Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
186k Per Second 4-Block World 84 Rules 9/11 Families A Big Victory Ace of Spades HQ Adam's Blog After Grog Blog Alarming News Alice the Camel Althouse Always Right, Usually Correct America's North Shore Journal American Daily
American Digest American Princess The Anchoress Andrew Ian Dodge Andrew Olmstead Angelican Samizdat Ann's Fuse Box Annoyances and Dislikes Another Rovian Conspiracy Another Think Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler Associated Content The Astute Bloggers Atlantic Blog Atlas Shrugs Atomic Trousers Azamatterofact B Movies Bad Catholicism Bacon Eating Atheist Jew Barking Moonbat Early Warning System The Bastidge The Belmont Club Because I Said So Bernie Quigley Best of the Web Between the Coasts Bidinotto's Blog Big Lizards Bill Hobbs Bill Roggio The Black Republican BlameBush! Blasphemes Blog Curry Blogodidact Blowing Smoke A Blog For All The Blog On A Stick Blogizdat (Just Think About It) Blogmeister USA Blogs For Bush Blogs With A Face Blue Star Chronicles Blue Stickies Bodie Specter Brilliant! Unsympathetic Common Sense Booker Rising Boots and Sabers Boots On Bottom Line Up Front Broken Masterpieces Brothers Judd Brutally Honest Building a Timberframe Home Bush is Hitler Busty Superhero Chick Caerdroia Caffeinated Thoughts California Conservative Cap'n Bob & The Damsel Can I Borrow Your Life Captain's Quarters Carol's Blog! Cassy Fiano Cato Institute CDR Salamander Ceecee Marie Cellar Door Chancy Chatter Chaos Manor Musings Chapomatic Chicago Boyz Chickenhawk Express Chief Wiggles Chika de ManiLA Christianity, Politics, Sports and Me Church and State The Cigar Intelligence Agency Cindermutha Classic Liberal Blog Club Troppo Coalition of the Swilling Code Red Coffey Grinds Cold Fury Colorado Right Common Sense Junction Common Sense Regained with Kyle-Anne Shiver Confederate Yankee Confessions of a Gun Toting Seagull Conservathink Conservative Beach Girl Conservative Blog Therapy Conservative Boot Camp Conservative Outpost Conservative Pup The Conservative Right Conservatives for American Values Conspiracy To Keep You Poor & Stupid Cox and Forkum Cranky Professor Cranky Rants Crazy But Able Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns Create a New Season Crush Liberalism Curmudgeonly & Skeptical D. Challener Roe Da' Guns Random Thoughts Dagney's Rant The Daily Brief The Daily Dish Daily Flute Daily Pundit The Daley Gator Daniel J. Summers Dare2SayIt Darlene Taylor Dave's Not Here David Drake Day By Day Dean's World Decision '08 Debbie Schlussel Dhimmi Watch Dipso Chronicles Dirty Election Dirty Harry's Place Dissecting Leftism The Dissident Frogman Dogwood Pundit Don Singleton Don Surber Don't Go Into The Light Dooce Doug Ross
Down With Absolutes Drink This Dumb Ox News Dummocrats Dustbury Dustin M. Wax Dyspepsia Generation Ed Driscoll The Egoist Eject! Eject! Eject! Euphoric Reality Exile in Portales Everything I Know Is Wrong Exit Zero Expanding Introverse Exposing Feminism Faith and Theology
FARK Fatale Abstraction Feministing Fetching Jen Finding Ponies... Fireflies in the Cloud Fish or Man Flagrant Harbour Flopping Aces Florida Cracker For Your Conservative Pleasure Forgetting Ourselves Fourth Check Raise Fred Thompson News Free Thoughts The Freedom Dogs Gadfly Galley Slaves Gate City Gator in the Desert Gay Patriot The Gallivantings of Daniel Franklin Garbanzo Tunes God, Guts & Sarah Palin Google News GOP Vixen GraniteGrok The Greatest Jeneration Green Mountain Daily Greg and Beth Greg Mankiw Gribbit's Word Guy in Pajamas Hammer of Truth The Happy Feminist Hatless in Hattiesburg The Heat Is On Hell in a Handbasket Hello Iraq Helmet Hair Blog Heritage Foundation Hillary Needs a Vacation Hillbilly White Trash The Hoffman's Hearsay Hog on Ice HolyCoast Homeschooling 9/11 Horsefeathers Huck Upchuck Hugh Hewitt I, Infidel I'll Think of Something Later IMAO Imaginary Liberal In Jennifer's Head Innocents Abroad
Instapundit Intellectual Conservative The Iowa Voice Is This Life? Islamic Danger 4u The Ivory Tower Ivory Tower Adventures J. D. Pendry Jaded Haven James Lileks Jane Lake Makes a Mistake Jarhead's Firing Range The Jawa Report Jellyfish Online Jeremayakovka Jesus and the Culture Wars Jesus' General Jihad Watch Jim Ryan Jon Swift Joseph Grossberg Julie Cork Just Because Your Paranoid... Just One Minute Karen De Coster Keep America at Work KelliPundit Kender's Musings Kiko's House Kini Aloha Guy KURU Lounge La Casa de Towanda Laughter Geneology Leaning Straight Up Left Coast Rebel Let's Think About That Liberal Utopia Liberal Whoppers Liberalism is a Mental Disorder Liberpolly's Journal Libertas Immortalis Life in 3D Linda SOG Little Green Fascists Little Green Footballs Locomotive Breath Ludwig von Mises Institute Lundesigns Rachel Lucas The Machinery of Night The Macho Response Macsmind Maggie's Farm Making Ripples Management Systems Consulting, Inc. Marginalized Action Dinosaur Mark's Programming Ramblings The Marmot's Hole Martini Pundit MB Musings McBangle's Angle Media Research Center The Median Sib Mein Blogovault Melissa Clouthier Men's News Daily Mending Time Michael's Soapbox Michelle Malkin Mike's Eyes Millard Filmore's Bathtub A Million Monkeys Typing Michael Savage Minnesota Democrats Exposed Miss Cellania Missio Dei Missouri Minuteman Modern Tribalist Moonbattery Mother, May I Sleep With Treacher? Move America Forward Moxie Ms. Underestimated My Republican Blog My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy Mythusmage Opines Naked Writing Nation of Cowards National Center Blog Nealz Nuze NeoCon Blonde Neo-Neocon Neptunus Lex Nerd Family Network of Enlightened Women (NeW) News Pundit Nightmare Hall No Sheeples Here NoisyRoom.net Normblog The Nose On Your Face NYC Educator The Oak Tree Obama's Gaffes Obi's Sister Oh, That Liberal Media! Old Hippie One Cosmos One Man's Kingdom One More Cup of Coffee Operation Yellow Elephant OpiniPundit Orion Sector The Other (Robert Stacy) McCain The Outlaw Republican Outside The Beltway Pajamas Media Palm Tree Pundit Papa Knows Part-Time Pundit Pass The Ammo Passionate America Patriotic Mom Pat's Daily Rant Patterico's Pontifications Pencader Days Perfunction Perish the Thought Personal Qwest Peter Porcupine Pettifog Philmon Philosoblog Physics Geek Pigilito Says... Pillage Idiot The Pirate's Cove Pittsburgh Bloggers Point of a Gun Political Byline A Political Glimpse From Ireland Political Party Pooper Possumblog Power Line PrestoPundit Professor Mondo Protein Wisdom Protest Warrior Psssst! Over Here! The Pungeoning Q and O Quiet Moments, Busy Lives Rachel Lucas Radio Paradise Rantburg Real Clear Politics Real Debate Wisconsin Reason Rebecca MacKinnon RedState.Org PAC Red, White and Conservative Reformed Chicks Babbling The Reign of Reason The Religion of Peace Resistance is Futile! Revenge... Reverse Vampyr Rhymes with Cars and Girls Right Angle Right Events Right Mom Right Thinking from the Left Coast Right Truth Right View Wisconsin Right Wing Rocker Right Wing News Rightwingsparkle Robin Goodfellow Rocker and Sage Roger L. Simon Rogue Thinker Roissy in DC Ronalfy Ron's Musings Rossputin Roughstock Journal The Rude Pundit The Rule of Reason Running Roach The Saloon The Salty Tusk Samantha Speaks Samizdata Samson Blinded Say Anything Say No To P.C.B.S. Scillicon and Cigarette Burns Scott's Morning Brew SCOTUSBlog Screw Politically Correct B.S. SCSU Scholars Seablogger See Jane Mom Self-Evident Truths Sensenbrenner Watch Sergeant Lori Seven Inches of Sense Shakesville Shark Blog Sheila Schoonmaker Shot in the Dark The Simplest Thing Simply Left Behind Sister Toldjah Sippican Cottage SISU Six Meat Buffet Skeptical Observer Skirts, Not Pantsuits Small Dead Animals Smallest Minority Solomonia Soy Como Soy Spiced Sass Spleenville Steeljaw Scribe Stephen W. Browne Stilettos In The Sand Still Muttering to Myself SoxBlog Stolen Thunder Strata-Sphere Sugar Free But Still Sweet The Sundries Shack Susan Hill Sweet, Familiar Dissonance Tail Over Tea Kettle Tale Spin Talk Arena Tapscott's Copy Desk Target of Opportunity Tasteful Infidelicacies Tequila and Javalinas Texas Rainmaker Texas Scribbler That's Right Thirty-Nine And Holding This Blog Is Full Of Crap Thought You Should Know Tom Nelson Townhall Toys in the Attic The Truth Tim Blair The TrogloPundit Truth, Justice and the American Way The Truth Laid Bear Two Babes and a Brain Unclaimed Territory Urban Grounds Varifrank Verum Serum Victor Davis Hanson Villanous Company The Virginian Vodkapundit The Volokh Conspiracy Vox Popular Vox Veterana Walls of the City The Warrior Class Washington Rebel Weasel Zippers Webutante Weekly Standard Western Chauvinist A Western Heart Wheels Within Wheels When Angry Democrats Attack! Whiskey's Place Wicking's Weblog Wide Awakes Radio (WAR) Winds of Change.NET Word Around the Net Writing English Woman Honor Thyself "A Work in Progress World According to Carl WorldNet Daily WuzzaDem WyBlog Yorkshire Soul Zero Two Mike SoldierHawkins says it is a piece of history, assuming it ever existed at all.
