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December 31, 2014
If I was a psychopath.
…and I was firmly ensconced in the halls of power within a massive enforcement regime; and if I hated the exercise of an inviolable right by the mundanes I rule over to the point where I thought the state should “brainwash” people against it; and if I knew I would be able to get away with treason to undermine that right by smuggling contraband into a foreign country to foment a crisis in order to pass laws that chip away at that right; and if hundreds of people in that foreign country died as a result of my treason; and if officers in the very agencies I oversee die as a result of my treason; and if I have zero empathy for any of said people; would I be OK with officers getting killed in my own country by people I motivate to create a crisis that can help me get the laws passed to chip away at the right I so despise?
Yeah, I probably would.
If I was a psychopath.
-- Ivy Mike CafePosted by gerardvanderleun at 11:36 AM | Your Say (2)
Man of the Year: The Grand Jurors in Ferguson
The Man of the Year for the Don Surber blog are 12 people whose names should never be disclosed to the public, the 12 grand jurors in St. Louis County who exonerated Officer Darren Wilson in the justifiable homicide of Michael Brown.
Their anonymity is crucial to the criminal justice system in the United States of America. Only one other person did as much to protect our civil liberties, Steve Green of Hobby Lobby, but Glenn Beck already selected him -- and the 12 grand jurors had nothing to gain but nevertheless, they refused to cave in to political pressure, and indict Officer Wilson. Their refusal to do so exhibits the courage that our Founding Fathers believed average Americans have.Don Surber: Man of the Year
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:41 AM | Your Say (3)
"We no longer believe in God so we keep inventing extremely poor imitations of him in our celebrity culture."
movie magazines, and television programs covered so-called celebrities. These were film stars, sport stars, and café society playboys and playgirls. No longer. With the arrival of the most annoying and malevolent invention since television—the Internet—hype now has expanded from the upper regions of stardom down to include almost everyone: businessmen, publishers, pop musicians, cosmetic tycoons, fashion designers, fashion designers’ assistants, fashion designers’ bum boys, record executives, gay liberationists, transgender activists, porn stars, plastic surgeons, victims of plastic surgeons, fashion victims, celebrity criminals, gossip columnists, gossip columnists’ assistants, professional confessional autobiographers—you name it, hype has made it famous. Late night talk show hosts are now on any A-list of the White House, 10 Downing Street, and the Elysée Palace.Hype's Premier Task - Taki's Magazine
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:18 AM | Your Say (5)
Spaghetti Toes
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:55 AM | Your Say (0)
December 30, 2014
"Ve haf wayz uf making you suffer"
Why Airlines Want to Make You Suffer
The necessity of degrading basic service provides a partial explanation for the fact that, in the past decade, the major airlines have done what they can to make flying basic economy, particularly on longer flights, an intolerable experience. For one thing, as the Wall Street Journal has documented, airlines have crammed more seats into the basic economy section of the airplane, even on long-haul flights. The seats, meanwhile, have gotten smaller—they are narrower and set closer together. Bill McGee, a contributing editor to Consumer Reports who worked in the airline industry for many years, studied seat sizes and summarized his findings this way: “The roomiest economy seats you can book on the nation’s four largest airlines are narrower than the tightest economy seats offered in the 1990s.”[To read enter "new yorker why the airlines want to make you suffer" in Google search and click link.]
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:10 PM | Your Say (8)
Of course that's what our space alien overlords would tell them to say...
CIA admits: All those UFO sightings in 1950s? 'It was us'
"Consequently, once U-2s started flying at altitudes above 60,000 feet, air-traffic controllers began receiving increasing numbers of UFO reports." The CIA actually cross-checked the UFO reports with its flight records, it noted in the document, but in instances when it verified the UFO was really a U-2, it stayed mum.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:48 PM | Your Say (3)
What about you people, Mr. Wilson, what do you have?
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:40 PM | Your Say (2)
Bone Music: How Banned Western Music in the Soviet Union Was Printed on Repurposed X-Ray Records
With the aid of a special device, people started pressing banned jazz and rock n’ roll music on thick radiographs scavenged from the dumpsters of hospitals. X-rays were plentiful (not to mention cheap), and while the records could only be pressed on a single side, the music they produced using a standard turntable was passable. The recordings even had a catchy name: bone music. From an interview with author Anya von Bremzen via NPR:“They would cut the X-ray into a crude circle with manicure scissors and use a cigarette to burn a hole. You’d have Elvis on the lungs, Duke Ellington on Aunt Masha’s brain scan—forbidden Western music captured on the interiors of Soviet citizens.” | Colossal
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:06 PM | Your Say (3)
This Just In: People Magazine's Last Minute Entry for "Headline of the Year"
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:30 PM | Your Say (0)
The Two Empires We Must Defeat
Like the more conventional imperial vision, the left's red Empire of Ideology depends on enlisting Muslims and Muslim countries into its ranks. T
his is the basis of the Red-Green alliance. These two types of imperialists are incapable of representing native workers or communities because they are transnationalists. Their vision is cosmopolitan, rather than representative. They are entranced with a byzantine international arrangement and uninterested in the lives of the people they are ruining. This Imperial blindness is why the West is falling so swiftly to Islam. It's why the pockets of resistance are coming from nations outside the imperial sphere.Sultan Knish:
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:04 PM | Your Say (0)
The Future is Null
The fact that all of this was thought up by science fiction writers a long time ago is lost on all of these folks.
