Archive for November, 2009

A Party Both United and Divided

Monday, November 30th, 2009

Washington Post:

The Republican rank and file is largely in sync with GOP lawmakers in their staunch opposition to efforts by President Obama and Democrats to enact major health-care legislation, but a new Washington Post poll also reveals deep dissatisfaction among GOP voters with the party’s leadership as well as ideological and generational differences that may prove big obstacles to the party’s plans for reclaiming power.

Republicans and GOP-leaning independents are overwhelmingly negative about Obama and the Democratic Party more broadly, with nearly all dissatisfied with the administration’s policies and almost half saying they are “angry” about them. About three-quarters have a more basic complaint, saying Obama does not stand for “traditional American values.” More than eight in 10 say there is no chance they would support his reelection.

But for all the talk among Republican elected officials about a nascent comeback after gubernatorial victories in Virginia and New Jersey this month, there is also broad frustration among Republican voters about the party’s direction, detachment from its congressional representatives and a schism over its priorities.

Fewer than half of the Republicans and Republican-leaners surveyed by The Washington Post see the party’s leadership as taking the GOP in the “right direction,” down sharply from this time four years ago. About four in 10 are dissatisfied with the policy proposals being offered by congressional Republicans, and similar numbers see the current crop of GOP legislators as out of touch with their problems and personal values. Nearly a third say the Republicans in Congress are not standing up for the party’s core values.

This portrait of how Republicans see their party is part of an ongoing series of stories examining the GOP at the midpoint between its disastrous losses in the 2006 and 2008 elections, and the midterm elections in 2010 and the 2012 presidential contest…
:
Nearly three in 10 of those surveyed expressed no opinion about who in the GOP best reflects the party’s principles or volunteered that no one does. Topping the list of named leaders was former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, the party’s 2008 vice presidential nominee.

In the poll, taken amid the media whirlwind surrounding the release of her memoir “Going Rogue,” more cite Palin than other Republicans as best reflecting the party’s core values and as the top vote-getter in hypothetical presidential nomination contests. But on neither question did she exceed 20 percent backing among all Republicans.

It seems to me we have a lot of “Republicans” running around who are still drunk and hung-over on this intoxicating elixir of personality-politics. Palin’s policies and Obama’s policies, they say, are somewhat or mostly irrelevant. The democrats have found a likable guy, so we need to find a likable guy. Palin may be likable but she doesn’t inspire confidence. We have to find a guy who is oh-so-likable, and oh-so-competent looking — that nobody will ever want to make fun of him, ever.

Then we put him up against Barack Obama, in an election that is bereft of any policy discussions just as the election of ’08 was. And Obama gets hammered into one-term history.

Yeah good luck with that.

President Sottero has the “popularity contest” of 2012 won already. At least in the likability category. He will absolutely, positively, guaranteed, emerge victorious there. The challenge for Republicans is to make the overall contest much bigger than that.

If that challenge is tackled in all the right ways, it won’t be hard. Barry’s policies suck ass, and the recognition is becoming widespread that we can ill afford them. As I attached to the end of the Daphne/Sarah thread this morning — speaking of elephants-in-the-room —

I get the impression Buck & friends are making fun of we who see promise in Palin, for our reprehensible judgment in deciding what’s a likable personality and what isn’t. How could you like her: She acts like a dotty old aunt with her midwestern accent and her Tina Fey glasses…this misses the point. Speaking just for myself, I have no affinity for dotty-old-aunts, I long for a return to the days when personality didn’t matter. When it was all about the wisdom of the policy.

We have no avenue to salvation in any other direction. When we forget about the policies, we end up with policies that say…hey let’s cut the unemployment rate by scaring the shit out of the businesses and taking all the stability out of our economy…let’s fight the deficit by borrowing lots of money…let’s get big government under control by means of a six trillion dollar “health care” plan.

Put Palin’s spirit and worldview in the body of some chubby middle-aged plumber with a hairy ass crack sticking out of his jeans, and I’d vote for that guy too.

If aliens came by and kidnapped President Obama and we were left to continue American political history without Him, we’d still be afflicted by the same curse: Republicans and democrats alike, being taken in by the phony-baloney “My personality is wonderful, so pass my bad policies” nonsense. The debt figures we are talking about have a debilitating effect on the financial wherewithal of generations yet-to-come; their shock waves will reverberate long after you and I, and President Sort-of-God, and His oh-so-capable handlers, are all dust, and the personalities of He as well as those who challenge Him, are long forgotten.

No Balls to Build the Walls

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

Gerard brings us reality, and not the pleasant kind either.

This is Maurice Clemmons, sought by the police of Washington state, for possible involvement in the ambush/assassination of 4 police officers Sunday morning in Tacoma. Reading Clemmons’ recent and not so recent criminal history makes any sensible person ask, “What is this animal doing out on the street?” The short answer is, “You just can’t lock up crazy and dangerous people any longer.” The longer answer, in fewer words, is “We don’t have the guts to jail the nuts.”
:
Clemmons became free to walk about Washington state in this way: “Clemmons posted $15,000 with a Chehalis company called Jail Sucks Bail Bonds. The bondsman, in turn, put up $150,000, securing Clemmons’ release on the pending child-rape charge.”

You’ve got to love the name of that bail company: “Jail Sucks Bail Bonds.” That name encapsulates in its depraved way everything that has gone amiss over the last few decades. “We think jail just sucks and if you do to come on down to Jail Sucks Bail Bonds where freedom to take your demented life back on the streets is only 10% away.”

Of course, the Democrat controlled Washington State legislature and governor are continually hatching legislation that will make it more difficult for ordinary citizens to arm and protect themselves from the vermin they catch and release like diseased trout back onto the streets. You’d think having four armed police officers executed while they sat having coffee in a Tacoma restaurant would make the politicians of this state, and other states, think twice about anti-gun legislation. Forget about it. The Democrat disease’s main symptom is that they don’t even think once.

The Daphne/Sarah Thread

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

Blogger friend Buck sez, over at Daphne’s place, that we here put up Sarah Palin posts with great frequency. And you know what Morgan Rule Number One is…that’s right. If I’m gonna be accused, I wanna be guilty. Because being falsely accused of something really sucks. We won’t allow it to happen. So it’s time for a Palin post.

Saw a magazine at the haircutting place when my son was getting his buzz cut. Had a caricaturized cartoon of Palin taking the oath of office from a Chief Justice John Roberts, with a huge crowd in the background. The depressed-looking face of a mopey one-term Obama prominent among them. It was truly a glamorous piece of artwork. But before I could look around for whoever the Vice-President-Elect was, my eye was drawn to the headline: “Is This Even Possible?” or words to that effect.

Palin!The article inside was very thoughtful about all the pros and cons.

Not.

Just a bunch of high-level take-aways from sharply biased polls…her unfavorable rate is at a staggering sixty percent or some such. And you shouldn’t expect this number to move, ever, no matter what.

Well, I’ll tell ya this much. If we start from these premises that must remain unchallenged, for they cannot survive scrutiny or debate of any kind…if we start from those, then yes I agree. Sarah Palin is unqualified for any federal office, let alone President.

The premises are these.

That this bilge you’ve been told in elementary school…”Republicans and Democrats want to get the same things done but have different ideas of how to go about doing it” — is absolutely, positively, completely true and not to be subjected to the slightest bit of doubt.

That, since we have unanimous agreement about what we’re trying to do, it falls to We The People to elect the most qualified, knowledgeable and sophisticated people among those who agree with us about what has to be done. Because Lord knows our problems have nothing to do with wrong-headed policies per se. They all have to do with chuckleheads. We somehow have been electing thick-skulled people to do the things we all know need to be done, but we’re like crack addicts or wife-beaters. Starting now, we’re going to do things completely differently and put some rocket scientists in charge and that’ll fix freakin’ everything.

If you believe those two things, I can see where you’re coming from about Palin. She just isn’t the sharp-knife-in-the-drawer we need. We gotta get us a genius, like ++SKNXKXKX++ (guffaw) Barack Hussein Obama.

But I don’t buy into those two things. I don’t think we’re all trying to do the same things. I don’t think we all desire the same outcome. I think — and frankly, if you disagree, I must disparage your alleged attempts to pay attention — this nation suffers from a fundamental ideological split.

