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March 31, 2012

"At the end of the road Utopia"

is Greece after the money ran out. It's Rhode Island and California.
It's patients dying under NHS' watch and six figure salaried medical ethics experts discussing which patients to kill. It's the Mandate and the SWAT team and a thousand bureaucrats and police enforcing a million rules. It's bills with too many pages to read and governments too big to fail until they do. -- Daniel Greenfield

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:00 PM | Your Say (1)

The Anchoress is saving me keystrokes when she types out...

"Rush Limbaugh was gassing away about this rather redundantly...."

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:18 PM | Your Say (0)

Feelings. Nothing More Than Feelings.

Isn't it interesting that the progressive postmodern left always seems to FEEL that their emotions are... scientific? That just because they FEEL something is good that it is "reality-based" and necesarily and undebatably true? Isn't it interesting that they always think they can re-engineer humans to adapt to their silly schemes--make them better somehow? --Dr. Sanity: ESSENTIAL SOCIOPATHY OF THE LEFT ON DISPLAY

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:03 PM | Your Say (1)

A bas la France

Saying "€œI Don't Know if Negroes Have Always Worked [Hard]"€ = Crime in France [It also equals one more vote for the French Nationalists, but who's worrying?]

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:42 PM | Your Say (0)

Becoming a “liberal voice” was once where the money was. The jack.

A lot guys still believed that. And boy were they wrong. 
Arianna Huffington won the right in court not to pay her bloggers a dime from the money she received from AOL for the sale of the Huffington Post. But if these individuals were facing a loss of income, Al Sharpton, by contrast, was trying to climb out of a deep financial hole. "The left-wing National Action Network Inc., headquartered in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood, owes at least $1,556,059 in federal taxes and $108,489 in New York taxes, according to the Nexis tax liens database. Tax agencies typically file tax liens only after taxes have become significantly overdue and other collection methods have failed."

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:38 AM | Your Say (1)

This Just In

Jimmy Carter Says If He Had A Son, He’d Look Like Barack Obama | The Rumford Meteor

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:13 AM | Your Say (2)

March 30, 2012

Countdown Reaches Zero

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"I am my own grandpa."

Current TV Dismisses Keith Olbermann Olberman sez, "I’d like to apologize to my viewers and my staff for the failure..." + Lots more gas, but the short form is: Door. Ass. Bang.

Instapundit asks: "Wasn’t it supposed to be Limbaugh going off the air?"

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:08 PM | Your Say (6)

"Exactly two things have made air travel safer since 9/11:"

reinforcing the cockpit door,
and convincing passengers that they need to fight back. Everything else has been a waste of money. Add screening of checked bags and airport workers and we are done. All the rest is security theatre. -- Economist Debates: Airport security: Statements

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:43 PM | Your Say (10)

The more popular it gets, the tackier it will become.

Nothing really gets older online; the only aging of things here
comes from the erosive force of changing human sensibilities. The black of that North Face jacket looks just as black, but the point of wearing it has faded a little. Here there is only the appearance of getting older because everything else has gotten much newer. --Shoot Hip or Die – The New Inquiry

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

Ammo has actually been a better investment than gold

I wonder if that'€™s why the US Department of Homeland Security is openly purchasing up to 625 million rounds of ammunition -- as an inflation hedge.  Perhaps as a matter of coincidence, buying up to 450 million .40 caliber hollow point rounds and up to 175 million .233 caliber rounds is enough to double-tap every man, woman, and child in the country. --And they say there's no inflation!

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:37 PM | Your Say (12)

The “Hispanic” mirage

There are Peruvians of Japanese ancestry (and one of them became president of Peru). There are Chinese Cubans.
There are English Puerto Ricans (my mother’s high school teacher’s family, for instance) – and Puerto Rico has a significantillegal alien problem from people from adjacent islands. There are German Venezuelans. There are Irish Argentinians. The Africans that were brought to Latin America from the slave trade are not all from the same areas of Africa and did not follow the same traditions. Even among the native peoples, the Peruvian Quechua are not the Chilean Mapuche who are not the Mayans of Apocalypto. --Revisiting the "€œHispanic"€ mirage | Fausta's Blog

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:31 PM | Your Say (0)

The “Hispanic” mirage

There are Peruvians of Japanese ancestry (and one of them became president of Peru). There are Chinese Cubans.
There are English Puerto Ricans (my mother’s high school teacher’s family, for instance) – and Puerto Rico has a significantillegal alien problem from people from adjacent islands. There are German Venezuelans. There are Irish Argentinians. The Africans that were brought to Latin America from the slave trade are not all from the same areas of Africa and did not follow the same traditions. Even among the native peoples, the Peruvian Quechua are not the Chilean Mapuche who are not the Mayans of Apocalypto. --Revisiting the "€œHispanic"€ mirage | Fausta's Blog

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:31 PM | Your Say (4)

Get Out of My Life, Rethuglicans! But First Could I Borrow About Ten Trillon?

The Supremes want to know what the "limiting principle" is behind Obamacare, but they're about 75 years too late, since they will search in vain for any such principle in leftism.
To put it another way, leftism is the principle of unlimited government, so it has no intrinsic limitation. It is omnipotent, omniscient, and utopian, hence "offended" by your petty -- and probably evil -- objections. You can't get too much of Never Enough. And there are no moral or rational limits to a Limitless Science. --One Cʘsmos: Raccoon Droppings: The Limits of Leftism are Death or Tyranny

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:48 PM | Your Say (0)

"If you jumped into a time machine to the day after the election, in November, 2012, "

and saw a headline saying "Obama Loses," do you imagine that would be followed by widespread sadness,
pain and a rending of garments? You do not. Even his own supporters will not be that sad. It's hard to imagine people running around in 2014 saying, "If only Obama were president!" Including Mr. Obama... Not-So-Smooth Operator - WSJ.com

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:03 AM | Your Say (8)

March 29, 2012

Kant Can't

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

Imagine a 15-year-old boy, born and raised in Panjwai. His name is Nazar.

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This war began when Nazar was about 4. His birth date is unknown, but he was born before the harvest.
If Nazar reaches thirty, and you ask his age or birthday, he might look at you curiously, as if you asked a random man his shoe size. He might smile at the strangeness of the question, and tell you that his age is about 35, but that he does not know. At 15, Nazar has no television and no idea what New York is. Is that a fruit, or a vegetable? He has never heard of 9/11, or of Osama bin Laden. He met some Navy SEALs when they killed his uncle. He heard that they were British or Russian. He knows that they were foreigners who shot his uncle -- who was a Taliban commander. --Michael Yon, Sergeant Godsmack vs. Nazar

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:19 PM | Your Say (1)

Con Art

I've coined the term Con Art, short for contemporary conceptual art and for art that cons people.
Contemporary conceptual art? All art is a concept in the sense that it's the product of thought. But all art must also be a creation. You have to be able to see art; it can't just be a projected thought. That's how the emperor got dressed; his expensive robes were all in the minds of people around him, when in reality he had nothing on. -- Julian Spalding: Damien Hirsts are the sub-prime of the art world

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:48 PM | Your Say (1)

Mustachioed soothsaying simpleton Thomas Friedman long ago mastered a formula

The formula is pretty much like this: schedule a few interviews, fly on out there, and piece together a column
with a bunch of quotes from people capped by a zingy opener featuring some jaw-droppingly obvious bit of conventional wisdom or common knowledge presented as revelation, combined with either something a cab driver said, or something that Tom Friedman saw in an airport. It should be superfluous in every way. -- Tom Friedman Travels the World to Find Incredibly Uninteresting Platitudes

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:35 PM | Your Say (1)

The Trayvon Martin tragedy

The media cannot explain why in this particular case some outlets have adopted the new rubric “white Hispanic”
— what is the reasoning behind that, and why all of a sudden now? Nor can it explain why it continues to run photos that give readers the impression that Mr. Martin was a pre-teen middle schooler, when a recent photo is accessible. The president cannot explain by which criteria he chooses to weigh in on controversial local issues, since to do so by definition makes them “teachable moments” and thus prompts the question: why this case (e.g., or a Gates or Fluke incident), and not others? -- Racial-Relations Regression - By Victor Davis Hanson - The Corner - National Review Online

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:31 PM | Your Say (2)

The Supreme Court Issues a 5-4 Decision on Where to Order Lunch

The majority opinion in the case of Domino’s v. That One Greek Place Over on N Street.
Several Justices have also noted that we ordered Pizza last Thursday. We reject this argument, however, since last Thusday was oral arguments for that dicey affirmative action case, and a bunch of us had to recuse ourselves and so couldn’t partake in the pizzas. Additionally, secondhand testimony that there are still a couple of leftover slices in the fridge is inadmissible as hearsay under the Federal Rules of Evidence. -- McSweeney’s Internet Tendency:

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:44 PM | Your Say (0)

Fair Warning

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Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:26 PM | Your Say (1)

Clint Black, Joe Diffie, Merle Haggard, Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss, Patty Loveless, Earl Scruggs, Ricky Skaggs, Pam Tillis, Marty Stuart, Randy Travis, Travis Tritt, Dwight Yoakam

"A string of fearless hearts, on an endless ball of twine It's the same old train, it's just a different time."

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:35 AM | Your Say (2)

"It would be interesting to know whose idea was to move the 340-ton rock from a quarry (at a distance of almost a hundred miles) to the Los Angeles County Museum...."

It helps to keep in mind that classifying this rock as an object of art
is not an isolated event and has much in common with other dubious and misguided designations of worthless objects as "art." They are often called "installations" and may include urinals, assortments of junk, body parts floating in formaldehyde, or empty canvasses pretending to be "paintings." -- A Moving Rock - Paul Hollander - The American Interest Magazine

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:31 AM | Your Say (4)

"Democracy was the optimal form of government when voters were capable of making rational choices..."

through an understanding of what was at stake,
when they were ready to bear the responsibility for the consequences of their choices, and when the right to vote was understood to be a privilege, or the result of a struggle still remembered. Nowadays it is difficult to shake the impression that democratic societies are rapidly turning into ochlocracies, where the vast majority of citizens, seeing their rights as given and their responsibilities not at all, are easily addled by propaganda, distracted by spectacle and either unable or unwilling to invest the time and energy required to be a responsible democratic actor. -- The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy - Vladislav Inozemtsev

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:22 AM | Your Say (1)

President George W. Bush to the Syrian people 28-3-2012

President George W. Bush sends a message to the Free People of Syria, at the launch of the Freedom Collection, The Bush Center, Texas.

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:41 AM | Your Say (7)

The ghetto didn't evolve naturally,

it was created through a web of national and local government regulations
that played with real estate, social welfare, voting districts and the manufacturing sector to achieve the desired results.The ghetto farms black communities for votes and more importantly for subsidies. For every dollar that is taken to help minorities, a penny goes to the problem and ninety-nine cents goes to the hucksters, the administrators, the bureaucrats, the wives of influential pols hired on massive salaries to oversee some aspect of the program, the experts who monitor compliance, the affirmative action contractors who charge four times as much to build a school or provide meals, the unions who have the exclusive right to service the program, the slumlords who administer affordable housing and finally the politicians who have the money kicked back to them by all of the above. -- Sultan Knish/ Daniel Greenfield

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:17 AM | Your Say (3)

The epilogue of Ameritopia, Mark Levin's latest bestseller

It is neither prudential nor virtuous to downplay or dismiss the obvious
— that America has already transformed into Ameritopia. The centralization and consolidation of power in a political class that insulates its agenda in entrenched experts and administrators, whose authority is also self-perpetuating, is apparent all around us and growing more formidable. The issue is whether the ongoing transformation can be restrained and then reversed, or whether it will continue with increasing zeal, passing from a soft tyranny to something more oppressive. -- The Complete Epilogue: Ameritopia

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:03 AM | Your Say (2)

March 28, 2012

"A working definition of a person who feels himself elite in modern America "

is that he doesn't integrate what he's learned from his daily life with his understanding of public affairs.
There is mundane knowledge that you use when picking out where to live or where to send your child to school, but only ignorant people apply that knowledge to thinking about what's in the news. Instead, people with class only apply to their Higher Thought the Higher Knowledge that they picked up from reading, say, To Kill a Mockingbird in junior high school. -- Steve Sailer's iSteve Blog: Everything's a travesty with you, man

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:12 PM | Your Say (4)

"Obama didn't even write his own syllabus."

Who might have prepared a course syllabus and light lecture notes on constitutional race issues with an emphasis toward education and race? Bernardine Dohrn. As in Bill Ayers' wife.
Bernardine Dohrn was a paralegal at the Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin from 1984-1988, and, as an aside, was very likely acquainted with Michelle Robinson (later Obama) when Michelle summer interned at Sidley Austin while she was in law school and was later hired right out of Harvard Law in 1988. The dates match exactly. Barry was hired as a summer associate by Sidley Austin in 1989 while he was still in law school. That is allegedly how he and Michelle met. Since both Barry and Michelle are affirmative action frauds and put together don't have the brains God gave a goldfish, neither one lasted long in an actual performance environment, and have only ever held non-performing meaningless crony positions. -- Ann Barnhardt @ Barnhardt.biz

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:07 PM | Your Say (3)

Thoughts While Emailing

Without RON PAUL!!!! Republicans would have no lawn signs at all.
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Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:08 PM | Your Say (0)

Haunting

"Is it strange I should change? /I don't know, / why don't you ask her?"