I guess when you have letters after your name, dreaming up crazy nonsense is grant worthy, even when it is someone else’s crazy nonsense. Regardless, the Borg was thought up when they rebooted the Star Trek series for TV. That was ripped off from the first Star Trek movie when Voyager returns after having acquired all knowledge in the universe. People who take a new spin on this bit are always heralded as futurists, people with grand imaginations that think up out-of-the-box scenarios. The reality is it takes little to no imagination or intelligence. What’s tough is imagining a world where we are are the dominant life form. That’s what pushes the envelope of imagination.at The Z Blog
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:33 AM | Your Say (0)
The Future Of Broadcast News And Punditry
It dawned on me that within a decade or at most two,
there will be no room on the airwaves for the ill-informed or the deeply biased. Information flows are too fast for the slow, too complicated for the dense. Every cable channel will have to jettison their good-looking but dim-witted anchors and correspondents and find good-looking, smart people. In this regard Fox News has led the way with Megyn Kelly and Bret Baier, CNN with Jake Tapper, and NBC with Chuck Todd, but look for more network execs to realize that the public is increasingly sophisticated about who is delivering the news. Stupid or biased –or worse, both– don’t stand a chance against the new wave of hyper-smart, energetic anchors and commentators.-- Hugh Hewitt
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:05 AM | Your Say (5)
Nobody Home
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:50 AM | Your Say (2)
Found
One wouldn’t think that news of wreckage and multiple bodies being pulled from the sea could be classified as “good.” But given what we already very strongly suspected—which was that AirAsia Flight QZ8501 had crashed, and that the likelihood of survivors was very poor—and given the continued unknown whereabouts of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the news that the wreckage of QZ8501 has been found and that 40 bodies have been recovered so far can be considered “good” in the relative sense, despite its horrific nature. neo-neocon » Blog Archive » Found
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:43 AM | Your Say (5)
December 29, 2014
Caption writer is not impressed by the new Sherlock
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:00 PM | Your Say (10)
Moral: Don't Piss On Your Porch -- The Real Feud Between the Hatfields and McCoys
due to the belief that he was a Confederate spy. Harmon lost the fight, but the Union troops went after Devil Anse anyway. Later, Harmon would shoot a friend of Devil Anse while stealing his horse. In turn, Devil Anse killed Harmon’s commanding officer, General Bill France, while he urinated off his front porch. In January 1865, there was a rumor circulating that Harmon was going to kill Devil Anse himself for killing General France. That rumored ended when Jim Vance, Devil Anse’s uncle and member of the Logan Wildcats, shot Harmon while he walked home to his family that he hadn’t seen in years.- - TIFO
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:25 PM | Your Say (5)
The World’s Most Majestic Trees
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:07 PM | Your Say (2)
The Importance of Not Being Seen
His bullet struck into the bank, and instantly our sharpshooter ran his ramrod down the hole made by the Johnnie’s ball, then lay down on his back and sighted along the ramrod. He accordingly perceived from the direction that his game was in the top of a thick bushy elm tree about one hundred yards in the front. It was then the work of less than a second to aim his long telescopic rifle at that tree and crack she went. Down tumbled Mr. Johnnie like a great crow out of his nest, and we had no more trouble from that source.Two Can Play – Futility Closet
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:08 PM | Your Say (1)
CROATOAN [UPDATE: OH RATS A BOGUS STORY!]
excavating an early 17th century Native American village near the Enoree River in Laurens County, North Carolina, have discovered seven contemporary Christian sepultures holding the skeletons of six males and one female of European origins. The bones have been proven through comparative DNA testing, to have belonged to members of the lost colony of Roanoke, established in 1585 on Roanoke Island, which disappeared mysteriously. More at:World News Daily
RATS!: Never Yet Melted » Mystery of Lost Colony Solved â BAD REPORT
This Roanoke story looked good and had a very plausible ring to it. There was no obvious giveaway.
But, one commenter, Gray, called the story out, and he is perfectly correct. There is no Professor William J. Monroe at Johns Hopkins or anywhere else.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:35 AM | Your Say (6)
This article appeared at HuffPo in 2008. It was written by Jackie Fuchs, a woman who went to law school with Obama
"The Barack with whom I went to school
wasn’t the Barack that debuted on the national stage at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, but the president suit was already on, even if it was still too big for him. In law school the only thing I would have voted for Obama to do would have been to shut up. When he made that speech almost exactly four years ago, I wanted to vote for him. For something, for anything."neo-neocon Looking back: a portrait of Obama in law school
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:28 AM | Your Say (13)
December 28, 2014
The dominance of the media by blacks is impressive.
If a white shoots a black to defend himself,it becomes national news for weeks, or months, and riots follow, but when blacks engage in their unending racial attacks on whites, the media demurely look the other way. The attackers are never black. They are “teens.” Reporters who say otherwise are likely to be fired. In effect, the thirteen percent censor the national press.Fred On Everything
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:50 PM | Your Say (8)
That future will be sterile, dull and short.
The brevity will be entirely driven by the sterility and the dullness.
Declining fertility rates are a direct result of the dreary dullness of modern times. The decision of a people to stop reproducing is just another way of saying they wish they had never been born. After all, you bring children into the world because you expect them to stand upon your shoulders. Children are about optimism. People don’t bring children into a dangerous or violent world, unless they expect things to get better. It turns out that they don’t bring children into a dull, sterile world either. The leaden sky obscures any possibility of a brighter future, so having children makes less sense.Boring Ourselves To Death at The Z Blog
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:26 PM | Your Say (2)
"Before this thing is over there will be a strongly worded report."
In Washington scandal news, the Internal Revenue Service,
responding to a subpoena, tells congressional investigators that it cannot produce 28 months of Lois Lerner’s emails because the hard drive they were stored on failed, and the hard drive was thrown away, and the backup tapes were erased, and no printed copies were saved — contrary to the IRS’s own record-keeping policy, which was eaten by the IRS’s dog. “It was just one crazy thing after another,” states the IRS, “and it got us to thinking: All these years we’ve been subjecting taxpayers to everything short of rectal probes if they can’t produce EVERY SINGLE DOCUMENT WE WANT, and here we lose YEARS worth of official records! So from now on, if taxpayers tell us they lost something, or just plain forgot to make a tax payment, we’ll be like, ‘Hey, whatever! Stuff happens!’ Because who are we to judge?”Dave Barry's Year in Review 2014 [HT- Morgan]
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:06 AM | Your Say (1)
While democide is not really a new development,
it was never as big as it was in the 20th century.
