Archive for November, 2007

There’s Still Time

Monday, November 12th, 2007

Regarding the fundraiser for Valour-IT I mentioned Friday night, please know the deadline has been extended through today.

This program buys voice-activated laptops for wounded service members who find themselves needing them. To write to Mom, get a job…maybe put some useful information into blogs like this one, to help balance out the relatively ignorant civilian ranting.

You may interpret that last sentence however you choose, since this post is non-political. But since the laptops run at eight hundred a pop, and the inventory on hand is practically empty, no snarking allowed if you haven’t hit the widget and chipped in some dough. The situation is much improved from Friday night, but it’s not nearly where we want it to be. Be part of the solution, not part of the problem…

Defining “Swift-Boating”

Monday, November 12th, 2007

The month before last, I had given the world a definition to a word in widespread use, that no one took the time to define. It was a phrase. The phrase was “swift boating” and the definition I gave it was…

The act of pointing out something with regard to a matter under immediate discussion, that extremist zealots (particularly those inclined to the left) would just as soon have been left unmentioned. Especially, testimony from knowledgeable individuals that would place a purported certainty into significant doubt.

Well, through the wonderful world of Malkin, we learn that someone has taken the trouble to make a similar contribution that is sure to be put in far more widespread use. It’s not as accurate as mine, but it is very nearly so…and perfectly adequate in all the ways that matter.

H/T: Phil.

Lions for Lambs

Sunday, November 11th, 2007

Lions for LambsWow, what the hell’s going on here? I thought for sure that in late 2007, if you wanted to put out an America-bashing, “hooray we’re liberals aren’t we so wonderful” type of movie you’d have to be a little subtle about it. A little sly.

Well, perhaps that is so, but someone in Hollywood doesn’t necessarily agree. As we learn from new sidebar addition Yolo Cowboy, CEO of The Roughstock Journal, the “user reviews” on Lions for Lambs are in…and those users are pretty pissed.

Pure Garbage…..
I had the opportunity to see this last week during a free screening (my wife got the tickets through work). I think I was robbed. About 20% of the audience…
TO LEFT LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE IN HOLLYWOOD…
THIS COULD HAVE BEEN A REALLY GREAT FILM IF THE ENTIRE CAST AND CREW DID NOT HAVE THIS LEFT WING AGENDA AGAINST EVERYTHING MILITARY, GOVERNMENT, AND EVERYTHING ON THE RIGHT….
If you Hate America, You’ll love “LFL”- Awful!!!
I’m sooo disgusted with this film. These are actors (Streep, Redman, & Cruse) who are popular enough to ‘choose their own projects’ and they actually got paid for this Anti-American…
I WANT MY MONEY BACK
HAVING SPENT 10 MONTHS IN AFGANISTAN THIS MOVIE DOES NOT COME ANYTHING CLOSE TO REALITY,THE DETAILS OF THE MILITARY ACTION LEAVE MUCH TO BE DESIRED, AS DOES THE DESCRIPTION OF…
Dripping With Liberal Bias and Lies… F- !
I’m not “pro” war, nor am I “pro” imperialism, but I am defintely “pro” reality, and this film contains zero reality, although it would have you believe that it IS…

And it goes on from there.

Interesting.

This is why I think our next President might very well be a Republican, maybe even governing with a friendly Congress. America’s liberals aren’t known for saying to themselves “okay, that’s enough hard-left visceral liberalism for now, let’s tone it down a little.” They just don’t do that. Hard-left liberalism begats more hard-left liberalism, and hateful liberalism begats more hateful liberalism.

The election campaign of 2008 began earlier than any in modern history. What kind of crap is our most devoted left-wing ideological segment going to be pushing by late October of ’08? What kind of hardcore hippy movies will have come out that summer?

This is not stuff for which mainstream America has an enduring apetite. Maybe in extreme situations “middle America” might get fooled into electing a Nancy Pelosi. Just like you might like wasabi with your sushi…but you wouldn’t like an entire Thanksgiving turkey made out of wasabi, would you. I haven’t seen the movie, but I’ll bet my bottom dollar that this, or something a lot like it, is why you have all those scathing reviews up there. Blue-blood left-wing Hollywood just doesn’t police itself, restrain itself, dilute itself or even show good manners. I’ll save this into my Netflix queue, but I’m not anticipating any major surprises.

The users are complaining about BOREDOM. Uh, the movie’s an hour and a half long. Robert Redford is getting panned…and who on earth has a built-in fan base, if not Mr. Sundance? No, I’m not sitting on the edge of my seat waiting for this thing.

Durst Deranged

Sunday, November 11th, 2007

File this one under Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) if you file nothing else there.

Crazy Old ManVia new sidebar addition The Black Republican, we’ve learned humor columnist Will Durst wants everyone to know that all seven milestones on the way to insanity are in his rearview-mirror, and he’s still charging forward pedal to the metal.

In particular, he’s passed the second, fourth, and seventh — roared right on past ’em. Compared to him, Ray Liotta, in that scene where Anthony Hopkins has him eating his own brain, looks like freakin’ Aristotle.

How far gone is he? Ever have one of those girlfriends who talks to you on the phone and you’re figuring, man, I’ve got some stuff to do that takes two hands…so you go do it…you forget to pick up the phone…suddenly you remember, and you figure you’re going to get that fast buzzing sound because she hung up, and you’ll be in trouble — but when you put the handset to your ear she’s still going on and has no idea you ever went anywhere?

Like that.

…uncouth, spiteful, boorish, vengeful, jingoistic, homophobic, xenophobic, xylophonic, racist, sexist, ageist, fascist, cashist, audaciously stupid, brazenly selfish, lethally ignorant, journalist purchasing, genocide ignoring, corporation kissing, poverty inducing, crooked, coercive, autocratic, primitive, uppity…

Learn What You Can While You Can

Saturday, November 10th, 2007

Well, here we go again. Sen. Hillary Clinton, considered a frontrunner on the donk side in the race for the White House next year, got caught in some skullduggery. (Fellow Webloggin contributor Big Dog has a decent write-up about it here.) I’d write something about it, but it occurs to me that’s wasteful. Nobody ever wants to know too much about these things for too long, and while it’s still too recent for anyone to avoid it completely there’s no hunger for details at all. Even among her opponents.

Everybody knows we’re going to be pressured to stop talking about this soon, everybody knows that before too long if you even so much as bring it up you’ll be considered a kook. Everybody knows she’s going to get away with it — again.

It’s gotten a little silly to even feign uncertainty about it, for ritual’s sake.

In fact, it occurs to me with a little bit of utility-grade artwork, I could summarize this to the extent anybody cares to find out about it, to the extent anybody’s ever going to tell anyone about it, and keep it in the realm of one hundred percent what we software developers from the early 1990’s used to call “reusable code.”

So I sat down with Microsoft Windows Paint and did exactly that.

Sen. Clinton got caughtNow I have something I fully expect to be able to re-use again and again and again, well into next year. And God knows how many “carbon tons” I’ve saved the planet, over the long haul. There are certain details it doesn’t address…but as has been explained above, it’s really useless to go into those. Nobody cares, nobody ever will care.

Go ahead, borrow it, use it, give it away. The image has it all…every little thing you’re going to be allowed to talk about, and it’s all true, and will continue to be true, scandal after scandal after scandal.

Meanwhile, it looks like the Sacramento Bee got caught behind the news cycle on this one. They chose to reprint, today, this story from the New York Times. I expect this will end up being a little awkward for them.

Late one night last year, while her husband was an Army scout in Iraq, Melissa Storey sat in the quiet of her bedroom to write President Bush a letter. She wanted him to know “we believed in him.” And after Staff Sgt. Clint Storey, 30, was killed by a roadside bomb, his widow put pen to paper again.

“I felt like I needed to let him know I don’t hate him because my husband is dead,” Mrs. Storey said, “that I don’t blame him for Clint dying over there.”

The correspondence did not go unnoticed. In May, Mrs. Storey received a surprise telephone call from the White House inviting her to a Memorial Day reception there. As she mingled at the elegant gathering, too nervous to eat, her 5-year-old daughter clutching her dress, her infant son cradled in her arms, a military aide appeared. The president wanted to see her in the Oval Office.

The Storeys, of Palmer, Mass., joined a growing list of bereaved families granted a private audience with the commander in chief. As Mr. Bush forges ahead with the war in Iraq, these “families of the fallen,” as the White House calls them, are one constituency he can still count on, a powerful reminder to an unpopular president that even in the face of heartbreaking loss, some still believe he is doing the right thing.

Since the war in Afghanistan began six years ago, Mr. Bush has met quietly with more than 450 such families, and is likely to meet more on Sunday, Veterans Day, in Waco, Tex., near his Crawford ranch. Mr. Bush often says he hears their voices — “don’t let my son die in vain,” he quotes them as saying — when making decisions about the war. The White House says families are not asked their political views. Yet war critics wonder just whose voices the president is hearing.

Like Melissa Storey, Bill Adams, who has been leading war protests in Lancaster, Pa., wrote Mr. Bush a letter — not to praise the president, but to question the military’s account of the death of his son, Brent. When Mr. Bush held a town-hall-style meeting in Lancaster last month, Mr. Adams asked a friend with a ticket to deliver his missive to the president. It worked, and a top aide to Mr. Bush later called Mr. Adams.

But when the president met families of the fallen that day in Lancaster, it did not escape Mr. Adams’s notice that he was not among them.

“I can’t help but be left with the suspicion that possibly his advance team screened those families for people who would be sympathetic,” Mr. Adams said. Given the chance, he said, he would have told Mr. Bush “that my son’s life was squandered.”