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:46 PM | Your Say (2)

Liberace: Never a conventional teen idol

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Though occasionally marketed as a sex symbol with youth appeal, Liberace was never a conventional teen idol, but he boasted a similar appeal to women at the other end of the age spectrum.
He was a safely impossible figure of romance and fantasy to women of a certain age who swooned to his fancy costumes, extravagant pianos, weakness for candelabras, and soft good looks without having to worry that his flirtatious stage persona might lead to anything untoward or carnal. --Ragingly Heterosexual Case File #12

[You're damn Skippy!]

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:31 PM | Your Say (4)

I don't know about you but I'd like to see a demo just to be sure...

D.C. Nuclear Blast Wouldn't Destroy City, Report Says

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:37 PM | Your Say (6)

Equipped for the November Elections

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No matter what happens, I am prepared: Two crossing nylon shoulder straps and an adjustable belt hold 36 bullet-shaped, one-ounce shot glasses complete with locking caps. $10 [Or rifle grenades. Dealer's choice.]-- 36ShotGlass Bandolier | Men | Gear

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:27 PM | Your Say (2)

Machiavelli Meets Churchill

In The Prince, Machiavelli wrote that
"€œA disorder should never be allowed to continue so as to avoid a war, because that is not to avoid it but to defer it to your disadvantage."  In his chapter about the infamous Munich agreement in The Gathering Storm, Churchill writes, "There is no merit in putting off a war for a year if, when it comes, it is a far worse war or one much harder to win."€ --Iran Again | Power Line

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:15 PM | Your Say (1)

Eviscerating the Secular: "What on earth, then, can Krauss have been thinking? "

Krauss seems to be thinking that these vacuum states amount to the relativistic-­quantum-field-theoretical version of there not being any physical stuff at all.
And he has an argument -- or thinks he does --€” that the laws of relativistic quantum field theories entail that vacuum states are unstable. And that, in a nutshell, is the account he proposes of why there should be something rather than nothing....But that'€™s just not right.... He does a good deal of railing about “the intellectual bankruptcy of much of theology and some of modern philosophy.” But all there is to say about this, as far as I can see, is that Krauss is dead wrong and his religious and philosophical critics are absolutely right. -- "A Universe From Nothing,"by Lawrence M. Krauss - NYTimes.com

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:35 AM | Your Say (2)

Titty Bars for Trayvon!

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If you find yourself in Greensboro, NC, on Wednesday night and feeling a little randy, you are invited to visit a local titty bar to show your respect and love for Trayvon, and to proclaim your demand for justice. Just FYI. -- Rod Dreher: Bonfire of the Trayvanities

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:46 AM | Your Say (4)

Velociman is Back! Hide Your Sheep!

Velociman @ Velociworld: "There seems to be some controversy over the pictures of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman."
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Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:26 AM | Your Say (2)

"And here's what really sucks....."

"What truly and decidedly makes Barack Obama the most callow, self-serving, disgusting piece of shit on earth:
he didn't proffer this to Medvedev Putin for a likeways geopolitical concession of significance. He gave this up because he was begging his enemy to help re-elect him. I would have thunk a constitutional scholar, as Obama professes to be, would know a little Latin. Like quid pro quo. You sell out your most loyal allies, you should get something in return. Like Raoul Castro's head in an iced-down Playmate cooler, or a necklace of Sudanese and Chechen warlords' ears, or Sandra Fluke's uterus in a Mason jar of George Dickel sour mash. Something." -- Velociworld: High Crimes and Misdemeanors

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

They ask, "How are you doing?"

"Things once done easily, even blithely, suddenly require taking second thought.
Coming down a staircase, I seek the banister. Walking on slightly uneven pavement, I remind myself to lift my feet. Don't drive too slowly, I say to myself. The safety bar in the shower is there for a reason. Put on sunscreen. Virtue consists of ordering a salad for lunch; disappointment, in eating it." -- Joseph Epstein, Old Age and Other Laughs, Commentary

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:28 AM | Your Say (3)

Spike Lee retweets WRONG address for George Zimmerman

The couple who actually live at the address which Spike Lee wrongly believed
to belong to one George M. Zimmerman have now barricaded themselves inside for fear of their lives. The address was actually associated with the electoral roll of a different Zimmerman -- George A. Zimmerman --€” though of course such fine distinctions are lost in the wash. -- Belmont Club » The Secret Chord

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:08 AM | Your Say (3)

March 27, 2012

"The egomania of liberalism functions in a very, very narrow band of experience."

This makes liberals highly vulnerable to intellectual deflation, which is something they greatly fear.
Liberals constantly depict conservatives and religious believers as ignorant, uncultured, and bigoted. But surrounding the suburban media-fed bubble of the liberals is a world of experience they cannot grasp, or, if they do, they only adulterate it. Quote any serious work of literature or history to them and all their egotistic self assurance escapes them in a rush of deflated self importance. -- Skilled female hiker falls to her death

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:58 PM | Your Say (3)

What's the best way to escape the police in a high-speed car chase?

Forget about it is the essence of Justin Freeman's answer to that question on Quora
Meanwhile, the agency is moving the K-9 unit to point position so when you shoulder your smoldering jalopy and make a run for it, Cujo's got less ground to cover before he eats your forearm. Did you think to wear chain mail?

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:44 PM | Your Say (4)

Cash Class, Nothing But Cash Class, Even In "Grief"

Mom of the Year: Trayvon Martin case: Mother trademarks her son's name | Mail Online
It was revealed today that Sabrina Fulton, the boy’s mother, filed two petitions last week to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to specifically gain the rights to the phrases ‘I Am Trayvon’ and ‘Justice For Trayvon’.

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:22 AM | Your Say (14)

The Enforcer: Scenes from Where the State Controls Your Life

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So, you want to give the state more power over your health and body, do you?
"The effects of China's one-child policy have rippled through society. Zhong Rufang, a gynecologist in Yunnan Province, is both a physician and local implementer of the policy. Doctors like her often must perform abortions on mothers who are seven or even eight months pregnant with another child and caught by the police. It's an especially wrenching task for Zhong, who has been unable to have a child herself. The Faces Of China, From Ai Weiwei to Liu Tianyou | Fast Company

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:08 AM | Your Say (4)

Tiptoeing Past the Ol' Graveyard

Mangan's: Media Quietly Dropping the Trayvon Martin Story? Over on the NY Times front page today, the only item on the recent hoopla over Trayvon Martin that I could see was quietly buried, listed with four other news items: "Gunman’s Account of Florida Shooting Emerges."

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:42 AM | Your Say (2)

You've got questions. Our commenters have answers.

Obama: This is my last election.

Posted by: bill: Is it his last election or our last election?

Posted by: Mike James: His. Look at the way he's locked up the Hispanic vote.

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:37 AM | Your Say (3)

Eagles but No Eagle Hole for the Arapaho [Bumped for discussion of eagle diets]

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Stuart, in a comment on Side-Lines: Death to the Bald Eagle tells us how eagle hunting used to be done when the Arapaho males were men:
I would not mind the Northern Arapaho killing two eagles as long as they did it in the traditional way. How is that you ask?

The hunter digs a pit in which he hides, naked, next to the pit he places a dead carcass, the bait. When the eagle comes to feed on the carcass the hunter springs from the pit and subdues the eagle with his bare hands, braving razor sharp talons and beak.

It takes real balls to hunt Bald Eagles in the traditional manner. The hunt is liable to result in deep wounds or loss of an eye.

I have found old abandoned pits in the high plains of Dakota north of the Black Hills. They are small, cramped, and no place this "white eyes" would care to spend up to 36 hours before the eagle comes for the bate. If the Arapaho have the cajones to do it in the traditional manner, I say more power to them. But they likely will simply use a shotgun.

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:21 AM | Your Say (17)

"White guilt such as it is, no longer exists."

"Bull Connor was nearly 50 years ago. Nobody cares anymore.
The Civil Rights era is as distant to us as the end of WWI (47 years) was to the Civil Rights Era. No one in 1967 was really concerned with the fallout of the end of the Great War. No one today really cares, about the Edmund Pettis Bridge either. Too many OTHER things have happened since. The media blitzkrieg to replay the 1960′s civil rights movement is as doomed as the German occupation of Stalingrad or Rommel in North Africa in 1943. -- Obama and Trayvon Martin: Stalingrad | whiskeysplace

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:59 AM | Your Say (3)

All Your Unfortunate Facts About the "Trayvon" in One Handy Location

"It’s becoming more and more clear however that the innocent appearance the mainstream media
is so desperate to apply to Trayvon isn’t at all accurate. The picture we’re used to seeing to represent Trayvon Martin appears to be a far cry from how he actually looked once he was a few years older." The seldom updated Wagist scores a home run with Was Trayvon Martin a Drug Dealer? complete with over 4,000 comments. ""

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:18 AM | Your Say (0)

Anonymous Donation: "You can use it. My wife would kill me if I did."

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Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:37 AM | Your Say (3)

President Obama: This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility. President Medvedev: I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.

Let Us Transmit this Information to the Voting Booths : When you consider the obsequious manner

in which our President has courted a nation that has never shown anything more than the slightest inclination toward friendship with us, it’s hard to come to the conclusion that his statement today had an innocent explanation. It is far, far more likely that Barack Obama intended Vladimir Putin to know that as soon as he doesn’t have to care what we Americans think about what he does, he’ll do whatever he wants.

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:36 AM | Your Say (5)

"How to Lose a Fortune in Movies" Starring Director Lee Daniels

Jane Fonda to play Nancy Reagan in 'Butler' - - Variety Or, as Rodger the Real King of France so sagely notes, "Americans would rather blow a monkey than pay to see Jane Fonda do anything."

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:22 AM | Your Say (3)

How's that hope and change for Libya working out? Who cares?

Had Enough Therapy?: The News From Libya Obama has succeeded in giving Egypt to radical Islamists. He has given al Qaeda a new stronghold in Libya. As long as there is an election to be won, American journalism will have nothing to say about.
Details at Militias Out of Control in Libya

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:16 AM | Your Say (1)

March 26, 2012

What if poor Trayvon Martin's thinking was:

"Who is this guy following me? If he was a white guy, I'd figure he's just a neighborhood do-gooder so I don't have much to worry about.
But he doesn't look white, he looks like some kind of drug-dealing Latin, and everybody knows in Florida that they're often gangsters. Didn't you seeScarface? So I'd better get the drop on him and punch Scarface here out before he tries to rob me or kill me for stepping on his drug-dealing turf." --Steve Sailer

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:38 PM | Your Say (4)

Attention Slaves. Your Masters Depend On Your Continued Credulity.

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Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:56 AM | Your Say (9)

Comics for Our Time

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LOANS by NINA DARGUZIS & NAOMI FRANQUIZ
Have a student loan?  The US government owns our student loans. If you default on your loan, they've decided to take it out of you.  Miss enough payments and you'€™re shipped off to a secret government run agency until you will pay off what you owe.  No one said education was going to be cheap. Once your debt is payed you are free to go. If you live that long. -- Launching 5 New Comics with Juxtaposed Publishing by Ryan Ruffatti -- Kickstarter

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:47 AM | Your Say (2)

White Black Doesn't Matter

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Coding privilege as white and oppression as black is outdated but politically useful.
These days anyone can be white, so long as they're guilty of something, and anyone can be black, so long as they're innocent of something they're accused of doing. Those racial codes of oppression are almost as sacred to its wielders as the ghost of JFK and Woodstock. But they mean nothing. No one is innocent anymore, if they ever were. Black men sailed slave ships and white men died to free them. Slavery and the resistance to it was not coded by color, but by character. -- Daniel Greenfield

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:13 AM | Your Say (1)

Rejoice! God's Got You Backed Up!