We agree.
Turn your back on popularity, to stand up for principles? Or turn your back on principles, to get popular and stay that way?
It’s a no-brainer. You stand for something through thick and thin, or else you don’t stand for it at all.
One — yes, it’s true (probably). There will be weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth if something isn’t done. And that something damn sure isn’t gonna be selling cars. History has shown the American economy can tolerate a lot of things, but it doesn’t tolerate a high unemployment rate very well.
Two has to do not so much with the bailout itself, but with us, and our reaction to things like this. When we have to act to save jobs, and the proposed action is something our labor unions do not like, the thing to do has very little to do with the proposed action. It’s more likely got something to do with coffee drinks that cost a lot and that you can’t pronounce the name of, American Idol, Survivor, and dogs-in-purses.
When our labor unions like what we’re thinking about doing, all of a sudden, it’s important that everyone be concerned. As in, it’s the first thought you have when you wake up, and the last thought you have when you call it a night.
I find that curious.
This is a situation that has been in the making for a very long time. People working on cars in Detroit didn’t have to start worrying about their jobs just in the late autumn of ’08. That’s when the labor unions stood to make millions of dollars from us worrying about it, though, so that’s when we started worrying about it. Labor unions are good at telling people what they’re thinking and what they’re worrying about. The rest of us are good at obeying. And so, all of a sudden, in the span of just a few weeks, we have a +++cough+++ “real” +++cough+++ problem.
Maybe we do have to do this awful thing because we’re all out of options. Let’s just not start thinking this is going to solve anything long term, though. And let’s not forget what this is really all about.
Firefox isn’t black enough.
I’ll do a better job of checking it out later…it seems to be serious.
Hat tip: Boortz.
You know, as a computer networking professional, I have always considered the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) to be a little bit on the milquetoast side as well…just sayin’.
Our good friend in New Mexico told me I should lower my blood pressure by paying less attention to dimwits. He’s not the first to say so. We, here, see Buck as an exceedingly sensible gentleman, one who possesses a past different from ours but is united with us in the future. In other words, throw us into a time machine, crank it ahead by a couple decades, out pops Buck. And it certainly does make good sense to monitor issues related to the systolic and diastolic when one is in one’s early forties, than in his late fifties, so we did what he suggested.
And paid more attention to intelligent, sophisticated people.
Like Dr. Helen.
Crap. More nonsense. Being a lady of class and dignity, she does not endorse, she just points, but there it is, getting me all worked up. Got any more wonderful ideas, Buck? The idiocy, it would seem it surrounds us on all four sides.
Young women ‘have more sexual partners’ than men
Young women are more promiscuous than men, according to a survey that claims the average 21-year-old has had nine sexual partners compared with seven for men.The poll of 2,000 by the magazine More also found that one in four young women has slept with more than 10 people, compared with one in five men who had done the same.
In addition, half of those questioned admitted they had been unfaithful, whereas only a quarter said they had been cheated on by a boyfriend.
It comes just a week after an academic study branded Britain one of the casual sex capitals of the Western world, with residents having more one-night stands and more liberal attitudes than those in Australia, France, the Netherlands, Italy and the US.
Lisa Smosarski, the editor of More, said: “Our results show that after decades of lying back and thinking of England, today’s twenty-something women are taking control of their sex lives and getting what they want in bed.”
First of all, there are problems with statistics…which I’ll get to later on.
But before that — whoomp, there it is. Lisa Smosarski puts a voice behind this thought that’s usually just rolling around out there, contemplated but unspoken. The five thousand years of oppression, by thoughtless, piggish men against the innocent, doe-eyed women, continues throughout this day and beyond…until girls start screwing like minks, and then that will somehow magically bring it to an abrupt end and it’ll be time for the ladies to start dancing like Ewoks at the end of Return of the Jedi (or Obamatons on January 20, but let’s keep the awkward metaphors to a minimum).
Captain Obvious is availed the luxury of dropping a single paragraph and then bailing out to attend to more pressing matters. Here’s his contribution: When you screw, you have a good chance of getting pregnant whether you use contraceptives or not. And a big round belly has very, very little to do with power. Or freedom. And it damn sure doesn’t have much to do with taking control of your sex life. More like surrendering same for a couple decades.
The floor is thus yielded to the owner of The Blog That Nobody Reads, so he can again bewail — with his blood pressure topping out — the continuing progress of all the civilized world, seemingly, past the second milestone on the way to complete insanity, which is the act of feeling your way around challenges rather than thinking your way through them. This doesn’t make any sense. The picture of a lady who has taken charge of her sex life, doesn’t have much to do with sleeping with lots of guys. Such a lady more likely sleeps with one guy. Think about it. Whether you’re a male or a female, cheating means lying. It means sneaking around. It means all the encumbrances that come with deceiving someone. And there’s nothing liberating about that.
Now, on to the statistics.
And Guthrum has put forward a decent, although somewhat incomplete, attempt to field this one. It comes down to a simple rhetorical question: With whom are these young ladies doing their fornicating? The study doesn’t seem to have much to do with lesbian sex, foreigner sex, or with a male-heavy domestic population. By process of elimination he determines someone is lying.
Well, I have another explanation, since Guthrum’s explanation would have to controvert the conventional wisdom of boys lying upward and girls lying downward. And this is a piece of conventional wisdom I believe…at least…when alcohol is not involved.
Here’s my explanation. And if it is true, it is not at all helpful to the study, or Ms. Smosarski’s idiotic conclusion(s), which is why it was left out of the article.
The fellas are subject to more of a 80/20 rule when it comes to frequency of sex and number-of-partners: Among those who are young and available, twenty percent of them are having eighty percent of the sex. This is not necessarily true of the women, since this would only take effect if there was some personal attribute that would make it likely for any particular instance to have more sex than her sisters. That would be physical beauty — which I think we should take into account only if we want to presume, when an appealing young lady is presented with lots of opportunities, she takes advantage of all of them. Let’s give the fairer sex the benefit of the doubt here.
So if you were to draw a graph about how much sex each person is having, and with how many partners, and draw two graphs on two pieces of paper for two genders — the female graph would be more of a flatline and the male graph would be all spikey.
And these “Alpha Males” who are screwing anything with a skirt, don’t participate in polls.
It’s just that simple. It fits in well with my philosophy about polls: They separate themselves from reality, when it is presumed, too casually, that that which was tested, extrapolates safely into that which is the universe. There are lots of things, generally, that confound this, and the tendency among study-makers and poll-takers is to not check those things out too carefully. Whether you buy it or not — Guthrum’s beef with the study makes good sense. With whom are these freewheeling strumpets doing their cavorting? Smosarski doesn’t seem to possess the mental horsepower to seriously entertain the question…which I find unsurprising.
Finally, my blood pressure trickles a little bit upward when I consider the issues of time and history. Those who cling to this notion that women will finally be free of male oppression the day they’ve finally done enough screwing, after all the other transgressions they’ve committed against responsibility and common sense, have failed to make use of long-term memory and allowed history to slip out of their mental fingers. Has this not been a doctrine that has already been put in practice for four decades or more? Free-love and all that shit?
Aighh…it’d be funny if nobody was listening to it. But congratulations to Editor Smosarski and those like her. Your next generation of urban-sprawl welfare queens, and all their litters of whelps, is comin’ right up. And half those whelps will be girls…whom you’ll tell to have lots of sex with lots of guys so you can sell your shitty magazine.
Their mommas who’ve spent so much of their lives with swollen ankles, big round bellies, and no man hanging around long enough to handle the extra work — somehow, for reasons I still fail to grasp — will, for the most part, fail to take the time to set ’em straight.
Who cares about any of it.
Women are having lots of sex. More sex than guys. That means they’re “free.” And empowered.
Yeah.
++sigh++ Blood pressure not coming down yet. I’m off to stare at my own Things That Make Me Smile page, to put me in a better mood.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Morgan Rule Number One lately — which says:
If I’m going to be accused, I want to be guilty.
There are a lot of reasons for my thinking about that right about now. We’re just coming off a two-year-long Presidential election, and I’ve been up to my ears like everyone else in all this talk about whether X is a “good guy” or not. We spend an abundance of energy trying to sort out whether this-guy or that-guy is a good guy. I don’t know why we do this. I think deep down, we all understand Barack Obama can be a wonderful guy and still botch quite a few things; John McCain can be a dirty rotten creepy jerk (DRCJ) and still make a lot of good decisions.
Maybe it’s television. When I was a little kid, it was very popular to have these things called action TV shows, which lasted roughly an hour, and aired about eight or nine o’clock weeknights. Pretty much every minute of that hour was spent proving over and over again what a good guy the main character was. He’d do wonderful ordinary things, like gettin’ down to the latest tunes in a honky-tonk bar or discoteque. And then he’d do wonderful amazing things like jumping over a grain silo in an orange car yelling “yee haw!” Or clocking a bad guy in the jaw with his fist. (Back in those days, you could get hit in the face a hundred times with another man’s fist and suffer no structural damage or even any bruising; a swift karate chop between your shoulder blades, however, would knock you out for a couple hours.) Ordinary or extraordinary, it was all wonderful.
He’d put his arm lovingly across the back of the tender doe-eyed vixen of tonight’s episode, and sensitively tell her that her stepfather’s drinking problem was not her fault and she’d have to stop blaming herself. Of course, as an amateur psychologist, every word he said was gospel, even though this was a guy who chose to wear cowboy boots when chasing bad guys on foot.