The major offenders have been; USSR (61 million killed), Communist Chinese (38 million), Nazi Germany (20 million), Nationalist Chinese (10 million), Imperial Japan (six million), Cambodian communists (two million), Ottoman Turks (1.8 million), Vietnam (1.6), Polish communists (1.5 million), Pakistan (1.5 million), Yugoslav communists (one million.) There are a number of surprises on this list. Most people think the Nazis were the worst offenders, but they are really only number three. That's because the communists managed to hide their mass murders for most of the century, aided by the tendency of the free world media to believe a lot of the propaganda regarding the "Worker's Paradise".Winning: Friendly Fire In The Name Of God
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:21 AM | Your Say (6)
December 27, 2014
I Was a Police Officer
--IOTW|
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:20 PM | Your Say (12)
Mike Rowe Notes
The vast majority of black Americans have never broken the law.
And yet, millions of lives are now entwined with the death of Brown and Garner. That’s not fair, but it’s hardly breaking news. Minorities are constantly stereotyped and the impression lingers. Looters and arsonists run amok, and Black America suffers the association. Now I’m trying to get my head around the fact that two cops are dead in Brooklyn, assassinated by a lunatic in “retaliation” for Ferguson and Staten Island. Unbelievable. How much worse can it get for the millions of law-abiding minorities, struggling to be seen as individuals?– Glenn Beck
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:47 AM | Your Say (12)
Woofers!
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:10 AM | Your Say (4)
271 Years Before Pantone, an Artist Mixed and Described Every Color Imaginable in an 800-Page Book
Not only would he begin the book with a bit about the use of color in painting, but would go on to explain how to create certain hues and change the tone by adding one, two, or three parts of water. The premise sounds simple enough, but the final product is almost unfathomable in its detail and scope.| Colossal
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:09 AM | Your Say (0)
What Wages Pay the Unpaid Apologists for Utter Evil?
None of the apologists for this evil seem to speak or act as if they fear the Jihadists.
Indeed, if anything, quite the opposite, as if they are utterly unaware of the danger, and regard anyone with a rational apprehension or caution toward the enemy to be the victim of a neurotic and irrational fear, namely, Islamophobia, or motivated by an irrational and contemptible hatred, namely, racism. These are not the words or actions of appeasers. The bespeak not fear, but a blindness to the danger nearly impossible to comprehend; and meanwhile, like Chicken Little, they take trembling steps under the sky, eyes wide and wet with unshed tears of fear, terrified of the weather, convinced the earth is about to be fried like an egg by Global Warming. (Or Global Cooling. Or Alar. Or DDT. Or arsenic in drinking water. Or a hole in the ozone layer. Or acid rain. Or radiated foods. Or…)| John C. Wright's Journal
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:38 AM | Your Say (0)
The argument is the people want their cars ugly and dull and maybe so, but why has a vibrant enthusiastic people suddenly decided to live in a black and white movie?
The reason is that dreaded word “efficient.”
It is the universal excuse for sucking the fun out of everything. Safety is its traveling partner, wreaking havoc on mankind. This Randall Parker post on self-driving cars is a good example of how it works. Self-driving cars will be “better” in the sense they will be more efficient. Then they will be considered safer as the technology exceeds the driving ability of the typical teenage driver. That’s when they become mandatory. Driving, as a simple pleasure, will be banned.Boring Ourselves To Death at The Z Blog
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:23 AM | Your Say (2)
December 26, 2014
One sincere year-end regret.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:06 PM | Your Say (4)
December 25, 2014
“His hands,” Ms. Tyson said, “are very soft.”
Driver Wanted for Obama Motorcade. Novice Welcome.
Bringing up the rear were police cars with their lights flashing and a Secret Service ambulance that follows the president wherever he travels. And in between were several vans filled with White House staff members and journalists, being piloted by volunteers like Natalie Tyson, a 24-year-old Bay Area graduate student wearing fluorescent orange sunglasses.... “If the motorcade ever comes under fire, it’s going to be a problem,” he said. “There are so many non-law-enforcement vehicles that it’s going to be a goat rope. Everyone will be responding, police officers and the Secret Service, and it will be all these people running around in a panic like the last scene of the ‘Blues Brothers’ movie, when there’s the big police chase that ends in a wreck of 50 police cars.”(Oh the country's in the very best of hands!)
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:33 PM | Your Say (7)
Statue of an Athlete
Bronze. Roman copy of Greek original of the 4th century BC from the school of Lysippos. Never Yet Melted ｻ
And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
--T. S. Eliot: "East Coker"
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:54 PM | Your Say (1)
Georges de La Tour The Birth of Christ
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:59 PM | Your Say (0)
Who owns Chicken Tikka Masala?