Every computer user knows that the hard drive of a computer is liable to fail without warning, to die, in other words.
(In fact, that’s how we put it when some mechanical device fails. "My car died," we say.) So computer users back up the data on the hard drive, say onto magnetic tape. If you have a current backup, your hard drive’s death causes only temporary distress. You can take the dead hard drive out and smash it to pieces with a hammer if you want. You install a new hard drive and restore the data off the backup tape onto it. Nothing is lost. All the information is restored perfectly. The new hard drive is indistinguishable from the old one. No one can tell the difference between the old one and the new one. God remembers us perfectly. And God will perfectly restore every "backed up" detail of who we are into our resurrected bodies in the age to come. -- Donald Sensing HT: The Belmont Club

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:55 AM | Your Say (5)

March 25, 2012

Death to the Bald Eagle

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Illo from Independent Sentinal

The Northern Arapaho last week were granted licenses to kill the symbol of the United States, the bald eagle.
This is an endangered species zoologists have given decades trying to repopulate. Yet Indians need feathers for their little two-steps, and synthetic plumage won’t suffice. -- The Legend of Whining Coyote

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:09 PM | Your Say (4)

Knock, Knock

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Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:47 PM | Your Say (0)

"IF I HAD A SON, HE'D LOOK LIKE TRAYVON"

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This is part of the reason I detest white liberals so much.
They are capable of teasing out the racial meanings and "implicit whiteness" of a photo of Mitt Romney and his family, or even the white shirtsleeves he is wearing. They can zoom in like an electron microscope on phrases in a Sarah Palin speech and tease apart every supposed dog whistle calls to white America, yet choose not to see the obvious racial implications of Obama's comments--"if I had a son he'd be black. So I care more about what happens to blacks, because I have shared genetic interests" -- Deconstructing Obama's remark

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:42 PM | Your Say (5)

MOBama

As I write, the hysteria (is there any other word for it when Spike Lee twitters the address of George Zimmerman or the New Black Panther Party publishes a wanted poster?) is beginning to die down.
The initial moblike news (in this regard, Fox News’s Shepard Smith was especially culpable in whipping up frenzy when he did not have the evidence to support his allegations) that a white, Germanic-named vigilante ran down and executed a small African-American child (at least Mr. Martin seemed so from his adolescent photos in the press), eating candy while strolling in an exclusive gated community—morphed into an account of an excitable Hispanic neighbor-watch volunteer, in a mixed community, had prompted (?) a fist fight with a 17-year old, 6’2” youth in a hoodie, apparently lost, and then pulled out a gun and fired—narratives that seemed to change with new information every day. The case is not helped by presidential editorializing that now, after the beer summit and Sandra Fluke, seems a wise gambit to divert attention from $4 a gallon gas and 8% plus unemployment. (17% in Fresno County). -- Works and Days » Beware of the Mob

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:06 PM | Your Say (1)

Say It Loud. He's Black and He's Proud

Spike Lee Retweets George Zimmerman’s Home Address Somehow I don't think we'll see Lee out on the street and doin' the right thing when the shooting starts.

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:07 AM | Your Say (0)

"The government at all levels is all coercion, "

all the time, about everything,
and in their hearts most government functionaries of both parties have a profound contempt for their constituents, and get elected solely on assembling a coalition of voters with a profound contempt of just less than half their fellow citizens.... Everyone thinks they have the right to micromanage everyone else's life, right down to the lightbulbs and happy meals. -- Sippican Cottage: Is Frank Bunker Gilbreth Senior The Greatest Man Maine Ever Produced?

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:31 AM | Your Say (1)

Harvard Sex Week Starts Today!

On Monday be sure to check out:
Sex-Positivity and Slut-Pride: Sex Tips for a Modern World from Good Vibrations: Join HLSRJ and Good Vibrations for a short discussion of sex-positivity, a demo of lube and some popular sex toys, then Q&A. Free Food! -- Legal Insurrection

And after... Free Sluts!

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:53 AM | Your Say (2)

Forbidden Facts: You can know the facts about "race and crime before too long, but you better be careful not to talk about them in polite society."

Murder is largely an intraracial crime. Almost all murders of blacks
are committed by other blacks. Blacks as a group commit murder at a rate astronomically higher than other groups. The rate of murder committed by blacks exceeds that committed by whites by approximately seven times. -- No justice, no agitation | Power Line

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:41 AM | Your Say (0)

March 24, 2012

"You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I'll tell you what his 'pinions is."....

"A political emergency brings out the corn-pone opinion in fine force in its two chief varieties -- the pocketbook variety, which has its origin in self-interest, and the bigger variety,
the sentimental variety -- the one which can't bear to be outside the pale; can't bear to be in disfavor; can't endure the averted face and the cold shoulder; wants to stand well with his friends, wants to be smiled upon, wants to be welcome, wants to hear the precious words, "He's on the right track!" Uttered, perhaps by an ass, but still an ass of high degree, an ass whose approval is gold and diamonds to a smaller ass, and confers glory and honor and happiness, and membership in the herd. For these gauds many a man will dump his life-long principles into the street, and his conscience along with them. We have seen it happen. In some millions of instances." -- Mark Twain's Corn-pone Opinions

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:56 PM | Your Say (1)

Paging Pro Racists Sharpton and Jackson!

Mark Twain’s Colonel Sherburn had the number of Sharpton and his ilk:
“Now the thing for you to do is to droop your tails and go home and crawl in a hole. If any real lynching’s going to be done it will be done in the dark, Southern fashion…” -- Shades of Sharpton | Power Line

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:42 PM | Your Say (0)

"The race card, the racial thing – whatever it’s gonna be called, it is the number one asset this administration believes it has to win in 2012. "

"But how far are they willing to push that?  Race.  The charges of racism? 
I believe all the way if they have to.  And they are gonna get people stirred up.  And if Barack Obama doesn't win re-election, watch them stand back while the riots break out, and watch them mouth the words "€œBurn baby burn."  I don't think they are willing to go that far, I know it.  If they can't have America, nobody will.  That's how big -- that's how important this election coming up is."  -- - The Ulsterman Report

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:21 PM | Your Say (8)

"What I Want"

Bird Dog @ Maggies Farm writes for me and many other in Getting stuff vs. getting experiences - Maggie's Farm when he talks about his "wants:"
To read things, learn things, go places, see things,do things. That's what I want. What I want is my good work, one cultural outing per weekend day (just one per day, mind you, Mrs. BD), time with my spouse, friends and kids, good energetic manual labor at home and at the farm, interesting and adventurous travel, and a tangible relationship with God.

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:17 PM | Your Say (2)

Never a rose without a thorn

Cycling Putting Women’s Genital Sensation at Risk

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:03 AM | Your Say (5)

March 23, 2012

The Million Cap March

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In Oklahoma, Bob and Nancy Strait, who had been married for 65 years, had their home broken into by a black teenager unarmed except for a BB gun.
The teenager beat and raped the 85 year old Nancy Strait to death. Her husband, a veteran of the 101st Airborne in WW2, is in the hospital struggling to make it. There will be no million cap march for Bob and Nancy, two mere Americans, whose deaths cannot educate us on the evils of racism. Their killer will have pro bono lawyers and innocence projects helping him until he's finally set free again. -- Daniel Greenfield

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:51 PM | Your Say (19)

Finally. A flag a patriot can burn with pride!

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It may well be that regular flag burnings can become part of the campaign. I know they will tell you not to do it, but so what? Since when did they have any balls? They're not radicals. They're Republicans.

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:11 PM | Your Say (2)

Let The Mocking Commence!: "My mama always used to say 'stupid is as stupid does'."

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From BarackObama.com
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From The Bad


Discovered by Doug Ross @ Director Blue, The Definition of Stupid

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:55 PM | Your Say (2)

Comment of the Week

"Everything I read and see says hoodies are the trademark of gangbangers, drug dealers, shoplifters, OWS-style dropouts and the like. Does this bunch think for a minute they're going to pique the national conscience this way?" -- BillH on "Then there's the “Million Hoodie March”

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:27 PM | Your Say (0)

The Limbaugh Curse

Carbonite backup service goes down in preparation for 'World Backup Day' | The Verge

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:05 PM | Your Say (6)

"A list of the 20 best restaurants in America"

according to the folks at something I've never heard of before called The Daily Meal.
If you take a look, you'll notice there's a trend, which is for restaurants that are elegant and (I'm fairly sure) expensive. Even if I had the money, these wouldn't be my choices. Mine would probably all be ethnic restaurants, and reasonable ones at that: Greek, Lebanese, Spanish, Chinese. -- neo-neocon Best restaurants?

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:59 AM | Your Say (7)

Then there's the “Million Hoodie March”

—the New York demonstration, wherein participants (though only about 1,000) were urged to don the garment young Trayvon was wearing when he was killed.
This is emblematic of where the entire American race conversation veers into the land of make-believe. The pretense is that the hoodie is an innocuous clothing item or, at any rate, that it is unfairly seen as carrying negative associations. There’s a word for this: nonsense. The hoodie isn’t like a letterman’s jacket or a t-shirt or a pair of jeans. It does indeed carry associations—for many, ominous ones. -- Guilt, Innocence, and Hoodies by Harry Stein - City Journal

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:35 AM | Your Say (9)

While watching Mad Men,

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Weiner affords us ample opportunity to congratulate ourselves on how much progress we’ve made.
For example, most of the black characters in Mad Men have servile jobs. Today, of course, things are infinitely better. Black men are seldom seen in servile jobs (unless they are African immigrants or gay). In fact, black men aren’t seen in any jobs as much anymore: ten percent of black men were out of the work force in Don Draper’s 1960 versus 24 percent in booming 2000. Indeed, black men aren’t even seen at all as much anymore because a million are now locked away in prison. (The incarceration rate of black male high school dropouts was one percent in the Bad Old Days of Dwight Eisenhower’s last year in office versus 25 percent in Bill Clinton’s glorious finale.) -- Man Men - Steve Sailer

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:28 AM | Your Say (0)

March 22, 2012

Obligatory Seriousness on the Trayvon Martin

A nation mourns its youth, gone away, gone astray, dying by the bullet.
And painted in stereotypical black, we have another stereotypical tragedy that cannot be anything but grist for a cycle of protest, outrage, sadness, disappointment and resentment. It quiets down until another bullet gives another HBO writer of 'The Wire' another million dollars. Because that's reality. -- Trayvon Martin - Cobb

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:11 PM | Your Say (4)

For all their intellectual vanity,

it is clear that the Left is not only incapable of organizing a root in a brothel,
the brothel itself would be renamed a non-procreative recreational outlet; a place where lonely men could part with their hard-earned to have one off the wrist over dog-eared photographs of Margaret Mead while the organisers stood in the hallway arguing angrily about the phallic symbolism of the stairway banister. -- Space wasters wasting time - Jack the Insider

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:33 PM | Your Say (0)

The Original Lego Patent Drawing

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Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:36 PM | Your Say (1)

Meanwhile...

the Fort Hood shooter, who screamed "Allahu Akbar" as he shot fellow soldiers
claiming vengeance for his Muslim brothers in the middle east was declared a "job hazard" and has yet to be put on trial. The guy who went nuts and shot up families - almost certainly because they were harboring the ones who murdered his best friend but were declared off limits by his CO - has his trial being prepped and rushed through. -- Word Around the Net: CRAZED MAN SHOOTS JEWS

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:14 PM | Your Say (3)

The idea that if public schools had more money they'd be swell is nonsense.

If you cut the education budget to zero, and had entirely unqualified teachers (parents) teaching their own children,
children would be overwhelmingly better educated than they are right now. And we'd be able to cut taxes by 400 billion dollars or so. All the good teachers (I know many) should be teaching in private schools and making more money anyway. --Sippican Cottage: I Got Asked Again The Other Day, Rather Bluntly, Why We Don't Send The Kids To School

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:12 PM | Your Say (0)

Upon the Stair

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Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away
-- "Antigonish"

[Charles Willson Peale, The Staircase Group (1795)]

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:58 PM | Your Say (0)

‘The Americans are with the Islamists’.

As long as the Leading from Behind consists solely in handing over whole populations
to the most powerful thugs in the region, no amount of word-craft, no magic of phraseology can ever disguise its true nature. It is just another name for the cynical betrayal of oppressed populations to interest groups who have represented themselves well in Washington. --Belmont Club サ The True Lie

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

Sound Familiar? Progressive Chinese Education Techniques

Everything they teach you to admire is jiade (fake).
Right now they’re pushing Lei Feng (the Communist hero who was a model of selflessness) again. But everyone knows that Lei Feng is made up. All of their model heroes are false.... So when they teach morality their teaching tools are fake. Completely fake. After a while the students learn that Lei Feng is a fake. He existed but all the stories are made up. It’s destructive—it destroys everything you’ve been taught. You feel that nothing is real. How can they teach virtues? It’s impossible. The problem is they don’t have a bottom line. There is no bottom line in society. You find out that the things you’re supposed to admire the most are untrue. So it seems nothing is real. So the only way the party can succeed is by cheating you. That becomes their biggest success. That’s who you’re ruled by. -- Learning How to Argue: An Interview with Ran Yunfei @ NYRB

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:53 AM | Your Say (6)

Why I Am a Democrat

I am a Democrat because I believe in the rights of women, be they lawyers or housewives or skanky interns.
For too long women have been the victims of discrimination, and we must target programs to help these women, and also the various people who have descended from women. I am a Democrat because I believe in women's right to choose. I mean, not a church school or a tax shelter, or something like that, obviously. Let's be reasonable. --iowahawk

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:38 AM | Your Say (0)

Door. Ass. Bang.

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Al Qaeda fanatic is DEAD: Serial killer jumps out flat window with all guns blazing in dramatic end to 32-hour siege
'The suspect’s door was been blown open, and the operation to arrest him is taking place,’... 'We sent in special cameras to be able to see where he was but we could not find him. It was when we were able to locate him in the bathroom that he came out shooting madly at everybody.... 'Merah jumped out of the window and continued to shoot. He was found dead on the ground.'