You know, we really should have known better. When those shows were on, we had a nice southern peanut farmer in the White House who was about as nice a guy as you’d ever want. Sure, I never saw him jump an orange car over a grain silo, but he was generally regarded as a Good Man. Even all these years later, most people think he’s a Good Man. Even people of different political leanings than his, will grudgingly acknowledge this. At least, the ones who haven’t been paying attention to the pus-filled rancid rot that so regularly spews out of this guy’s cakehole. Today, only by paying close attention can you come to the conclusion that Jimmy Carter is an asshole.
But back then, even the people who followed political events, were convinced he was some kind of super-duper-Messiah guy. Not Jesus, but a really nice man come to deliver us from our own inherent nastiness.
Know what happened?
He screwed up everything he touched. Foreign-policy, stagflation, unemployment, energy, hostages…etc., etc., etc. Jimmy Carter would take charge at noon; by seven o’clock that evening, everything that could possibly be busted, would be.
Therein lies the problem with proving what a good guy you are. If you’ve proven it once, you shouldn’t have to prove it again, like Buck Rogers or Those Duke Boys or Dr. David Banner or Steve Austin or Walker Texas Ranger. And people shouldn’t be spending that much time or energy wondering about it.
There is another reason I’ve been thinking about the Morgan Rule.
Blogger friend JohnJ referred me to an unusually informative article over on — of all places — Cracked Magazine. Really. Y’all gotta go check this out.
5 Government Programs That Backfired Horrifically
No, it’s not a bunch of Bush-bashing about the invasion of Iraq. America figures in to only two-and-a-half of them. Your list is…
#5. Prohibition
#4. Glasnost
#3. The Strategic Hamlet Program
#2. The Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909
#1. China’s Great Leap Forward
I’m glad to have an excuse to highlight this one. I think more people need to understand the correlation between dimwitted government programs, and waking up one morning with a trantula the size of a poodle sitting on your face. (Fair disclosure: My grandparents were those people, and they worked through the situation okay. The chronicles scribbled down by those who lived through it, all agree, though, that it wasn’t easy and it wasn’t too much fun.)
Now read that, from top to bottom. Do you see what I see?
Yup. An essential pillar of all five plans…sometimes stated, sometimes not…is…
And after it all falls into place, everyone will be forced to recognize that we are really, really good people.
Why is this a bad idea. Why, in fact, does this always seem to lead to disaster.
The hitch in the giddy-up is a simple one: People will think whatever they want to. This is the simple truism people in power seem to forget, after not too long a time. The worst plans all have it in common that they’ll convince people whoever made the plan, was “good.” In reality, even if the plan turns out to be a roaring success…and this really hasn’t happened very often…the most likely outcome is that after a few years, people can’t remember whose idea it was. There really is no such thing as a plan that will force the common people, to think any identifiable band of elite people, are good. People think what they want to think.
On the other hand, the best plans are the ones that end with “And then people will think about us, the architects of the plan, whatever they damn well want. But at least the plan will be effective.”
These are two diametrically-opposed styles of thinking about plans.
This is why America is a good country: It doesn’t rush to the front of that big pack of countries desperately trying to prove how generically wonderful their leaders are. Quite to the contrary, America is founded on the non-negotiable platform that our leaders are lousy, lying, drunken, dirty-rotten-creepy-jerks. Not so much that, but they require constant oversight.
It’s a precious part of our legacy. And I’m afraid we’re going to lose it on January 20. Millions of my fellow citizens are already convinced that if an idea came out of the mouth of the iPresident-Elect Man-God Modern-Messiah, it must be a good idea.
Face it, Obamatons: Barack Obama could do all five of those things on that list, all over again. He could do ’em before breakfast. After they turn out the same way they did before, you’d still think His poop doesn’t stink.
And that’s fine. An incoming President, by definition, should be popular. Just not to the point where everyone’s distracted from the central issue of whether his ideas are good or not.
Because I think it’s been demonstrated, by now, that governments like ours are at their least effective when they are 1) turned over to people who’ve proven what decent wonderful nice guys they are, and then 2) thrust into a bunch of feel-good experiments designed to prove what is supposed to have already been proven.
Gosh, you know, someone should start a country that is dedicated to not repeating such failures. We could have some, like, really really super-important pieces of paper to remind us not to think that highly of our leaders, so they won’t be tempted to launch such hairbrained schemes to prove what decent guys they are. We could call one of ’em the Declaration of Independence and the other one, the Konstitooshyun…
Seriously, though. I think that’s what the Founding Fathers were trying to do. I think this is exactly what their concern was. Here we are learning it all over again, the hard way, as if we have some internal wiring that compels us to live as serfs within a monarchy. The whole “Make This Guy Think That Guy Is Wonderful” is nothing but a fool’s errand…for both sides. It’s true outside of governments, too. When people are constantly proving what good people they are, something bad is about to happen. It’s a much better option, once you’re accused of something, to just go ahead and be guilty of it if you aren’t already. Because experience has taught me you might as well — people don’t change their minds about things after they have ’em made up. And if you have to work that hard to prove something, you’re probably hiding something ugly, and you’re probably hiding it from yourself.
Just a little thing to think about, in the weeks and years ahead.
Kelly can be a girl’s name as well as a boy’s name…so poor little Kelly has a problem with Santa Claus leaving him adorable pink girl stuff.
And the feminists have a problem with Kelly having a problem with it.
Okay, one MORE time…what does this have to do with promoting dignity in the stature and treatment of women in a civilized society, and developing and defending the opportunities they have?
Feminists. They want so badly for people to listen to their propaganda. And they want so badly for people to join on in when the feminists say “please help me deplore the latest thing I’ve placed in the crosshairs, today.”
But that ends up meaning they don’t want people to have memories.
Because if you remember all the things that have ever been in-the-crosshairs-today, across any significant swath of time…the propaganda just crumbles. You know what propaganda I mean. The “narrow agenda” propaganda. The “oh no, we’re not here to dismantle gender differences or anything like that, we just want a fair wage.” The a-man-can-be-a-feminist propaganda.
The it-doesn’t-have-anything-to-do-with-being-a-bitch propaganda.
The propaganda that says feminists are just as loving and charming as any other kind of woman. If you aren’t knocking a woman’s tooth out, or swatting her on the butt, or behaving in a way toward a woman that you wouldn’t behave around your own grandmother, then we have no beef with you.
The propaganda that comes out anytime they’re called on their crap. The propaganda we saw when Cassy, Hawkins, myself and others helped Jessica Valenti get that free publicity for her book.
It’s all a crock o’ bullshit. At least, on web sites like Feministing, it is.
Keep sufficient wits about you to observe and remember trends, and you can’t help but form some opinions about these post-modern feminists they aren’t gonna like. They aren’t friends to chastity, or even to any kind of discretion an available young lady might use in choosing her sexual partners or keeping the number thereof down beneath a non-scandalous ceiling. Somehow, that rankles them. It always has. The one exception seems to be the woman who resolves not to sleep with any conservative Republicans — that’s alright. Any other kind of criteria applied…no. If you have something to say about an Aspirin between the knees, or waiting for marriage, or waiting until he meets Mom and Dad, or waiting a few weeks — feminists ain’t gonna like it.
They might like it if you say women can do something.
If you say men can do something, they won’t like it.
If you say women and men can do more things than they’re doing, feminists won’t like it.
If you say women can’t do something, they’ll come out swinging.
If you say women and men can do things together, they aren’t going to be too happy about it. Unless it’s holding a candlelight vigil and calling George W. Bush a war criminal.
It’s pretty tough to get them to opine at length about the draft.
They’re very passionate about gay marriage. I don’t think I’m ever going to understand that one. If a woman wants to support the feminist movement with her time or her money, but she’s opposed to gay marriage, feminists don’t want her support? What’s gay marriage got to do with womens’ rights? It’s just stupid, in my opinion. It’s like starting a movement to promote responsible pet ownership, and spaying and neutering and proper veterinary care for your pet — and oh, by the way, we’re also big Monster Truck fans. If you don’t go to the shows then we don’t want your support. One has nothing to do with the other, so why tie the two together?
Actually, re-defining marriage has a distinct effect of diminishing the role of women in society. So I would say it’s like promoting responsible pet ownership and also owning your own monster truck. But whatever.
When Feministing opined about Sarah Palin for the first time — that is when the site hit the low nadir. That just completes the picture, doesn’t it? A more complete and fulfilling role for women in society, goes off in this direction…progressive politics dashes off in the other…Feministing follows the progressive politics. Embarrassing to watch. Just like when liberals circled the wagon around Bill Clinton when he was trying to stop the women he’d been exploiting from having their day in court — and went on to call themselves staunch defenders of womens’ rights. Based on what? Just plain ol’ tradition? We’re supposed to think left-wingers think highly of women just because they’re left-wingers?
Left-wing politics, in general…and the feminist movement, in particular…these are, at a breakneck pace, rapidly degenerating into places that are ideal for a lifelong male chauvinist pig to join, places where he can feel at home. I mean, just stand back and look at it. If a male politician supports the right policies he should be able to exploit women, shove his penis into the faces of perfect strangers, and that’s okay. The whole world should be his glory hole. If women are offended by that and want to sue, they shouldn’t have their day in court. They aren’t entitled to it. Because the right political agenda is worth exploiting a few broads, if they’re good lookin’. Wives aren’t special. Housewives aren’t special. Stay-at-home-moms aren’t special. There’s no need to feel appreciative about any of these women or what they do. Actually, when they get down on their hands and knees and scrub your toilet so it sparkles, you should behave as if it just happened…by magic. Like Tinkerbell flew in and sprinkled some pixie dust on it. Anything but show the goddamned minimal gratitude your mother eventually insisted you start showing.
And wives are disposable, because now we’re going to re-define marriage as being whole and complete if there aren’t any women involved in it at all. Two guys can raise a kid just as nicely — which means mothers are disposable too — and oh by the way, if you dare to disagree with us about it, we’ll crush you.
Anything a woman can do a man can do better. Including playing with pink toys.
Looks like a chauvinist pig platform to me.