Constrained or unconstrained vision.

Extroverts in charge, or introverts.

Yin, or Yang.

Creators & preservers, or destroyers.

Real-life people, or fantasy-land pixie dust people.

Do we want wise, tested policies put in place, or crackpot bullshit policies, with really nice smart people who are capable of convincing us they’re the right way to go when they really aren’t.

Castes, or not.

People keep what they earn…or we need a wise, benevolent government to gallop in on a white hors after all the loot has been earned by others, and redistribute it. You know, like Obama said. “I think that when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

If you have your head stuck up your don’t believe i this schism, I can see how it would make perfect sense to carry around all this concern about whether she’s “qualified” or not.

If, on the other hand, you know what’s going on and you appreciate the gravity of it, you understand that insisting on a candidate who can get along with Katie Couric, makes about as much sense as telling the little boy to pull his finger out of the hole in the dike and let the city flood…because he doesn’t have a Ph.D.

She’s the boy. She’s got the hole plugged with her finger. How she ended up where she is, doesn’t matter one little bit. Our nation is about to be flooded…invaded. She’s standing between us and disaster, and she deserves our support.

Delicate Negotiations with the Attractive Girls Union

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

Some language toward the end there not quite safe for a work environment…


Attractive Girls Union Refuses To Enter Into Talks With Mike Greenman

Nevada-to-California Run, November, 2009

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

Let me bore you with some “slides” from my last trip. Just the four I thought were worth exposing to the innerwebs. Click the pics for larger. The occasion is me doing all of the driving…ahem…to pick up my kid after he spent Thanksgiving with his mother. So father and son are on a road trip together. Through what might be the most boring stretch of asphalt in God’s fifty states. Lessee what we got…

This is by Lamoille Canyon. We devoted some time after the pick-up to exploring it, but I had to declare this window of opportunity spent before too long so we could make some progress home. You can’t be too careful with Donner Pass at this time of the year. Well, anyway. This one might be suitable for a decent desktop background, with some aligning and clean-up.

This was actually taken on the way back home after dropping him off last weekend. It’s at Echo Pass, on the Highway 50 leg.

This could have been any old godfersaken stretch of highway. But if memory serves, it is somewhere east of Winnemucca, by Carlin or Battle Mountain. I took a few shots like this, and this is one of the clearest.

I’m not too happy with this one, just thought it was something neat to keep. Camera sucks for indoor shots, and that includes most night shots. You see why; it’s a matter of light and time. It remains a problem when the jiggle-factor goes away. This is in the Auburn/Forestville area, by that large dip that avails a splendid view of the whole valley. If only we reached it when there was still some more light.

“Right Brain, Left Brain, Who Cares?”

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

Research Example No. 1

One eerie, foggy, rainy night [i]n 1889, Igor finally got it right. He dug up the fresh corpse from that day’s funeral. This allowed his master to complete some top secret research he had been working on for years, which led to the following starting discovery: When Dr. Frankenstein touched the left half of the brain with his electrode, the monster began to perform complex mathematical computations, to organize his dorm room immaculately, and to dress like a nerd. When he would touch the right hemisphere with his electrode, the monster would begin to play the blues on his guitar, to produce bad movies, and to render political opinions based on bad public policy and faulty data.

How To Stay Humble When You’re Smarter Than Everybody Else, pp. 47-48.

Imitation is the Sincerest Form XXVIII

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

Two days ago I briefly touched on the Climategate scandal in the middle of my thoughts about our society’s recently maturing caste mentality:

Scientists are to contribute studies to the IPCC…if their work has been subject to “peer review.” If not, then whatever they have to say doesn’t mean anything, even if they are real scientists. But gosh darn it, if we have to re-define what peer review is, we’ll go ahead and do that then! And, of course, you can’t participate in the peer review, if your works have not been peer reviewed. So it ends up being a cyclical, nonsensical criteria. Nothing more than a gentleman’s-club. I’m in. You’re out. I count. You don’t. We’re right. You’re wrong. Behold: the new “scientific method,” fit for a post-modern world saturated with, and drowning in, institutionalized thinking.

This has never helped the human race. It never once helped us to figure out the earth is round. To the contrary, this is precisely what kept it flat.

This championship of process-over-outcome is not by any means a failure; it achieves precisely what it is supposed to. It divides thinking people into two groups, one of which never makes any mistakes and the other of which is never right about anything. Real life very seldom actually works that way, and so through this thinking style the committee engages in a circular travel, and in so doing divorces itself from reality. This is the task that was attempted, whether anyone wants to admit that or not.

I don’t know if the Review & Outlook editors of the Wall Street Journal read my blog. I’ve always been of the mind that hardly anybody ever does…it isn’t called The Blog That Nobody Reads for nuthin’, ya know. But how else, then, do you explain this gem which popped up just a few hours ago?

This September, Mr. [Michael] Mann told a New York Times reporter in one of the leaked emails that: “Those such as [Stephen] McIntyre who operate almost entirely outside of this system are not to be trusted.” Mr. McIntyre is a retired Canadian businessman who checks the findings of climate scientists and often publishes the mistakes he finds on his Web site, Climateaudit.org. He holds the rare distinction of having forced Mr. Mann to publish a correction to one of his more famous papers.
:
“Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board.” In other words, keep dissent out of the respected journals. When that fails, redefine what constitutes a respected journal to exclude any that publish inconvenient views.

A more thoughtful response to the emails comes from Mike Hulme, another climate scientist at the University of East Anglia, as reported by a New York Times blogger:

“This event might signal a crack that allows for processes of re-structuring scientific knowledge about climate change. It is possible that some areas of climate science has become sclerotic. It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.”

The response from the defenders of Mr. Mann and his circle has been that even if they did disparage doubters and exclude contrary points of view, theirs is still the best climate science. The proof for this is circular. It’s the best, we’re told, because it’s the most-published and most-cited—in that same peer-reviewed literature. The public has every reason to ask why they felt the need to rig the game if their science is as indisputable as they claim. [emphasis mine]

This is the danger of process-over-outcome. Certainly, you can value outcome over process, and still have lots of rules about what you’re doing — if there are consequences to flouting the rule. Wash your car from the top down OR you’ll use up more water and your car won’t get as clean…water your Christmas tree twice a day OR it might die, dry out and catch fire…wash your hands before preparing meat OR you might make yourself sick.

There is no such consequence for this “peer review” as it is embraced by the chicken-little crowd. None that services the interests of the rest of us, anyway. Of course, if you base science on what any-ol’-Joe happens to say, you just might end up making an ass out of yourself. That’s the traditional premise for it.

But here we have a situation where the CRU scientists made asses out of themselves anyway, with their wagon circling. Granted, most of the humiliation came from the collusion about the wagon-circling rather than the wagon-circling itself. But what does that matter? It looks, to the public, like something anti-scientific…and there’s no defense against that, because in the end anti-scientific is precisely what it is.

Ultimately it all comes down to this:

These guys were not trying to stop the world from cooking. What they were trying to do to the world, was get it to buy the stuff they were selling. “Science” was reduced to nothing more than a label to affix to the sales pitch.