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:31 AM | Your Say (2)

March 21, 2012

First of the long list of monsters who need to die in a fire ASAP, televised.

Until the murderer of seven Frenchmen and children
turned out to be a self-confessed flower of al Qaida, the Lame Stream Media in Europe and the US were ready to brand the Right as guilty. The AP just knew who the culprits were: “Focus fell Tuesday on three paratroopers who had been expelled from their regiment near Toulouse in 2008 for neo-Nazi sympathies, a police official said. The killer on Monday handled large-caliber guns with expertise, leading some to suspect he had a military or police background.” How unfortunate for them that the culprit is named Mohammad. -- The Virginian: Things that must not be said.

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:46 PM | Your Say (7)

Meanwhile in Europe the same sort of Islamic monster gets the same sick excuses

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Assassin's victims

No surprise here:
About 300 police officers surrounded an apartment in the south of France Wednesday, trying to coax a man whom authorities called a self-styled al Qaeda jihadist to surrender after a series of shootings that left seven people dead. -- French police surround suspect in Toulouse shootings - CNN.com

No surprise here:
It is not religion that turns some young Muslim men in the West violent, but the sense of alienation and frustration that inevitably comes from being a second-generation immigrant. -- Don't blame Islam for the Toulouse killings – Telegraph Blogs

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:10 PM | Your Say (23)

[BUMPED] TSAssholes subject child in a wheelchair to airport security tests in Chicago

[Bumped for an interesting exchange in the comments.]

Despite such strict security for this toddler,
the TSA is offering background-checked travellers the chance to use special lines and keep their shoes, belt and jacket on, leave laptops and liquids in carry-on bags and avoid a full-body scan - for a price. To qualify, frequent fliers must be invited by airlines and meet an undisclosed TSA criteria. A $100 fee for a background check is required as well as a brief interview with a Customs officer. --| Mail Online

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:52 PM | Your Say (42)

The Marines Are Looking for A New Good President

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"Sgt. Gary Stein might be saying things about President Obama that a lot of Marines think,
but some are saying he took it too far. Stein has come under fire for stating on Facebook that he wouldn't follow certain orders given by his commander in chief.  And Marines say Stein's not alone in his disapproval.  More anti-Obama talk is being heard in the workplace and new Military Times poll data shows declining approval among military service members for the president's job as commander in chief. --Battle Rattle - Anti-Obama Marines

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:17 PM | Your Say (4)

"A quiet man"

"Suspect Merah was generally described by his neighbors as a quiet man, with a penchant for watching "violent jihadist videos online, including footage of decapitations"€ at home.  He was in other words, what the French government and polite society hoped he wouldn't be. What they fervently prayed he wouldn'€™t be. And now that he appears to be what he is, they can only hope for the cover of the Rhythm of the Night." -- Belmont Club » The Rhythm of the Night

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:03 PM | Your Say (0)

From Mass Media to Micro Media

The trend in political journalism isn’t higher heels, it is in micro-coverage.
If Rick Santorum sneezes, it becomes a video, which is then Tweeted out. Minor gaffes, once completely ignored, now drive media coverage, confirming “narratives” or preconceived notions we have about the candidates. --Conservative punditry and political journalism: The things we think but do not say | The Daily Caller

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:51 AM | Your Say (0)

"I Just Flew In From Holland, And Boy Are My Arms Tired"

Humans have minds. They invented all the stuff that made it possible for that feeble carcass, which is probably less feeble than most, to fly like a bird for a minute. -- The Borderline Sociopathic Blog For Boys

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:14 AM | Your Say (6)

March 20, 2012

More Acting and Less Activism, Please

The last thing we need in the current political climate is another idiot thinking he can make a difference. The only difference that actors can make is making things more idiotic. -- - Taki's Magazine

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:45 PM | Your Say (1)

"Let's take it as read that Rick Santorum is weird."

After all, he believes in the sanctity of life, the primacy of the family,
the traditional socio-religious understanding of a transcendent purpose to human existence. Once upon a time, back in the mists of, ooh, the mid–20th century, all these things were, if not entirely universal, sufficiently mainstream as to be barely worthy of discussion. Now they're not. Isn't the fact that conventional morality is now "weird" itself deeply weird? The instant weirdification of ideas taken for granted for millennia is surely mega-weird — unless you think that our generation is possessed of wisdom unique to human history. In which case, why are we broke? -- Weird Politics :: SteynOnline

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:36 PM | Your Say (1)

The real tragedy of this election year is that Hillary Clinton clearly does not have enough to do.

Amelia Earhart search cheered on by Hillary Clinton

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

Re Jimmy Carter of Mars

Who would ever green-light such an absurd amount of money for a project whose original fans were driving Model T’s and listening to the organ while watching the latest moving picture from the Lumiere brothers?

Yeah, but what else you got? Sherlock Holmes? Narnia? Middle Earth? Hollywood’s business model is to take a story that cost two shillings and thruppence-ha’penny and spend a fifth of a billion making it lousier. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn’t, but either way the industry’s living off Model T fumes. -- Mark Steyn

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:34 PM | Your Say (9)

""IF YOU OBJECT TO BEING FORCED BY THE GOVERNMENT TO PAY FOR MY BIRTH CONTROL, THEN YOU ARE VIOLATING MY RIGHTS AND ARE ANTI-WOMAN, SEXIST, AND EVIL.""

"If you accept this premise, then you do not deserve to live in a free society; and, frankly, you won't be for much longer." -- Dr. Sanity: STRAW WOMEN

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:00 PM | Your Say (2)

Prole Porn Journalism

Where young female journalists perform manual labor and report back to the rest of us how crappy their jobs were. We're probably then supposed to call a Congressman or #occupysomething. -- Questionable Motives ォ Gucci Little Piggy

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:53 AM | Your Say (1)

The God of Tolerance is a jealous and hungry god and demands many sacrifices.

First he calls for human blood, and in the vast polyglot societies whose social engineering he has overseen,
it is duly delivered up, either at the hands of a group of Al Qaeda wannabes or, as in the latest case, the mysterious motorcycle gunman of Toulouse, supposedly driven to murder by the kind of political debate that occasionally accompanies elections in the supposedly free world.... We are being told once again that discussing race inevitably stirs up hatred, and that stirring up hatred is the same as shooting a small Jewish girl in the head at point blank range, which is the same as gassing six million Jews, etc., etc. --The God of Tolerance

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:45 AM | Your Say (1)

It's a Matt Drudge News Hole. Other Sources Are Just Trying to Fill It

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You bet you life Chicago has a gang problem.

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:28 AM | Your Say (1)

The Power of Habit

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A pint of butterfat and sugar with a Ben and Jerry's label,
a spurt of oxytocin when you see that @jayrosen_nyu or @ebertchicago has retweeted you, that tingling in your legs after a strenuous workout, the numbing rush of a fix, the first puffs of an American Spirit .... it's all the same to the basal ganglia, four lumps of gray matter in the forebrain that encode highly rewarding behavior for easy repetition. -- Breaking the Habits that Enslave Us: Q&A with Charles Duhigg

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:03 AM | Your Say (1)

March 19, 2012

"The Alinsky way is self-corrupting in the most direct way possible. "

Ends as means as a political program makes for something very much like Obama,
a moderate veneer over a leftist veneer over a mafia center. First fool the moderates, then fool the left and then make out like a bandit. In practice this means that there are some centrist policies on top, a deeper layer of leftist policies and everything below that is just grand theft government. -- Sultan Knish a blog by Daniel Greenfield

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:07 PM | Your Say (7)

"The whole "war on women" bit isn't working like the Democrats hoped."

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One almost gets the impression that what they perceive the average American woman to be is far from the case. -- Christopher Taylor @ Word Around the Net

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:34 PM | Your Say (1)

Planned Parenthood Thanks Obama For Being a “Strong” Pro-Abortion President…

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They know where they get their cornpone.

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:13 PM | Your Say (2)

"We went back to Pac’s house and they just rolled up:"

"Big was rolling, Pac was rolling, Greg was rolling, Groovey Lew was rolling, it was just going back and forth. Next thing you know, they started a cypher.
We sitting at the house, Big is flowing, Pac is flowing, Greg is flowing, and me and Lew is just sitting there like, Yo, the moment of hip-hop for us has reached its high. After the freestyle session, Pac went into his room and pulled out this green army bag, and dumped it onto the floor. And it was, like, 25 guns. Handguns, machine guns.... So now, here we are, in this backyard running around with guns, just playing. -- How Ya Livin Biggie Smalls? ォ The FADER

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:04 AM | Your Say (2)

Email Just Received

Hello, my name is T Cook, CEO of Apple Corp. I beseech your assistance in helping transfer $100 billion in cash left by the late Steve Jobs. -- @edbott

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:34 AM | Your Say (1)

March 18, 2012

The United States of Pizzafication

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The history of pizza is no longer cause for celebration.
Only slick advertising can erase the truth. The Greek poet Hesiod identified five Ages of Man: the Golden Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, the Heroic Age and the Iron Age. We are immersed in something he could not have foreseen: the Pizza Age. Someday even our rivers will turn red with excreted tomato sauce. There will be so much pizza in our bloodstreams that doctors will have to open de-mozzarella-fication clinics. As people sit in reclining chairs, the cheese globules painstakingly extracted from their veins by sophisticated technology, they will see their internal horizons gradually expanded and restored. Their souls and bodies will return to a state of innocence they never knew existed. -- The Thinking Housewife

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:44 PM | Your Say (3)

Call for Votes: I'm not really sure if this makes me optimistic or pessimistic about the future of America.

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A father-daughter Wonder Woman team pose at the DC booth of Wondercon in Anaheim. -- Twitter / @amy_geek.

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:14 PM | Your Say (9)

A liberal, a moderate, and a conservative walk into a bar.

The bartender says, "Hi, Mitt." -- TOF Spot

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:46 PM | Your Say (7)

When Justice Delayed Really Is Justice Denied

Convicted Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk dies in nursing home John Demjanjuk, the Cleveland auto worker convicted for crimes he committed as a Nazi death camp guard, died in a German nursing home.
Demjanjuk, 91, died Saturday at an old-age home in southern Germany, where he was free while he appealed his conviction last year for his role in the murder of 28,060 people at the Sobibor death camp in Poland. ... The decision to allow him to remain free during the appeal process was criticized by many Jewish groups.

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:32 PM | Your Say (3)

It's Not for Nothing That This Segment of Obama Supporters Are Known as "The Base"

Tyler Perry Hosts Obama Fundraisers The first 5 PM gala featured a performance by singer Cee Lo Green
and was sponsored by the African American Leadership Council. It sold tickets for $500-$2,500 per person. A photo with the president cost $10,000.... Grammy-winner Green made news when he flicked off the audience before asking, "Can I curse in here?"€ and let out a loud "Fuck You!"€

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:05 AM | Your Say (1)

March 17, 2012

No Matter Where You Stand I See You

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The Trilobite eye is truly amazing instrument:
it's the oldest eye we have on record, and also a very successful one - it gave trilobites a huge evolutionary edge compared to other species. The most advanced species possessed compound eyes capable of 360-degree vision; what's more, their eyes were made of solid crystal! - Dark Roasted Blend: Heavy Bombardment of the Moon

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:26 PM | Your Say (6)

Wheelmate Laptop Steering Wheel Desk

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"Attaches to your steering wheel for easy access to a writing and drink storage surface. The Go Office Wheel Mate Steering Wheel Desk is flat for writing and perfect for lunch or a snack."

Follow the link to Amazon.com: Wheelmate Laptop Steering Wheel Desk: Automotive. Click thee then upon ye olde "See all 124 customer images" and browse through. "A classic" sayeth the Sippican and he is correct.

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:48 PM | Your Say (5)

Romney Derangement Syndrome

In truth, we are in the era of Romney Derangement Syndrome.
It has gone so far that in the PJ Media comments today, someone wrote there was no hope for the country because Obama and Romney were both Marxists. Really? The co-founder of Bain Capital is a Marxist? Well, I suppose if Bain were wildly unsuccessful you could hypothesize some kind of Cloward-Piven covert sabotage of our economic system was being attempted. But it wasn’t — and isn’t. -- Roger L. Simon »

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:26 PM | Your Say (12)

Found Dog

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Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:13 PM | Your Say (1)

Environmentalism, The Autopsy

The death rattle of environmentalism will be deafening.
It has too much political momentum and fanatical devotion to go quietly. The environmental establishment is a billion-dollar a year business, and there are plenty of stupid guilty rich people, idiot Hollywood celebrities, and direct-mail dupes to keep the agitation machine going for many years to come. -- | Power Line

And as we learn in the holy book of Dylan:

"I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
’Til I’m sure that you’re dead"

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:44 AM | Your Say (1)

"The problem is not Bill Maher."