So after today, let’s not have any further discussion about whether modern feminism, or Feministing anyway, is all about erasing the gender divide, trying to make men and women the same. We don’t need to wonder about it anymore. It’s settled. That is what it’s about. And it’s about eradicating masculinity. They don’t like it; they want to see it go away. I guess when a boy is unfortunately saddled with fluffy pink toys, he should just turn gay on the spot.
Fascinating point raised at Dr. Helen’s place:
BC: Why do we as a society automatically extend empathy and compassion to criminals rather than the victims of their crimes? There’s a phrase that you use in this context: “a preference for barbarism.” Why do our intellectuals rally to the cause of miscreants rather than that of good, honest citizens?
Dr. Dalrymple: Intellectuals need to say things that are not immediately obvious or do not occur to the man in the street. The man in the street instinctively sympathizes with the victim of crime; therefore, to distinguish himself from the man in the street, the intellectual has to sympathize with the criminal, by turning him into a victim of forces which only he, the intellectual, has sufficient sophistication to see.
Now that’s a Thing That Makes You Go Hmm.
Common sense from Floyd at Making Ripples:
In order to keep earning income, we have to come up with compelling reasons that our services will make someone else’s life easier.
He goes on to say…
When there is not enough money for business as usual, buyers and employers alike start looking for ways to bring costs in line with income. Every expense gets scrutinized to see how it contributes to survival.
This doesn’t seem, at first glance, very profound at all. And perhaps it isn’t. But if you think on it in conjunction with other things, you realize that some folks who may be laboring under the delusion that they’re not in for some kind of surprise, in fact, are indeed due to be whacked upside the head by a big ‘un.
Like for example…here.
This woman appears to be living in a house with her daughter, and therefore, I’m going to presume, has a job in which she makes a living. I hope that’s true. The job absolutely cannot demand anything by way of critical thinking skills. I’m further presuming that, for reasons I hope are obvious.
What are the odds that this woman is, by the fruits of her labor, “mak[ing] someone else’s life easier”? I’m gonna peg that one at about one-in-four, maybe one-in-three. Perhaps she’s an extraordinarily conscientious receptionist in an office somewhere, maybe in a doctor’s office, blossoming with organizational skills to make up for the other deficiencies she so clearly has. Please don’t blast me, all you insulted medical receptionists; I’m trying to give her the benefit of the doubt here.
So there’s at least a two-in-three chance that she just clocks-in-clocks-out.
And a nine-in-ten chance that the iPresident Man-God is not really going to pay her mortgage for her.
Those guesstimates are on the down-side. They’re on the low end.
So the lady is more than a little bit likely to receive that layoff notice Rick was talking about…which by itself isn’t big news. But again. Think of all the millions who are in the situation she’s in, who think on things the way she does. All these mediocre people sick and tired of their own mediocrity, looking to pandering politicians to somehow make them extraordinary.
It’s already happened to one Obamaton I know. Two solid years of listening to him crow about how Obama’s gonna lead us, and Is America Ready to Elect a Black Man? And then Mister Hopenchange prevails…the Dow falls into the crapper…poor fellow’s been working so hard at falling into line, being whatever he’s expected to be by the youngest, cutest, hottest fashion trend. Achieving extraordinary levels in his ordinary-ness. And he ends up not standing out in any particular way, when the bosses go through and try to figure out who doesn’t stand out in any particular way.
That’s the oddest thing I’ve noticed about these layoffs. We’re trained, in the public school system, to maintain our employability by falling into line, being similar to everyone else around us (right before paying that lip-service to “diversity”). Chasing that theory of Nonconformity Is The Surest Way To Get Your Ass Replaced Around Here. People work like the dickens to fit in…just like little schoolkids…to be like everybody else. To be, instead of to do. It’s exactly the wrong approach.
So Rick’s layoff notice, without anyone working to make it come true, ends up coming true nevertheless:
So, this is what I did. I strolled through our parking lot and found 8 Obama bumper stickers on our employees’ cars and have decided these folks will be the first to be laid off. I can’t think of a more fair way to approach this problem. These folks wanted change; I gave it to them.
Hawkins really found a humdinger this time. On Huffington Post, one Stephen Mo Hanan has made the point that capitalism is simply beyond saving. An important message, since his viewpoint no doubt represents the same of many others:
The oft-prophesied collapse of capitalism is looming over our world’s daily supply of goods. The global economic system is on the ropes and must not be allowed to fail. So proclaims government, financial marketeers, tottering czars of industry, media mandarins, and just about everybody else who can pay to be heard. But since their efforts to avert failure have so far inspired little confidence, some attention might be given to Plan B. After all, despite its arcane procedures, capitalism is really just an accounting system, a way of ensuring that the world’s work gets done and that those who do it are properly compensated.
Now I’m not stupid enough to forget that capitalism is also a system that has allowed a substantial though relatively small group of human beings to amass titanic wealth and, so to speak, to capitalize on that wealth by exercising transformative power over the whole planet and everyone on it. If they were all wise and benevolent, that might be a satisfactory arrangement; they aren’t, and it isn’t. So any discussion of how human history (let alone human well-being) might continue after the demise of capitalism must get a good fix on the roots of greed and why it has persisted despite the abundant evidence of its perversity.
Ah yes…greed. The House of Eratosthenes Glossary says —
Greedy (adj.):
An undefined word. If it does have a meaning at all, the closest one we’ve been able to extrapolate from the pattern of the word’s actual usage, is: Someone who manifests a desire to keep his property when someone else comes along wanting to take it away. A wealthy person who wants to stay that way (but you’d better click on the word “wealthy” to find out what it really means).
Mo Hanan takes a few paragraphs to say what he really means, but eventually gets around to it…
What if we began to ask whether corporate consumerism was really the ultimate flowering of America’s promise? For one thing, capitalism as we know it would fade away. But since it may be doing that anyway, we might be wise to drop our resistance and bid it a fond farewell. We could thank it for its efficient promotion of the Industrial Revolution, while observing that by creating an interconnected world it has rendered its own creed of frenetic competition obsolete. A satellite can’t go into orbit till its booster rocket falls away. If the accounting system is in flames, let it drop and disintegrate, mission accomplished.
This is the first part of his long column in which that voice in my head, screaming “What in the hell have YOU been watching, Mo Hanan?” finally subsides. I agree with him a hundred and ten percent here. Socialism…anti-capitalism…modern liberalism…call it what you will. It is dedicated to an axiom that whatever has helped us up until this point, is a hindrance from here on out and has to be jettisoned.
I live in a world in which fathers teach their sons how to use guns, even though in these times, you don’t need to know that in order to feed yourself. How to tie knots, even though you don’t need to know that in order to travel. How to change a flat tire, even though a service that will handle that for you, is a phone call away. How to make a car last three hundred thousand miles, even though you’re expected to trade the bucket o’ bolts in after fifty or sixty, seventy tops.
Mo Hanan, and those like him, live in a metrosexual world. A Twilight Zone in which yesterday’s assist is today’s burden and tomorrow’s toxin. He lives in a world in which we’re expected to provide payback to whatever has ferried us, rescued us, lifted us up from disaster, by casually discarding it. To reward life with death.
And his preaching is in favor of brotherly love, and against materialism.
Oh, the irony.
No, we share effectively only when we do so from love, as children spontaneously teach. They teach it not only in those moments when they suddenly share a prized possession, but especially when they share some unexpected aspect of themselves, the harvest of self-discovery. We could travel steadily through life making such offerings of ourselves, giving and receiving delight, except for being conditioned by fear to suspect the worst of each other.
Of course, living can inflict a thousand wounds on our ability (or willingness) to “love one another.” But with the advances since Bible times in our understanding of how the psyche functions, self-realization techniques are widely available to repair the damage done to our inherent nature. Why not make use of them? The world’s work would get organized and performed in a collective spirit of mutual assistance and shared benefit.
Mr. Mo Hanan, you possess a remarkable ability to abandon in a great big hurry whatever dollops of reality contradict this vision of yours, so I’ll pose this question as if you’ve not yet thoroughly noodled on it and it’s not a mere formality: What in the world were the last forty-five years about? What was going on since this vision first gained widespread recognition and acceptance, and the election last month? Was America just s-l-o-w-l-y allowing the lesson to sink in?
What was 1968 about? What was 1980 about? What was 1994 about? Could we have been experiencing the same kind of fatigue with the party-in-charge, leading up to those years, that we displayed in 2008 with their ideological opponents? Or were the people just going off willy-nilly, showing a mindless Pavlovian response to — aggressive marketing?
No, what you’ve managed to ignore here, and I get the impression you have an impressive talent for so ignoring, is the well-established fact that while the capacity to share and give and love is an ingrained part of this mystery-shrouded human psyche, so too is the ego.
Seriously, there is some thought with some horsepower behind it going into Mo Hanan’s column. I’m not entirely sure it’s all his…it has the flavoring of something ripped off from somewhere else, and it is a rather tired message I’ve been hearing over and over again, here and there, since my childhood. But there is some good thinking somehow getting injected in there. It’s just not very well informed. Someone has achieved way too much talent for expurgating ideas he doesn’t like, before he adequately checks ’em out.
Hey, here’s a fun exercise for you during your down time. Every time Mo Hanan talks about loving each other and getting along with each other in this new post-modern era of mutually cooperative human history, in your mind’s mind, insert afterward “with conservatives and Republicans.”
For a chuckle.
But don’t get too humorous with that chuckle. Don’t forget — there are millions upon millions of people who see the world exactly the same way as Mr. Mo Hanan. And they want “everyone” to get along and love each other, to be included. But their definition of everyone excludes quite a few folks, folks just as real as any other, that they don’t want to talk about. Their Utopia is a sort of modern version of Noah’s Ark, built from stem to stern for the express purpose of providing a shelter to an elite crowd…leaving the balance behind. In their world, “everyone” never really means everyone. And they don’t want to admit it.