On My Mind During My Travels

Saturday, November 28th, 2009

1. My mind wanders to an evil wishing well…imagine a man can toss a penny into it and be robbed of some years of his virility, his hair, his teeth. But he gets to pick one and only one thought his wife will never have again. Burned out of her head forever. Feminism makes me feel sexy even when I can’t stop stuffing my fat face…I need a dog…our son should be put on Ritalin…
2. Are Hooters’ waitresses absolutely, positively, without exception, in all fifty states, always over eighteen years old? Because if they aren’t, that would be just too weird.
3. When Superman flies somewhere at super-speed and lands again, shouldn’t he always be covered with a layer of fried bug-guts?
4. Does PETA get mad when dockworkers scrape barnacles off the hulls of the boats?
5. Elementary school elections should be done Chicago-style. One of the candidates should promise all the kids malt liquor and cigarettes in exchange for their votes. We have a Chicago guy as our President now.
6. Dumbass, you always remember the toothbrush and deoderant but you keep forgetting the hairbrush.
7. With regard to that wishing well. I wonder how often it would have gotten a penny back in the olden days. Perhaps as often as Robert Louis Stevenson’s bottle imp changed hands? Nowadays, I suppose the pertinent question would be how often the pennies would have to be cleaned out of it.
8. Hotel room has no grounded 120V outlets. At all, whatsoever. I didn’t know that was possible anymore. Did I step into 1968?
9. If we want honest government, we should make a habit of voting for the candidate who puts us to sleep. The first thing a professional liar learns is to be fun; being convincing is Lesson Two.
10. I want to see a family comedy in which the mom does what the dad usually does. You know. Figure out she’s a selfish jackass; resolve to improve, do a better job of listening to what her husband and kids want, and not to spend so much time at work.
11. Has James Bond ever used a disguise or a pseudonmyn that’s worked for him for very long?
12. I keep hearing people need to come together and stop being so contentious. I think they don’t argue enough. Here’s some evidence. “Violence never solved anything!” First time someone said that, someone else should’ve stood up and said “That’s a load of crap.” It didn’t happen, so we get to hear that over and over again, even though there isn’t a grain of truth to it.
13. Big Brother was trying to do to the people, exactly what our Founding Fathers were trying to do to the three branches: Tear apart any connection between them, sever any relationships, stop any conspiracies from forming by inhibiting the necessary underlying feeling of trust. Under Obama, is the government doing a better job of keeping us from trusting each other, or are we doing the better job of keeping people in government from trusting each other? Answer that, and you have answered which vision we most strongly resemble.
14. Are slasher movies made by fundamentalist church people? Look who bites it: Girls who show off their boobs all the time, druggies, fornicators. And then there are the jocks and the nerds. Of course, the cute girls who take showers don’t make out too well either. Especially when their response to a power outage is to light a candle and walk backwards, slowly, whimpering.
15. A family-owned greasy-spoon diner with unsecured wireless. That’s pretty awesome! California can forget about it. We got rid of anything family-owned quite some time ago…save one. For the past few years when I travel out of state, a small greasy-spoon is more and more of a novelty to me. And cigarette smoke actually smells good.

Once More Into the Breach My Friends

Friday, November 27th, 2009

So last weekend I dropped the kid off with his mother.

Today I zip on over there and pick him up.

Up until Reno/Sparks, things are a little on the scary side and there’s too much going on. Especially on Black Friday. After that, the problem is the opposite. The struggle is to stay awake. Coffee, soda, audio books, hamburgers and piss breaks.

Like I’ve said before. If Nevada was provided by the Good Lord with something, and the nothing had to be manufactured or grown or trucked in…it would be a technological achievement nothing short of breathtaking.

Clicky pic to embiggen.

Castes

Friday, November 27th, 2009

Had another thought about The Wilding of Sarah Palin that is worth a post all by itself. You know how it needs to fit into the 2010 and 2012 elections…whether she chooses to run or not.

Castes.

From Wikipedia:

A caste is a combined social system of occupation, endogamy, culture, social class, and political power. Caste should not be confused with class, in that members of a caste are deemed to be alike in function or culture, whereas not all members of a defined class may be so alike.

Alphas betas gammas deltas epsilons, from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Those are castes. Each layer has a separate function to fulfill, and this in turn determines the rights and privileges enjoyed as well as the burdens and obligations imposed.

Liberalism has built an entire “Western Sharia Law” around this; a religion inextricably intertwined with a way of governing. If you’re a straight white guy, you get one package of rights & responsibilities; if you’re black, you get another, if you’re gay you get another, if you’re a woman you get another. Expectations are made. If you’re Latino, you m-u-u-u-s-t support illegal immigration even if it offends you deeply — even if the reason for the offense, is that you and your relatives, or your grandparents, meticulously followed the rules when coming here. And we already know from the good Rev. Jesse Jackson that “You can’t vote against healthcare and call yourself a black man.” Of course you can’t. Expectations have been made.

There is the purity test to help define what it means to be a conservative. That’s a good thing; next year, it will certainly be needed. But a more concise definition is always helpful. One bullet is better than ten, although ten bullets are certainly better than the endless tome that is my own conservative platform. One bullet distills things down to an either-or.

Conservatives need to know two things about you in order to figure out what your rights are. One: Are you capable of accepting the associated responsibilities? Or are you mentally indigent? And two: Are you free? Or have you had a conviction imposed upon you, that revokes some of these rights through due process?

It seems to me that this is where the fundamental split takes place this year, and the next one. Liberals need to know so much more about you. It’s like they’re looking you up in an actuarial table. Do you believe in evolution, do you believe in climate change, are you white, are you Christian, are you Jewish, are you Muslim, are you female, are you gay, do you chew tobacco, do you smoke dope, do you drink, do you drive a hybrid, are you an immigrant, do you shoot guns, do you live in the city…

…are you a member of a labor union. That’s the big one right there. That demonstrates the point all by itself. You have an absolute, inviolable right-to-work — if you have that card in your wallet. And if you don’t, you don’t.

I’m a Congressman, so I get this health plan, over here. You’re not, so you get that one over there.

I got a liberal democrat elected, so I get some “stimulus” money. You didn’t, so you don’t. You get to pay in so I can have my money.

You see it in the CRU scandal. Scientists are to contribute studies to the IPCC…if their work has been subject to “peer review.” If not, then whatever they have to say doesn’t mean anything, even if they are real scientists. But gosh darn it, if we have to re-define what peer review is, we’ll go ahead and do that then! And, of course, you can’t participate in the peer review, if your works have not been peer reviewed. So it ends up being a cyclical, nonsensical criteria. Nothing more than a gentleman’s-club. I’m in. You’re out. I count. You don’t. We’re right. You’re wrong. Behold: the new “scientific method,” fit for a post-modern world saturated with, and drowning in, institutionalized thinking.

This has never helped the human race. It never once helped us to figure out the earth is round. To the contrary, this is precisely what kept it flat.

Castes, Republicans. You want to drive those other guys out, you talk about castes. That’s what it’s all about. Liberals love to talk about how we’re “all in the same boat,” and “all in this together.” Their actions are the direct opposite of that. Not on this issue, or those two issues, or these three issues over here. Each and every single one, all the way down the line. Do we have a caste system in place or do we not.

And they have to lose. Castes have no place in a free society. A free society cannot continue to function with their system put into effect. No culture is big enough for the two of them.

Update: Some quality parody of this mindset, making for a welcome lighter fare, from FrankJ at IMAO.

Look at this e-mail I just got:

Frank,

I noticed you have a few thousand in savings. Please don’t spend any of it because I already have plans for it. Also, you’re out of Doritos.

kthxbai,
President Obama

I’m really starting to think Obama doesn’t understand the American ideal of privacy and freedom. Plus, he’s a mooch. Here’s what I wrote back:

Barry,

That’s my money! I’m going to buy a bouncy castle and usurp the king and declare myself “Lord of Bounce.” Why don’t you just admit you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re losing all our money, and you have stupid ears and then go resign. And those were Fiery Habanero Doritos! You have to go to Mexico to get those! You suck!

-Frank J.

AwesomeThe e-mail exchange continues, as His Holiness replies

Frank,

I know change is scary and confusing, but that doesn’t mean you should direct all your cracker rage at me. I’m sorry you had plans for your money, but we don’t all get what we want. What’s more important is that I get what I want which is what the country needs. We all other than me have to make sacrifices. And I borrowed your golf clubs.

kthxbai,
President Obama

Graaah! What a jerk! Here’s what I wrote back:

Barry,

YOU’RE THE CRACKER!!! You don’t have any plans! You don’t even know what’s in those bills! And you don’t get what you want, which is to not suck so much! What this country needs is for you to announce to everyone, “I’m a stupid dummy dumb.” And then you should resign and get a job more to your skill level like Walmart greeter.

And you should have asked before taking my golf clubs! I need those to control the local squirrel population!

-Frank J.

I told him good. Hopefully he’ll resign now and return my clubs.

Effective parody has truth behind it; really good parody has more truth. This is awesome.

Avoiding Paying Bills

Friday, November 27th, 2009

This guy is a carbuncle on the ass of the free market and deserves a good flogging.