Mr. Adams’ case is pure conjecture, and it’s a little hollow. He thinks President Bush is doing the same thing Hillary Clinton just got caught doing — pre-screening the audience.

Except.

The comparison I’m making here is unworkable for a lot of reasons. Mr. Adams thinks President Bush is filtering his audience. Sen. Clinton, if you click at the first link in this post, you’ll see has been accused of putting plants into hers.

President Bush is meeting with hurting families in a confidential, private forum. Sen. Clinton is putting on a show.

Most importantly, we have a first-hand account of someone who says she was given a question to ask by a Clinton staffer. Bill Adams has a hunch, and not at all an incriminating one at that. I’m awfully sorry this man lost his son, but to be frank about it, if I were the President I wouldn’t invite him either…even if we did not have that episode with the “absolute moral authority” mom…which we did. It’s simply ridiculous to think Bill Adams wouldn’t take over the session in some way, for however brief a time. There are supposed to be other families there, in similar straights. It simply wouldn’t be appropriate.

Now, in reproducing this story on the front page today, the Sacramento Bee jumped onto Page A14 right after the words “near his Crawford ranch.” So they weren’t quite able to work Bill Adams into the front page. But that’s okay, they re-wrote the headline as…

Many ‘families of the fallen’ still back Bush

…and the sub-headline is cobbled together as

But war critics suspect that president’s private meetings are screened.

Hey, good going Sacramento Bee. You’ve just accused the President, based on one war activist’s extravagant speculation, of doing exactly the same thing we know Sen. Clinton’s campaign is doing. Even worse, by implying there’s something wrong with screening, you’ve pretty much dis-invited yourselves from any pre-Thanksgiving cocktail parties or emergency strategy sessions with any high-fallutin’ blue-blood Clinton fans, who might want to spin the tale that, y’know what, screening and planting is all just wonderful stuff. You better leave the black-tie wardrobe in mothballs unless you can come up with a good explanation for this.

But it can only get so embarrassing for you. Worst-case scenario is, someone is going to connect the dots, and write a letter to the Editor questioning — how come you’re accusing the President of doing something we don’t really know he’s doing, which would actually be appropriate if he was doing it, and letting Sen. Clinton get off scot-free for doing exactly the same thing only worse?

In which case you’ll just use the standard remedy: Print that letter just above, or below, a letter from someone in Davis or West Sacramento accusing you of being too friendly with the “neocons.” This always works. It isn’t even necessary to write an editorial crying “boo hoo, poor us, no matter what we do someone somewhere is always unhappy.” That isn’t necessary. The message is implied, and comes through loud and clear.

Meanwhile, I await that hard-hitting expose in the Sacramento Bee — and the New York Times — about Sen. Clinton and the plants in her audience. Obviously, I’m not holding my breath.

Another Happy Birthday to the Marines

Saturday, November 10th, 2007

MarinesHappy birthday, to the noble warriors who would be utterly useless to us in an imaginary world where nobody ever wishes harm on anybody else.

Since that world has been, is now, and always will be a work of pure fiction — even though a lot of citizens fail to realize this, to the embarrassment of all the rest of us — we’re glad you’re here. Oo-rah!

It seems appropriate to mark the occasion now with a story you can download from just about anywhere, and keeps getting better every time it is retold:

A U.S. Navy Admiral was attending a naval conference that included admirals from the US, British, Canadian, Australian, and French Navies.

At a cocktail reception, he found himself standing with a group of half dozen or so officers that included personnel from most of the countries.

Everyone was chatting away in English as they sipped their drinks, but a French admiral suddenly complained that, whereas Europeans learn many languages, Americans learn only English. He then asked: “Why is it that we always have to speak English in these conferences, rather than speaking French?”

Without hesitating, the American Admiral replied:

“Maybe it’s because the Brits, Canadians, Aussies, and Americans arranged it so you wouldn’t have to speak German.”

It got so quiet, you could have heard a pin drop.

On this 232nd, let us remember: Those who are opposed to freedom, always come marching in under a banner of “peace.” Ever since human sensibilities have “matured” to the height of realizing that war is a horrible thing, there have been no exceptions to this. The tyrant doesn’t say “submit to my will or I will hurt you and kill you” — he says “I have a plan, and my plan is a sure path to peace.”

Looking back over the years from my deathbed, I’m sure it will be all the clearer to me that this has been the big disadvantage to being alive in these times. Our ever-unslaked thirst for more and more “peace” has left freedom, already won and enjoyed by countless peoples, in danger at every turn of being lost forever. Get this guy out of office so we can have peace. Put that guy in charge so we can have peace.

It’s the campaign slogan of despots. Freedom means fighting. It always has and it always will. Your service, in particular, is invaluable and irreplaceable.

Men Pay More

Saturday, November 10th, 2007

How the National Organization of Women (NOW) gets total strangers pissed off brings attention to the issue of pay inequity:

Imagine going to McDonald’s and hearing that, because you’re a white male, you pay full price for a Big Mac. Meanwhile, the girl behind you pays three-quarters of the total amount for the same thing.

NOW (National Organization for Women) @ SDSU brought that reality to San Diego State yesterday at the Aztec Center by holding a pay equity bake sale. The prices for cookies reflected the difference of pay between genders and races.

“It’s just to raise awareness,” NOW @ SDSU Co-President Amanda Whitehead said. “A lot of people don’t realize that white women make 75 percent of every dollar a white man makes or Hispanic women make 50 percent. It’s pretty ridiculous. When they actually have to buy the cookies, it puts it into perspective.”

White men, of whom NOW @ SDSU says make the most money of any demographic, were charged a dollar for the same cookie a Hispanic woman would pay 50 cents for. The group broke down the prices for white, Hispanic, black and Asian men and women, using pay scale statistics from NOW and www.payequity.org.

“It’s a more unique way of showing the differences without just showing the statistics all the time,” NOW @ SDSU Co-President Ashley Frazier said.

Jeanne Sahad of CNN Money, on why the statistic measurements and the ensuing crankiness don’t really work with reality:

Unequal doesn’t always mean unfair. Much depends on the reasons for disparity. And, Hartmann notes, “parsing out (the reasons for the gap) is difficult to do.”

Factors may include: more women choose lower-paying professions than men; they move in and out of the workforce more frequently; and they work fewer paid hours on average.

Why that’s the case may have to do in part with the fact that women are still society’s primary caregivers, that some higher-paying professions require either too much time away from home or are still less hospitable to women than they should be.
:
But maybe there can never be absolute parity because often there are many non-discriminatory variables that cause a differential in pay. What determines someone’s pay isn’t just a title and job description, but also performance, tenure and market forces — e.g., what it takes to get a desirable job candidate to accept a position.

And then there are situations in which a company may do well by a female employee but still be vulnerable to charges of discrimination and reverse discrimination.

In an article, Warren Farrell, author of “Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap — and What Women Can Do About It,” tells of a company that promoted good women employees faster than men. But consequently the women moving into the higher positions often were paid less than men in the same position because the men had greater tenure at the company.

Bill Maher’s comments on women feeling abused and mistreated by our society…take what you like, leave the rest.

Maher is so sad. His central thesis is not only, as they say, “politically incorrect” but it makes good sense as well. He simply inspects what we’ve been culturally discouraged from inspecting, and he finds, lo and behold, truth. Women are upset at not being treated fairly, they make noise, after a third of a century our society values everything according to the female mindset — women still think they’re being treated unfairly. It’s a great point. But being a whack-a-doodle, he has to tun over some more rocks until he can find something to blame on George W. Bush. It’s like a rule with him. By the time he’s six minutes in, he’s envisioning Clinton’s impeachment trial and the 2000 election as the watershed events — the eye of this hurricane, if you will.

I suppose people could say I’m selectively choosing when to agree with Maher and when not to, based on whether his commentary comports with my prejudices. There would be a kernel of truth in that, but also a kernel of insanity; the first step on the way to it, in fact. Remember — subjective and objective. Maher’s slippage from “political incorrectness for sake of truth,” into “political incorrectness for sake of lunacy,” does not rest on my opinion.

It is measurable.

Bill Clinton stayed in office. Because of the female vote. And mostly because of that, the feminist movement on January 20, 2001, was a shadow of it’s former self on January 20, 1993. And furthermore…struggle as I might to recall year-2000 campaign commercials for George Bush following the theme he’s described, I’m coming up empty. I don’t think they occurred. These are historical events open to no interpretation at all, or very little. And they gut the last two minutes of Maher’s rant like a big sharp Gerber knife gutting a fish.

Other than that, great rant.

The most successful lie arrives bundled in with a kernel of truth. That’s what makes ungrateful women so dangerous and toxic in our society. We do discriminate against women. Everybody does. It’s unavoidable — they aren’t men.

And the truth is, nobody wants it to stop. Women who say they want discrimination to stop, only want to bring an end to discrimination that doesn’t benefit women. All the other stuff, they want to keep in place forever.

And now that the Clinton impeachment thing is behind us, society at large simply isn’t willing to tolerate that. The pay “discrimination” is actually a perfect example of this. It is linked to the role women still enjoy in our society, as primary caregiver of our children. Once it’s recognized that the best way to equalize the pay scales across the gender barrier, is to remove women from that cultural role, to tear down that status symbol — will that be a popular effort? Nobody in their right mind is going to think so.

So what we really have going on here, is an effort to make sure women are more important than men in the office, in the sitcom, and in the real-life home. That’s wildly unrealistic, but on top of that if it starts to succeed, a lot of ladies are going to feel even more overworked than they do right now.

And then you’ll see even more stuff like this:

Last year, a team of researchers added a novel twist to something known as a time-use survey. Instead of simply asking people what they had done over the course of their day, as pollsters have been doing since the 1960s, the researchers also asked how people felt during each activity. Were they happy? Interested? Tired? Stressed?

