauty and virtue for the roaring abyss of nihilism, civilization lost the engine and motive of its progress. When you stopped calling yourself sons of God and started calling yourself naked apes, you stopped climbing Jacob’s Ladder toward the angels, and slumped instead toward the jungle where Nature red in tooth and claw holds reign. -- Futurism and Shoepiles | John C. Wright's Journal
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:28 AM | Your Say (4)
Where Christian virtues fail
Where Christian virtues fail there liberty turns into license and licentiousness: pornographers admired as men of business. Wealth promotes an industry of envy, as lawyers, bureaucrats and politicians make it their daily business to loot what others produce. Medicine turns to infanticide, and the Hippocratic Oath languishes. Science goes mad, and says the universe is nothing but a carousel of atoms, and your brain a defective calculation machine that merely hallucinates self-awareness and free will. --Futurism and Shoepiles | John C. Wright's JournalPosted by gerardvanderleun at 11:25 AM | Your Say (0)
"May I suggest that this is not a rejection of the Tea Party,"
but rather of the candidates themselves. None of them are worthy -- at least at this point -- of the presidency. A three-term congresswoman and a half-term governor are as unready as Barack Obama was in 2008. Let's not fight fire with fire. Let's use water. That usually works unless it is a grease fire. --The view from the fence « Don SurberPosted by gerardvanderleun at 9:59 AM | Your Say (0)
Inside The Ridiculously Complicated Process Of Buying A Super Bowl Ad
"The $4 million price tag is the least of it." -- The 1st of 14 screens @ Business InsiderPosted by gerardvanderleun at 9:22 AM | Your Say (0)
And now football, like Madonna, is over...
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:23 AM | Your Say (1)
February 5, 2012
"Then there's the other Republican Party. "
It does not believe that most of the national debates are a tempest in a teacupthat can be settled amicably behind closed doors. It is uninterested in bipartisan great compromisers, it seeks fighters who will stand up for its agenda. It is not interested in the progressive voyage to the national future that has been taken up by both parties, what it would like is independence from their reign of policy terror. It would like to roll back the progressive policymaking of both parties. --Sultan Knish a blog by Daniel Greenfield RTWT!
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:05 PM | Your Say (1)
Piltdown Man: Another Case in Which "The Science Is Settled"
those shards of skull were part of a scientific scam that completely fooled leading palaeontologists. For decades they believed they were the remains of a million-year-old apeman, an individual who possessed a large brain but primitive jawbone and teeth. --Piltdown Man: British archaeology's greatest hoax The Observer
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:53 PM | Your Say (3)
"If you were an Iranian subscriber to the Post who works at Iran's "Interests Section" inside the Pakistani embassy in Washington, what would be your considered judgment? "
I think you'd end up saying: "We can't compete with the Krauthammers. They are better than us at putting together words. Therefore we can't guarantee that the ruling class in Washington won't work itself into another frenzy like it did in 2003 and do something stupid. So, we'd better get ourselves a few nukes as a deterrent." --Steve Sailer's iSteve Blog: The Great Game ain't so great anymore
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:44 PM | Your Say (0)
The Summing Up
JUST ABOUT AS BAD A GAME AS YOU'D EXPECT FROM TWO MEDIOCRE TEAMS...Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:56 PM | Your Say (0)
Citizens of Slab City
There are Year-Rounders who brave the 120ｰF summer inferno, and Snowbirds who land from as far as Canada with their souped-up RVs and pensions,soul-searching Gypsy Kids who arrive by train with little more than the ragged clothes on their back, Spaz Kids and their electro-psychedelic outdoor parties, and Scrappers who risk life and limb to collect shrapnel from the gunnery range that flanks the camp, where Navy SEAL teams train year-round (and where rumor has it they prepared for the Osama bin Laden raid). That's to say nothing of the rowdy bikers who pass through, or the meth-addled loners on the outer edges inclined to greet a trespasser with a gunshot. -- Slab City: Living Off the Grid in California's Badlands
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:50 PM | Your Say (0)
Big Wind: For Dummies, Chumps, and Greens
Once an honest and intelligent person opens himself to the facts,it becomes very difficult to support big wind power on any basis whatsoever. Unless, of course, you are a big developer or investor in government subsidised wind farms. In that case, there are $billions to be made, without the need to provide any useful power to the public, whatsoever. A neat scam, if you can live with yourself. Just ask Warren Buffett. --Al Fin Energy:
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:33 PM | Your Say (2)
"There are new monsters in America, and I am starting to wonder whether I am to be considered among them: "
those of the uninvolved and uninformed lives, the bar-raisers, the downright mean ones,the never deserving of respect ones, the Vegas junketeers, the Super Bowl jet setters, the tuition stealers, the faux-Christians who do not pay higher taxes, the too much income makers, the tormenters of autistic children, the polluters, the enemies deserving of punishment, the targets to bring a gun against, the faces to get in front of, the limb-loppers, the tonsil pullers, the fat cats, the corporate jet owners, the one-percenters, the stupidly acting, the not paying their fair sharers, the discriminators on the âway you lookâ, the alligator raisers and moat builders, the vote deniers, the clingers, the typical something persons, the hunters of kids at ice cream parlors, the stereotypers and profilers, the cowards, the lazy and soft, the non-spreaders of money, the not my people people, the Tea party racists, the not been perfect and mistake makers, the disengaged and the dictating, the not the time to profiteers, the ones who did not know when to quit making money, and on and on. My God, man, how did Barack Obama & Co. conjure up so many demons? -- Works and Days » Are You "Them"?