That’s absolutely believable given that, by 2009 Brits were consuming 25 million portions (2.5 billion pounds) of chicken tikka masala per year and 65,000 people were employed cooking and serving it. And that was just one-seventh of all the curries served in the nation. Syed Belal Ahmed’s Taste of Britain Curry Festival, hosted in Kolkata, India, in 2010, showcased over 50 distinctly British Indian dishes. Now there’s a yearly National Curry Week in Britain, a musical number written about chicken tikka masala by a nightclub owner from Newport, Gwent in Wales, and even a tinned version sold by Heinz, everyone’s number one source for goopy baked beans that make up a good part of a Full English Breakfast.| Roads & Kingdoms
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:54 PM | Your Say (5)
The Anonymous Publishing of "The Night Before Christmas,"
One interesting thing to note, however,
is that while the general appearance, in terms of the flowing beard, rosy cheeks, etc., of Santa Claus was popularized by this poem, the Santa we know today has had one very big change over Moore’s description- namely that Santa is now big. If you go back and read the actual poem, you’ll note that Moore described St. Nick, (who he never called Santa Clause) as “a little old driver,” with a “little round belly… chubby and plump.” He also described St. Nick riding a “miniature sleigh” with “eight tiny reindeer” that had little hooves. This, of course, explains how St. Nick was able to fit down a chimney without any magical means necessary- he was a tiny little elf.TIFO
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:04 AM | Your Say (0)
Borderline Sociopathic Christmas Gift Buying Guide For Your Special Lady Friend
| The Borderline Sociopathic Blog For Boys
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:27 AM | Your Say (4)
The Internet in Real Time:
By the time
you finish reading this sentence, there will have been 219,000 new Facebook posts, 22,800 new tweets, 7,000 apps downloaded, and about $9,000 worth of items sold on Amazon… depending on your reading speed, of course.More date HERE @ Web Usage Stats Per Second
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:55 AM | Your Say (1)
December 24, 2014
This
This is not very interesting
But if
You have read this far already
You will
Probably
Read as far as this:
And still
Not really accomplishing
Anything at all
You might
Even read on
Which brings you to
The line you are reading now
And after all that you are still
Probably dumb enough to keep
Right on making
A dope of yourself
By reading
As far down
The page as this.
— Anonymous, Princeton Tiger, 1949
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:04 PM | Your Say (6)
The Meat Prophet of Peru
there is a change, but it won’t blow you away,” he tells me. “At 150 days old it’s another story. At 200 days old it’s like the difference between a boxed wine and a 30-year-old Bordeaux. It’s so complex, so elegant to analyze....”
In the jungle, there’s zebu, the hump-backed tropical cow from Southeast Asia that some ranchers are trying to develop. They need some help from the government to be able to move their product to the coast, but it should happen eventually. In another part of the jungle another group is breeding a cattle that eats the upper part of sugarcane plants, which are usually just tossed out. “The fat has a lot of character. A lot of flavor,” he tells me. “It’s intense. Aggressive. Very cool. Salty.”| Roads & Kingdoms
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:43 PM | Your Say (8)
Another wonderful Leyendecker Santa Claus
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:05 AM | Your Say (0)
December 23, 2014
What Kids Wish For: "I want a gun that kills bad thoughts"
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:57 PM | Your Say (5)
Could Germany be witnessing a rise in nationalism?
The swelling marches against the "Islamisation of the Western World" could indicate that that very miraculous feat is already a foot.
The German PEGIDA movement held its largest meeting yet last night to protest what they call the ‘Islamisation of the Western World’, despite stiff opposition from all sections of Germany’s elite including politicians, media, and the arts. PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against Islamisation of the West) has grown rapidly since its inception in October, a peaceful ‘strolling’ movement opposing the exceptional violence seen in street battles between Salafist Muslims and ethnic Kurds seen in many German cities this year and enormous immigration. Now on it’s tenth ‘evening stroll’, it has grown from a couple of hundred people, to 15,000 last week, to more than 17,500 last night.Like The Roman: 'They Keep Growing' — RADIX JOURNAL
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:55 PM | Your Say (15)
All She Wants for Christmas is for Al Sharpton to STFU!
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:11 AM | Your Say (8)
Still Borderline and Still Sociopathic After All These Years
I would like to point out that he did indeed try his best,
he gave 110 percent, and he left it all out there for everyone to see -- but we live in the real world where leaving it all out there for everyone to see just gets you put on a list that says you can't go within 100 yards of a school or Chuck E. Cheese's.| The Borderline Sociopathic Blog For Boys
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:40 AM | Your Say (3)
“Joe Cocker is dead, Rolling Stone! Gaia save you!”
Cocker was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.
The register of his burial was signed by the barman, the A&R weasel, Google analytics, and the chief mourner. Rolling Stone signed it: and Rolling Stone's name was as good as a contract with Alan B. Klein, for anything he chose to put his hand to.... Rolling Stone Magazine knew he was dead? Of course they did. How could it be otherwise? Rolling Stone and he were partners for I don’t know how many years. Rolling Stone was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner. And even Rolling Stone was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that they were excellent men of business on the very day of the funeral, and will solemnise it with an undoubted bargain reprint of a Mad Dogs and Englishman review from 1970 that said that "the album lacks stylistic variety."Sippican Cottage: Death By Oklahoma
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:27 AM | Your Say (12)
December 22, 2014
The Oppressor Must Pay..... Or Else the Hamster Gets It!
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:32 PM | Your Say (3)
“It really means nothing, but I like the tradition.
That’s all I care about. I participate in the Eucharist even though I know that it is meaningless, and that it, and all of it, is just ritual, but it feels good. I enjoy it.”
We went back to her condo, unloaded and situated the perfect blue spruce into it’s Christmas tree stand. She was so excited. “I love Christmas.” She’d already pulled a dozen boxes of ornaments and decorations out of storage. “What can I help you with?” “No, no. You’ve done enough. I love decorating. I really look forward to doing this.” On Christmas Eve, her condo will be packed with friends, for her annual Christmas Eve party.The Thinking Housewife › Hitching a Ride on Ship “Christmas”
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:42 AM | Your Say (3)
Field Guide to Birds
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:41 AM | Your Say (1)
When the velocity of money is zero
I am barraged daily with references to Helicopter Ben running the Treasury printing presses day and night, and thereby causing inflation.