Not surprisingly, men and women often gave similar answers about what they liked to do (hanging out with friends) and didn’t like (paying bills). But there are also a number of activities that produce very different reactions from the two sexes, and one of these activities stands out: Men apparently enjoy being with their parents, while women find time with their mom and dad to be slightly less pleasant than doing laundry.

Alan Krueger – a Princeton economist working with four psychologists on the time-use research team – figures that there is a simple explanation for the difference. For a woman, time with her parents often resembles work, whether it’s helping them pay bills or plan a family gathering. “For men, it tends to be sitting on the sofa and watching football with their dad,” said Krueger, who, when not crunching data, happens to enjoy watching the New York Giants with his father. This intriguing – if unsettling – finding is part of a larger story: there appears to be a growing happiness gap between men and women.

Are women being victimized? Hell yes they are. Their interests are being represented to society-at-large, by a small coterie of loud angry self-appointed spokespersons, people who can’t ever be made happy.

Thing I Know #52. When angry people make demands, the ensuing fulfillment never seems to bring a stop to their anger.

Not In It For The Attention, Mind You… XII

Friday, November 9th, 2007

…but something wonderful has happened, along with with something terrible. I care a great deal about what went wrong, and about what went right, well, I’m just not that much into it. So I’ll try to keep my bad humor out of this. And I really should be doing that, because I owe a lot of people big-time and I don’t want to be urinating all over the fine china and furniture while I’m supposed to be expressing gratitude to them, they deserve better.

On with it.

We have real important stuff down in the meat of the article, so if you’re pressed for time and can’t abide any foolish nonsense please click here. Your assistance is desperately needed. Thank you.

This blog, which nobody actually reads anyway, has been going through high-cotton lately. That means, for something nobody’s supposed to be reading, there’s a whole lot of nobodies. In blogging parlance that means we got a lot of “hits.” By “lately” I mean over the last week or two. It is pretty much sheer coincidence that this happened. We are not a “traffic magnet.” We don’t try to attract readers. We like to make new friends…a lot. We lean somewhat in the direction of making people feel good, but just barely. We just barely go that way. We prefer making people feel good to making them feel bad, and that’s only because we don’t like to try to make people feel bad. Part of that whole “don’t be an asshole” rule. The one thing this blog is absolutely, positively against, is shaping the content of it’s pages in anticipation of attracting a broader audience. Which is done quite a bit in other places, we notice.

Girl in bikiniWe don’t do that. We put up pictures of girls in bikinis, which attracts traffic…like you wouldn’t believe…when we want to look at girls in bikinis. But anything that goes up, has to please us before it pleases the audience. We aren’t in a Nielsen ratings race, and are not going to be in anything resembling one. We talk about what we want to talk about. Period. If we get a zillion hits, that’s great. If we get zero, that’s just as good.

There’s an important reason for this. You can’t prostitute yourself a little tiny bit, we think. Can’t go halfway on that. Stray outside the girls in bikinis and other things we personally find interesting, just because we think our readers are interested in something else — before you know it, we’d be saying some pretty outlandish stuff. This, we think, is why there are people out there dribbling a bunch of crap. Like for example, “our own government might have been directly responsible for the (September 11) attacks themselves.” That is exactly what I’m talking about. Selling out your opinion to get extra attention, is an all-or-nothing proposition. We prefer not to even start down that path.

This blog is based on the fundamental principle that only through this determined apathy, can a “blog,” or any other informational resource, remain faithful to truth and logic over time. Let me put it this way. Now and then, an older relative or other acquaintance will ask me how to start a blog, and my first words of advice are always these: You need to figure out the purpose of your new blog, before you put it up — is it a glossy magazine or is it a scrapbook? In other words, is there some mission that has been failed if you one day find out no one reads your blog? This blog…the one you’re reading now…is decidedly a scrapbook. We’re plumb pleased you’re here, of course, but overall we really don’t care if “nobody” reads it and we’re not going to care.

Well, care or not, we have a lot of new readers. And of course we’re plumb pleased to have you too. How many new readers? Well, over on The Truth Laid Bear which is like the Who’s Who of blogs, we’ve been a “slithering reptile” since last year sometime. Over the last several months — we hadn’t been peeking, remember? We’re “The Blog That Nobody Reads” — somewhere we got demoted to the next lower status of “crawly amphibian,” which meant we had been representing ourselves falsely because we had this goofy-looking snake in the sidebar to show off our slimy reptile status.

Well, we’ve been talkin’ smack about Hillary Clinton, and pointing to really cool photographs taken by other people, and giggling over fashions in the 1970’s, and you know what happened today? Remember the wonderful thing that we don’t really care about that much? Well…we pole-vaulted over the reptile, over the flappy birds, over the adorable rodents, and plunged headlong into the ranking of marauding marsupial. This is a little unexpected, even if the nature of the scrapbook “Blog That Nobody Reads” makes it trivial in some ways. Like going from butterbars-2nd-Lieutenant to full-bird-Colonel. Or trading in your ’82 Datsun on a new BMW Z4.

And it’s been a slow burn, too, so that implies a little bit of permanence this time. I guess when the nobodies come around to not read the blog nobody else is reading, they like what they see and keep coming back. Or not.

But could that have a purpose? None that I can see…until…later that same day, something awful happened which is far more meaningful to us. Something’s heap-big busted, folks, and very wrong. We have an opportunity to fix it and make it right. But the key word is “we”; I can’t do it without your help.

Project Valour-IT of Soldiers’ Angels, is going to miss it’s goal.

Soldier's AngelValour-IT is a wonderful program that provides laptop computers to soldiers who have been wounded. I’m going to let the project’s “About” page do the talking here…

Every cent raised for Project Valour-IT goes directly to the purchase and shipment of laptops for severely wounded service members. As of October 2007, Valour-IT has distributed over 1500 laptops to severely wounded Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines across the country.

Valour-IT accepts donations in any amount to support the purchase and distribution of laptops, but also offers a sponsorship option. An individual or organization may sponsor a wounded soldier by completely funding the cost of a laptop and continuing to provide that soldier with personal support and encouragement throughout recovery. This has proved to be an excellent project for churches, groups of coworkers or friends, and members of community organizations such Boy Scouts.
Originally Valour-IT provided the voice-controlled software, but now works closely with the Department of Defense Computer/electronic Accommodations Program (CAP): CAP supplies the adaptive software and Valour-IT provides the laptop. In addition, DoD caseworkers serve as Valour-IT’s “eyes and ears” at several medical centers, identifying possible laptop recipients.

The laptops, should the injuries demand it, are capable of speech recognition. You know, think about it…think about I.E.D.s, think about what an explosive does to human flesh, think about burns. Think about a young guy or lady away from home for the very first time, hands in bandages, wanting more than anything to let Mom and Dad know that they’re whole, or relatively whole, but unable to type. This is as good a cause as you’re likely to find anytime soon.

About this time every year, the project holds a fundraiser and puts the various branches of our defense against each other to buy these laptops. It’s a pretty sophisticated operation filled with fun stuff like gas-gauge controls comparing how each branch is doing, the good-natured inter-service joshing among real vets that goes along with that, clicky-buttons that patch directly over to secure donation sites…and you know what…

…it’s just not getting done. The report on fundraising, is not good. The report on inventory-on-hand, is even worse. I’m kind of unhappy about it. Actually, I have some negativity to put in, and maybe I should keep it out, but I gotta get this one off my chest. I’ll try to keep it in measured doses.

I keep hearing around the web and on the news, “of course, we can disagree about this war but we all agree on one thing, we support the troops.” Well, I don’t believe it. What’s the nicest thing you could say about one of those “troops” if you oppose the war effort? Remember, this is 2007. We don’t have people who “oppose the war” and just leave it at that. You’re supposed to throw in inflammatory buzzwords like “illegal” and “unjust”…what the hell does that say about these troops you support? That they’re a bunch of stupid patsies? Okay you’re entitled to your opinion. But you’re probably not going to skip too many fancy iced coffee drinks to buy a laptop for a disabled stupid patsy, are you.

Another thing I keep hearing about is how scandalous it is that we “all” aren’t being called upon to “sacrifice more.” I think this is a crock. I think the country’s been slipping for awhile, and it’s being taken over by socialists…or whatever you call socialists nowadays. I know that makes me sound like the crazy old man in the plaid shirt with the drool stains. Pardon me, I’ve just spent half a lifetime listening to people babble on about the glory of “sacrifice,” people who, once you inspect their thoughts more deeply to the extent you’re able, don’t appear to recognize any goal higher than that sacrifice. In short, they seem to think it’s noble when people throw themselves away. I don’t believe that’s what America is about. America is about accomplishing wonderful things that may demand sacrifice…it is about offering profound and heartfelt respect to individuals who have proven themselves willing to endure that sacrifice…we don’t worship the sacrifice itself. This is a surgical-precise distinction to muck around with, but I think it is an all-important one in this nation and it’s culture. We worship the objective. We don’t worship our own self-destruction, even though in desperate times it may be necessary for reaching that objective. As George Patton said, no damn fool won a war by dying for his country, he won it by making the other damn fool die for his.

So you like to bitch about not enough people sacrificing, do you? Or being called-upon to so sacrifice? I call bullshit. Why is Valour-IT having a tough time of it, then. People who wail about this, don’t care about achieving what the sacrifice is supposed to win for us…they care about the sacrifice itself, which is a completely different kettle o’fish, and doesn’t fit my definition of “American” at all. I think these people just complain about whatever they think will win them the most favorable attention in that long line at Starbuck’s, blame a few tidbits of nonsense on George Bush, cuss out the poor lady who has to take their money and serve them their sissy frothy foo-foo drink about how long the line took this morning…and move on. Living the rest of that day for their own sake. Next day, they’ll be back again to spend another $6.50 on another fancy drink, bitching up a storm about gas prices and health insurance and what a lean Christmas they’re going to have to endure because of this expensive war. With nary a thought about how to share this unshared “sacrifice.”