But I can’t help retaining some admiration for a genuine outsmarting. Clinton playing his games to get out of Lewinsky-gate, is not in the same league; he didn’t outsmart anyone. This is an outsmarting.

And at the very least, it’s worth a few chuckles.

“Jane Giles,” the “overdue account,” and the drawing of a spider.

“Megan Roberts” and the Blockbuster video late fees.

I own Logan’s Run, and I’ve often had exactly the same thoughts about that computer. One piece of data that doesn’t meet the validation criteria, and the city is destroyed. The following year Luke Skywalker blew up a space station as big as a planet, by firing something into an unprotected “exhaust port.” A few years earlier, Spock told Norman “I am lying” and all the robots freeze in their tracks and stop working.

Not sure what was running on these things, but it had to be something from Microsoft.

And you see by the way David skates past his unpaid bills, the humans don’t work too much better than the machinery.

I suppose that’s the price we pay for technology. We get a system that works as long as everything that goes in, is precisely what the system expects. Otherwise it all goes ker-blooey. David draws a parallel between the City of Domes computer, and “the Blockbuster ‘returned or not’ database.” Uh, yeah. If he didn’t notice that connection, I would’ve.

David Thorne’s site is over here, and his Wikipedia entry is here.

The Wilding of Sarah Palin

Friday, November 27th, 2009

Robin of Berkeley’s piece at American Thinker made my stack, and was going to naturally migrate into this scroll. Over the turkey-day, all sorts of others found it and gave it the attention due. So if you are one of those or if you read one of those, this doesn’t come as news to you.

And of course if you’ve been paying attention to what’s going on, Robin is merely giving words to the obvious.

Like for most feminists, it was a no-brainer for me to become a Democrat. Liberal men, not conservatives, were the ones devoted to women’s issues. They marched at my side in support of abortion rights. They were enthusiastic about women succeeding in the workplace.

As time went on, I had many experiences that should have made me rethink my certainty. But I remained nestled in cognitive dissonance — therapy jargon for not wanting to see what I didn’t want to see.
:
[W]hile liberal men did indeed hold up those picket signs, they didn’t do anything else to protect me. In fact, their social programs enabled bad behavior and bred chaos in urban America. And when I was accosted by thugs, those leftist men were missing in action.

What else should have tipped me off? Perhaps the fact that so many men in ultra-left Berkeley are sleazebags. Rarely a week goes by that I don’t hear stories from my young female clients about middle-aged men preying on them. With the rationale of moral relativism, these creeps feel they can do anything they please.
:
The Left’s behavior towards Palin is not politics as usual. By their laser-focus on her body and her sexuality, leftists are defiling her.

They are wilding her. And they do this with the full knowledge and complicity of the White House.

The Left has declared war on Palin because she threatens their existence. Liberals need women dependent and scared so that women, like blacks, will vote Democrat. A strong, self-sufficient woman, Palin eschews liberal protection…
:
[T]he Democratic Party is hardly an oasis for women. Now that it has been infiltrated by the hard Left, it’s a dangerous place for women, children, and other living things.

In the wilding of Sarah Palin, the Left shows its true colors. Rather than sheild the vulnerable, leftists will mow down any man, woman, or child who gets in their way. Instead of a movement of hope and change, it is a cauldron of hate.

Gerard, one of many who managed to beat me to the bunch, summarizes it most capably:

“A cauldron of hate” pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it? It’s bubbling away everywhere you look in Democrat politics these days, and it is giving off a worse and worse stench as “friendly persuasion” gives way to bribery, corrupt ethics and morals, thuggery, buggery, and a rising and shrill insistence that all Americans simply give up their reservations and chow down on another heaping plate of Democrat bullshit.

Ad Hominem is their argument of choice because it is the only argument they have left. Obama Himself is a massive fail; the TARP bailout is a massive fail; the swindle-us is a massive fail; unemployment up, Obama approval down, other foreign heads-of-state think our guy is a sissy and a bowing buffoon. Iran’s going forward with their nuclear program and probably kicking themselves for the time wasted on diplomatic meetings with our empty talking-head. Approval rating for ObamaCare down to 30%, and doesn’t seem to have bottomed out yet. Climate change has been exposed as the trillion-dollar scam it always was.

Their plans just plain don’t work.

Usually, we get fooled by ’em anyway, because it takes a few years to realize their plans don’t work. In 2009 they don’t even have that working for ’em. All the fail takes place within the narrow window of short-term memory.

And so all the supporting arguments come down to calling the other guy a boob. Or a yokel. Or a dummy or a neanderthal or a tundra princess or a caribou barbie…or something that ends with -ist.

The realization that someone with deleterious attributes can be correct about something, and someone with many appealing tangential qualities can be wrong — easily substantiated through natural experience, within the lifetime and memory of all mature, observant adults — rends this argument asunder. But it’s all they have left, so when it doesn’t have the desired effect they just crank up the volume and the hatred another notch.

Every single other munition that ever lay in their stockpile, was spent some time ago.

Update: Hey, how’s this for a bumper sticker:

I treat women better when I’m oppressing them, than the average liberal does when he’s defending them.

The Fifty Most Interesting Articles on Wikipedia

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

“Subjective, but still educational.” That is the summary, part of it anyhow, from Fourth Check Raise to whom we owe a grateful tip of the hat.

Here’s your link.

P and R

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

Pamela Hensley, back in the day, from the pilot movie for Buck Rogers and the 25th Century. Which she made into a much more worthy investment of prime-time viewing all by herself.

Screen legend Raquel Welch, also back in the day. Although the lady has always aged like fine brandy.

We’re skipping Q. If it isn’t important enough for the telephone keypad, why should it be worth our time. And so the two icons from antiquity go at it, head-to-head. Who wins?

Mmmm…I think Raquel snags this one, guys. You should really watch Bedazzled if you’re wondering why.

Women With Books

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

Click pic for more. Some would carry an implication that may not be altogether safe for a work environment…although if you have reason to believe you’d receive the benefit of any doubt, they all could conceivably be rated G.

Frank’s Purity Test

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

So Frank got a gander at the new Republican purity test, and came up with one of his own.

(1) Punching hippies is a legal form of expression.

(2) The moon should be declared hostile and nuked.

(3) The average American should be armed like Neo from the lobby scene at all times.

(4) Nachos are awesome.

(5) The federal government needs to stop wasteful spending. Also, researching giant war robots and dinosaurs with rocket launchers on them is not wasteful.

(6) America owns Antarctica.

(7) It’s not good diplomacy unless the foreign leaders are kneeling before us.

(8) Vampires shouldn’t sparkle.

(9) The fact that we torture terrorists isn’t horrific and is actually kind of funny.

(10) Biggest problem facing our nation: Too many sissies.

If you disagree with one of them, the punishment is for everyone to look at you and yell, “What’s wrong with you!” If you disagree with two of them, you get beaten up after RNC meetings. If you disagree with three, you lose RNC funding. And if you disagree with four or more, Fred Thompson punches you in the face such that your head explodes.

My favorites are #9 and #10, with #10 in a slight lead.

“Pigs Get Fed, Hogs Get Slaughtered”

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

I’m going to have to just toss in the entire article this time, lock stock & barrel. I see no way to excerpt a piece of it, it’s too good.

What Would Barack Obama’s Approval Rating Look Like Today If He Had Done This?

Imagine this scenario. Barack Obama is elected President and he actually decides to pursue a center-left agenda and work with Republicans.

 • He crafts a stimulus package, smaller than the one he has now, but with more tax cuts and all the spending front loaded to 2009. It passes with a significant number of Republican and Democratic votes in the House.

 • Obama shoots down the cash-for-clunkers deal. Says that he wants to spur car sales to, but that it’s not responsible for government to spend money like that in a recession.

 • Barack Obama wants to let other world leaders know he’s humble, but not servile. So, no there’s no bowing.

 • Stanley McChrystal asks for more troops for Afghanistan, a conflict Obama has called a “war of necessity.” Within a week, Obama notes that even though some people in his own party disagree, he’s not going to play politics with the decision — he’s going to give McChrystal his 40,000 troops.