It's an insane idea. When the velocity of money sniffs zero, there is no inflation. The Fed makes money and gives it to the government, who lends it to itself, and none of it ever makes it into the wild where a car mechanic and his downstream brethren might get ahold of it. For productive people in today's American economy, the money might as well not exist. The bill for it will exist plenty in the future, of course. But when the velocity of money is zero, the future must be entirely discounted. It's a meaningless concept, like watching an unplugged clock.Sippican Cottage: Damocles Had Nothing To Do With It. It Was Cassandra All The Way For Sippican
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:38 AM | Your Say (7)
"It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...."
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:23 AM | Your Say (1)
"The most wonderful time of the year...."
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:21 AM | Your Say (2)
December 21, 2014
Entry in My Mother's Datebook
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:36 PM | Your Say (3)
Ubi Caritas
Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est.
Congregavit nos in unum Christi amor.
Exsultemus, et in ipso jucundemur.
Timeamus, et amemus Deum vivum.
Et ex corde diligamus nos sincero.
Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est.
Simul ergo cum in unum congregamur:
Ne nos mente dividamur, caveamus.
Cessent iurgia maligna, cessent lites.
Et in medio nostri sit Christus Deus.
Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est.
Simul quoque cum beatis videamus,
Glorianter vultum tuum, Christe Deus:
Gaudium quod est immensum, atque probum,
Saecula per infinita saeculorum. Amen.
Where charity and love are, God is there.
Christ's love has gathered us into one.
Let us rejoice and be pleased in Him.
Let us fear, and let us love the living God.
And may we love each other with a sincere heart.
Where charity and love are, God is there.
As we are gathered into one body,
Beware, lest we be divided in mind.
Let evil impulses stop, let controversy cease,
And may Christ our God be in our midst.
Where charity and love are, God is there.
And may we with the saints also,
See Thy face in glory, O Christ our God:
The joy that is immense and good,
Unto the ages through infinite ages. Amen.
[HT: jwm]
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:36 PM | Your Say (4)
Merry Christmas from the US Petroleum Industry
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:36 PM | Your Say (5)
"Ye are the salt of the earth; but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted?
It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men. Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick, and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven."He put the children to bed, to dream of the morning. His wife kissed him, said only "good night" to me, and went upstairs. We sat for a long moment by the fire, the soft gentle sucking sound of the logs being consumed audible now that the children were gone. The fire was reflected in the ornaments on the tree. The mantel clock banged through the seconds. Sippican Cottage: I Want The Old Testament
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:36 PM | Your Say (1)
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:20 PM | Your Say (2)
To ride in a car marks you as an official, but the model, color, and size will vary according to your importance.
At the bottom levels one finds Russian, Czech, and Chinese medium-size cars, cream-colored or gray; at the top, one has long black Hung-ch’i limousines, with tulle curtains that conceal the passengers from the crowds.
Peking is thick with these capacious hearses; their blinded windows have an aura of august mystery, suggesting at the same time the Coach of the Holy Sacrament and the limousines that Arab sheiks shuttle their harems around in. One of the favorite pastimes of Peking people—they do not have many—is to crowd around the entrance of the Peking Hotel or near the Great Hall of the People on gala nights to see the long processions of official cars go past with drawn curtains. Those people, one feels, have no envy or bitterness—they have the experience of three thousand years of despotism—but only the normal curiosity of gapers who try to glimpse, however fleetingly, the faraway magical world where their mysterious rulers live.Chinese Shadows: Bureaucracy, Happiness, History | ChinaFile
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:17 AM | Your Say (2)
December 20, 2014
Do Elephants Have Souls?
Grandmothers, aunts, sisters, and cousins crowd around the new arrival and its dazed mother, trumpeting and stamping and waving their trunks to welcome the floppy baby who has so recently arrived from out of the void, bursting through the border of existence to take its place in an unbroken line stretching back to the dawn of life. After almost two years in the womb and a few minutes to stretch its legs, the calf can begin to stumble around. But its trunk, an evolutionarily unique inheritance of up to 150,000 muscles with the dexterity to pick up a pin and the strength to uproot a tree, will be a mystery to it at first, with little apparent use except to sometimes suck upon like human babies do their thumbs.Caitrin Nicol Keiper - The New Atlantis
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:38 PM | Your Say (7)
The kids, with their smartphones and sharing economy, are just a bunch of addled-minded commies, high on stupid.
Uber strikes me as one of the pet rock businesses of post-reality America.
By that, I mean it is is a fun fad that people get rich from, but otherwise is not a real business with staying power. The reason is they are basically making money by deception. Part of that deception is cost shifting. They shift the operating costs of a taxi company onto the drivers, cell phone carriers and general society.Uber Rape at The Z Blog
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:30 PM | Your Say (6)
The magic of these pallets is the magic of abstraction.
Take any object you like, pile it onto a pallet, and it becomes, simply, a “unit load”
—standardized, cubical, and ideally suited to being scooped up by the tines of a forklift. This allows your Cheerios and your oysters to be whisked through the supply chain with great efficiency; the gains are so impressive, in fact, that many experts consider the pallet to be the most important materials-handling innovation of the twentieth century. Studies have estimated that pallets consume 12 to 15 percent of all lumber produced in the US, more than any other industry except home construction.CABINET // Whitewood under Siege
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:24 AM | Your Say (5)
Grandma’s expertise in nutrition dates back to the 60s.
By the mid 70s, she had written several self-published mimeographed books on nutritional intake and vitamins.
Around then or possibly earlier, I think, she started to poison people..... At first, my mother was the only one who’d refuse to eat Grandma’s food, and I thought she was being paranoid. Then I started noticing that every time I went to Grandma’s, I’d pass out on the couch or on the train on the way back to the city.What Do You Do When You Think You Have a Murderer in the Family? | VICE | United States
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:58 AM | Your Say (3)
The White Ghetto
you aren’t in the Appalachia of Elmore Leonard’s Justified or squatting with Lyndon Johnson on Tom Fletcher’s front porch in Martin County, a scene famously photographed by Walter Bennett of Time, the image that launched the so-called War on Poverty. The music isn’t “Shady Grove,” it’s Kanye West. There is still coal mining — which, at $25 an hour or more, provides one of the more desirable occupations outside of government work — but the jobs are moving west, and Harlan County, like many coal-country communities, has lost nearly half of its population over the past 30 years.