As skewed a sense of perspective as there ever was.

You want a sense of respect for sacrifice? Here, I’ll explain it to you in terms of what it means to me.

Three years ago the war in Iraq was just a year old. I had some business to take care of at Walter Reed AMC, as well as a few other places, and this involved a lot of travel over a very short period of time. Well, parking at Walter Reed fills up pretty quick. I had ambitions of taking care of everything before eight in the morning, and because of some delays with some stupid thing or another it just didn’t happen. I barely reached the place by nine, which turned the parking situation upside-down for me.

So I showed my credentials to the guards, found a parking spot as best I was able…which wasn’t fun…and slithered into the lobby with my fancy suit on and a zillion other places to go after this one, feeling all abused and put-upon.

I reached the elevator just ahead of a little toe-head tyke barely half my age, and politely stepped aside to let him board first. I was glad I did, when I got a better look at him. See, he was young. He still had acne scars, and a couple of fresh zits just like what I had in my junior year of high school.

And he’d never pick any zits again.

He politely addressed me as “sir” and insisted — INSISTED — on pressing the buttons on the elevator with his own hooks.

There’s a paradigm shift for you. Three years on, I see lots of talk about an illegal and unjust war, oh but we all “support the troops” though…I hear a lot of complaining about the sacrifices some people have to make, with the knowledge that not enough other people are being called upon to do any sacrificing…people love love LOVE their foo-foo coffee drinks, their pizza deliveries, their movie rentals, their tattoos, their tabloids bursting at the seams with stories about Britney and what-not…

…and Project Valour-IT is sailing into it’s Veteran’s Day deadline reaching not even twenty-five percent of it’s goal.

What can I say, folks? My rant is done here. On the positive side, I feel truly blessed that The Blog That Nobody Reads, has for the first time an audience that is far-flung and wide-spread and (somewhat) voluminous…and loyal. We’ve had more readers-per-day before, but those were flash-in-the-pan things. Now we’re a Marsupial, and the stats and incoming-link counts say we’re somewhat deserving of this…for now…and here’s a situation where we can take that traffic and do some good with it. Make a world of difference to a lot of people who desperately need it, and richly deserve it.

Today’s payday Friday. You’re probably reading this on a Saturday morning. We’ve tried to post fun things on Saturday mornings for our Saturday morning audiences…we’ll probably be skipping that this weekend. You probably got paid yesterday. Midnight has come and gone. The funds are available. Your help is needed.

If you’re finding out about Buck’s place for the first time from this plea, do consider bookmarking him. All he’s really doing is keeping a running diary of his retirement, and it’s ended up being one of the more interesting places on the web. But if you can spare a few bucks today, do hit that Valour-IT jar. See if you can close that gap, will you?

And if you can spare more than that, fer chrissakes if the phrase “give until it hurts” ever had practical meaning, it is now. The young men and women you’re helping, have done exactly that for you.

Going Back to 1977

Thursday, November 8th, 2007

Leprechaun BodyguardsHow often do I wonder how this decade in which we live, the “aughts,” will be remembered by people in the 2030’s? Oh…pretty much constantly. The bullcrap that is supposed to seem normal to us today, would not even begin to make sense in any other time. For examples I could cite just about anything, but I really don’t see the point.

Let us turn away from the dead horses we’ve been beating into Jello, which is War on Terror and the glowbubble wormening ManBearPig, to mens’ and womens’ fashions. About a month ago this post appeared here, assuming I have indeed tracked down the original appearance of it…which I’m just going to assume is true.

Get ready to laugh your ass off.

Last weekend I put an exhaust fan in the ceiling for my wife’s grandfather. After a bunch of hours spent in The Hottest Attic In The Universe, he had a ceiling fan that ducted to the side of his house.

While my brother-in-law and I were fitting the fan in between the joists, we found something under the insulation. What we found was this…A JC Penney catalog from 1977. It’s not often blog fodder just falls in my lap, but holy hell this was two solid inches of it, right there for the taking.

There follows illustrated directions on how to get your ass kicked in school, in business meetings, on the golf course. And you know, thirty years on, it would probably work just fine.

The couples-attire is pretty interesting stuff. Well, I was alive in the seventies, and I don’t remember too many couples dressing alike. But the fashion trend was certainly there. The Womens’-Lib stuff was pushed into high gear, and perhaps partly out of the appeal of telling their beau how to dress, and partly out of insecurity, the liberated women were receptive. They must have been, or else the attempt to market the product wouldn’t have been there. And it was there, in spades.

Nowadays, we expect gentlemen and ladies to dress differently. Women are supposed to be cute and neat, men are supposed to be droopy and sloppy. But hey — you think that will be easy to explain to people in three decades? I have my doubts.

Timing Is Everything

Thursday, November 8th, 2007

Bird BathI could just kick myself for my failure to take good notes.

I found this really cool online photo album called “25 Pictures Taken at the Exact Right Time, and I was able to find it again too. But I lost track of the referral site.

I try to get as obsessive about the traditional “hat tip” as I reasonably can, because I didn’t find this on my own. I simply owe it to whoever paved the trail for me, I figure. Without them I’d thrash around endlessly and never have found it.

I was reasonably sure it was this guy, who I wanted to add to the blogroll anyway. It’s an informal rule around here…you point to us, we point to you. And his content is decent. If he did have the link, he must have taken it down or else I’m still half-asleep not finding it.

Be that as it may.

This is an amazing collection of shots. At least, the ones that are real…which is still probably most of them, even though one or two have been “busted.” Check out the cat getting thrown in the water.

Update 11/9/07: Welcome, My Pet Jawa readers and all other new readers. I apologize in advance for welcoming you with such poor form, it can’t be helped because time is of the essence. Could you please consider donating to a worthy cause? Thank you.

Best Sentence XX

Thursday, November 8th, 2007

The Twentieth Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) award goes to Bullwinkle, commenting on something I care nothing about and neither does he…

Striking Writers Guild member Steve Young:

“There’s a belief in Hollywood that at 28 the brain starts to die and you’re no longer funny or hip. If you’re waiting for the phone to ring when the strike is over, it may not. A writer is like an NFL running back, it’s a short career,” Young added.

That’s why I couldn’t be forced to make myself care at gunpoint. By the time 28 episodes of what the vast majority of these writers turn out I’ve managed to miss 28 episodes. I have the feeling that anyone who watches 28 episodes of nearly anything was braindead long ago.

Here’s a novel idea for the striking writers –

You want more money? Write something worth watching. Your last strike was a miserable failure and this one probably will be too. Striking is basically holding your product for ransom and it only works if someone misses what you produce. Kidnappers rarely send their demands to the victim’s inlaws. [emphasis mine]

That is such a strikingly perfect description of my own sentiments about television in general: Like those of a father whose daughter married the wrong fella. Son-in-law is someone who is just kind of…there. I tolerate him. And if the women of the house are around, there’s going to be a social order that demands, among other things, that I put on this charade of liking him. But maybe I don’t. And if he gets kidnapped and a ransom note shows up? Heh.

It’s been a week or two since I’ve seen any situation described so aptly. Writer’s strike…pfeh. These are the same folks responsible for that jackrabbit-pace dialog in CSI, Law & Order, Gilmore Girls and West Wing?

I just rented my pilot episode disc from Netflix for Heroes; it is my latest half-hearted “attempt” to stay up-to-speed with what all “the guys” are talkin’ about, a social endeavor that has received nothing beyond the most casual attention from me since the fifth grade. And I’m not even putting out an attempt here, really. All that office banter finally got my curiosity going. The guys were asking my take, and I had to report that while the acting and directing were superb, the writing left a great deal to be desired.

But this says something about the writing profession in general. I didn’t expect too much in the first place…I did, however, expect my imagination to be captured. The bad writing just got in the way.

Maybe I’ll give it another shot down the road. For now…the subject turned to some exciting stuff happening in the “now,” and then one of the participants politely interrupted it for my benefit because “spoilers” were about to be discussed. I waived my privileges to this injunction and let them proceed. I could tell if I ever started caring about this show, it would be quite aways down the road.

I really hate bad dialog. A lot. I understand people in real life talk to each other in ways you aren’t going to see it done on the boob tube. They interrupt, cut each other off, pursue parallel monologues, misunderstand each other…throwing that into a TV show or a movie, would add nothing.

But I would simply suggest, if you’ve got a couple of characters, and the purpose of a scene is to reveal two things about one of them…or three things…or four things…go ahead and make the scene longer than thirty seconds. Because otherwise, bad dialog becomes something unavoidable.

“You’ve got to come to terms with the fact that Dad died, and stop beating yourself up with it!” “I can’t help it, because I have nightmares every night for the last seven years, ever since my wife left me!” “I know, man, it’s like your Dad’s ghost is haunting you and you can’t find peace, but you got to try!” “Well I know one thing, I’ll never rest until I fulfill his dream of finding a cure for the disease that killed my sister when I was nine and she was six…even though I hate him so much, even in death!” “You see her in your daughter’s eyes, don’t you?” “Only when that bitch lets me. Supervised visitation and all. Well, gotta go, my AA meeting is in ten minutes. I’m 180 days clean tonight.” Ugh.