 • Obama decides the TARP funds are doing little good, are being misused, and are costing too much. So, he decides not to spend any TARP money beyond holding back a bit of cash to be used to give low interest loans to Chrysler and General Motors after they are finished with bankruptcy court.

 • Obama decides Cap and Trade probably can’t pass the Senate and even if it could, it would make little sense to dramatically spike energy costs in the middle of a recession. So, rather than push for it, he says he’s going to wait until the economy is better to push the plan.

 • On health care, Obama says that given the budget situation, he can’t justify a huge new program. However, he does want to work with Republicans to set up an insurance pool to cover the roughly 8-10 million Americans who want health care insurance, but can’t afford it. He works with Republican moderates the whole time and passes the bill easily with bipartisan support.

After all that, you tell me, how much higher would Barack Obama’s approval rating be today? How much more popular would Democrats be? How much more fractured would the Republican party be today? Yet, the Democrats could have moved their agenda forward quite a bit. There’s an old saying that applies in situations like this: Pigs get fed, but hogs get slaughtered.

I started on this list and I thought John was going to be summarizing George W. Bush’s presidency from nine years ago. Remember that? Hurt feelings about Florida recount…gravitas…bipartisan this-and-that.

It’s funny how we put pressure on our leaders to be centrist — or not — depending on which side of the “center” they are. You can’t blame them, really, for looking at liberal politics as a convenient shelter from such pressure. Or a constantly flowing wellspring of redemption. Redemption from the guilt that comes from misusing White House interns…pulling our forces out of Southeast Asia so the Khmer Rouge can rip on through and start massacring people…sucking up babies out of their wombs…pouring our hard-earned money into bullshit stimulus and bailout programs…leaving young girls to drown in their sunken cars…making labor more expensive, making fuel more expensive, making energy more expensive, making our annual tax liabilities more expensive, et cetera.

Conservatives are constantly scrutinized to see if they can “get along.” “Reach across.” Forgive and forget. Invite Levi Johnston to Thanksgiving. The redemption that is supposed to come from such things, never comes. Nobody ever looks back again…for example, today’s Thanksgiving, and who knows if Levi Johnston is headed to the Palin household for a belly-full? Or is even trying to find out? I thought so many people were supposed to be curious about it!

They weren’t curious about it. It was just another way to smear.

That’s why the same scrutiny is not applied to liberals. They’ve already demonstrated their “goodness” with their cool, hip, fashionable social policies that don’t work. You might say they “gave at the office.”

But as Hawkins points out, President Obama has been in the position, all year long, to benefit from this much-lauded moderation-of-tone. But the pressure on His Holiness to take advantage of such a thing, was never there. That’s for the other guys. Obviously, He was never advised to do it, so He didn’t do it. It’s not like He knows any better.

Maybe this is why He’ll be a one-termer.

Thanksgiving Morning 2009

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

You have to de-bone the turkey if you want to do Turbaconducken. My girlfriend took care of de-boning the chicken and the duck, but the turkey was up to me. The hitch in the giddy-up was that as of this morning I had not yet shed my turkey-deboning-virginity. It’s pretty damn dismal when you’re asking Google how to do it. What can I say. Mom always crammed the turkey full of traditional stuffing, so there was no de-boning…or maybe there was…but her two sons weren’t involved in that process. How the turkey was to be stuffed, was never anything that was put up for debate. There was no call for it, none whatsoever, believe me. Turkey stuffing. One of Mom’s culinary victories.

Well, I’d say the turkey was 60 or 70 percent de-boned. Packing the bacon-wrapped meat into it was considerably quicker and more fun. Now it’s cooking away, and it smells awesome.

On this morning, sitting side-by-side with the wonderful woman who was allowed to sleep in because of my masculine (which means awkward) struggles — and Lord knows she’s earned it — watching some airheaded chick-flick drivel on cable…I am…

1. Thankful for family.
2. Thankful for friends.
3. Thankful to be alive in interesting times. Yes I know it’s a Chinese curse. But when you’re on your deathbed, really, who wants to look back on having lived in uneventful times?
4. Thankful for California’s climate. Yes that new blog makes the brilliant, accurate and irritating point that this is the only reason people don’t leave in droves, and he could be right. But what the hell. It is what it is. We’ve got our seasons, or lack thereof.
5. Thankful that Folsom, California, although imbued with a with an unmistakable social undertone of “I’m never in the way and you always are,” and people drive their cars like complete assholes, at least isn’t another liberal shithole just yet.
6. Thankful for President Obama’s election. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that we have to see what this looks like every now and then. We will always make the mistake of electing it if we haven’t lately seen what it looks like. And I’m thankful He’s doing such a splendid job of feeding all the passion that will yank us out of this part of the cycle, like a golf ball out of a sand trap, the sooner the better.
7. Thankful for Russian computer hackers. They just might have saved the world as we know it. They certainly stand a chance of having saved us trillions and trillions of dollars, and probably millions of lives.
8. Thankful for our fighting men and women, their readiness for their missions, their willingess to volunteer, and their ability to kill people and blow things up. I’m thankful for the ones that come back whole, and I’m thankful when the ones that don’t come back at all, are respectfully remembered as the heroes they are. And for the ones who make it back and leave something behind, I’m thankful we have foundations like Wounded Warrior and Soldier’s Angels so we can show them we appreciate their service, in a way that will really help them.
9. Thankful for Palin. Hope she saves us from all the nonsense.
10. Thankful for Beck.
11. Thankful for Limbaugh.
12. Thankful for that “great American” Hannity.
13. Thankful for Coulter.
14. Thankful for all the other wonderful columnists that people don’t hear about, because it would be far more difficult to “tar & feather” them as teabaggers, homophobes, racists or sexists…Krauthammer, Hayes, Tyrrell, Simon, Blackwell, Sowell, York, Milloy, Hanson, Chavez, Elder, Saunders, Williams, Stossel, West, Barone, Monckton, Meister.
Thanksgiving15. Thankful for my blog and all the nobodies who don’t stop by to read it. Which, by extension, means when I’m told “everybody agrees” on something, when the rubber hits the road it seems there are always lots of exceptions to “everybody.” Also thankful for all my blogger-friends; Rick, Gerard, Cassy, Buck (from whom I shamelessly copped the image), Neo-Nocon, Phil, Andy, Daphne, Melissa Clouthier, Sister Toldjah, Old Iron and KC. Especially the ones like Cassy, and John Hawkins, who continually approach me for “guest-blogging” stints so I can gum up their sites with my loquacious bloviating. Hey now that I think about it, I’m thankful for words like “loquacious” and “bloviating.”
16. Thankful there are still some women in the world who don’t lie awake at night thinking up ways to denigrate, abuse, neglect, short-change, snark at, scold, nag, and generally disrespect men. Sweetie pies. Women who pride themselves in how happy they make him. A- and B-Girls. And that, actually, their numbers seem to be increasing and they’re beginning to outnumber, or have outnumbered for quite some time now, their unfriendly, brittle, shrewish, churlish, griping, high-drama, sour, dour, vituperative, vengeful, perpetually jealous, perpetually unhappy, perpetually dissatisfied, perpetually complaining sisters. The ones that have long ago doomed themselves to a lonely death in a house full of cats.
17. Thankful to have been born here, so I can torture myself wondering what small part I can play in keeping the country great, rather than torturing myself about why some mysterious cosmic plan stuck me in just another filthy socialist mudpuddle.
18. Thankful for my wonderful girlfriend who cooks my dinner, puts up with my weird-ass kid, covers up my Turbaconducken experiment with foil properly so the bacon grease doesn’t all evaporate, her heart of gold, her (mysterious) willingness to work such long hours for so little pay, and those quick phone calls I get asking me if we need more beer so she can bring home a box or two.
19. Thankful my son brings me a bottle of it when I yell for him to do so.
20. Thankful his mother isn’t one of those ball-busting termagants and doesn’t get in the way of me raising him like a real man should.
21. Thankful for health; thankful I’ve gone ten years without barfing, that I’m well over forty and my eyes work more-or-less perfectly, that I almost never seem to get sick, that I’ve never had any cavities, that in spite of all my physical adventures I’ve never broken a bone, that in spite of all the time I spend sitting on my fat ass I actually have some physical endurance, that I don’t have a tumor wrapped around my caratid artery, a brain aneurysm, a conjoined twin, that I’m not allergic to peanuts, that I don’t have plantar fasciitis, haven’t lost any limbs or digits, haven’t had to have any intestines removed, or…you know what, let’s just bring this list to an end right here and now.
22. Thankful that the institution of marriage is slowly but surely pulling out of its half-century side-trip metamorphosis into an institution of legalized theft. Maybe once it’s returned to its roots, it’ll work for me again, who knows.
23. Thankful the society in which we live is decorated with all these amazing resources that are necessary to fulling this vital task of spoiling ourselves so superlatively rotten. That a grown, slaughtered, cleaned, sterilized, sanitary, skinned, filleted, inspected, certified and competitively plump cut of chicken is one swipe of the debit card away. Just think about it. When this country got started, if you were a lawyer you did your lawyer-ing after putting in fifteen hours growing your food. Now we swipe a card. How fucking anesthetized and stultified can we possibly get.
24. That I have all the fruit, soda and coffee I can possibly consume at work, free of charge. Because let’s face it, I’d be quite the asshole if I didn’t include that on this list.
25. That my commute is 3.1 miles, from key-on to key-off.
26. That nobody is trying to bring me down, to the best of my knowledge, like at the last job…therefore I don’t have to ask myself that ageless question “does it make me paranoid to think so, when it’s demonstrably true?”
27. That my mini-notebook doesn’t overheat, take ten minutes to boot up, shed plastic key caps like a sheepdog in molting season, suck up viruses off the Internet wherever it can find them, or sit there giving me dumb looks when I’m expecting it to do something.
28. Thankful that people are inherently greedy. Whenever some communist or religious-leftist tries to monopolize a dinner table conversation and insist everyone should take a vow of poverty, it seems all I have to do is murmur something to the effect that that guy should go first, and before you know it someone’s changed the topic in a great big hurry. Which means I won and he lost. Because in a society where everyone really believed it was virtuous to starve one’s own family to death, it wouldn’t be so easy to make that point. In this one, all I have to endure is people putting their voices behind a bunch of bullshit they don’t really believe anyway.
29. Thankful my kid’s school does not seem to be one of those that are indoctrinating the students to worship President Sort-of-God.
Casual30. Thankful for the DVR and all the crap I can put onto it. Saturday Night Live (although I erase the episode right after the opening monologue), Tales from the Crypt, Tales from the Dark Side, Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe, South Park, Old Star Trek. And I’m very thankful for the people Mike goes out to interview in his respectful way, that they’re out there doing what they do, being so deserving of this overdue respect. We need them more than they need us.
31. Thankful for Netflix.
32. Thankful we don’t have any pets and I’m not being ambushed with that insipid conversation every goddamn day.
33. Thankful I can wear jeans and a tee shirt to work.
34. Thankful we live in a society in which someone, somewhere, needs to figure out how to make things work…and that it is therefore possible to earn a handsome living doing this…however much energy we may expend pretending this is not the case and that charisma will getcha everything you or anyone else could possibly need or want.
35. Thankful I spent the time and effort learning how to type, because life would be really awkward otherwise.
36. Thankful for Context, TreePAD, Subversion, WordPress, Google Docs and that I can still buy Microsoft Excel from way back in the olden “97” days before they screwed it all up.
37. Thankful the ocean is two hours away. Thirty minutes would be a lot better, but I’ll take two hours.
38. Thankful Lake Tahoe is also two hours away.
39. Thankful for my good fortune with cars that do what they’re supposed to do. Of course I deserve a lot of credit for that. But hey, if the car’s a piece of shit, you can drive it and maintain it as wonderfully as you want and it’ll still be a piece of shit and a money hole.
40. Thankful that cop didn’t show up. It was only a two hundred dollar ticket, but I wouldn’t have been suprised to see that whole thing get out of control because I was really, really aggravated…and I don’t have that much self-control. Not for situations like that one, I don’t. Scandinavians can have temper tantrums too, ya sure yoobetcha we do.