There is here a strain of fervid and sometimes apocalyptic Christianity, and visions of the Rapture must have a certain appeal for people who already have been left behind. Like its black urban counterparts, the Big White Ghetto suffers from a whole trainload of social problems, but the most significant among them may be adverse selection: Those who have the required work skills, the academic ability, or the simple desperate native enterprising grit to do so get the hell out as fast as they can, and they have been doing that for decades. As they go, businesses disappear, institutions fall into decline, social networks erode, and there is little or nothing left over for those who remain. It’s a classic economic death spiral: The quality of the available jobs is not enough to keep good workers, and the quality of the available workers is not enough to attract good jobs. These little towns located at remote wide spots in helical mountain roads are hard enough to get to if you have a good reason to be here. If you don’t have a good reason, you aren’t going to think of one.-- Kevin Williamson, National Review Online
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:34 AM | Your Say (3)
Normalizing relations with Cuba will not,
as Sen. Marco Rubio passionately put it in these pages, grant the Castro regime “legitimacy.”
Nothing can grant it legitimacy. Fidel Castro ruined his country for a dead ideology and the whole world knows it. It may be closer to the truth to see the Castro brothers’ eagerness for normalization as an admission that they’ve run out their string. They’ve lost everything that kept them alive, from the Soviet Union to once-oil-rich Venezuela. The Castro government is stuck. Their economy is nothing. They have no strength. They enjoy vestigial respect from certain quarters, but only vestigial. They’ve lost and they know it.The Cuban Regime Is a Defeated Foe - WSJ
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:37 AM | Your Say (5)
Like a bearded nut in robes on the sidewalk
proclaiming the end of the world is near,
the media is just doing what makes it feel good, not reporting hard facts. We need to start seeing the media as a bearded nut on the sidewalk, shouting out false fears. It’s not sensible to listen to it … Personally, I think we need to start turning away from media, and the data shows that we are, at least from television news. I find that whenever I lack exposure to media I am much happier, and my life feels fresher.The Gell-Mann Effect
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:22 AM | Your Say (4)
The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect
The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows.
You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”-- Michael Crichton
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:16 AM | Your Say (6)
December 19, 2014
What Do You Get for the Man Who Has Everything?
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:01 AM | Your Say (2)
Stooges. Seriously.
It’s based on the premise that all of them are stupid, but some are more stupid than others. Moe, with his gravelly voice, permanent scowl and menacing helmet of bowl-cut hair, was the leader, invariably the under-boss entreated with overseeing whatever hopelessly doomed endeavour the Stooges found themselves pursuing (and whatever it was, you can bet it involved heavy objects and the potential for maximum mayhem; plumbing, not surprisingly, was a favourite Stooge profession).
Curly, his hulking frame bursting out of a too-small suit, was the irredeemably incompetent man-child, the knucklehead’s knucklehead and recipient of most of Moe’s abuse — a litany of punches, slaps and smacks, bonks on the head and, quintessential Moe, the twin-pronged poke in the eye. (Moe actually had his brother Shemp to thank for his signature move. Once, during a card game, Shemp became so convinced that Larry was cheating him he leapt up and poked him in both eyes. Moe made a note of it and duly incorporated it into the act.)
Larry, too often underestimated, was the all-important bridge between Moe’s authoritarian bully and Curly’s babyfaced clown. An easygoing simpleton, Larry was the essential, non-threatening intermediary, and he brought a special genius to the role. “As in Waiting For Godot,” writes Ted Levitt in his essay Larry: The Existential Stooge, “if Curly and Estragon are body, Vladimir and Moe are the intellect, then they are waiting for Larry in order to be complete, to have a sense of their own existence.” Of course, he also got hit in the head with a wrench now and then, too.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:59 AM | Your Say (2)
Close But No Cigar [Bumped]
Updated: Clinton with "Butterface" Catsimatidis , The Early Years
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:28 AM | Your Say (19)
December 18, 2014
The Left hates the light because their deeds are evil.
The Jihad and the Soviets are utterly, absolutely, entirely, hysterically, insuperably and supremely devoted to falsehood.
Whereas I am truthful. All their bombs and guns and tanks, their money, their armies, their suicide bombers do not frighten the Left, because the Left literally cannot imagine physical danger, nor more than Veruca Salt can do, and for the same reason they cannot. They are spoiled brats. Brats always get their way. But telling Veruca Salt the truth about the state of her soul, and her conscience will prick her, and that is the one pain she cannot fight or tolerate. The Left hates the light because their deeds are evil.What Wages Pay the Unpaid Apologists for Utter Evil? | John C. Wright's Journal
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:08 PM | Your Say (0)
“Do not underestimate,”
The satisfactions of the book, in the age of social media and proliferating cultural choices, are very singular.” The pleasures of reading morph into the aesthetic delights of print and paper. Reading a favourite novel on a screen is like tasting a vintage wine through a straw. The unintended consequence of the ebook, Daunt reports, has been to make many readers return to the hardback.Whisper it quietly, the book is back … and here’s the man leading the revival
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:13 PM | Your Say (0)
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:07 PM | Your Say (2)
Have You Seen Me?
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:07 PM | Your Say (2)
"Each step was so small, so inconsequential..."