You know that scene where Michael Corleone tries to buy out Moe Greene? I clocked it once — it’s over five minutes long. In screenwriter land, that’s like an eon. That’s like Charlemagne, to yesterday. Was it boring? Anybody feel like skipping out in the middle of it for a potty break? Maybe that was the perfect time to fish another cold one out of the fridge? Didn’t think so. Did it sound like real people talking to each other? You’d better believe it. How many things did you learn during those five minutes about Moe, about Fredo, about Michael, about Vito…about the relationship between the Corleone family and the rival families in New York, and elsewhere?

Well, that isn’t fair I guess. Five minutes is quite impractical, and for reasons stated above you can’t always have everything resemble real life. So how about…the two scenes where Belloq starts psychoanalyzing people? Not realistic dialog by a damn sight, but certainly excellent dialog nonetheless. Motivations are established. Feelings are manifested. Characters are built. The story…proceeds.

See, it can be done.

Gosh, that’s a rambling for something I’m not supposed to care about; actually, that’s not what it is at all. I do care. I’m writing about the fella she should’ve married.

High Nerd

Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

Via Duffy:


NerdTests.com says I'm a High Nerd.  What are you?  Click here!

Bash in Bali

Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

Via Claudia Rosett, via Instapundit, via Rick, we discover that apparently you need a certain amount of global warming before you can talk seriously about global warming.

Really, now. If you wrote this up as fiction, no publisher would accept it. The villains in your story, he’d explain to you, are not nearly subtle enough. Look, you’ve got them as-much-as telling everyone “the world will end if we don’t get your global taxes raised.” You’ve got a scientific “documentary” produced, not by scientists, but by a failed politician and his Hollywood friends…all of whom constantly jet around the globe. You don’t even have them trying to hide this stuff, and you’re saying people are being taken in by it?

Make this into a work of fiction suitable for adults, he’d say. Make the plot a little more complicated…have the bad guys put some effort into hiding what they’re doing. As it is, it’s just too fantastic. The tales being told to people are far too tall, and you’ve got them falling for it too reliably. Anybody should see it would never happen in real life.

And yet here we are.

The Second Most Important Issue III

Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

From an unlikely source, a ray of hope:

Democrats and Waterboarding
The party will lose the presidential race if it defines itself as soft on terror.
BY ALAN DERSHOWITZ

I recently had occasion to discuss the Bush administration’s war on terrorism with one of the highest ranking former officials responsible for planning that war. He asked me what I thought the administration’s biggest mistake was.

I told him that it was not immediately going bipartisan following the attacks of 9/11. President Roosevelt had invited Republicans to join his cabinet as the U.S. prepared to fight the Germans and the Japanese, and President Lincoln had included political opponents in his efforts to preserve the union. Creating a united political front against an external enemy may blunt the partisan advantage expected from a successful military effort, but it helps to keep the country together at a time when partisan bickering can undercut the effort. The former Bush official agreed, regretting that the war against terrorism had become essentially a Republican project.

Now the Democrats appear to be making the same mistake as they move toward what seems to be an inevitable retaking of the White House. Most of the Democratic presidential candidates are seeking partisan advantage from what many Americans see as the Bush failures in the war against terrorism and especially its extension to Iraq and possibly, in the future, to Iran.

This pacifistic stance appeals to the left wing of the democratic electorate, which may have some influence on the outcome of democratic primaries, but which is far less likely to determine the outcome of the general election. Most Americans–Democrats, Republicans, independents or undecided–want a president who will be strong, as well as smart, on national security, and who will do everything in his or her lawful power to prevent further acts of terrorism.

As I’ve stated repeatedly, there are two issues with next year’s election that are far more important than any other, and just about everybody understands this even though few will admit outwardly that it’s true. The second most important issue is close on the heels of the first. The top spot is occupied by: Which of the candidates, from either party, will bring us the biggest pile of crispy dead terrorists? If one administration would haul in 500 terrorist carcasses a month and the other one would bring in 499, there really isn’t any other factor that would justify letting that 1 terrorist continue walking around. He could very well be responsible for some real damage. This is a pestilence that has gone unexterminated for far too long, and we need to poison, burn, and stamp out all we can. We’ve already tried ignoring them. For a good long time. It didn’t work. Now we need to kill them off.

And the second most important issue, just behind the first, is internal. It, too, is a question left too long unaddressed: What do we get when we put liberal democrats in charge of things? Do we get someone simply ignorant of history, or do we get certifiably insane people? Is their connection to reality just strained, or has it snapped altogether?

What makes the second most important issue so close in importance to the first, is this overwhelming crush of people who call themselves “moderates.” They think when you put Republicans in half the time, and donks in the other half of the time, you’ve achieved moderation. That’s true, assuming one ideology is cleanly left and the other is cleanly right, and there’s some path of decency and righteousness halfway between them. And that’s a great way to go if you subscribe to the “highest point of a mountain is the center” theory, concluding that when those two halves are forced to work together, the whole must be greater than the sum of the parts.

The problem comes in when we review facts that do, or do not, support this. The problem is that we have no reason to believe in any of the theories of “moderation” above.

What we do have reason to believe, is that the people we call liberals and leftists are wombat-rabies bollywonkers insane. And I would hope it’s obvious — when you alternate between letting sane people and insane people run things, maybe, just maybe, that’s not the right way to go.

This ties in with Derschowitz’s closing uppercut, and it’s a killer:

Perhaps political campaigns and confirmation hearings are not the appropriate fora in which to conduct subtle and difficult debates about tragic choices that a president or attorney general may face. But nor are they the appropriate settings for hypocritical public posturing by political figures who, in private, would almost certainly opt for torture if they believed it was necessary to save numerous American lives. What is needed is a recognition that government officials must strike an appropriate balance between the security of America and the rights of our enemies.

Unless the Democratic Party–and particularly their eventual candidate for president–is perceived as strong and smart on national defense and prevention of terrorism, the Bush White House may be proved to have made a clever partisan decision by refusing to make the war against terrorism a bipartisan issue. The Democrats may lose the presidency if they are seen as the party of MoveOn.org, Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, Dennis Kucinich and those senators who voted against Judge Mukasey because he refused to posture on a difficult issue relating to national security. They will win if they are seen as just as tough but a lot smarter on how to deal with real threats to our national interests.

And that’s why I see this as a ray of hope. In politics, Derschowitz’s points are all sound. But — I think I can almost guarantee that the donkey party will not, anytime soon, present themselves as “just as tough but a lot smarter on how to deal with real threats to our national interests.” Kerry tried it three years ago. Whenever it came time to address details, he waffled.

Because what Derschowitz can’t admit, or won’t, is that there is money coming in to support the donks. And that money comes from people who, for one reason or another, don’t want a War on Terror to be fought. It’s not all about votes, a lot of it has to do with sponsors.

There’s no real challenge involved in proving this to be true. Just look at the donks address the War on Terror sometime; just watch ’em. Blah blah blah Bush’s Fault War For Oil Illegal Unjust War blah blah blah…but meanwhile, the country does have a problem with international terrorism, and it doesn’t quite fill-the-bill to say we have a problem because of George W. Bush. The terrorists are out there. They pre-date the George W. Bush administration. They’ll get to us again if they can. What should we do about them? ………..SILENCE.

The donks are all too eager to pump out hatred at their political enemies. Why, if we could bottle up just a quarter of it and aim it at the terrorists, that might solve the problem right then & there. But what about the PROBLEM? What is to be DONE? All these years gone by, the donks have had nothing to say there. That’s the way people behave when they’re on the take. When they get money for doing a job, and the job is to distract. That is how people in general act when someone is giving them money under the table.

So yes, Prof. Derschowitz, if the donks start presenting a mantle of toughness — and filling in details about it better than John Kerry did, to show they’re serious about it — they might win. And if a frog had wings he might not have to bump his ass on the ground all the time. See, it won’t happen. The donks are as beholden to their donors as they are to their voters…as much as Republicans are beholden to their donors…probably even moreso. The strategy of the donks, whether the donks themselves like it or not, is to put a George Soros puppet in the White House.

And the rest of us should be very concerned about that, even if some of us want to call ourselves “moderates.” Because that would service the first-most-important issue very poorly. You could take the terrorists off the endangered-species list then.

I Want To See

Tuesday, November 6th, 2007

If/when the Republicans lose the White House next year, a book by Mark Crispin Miller telling us all about how the 2008 elections were stolen through liberal chicanery and shenanigans. Think I should hold my breath long?

We need a new word to describe people like Prof. Miller. People who fervently believe President Bush is the biggest dunce that ever walked the planet, and at the same time, has fooled and continues to fool everyone. How does a village idiot manage to get that done?

Flash Mob

Monday, November 5th, 2007

It sounds pretty stupid, and probably is. You tell a bunch of your friends to meet you at a designated place at a designated time, and then you pretend to beat up on each other or shoot each other with make-believe guns just to get the onlookers to wonder what’s going on.

America's HatAnd now it’s led to criminal charges.

An Ottawa teen believes cops were too quick to pull the trigger on a mischief investigation that involved shaping his hand into a gun and yelling bang in a mock gunfight.

Henrick Vierula told the Sun he doesn’t deserve to be charged with multiple criminal offences after participating in a phenomena known as a “flash mob” at the Rideau Centre on Friday.

“The whole thing is ridiculous,” said Vierula, 19.

Vierula and other participants were to shape their hands into a gun, point them at each other, yell “bang” and collapse to the ground.

I didn’t know pointing your finger at someone as if you were holding a make-believe gun, and yelling “bang,” was a criminal offense. But this is Ottawa.