I’m also thankful there’s a little bit more coffee left, and now I’m going to go fix that.

How to Destroy a Liberal’s Worldview

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

Hat tip to Gerard, we have a new blogroll addition called Exercise in Futility. Most recent post there, How to Destroy a Liberal’s Worldview.

In response to “what about rape” question, ask: “Is your father a rapist?” (the answer will be no). Follow up with: “if he were, would I be allowed to shoot you dead right here, right now?”
:
“How much does the atomsphere weigh?” (the answer is 5 quadrillion tons, aka 5,000,000,000,000,000 – that’s 15 zeroes).

“If the humans pump 1 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year, how many years will it take to increase the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere from 0.038% to 0.04%? (The answer is 25,000).

Great stuff.

A Movie Thing That Ticks Me Off

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

So this appealing-looking, seemingly-harmless male figure is placed in a position of trust and he turns out to be a venomous viper. That kind of thing I just love all to pieces. Especially if it’s a woman, like in Hand That Rocks The Cradle. It’s so predictable. Backstory in the first twenty minutes; plot thickens at the end of the first hour; some horrible tragedy and/or injustice takes place as the second hour unfolds. Final conflict begins a hundred minutes in, and then the killer suffers some grisly demise. The innocents live ever after but not altogether happily, just wisely. Their lives changed forever.

This thing though, just pisses me off. Know why?

You have the oldest kid, who apparently is the star of the show.

You have the evil stepfather.

You have the estranged bio-dad.

These guys could be triplets. Why? Why?? Why can’t you make the bio-dad look kind of like…I dunno…Nick Nolte’s mug shot.

NolteYes there are subtle differences. The kid is younger, of course. But there will be a climactic battle. Probably in the dark. People falling in water. Getting dirty. Bloody, maybe. And I’m supposed to sit there with five beers in me, and go…”ooh…I hope…uh…that guy wins, and, er…that guy over there…loses. Yeah.”

It’s simply beyond my capacity. Can’t keep up. Even their hairlines are more-or-less the same. Is the creativity-shortage that powerful? Did Ron Perlman ask for too much money?

I need to come up with some kind of name for this thing with guys’ haircuts and grooming and costuming. Maybe “Beverly Hills 90210 Syndrome.” I’m not asking for too much here, I don’t think. Guys in real life look quite different. In movies, I do not want them looking like identical twins if 1) they’ll be getting in a fist fight, 2) they’ll both be fucking the same girl, or 3) both of those. Show some goddamn creativity. Put one of them in dreadlocks. Make one of them bald. Add some depth to the characters, at least so that I can tell people apart. You’re taking enough of my money.

Maybe after it comes out on video I’ll find out it’s a terrific flick. But that’s how I’m seeing it, if at all. And that’s a great pity, because I’m part of the audience they think they’re chasing.

Cosmo, Stupak and Defiant-Looking Women

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

Cassy Fiano brings us the latest example of Cosmopolitan nags making abject fools out of themselves, with an alarmist expose absurdly headlined Are Your Rights in Jeopardy? Once again, the glossy-mag scolds are confusing the right to indulge in baby-killing, with the right to demand taxpayer-funded baby-killing.

Cosmopolitan has gotten in on the anti-Stupak movement. Without bothering to think for themselves at all, they’ve just taken the feminist route and decided that cutting abortion funding means that “women’s rights” are being threatened somehow. Check it out:

If you’re pro-choice, you may not be aware that an amendment to the health-care reform bill that passed in the House earlier this month threatens women’s rights. Called the Stupak-Pitts Amendment, it bans abortion coverage for millions of women who will purchase health insurance in the new health exchange. This ban will also extend to women who opt to be covered under the “public option” form of health insurance that the bill will create.

The health-care reform bill still has to be passed by the Senate, so it isn’t law yet. If you want to preserve a woman’s right to comprehensive reproductive health care, click on the link below to sign a petition that will be sent to President Obama and key legislators.

To really get their point across, they even included the prerequisite picture of a defiant-looking woman.

Defiant-Looking WomanI guess it would be impossible for someone to point out to these harpies that abortion would still be legal. Any woman in the United States, provided she is over the age of 18, can legally get an abortion without any trouble at all, beyond the occasional pro-life protestors. All the Stupak amendment will do is prevent abortion from being taxpayer funded… in the new health care bill. It doesn’t ban all taxpayer funding for abortion. But to hear these feminists carry on, it’s as if abortion is going to be completely outlawed and the world is going to end.