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:07 PM | Your Say (4)
Probably Means Nothing
Russian Food Suppliers Have Begun Halting Shipments | Zero Hedge Russia's Vedomosti reports, citing vegetable producer Belaya Dacha, juice maker Sady Pridoniya and others, Russian suppliers are suspending food shipments to stores because of unpredictable FX movements. And it is about to get worse: very soon Russians may have to live without imported alcohol because at least on supplier of offshore booze.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:19 AM | Your Say (2)
December 17, 2014
A Billionaire Dinosaur Forced Me Gay
due to exceptionally accurate stock predictions. After graduating from NYU with a business degree, John is hired to be the assistant for one of the largest trading firms on Wall Street. His boss, the CEO of the company is highly regarded as the best businessman of the century. Only difference is that he is a dinosaur!- by Hunter Fox.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:37 PM | Your Say (1)
The Jew today is called on to forget.
From the first holiday of Passover, after which the freed slaves kindled the first Menorah, to the final holiday of Chanukah, that light burns on. The historical cycle of Jewish holidays begins with Moshe confronting Pharaoh and demanding the freedom of the Jewish people. It ends with the Maccabees standing up to the tyranny of Antiochus and fighting for the right of the Jewish people to live under their own rule on their own land. The lights of the menorah embody the spirit of the Jewish people. A spirit that has outlived the atrocities of every tyrant. In the heart of the flame that has burned for a thousand years lives the soul of a people.Sultan Knish: A Dangerous Holiday
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:16 PM | Your Say (0)
GENERAL DYNAMICS (Astronautics) SPACE CARDS
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:05 PM | Your Say (0)
Conservative Republicans Take It In the Shorts. "But.... but.... we won!"
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:57 AM | Your Say (2)
The New Churchill
The house itself is like a woman grown old, missing a few teeth, gone thick and manly.
But you can tell the ruin used to be something. The old frame shows something of the heretofores. I heard tell a captain of local industry built it to prove to everybody that he had finally made it big in this old world. He said prove it to everybody, but really meant to himself, I'll bet. The bank took it from him the minute a dark cloud appeared on the horizon, and showed him that the world has no opinion.Sippican Cottage
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:06 AM | Your Say (0)
Depravity will keep going as far as it will go.
Terrorism, like all perversions, needs stronger and stronger stimuli to achieve the same result. The door to hell is self-sealing. The damned vie with each other to burrow deeper into it. Upstairs, Downstairs | Belmont Club
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:22 AM | Your Say (2)
The blue ribbon in the “Self-Hating White Man” category has to be placed on the coffin of David Ruenzel
That’s because he made a living writing about “white privilege” for the inexplicably respectable Southern Poverty Law Center—and he was killed by two black dudes. ...While hiking, no less. Hit Me Harder, I’ve Been Bad! - Taki's Magazine
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:06 AM | Your Say (4)
Life On Mars
Our lives must be in some strange way — beyond any passing subjective enthusiasm — worth living. For, Someone went to a lot of trouble to put us here. Whether He also planted microbes on Mars for us to find, in our season, is an open question. I can’t see why He would, but then, I am not privy to all of His intentions; only the ones He has told us about. - - Star dust : Essays in Idleness
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:03 AM | Your Say (0)
Now Even Dieting Causes Global Warming
dieticians and personal trainers is that the missing mass has been converted into energy or heat. "There is surprising ignorance and confusion about the metabolic process of weight loss," says Professor Andrew Brown, head of the UNSW School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences. "The correct answer is that most of the mass is breathed out as carbon dioxide. It goes into thin air," says the study's lead author, Ruben Meerman, a physicist and Australian TV science presenter.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:35 AM | Your Say (8)
Anyone here ever been to Pakistan?
I have. Shithole doesn't even scratch the surface.
That place is beyond shithole, far in excess of any shithole the Western, Christian mind can conceive. Hell, it's not even a real country! It's just a name, stuck onto a cesspool full of human filth and the hapless creatures being pulled by that filth down to the bottom. Pakistan is a made-up country, you know; history knows no "Pakistan", and there is, was, and never will be any such thing as a "native Pakistani". There are only tribes, and money, and drugs, and misery, stuck together by Islam into a fetid mass that can never and will never endure. Call it Yugoslavia East.
One time in Karachi, a lady walked up to me with a baby in her arms, crying and begging me for money for the baby. At first I thought the "baby" was some sort of doll, but as she got closer I looked closer and that's when I realized she was carrying no doll but an actual, mummified dead human baby, its face painted with cosmetics.
I ran and am still running today.
I am a Catholic, and I believe in Jesus, but I have to tell you in all honesty that if by some miracle every Muslim on the planet dropped suddenly dead I wouldn't feel a thing, and that's wrong, but it's honestly how I feel. I wish I didn't, but I do. I'd like for one day to go by, just one day, without having to think about those lunatics and wonder what nightmare they're cooking up next.
"But you can't tar all Muslims with the same brush! What about nice Mr. Dirkadirka down at the Schwarma Hut?" Well, what about him? He's nice now, but what about tomorrow? Do you think he'd be nice if his kind were numerous enough to call the shots, or if someone in your town were to do something for which the Prophet demands death? That same nice, friendly guy at the schwarma stand today might slit your kid's throat tomorrow. We certainly didn't mind tarring the Japanese in America with the same brush -- and for far, far less than American Muslims have done.
"Nice" Muslims? Sure, there are nice Muslims. There were plenty of nice people in the Cheka, the NKVD, the SS and the Ustase, too. No, counting on the niceness of Muslims is like tiptoeing past the devil.