The problem is liberals are misogynists who are cruel, mean and nasty to any woman who dares challenge their paternalistic vision of the world. Consider the destruction of Hillary Clinton 4 years ago. Ironic, isn't it? The very things that liberals falsely accuse conservatives of doing are the things the liberals do. -- Condemn the audience and Bill Maher ォ Don Surber

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:24 AM | Your Say (1)

That "Rutherford Hayes" Speech by "The Smartest Man in the Tomb"

The president sneers at the ignorance of 15th-century Spaniards, when in fact he is the one entirely ignorant of them.
A man who has enjoyed a million dollars of elite education yet has never created a dime of wealth in his life sneers at a crippled farm boy with an eighth-grade schooling who establishes a successful business and introduces electrical distribution across Michigan all the way up to Sault Ste. Marie. A man who sneers at one of the pioneering women in broadcasting, a lady who brought the voices of T. S. Eliot, G. K. Chesterton, and others into the farthest-flung classrooms and would surely have rejected Obama’s own dismal speech as being too obviously reliant on “Half-a-Dozen Surefire Cheap Cracks for Lazy Public Speakers.” A man whose own budget officials predict the collapse of the entire U.S. economy by 2027 sneers at a solvent predecessor for being insufficiently “forward-looking.” -- Obama’s History Lesson - Mark Steyn
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Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:45 AM | Your Say (2)

March 16, 2012

"Of course, while George Clooney's being arrested outside the Sudanese Embassy,

Brad Pitt and Matt Damon are inside cleaning out the safe." -- T @MitchBenn

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:25 PM | Your Say (0)

"Sooner or later, Iran’s terror base in Gaza will be uprooted."

I have always believed that an Iran armed with nuclear weapons would pose an existential threat to Israel
and a serious threat to the well-being and security of the entire world.  I warned against this threat even when it was not popular to do so, and even when it was unacceptable – when many leaders in Israel and around the world preferred to ignore Iran's nuclear program and its repercussions. There were those who believed, and probably still believe, that an agreement with the Palestinians is the solution, that it would lead to a solution of the Iranian problem.  As if an agreement with Mahmoud Abbas would stop the centrifuges.  Let's make a deal and the centrifuges will stop spinning.  Whoever wants to believe this can do so, but he is simply burying his head in the sand. -- PM Netanyahu's Speech at the Knesset 40 Signatures Special Session

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:15 AM | Your Say (1)

"In the world of Bioethics, Moral relativism has been refined to an artform,"

and the prominence of bioethical arguments is expanding considerably here in the U.S.
The reason for this can be tied directly to the elitist adoption of environmental activism as a vehicle to promote morally relative social policies. The field of climate change continues to offer the most ample venue. If the very future of our planet is supposedly at stake due to the mere creation of carbon emissions, a product of almost every human action, then all aspects of human life come into question and eventually, lend themselves to taxation, regulation, and domination. Despite the fact that climate research labs like those at the CRU of East Anglia and NASA still refuse to release the source data for their experiments supporting their assertions that man causes global warming, and the fact that East Anglia's rigged computer modeling methods were exposed through the Climategate emails, the Bioethics community continues to use manmade global warming as the boogieman rationalization for scientific tyranny. -- Lost Principles And Social Destruction | ZeroHedge

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:50 AM | Your Say (3)

The Boomerang Baby Boom: "Three in 10 young adults live with parents, highest level since 1950s"

After graduating from Brown University in 2009 with
a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature and completing a Fulbright scholarship in Brazil, Cassie Owens was left with a few dollars on her stipend and no job in sight. So, Ms. Owens returned home to her mother in Philadelphia. “I moved back home pretty much for lack of money and prospects,” she says. -- - CSMonitor.com
[Where, oh where, are the manufacturers who thirst to have their literature compared? ]

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:37 AM | Your Say (4)

History Ain't Fiction

Ouch: "Novelists (notably Mann) and literary scholars (such as J P Stern)
have sometimes managed to use a novel angle of approach to say something new and provocative about Hitler, the Nazis and the German people. However, there is no evidence of that here, neither in the stale, unoriginal material, nor in the banal and cliché-ridden historical judgements, nor in the lame, tired narrative style; just evidence of the repellent arrogance of a man who thinks that because he's a celebrated novelist, he can write a book about Hitler that people should read, even though he's put very little work into writing it and even less thought." -- New Statesman - Hitler: a Short Biography

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:17 AM | Your Say (0)

Why should Archie vote for the Meathead party that shipped his job to Mexico?

Lefties should only be confused about the white proles who still vote for them.
The left’s “Why don’t you loooove me anymore?” routine with the white working class reminds me of a friend’s crazy-ex-girlfriend story. She cheated on him, lit his car on fire, and gave him the clap. She used to get drunk and scream into his answering machine at 4AM. Then she wondered why he never called back. --Why Democrats Lost the Redneck Vote - Taki's Magazine

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:24 AM | Your Say (0)

Working Tirelessly for a Better America

President's fundraisers tomorrow resemble a movie theater schedule: 1:20, 2:35, 6:35, 8:25, & 9:20 -- Obama goes into full campaign mode | Twitchy

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:05 AM | Your Say (2)

March 15, 2012

They Just Don't Make Cat Suits Like They Used To

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GALAXY PURPLE CATSUIT >Sold Out - Gone Forever :(
For those parties where you just feel like being the most outrageous person in the room. Having said that, you can dress this down with the help of jackers, belts, vests, throw over cardigans etc. Way cool. --Galaxy Purple Catsuit | Black Milk Clothing

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

Lies My Newspaper Told Me: Five things Portlanders are wrong about

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1) Home solar is the wave of the future

2) Eating local will save the earth

3) Portland’s hybrid-car habit will solve our carbon woes

4) Home ownership: Your best investment

5) Hands-free cellphones make multi-tasking effortless -- Williamtte Weekly

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:38 PM | Your Say (4)

As in other things, "Obama's haul is small."

As Karl Rove noted, "The president's difficulty in raising campaign cash is evidence of this. He is working a lot harder than he thought he would to raise a lot less than he had hoped." -- Obama running out of money? « Don Surber

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:09 PM | Your Say (1)

"Today is my last day at the Empire."

"After almost twenty years, first as a summer intern,
then as the Emperor's spy on the Jedi Council, then as his apprentice and Dark Lord of the Sith, I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of the Empire's culture, its people (both cloned and non-cloned) and its role in bringing order to the galaxy. I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it, and I don't mean destructive in its traditional, positive connotation...." -- Never Yet Melted サ Another Angry Letter to the Times

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:01 PM | Your Say (0)

The E-Reader of 1935

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Matt Novak, curator extraordinaire for the Smithsonian, has found this gem of paleo-futurism from the pages of a 1935 issue of Everyday Science and Mechanics -- a screen-based reader that, he writes, "was to be the next logical step in the world of publishing." --- Megan Garber - Technology - The Atlantic

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:54 AM | Your Say (1)

Nero + Fiddle =

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Wants Afghan-quality bodyguards.
Needs to get his wish. Now.

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:40 AM | Your Say (13)

"The consensus wants you."

All of you. If it cannot have you,
it will have your children or your grand-children. It is through talking and done debating. It has climbed up to the steeple, past the gargoyles and shouts down at the world. It is not interested in ideas, only in submission to its will. It will sneer at you, laugh at you and do its best to compel you to obey its doctrines. Because it knows that if it cannot, then the consensus will dry up and blow away on the wind. -- Sultan Knish a blog by Daniel Greenfield

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

Noted while passing in the breakdown lane.

Stupid cat apparently has nothing better to do than chase my laser pointer around for the last three hours. -- Twitter / @badbanana

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:27 AM | Your Say (1)

If you were to ask Quora -- "How did Tim Morgan answer that question about the controls of airplane cockpits?"

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The answer would include, most likely, the words "epic" and "awesome" and "amazing."
And that's not just because of the post's [9,000 word] length, or the wealth of information it contains, or the fact that, after reading it, you will probably be unable to look at an airplane or a pilot or a manual outflow valve control quite the same way again. It's also ... the joy. Seriously: the joy. It's the sheer enthusiasm, the I-know-something-you-want-to-know-about-and-I'm-gonna-tell-you-about-it excitement, that pretty much bursts through the answer's 9,322 words and 162 paragraphs. It is epic. It is awesome. It is amazing. --The Story Behind That 9,000-Word Quora Post on Airplane Cockpits - Megan Garber - Technology - The Atlantic

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

March 14, 2012

In January California governor Jerry Brown said, “Contrary to those declinists who sing of Texas and bemoan our woes, California is still the land of dreams. . . . It’s the place where Apple . . . and countless other creative companies all began.”

Fast forward to March: Apple announced it was building a $304 million campus in Austin with plans to hire 3,600 people to staff it, more than doubling its Texas workforce. California may be dreaming, but Texas is working.

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:04 PM | Your Say (10)

Saying of the Day

"Build a man a fire and you warm him for a day. Set a man on fire and he shall be warm the rest of his life." [Via commenter "twolaneflash"]

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

Dante Laughs: "Ban the Divine Comedy? Really?"

The paradox of modern so-called "liberalism" -- which has nothing at all to do with actual liberalism --
is that if they had their "open-minded" way, the world and all of our perspectives would be forced into a most unnatural narrowness. The very same people who understood that it was a bad and reactionary thing to burn Beatles albums have themselves become reactionary ideologues who will betray the foundational ideas of the nation and its constitution in order to enforce conformity to their own sensibilities, leaving no room for individual thinking, dissent or, yeah, personal conscience. -- « The Anchoress

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:57 PM | Your Say (4)

"Nor could he explain why the Afghan was on fire."

Mr. Little said Mr. Panetta was never in danger
but he could not explain the Afghan’s motive or whether he was a suicide attacker aiming for Mr. Panetta’s plane. Nor could he explain why the Afghan was on fire. “For reasons that are totally unknown to us at this time, our personnel discovered that he was ablaze,” Mr. Little said. “He ran, he jumped on to a truck, base personnel put the fire out and he was immediately treated for burn injuries.” -Panetta Visits Afghanistan in Aftermath of Massacre - NYTimes.com

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:51 PM | Your Say (6)

Headline of the Year (So Far)

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Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:29 PM | Your Say (2)

A Gentle Reminder

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Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:06 PM | Your Say (3)

Comment of the Month (So far)

IB Bill responding to Study: Liberals More Likely To Block Online Friends Over Political Disagreements

Well, in my own case, I'm a conservative who, during the Komen/Planned Parenthood kerfuffle, unfriended eight people.

I found it difficult to tolerate that many people who could go on and on about how great Planned Parenthood is, and who show little respect for the other side. I found their arguments tendentious and manipulative, and I'd just had enough.

The only other time I unfriended someone was when this person came out in favor of Hezbollah, Iranian hostility to the U.S., Palestinian terrorism, gay marriage and abortion in a short period of time. I didn't unfriend him earlier because the posts were usually pretty well spaced out. But one day he went off, and I'd had enough. (Unrelated to the unfriending, he took his wife's last name when he got married.)

So that's my story. There is a lot of liberal hostility to conservatives and Republicans, and I have to listen to it all the time. Just yesterday a co-worker was going on and on about how the South should be expelled so they can learn to pay their own bills, and so they can create a racist theocracy.

I always thought educated people can state, correctly, the other side's point of view. It's childish to think, in most cases, someone disagrees with you because they're bigoted and ignorant.

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:01 PM | Your Say (6)

What is unclear about "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image"?

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Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments. (Exodus 20:4-6)

Veterans Outraged Over American Flag With Obama Image

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:33 PM | Your Say (11)

Keep Clam and Carry On!

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For Obama everything seemingly is spinning out of control! But there's no need to panic.
After all, Feller notes, "sizable job growth has taken hold by the month." What's more, "Obama has a story to tell on the killing of Osama bin Laden." Our guess is that Obama waits till October to inform Americans that bin Laden has been dispatched so that it will have the maximum impact on the election, while also not queering his chances for another Nobel Peace Prize. No sitting president with two Nobel Peace Prizes has ever failed to win re-election. -- Where's the Afterglow? - WSJ.com

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

Change Never Comes Without Problem

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Via Curmudgeonly & Skeptical presents Boned Jello

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:33 AM | Your Say (1)

Asked and Answered: "What do all the controls in an airplane cockpit do?"

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All of them? If you're talking about a commercial airliner, then there's hundreds and hundreds. There are big, fat manuals describing what they all do. But, since you asked, buckle up.....
At the center are the throttles. Push forward to burn more gas, pull back to save money. There's one for each engine. There are also paddles behind each throttle lever that control the thrust reversers. Pull up to apply reverse thrust during landing. There are buttons underneath each throttle grip (not shown) that engage TO/GA (takeoff/go-around) mode. Press either button and the throttles automatically set for either a takeoff or an aborted landing. The black buttons on the side of each throttle grip cause the auto throttle to disengage, giving throttle control back to the pilot. -- An amazingly detailed answer about controls at Quora

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:28 AM | Your Say (4)

Real World Says: F*ck You, Fukushima!