But Cosmopolitan wouldn’t possibly point out all those pesky little facts, would they? They phrase it in a very specific way. They aren’t lying, but they don’t point out that abortion itself isn’t going to be banned, nor is all taxpayer funding going to be ceased. Women who don’t pay attention to politics — which would be many Cosmopolitan readers, of course — could very easily be misled. And why would they offer the other side of the argument, either? It’s all one-sided with liberal publications like Cosmopolitan, which, of course, masquerades as a non-partisan, non-political publication.

A hundred years from now, historians will look back and associate pictures of defiant-looking women with all the evils, liabilities and weaknesses of the times in which we live. Here we go again: People pretending to be preserving “rights,” when really all they’re trying to do is destroy things. Every single abortion that might happen, has to happen. The lying, the obfuscation, the half-truths.

And gol darn it, we’re just trying to get the world to spin on its axis with a little bit more peace, love, mutual respect and harmony…and the standard we hoist as we ride into this battle, is always some kind of a hip skinny spoiled white chick with her arms crossed looking like she’s ready to lay some smack down.

I remember last time I was single and available. I had certain “jobs” expected of me on dates…and they no longer had much to do with pulling out chairs or opening doors. They had to do with what I was supposed to be, and what I was supposed to be was something very, very normal but at the same time very, very extraordinary. Usually, I failed that test before things went on to the next step…but the next step was to show lots and lots and lots of empathy.

My date would reciprocate by demonstrating how self-assertive she was and how she wouldn’t-take-no-shit-from-anybody.

That was not, by the way, for the purpose of laying ground rules for a potentially lasting relationship. That, I suppose, might have happened around step five or six, by which time I would typically have been dismissed from the interview process quite some time ago. No, this I-am-woman-hear-me-roar bullshit was…and this gets back to Cassy’s observation about feminists, and I find it exceedingly sad…the young lady’s offering. She was demonstrating for me what she would be bringing to the table. It was the reason why I should want to continue dating her.

Just imagine. I had to show empathy. That was her way of reciprocating: Hey, she knew exactly what I wanted! To spend the rest of my life with a spoiled rotten harridan. Gee, I’m so impressed, she knows me better than I know myself. What a keeper.

So from this experience of mine while I was “on the market” — some ten months or so, now five years out of currency — I have this impression that there’s a lot of delusion and fantasy taking place out there. There are single and available females somehow operating under the premise that cantankerous bitches are rare and therefore sought, coveted and highly prized.

Toward the end of it, I had to conclude that I was being offered an endless procession of just the women who happened to be available, each of them arriving with a bundle of reasons why they were the ones still available.

Feminism hurts women in all kinds of ways. In this case, it mentally “abducts” them when they’re at an impressionable age, and indoctrinates the weaker among them to the idea that everyone is going to be oh so nice to you, if you can just show how irascible and vicious you can be. And this has been going on for forty years now. It’s thankfully on the wane, it seems to me…part of the female coming-of-age is, more and more often, learning how to show proper etiquette, smile sweetly at the right time, do your bit to keep things pleasant…then just wait until the time’s come to stand up for yourself, and do so. Behind closed doors. That’s what a mature, capable, sophisticated lady does. That’s what a woman of class and substance does.

But the less capable grown-up-girls are still out there, the “Real Housewives of New Jersey” types, eager to showcase their talents for dripping acid.

This does not represent womanhood well. In fact, thinking on it awhile one has to notice: These “ladies” must have some friends who tolerate the behavior, or else they wouldn’t keep doing it. Sure, most women grow out of it by the time they’re thirty. But that’s a long time to be going through life spoiling for a fight, with your brow all furrowed up like that and your arms crossed.

Cosmopolitan-and-similar-mags: Civilization will ultimately succeed in spite of you, not because of you.

Barry’s Screwing Up, But Let’s Talk About Michelle’s Gown

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

Interesting how “journalism” works overseas, isn’t it?

Traditional evening gowns vied with saris of vibrant colours last night at the first state dinner of the Obama White House.

The high-glitz event was held in honour of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, so Michelle Obama wore a strapless, gold and cream-coloured sheath dress with an overlay of silver and matching shawl.

Her outfit was designed by Indian-born Naeem Khan and made in India.

At the State Dining Room event earlier in the day, the First Lady wore a skirt by Rachel Roy, who is Indian.

Speaking ahead of the dinner, Mrs Obama described the trick to pulling off the event as sort of like being a swan – calm and serene above the water but ‘paddling like mad, going crazy underneath’

Spiegel Online has a different view of things, having opted to step back and take a broader view of what’s going on.

When he entered office, US President Barack Obama promised to inject US foreign policy with a new tone of respect and diplomacy. His recent trip to Asia, however, showed that it’s not working. A shift to Bush-style bluntness may be coming.
:
The mood in Obama’s foreign policy team is tense following an extended Asia trip that produced no palpable results. The “first Pacific president,” as Obama called himself, came as a friend and returned as a stranger. The Asians smiled but made no concessions.
:
Upon taking office, Obama said that he wanted to listen to the world, promising respect instead of arrogance. But Obama’s currency isn’t as strong as he had believed. Everyone wants respect, but hardly anyone is willing to pay for it. Interests, not emotions, dominate the world of realpolitik. The Asia trip revealed the limits of Washington’s new foreign policy: Although Obama did not lose face in China and Japan, he did appear to have lost some of his initial stature.

He’s bringing a wife-in-a-sparkly-gown to a gunfight. That line about “interests not emotions dominate” seems to sum up the situation. If you read that first linked story down further where it stops gushing over Michelle’s party-wear and gets into the details of what happened in the state room, you can make out this undertone: “Cut the crap Mister President, now what about my interests and where are your priorities?”

I don’t know what is a bigger concern: That His guests aren’t getting out of these meetings what they wanted to get out of ’em…or that they are. Either way, it’s a problem. Barry’s not tuned in. He’s stuck in campaign mode.

Census Worker Killed Himself, Officials Say

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

Well, imagine that.

A part-time U.S. Census worker found dead near a secluded Clay County cemetery killed himself but tried to make the death look like a murder, authorities have concluded.

Bill Sparkman, 51, of London, apparently was trying to preserve payments under life insurance policies he had taken out, one as recently as May, which paid benefits if he died as a result of murder or accident, but not suicide or natural causes, police said.

Sparkman had survived a bout with cancer a few years ago, but told a friend he believed the cancer had returned and that he would die, police said.

However, there was no indication Sparkman’s cancer had recurred, said Cristin Rolf, deputy state medical examiner.

In a two-month investigation, police marshaled a number of reasons to conclude Sparkman ended his own life. Among other things, only Sparkman’s DNA was on evidence at the scene, and he had told a friend details of his plan that matched what happened, police said at a news conference Thursday.

Flashback to some of the irresponsible comments that came bubbling up to the top of the blogosphere shortly after the man’s death…first up, charlow1 at the Huffington Post:

There are a lot of people out there who have been so sufficiently aroused by the irresponsible radical right that they will not want to be counted, and I am not talking about the usual homeless people that the census usually has difficulty finding. It’s our own aunts, uncles, parents who have been led to believe that our federal government and our President are out to get them. This is completely shameful and detrimental to our having the civil society that is necessary for democracy to work. To those who have made this happen, shame on you!!!

rossi at Daily KOS:

The people instigating this should be ashamed of themselves. It’s one thing to have a philosophical and political disagreement – it’s another to distort reality and irresponsibly use your rhetoric to make the world a more dangerous place. And for what? So Glenn Beck has better ratings and Rush Limbaugh isn’t offended? I’ve been wary of overzealous claims on the left of racism and dangerous rhetoric, but I’ve been convinced of the shear stupidity of the leaders of the Republican Party. Ugh.

go west young man at Democratic Underground:

It hit’s too close to home after all the anti government sentiment they have drummed up since Obama became president. The U.S. press should be ashamed. They would rather cover Acorn and Faux propaganda than provide some justice for a true American patriot like Bill Sparkman. Fucking wake up America! Wake Up!

shapiromarilyn commenting on the Washington Post story:

The latest iteration of domestic terrorism – – tea baggers, so-called “patriots”, and libertarians, consist of two elements: unthinking angry white males and women who are under their thumbs AND the wealthy puppet masters and politicians who stoke the flames of hate and violence for financial and political means. The Michelle Bachmans and Glenn Becks in this country take orders from the puppet masters who are threatened by a possible shakeup of the status quo. This is a dangerous time for us. Why isn’t the FBI throwing these domestic terrorists (from Fox News to unpatriotic senators and congresspeople) into jail?????? Why are tea baggers and town hall crazies allowed to come to meetings with loaded guns????