God help us. How can we fight an enemy that God won't allow us to hate?Shibes Meadow Comment on Pakistini Taliban attack school, kill 140
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:14 AM | Your Say (12)
December 16, 2014
The Left loved the Communists killing countless millions of innocent people
both because they love the idea of corpses piled up so high that they blacken the sun,
and because the Communists were foes of Christianity and civilization. But the Reds were civilized themselves enough to want things like running water and food and life, and so were unwilling to ignite a nuke and bring about the final and utter semisexual craving of the Left, which is obliteration. The Jihad are far more attractive, because they are vile, violent, and dishonorable on every level.What Wages Pay the Unpaid Apologists for Utter Evil? | John C. Wright's Journal
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:10 PM | Your Say (1)
The Task
And he had written it, too. I’ve seen it. I’ve read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, but too high–strung, I think. Seventeen pages of close writing he had found time for! But this must have been before his—let us say—nerves, went wrong, and caused him to preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites, which—as far as I reluctantly gathered from what I heard at various times—were offered up to him—do you understand?—to Mr. Kurtz himself. But it was a beautiful piece of writing. The opening paragraph, however, in the light of later information, strikes me now as ominous. He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings—we approach them with the might of a deity,’ and so on, and so on. ‘By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,’ etc., etc. From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence—of words—of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’-- Conrad, Heart of Darkness HT: Fatman
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:13 PM | Your Say (0)
Everyone knows something basic about government: if it gets too powerful, too big, and too all-encompassing, it becomes tyrannical and destructive.
Law enforcement is carrying out the will of an ever-increasing monster
with billions of tentacles reaching out further and further. If they go too far, often if not most of the time, its because they're being pressured and directed to by their bosses. For every "free speech zone" there's a cop arresting people for expressing their freedom of speech in the "wrong place." For every city ordinance against smoking, there's a cop writing someone up for smoking in the wrong place. For every regulation against trans fats, there's a law enforcement official reporting on a restaurant serving the wrong food.Word Around the Net: GOOD COP/BAD COP
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:16 PM | Your Say (7)
“Backlash” is the Sasquatch of liberal journalism.
The sad fact of the matter is the whites never return fire.
Year after year the incidents of Muslim terrorism pile up and nothing is ever done about it. Maybe if Romper Stomper were true, there would be fewer Muslim’s to cause trouble in the civilized nations. Of course, that’s true everything else. Blacks riot and everyone worries about the white backlash that never comes. Whenever a group of lunatics gets out of hand, the first thing we see in the news is fear of a backlash from the normals, but it never comes.-- Z Blog
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:14 PM | Your Say (3)
He said Mr Monis was “without a single blur” on his character and had been “preaching peace”.
“Without a single blur”. Sadly, questions about Mr. Monis’ character are likely to remain unresolved now that he’s dead.
But uppermost in the minds of many, especially those who have been in a jam, is the question of ‘how did you make bail for a rap sheet like that?’ How did Monis pay for all his lawyers? Were the lawyers public defenders? If so they must have been pretty good.Belmont Club » Making Bail
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:45 AM | Your Say (2)
1,000 Hues
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:07 AM | Your Say (5)
RickRuns: Rick Perry's Statement On Australian Hostage Situation
"As a nation, we must be prepared to terminate ISIS with superior military power. We must work with our allies to build a grand coalition of civilized nations who will stand united against this evil and care for refugees of the conflict. We must be committed to the principles of freedom against evil ideologies around the world. By focusing on those three components, ISIS will one day be left on ‘the ash heap of history." | Truth Revolt
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:13 AM | Your Say (4)
66 years ago....
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:01 AM | Your Say (0)
The Real "Doc" Holliday
left three men dead, and several men injured. While no one knows for sure who fired first, it was Doc’s bullet that first rendered a fatal shot. It is even written in some accounts that Clanton was not armed. But finding the truth about what happened in that gunfight is about as difficult as finding Bigfoot. In the end, Holliday, along with Earp, was put on trial for murder. He was exonerated, but several attempts were made on his life over the next few years. He eventually made his way to Colorado where he increasingly became dependent on alcohol and opium as his health deteriorated.TIFO
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:33 AM | Your Say (4)
The Conned Can't Admit They've Been Conned [Bumped]
Social justice fanatics may be fanatical
because they are justifying to themselves the amount of money and time that they spent on getting a Marxist degree that sets them at odds with their surrounding society. They feel that, unless they join the class struggle, their expenditure has been wasted. This behavior tends to present itself frequently in victims of scams: the more that they have spent on getting into the scam, the more fervently that they want to believe in it.Social Justice Warrioring As Justification for Student Loan Expenses | Henry Dampier
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:22 AM | Your Say (12)
Does Truth Matter to the Feminist Left?
Many of those who describe themselves as “journalists” these days are more interested in moral positioning
and the advancement of their agendas than in the attainment of objective truth. Where most of us are primarily concerned with whether a given claim is correct, others seem more attentive to how we react to that claim in the first place. Did you ask questions about Jackie’s story as it was reported? If so, you must hate women, work for the patriarchy, or hope to prove that nobody is ever raped. Did you believe Jackie uncritically and with a full-throated roar? Excellent, then you must be a good person who wants to help women, move the country forward, and do something concrete about the issue of sexual assault. It’s really that simple, my dear.| National Review
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:16 AM | Your Say (1)
“Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories.”
Why, even when conservatives win elections, does the nation continue to move inexorably leftward? As a friend from that era wrote me recently, other than our victory in the Cold War, what do we conservatives have to show for all of our political victories? -- Jonathan Gruber: Honest Liberal
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:07 AM | Your Say (7)
Sydney Siege
I thought it odd to hear journalists wondering
about the gunman's motivations when he was forcing hostages to hold up a banner that read, "There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet," and demanding that the cops deliver to him a proper ISIS flag. Wonder what was his inspiration? Only a journalist or some other member of the progressive clan could and would pretend not to know.The DiploMad 2.0
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:33 AM | Your Say (1)
December 15, 2014
The Bloop
Bloop is the name given to an ultra-low-frequency and extremely powerful underwater sound detected by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 1997. The sound is consistent with the noises generated by icequakes in large icebergs, or large icebergs scraping the ocean floor. List of unexplained sounds