And always, always, always…their plans for creating this new world, fall apart when the time comes to decide who’s going to be in charge. Because every face on the totem pole thinks it’s going to be the one on top. Everyone in their new Starfleet wants to be a Captain, and nobody wants to clean the Starship latrine. They confront the mystery and the power of the human ego, later rather than sooner — always insisting on the dubious privilege of allowing it to take them by surprise.
That’s why, as you survey all the gear that has given good things to you and those you know, from coffee makers to green (!) automobiles to the weaponry Mo Hanan hates so much, to nuclear reactors…capitalism continues to retain a complete monopoly on providing it. Every nut, every bolt.
So with all due respect, Mr. Mo Hanan, maybe we still have some waiting to do before we talk about jettisoning things.
Okay, I’ll talk about the damn sign.
Atheists brought their own seasonal message to Olympia on Monday, saying the religious beliefs that underpin the holidays are superstitions that lead to conflict.
“We can’t solve the world’s problems by getting rid of religion, but it would go a long way,” said Dan Barker, co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation.
The sign his group erected in the Capitol rotunda is the second such capitol display in the nation, he said. The other is in Madison, Wis., where the foundation is based.
The sign says there is no god or heaven, only the natural world. It also criticizes religion, saying it “hardens hearts and enslaves minds.”
Isn’t that funny? You talk about how religion motivates people to do nice things, like donate to charity, offer a home to those who need one, put food in the bellies of poor people who wouldn’t be able to come by it any other way — you have to put in a disclaimer that not all atheists are dicks. And true, some aren’t. But the point is, you have to have that disclaimer. Even on a blog.
On the other hand, if you want to talk about religious people being a bunch of nose-picking rubes, you can just leave it at that. Even under a state’s capitol dome.
A depiction of the birth of Jesus, the central figure of Christianity, also was installed Monday just a few feet from the foundation’s sign. And workers set up a 30-foot noble fir tree that will be decorated and lit in a public ceremony Friday.
Those other displays might lead some to think that Washington is a Christian institution, Barker said. “Us being here underscores this is not a Christian state. It’s a secular state, where Christians are welcome.”
Based on what, Mr. Barker? And what’s your definition of “welcome”?
Let me see if I can paraphrase this for you…
“Welcome to our proud, secular state, you hard-hearted, enslaved-minded Christians with your religion that hardens your hearts and enslaves your minds. Please accept this liberty to indulge your pea-brained religion within our secular borders, as a gift, to you, from us, your more big-hearded large-minded secular overlords.”
Like that?
Lois Walker of Shelton, who died last month, requested the foundation sign after a local real estate agent set up the nativity for the first time last year.
That nativity was inspired by the installation of a menorah, symbolizing the Jewish holiday Hanukkah, in December 2006. There is no menorah display this year.
“I’m not very fond of all the competition to set up religious displays on state property,” said Bette Chambers of Lacey, who attended Monday’s dedication.
Bette Chambers is the only one so far, in this fracas, with whom I agree. This is sick.
A member of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, she pointed to the recent terrorist attacks in India, which Indian authorities believe were carried out by Islamist extremists.
“Religion is fine, as long as it’s not too fiercely believed in,” Chambers said.
Oh, scratch that. The woman’s a coward. What else would you call it…she cites violence committed by crazed Islamic extremist thugs, and uses it to put a damper on this other religion, the one that has something to do with that guy who was nailed to a tree. The religion of people she knows won’t come after her and cut off her head.
The nearby nativity was installed without fanfare early Monday, with a sign explaining that the birth of Jesus, believed to be the son of God by Christians, is celebrated around the world.
The tree is a project of the Association of Washington Businesses. Originally called a Christmas tree, the group named it the “Capitol Holiday Kids Tree” to be more inclusive of non-Christian families, according to executive director Don Brunell.
People in northern countries long have recognized the shortest day of the year — Dec. 21 this year — with festivals, said Barker of the foundation. “We nonbelievers are happy to welcome Christians to the celebration of this time of year.”
The group also set up a billboard in downtown Olympia reading “Reason’s Greetings.”
Aren’t we forgetting something?
If this hostile, snotty atheist message is to be allowed into the capitol, so that Christians can have their faith ridiculed just a few paces away from where this “capitol holiday kids’ tree” is to be erected, and the concern is some sort of fairness-doctrine equal-time, why…that must mean atheism is a religion.
Now, waitaminnit. That isn’t true of the decent atheists I know. The ones that aren’t dicks. They just want to be included-out of something. They’re simply looking in from the outside at a vision of the cosmos, with which they choose not to participate because that isn’t how they see it.
You know the old cliche — atheism is a religion like bald is a hair color.
According to that, we have nothing to worry about a secular “religion” being enshrined as the official state creed. Because it isn’t one. It’s an opting-out.
Well if that’s the case, there would be no need for equal-time or rebuttal, because there would be no religion demanding this equal-time. You can opt out of the Christian religion or any other religion; you can, just as easily, opt out of staring at these displays in the capitol.
So a truly secular form of atheism has no need for equal representation, equal expression, or anything of the like. It need not concern itself for how the li’l darlings of the next generation are indoctrinated or are not indoctrinated.
It could use reason to convince the next generation of how true it is. Or not. It could remain blithely unconcerned about who does or does not believe in it. It isn’t a religion, after all.
Unless it is.
I’m not sure which one is the case. Seems to me the folks who are responsible for putting up this sign — aside from being just plain nasty — are trying to have their cake and eat it too. If it’s all about reason and not religion, there’s no need to put up such a sign; nothing to be gained from it. In fact, I would add, no legitimate beef for insisting upon it. If it is a religion, on the other hand, then it’s a matter of great concern that one of its bishops is insisting that Washington State belongs to his order. How many Washington State citizens had no idea of such a thing? Beware, Washington State people, there’s a bunch of religious zealots trying to put you under the iron fist of a theocracy!
Also, if this kind of atheism is an actual religion, and we’re taking these extreme measures to ensure fairness across all these different religions, shouldn’t it be evaluated like any other? What if the Christians, instead of simply putting up their holiday tree, put up a sign criticizing all the things that are wrong with Judaism? Oh wait, I got another one! What if the Christians and Jews got together and put up a sign that said “all Muslims aren’t terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims”?
What that be of the proper civility and decorum to put in a state capitol? Would that lay the groundwork for everyone to get along with everybody else?
Because this atheist-sign seems, to me, to be on par with that. There’s not too much difference between saying the other-guy’s-religion can motivate you to become a terrorist, versus saying it’ll motivate you to have a small heart or a weak mind.
I think we’ve got a “Joshua” situation here: A strange game, it seems the only way to win is not to play. Or more like a Momma situation. If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.
You know, I think if we apply that standard equally across all these “religions,” we just might possibly have a happy “holiday.”
Merry Christmas.
I was conducting negotiations with “Kidzmom” about Christmas gifts and someone (no need to ponder who, too long, if you’ve been reading these pages) brought up the point that the people who produce toys seem to be hunkered down in an undeclared war with the people who produce the kids who produce the demand for those toys. This someone could not help noticing that as the grown-ups selecting the toy-gifts labored longer and harder to avoid the December 24 frowny-faces as the gifts were opened, the laboring seemed to come longer and harder still. The tech specs seemed to become more and more picky. Fine-grained. Deceptive. Failure migrated from the realm of the possible, to the likely, bordering on unavoidable. It began to feel like fighting someone.
When I was the rug-rat, it was just batteries not being included. Now it’s memory cards. And more. Packages that include these-or-those vital things, given names identical to corresponding packages that aren’t supposed to have them (even though you need them).
Most aggravating of all is the movie tie-in toy that has had the bejeezus marketed out of it, to such a degree that your adorable little yard ape, along with the others, is convinced that this is His Reason For Being. And the more you look into it, knowing your child’s personality, you know it’s going to end up at the bottom of the toy basket covered by a thick layer of dust. Even the damn thing costs four hundred bucks. When it’s all over, the parents will be blamed for Christmas becoming anti-Christian and overly-materialistic — well, yes, it is the parents’ fault. It’s the parents’ fault for being negligent. But what about those who are wilfully fooling them?
Are they really in the fun business? You know, I’m so glad it hasn’t happened around here…too often…but I think when the cherub is expecting X on Christmas Eve, and he opens the coveted present and pulls out Y instead of X — it ain’t that fun. From where arises this impressive effort to try to make it happen?
Well, Dr. Helen has found something I don’t think anybody, anywhere, is going to be expecting. And woe be unto you if it ends up in your abode.
How much must you hate the parents of the kid that you give this to? I can’t imagine how annoying and loud this thing must be. Nothing like a loud megaphone, flashing lights and a working fire hose to bring tranquility to the house.
Now, you just stop. I know what you’re thinking. And that parent, whoever she is, was not that mean to you.
Someone needs to go look for some in his mirror.
Reminds me of something Evan Sayet said: “If it was stupidity, they’d be right more often.”
My intuition tells me there’s a little bit too much attention to vague notions of “diversity” involved in your education system there, Ms. Rhee…maybe the time’s come to focus on something else.
Yeah…no worries here about that next generation.
A 12-year-old boy visiting from Georgia called police, complaining that his mother had “slapped him as hard as she could across the face,” because she believed he had been intentionally mean to their little dog.
The Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office deputy who responded noted in the incident report that he could see no signs of redness on the boy’s face nor did he appear to be very upset.
The mother said she got upset over the way the boy treated their dog and when it was time to go back up to their condo in the elevator, she told him she would take a different one because the dog was scared. The boy then called her an “(expletive) idiot,” the report said.
All high civilizations have been built by conservatives. You can’t accumulate the cultural capital needed to build any high civilization if you try to destroy the past, as the Left constantly tries to do. You can’t build a chariot if you have to reinvent the wheel every generation. The batty idea that kids have the real answers in life is just a modern delusion. It is just ignorant.
Conservatism builds. Leftism overthrows. That is the meaning of that pop word “revolution.” The all-destroying revolution is an adolescent fantasy, and the Left hangs on to those fantasies a lot longer than conservatives do.
American Thinker, via Rick, via Alice the Camel.