I see a cause and effect going on here. Young men, in Canada as well as elsewhere, seem to be increasingly suffering from a global epidemic of stupids. Well, maybe they should. As any normal grown-up man can tell you, especially if he’s been tasked to help raise small boys into other mature men, masculinity can’t really be stamped out because it is an incompressible liquid hydraulic agent. You can apply pressure to it but for every unit of volume that gives way to cultural forces in one location, an equal volume of it will explode outward elsewhere with equal force.

And where better to observe the consequences of a war against manhood, than Canada?

Poor Henrick is now looking at having a criminal record. Well, I’m not too much opposed to having a criminal record for general stupidity. I figure if you’re a dedicated stupid, it’ll happen sooner or later. But let the punishment fit the crime. Seems to me, this has failed to materialize in the situation at hand, and the reason for that failure is there’s two cultures living in Ottawa that ought not be intermixed. The folks in charge of the rules, want a plaid-paisley society with no reminders of that dreaded knuckle-dragging manly-man anywhere to be seen. But they forgot to ship all the teenage boys out first. Dealing with masculinity by trying to stamp it out. It no workee.

I’m pretty sure that’s the situation. Don’t know it for an absolute fact. But I’ll take my chances.

Speaking of which, for reasons along the same lines, Pokemon has been put on probation in my house. I caught a certain young man failing to show initiative at solving his own problems…I mean, little problems, in ways he used to solve them. So we know it’s not an issue of maturity. Something has been eroding his sense of self-government and leadership — about the same time he got really revved up on Pokemon. Now, a lost pair of socks is an occasion for planting your skinny ass on the couch and waiting for someone to bring them to you. Not good. This, my girl and I have been lecturing him, is how Katrina happened.

What’s Pokemon? Ask the Wiccans at you-know-what

is a media franchise owned by video game giant Nintendo and created by Satoshi Tajiri around 1995. Originally released as a pair of interlinkable Game Boy role-playing video games, Pokémon has since become the second most successful and lucrative video game-based media franchise in the world, falling only behind Nintendo’s Mario series. Pokémon properties have since been merchandised into anime, manga, trading cards, toys, books, and other media. The franchise celebrated its tenth anniversary on 27 February 2006, and as of 1 December 2006, cumulative sold units of the video games (including home console versions, such as the “Pikachu” Nintendo 64) have reached more than 155 million copies.
:
The concept of the Pokémon universe, in both the video games and the general fictional world of Pokémon, stems from the hobby of insect collecting, a popular pastime which Pokémon executive director Satoshi Tajiri had enjoyed as a child. Players of the games are designated as Pokémon Trainers, and the two general goals (in most Pokémon games) for such Trainers are: to complete the Pokédex by collecting all of the available Pokémon species found in the fictional region where that game takes place; and to train a team of powerful Pokémon from those they have caught to compete against teams owned by other Trainers, and eventually become the strongest Trainer, the Pokémon Master. These themes of collecting, training, and battling are present in almost every version of the Pokémon franchise, including the video games, the anime and manga series, and the Pokémon Trading Card Game.

Now this could all be quite healthy. But I’m not going to assume that it is, just because it has non-caucasian roots, the animals are cute and kids happen to like it.

I see too many parallels that concern me a lot. I see connections with those confused, frustrated — and I’ll bet my bottom dollar, bored — kids in Ottawa. I see connections with the war in Iraq, and the War on Terror. The war is unpopular, I’m told, because no weapons of mass destruction were found. Well, anyone who hasn’t been living in a cave, should be able to see the (economic) necessity of criticizing the war, came first; the Bush administration’s embarrassment over weapons, just dumped a lot of refined fuel onto an open flame that was already present. Even with that, the argument that we should have left well enough alone in Iraq, makes sense only to a mindset that has been somehow inculcated to a predisposition that vexing problems like Saddam Hussein’s despotic regime, are best left ignored.

Conclusion: There is something toxic under the surface of the era in which we now live. Something that says taking the initiative and finding ways to achieve a positive outcome, or to thwart a disaster, is inherently distasteful. Pokemon is both a cause and an effect. It dissuades young people from solving problems the way thinking people are meant to solve them. And it is an agent of something more ancient, something larger. Feminist movement? Maybe that, and some other things.

I’m not venturing too far out on a limb, to guess that this is has a lot to do with why young manly-boys, and tomboys, filled with that good vibrant problem-solving energy the good Lord gave them, are so freakishly bored that they have no better way to channel it than to coordinate “flash mob” nonsense on their MySpace pages. There may or may not be problems to be solved, but finding solutions to them on your own is now frowned-upon.

Well Pokemon came along, according to the Wiccans, in ’95.

Blame Pokemon? Well I dunno ’bout that. Placing all the blame on any one thing, seems childish. But consider what happens in a Pokemon game or cartoon. Consider for just a moment…

…a bunch of semi-adorable, spiky-haired moppet kids with eyeballs the size of dinner plates, get together and talk smack at each other. They challenge each other to fights, and once the fights commence, the moppets don’t do any of the fighting. The fighting is done, instead, by even-more-adorable sickly-sweat animals that look like they came from alternate universes.

The adorable animals, the “pocket monsters,” are very weird looking. It’s clear they are designed to resemble earth species just somewhat, and in some cases, but overall they are supposed to look other-worldly. Not scary, but strange and surreal. They are designed, it’s clear to me, to avoid inspiring too much of a relationship with their human masters, or with the humans in the audience. They, in short, externalize the fighting. Their “masters” give each other a lot of lip, and even if the fight is lost those masters absorb no bruises anywhere except on the ego. All the physical injury is dealt animal-to-animal.

I have never, ever seen a subplot pursued where a defeated animal carries an injury onward into other scences as part of a temporary or permanent maiming. Injuries are forgotten when the battle is ended. It’s kind of like Luke Skywalker getting dragged under the slimy goo by that monster in the garbage compactor, and in the next scene he’s all brushed and blow-dried, like a Bee Gee ready to take the stage. Like that.

The message is unmistakable. Problems, even of your own making, are there to be solved by someone else. There’s just no getting around it.

PokemonPokemon will be banned from my house only for a little while, until a certain ten-year-old shows me some of the leadership and intiative I saw in him when he was six. I know he’s got it in him, so this won’t be much of a wait. But what about all the other toe-heads of his generation? Half the time the protagonist’s adorable pocket-monster loses the fight, and so you have to be prepared for disappointment; there is some value in that, I guess. But is it put to any practical use if that protagonist has no concern about anything, other than a miniscule delay as his inevitable victory is positioned at the end of the episode rather than in Act One?

The human receives no injuries. Beasts do the dirty work. You know, when grown men do exactly the same thing with chickens or dogs, in a lot of places that’s a felony. There is a reason for that: There’s just too much cowardice being enshrined and rewarded in such an activity. Well this cartoon seems to make a primary objective out of enshrining and rewarding exactly that, in exactly the same way — and once again, I’m annoyed with the whole thing.

Why am I annoyed? Well, I’ll plagiarize Joe McCarthy: If the Saturday-morning cartoons were merely ignorant of rough-and-tumble, problem-solving creative-resourceful Indiana-Jones masculinity, rather than being determinedly opposed to it, the frequency with which they’d be seen promoting something contradictory to it would be on par with random chance. Somewhere around fifty percent of the time. Take a few steps back from Pokemon and look at all the other stuff our kids watch, and this is higher than fifty percent. Naturally, a guy in a black hat telling Matt Dillon to “draw!”, or anything remotely like that, is nowhere to be seen. This looks more like a deliberate, intense, prolonged and sustained campaign to bypass and usurp parental authority, and do whatever can be done to kill off manhood. To make sure that a dozen years from now, any swimmer caught in an undertow, any child caught on the second floor of a burning house, anyone in trouble who needs a rescuer capable of seeing what needs doing, and doing it…is SCREWED. To make sure a generation of helpless whelps is raised, filling the space just emptied by old-fashioned, can-do American ingenuity.

Once again, I’m pretty sure that’s the situation. Don’t know it for an absolute fact but I’ll take my chances. After all, back in my day Wiley Coyote taught me that I may know the least about what’s going on, when I’m most sure of myself, and I may very well get run over by a truck or smashed by a rock — but that doesn’t mean I should ever stop trying.

Know what? I like that lesson a whole lot better.

Burning Cities Americans Won’t Burn

Saturday, November 3rd, 2007

How’s this for an inconvenient truth:

Police have arrested a man in Los Angeles after witnesses say they saw him lighting a fire on a hillside.

Authorities say 41-year-old Catalino Pineda was seen starting a fire in the San Fernando Valley Wednesday and then walking away.

Witnesses alerted authorities and followed the man to a nearby restaurant where police arrested him.

Pineda was booked for investigation of arson. Authorities say the Guatemala native is currently on probation for making excessive false emergency reports to law enforcement.

Police and fire officials could not immediately say whether he might be connected to any of the wildfires in Southern California.

From the L.A. Daily News story that came out roughly the same time…

Prosecutors have charged a 41-year-old Sun Valley man with arson after witnesses spotted him lighting up a hillside in Woodland Hills on Wednesday, officials said this morning.

Catalino Pineda is scheduled to be arraigned some time this morning in Van Nuys Superior Court, said Deputy District Attorney Steven Frankland. He is charged with one count of arson of a structure or forest.

Witnesses allegedly spotted Pineda lighting a fire on a hillside near Del Valle Street and Ponce Avenue about 4:30 p.m. Wednesday and walk away, police said. The fire was quickly extinguished.

Witnesses followed Pineda to a nearby restaurant and notified police, who arrested him. He is being held on $75,000 bail. If convicted, he faces up to six years in state prison.

Pineda is a day laborer and native of Guatemala. He is currently on probation for making excessive false emergency reports to law enforcement, police said.