Green ideologues inside and outside of governments and inter-governments,
would like to be able to repeal the industrial revolution from the outset.... The real world outside of green-dominated jurisdictions is having none of that nuclear and carbon hysteria. For those who must labour under capricious and irrational green dieoff rules, regulations, and taxes foisted on them by corrupt, delusional, and degenerate ideologues, hold on. Help is coming. -- Al Fin Energy:

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:14 AM | Your Say (0)

March 13, 2012

"We are a bit confused 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." -- Asia Times Online :: Conjuring the ghost of Richelieu

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:02 PM | Your Say (2)

American Calvinism

- specifically the belief that God's purposes transcended our knowledge and might conflict with our wishes - had remained the decisive residual influence on Lincoln and his generation.
After the Civil War, it was replaced by the conceit that political tinkering and social engineering could remake the world in America’s image - an underhanded way of stating that there is nothing really special about America, and that America’s unique character as a country whose citizens selected themselves from out of the other nations does not really distinguish it from nations defined by blood, tradition, and geography. From this muddy well came both the naive universalism of the Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter and the Wilsonian optimism of George W Bush. -- Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:51 PM | Your Say (1)

New Rules for Old Farts

If you've never uploaded naked photographs of yourself, you are an old fart.
If you know how to spell, you are an old fart. If you ever waited to hear your favorite song on the radio, you are an old fart. If you remember when being radical meant hating the government, rather than relying on it, you are an old fart. -- Many more to be found @ Zombie

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:51 PM | Your Say (2)

"If you want to make money over the next 20 years, agriculture is the way to go."

"If you don't want to be a farmer, buy the Lamborghini dealership or a restaurant in Iowa.

Why? Because the farmers in Iowa are going to be very wealthy. And they will be able to afford Lamborghinis. Fewer and fewer people are producing more and more food for more and more of us. -- gulfnews : The world, according to investor Jim Rogers HT: Schneiderman

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

Still Here

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By Dale @ Out of Order the Blog

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:56 AM | Your Say (7)

Morgan's "Just sayin'..."

"Ever notice the people who want “laws kept out of my/her uterus” are the same people who want lots and lots of regulation everywhere else?" -- House of Eratosthenes

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:14 AM | Your Say (2)

Burt Prelutsky's "Just sayin'..."

"I really am sick and tired of hearing Mitch McConnell referring to “Our friends on the other side of the aisle.”
Harry Reid is not your friend. Charles Schumer, Patrick Leahy and Dick Durbin, are not your friends. What’s more, Barbara Boxer, Patty Murray and Dianne Feinstein, are not going to the prom with you. Get over it." --BurtPrelutsky.com: A FEW MORE REASONS TO SEND OBAMA PACKING

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:12 AM | Your Say (4)

Frank J's "Just Sayin'..."

"Have you noticed how about 95% of modern feminism is about contraception and abortion? I.e., most of feminism is about being able to have consequence free sex --€” so it's feminism as designed by horny teenage boys. Also, have you noticed how most of the women shrieking about how the Republicans want to control their bodies are people who no one wants to touch their bodies with ten foot polls?" -- IMAO » Blog Archive » Nuke the News: War on Useless Presidents

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:07 AM | Your Say (2)

Me? I'm just sayin': If you have to have cardiac arrest, avoid the car.

Bob Caldwell, editor of The Oregonian's editorial pages, was in the Tigard apartment of a 23-year-old woman when he went into cardiac arrest Saturday afternoon.
The Oregonian previously erroneously reported that Caldwell had been found in his parked car on Saturday, based on information from a family friend. --OregonLive.com

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:04 AM | Your Say (8)

File Under: Road Signs Paid for by the Stimulus

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Greg Smith in front of a sign on Boogie Lake Road in White Lake, Mich. --Sign of the day ォ Don Surber

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:47 AM | Your Say (2)

Really? No kidding? You don't say. Who knew?

Study: Liberals More Likely To Block Online Friends Over Political Disagreements - Tech Daily Dose

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:15 AM | Your Say (7)

"The miracles of the Bible pale beside the marvels of modern politics"

The political world is a really miraculous place, where windmills power nations into the 21st century,
the climate can be cured by purchasing little pieces of paper called carbon credits from China; where money by the trillion is routinely conjured from the presses and all this incredible stuff is lying around for free for the taking. Merchandise that never had to be paid for by taxpayers, nor anyone is available to all and sundry through the simple expedient of the Mandate. Like it fell off the back of a truck. The miracles of the Bible pale beside the marvels of modern politics and the best part of it is that millions of intellectuals who account themselves too sophisticated to be fooled by imbecilities of the Christian, Jewish or Islamic religions are willing to swallow prodigies that would put science fiction to shame without so much as blinking an eye. Who said the Age of Faith has ended? It has scarcely begun. -- Belmont Club サ I Owe My Soul To the Company Store

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:45 AM | Your Say (1)

I Owe My Soul To the Company Store

Gone are the days when civilizations perished from vice.
Today they go bankrupt for a surfeit of virtue. If the subprime mortgage crisis was rooted in the quest for affordable housing, the curtain now rises on a scene laid waste by the student debt bomb. Student loan debt is now $704 billion bigger than total US credit card debt. Families which believed they were investing in the future find themselves facing eviction tomorrow.... “President Obama has said he will help ease student loan debt, claiming he doesn’t even need Congress to do it. It seems the Education Department has the cash to back him up.”-- Belmont Club サ

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:33 AM | Your Say (1)

March 12, 2012

The Blood Price of Afghanistan

The alleged attack on Afghans by an American soldier in Kandahar, where 91 soldiers have been murdered last year alone,
is already receiving the full outrage treatment. Any outrage over the deaths of those 91 soldiers in the province will be completely absent. There will be no mention of how many of them died because the Obama Administration decided that the lives of Afghan civilians counted for more than the lives of soldiers. No talk of what it is like to walk past houses with gunmen dressed in civilian clothing inside and if you are fired at from those houses, your orders are to retreat. -- Sultan Knish a blog by Daniel Greenfield

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:04 PM | Your Say (4)

"That the United States Postal Service (to cite just a single example) still exists"

is a monument to the cheating prowess of sovereigns.
The power to exclude competitors by diktat (the Post Office enjoys a monopoly over First Class Mail in the United States where clearly any number of firms have demonstrated the ability to provide that service cheaper and faster), the power to change the rules (the accounting routinely used by the United States government would land the management of a private firm in jail), and the power to destroy competitors (by seizure, taxation or regulation). -- The Flaccidity of Modern Marxist Revolutionaries | finem respice

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:10 PM | Your Say (1)

FIGHT or STFU: "The objective of Kony 2012 is to inspire political activism, which will, in turn, inspire the American government to make yet another military foray into the underdeveloped world. "

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I’ve got a suggestion for the idealistic young fans of Jason Russell.
Donate your cash to the cause of Kony 2012. Establish a fund and track its progress on the net. When there is money enough, use it to train and outfit yourselves for war. Then go to Uganda, root out Joseph Kony, and kill him. I’m sure Jason Russell, sporting his latest die job, will be eager to lead you into battle. Or would he? Maybe the prospect of killing would inspire the gentle Mister Russell to reassess his priorities, stay home, and hold on to his nuts. -- SWiPL Porn

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:48 PM | Your Say (1)

"Never argue with a pig. It just frustrates you and irritates the pig."

Another reason why I don't argue with leftists
is that I have only to mentally travel back to my own hellseein' daze, and imagine how I would have reacted if a so-called conservative had presumed to instruct me about anything. I was 100% unreceptive, and would use the occasion merely to enlist them into my persecutory fantasy world. Because I was just as intelligent then as I am today -- maybe even more so, given the inevitable loss of brain cells -- I was virtually always able to run circles around myself and repel any interlocutor. -- One Cʘsmos: Truth Sets Us Free, Freedom Sets Us on Truth

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:46 PM | Your Say (4)

"Consent does not alter the act’s reality; it merely adds a conspirator to the killing."

As it turns out, the boyfriend in Room 105 has a ready answer for us. 
"It is only a blob of cells right now," says he, having picked up the phrase in health class at Unreal High.  But a blob of cells is precisely what the developing child is not.  A blob may have a more or less spherical shape, but that is not what makes it a blob.  A germinated seed may have a more or less spherical shape, yet it is certainly no blob.  A blob is an undifferentiated mass. It is lifeless, unless it comes flowing from the ball return at the bowling alley in a bad movie.  But the embryo is already a self-integrating organism.  It is a living thing.  It is human – not canine, not equine, not porcine.  It dwells within the mother’s body -- and she is, eo ipso, not a mother-to-be, but already a mother. --The Strange Happenings at the Unreal Hotel — Crisis Magazine

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:24 PM | Your Say (1)

115-year-old electric car gets same 40 miles to the charge as Chevy Volt

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Meet the Roberts electric car. Built in 1896, it gets a solid 40 miles to the charge
— exactly the mileage Chevrolet advertises for the Volt, the highly touted $31,645 electric car General Motors CEO Dan Akerson called “not a step forward, but a leap forward.” -- Chevy Volt | Electric Car | Old Car | The Daily Caller

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:12 PM | Your Say (10)

"Out here is also a refuge..."

for a few hours per week from the nonsense of the modern age,
the lectures to buy a Volt from the non-car owning Steven Chu, the calls for civility from "punish our enemies" Barack Obama, the warning about carbon footprints from private-jetting Al Gore, our "downright mean country"€ bookended with Costa del Sol, Aspen, and Vail, the "two Americas" paralleled with "John's Room"€ the New York Times editorials berating the 1% coupled with a $24 million payout to its own departing CEO. How pleasant to be far distant from that bunch, and their nonstop scolding, whining, and lecturing that serves as a pathetic projection of their own elite tastes and guilty desires. -- Works and Days » Welcome to the California Outback

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:08 PM | Your Say (0)

"There are about two or three million rural Californians who drive but have learned to do so only very recently and pilot used huge (cheap) and dangerous gas-guzzlers."

At some point, the odds run out and you have a rendezvous with one.
They do not speak or read English well, if at all, and often have no (official) driver's license, no insurance, no registration, and no exact knowledge of U.S. traffic laws (I know all this politically insensitive information because five drivers have ended up in my vineyard, fled, and left their wrecked cars behind). -- Works and Days サ Welcome to the California Outback

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

Not, it would seem, the Onion. Yet.

Wi-Fi Hotspots Made of Homeless People: Not as Horrible as They Seem

It seemed straight out of South by South Onion: the homeless people of Austin, being used as wi-fi hotspots for bandwidth-hungry, gadget-happy conference-goers. Wait, Homeless Hotspots? Wi-fi hotspots made out of homeless people? It's got to be a joke, right?

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:14 PM | Your Say (0)

March 11, 2012

The Dunning–Kruger Effect

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The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which the unskilled suffer from illusory superiority,
mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes. Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. As Kruger and Dunning conclude, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others." -- Dunning–Kruger effect - Wikipedia

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:22 PM | Your Say (1)

"The licentiousness of the [American] multitude is the supreme law.... "

Here the licentiousness of the people is more hedonistically focused.
The Americans have built an empire by defending the free world against totalitarian threats (Nazism, Communism, radical Islam, etc.). Instead of extracting money from other states, the Americans have worked out an arrangement whereby they export their inflation. This allows a high standard of living on the basis of a "service economy,"€ with manufacturing jobs disappearing year to year. Under this arrangement, mediocre men have been elected to the U.S. presidency. Some have been demagogues. None are equal to the crisis.   -- The Incompetent Many | JR Nyquist | FINANCIAL SENSE
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Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:12 PM | Your Say (0)

Fisking Fluke’s Fables

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Just before gutting Sandra Fluke (rhymes with “luck”), Teresa in Fort Worth asks, "Is it just me,
or has anyone else noticed a very disturbing trend among law school students recently? I mean, it seems like every time some young advocate gets some face time in front of a camera, he/she is telling the most outrageous stories, and the press just eats it up. -- Koch's Tour

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:53 PM | Your Say (2)

"The problem here, as I see it, is empathy:"

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Since around the time of Bill Clinton’s victory twenty years ago,
The Left has enjoyed easy victory by peddling their nonsense to the moderates I mentioned above — the charitable, kind-hearted, hardworking moderates. Who are suckers. Because those suckers cannot tell the widow apart from the town drunk, and make no effort or achievement toward understanding there are people walking around determined to live off of the sweat of others. People who think only idiots work hard. And why shouldn’t those town-drunks think such a thing, if their lives have been devoted to suckering the sucker moderates — and it has always worked? -- House of Eratosthenes

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:24 PM | Your Say (0)

Emo, don't let the sun set on you in Iraq.

90 students in Iraq stoned to death for having 'Emo hair and tight clothes' | Mail Online

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:01 PM | Your Say (3)

Scott Simpson Shares My Shame

I'll never be on the cover of Ebony, and I just need to come to terms with that. -- @scottsimpson

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

The Wonders of the Arab Spring Continue

Insurgent commanders say most of their weapons come from the very army they're fighting,
either seized or purchased in a thriving illicit trade. Intermediaries such as a merchant known as Abu Hussein arrange arms deals between the two sides. Abu Hussein described how the rebels will shoot a few times at a government checkpoint, giving soldiers the cover to fire off their weapons. If the troops expend 200 bullets, Abu Hussein said, they may tell their superiors that 400 bullets were fired. The remaining 200 bullets will be sold to the rebels, typically for 150 Syrian pounds (about $2.50) per bullet. -- Syrian rebels in Idlib bide their time - latimes.com

"Hey, don't shoot it all in one face!"