Not hard to prove at all. Just read some liberal blogs. Aside from the usual “we are poisoning the land and the planet and the environment and the world and this and that and some other thing over there” and America is at fault for this-that-other-stuff…there are the toxic items. Look at this awful commercial. Look at this awful magazine article. Look at this YouTube clip. Here, read this transcript of this terrible thing this guy on the radio said. Help me deplore it.
Thoughts about building versus thoughts about destruction. Yeah, liberals like to trot out some token victim to help justify the destruction, but that doesn’t mean they’re about preserving anything. They’re just in the habit of using certain tools for their public relations needs.
Global warming, for example. It always has, back to Day One, been about forcing humans…particularly Americans…to stop doing something they are currently doing. To destroy an activity. The crisis of the day rotates among the American/human activities, but what they all have in common is that some thing being done must be stopped. The guilt is always directed toward a common target. A bulls-eye the size of a pencil lead.
Nobody knows what a “saved” planet would look like. Nobody knows what the carbon saturation in such a victorious, restored global ecosystem would be — even though we can measure it quite accurately now. We don’t know what the goal is, because it isn’t discussed. That’s because that isn’t what the movement is all about. It’s about destruction.
Destroyer wolf, in protector-sheep clothing. That’s pretty much it.
St. Wendeler has taken to throwing around the Ayn Rand phrase Aristocracy of Pull. His explanation of the meaning of the phrase means a great deal more to me than whatever’s in the book, which frankly didn’t make much of an impression and probably didn’t convey the idea that was intended. Perhaps, if I started over again with Page One immediately after finishing the last chapter, I would have figured out where Rand was going with this.
My memory’s fuzzy and all these refresher courses in Atlas Shrugged take significant time, which I do not have at the moment. I seem to recall Dagny is not to be credited with this phrase, instead the authorship goes to Bertram Scudder, President of the National People’s Commission on whatever whatever whatever. The setting was Hank and Lillian Rearden’s anniversary party (Update:) James and Cherryl Taggart’s wedding reception.
We’ll see just how much of my senile memory remains, tonight. Or tomorrow night, or the night after…it’s not exactly bobbing up to the top of my stack of priorities.
But I do agree with Wendeler that the time is right for the true meaning of the phrase.
Just wow. Once upon a time, your corporate bank account balance was determined not by your ability to offer sales pitches to bureaucrats, but instead by your ability to build things and produce things. To cook up stuff ordinary people could use.
Remember that?
Now that the chapter’s been closed on that bygone era, I wonder how much responsibility the iPresident-Elect Man-God Messiah will claim for writing its obituary. Will He stand atop a pedestal and claim Himself as the righteous slayer of that generation of greed? Or will He blame it on FaPoBuAd again (failed policies of the Bush administration)?
That’s what I’m waiting to find out.
Update: It wasn’t Dagny and it wasn’t Bertram. It was Francisco d’Anconia, in the middle of p. 375. I’ll opine further later, because it’s a worthy thought.
And Wendeler’s right, we are headed there. Actually we’re well past that trailhead.
Cross-posted at Right Wing News.
…or else it will fail, and take the entire country down with it. Hmm. Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue; not just yet. I’ll keep practicing.
Nope no bailouts for blogs. Not today. Nobody’s talking about it. Newspapers, on the other hand…
“This is the worst financial turmoil I have ever seen, not only in our state but in our nation,” [Connecticut] Gov. M. Jodi Rell lamented as she expressed her support for some sort of government/media salvation plan. Attorney General Richard Blumenthal asserted: “The newspaper is an information lifeline. It provides really an essential service.”
How about not doing it, and then saying we did?
Hat tip: The Virginian.
By selling idiotic faux-woman shit to men, that’s how.
Introducing…mantyhose.
I hate pantyhose and I’m a woman, how the hell would a man wear them with all that hair on his legs? Wouldn’t that be miserable? Are they trying to turn men into women because women buy more shit? What other reason could there be?
Well, I’m a dude…and I’m not having any luck coming up with any other reason.
The whole leg issue, to me, goes into the file marked “proof or strong evidence of intelligent design.” Girls are designed to show off their legs. Their legs look good. Guys, who aren’t jogging or doing something strenuous, need to keep theirs covered up.
Back when my mother was alive she used to joke about how it was the ugliest part of a man’s body. Just that swath of two or three inches, when a fella wore some nice suit trousers cut to come down just barely to the ankle when he was standing up, then sat down, with his legs crossed like an old man and the hem would rise up halfway to his knee with one nice wool sock all slouched down. The Bill Clinton look. I don’t swing that way, but from the evidence I can gather I think Mom was right. If the Good Lord put together any fleshy specimen anywhere for the purpose of directing people to look away, that surely must be it.
What does mantyhose do for that, I wonder.
Okay, so now we have manscara, man-lipstick, and mantyhose.
Can manpons be far behind? Come on you gender-bender manufacturers, that’s where the gals have entire store aisles all to themselves. Go all the way. Take that big step.
Blogger friend Gerard noticed it nearly three years ago:
You hear this soft, inflected tone everywhere that young people below, roughly, 35 congregate. As flat as the bottles of spring water they carry and affectless as algae, it tends to always trend towards a slight rising question at the end of even simple declarative sentences. It has no timbre to it and no edge of assertion in it.
It is a conscious assault upon male things…or an unconscious one. Most likely a sloppy hodge-podge of those two. Being a resident of Folsom, I decided a month ago I’d left my own observations unmentioned plenty long enough:
The patchwork-quilt of [F]olsom is polka-dotted with parks of varying size, and being a parent myself I get to watch lots of parents interact with their children.
:
Fathers…and mothers…modulate their voices way, way upward. Several octaves in the case of the gentlemen. It does not sound like me telling my kid to keep his feet on the pedals. It does not lack a declarative tone at the end, like the Castrati described by Van der Leun. They declare things. They just declare them in this weird, other-worldly, somniferous voice. Kind of like Marvin the Martian. Except Marvin the Martian sounds like an opera baritone compared to this.
Victor Davis Hanson, last week, got in on the act (he must’ve been reading Gerard’s blog because nobody reads this one!):
Something has happened to the generic American male accent. Maybe it is urbanization; perhaps it is now an affectation to sound precise and caring with a patina of intellectual authority; perhaps it is the fashion culture of the metrosexual; maybe it is the influence of the gay community in arts and popular culture. Maybe the ubiquitous new intonation comes from the scarcity of salty old jobs in construction, farming, or fishing. But increasingly to meet a young American male about 25 is to hear a particular nasal stress, a much higher tone than one heard 40 years ago, and, to be frank, to listen to a precious voice often nearly indistinguishable from the female. How indeed could one make Westerns these days, when there simply is not anyone left who sounds like John Wayne, Richard Boone, Robert Duvall, or Gary Cooper much less a Struther Martin, Jack Palance, L.Q. Jones, or Ben Johnson? I watched the movie Twelve O’clock High the other day, and Gregory Peck and Dean Jagger sounded liked they were from another planet. I confess over the last year, I have been interviewed a half-dozen times on the phone, and had no idea at first whether a male or female was asking the questions. All this sounds absurd, but I think upon reflection readers my age (55) will attest they have had the same experience.
And now the eggheads have done their studies on exactly this thing. To whatever extent you allow eggheads to tell you what the girls want, it would seem the girls are starting to place a premium value upon that which is, according to the observations of the three of us, in a state of wane:
While Justin Timberlake’s high-pitched voice may be music to many female ears — it seems women actually prefer men with raspier, deeper voices like that of Sean Connery.
A study, done by researchers from Harvard University and Ontario’s McMaster University, found women are attracted to deeper voiced partners, which experts claim indicate dominance and good genes, the Daily Mail reported.
For the study, anthropologists and psychologists from the two universities studied 88 members of the Hadza tribe in Tanzania.
They found that when women are at their most fertile, they are attracted to deeper voiced partners because they are considered to be better hunters who offer more protection, the newspaper reported.
In fact, women are only attracted to higher pitched male voices when they are at their least fertile, such as when they are breast feeding, researchers said.
The findings, published in the British medical journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, go on to say: “Voice pitch may be an indicator of underlying mate quality in humans. Vocal attractiveness is correlated with body and facial attractiveness.”
Now, I’m no egghead; I don’t have sheepskin on the wall or a white lab coat or a pocket protector to put in the lab coat or a propeller beanie I can wear on my head. I may have picked up a thing or two about how to work with statistics, but I don’t apply it to my “research,” which amounts to nothing more than looking around at people, watching the idjit box, not being afraid to use the word “whenever” or to remember things like Hanson does.
Nevertheless — my “research” has noted there is a strong correlation between these cultural enclaves in which higher pitches are used for what passes through the masculine voice box, and lower standards in defining what is, or might be, a threat. No, not so much lower standards. Confusion. You know what I mean. Wherever people who mean to harm others, are perceived not to, and people who only mean to harm those who do harm, are perceived to be out of control and dangerous.
Social circles in which Denny Crane would be the “bad” guy…
These are bubbles of thought in which I notice the masculine voice starts to rise……..? And I would extend that into the playgrounds in which I see the daddies talking like Mariah Carey. I’m just going to assume, and I’m not going out on a limb here, that these daddies-and-kids come from households in which masculinity is regarded as a useless burden, an intrusive threat, or both. So daddy talks high, like mommy. Who wants to threaten his own kid? I don’t think this is conscious. I think this is an evolutionary trait — when the village imposes a new criteria for belonging, people who live within it start working like the dickens, to belong. Gals are better at this than guys are, but guys are improving their chameleon skills as they become more feminine. Spending more of their time within the walls of the village, as opposed to outside, where they used to be, running around in their loincloths hunting for rapidly-moving, sneaky, tasty things.
I find it interesting the eggheads have started to pick up on this conflict. The conflict will no doubt unfold, in the years ahead, becoming more and more effervescent…I find that interesting too.