These are just samplings…

It’s so much easier to repeat a bunch of sensationalist bullshit than to do some thinking about things, isn’t it.

The Vilest Commercial Blogsister Daphne Has Ever Seen

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

Let’s see…the way the statistics are used constitutes abuse, the logic is unsound, the implications are sick, we’re ready to go — lights, camera, action.

Read her comments, and those of others.

To me, it’s just a monument to all the things that happen to a mind, when guilt meets up with an anxiety to do something.

Is it my imagination, or is it that out of all the effort taking place to fightblowgalwarming…some ninety-nine percent of it is going toward getting the word out that the other guy has to do something? There’s something a tad curious about that. Obviously it’s not the right way to go — it’s late 2009 now, I know there are little kids getting born every year, but for the most part just about anyone capable of getting dressed and walking around, has heard of global warming, carbon, and the blah blah blah. The word’s gotten out. Mission accomplished.

But I think we’re seeing a portrayal of a fundamental human weakness here. Once we recognize a need to do something, we seem overly enamored of the prospect of telling others to do something — “grab a mop!” — as opposed to just doin’ the stuff. I’m not talking about laziness. I’m talking about a lust for attention. We’re surrounded by idiots who buy into this thing hook line and sinker…and yet…the idea of just plugging away tediously at the things in their own lives, using what they have “learned” to make their own routines more environmentally friendly without anyone paying attention to them, is absolutely horrifying to them. World’s burning out, and they have to use the occasion to get some attention.

Whatever your thoughts on global warming: If you think there is a problem persisting because of lack of awareness, and yet more mass-communication messages are part of the solution we need the most…you are hopelessly deluded. You are no longer attached to reality. It is so late by now, that the old people have stopped forwarding e-mails about flashing your headlights at gang members. They figured out the folly of doing this years ago, and they’re old. Here you are still “getting the word out about carbon and the greenhouse effect.” What in the hell is wrong with you?

World’s Funniest Signs

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

More here.

Hat tip to Weasel Zippers.

“Will You Kiss Me?”

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

Hat tip to Primordial Slack.

The Dithering is Over?

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

Thirty-four thousand. Okay, now maybe we have a President, Mr.Sullivan.

President Barack Obama met Monday evening with his national security team to finalize a plan to dispatch some 34,000 additional U.S. troops over the next year to what he’s called “a war of necessity” in Afghanistan, U.S. officials told McClatchy.

Obama is expected to announce his long-awaited decision on Dec. 1, followed by meetings on Capitol Hill aimed at winning congressional support amid opposition by some Democrats who are worried about the strain on the U.S. Treasury and whether Afghanistan has become a quagmire, the officials said.

Pffft…democrats worried about the strain on the Treasury. They. Really. Do. Think. We. Are. That. Stupid. Tell me another one, guys.

Anyway, nice job Mr. President. Now why in the world did that take so long? Are you any more certain this is the right move now, than you would’ve been several weeks months ago? What’s that? You are? Really? That’s good enough for that “Really?” segment on Saturday Night Live…not that I’ll be holding my breath for it.

Maybe now you can start growing into the job. Make some decisions. Vote on things in some other way besides “present.” Believe it or not, millions of the people over whom you “rule” have to do that kind of thing every damn day. Some of them even might have voted for you…although most did not and will not. They just live in that kind of world. No “good” choices available, and yet a decision has to be made anyhow.

That’s life, Mr. President.

Anyway — let’s stop picking on Mister Wonderful for a minute or two. This is my biggest concern about people in general, walking around, calling themselves grown-ups, when they have yet to grow up. Some decision comes up and they are OH! SO! DECISIVE! about it…because there’s some option available that makes them look like good people if they happen to choose it.

And then a real carbuncle of a leadership decision comes along. A classic adulthood-test decision. All options available, suck big green eggs. Any decision you make will make you look like a creep. Do we buy a new engine for the family car, or junk it and buy another? Do we spend more money at the vet, or do we put the dog down? More tough choices come from the movies. Do you throw your little brother in the blast furnace now that aliens have taken over his body? Do you unlock the door and let the guy in when zombies are chasing him?

And faced with classic avoidance-avoidance conflict, these grown-up children do what President Obama did. LOOK FOR A CHOICE THAT MAKES YOU LOOK GOOD. IF THERE IS ONE, MAKE THAT. IF NOT, STALL FOR TIME AND GO BACK TO STEP ONE. That is not leadership. And if that is not the situation — you know what? Your “leadership,” however you define it, hasn’t really been tested. Leadership is only tested when the leader faces a plurality of options, and each one sucks.

Obama has faced His first real test of leadership as President.

Hopefully, He’ll do better next time.

Death Panel Cartoon

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

From here.

The Dog Gets Better Treatment

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

Dr. Helen notices that when the time comes to ration Christmas presents to accommodate the lean times that have fallen upon us, the hubby-of-the-home seems to have taken a back seat to Fido:

In a separate Consumer Reports survey, 22% of women who expected to reduce their holiday spending said they would be cutting back on gifts for their spouse. Only 14% said they would cut back on gifts for their pets.

Who loses when men are disrespected? Who loses when dogs become replacement husbands?

We all do. Gals, especially, lose out when the figurine at the top of the wedding cake has four legs.

It’s a loss to everyone because men are human and dogs are not. If some of us can be simply re-defined out of human-hood, then we all can be so re-defined out of human-hood.

Because it requires considerably greater skill to form a relationship with a human being than it does to form a relationship with a dog. The magical, wonderful thing about dogs is that they think you’re wonderful all the time. That’s because dogs are stupid. You’re not really that wonderful, and you’re certainly not wonderful that often.

And also, because in spite of appearances and feelings, they pay about the same amount of attention to the woman who accompanies them. In fact, the two-legged companion is slightly more attentive. Few things assault the eardrum more cruelly than a “mistress” going through the motions of taking command of her canine. “Leonardo! Heel! Leonardo! Sit! Heel! Leonardo, didn’t you hear me!?!?” While Leonardo sniffs whatever other dog’s butt he wants to sniff, and pisses wherever he wants to piss. It’s an endless loop. Men and dogs have evolved into a natural partnership, but the dog’s ear just isn’t attuned to a female voice. Dogs appreciate an authoritative master’s voice, in a booming baritone, and a one-syllable name.

And, finally, because it is a departure from reality. Dogs are not capable of things that are within a human’s capacity. And as a result of this inability, they cannot participate in human things. You cannot lend money to a dog to buy a house. A dog can’t even co-sign on your loan. A dog cannot calculate interest payments and a dog cannot sub-let an apartment.

Also, using a dog as a fashion accessory is a form of animal abuse. A dog deserves a master who sees the dog as an animal, which is what the dog is. A domesticated animal, molded and shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution into a perfect companion for work and play…one that is capable of a limited spectrum of tasks. Certainly, a broader spectrum than a lot of people appreciate. That is absolutely true. But still a limited spectrum. They aren’t humans and they aren’t replacements for humans. And they aren’t toys either.

Not In It For The Attention, Mind You… XXXVII

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

This blog over here is called Bombs and Dollars: America’s Top Exports, and it seems to be almost an online periodical. I like the title and I like the content. But I particularly like this page because we’re on it: “Top 133 Conservative Blogs.” The Blog That Nobody Reads is in slot #118.

In truth, we don’t feel worthy. There’s a whole lot of stuff well worth checking out, in the form of all the other names sharing that list with us. So we’re linking it with the plan of checking back on it, again and again. When time permits.