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:55 PM | Your Say (1)
Even a Nun Might Say, "Jesus Christ it's cold in Europe!"
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:31 PM | Your Say (0)
And the Sammy Hager Award Goes to McCain for "You Idiots, Get Out of My Way!"
but evidently they’re issuing drivers licenses to people too stupid to understand that rule, who are probably also too stupid to figure out that passing a semi-truck might require use of the accelerator pedal. (Trust me, idiot: It’s down there on the floorboard of your car, probably somewhere on the right side.) If there were any justice in the world, state troopers wouldn’t be laying radar traps for guys doing 82 mph in a 65 mph zone, but would instead be issuing tickets to slow-moving idiots who take more than a few seconds to pass a semi-truck. -- Hate Hoax Busted by Cop’s Dash-Cam (Also: You Idiots, Get Out of My Way!) : The Other McCain
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:22 AM | Your Say (2)
February 4, 2012
"Spoiler alert! Living in San Francisco with her gay male BFF blogging the existential ennui of being unmarried was my tip-off."
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:25 PM | Your Say (22)
Change is nothing but the status quo
The status quo must be thought of as a direction, not merely a state,considering how predictable change has become. (Does anyone dispute at this point that, for example, gay marriage will soon be legalized, most likely by the courts?) Political action must address this change, must figure out where it stands relative to that change and act accordingly; if it limits itself to addressing the present, it may end up misdirecting its energy, addressing issues that will soon resolve themselves by pure inertia and ignoring issues for which the direction that inertia will eventually drive them in has not yet been decided. --Anonymous admits its irrelevance
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:33 PM | Your Say (0)
The One-Check Education Bill in the United States
If you had to write one big check for the whole twelve years of public education of the 88 percent or so of the entire population of the United States that doesn't go to private schools, at 2011 rates of $10,441 per person per year, it would be a check for thirty-three trillion, eight hundred forty-eight billion, eight hundred eighty-six million dollars. --Sippican Cottage: Bin Laden; Joe Biden; WhateverPosted by gerardvanderleun at 11:22 AM | Your Say (0)
If Newt wasn't steeped in envy, spite, and self-pity he wouldn't have to empty his drool cup so often
"They outspent me five to one to quote destroy Newt Gingrich?" Gingrich said in an interview on CNN's "The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer." "You know, I think that doesn't deserve congratulations. I think that's reprehensible, I think it's dishonest, and I think it's shameful." --Gingrich: Romney didn’t deserve congrats – CNN Political TickerSigh. The person who doesn't deserve congrats for the regularly scheduled destruction of Newt Gingrich is.... Newt Gingrich!
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:52 AM | Your Say (6)
Strange Apparatus
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:17 AM | Your Say (1)
Nerd Valentines
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:38 AM | Your Say (0)
The Dead Cities of Syria
Between the cities of Aleppo and Hama there is a limestone massif and it is here these ancient settlements were built by their once prosperous peoples. The area is about thirty kilometers in width yet is several times longer – extending to almost 140 kilometers in length.... An extensive and fascinating photo essay @ Kuriositas
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:58 AM | Your Say (1)
February 3, 2012
10-Year-Old Accidentally Creates New Molecule in Science Class
Kenneth Boehr, Clara Lazen's science teacher, handed out the usual ball-and-stick models usedto visualize simple molecules to his fifth-grade class. But Clara put the carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen atoms together in a particular complex way and asked Boehr if she'd made a real molecule. Boehr, to his surprise, wasn't sure. So he photographed the model and sent it over to a chemist friend at Humboldt State University who identified it as a wholly new but also wholly viable chemical. -- | Popular Science
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:16 PM | Your Say (3)
In which Warren Buffet wraps up his national tour of intellectual drooling and presidential fellatio with bunny ears
The ritual ends with a photo shoot. Each student gets to take two pictures with Mr. Buffett. The first one is a serious shot, the second is a funny pose of their choosing.Would the ritual ended with sepaku for the hilariously named "Sage of Omaha."