What I find most interesting of all, is that the two juxtaposed and contradictory forces in this conflict — men talk high, men talk low — are both provided by the preferences of the females. Females, as we’ve said many a time before here at The Blog That Nobody Reads, are individuals just like anybody else. They are not of one mind. And the female individuals part company on whether or not it’s a good thing that men are different from them, and can do things they cannot…write something in the snow, open a pickel jar, grow all kinds and types of hair on the face.
There are women who get agitated just thinking about it. And still prefer the company of “men.” Quasi-men. And they manage to find some. The poor bastards.
There are other women who practice viva la difference. They may be conservative, they may be liberal, they may go hunting for moose, they may have spent their entire lives indoors.
What should men do? My advice is the same for all men, whether they’re looking for a nice lady, or are already happy with the one they got. Just talk the way you naturally talk. If your voice is, indeed, two octaves above Middle C, then by all means talk that way — but I don’t think it is.
Save the question-mark-on-the-end for occasions on which it belongs there. Learn to declare things. I’m convinced, at this point, and with the passage of time I’m only becoming moreso…this has a direct bearing on how a man thinks. Some things are open to question, others are not, and the guys I’ve met who talk like women, seem to have a profound weakness for intellectually regarding matters closed that, in fact, are. They seem to live in this mind-falsetto world in which everything’s open to question, constantly. That isn’t good. And no, I’m no longer willing to entertain any further thought or pondering about that. Dammit.
In short, just follow the advice of this guy…
It is said that the truth has a well-known liberal bias. I agree with this. At least, within the provision that seems to be accepted all-too-quickly by the feeble-minded about truth, that it is nothing more than an aggregate of whatever is spoken most forcefully and most often.
Consider for a moment what the “truth” says about liberal democrats, when they get their own asses handed to them in an election. Do you hear a great deal about how they need to move their positions closer to the center, drop the most fringe-kook beliefs from their platform? I didn’t hear about that in 1988, or 1994, or 2000 or 2004. No, I hear, instead, of the need to find a new and better spokesman. The need to “repackage.” To make things “more easily understood.”
That is not what we’re hearing now, when it is the conservatives and Republicans who got their own butt cheeks extended to them upon a silver platter. Now, things are different. No need to repackage anything; it is the contents within that have to be filtered out, organized, purified…purged.
This difference is all the more bizarre when one considers the extreme imbalance within the wreckage of landscape that is our legislation — on the national level, as well as within several states. Quoth Randall Hoven in the American Thinker (Hat tip to Phil):
The most obvious point to me is that it is the do-gooding liberals who are telling us all what we can and can’t do. The religious right usually just wants to be left alone, either to home school, pray in public or not get their children vaccinated with who-knows-what. Inasmuch as the “religious right” wants some things outlawed, they have failed miserably for at least the last 50 years. Abortion, sodomy, and pornography are now all Constitutional rights. However, praying in public school is outlawed, based on that same Constitution.
Just think for a moment about the things you are actually forced to do or are prevented from doing. Seat belts. Motorcycle helmets. Bicycle helmets. Smoking. Gun purchase and ownership restrictions. Mandatory vaccines for your children. Car emissions inspections. Campaign ad and contribution restrictions. Saying a prayer at a public school graduation or football game. Trash separation and recycling. Keeping the money you earned. Gas tax. Telephone tax. Income tax. FICA withholding. Fill in this form. Provide ID.
For the most part, the list just cited is post-1960. Neither Pat Robertson nor James Dobson ever forced any of that on us.
I can get pornography right at my keyboard, or drive a mile and get all the sex toys I can fit into my car. I can walk to the nearest casino to gamble (but can no longer smoke there). I do need to travel to Nevada for a legal prostitute. If my teenage daughters had wanted abortions, they could have had them free and without even notifying me. (However, had they taken Advil to school, we’d all be in trouble.)
This is reason number…I lost count…of why I’m convinced His Holiness’ Administration is going to be a serious disappointment for everyone, not the least for those who supported Him most ardently. The foundation upon which His ideas are built, is a philosophy that conservatism has bogged us down too much with “lost freedoms” and an injured economy, and we need His Divine Eminence to bring about “change.” Now, read the above paragraphs again. A change from that means what, exactly? The iPresident Man-God is going to bring this about?
Have you ever taken a minute or two to indulge in a fantasy that is the opposite of what’s jotted down above…to entertain what, exactly, would be different about our nation’s political landscape if the country really was in imminent danger of being placed under the iron fist of a theocracy? The way I figure it, the very first thing that would have to happen, would be some kind of a white-hot blistering inter-creed feud. We would have to figure out, don’t you see, which religion was going to be enshrined as our official state faith once the shredding of the First Amendment was finished and the revolution declared a success. Who is it to be? Methodists? Pentacostals? Baptists? The Catholics do not seem to be that interested, nor is anyone terribly worried about them, so it must be something Protestant.
We haven’t even seen the question raised, let alone anyone try to answer it.
Don’t get me wrong, I think overall paranoia can be a good thing. As Andrew Grove said, “only the paranoid survive.” But for paranoia to be beneficial, it has to be somewhat aligned with…truth. And I don’t mean, by that, the feeble-mind’s version of truth. I mean truth as it measurably exists.
And so far, as Hoven points out, Dr. James Dobson and all the rest of ’em haven’t stopped me from doing a damn thing. That’s the truth.
Update: Image swiped from Space Invaders, via Gerard.
Andrew Mondia, 32, was one of several Father Christmases handing out presents and seasonal good cheer in the grotto of the London fashion store.
The store said an elf had warned Mr Mondia he should not be inviting either children or adults to sit on his knee and it was against company policy.
A spokesman for Selfridges told the Guardian: “It’s vital that everyone bringing children to see Santa can be absolutely confident that the visit will be a happy one. Unfortunately, this particular Santa didn’t behave in line with his training or the standards we’ve set so we acted swiftly and asked him to leave.”
I see the nanny-state is doing well with our perpetually-offended friends across the pond.
Ship. Tea. Crates. Boston Harbor. Ker-sploosh.
Now this is a thing that makes you go hmmm. And when I go hmmm, like anyone else, I’m thinking back on personal experience…and I must say, the findings make a lot of sense to me.
In Hollywood lore, the lone cowboy tamed the Wild West with two six-guns by day and drank warm beer with both fists in dusty saloons at night.
That stereotype of the rugged individualist who enjoys tipping back a few might not be so off the mark, according to a newly published study by marketing professors at the University of Texas at San Antonio. They found that places where individualism is valued over the collective good also tend to be places where a lot of beer is consumed.
I like reading about these studies that dabble in individualism versus collectivism, because they’re written up by eggheads and journalists — both of which tend to lean heavily toward the “collectivist” end of the spectrum. It’s interesting to me when they try to take a centrist approach, and their colors just shine through.
In this case, there is a theme permeating the column from top to bottom, that this correlation is taking place on a layer of thinking that was the subject of Pavlov’s experiment with the pups. Ring bell…dog starts slobbering. Mention individualism…people get thirsty for beer.
Problem: People don’t mention individualism that much.
I’m probably in a position to comment because I’m the guy they’re trying to study. Anyone who’s been reading the pages of this blog for awhile (which, of course, nobody actually reads) knows we tend to see very few linkages between collectivism and anything good. We see individuality as the source of everything we have that’s worth having — because it is.
And we like beer. Here.
So what’s it look like to me? It’s a stigma. When you’re a true individualist you have to be left behind by quite a few things. First, of course, there are the true-blue collectivists, and you don’t fit in with them because you don’t see life the same way. Then there are the goths. And other rebels who try to be individualists, but they’re more concerned with what others think than they want to admit — so you end up having very little in common with them, either. And then there are the socially inept, the mentally incapacitated, the narcissists, the…well, I’m pretty much recounting middle- and high-school here, aren’t I. Nerds, jocks and smoke-holers. That’s life.
The point is, by the time the individual has been rejected by every collective there is, there’s no one left around except those who are distracted from these social issues. We don’t try to be individualists. We grew up being distracted from all this stuff, while we were fiddling with things. Tinker toys, erector sets, computer programs…that cool slider thing I made out of Dad’s rope and Mom’s clothesline poles, on which I could very well have busted my back, and I’ve often wondered how that didn’t come to pass.
We’re the builders.
And when we’re done building stuff, we just want a nice cold bottle of beer, dammit.
Contrasted with that, collectivists have an identity to worry about, and the identity is externalized from them in that it’s decided by a prevailing consensus within their group. They can get thrown out. Therefore, there’s a stigma — beer happens to be the first and easiest thing to stigmatize. That’s my explanation. And the column seems to veer close to this realization, almost tumbling into it, but then beating a hasty retreat:
“The definition of an individualist is that we act on our attitudes, we be ourselves,” [L.J.] Shrum [, marketing department chairman at UTSA] said. “Whereas in collectivist societies that’s more frowned upon, and you want to make sure you reflect on the good of the group.”
I’ll bet if you could live in one collectivist society after another, for millions of years, watching ’em rise and fall, you’d see the sequence is consistent. Stigmatize skin color, then right after that stigmatize the things people stick in their cakeholes — alcoholic beverages, hard drugs and tobacco. We start off with the visible things, you see. And then bloodlines…starting with the issue of disposable income in your family tree, and how it affects the way you dress. Again, what’s visible. Thoughts and ideas come soon afterward, at which time skin color is un-stigmatized, but all the other visible stigmas remain.
The researchers also found they could take a group of college students and manipulate those individualist-versus-collectivist impulses a bit, which in turn influenced how thirsty those students were for beer.
:
The researchers first compared per-capita beer consumption with a well-known set of national scores for individualism and collectivism developed by Dutch marketing researcher Geert Hofstede.
:
“Our standard cowboy image is the prototypical individualist. However, Hispanic cultures, Latin American cultures, many Eastern European cultures, are very collectivistic,” he said, adding that those who make the move to the U.S. may be the more individualistic members of their cultures.But the real picture is even more complex, Shrum said. All people have some degree of both individualism and collectivism, with one side more dominant. And by getting people to focus on themselves or their families and friends, psychologists can bring either trait to the surface.