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:39 PM | Your Say (0)

"Insane as this scenario is, the Democrat-media complex insists that everyone take it seriously. "

"The most basic issue here is not religious morality, individual liberty, or fiscal responsibility.
It’s that a society in which middle-aged children of privilege testify before the most powerful figures in the land to demand state-enforced funding for their sex lives at a time when their government owes more money than anyone has ever owed in the history of the planet is quite simply nuts. -- The Fluke Charade - Mark Steyn - National Review Online

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

Edukation Now

Cape Elizabeth High Says The Hell With Trying To Educate Anybody, Let’s Hand Out 10 Inch TVs And Be Done With It | The Rumford Meteor

Students At A Loss Where To Find Artist Materials When Local Store Closes And Steve Jobs Doesn’t Sell Any | The Rumford Meteor

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:41 AM | Your Say (4)

March 10, 2012

How to Write about Africa

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize.
An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress. In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates.

Describe, in detail, naked breasts (young, old, conservative, recently raped, big, small) or mutilated genitals, or enhanced genitals. Or any kind of genitals.
And dead bodies. Or, better, naked dead bodies. And especially rotting naked dead bodies. Remember, any work you submit in which people look filthy and miserable will be referred to as the ‘real Africa’, and you want that on your dust jacket. Do not feel queasy about this: you are trying to help them to get aid from the West. The biggest taboo in writing about Africa is to describe or show dead or suffering white people.-- Granta 92: The View from Africa | Archive

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:00 PM | Your Say (6)

"Gay is the new black and goy is the new gay."

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"Funny, you don't look goyish."

Has anybody ever said "gay is the new black" before me, or did I just make that up?
Why, yes, that phrase, in quotes, brings up 855,000 pages. So, other than the 849,999 who beat me to it, I was the first to notice that. On the other hand, "goy is the new gay" has never been said before in the history of the Internet, which suggests that nobody has noticed before it because it's not true.) Then, it dawned on me ... -- Steve Sailer's iSteve Blog: Chris Hughes buys The New Republic

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:07 AM | Your Say (2)

"Kill for Mother Teresa! Sing for laryngitis! Screw for chastity!"

On Wednesday, White House officials summoned dozens of leaders of nonprofit organizations that strongly back the health law to help them coordinate plans for a prayer vigil, press conferences and other events outside the court when justices hear arguments for three days beginning March 26.
Hmmm. A prayer vigil for Obamacare. -- Let us pray | Power Line

But.... but..... I thought this was the administration and party that loved underscoring the separation of church and state.

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:55 AM | Your Say (3)

March 9, 2012

AND THE EATBEAT GOES ON: Olive Garden Reviewer Marilyn Hagerty Takes America by Storm

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Best. Story. Of. The. Week. Keeps. Getting. Better.

Marilyn Hagerty said her daughter, Gail Hagerty of Bismarck, urged her to read the Facebook comments about her review.
“I told her I’m working on my Sunday column and I’m going to play bridge this afternoon, so I don’t have time to read all this crap,” she said. -- Marilyn Hagerty takes America by viral storm (VIDEO) via Grand Forks Herald

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:42 PM | Your Say (8)

THE EATBEAT: Long-awaited Olive Garden receives warm welcome [Bumped for the Pizza Wars]

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"It had been a few years since I ate at the older Olive Garden in Fargo,
so I studied the two manageable menus offering appetizers, soups and salads, grilled sandwiches, pizza, classic dishes, chicken and seafood and filled pastas. At length, I asked my server what she would recommend. She suggested chicken Alfredo, and I went with that. Instead of the raspberry lemonade she suggested, I drank water. She first brought me the familiar Olive Garden salad bowl with crisp greens, peppers, onion rings and yes — several black olives." -- | Grand Forks Herald | Grand Forks, North Dakota

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:41 PM | Your Say (32)

Gloria Steinem Emerges from Grave

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"It's alive, ALIVE!"

Today in Palm Beach County a previously believed to be dead of old age Gloria Steinem,
overcome with anguish and unable to speak, was seen holding up a hand-lettered sign demanding the immediate arrest of Rush Limbaugh, for his crimes against huwomynity - specifically for insulting Sandra Fluke (rhymes with 'fu*k') on his national radio program last week. As bystanders "rushed" to support her aging and frail body, Ms Steinem attempted again to speak, but was unable to, obviously because of the decades of pent-up womyn rage held captive in her wrinkled but beautiful as ever womynness. -- The People's Cube

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:31 PM | Your Say (13)

"They hired consultants to restructure, and the consultants were instructed to ask me how I did it. "

"I told them I didn't do anything. I let other people do it.
I told them that when the customers called, we always answered the phone, and asked them what they wanted. I told the estimators to accurately determine what it would cost us to perform the required work. I submitted the bids on time and told the customer I wanted the job. If they said someone else was cheaper I instructed them to hire them, and to please keep us in mind for the future. I kept accurate track of how we were doing, and made sure we charged for all the work we performed. And I directed that we deliver the jobs on-time no matter what. When I ran out of one kind of work, I looked for work that was similar to the kind we already knew how to do. I hired good people and I trusted them, while expecting a lot from them. That was it. They seemed disappointed." -- Sippican Cottage: I Wrote This In 2006. There's Been A Lot Of Effluent Under The Bridge Since Then. I'm Still In Business

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:38 PM | Your Say (2)

"The glow of Jesus has come to us distorted"

by the distance light has to traverse over 2000 years to reach the here and now,
bounced along the way off such cracked mirrors, bent copper pans and dented silver chalices that the Gospel writers and Church leaders have been, and all men are. It’s miraculous that unknown outside a little sliver of a remote, benighted province at its inception, and multiplexed with great noise as it has been since, the transmission has reached us at all. Admitting that we don’t know where the noise ends and the transcendent music begins could rebuild a stout foundation for a new Christian spirituality. “There lives more faith in an honest doubt,“ wrote one of the great 10-percenters of the 19th century, Alfred Tennyson, “than in half the creeds.” -- Gates of Vienna: The Bee and the Lamb, Part 5 [HT: Birddog @ Maggie's Farm]

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:15 AM | Your Say (2)

March 8, 2012

"How birth control boosts women’s salaries. "

As if an actual pill manufactures paychecks out of thin air. What's the final destination here? A policy similar to China's one-child limitation? Forced birth control dosing? -- Stuff ォ Gucci Little Piggy

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:19 AM | Your Say (2)

Awwwwwww: Teeny-weeny baby squirrel wearing a teeny-weeny purple cast

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The squirrel, named Violet, endured the ordeal when the branch that held her nest was cut down. -- Animal Tracks

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:55 AM | Your Say (4)

The "New" iPad

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"It's the large print version of my iPhone, that's the thing. iPad mostly does the same things my iPhone does it's just slightly less convenient. " -- No thanks! - Ross and Burbank

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:19 AM | Your Say (1)

March 7, 2012

"What we require is a handbook,"

a close study of Bretibart's tactics and methods, covering how he analyzed the information he was given, and how he chose to utilize it in the new media sphere.
We know that he carefully subdivided and scheduled the material on hand according to the response of the media and the liberal elites. How did he do this? What were his criteria? How did he reach his decisions? If we wish to continue Breitbart's mission -- and who doesn't? -- this is the very minimum of what we need to know. -- Articles: Emulating Breitbart

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

Aside of the Day

"It's hard to be surprised when you pay attention to history. At least it's hard to be honestly surprised."-- TMUtah in a remark about Side-Lines: "Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. "

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:45 PM | Your Say (3)

The Poisonous Puff Adder and His Party

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The Party of Hate | Power Line
Barack Obama has been a terrible president in many ways, but perhaps his most poisonous legacy is his cynical fomenting of partisan hate to advance his own political interests. After three years, we have learned that “hope” is not the word that we should associate with the Obama presidency.

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:09 PM | Your Say (2)

All things must pass...

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Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:53 PM | Your Say (1)

"Leon Panetta recently confirmed, the President makes the ultimate decision as to whether the American will be killed: "

"€œ[The] President of the United States obviously reviews these cases, reviews the legal justification, and in the end says, go or no go."
So that is the "process"€ which Eric Holder yesterday argued constitutes "due process" as required by the Fifth Amendment before the government can deprive of someone of their life: the President and his underlings are your accuser, your judge, your jury and your executioner all wrapped up in one, acting in total secrecy and without your even knowing that he's accused you and sentenced you to death, and you have no opportunity even to know about, let alone confront and address, his accusations; is that not enough due process for you? -- Attorney General Holder defends execution without charges - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:39 PM | Your Say (4)

"Odśnieżanie po łódzku" -- or -- Where Do Polish Jokes Come From?

Poland of course!

Polish lumberjack returns chainsaw to store where he bought it. Tells clerk, "You said I could cut down ten times as many trees with this as before. I only cut down twice as many as before. I demand refund!"

Clerk says, "Maybe the chain is dull. Let's test it out." Clerk pulls the rope to start the chainsaw.

Customer says,"What's that noise?"

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:56 AM | Your Say (4)

March 6, 2012

Congress Threatened with Increase in Intelligence, Sanity

Rep. Dennis Kucinich suffers primary defeat in Ohio - The Washington Post

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:43 PM | Your Say (11)

"Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. "

Both are totalitarian ideologies. The totalitarian nature of Political Correctness is revealed nowhere more clearly than on college campuses,
many of which at this point are small ivy covered North Koreas, where the student or faculty member who dares to cross any of the lines set up by the gender feminist or the homosexual-rights activists, or the local black or Hispanic group, or any of the other sainted “victims” groups that PC revolves around, quickly find themselves in judicial trouble. Within the small legal system of the college, they face formal charges – some star-chamber proceeding – and punishment. That is a little look into the future that Political Correctness intends for the nation as a whole. -- The Origins of Political Correctness :: Accuracy In Academia

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:31 PM | Your Say (8)

Can Bill save Barack? "The spin from the left that Republicans are in disarray."

But The Won is begging Bill Clinton to bail him out -- again.
To be sure, Barack Obama had --€” as of January 31 --€” $75,953,128 in the bank. But Barack Obama spent $63,236,869. That is more than any Republican has spent so far. And Obama is unopposed in the Democratic Party primaries. -- « Don Surber

[Only if Bill saves Barack can Bill have a hope of keeping Hillary out of the country for five more years. ]

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:36 AM | Your Say (3)

“Young women of the world, have you all lost your minds?”

You demand I buy your birth control, but you don't even require your dates to buy you dinner before using it. Discuss. at Haemet Back in the Dark Ages, men used to buy women diamonds before getting them into bed.
Now that you've done away with that requirement, how about at least asking men to buy your Ortho Tri Cyclen? If you're an equal partner, negotiating a sexual encounter, why are you so unequal that you're the ones crying to rich men in Congress for help, like Oliver Twist asking for another serving of food, while all the guys on Law Review are writing their Notes and applying to clerkships without a care in the world?

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:31 AM | Your Say (4)

Johnson: "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:25 AM | Your Say (4)

"Don't Think and Strive"

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Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:44 AM | Your Say (1)

March 5, 2012

"New York City wasn't attacked on September 11. It was sacked."

It is still being sacked in small ways today.
Paris gets sacked every time there's a major or minor riot. Europe is slowly being sacked in every city with a sizable Muslim population. Conquest is not a pretty thing, but it is what pre-moderns do to moderns who forget that power doesn't come from seminars or iPhones, it comes from the willingness to kill people in order to keep your cities, your seminars and your iPhones. -- Sultan Knish a blog by Daniel Greenfield

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:15 PM | Your Say (1)

"Slut:" Request for Clarification

1) It's okay to go on slutwalks, right?

2) No women are really sluts, right?

3) If there are women on a slutwalk and they are not sluts, what, indeed, are they? And if they are walking but not sluts what makes their slutwalk a slutwalk?

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:35 PM | Your Say (8)

Mistaeks Were Made

A gust lifted the right wing and main landing gear off the runway just before the spoilers rose and exactly when the auto-brakes activated. Yikes! The auto-brake computer could not handle one main gear on the runway and the other still airborne, so it said, "See ya later boys, and, by the way, I am taking number four brake with me." -- Flight Level 390: Approved for Line Operations

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:18 PM | Your Say (1)

"This is very similar to the tactics of the Red Chinese Army in Tibet in the mid-20th century."