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:09 PM | Your Say (2)
If he's talking about prayer we know he's lying. On the other hand....
Obama: 'I have fallen on my knees with great regularity' - Investors.com
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:52 PM | Your Say (5)
Record 1.2 Million People Fall Out Of Labor Force In One Month, Labor Force Participation Rate Tumbles To Fresh 30 Year Low
No, that's not a typo: 1.2 million people dropped out of the labor force in one month!So as the labor force increased from 153.9 million to 154.4 million, the non institutional population increased by 242.3 million meaning, those not in the labor force surged from 86.7 million to 87.9 million. Which means that the civilian labor force tumbled to a fresh 30 year low of 63.7% as the BLS is seriously planning on eliminating nearly half of the available labor pool from the unemployment calculation. -- | ZeroHedge
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:37 AM | Your Say (5)
Caesar Commands the Jews Eat Pork, Quakers Join Army, Amish Get i-Pods, Christians Burn Incense
To all Roman Catholics who voted for Mr Barack Obama: SUUUCKERS! -- | John C. Wright's JournalPosted by gerardvanderleun at 9:12 AM | Your Say (2)
Kinder, Gentler Embroidery
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:32 AM | Your Say (1)
O’Sullivan’s First Law: Any institution that is not explicitly right wing will become left wing over time.
Re: The Planned Parenthood Paroxysm --It is a fresh reminder that the left fully absorbed and adapted the Brezhnev Doctrine: once they capture an institution, they aren't giving it up. How dare a private foundation stop coughing up the dough. It explains why "diversity" means conformity to liberal views in newsrooms, college faculties, and Hollywood studios. It's why the left reacts with howls of outrage every time you propose reducing taxpayer funding for NPR and PBS, even as the left disingenuously argues that NPR and PBS receive only a "tiny" amount of tax subsidy. It should also remind us how the left will fight every battle to shrink government like it was Verdun. Which suggests one obvious conclusion if you're an incoming Romney Administration: go big. Go after everything at once. -- | Power Line
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:26 AM | Your Say (6)
DIANA WEST: An Interesting, In-Depth Interview
An hour's worth of C-SPAN Q&A: Diana West, Syndicated Columnist, Universal Uclick - YouTubeDiana West, discusses her weekly online column syndicated in over 100 newspapers nationwide. She writes about cultural and political issues from a self-described conservative viewpoint. She talks about some themes in her columns, including the spread of Islamic law throughout formerly non-Islamic areas of the western world and her opposition to the war in Afghanistan.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:18 AM | Your Say (0)
"Every day we see people championing the pathetic in journalistic essays:"
a scared mother of four on food stamps, or her selfless Community Activist advocate.No one champions the simple strivers, those who take care of themselves and in the process alleviate society of one more charity case, and along the way create wealth via 'gains from trade' implicit in market transactions. A simple prosperous mensch who does not hypocritically claim he primarily works for others is off the radar, implicitly insulting to any intellectual making considerably less than him. The kind of change Murray is talking about will not happen until productive, successful people again feel pride in their distinguishing learned characteristics, including the willingness to shame people who do not have them. -- Falkenblog: Charles Murray Reiterates Willpower
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:03 AM | Your Say (1)
Poor Mitt Romney
As for Romney and his disregard, real or putative, for the poor,I would suspect he has actually done more for the poor than anyone else in the presidential sweepstakes, by virtue of the tithes he has paid to his church and the whopping taxes he has actually paid. While we might carp and squeal about his tax rates, the actual amount of cabbage he has forked over in his career to the federal government must cover a sizable acreage indeed, and we assume that even given the spectacular ineptitude of that same government in distributing assistance to the needy without leakages of Mississippi dimensions into various private spillways and sluice gates, a fair amount of Mitt's earnings must have found its way into the pockets of the deserving. -- | The Daily Cannibal
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:58 AM | Your Say (0)
February 2, 2012
Commenters Can Be Really Mean
Obama's After Lunch Schedule as given by a commenter on: Just What Does Barack Obama Do All Day @ The Daily Caller2:00 PM: Golf with Plouffe
5:00 PM: Dinner with the wookie
6:00 PM: Sneak a cigarette
6:15 PM: Watch Oprah on Tivo
8:00 PM: Smoke a joint and have sex with a male campaign staffer
8:05 PM: Done with sex
8:10 PM: Watch the wookie scarf down everything in the White House refrigerator
9:00 PM: Hold the wookie's head as she "purges" her snack
9:30 PM: Watch Ray Maddow fantasize about sex with him
10:00 PM: Pass out
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:05 PM | Your Say (1)
This is the ghetto way of life.