Anyone with information is asked to call West Valley Area detectives at (818) 374-7730. On weekends and after hours call the 24-hour Detective Information Desk at 1-877-LAW-FULL (529-3855).

Now, you’ve heard that these “undocumented” immigrants actually commit crimes at a rate far lower than people who actually belong in the country. For example…here. But this example, typical of many others, is loaded with half-truths and red herrings. You fall into the trap when you’re lulled into thinking the faux-statistic addresses illegal immigrants…

In 2007, the American Immigration Law Foundation found that, based on U.S. Census data, “immigration is actually associated with lower crime rates” and that “incarceration rates among young men are lowest for immigrants, even those who are least educated.”

Additionally, the report states that foreign-born (including undocumented) men aged 18 to 39 have incarceration rates five times lower than U.S.-born counterparts. Contrary to media portrayals, undocumented immigrants actually commit crimes significantly less often than U.S.-born citizens.

Two differentiations that I personally think are probably important, are being conflated here rather casually. We have “immigrants”; we have “undocumented.” Those groups are overlapping but are far from statistically identical. Earlier in the article, it is stated as fact that 75 percent of immigrants are “with documents.” The statistical comparisons in the two paragraphs above, have to do with the superset, not the subset. The final sentence of the second paragraph summarizes the situation, but incorrectly or in a manner inconsistent with what the cited research supports: “Undocumented immigrants actually commit crimes significantly less often.” Uh, beg your pardon. We don’t know that. We don’t know that from what’s been offered here.

The other distinction to be made, when we’re talking about comparing crime rates among illegal aliens, or at least pretending to be talking about that, is between “incarceration” and “committing crime.” One would presume if you happen to have broken the law by coming into this country and want to continue breaking the law once you’re here, you would have a few tips and tricks for avoiding getting caught right? I mean if you didn’t…you’d be far less likely to have made it in.

It’s very rare that I hear of studies about illegal aliens committing crimes. Whenever a statistical comparison is done, almost always it has to do with incarceration rates. Smells like skullduggery to me, because the question I hear people asking has to do with who’s committing the crime, not who’s getting locked up for it.

Anyway, we seem to be split straight down the middle on this one. Citizens want the border locked down, and our slimy politicians and lazy egghead white coat propeller-beanie-wearing scientists with their phony studies want it busted wide open. What to do, oh, what to do…

Well, that’s a lot of homes. Maybe now we have our answer.

We’re Paranoid

Saturday, November 3rd, 2007

This guy’s a nut, but no nuttier than our liberals. If the September 11 attacks hadn’t happened, his response would make perfect sense. But they did, and so he’s a nut.

A Swedish man accused of falsely telling U.S. authorities that his son-in-law had links to al-Qaida has been charged with defamation, a newspaper reported Friday.

The false warning spoiled a business trip to the U.S. for the man’s son-in-law, who was stopped at a Florida airport and questioned for 11 hours before being sent back on a plane to Sweden, the Sydsvenska Dagbladet daily reported.

U.S. authorities apparently reacted to an e-mail sent to the FBI saying the man “likely has links to the Muslim terror organization al-Qaida’s network in Sweden,” the newspaper reported.

The 52-year-old father-in-law admitted to having sent the e-mail after it was traced to his home computer, the paper said. He reportedly told police he sent the e-mail in anger after a dispute with his son-in-law, who was divorcing his daughter.

The man said he did not expect such a “paranoid reaction” from U.S. authorities, Sydsvenska Dagbladet reported.

Honestly, where do all these people come from? Do they have incredibly short memories or did they just never give a rat’s ass?

There’s more to this worldwide phenomenon raising the hair in the back of my neck…other than it being horribly offensive. I’m just wondering about the future conversation with my grandkids…

“Grandpa, when did all that ‘global warming hysteria’ you were talking about take place?”

“Oh, I would say it peaked around aught six and petered out around aught eight or nine…got started in two or three.”

“And people were a lot more worried about that than anything else?”

“Yup. Kids of your generation were supposed to be peeved at grownups from my generation for daring to continue generating power, going to work, cooking meat outdoors, and generally living life. It was the biggest political issue of that decade by far.”

“Uh…I thought you said the September 11 attacks occurred in oh one. How did people go from that, in the space of a year or two, to worrying about something that never even killed anybody?”

“You know…you come up with an answer to that one, let me know.”

Really, some of the things my grandmother and uncles told me that made so little sense at the time, I’m seeing now in an entirely different light. That fool swede should be one isolated kookburger. But he represents the majority, from what I can figure. Worry about the gobular wormening ManBearPig, which has yet to hurt anyone, but pretend the September 11 attacks never took place. You exist in any other era, and not only will this perspective cease to make any sense, but you’ll be just incredulous at just how foolish we are overall in this generation. We’ve really lost all meaningful hold on reality.

Imitation is the Sincerest Form XXI

Saturday, November 3rd, 2007

A couple days ago I said, regarding Senator Clinton’s fumble

I don’t know for a fact that a President Hillary Clinton would certainly end the United States as we know it. But let’s face facts: She’d certainly be able to. She could erode “civil liberties” a hundred times more than President Bush has ever dreamed of doing, and afterward, face one-hundredth as much scrutiny and inspection from the media or from anyone else.

A woman of real courage would just leave that “don’t pick on the girl” card unplayed. You’d get answers out of her, which would have real meaning, that you’d be able to understand.

Now, I don’t know if Hillary’s rival and colleague Barrack Obama reads my blog. I have long operated under the premise that hardly anybody does. But how then do you explain this gem, which appeared in the online edition of the L.A. Times earlier this morning?

“I am assuming and I hope that Sen. Clinton wants to be treated like everybody else,” Obama said on the “Today” show.

Referring to debates where he has come under attack, Obama said, “I didn’t come out and say, ‘Look, I’m being hit on because I look different from the rest of the folks on the stage.’ “

I’ve been robbed, but I’m not calling the police. I’m quite flattered.

It’s easily the most sensible thing I’ve heard of Sen. Obama saying, since…well, since a few short months ago when he dished out his first not-really-positive comment about something, whatever that comment was, after some advisor got hold of him and correctly convinced him he couldn’t win the White House on a bunch of empty bromides and platitudes. He was probably reacting to the Clinton campaign’s YouTube clip, which in my opinion is about as clever as any other, but nevertheless amounts to a whole lot of whining.

One of the things that makes America a great country is we get bitchy about whiners…other countries get bitchy about people who gloat, and end up nurturing cultures opposed to success, eventually festering into unabashed jealousy. But we get particularly bitchy about powerful politicians snivelling away about having to answer tough questions when seeking high office.

In the first 150 years or so of this nation’s history, Hillary Clinton’s boo-hoo-hoo don’t pick on me schtick would have gotten her disqualified. Well, of course, being a woman she wouldn’t have been a likely candidate in the first place. Now things are different. A woman can run for President, and in the mind of Hillary Clinton, that apparently means it has become distasteful to inspect what a perceived front-runner would do about even highly-controversial issues. Now that someone with fallopian tubes is running we’re supposed to stop asking questions and just hope for the best.

I don’t think the man’s been born who’s a worse chauvinist pig, than this one candidate who is arguably more likely than any other to be our next President and happens to female herself. I’ve torn up the sheets with some whiny, weepy women in my time, but I doubt I’ve met anyone with a lower tolerance for confrontation or a lower vision for what a woman can handle than Hillary. Obama nailed it: Sen. Clinton’s tactic is useful only to a candidate hiding something. As if we needed a further demonstration of that after her waffling answer.

But of course, I called it out first, and while it’s a stretch to think he was inspired reading the same pages you’re reading now, I have no hard evidence to prove or even to suggest he did not.

Olbermann Apologizes

Saturday, November 3rd, 2007

I get to link straight to the FARK thread on this one since it was green-lit, meaning you don’t need to be a member of TOTALFARK in order to see it. Just click on the YouTube logo at the top and away you go.

I think some of the comments from the Olby apologists are pretty important here.

The apology is for having pointed out what a crazy whack-a-doodle Rudy Giuliani seems to be, when you pretend that Giuliani said something that Giuliani did not, in fact, actually say. Actually, it’s somewhat less sincere than that. Giuliani said something, the Associated Press somehow began circulating a mythology that Giuliani said something else, the mythology reached Olby, Olby helped promote the mythology, AP issued a retraction, Olby followed suit.

To Olbermann’s credit, his apology clip contains an excerpt of Giuliani’s comments. From that, you are eqiupped with all the tools necessary to make up your own mind…an unusual move for Olby, but one can see how circumstances might persuade him to turn over a new leaf and step out of that cloistered citadel of “everybody tells everybody else what to think all the time.” What is not so clear, however, is how Giuliani’s remarks were mangled in the first place.

Nor am I clear on the thinking of the Keith-Oh fan base. To be sure, Olbermann’s doing a few things here that he doesn’t necessarily have to do, but each and every one of those things is reactive in nature. But more important than that, he got into this trouble by passing the second milestone on the way to insanity; in other words, he navigated the First Traid of the Nine Pillars of Persuasion out of sequence. And in that sense, his apology is just as out-of-step as the blunder that originally made the apology necessary.

To bottom-line it, he heard something, he believed it uncritically, he re-broadcast it, he learned about a retraction from the original source and then he re-broadcast that. And for the second re-broadcasting, his fan base is telling everyone within earshot that we’re all supposed to hold Olby in high esteem for his vaunted personal integrity.

This strikes me as trying to have things both ways. The apology is a reflection of your personal integrity, while the original screw-up is not? I dunno. When I look at the facts and decide what they mean for myself, it seems Olbermann is just some guy who reads or watches products from the Associated Press, believes every word of it without checking it out, does his bit to re-broadcast it to whatever extent he can, and takes bows for the AP’s retractions while disclaiming any involvement or responsibility when the AP fumbles.