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"It is the same satanism afoot now with the Obama regime. They won't be satisfied until every Catholic priest desecrates the Eucharist himself
by attempting to force him to give the Eucharist to the enemies of Christ. It isn't enough for the Obama regime to simply promote and pay for abortion. No. They won't stop until they force the Bride of Christ to commit abortions Herself. Please notice that the satanic Obama regime isn't attacking the United Methodist church, the Presbyterian church, or superfun rockband church. All of these attacks are specifically targeted at the Catholic Church, and now at the Eucharist specifically. You might want to go ahead and draw a conclusion from that." -- Ann Barnhardt

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:17 PM | Your Say (10)

First Things

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Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:57 PM | Your Say (3)

"As with the Republicans, Limbaugh operates by one core principle: Always Retreat. And that is why conservatism has failed and one reason why American democracy is a thing of the past."

Limbaugh's apology demonstrates the fundamental cowardice of the conservative media.
They are spooked as easily as neurotic thoroughbred horses. He's the one with the massive audience, so why should he pay any attention to what his advertisers want? By allowing them to dictate his limits, he's making himself their bitch. That's fine, if that's his desire, but then he would do well to abandon all of the heroic posturing of which he is so fond. -- Vox Popoli: Run away, Rush, run away

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:18 PM | Your Say (16)

Obama and His Admiration for Omar. Black? Check. Raised by Grandmother? Check. Gay and Out? Check and Double-Check!

Just two regular guys, discussing Linsanity, Blake Griffin's jump shot, what it's like to pitch a baseball while wearing a bulletproof vest, and — as the conversation wound down — The Wire.
Asked to name the greatest Wire character of all time (let it never be said that Grantland does not ask the tough questions!), the Commander in Chief didn't hesitate: "It's gotta be Omar, right? I mean, that guy is unbelievable, right?" --Smacketology — A tournament to determine The Wire's greatest character - Grantland

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:06 PM | Your Say (1)

Obvious Innovation #7

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Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:55 PM | Your Say (10)

"All they want to do is talk about sex. And they won't shut up. It has gone too far. "

Let us first have a moment of silence for the 7000 civilians killed in Syria.
Ok now let's talk about the sex life of collegiate women and what it means in American peasant politics. And while we're at it, let's talk about how one man's insult means everything and how his apology means nothing. But before that lets talk about how another man's untimely death provides an opportunity for his political enemies to Write his obituary and how .. Nah let's not. I believe that the portsiders are against the privatization of anything, including and especially sexual behavior. -- Of Sluts, Sex and Silence - Cobb

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

It's Girl Scout Cookie Season...Get Them While You Still Can

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From The Looking Spoon

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:26 AM | Your Say (2)

Our Tepid Present Politics

Our foreign-policy hawks are doves compared to Teddy Roosevelt;
our left-wing populists are boring centrists compared to William Jennings Bryan; our “conservative Catholics” are liberals by the standards of the pre-Vatican II Church; our militant atheists are timid trimmers compared to their utopian predecessors. And our demagogues — well, I’m not sure whether we really “live in a time of political and media demagoguery unparalleled since the 19th century,” but even if Frum is right, in the 19th century “media demagoguery” on racial issues involved whipping up white hysteria to defend lynchings, poll taxes and Jim Crow, whereas in the 21st century it involves hurling bogus accusations of racism and reverse racism in a landscape where everyone agrees on the principle of racial equality. -- Speaking of the Dead - Ross Douthat

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:24 AM | Your Say (1)

March 4, 2012

Today in the Annals of Settled Science

A study led by Jonathan Tilly of the Massachusetts General Hospital overturns the decades-long idea that women are born with all the eggs they will ever have. It reports that women of reproductive age carry ovarian stem cells, meaning that they can produce new eggs.
So, to recap: after centuries of intensive scientific research we are still learning amazing and surprising things about our bodies. But climate science is settled once and for all and no further questions need to be asked. -- | Via Meadia

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:22 PM | Your Say (2)

Flukeness

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"In a society in which sex is just recreational, and nobody reproduces except the incompetent
(because nobody can afford to), womanhood loses value. Women devolve from their previous stature, as our sisters and mothers, and guardians of virtue, definers of our culture, to a bunch of screaming, constantly complaining, trouble-making harridans who can’t pay for their own stuff." -- House of Eratosthenes

Why Do I Know The Name "Sandra Fluke"?
Every issue gets a mascot. The mascot of contraception coverage has been chosen (by someone), and she is Sandra Fluke. I don't want to know about these people. Stop telling me their names. Who decided this made sense as a way to discuss political issues? Is this a conscious strategy on the part of one side or another? Will they ever knock it off?

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:52 AM | Your Say (5)

The Biggest Lie Is the One They Live: “You do not fight the narrative.

The narrative will destroy you. The narrative is all-powerful.
The narrative rules ... a set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It's so powerful because it's unconscious. It's not like they get together every morning and decide "These are the lies we tell today."€™ No, that would be too crude and honest. Rather, it's a set of casual, nonrigorous assumptions about a reality they've never really experienced that's arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves ... They know for example, that Bush is a moron and Obama a saint. They know communism was a phony threat cooked up by right-wing cranks as a way to leverage power to the executive. They know Saddam didn't have weapons of mass destruction, the response to Katrina was f***ed up, torture never works and mad Vietnam sniper Carl Hitchcock killed the saintly peace demonstrators. Cheney's a devil, Biden's a genius. Soft power good, hard power bad. Forgiveness excellent, punishment counterproductive, capital punishment a sin." -- Stephen Hunter in "I, Sniper" quoted at Belmont Club's Shadow of the Past

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:27 AM | Your Say (5)

March 3, 2012

"Anyway, the birth control ruse is merely the KY Jelly"

to ease us into the giant butt-fucking that is nationalized health care. 
If conservatives buy into the frame that liberals are trying to push birth control on us – and, as a commenter pointed out, if we start talking dollars and cents – we’ve lost the game.  The response should always be that any sort of government mandate – whether that be for individuals to buy health care or companies to provide certain pre-approved plans – is unconstitutional and coercive.  To get sidetracked by birth control or morality plays is to let mandated health care become the norm.  To let mandated health care become the norm is to set the table for a debate on nationalized health care.  And who do you think will win that debate? --Fluke « Gucci Little Piggy
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Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:44 PM | Your Say (3)

Rush Limbaugh Apologizes to Sandra Fluke

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:01 AM | Your Say (2)

That Slut Sure Came In Handy This Week

Barack Obama's Diary

"Anyways, I spoke to the aforesaid student on the phone, praising her courage. That helped make one more day when we distract the MSM [what Jay Carney calls the KAMM or Kiss Ass Media] from the state of the economy. The Republicans have already been distracting the electorate from the jobs issue for weeks, thank goodness. Let's hope that extends through Super Tuesday. Well, that's it for today, better close the laptop, say a bedtime prayer to myself.

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:43 AM | Your Say (0)

Obama's Edsel: Volt Suspends Production, Lays Off Those Producing

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"This isn’t just the car we wanted to build. This is the car America had to build.” -- GM temporarily halts production of Volt - The Hill's Transportation Report

The car company had hoped to sell 45,000 Chevy Volts in America this year, according to the Detrot News, but has only sold about 1,626 over the first two months of 2012. GM blamed the lack of sales in January on “exaggerated” media reports and the federal government's investigation into Volt batteries catching fire, which officially began in November and ended Jan. 21. -- GM laying off 1300 due to low Volt sales | Campaign 2012 | Washington Examiner [HY: Moneyrunner ]

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:06 AM | Your Say (3)

A head shot only encourages them

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In certain Democrat strongholds... the dead vote too.

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:52 AM | Your Say (3)

March 2, 2012

Hitler learns Georgetown doesn't cover contraception

-- Don Sensing @ Sense of Events

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:55 PM | Your Say (4)

"David Frum exceeded Andrew Breitbart in one measure only, span of life."

But not in life. David Frum will die as he lived,
gray, timid, small, spiteful, cramped in thought and bent in spirit, slender of talent and obese in self-regard, unloved, unnoticed, unremembered and unread. -- That About Wraps It Up For David Frum

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:03 PM | Your Say (3)

Apologize?

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Andrew Breitbart's Legacy @ Sister Toldjah

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:48 AM | Your Say (1)

Top of the Grand-MILF Food Chain!

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55-year-old grandma Sharon Simmons wants to be Dallas Cowboys cheerleader | Larry Brown Sports
Sharon Simmons is 55 years old and a grandmother of two, but that’s not stopping her from trying to become a new member of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleading team. “I thought that’s something I never tried. I always wanted to try out. I got real close in my early 20′s but got busy raising my daughter. And I thought, why not now?”

[HT: NeoNeoCon]

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:22 AM | Your Say (10)

March 1, 2012

Breitbart's Obama tapes will be out soon: "ANYONE that is willing to vote for Obama this time around will not be deterred"

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by ANY video, story, etc. Obama could come out TOMORROW on National News and declare that his next move (should he be reelected)
is to put Whites in concentration camps to work for blacks (as reparations for slavery) AND...THE VERY SAME WHITE PEOPLE that voted for him last time would vote for him AGAIN to prove they weren't racist, and the VERY SAME BLACK PEOPLE that voted for him last time would vote for him AGAIN because he's black. THE VAST MAJORITY OF PEOPLE that voted for him last time WILL vote for him AGAIN this time...the man can do NO wrong in their eyes... Our only chance is to increase OUR turnout at the polls, and stay vigilant for voter fraud (because IT'S coming)..." -- Bannon @ The Right Scoop -

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:16 PM | Your Say (5)

One Typewriter is Still Made and It's Transparent

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Especially designed for Inmate use in [prison] education departments,

law libraries, administrative areas and in personal living quarters. Easy to use, yet packed with automatic features, the Swintec 2600CC will bring you the power of Correction Memory, Format Memory, Decimal Tabulation, and so much more. If you want a reliable electronic typewriter that's designed for comfort and priced for value, count on the Swintec 2600CC. Highlights : Transparent cabinet facilitates searching -- Swintec Clear Cabinet Electronic office Typewriter - With Spellproof

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:59 PM | Your Say (1)

"Apologies take on the character of surrender and demands for them the nature of ultimatums."

"Rather than proving civil discourse is alive and well it may indicate it is rapidly coming to an end.
The Great War began with a demand for an apology by Austria and Hungary to Serbia, one that it could not possibly make. It was calculated to humiliate the Serbs, a fact which the diplomats calculated would have limited effect. They were wrong. The development of a crisis is never linear. It starts slow and imperceptibly gathers speed until all of a sudden, quite without anyone noticing it, it has spun out of control. -- Belmont Club サ What Shall You Regret?

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:37 PM | Your Say (1)

iowahawk on Breitbart

Breitbart, of course, reveled in it, and took great delight in retweeting and exposing that hate,
the real source of which is clear: unlike meek approval-seeking chickenshits like me, he relished poking at hornets' nests, lifting up rocks, calling out the bullies on the playground. He made himself an enemy of corrupt political con artists who operate on latent threats of thuggery, called them out on it, and, best of all, knew exactly how they would react before they did. He deserved a Pulitzer, but got something better: their opprobrium. Plenty will be written about Andrew Breitbart in the next few days, some flattering, some not. As for me, I will drink two beers in his honor tonight, and remember him the way he was last December in Venice - a big, lovable, random, generous, fearless, patriotic grinning goofball surrounded by his family, basking in the coolness of it all. -- iowahawk: Andrew Breitbart, 1969-2012

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:15 PM | Your Say (2)

Breitbart

"The media is dominated by people who disagree with American exceptionalism--the academic Marxist crowd's worldview--
and somebody needed to start taking it on directly. The Right has focused its energy and money on the political process, and it just kind of shrugged off culture. But culture is everything in this country. Once you get down to the political level, you've already lost the battle. --What Andrew Breitbart Got About the Internet - Rebecca J. Rosen - Technology - The Atlantic

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:49 PM | Your Say (3)

The New York Times Has Some "Doubts" About the Taliban

Beheadings Raise Doubts That Taliban Have Changed - NYTimes.com
KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban took the four men to the main bazaar in a southern Afghanistan district at evening prayer on Sunday, regional government officials said, denounced them as government spies because they were carrying satellite phones, then beheaded them in front of local residents who had been summoned to watch.

Me, I'd cite the 4 beheadings as proof positive, but what do I know?

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:32 PM | Your Say (2)

Weed Whacking Wolcott

Evidently James Wolcott has a book out. Joseph Epstein isn't having it:
"Whether he is writing about the media, popular culture, or politics—on politics he eschews analysis and plays the insult comedian, a Bill Maher with a gaudier vocabulary—Wolcott is intensely, relentlessly, hopelessly with-it, breathing heavily in the attempt to stay 20 minutes ahead of the loop. Always a mistake, this venture, because with-it-ness does not comport well with getting older, and Wolcott, who will be 60 this year, is no longer a kid. Unless he is up for wearing one of those depressing grey ponytails, James Wolcott, clearly, needs a new style. In fact, he needs an entire intellectual makeover." --Memoirs of a Voyeur | The Weekly Standard

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:20 AM | Your Say (5)

"Don't Mourn. Organize" -- Joe Hill

Andrew%20Breitbart%20Fighter.jpg
By Bosch Fawstin

Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:01 AM | Your Say (6)