The ones I do are 1) really big-ass black guys with hardcore street cred, 320 pounds and a lot off tattoo chatter on their arm, 2) Mexican psycho dudes with tattoos on their face. See the commonality? Once you etch shit in your face you are telling the world that you have ceased belonging. This is a clear signal of danger. Animals use subtle aromatic spear to ward off predators. Man now uses skin ink. Heavy skin ink. -- Men in East L.A. that scare me ｫ An Unmarried Man
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:45 PM | Your Say (4)
"Fiat, fiat, fiat": Catholics need to declare the president as anathema
The formal statement of Anathema goes like this:Wherefore in the name of God the All-powerful, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, of Blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and of all the saints, in virtue of the power which has been given us of binding and loosing in Heaven and on earth, we deprive Barack Hussain Obama himself and all his accomplices and all his abettors of the Communion of the Body and Blood of Our Lord, we separate him from the society of all Christians, we exclude him from the bosom of our Holy Mother the Church in Heaven and on earth, we declare him excommunicated and anathematized and we judge him condemned to eternal fire with Satan and his angels and all the reprobate, so long as he will not burst the fetters of the demon, do penance and satisfy the Church; we deliver him to Satan to mortify his body, that his soul may be saved on the day of judgment.That would pretty much work for me. What about the Catholics among us?
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:56 PM | Your Say (9)
GRAPH #20
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:22 PM | Your Say (2)
"The news. I don’t watch it and I don’t read it."
I can't stomach the fact that something designed specifically to help us know thingshas exactly the opposite effect. At best, it only helps us think we know things. Doubtful knowledge. Or doubtable knowledge. Which is a hell of a lot worse because that makes us want to hurry up and make a whole bunch of other people think they know it, too. --How Dead Do I Have to Be? « The Dipso Chronicles
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:21 PM | Your Say (1)
YUMM!: 64 year-old tub of lard still 'fit for consumption'
"There is of course a slight lack of smell and taste," sniffed Frerk Feldhusen,
from the office of agriculture, food safety and fisheries in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. However, "all in all, given its level of freshness and its material composition, the product is assessed as satisfactory," Feldhusen said, adding it would stand up to today's definition of being fit for the dinner table. --PhotoBlog -
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:03 PM | Your Say (4)
And then he said, with a straight face, "An Economy Built to Last."
Republicans think it's all about the bad economy. It is. But Barack Obama is going to do something his opposition wouldn't think possible.He's going to take ownership of the American economy. Not the real one, but the one he's just made up, "the economy built to last." It won't last long, but long enough. You'd think the best and the brightest would be beyond Mr. Obama's crude populist pitch. You of course would be wrong.... A speech that flopped among Washington's policy sophisticates is soaring out in the country. Republicans had better figure out why. --Henninger: Obama's Maddening, Winning Speech - WSJ.com
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:11 PM | Your Say (2)
Lest We Forget What Day It Is
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:47 AM | Your Say (0)
Looking Ahead to the Election Coverage of 2048
“With 34 percent unemployment and the price of goat so far out of rangeof most working families that they have been forced to switch to chicken, it is time that our opponents stopped dodging the issues and took a serious look at the economic consequences of their policies,” Bashar Mohammed Hussein Al-Hamdani, said during a campaign stop at a HalalBurger in Peoria, Illinois. -- by Daniel Greenfield
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:38 AM | Your Say (0)
'Huffington Post' Employee Sucked Into Aggregation Turbine
sucks up original articles from around the web with its massive rotor assembly, re-brands them with the Huffington Post name, and then spits them back out on the company's home page. Workers said that when the machine ground to a halt at approximately 11:30 a.m., Evers reached inside to dislodge a particularly thoughtful 700-word Christian Science Monitor essay on the unrest in Syria that had become jammed. Apparently unprepared for the aggregator mechanism's quick restart, Evers was gruesomely dismembered by its rapidly spinning blades, which soaked the room in blood and unprocessed news content. -- America's Finest News Source
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:07 AM | Your Say (1)
Mickey Kaus is sure, really sure, that President Zebra is smart, really smart
I’m sure Obama is smarter than this. He can’t be an executive who spends his days checking boxes,accepting the choices presented by his aides, never reaching outside them through unconventional channels or reaching unconventional thinkers, never throwing over the framework with which he is presented. .... He’s asked to check a box saying whether he wants to fund his “child nutrition agenda” out of the money for community colleges. … He’s asked about including medical malpractice reform in his health care bill, and writes (“in his characteristicaly cautious and reasonable style”) that “we should explore it.” … He’s presented a plan for a watered-down tax on multinationals or a very watered down tax. He writes “worth discussing.” --What Does Barack Obama Do All Day ? New Yorker | The Daily Caller
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:00 AM | Your Say (3)
“The Colonels lady and Rosy O’Grady are sisters under the skin.”