I mean, an eight dollar pair of amplified speakers can do that.

Except stereo speakers don’t make careers out of being angry. At least now when I see Keith Olbermann being angry about something, I’ll know there’s a good chance he hasn’t the slightest idea whether or not his anger is based on anything real.

I get angry about things too. Pig-bitin’ mad, sometimes. I can make Olby look like Mahatma Ghandi, depending on what’s under discussion. But I can get only so mad, up to a certain level, beyond which I have to check things out and find out what’s going on. If I get angrier than that, then I’ve got to do this…or make a priority out of it. It’s tough on the ol’ ticker you know, I’ve only got so many occasions to get angry before it’s time to cash things in. I’d like my anger, therefore, to be based on something real. So anger compels me to check things out. That’s what normal people do.

So what use would I have for a guy like Olby, who shouts first and checks things out second?

Energy Thermometer

Friday, November 2nd, 2007

Had this cool idea when I first rolled out of bed this morning. It makes more and more sense to me every time I think on it.

You know that “Doomsday Clock” the anti-nuclear egghead scientists rolled out during the cold war era to show how close to midnight we were getting, the “moment” when we’d supposedly use our amazing nuclear arsenal to blow up the planet? My son has been asking me here & there about the difference between Fahrenheit and Celsius, and I was describing for him how both scales are based on 0 to 100 but use different definitions to define those two calibration points.

Well, Rick has been thinking some more about that Cristy article, as have I…

I’ve had a lot of fun recently with my tiny (and unofficial) slice of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But, though I was one of thousands of IPCC participants, I don’t think I will add “0.0001 Nobel Laureate” to my resume.
:
I’m sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see. Rather, I see a reliance on climate models (useful but never “proof”) and the coincidence that changes in carbon dioxide and global temperatures have loose similarity over time.
:
Suppose you are very serious about making a dent in carbon emissions and could replace about 10% of the world’s energy sources with non-CO2-emitting nuclear power by 2020 — roughly equivalent to halving U.S. emissions. Based on IPCC-like projections, the required 1,000 new nuclear power plants would slow the warming by about 0.2 ?176 degrees Fahrenheit per century. It’s a dent.

But what is the economic and human price, and what is it worth given the scientific uncertainty?

My experience as a missionary teacher in Africa opened my eyes to this simple fact: Without access to energy, life is brutal and short. The uncertain impacts of global warming far in the future must be weighed against disasters at our doorsteps today. Bjorn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus 2004, a cost-benefit analysis of health issues by leading economists (including three Nobelists), calculated that spending on health issues such as micronutrients for children, HIV/AIDS and water purification has benefits 50 to 200 times those of attempting to marginally limit “global warming.”

So what’s the whole global warming movement about? If it was about keeping poor kids from starving, it wouldn’t be posing this threat to them…if it was about curtailing the carbon emissions into the atmosphere, people wouldn’t be flying around in private jets to promote it.

It’s not about stopping us from supplying people with energy. I think it would be far more accurate to say it’s about stopping us from providing that energy independently.

Which, already, we don’t do. You build a power plant, nuclear or otherwise, you have to get permits, file environmental impact statements, zone, design, approve, get blessings from Department of Labor, OSHA…

Just like any business. But someone has figured out, you can hamstring us by regulating businesses in general — or, you can hamstring us so much more effectively by regulating businesses that produce energy all other businesses use.

That’s what it’s all about. Greenhouse gases are just a distraction. A cow farts and burps greenhouse gases that are far more potent than anything you’ll produce by driving down the road. But cow doesn’t do anything to drive commerce. It just makes beef steaks and milk products, that’s all. So nobody even bats an eyelash at the cows. It’s our technology-related greenhouse gas output that has to be attacked.

As I said, we already don’t produce energy in the private sector with free-enterprise independence. We have the standard regulations. We have the Endangered Species Act. Our elected officials prohibit the production of energy, which is needed by poor people more than anybody else…or, they control the production of that energy. Their decisions determine, in whole or in part, who lives and who dies. Global warming is just a way to get some more of that going on.

I propose a thermometer. A thermometer, just like the Doomsday Clock. An “Energy Thermometer.”

Zero degrees means private industry produces the energy we need, with complete independence. A hundred degrees means the public sector determines all, and if private industry has any role to play whatsoever, it is simply to do what government says.

This would be a valuable thermometer. It would define the real purpose to all this fear-mongering and weird, other-worldly legislating. The above mentioned Endangered Species Act, for example — which has few defenders anymore, but pointedly nobody’s rushing to take off the books even at the dawn of our most long and drawn-out campaign season ever — probably boosted the “temperature” on such a scale by a good fifteen to twenty degrees.

Let’s build a thermometer like that. Then we could see the real point to these anti-technological, anti-capitalist movements we get from time to time…and we could measure their achieved effects, as well.

Hop the Turnstyle, Punch a Ballot

Friday, November 2nd, 2007

What better way is there for us to apologize for our very existence as a nation, than to hunt down those who would kill themselves in order to take a few of us down with ’em…and give them the right to vote for or against our public officials.

Here’s the thing. An immigration investigation by the federal government found 4,000 probable illegal voters in that race. It was decided by less than 1,000 votes. Eight of the 9-11 hijackers, eight of the 19 hijackers, were registered to vote — because they’d gotten driver’s licenses.

This is a “Why We Have Blogs” moment if ever there was one. The Newsbusters pice excerpted above is a little on the long side, jam-packed with interesting tidbits you’re not going to hear on the alphabet-soup networks on the boob tube. Ever write a letter to your senator or congressman and wonder why they aren’t exactly slobbering with anticipation for your latest clear guidance about how they should be voting? Well, it almost seems sensible…they’re so busy, and you’re just one voter.

Well, in all likelihood you’re not even that. America, The Beautiful — where the voters elect leaders, and then the leaders get together and decide who’s going to vote. And then the voters wonder why it is they don’t have a say anymore, when the answer is right in front of our faces the whole time.

The donk party just barely managed to squeak out a congressional victory for the first time this century last year. They’ve managed to win 3 out of 10 presidential elections since 1968.

Overall, in spite of the enormous amounts of money they spend bullying us around and telling us what to think, we just don’t want them running anything. And so, we see through Hillary’s embarrassing performance in that debate earlier this week, and through that asinine Motor Voter law enacted in the first year of her husband’s presidency, they want to give the right to vote to people who enter the country illegally.

If the donks were forced to spend one twentieth as much time proving the above musings false, as Republicans are forced to prove they aren’t sexists and racists, we might have a chance as a country. Me, I’m braced for a full year of listening to Hillary and Co. endure hard-nosed, scrutinizing questions such as “how does campaigning make you feel?”

Speaking of which, I wanted to be sure and capture this (H/T: Duffy), which I expect to come in handy in the long months ahead…

Drivers Licenses for Illegal Aliens

Thursday, November 1st, 2007

Wow, this was a little tough to find. It was kind of easy running into the water cooler hubbub hear-and-there about Hillary Clinton flubbing up an answer, but getting a link to the actual cilp was no mean feat.

“This is where everyone plays gotcha.” What the hell is that supposed to mean?

We need to reform that word “reform.” Ban it from politics altogether. This is a pet peeve of mine and it’s not a Republican/donk thing either; I’m sick to death of some waffling politician using that word, giving not one scintilla of evidence as to his real position on the issue under discussion one way or t’other, and then giving this steely-eyed stare into the camera or just off it, as if s/he’s just gone out on a limb and taken some courageous position on something.

It goes well beyond drivers’ licenses for illegal aliens, and it pre-dates Hillary by a good stretch. “We need blahblahblah reform!!” …it’s become the rallying cry of politicans who try to please everybody. Or have hidden agendas they’re afraid to really talk about.

Hillary thinks guys like me are afraid of her because she’s a strong-willed woman. Damn straight. I’m terrified. This flubbed-up answer was a real occasion for surprise and I have no reason to think it’ll ever happen again. She’s using her female-ness to avoid tough questions, with admirable effect — she could be caught red-handed covering little tiny puppies with gasoline and setting them on fire, and when questioned about it she’ll just say she’s forced to do it because of the incompetence of the Bush administration. And in that circumstance, I would fully expect her to get away with it.

I mean, I don’t know for a fact that a President Hillary Clinton would certainly end the United States as we know it. But let’s face facts: She’d certainly be able to. She could erode “civil liberties” a hundred times more than President Bush has ever dreamed of doing, and afterward, face one-hundredth as much scrutiny and inspection from the media or from anyone else.

A woman of real courage would just leave that “don’t pick on the girl” card unplayed. You’d get answers out of her, which would have real meaning, that you’d be able to understand.

Update: Once again, an unidentifiable, omnipotent cosmic kismet says to itself “Hey that Morgan Freeberg guy is babbling nonsense again, let’s make some stuff happen to prove what he’s saying is true.” Some weepy apologetic male surrounded by feminists, spins like a Turkish dervish to support the canard that Senator Clinton’s position is cohesive as all get-out, just communicated badly. Poor fellow just doesn’t get it. He seeks to measure the achievement of the feminist movement by how many of us have the pardon-my-French BALLS to call women “girls.” Get that number to zero, the movement is success; otherwise, it still has a way to go.

It’s not compatible with a free society. Such a brand of feminism, can only achieve when the spirit of the individual is utterly defeated. Until then, everybody gets to call everything by whatever name they’re compelled to use by the wrinkles in their brains. And that’s just the way things are.

Oh, and Senator Clinton is a duplicitous weasel. It’s no less reprehensible when the girls do it. Sorry if that comes as a shock.