Cheek implants and fillers were originally designed to offset the ravages of age, when the cheeks can lose subcutaneous fat and droop. But now even the young have them, especially if in the public eye, and the additions are so noticeable and generally odd-looking that they give their bearers an alien yet almost-familial resemblance to each other.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:36 AM | Your Say (2)
February 1, 2012
The great mystery of memory is how it endures.
The Persistence Of Memory | Wired Science | Wired.comThe typical neural protein only lasts for a few weeks, the cortex in a constant state of reincarnation. How, then, do our memories persist? It’s as if our remembered past can outlast the brain itself.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:57 PM | Your Say (6)
From Furious to Tedious in Under 24 Hours
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:47 PM | Your Say (5)
"Harry Truman, late in life, caught his wife, Bess, burning their letters to each other. "
"What are you doing?" Truman implored. "Think of history." "Oh, I have," she said, and went on adding to the pyre.Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:45 AM | Your Say (3)
How to be a Really Good Climate Change Alarmist
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:21 AM | Your Say (2)
"To show our solidarity as Americans,"
Let's all get together and show each other our support for the candidate of our choice in civilized fashion,Democrats and Republicans alike. If you support the policies and character of the Republican party, please drive with your headlights on during the day. If you support Obama, please drive with your headlights off at night." --Curmudgeonly & Skeptical presents Boned Jello
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:55 AM | Your Say (2)
Any Identifying Marks and Scars?: Keeping Up with the Popstars
Rihanna's tattoos include a music note tattoo on her ankle,a Pisces sign behind her right ear,[ a Sanskrit prayer going down her hip, a star in her left ear, the word love on her left middle finger, an Arabic phrase meaning "Freedom in Christ" on her ribcage area, a trail of stars going down the back of her neck, a skull with a pink hair bow, the phrase "shhh..." on her right index finger, the date 11.4.86 in Roman numerals on top of her left shoulder, a henna-style dragon claw including hibiscus flowers, a handgun under her right armpit, the phrase on her chest "Never a failure, always a lesson" (tattoed backwards because she wanted to be able to read it in the mirror, it is her "motto in life for everything" and the phrase "rebelle fleur" on her neck, which means "rebel/rebellious flower" in French. --Rihanna - Wikipedia
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:06 AM | Your Say (3)
"Dudes can do things chicks can’t. "
We all know it’s true, and we try to bury the truth deep down in all sorts of logical fallacies.The most attractive and appealing among these is to compare the impressive feats of a selected female champion against the efforts toward the equivalent by an average male…think of Mia Hamm engaged in a one-on-one against an average middle-age guy, let’s say one who luxuriates on a couch watching mens’ soccer games and was caught saying something disparaging against womens’ soccer. She’d clean his clock, of course, and all the usual suspects would smirk until their smirkers got tired…but…how fast can the fastest guy run? How much can the strongest man lift? Can the gals compete? No, not only can’t they, but we know they can’t and we customize the athletic efforts and competitions accordingly. -- House of Eratosthenes
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:25 AM | Your Say (9)
Geopolitical Risk, G-Zero World, and Rise of Regions
These phrases, of course, sound really heavyweight and important. But I am not fooled. Nobody knows what those words mean. The only purpose is inform me that the sender is among the elect glitterati who get invited to the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos. -- Clueless in Davos | PrestowitzPosted by gerardvanderleun at 8:09 AM | Your Say (2)