And that’s what Zhang and Shrum did with 128 undergraduate business students (all of legal drinking age). When they temporarily induced the students to become individualists, they became thirstier for beer. Collectivists became less so.
There’s a glaring hole in this research, and I think the researchers missed it because they were more sympathetic to the collective mindset than they should’ve been.
You see, the collectivist becomes agitated toward the individualist when the collectivist gets the idea that somewhere, beyond the immediate line-of-sight, someone might be behaving individually. Then they crack down with their “convert or die!” sermonizing upon that renegade individual. They accuse him of being a rebel, of actively figuring out what everybody else is doing and then laboring toward the opposite — even though the evidence says the individualist just doesn’t care, because that’s what an individualist is.
Does the individualist get all cranky and lay the smack down upon the collectivist, when he finds out someone’s behaving collectively?
No.
He just wants to be left alone.
To drink his damn beer.
He gets all cranky when someone breaks down the door and barges into his living room, to take that beer away.
Another thing I notice, is they left out ancient Egypt which is commonly thought to have come up with the first thing that could’ve been called “beer.” Yeah, ancient Egypt which came up with so much cool stuff that there are all these theories rattling around they were visited by aliens from other worlds. Oh yeah, collectivist hoards built those pyramids by shoving enormous slabs up the inclines, lots of collectivist labor involved in that. But someone had to design it first. We’re not too captivated by the idea of 400 guys lifting or moving something one guy could not; it’s simple math, really. What fascinates us about that civilization is how the designing got done.
Well whoever did it, after he came up with something he knew would work, probably the first thing he did was sit back and have a beer.
Finding a problem, making a problem, being the problem?
Parents in this quiet university town are sharply divided over what these construction-paper symbols represent: A simple child’s depiction of the traditional (if not wholly accurate) tale of two factions setting aside their differences to give thanks over a shared meal? Or a cartoonish stereotype that would never be allowed of other racial, ethnic or religious groups?
I often hear of teaching children to have respect for diversity. If that is indeed being practiced everywhere, and means what I think it means, and people are being consistent about it…what the hell is there to argue about?
H/T: Michelle.
They’re here. Every single one of them looking fantastic, of course. Which is the point…
There are plenty of beautiful actresses out there, many of who[m] have stayed young and beautiful after having children.
The sensitive males, like yours truly, will be pleased to know the small-dee dad is occasionally worth mentioning.
Todd Palin didn’t make that cut. Sorry, Todd.
Actress Melanie Griffith has three children, one for each of the men she has married.
Way ta go, Mel.
There’s also a huge flock of oyster-gals reproducing asexually…I would guess…though I tend to think reality is something in the opposite direction from that. Just like the old bearded aliens speaking perfect English greeting Captain Kirk to their paper mache planets, always with the one nubile alien daughter who needs to be taught how to kiss. No momma worth mentioning, alive or dead. Except this is Earth, Hollywood exactly; and the shoe’s on the other foot now. Women give birth. Women have kids. What the guys are doing in there, well, nobody really knows…they’re just rattling around, dropping seed in random places that’s scooped up by someone else eventually.
It’s really sad how self-defeating this is. I understand the point — “real” women have kids and then worry about whether they’ll stay attractive. So this gives them hope. I get that. Hope for what? And, as Edna Krabappel Helen Lovejoy famously said, won’t someone think of the children? It doesn’t seem to be in their best interests for their small-em mom’s market value to be kept up, just in case she figures out she’s done a better job keeping up her “resale value” than that schlubby husband of hers called dad.
So it’s not about the kids, it’s about small-em mom’s self-esteem. Well — what about the moms who’ve already made up their minds that after five or six kids, their market value is spent, and they’re still so in love with the capital-D Dad that they don’t give a rat’s ass about it? What about them? I don’t think it does anything for them to be told how great Brooke Burke looks…after reproducing repeatedly, and apparently all by herself.
So when you start out trying to feel good about yourself, instead of trying to do right by people who are counting on you — you end up accomplishing neither one.
And…you can’t play “musical dads” without diminishing the role of dad. Hope that doesn’t cheese anyone off. I know a lot of folks out there were raised by perfectly decent stepdads and think the world of ’em. But now that you have sons and daughers of your own, you’d want the daughters to get hold of a decent guy and stick with him for life, wouldn’t you? And you’d want the sons to raise their own kids, rather than taking on someone else’s, or leaving their own kids to be raised by some other guy.
Maybe — just maybe — it all starts with thinking of the Dad as someone worthy of a Capital Dee. Someone worth mentioning.
If you think the two people mentioned in the headline are a couple of big ol’ stupid dumbasses, and you think this because someone else told you so — and you believe it right down to the marrow of your bones — don’t get started on any of what follows. Not with me.
Just…don’t.
1. I don’t want to hear what an independent thinker you are.
2. I don’t want to hear about your education. You’re not using it.
3. I don’t want to hear that you’re a “nuanced” thinker, capable of perceiving the world outside of overly-simplistic black-and-white terms.
4. Don’t bore me to tears telling me how much Europe has hated us up until now, or is going to be inspired to not hate us quite so much from here on. Who cares what you think.
5. And I really don’t want to hear you asking about if “America is ready to elect a person of color.” I said she was, when it wasn’t cool to say so. You’re the people who called me ignorant. I won’t even ask if you’re going to recant what you said or apologize, I know that’s not happening.
6. Save your blathering about how intolerant conservative Republicans are. You and I both know you can’t name examples, and you’re not the kind of person who thinks too deeply about that anyway.
7. Clothes that cost $150,000. Don’t even start to go there.
8. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act. His Holiness The iPresident-Elect could pass his own modern-day Alien and Sedition Act and you’d be just peachy with it. You know it and I know it.
9. Globular wormening. I ride my bike to work. You probably don’t. Stuff a sock in it.
10. Liberty. You adopt opinions about the intelligence or lack thereof of total strangers, because other total strangers, told you what to think. You don’t know what liberty is. You don’t have the first clue.
Had to get that off my chest.
Among people who have not met Sarah Palin or George W. Bush, any statement that either one of those high-profile Republican contenders is some kind of a big dummy, is tantamount to driving a mile and a half down the freeway with your left blinker on — not a sign of gargantuan intellect.
It is an exceptionally odd prestige symbol a lot of people have. Their numbers are more than significant, and their misunderstanding about how they’re presenting themselves, is quite tragic really.
I have a dream, that my children and my children’s children, will be judged on their intellectual acumen or lack thereof, by people who’ve actually met them. And will grow up in a world in which people wait to personally meet each other, before passing judgment on how smart or stupid everybody is.
Seems like so little to ask.
And yeah, I have the same words for any Republican voter who wants to call Obama a big ol’ stupid-head or whatever. Meet people…then decide. And even then, know a little bit more about things than what you say out loud. A generation or two ago, this was just common sense.
Regular readers of this blog — which (all together, now) Nobody Actually Reads Anyway! — know that we have been investigating this prevailing sensibility that there is something hideously wrong with nice-looking females showing skin…or with observant and sentient gentlemen noticing.
We have found this to be a particularly craven and cowardly taboo. Nobody seems to want to come out and say there are bad consequences involved in this. I’m not referring, here, to “T-back” thongs and other articles likely to give the gals peculiar and painful sunburns. I’m talking standard summertime apparel. G-rated stuff. Bare cleavage…bellies…thighs and calves…shoulders…backs.
There’s nothing wrong with any of this. Even if it is an attention-getting device, there’s nothing wrong with it. And we, here, are more than just a little bit fascinated with people who think there is something wrong with it. They seem so sure of themselves, right up until they’re invited to fill in the details.
Our comments, here, are confined strictly to the scantily-clad ladies who’ve sailed on past their eighteenth birthdays, or whatever passes for the age of majority. We do have our own puritanical streaks with regard to specimens not yet ripe — we pass by a high school every morning on the way to work, and we’ve taken our fair share of double-takes at sophomore gals traipsing in to their morning studies with the entire leg exposed to the late autumn air. Entire. And, as healthy a libido as we’ve shown throughout our 42 years on the planet, nevertheless, there is nothing licentious about our whiplash. We’re somewhat revolted. A fifteen-year-old girl wearing Daisy Dukes before eight in the morning in the last week before Thanksgiving, that’s a WHISKEY…TANGO…FOXTROT if ever there was one. Just not right.
Once the maiden is old enough to vote, though, we’re all on board. We figure, if you’re old enough to marry whoever you want to, if the contracts that pass under your pen are legally binding — if you see a skirt at The Gap that ends six inches above the knee instead of three, then you just go right ahead. Especially if you look good in it. We are, after all, a straight male with a healthy libido. And we’ve always been a leg man.
Anyway, this taboo. I said it is craven and cowardly. I don’t mean that as a criticism. It is a comment regarding what makes it fascinating to us. Learning the least little detail about it, is very much like nailing jello to a tree. Nobody stands up for this rule; nobody stakes their reputation on it; nobody voices it on behalf of a third party, and nobody dares to actually draw a line anywhere. So it’s really hard to get some definition to what exactly is being prohibited here, save for the thirty-thousand-foot idea that female humans should not make it easy for strangers to guess what their bodies look like. Hey…that sounds kinda like the Taliban.
All of which is a rambling preamble.
A preamble to John Hawkins’ reply to the author of an e-mail, one “Andrew Bell.” The subject is, among other things, the leggy Sarah Palin, fresh off of giving an interview with a turkey being slaughtered in the background, daring to show some thigh in, of all places…
…wait for it…
…a hotel swimming pool area. That hussy!
Mr. Bell, I suppose, represents many others…I don’t know that for sure, but I don’t doubt it either. He would like John Hawkins to let him know, regarding Hawkins’ other site Conservative Grapevine,
I believe I read in one of your pieces on Right Wing News that you are a Christian. Is that true? If so, then why does it look like you post bikini pictures on Conservative Grapevine as well as RWN? e.g., Sarah Palin at the pool.
Do you think that it’s OK to do that as a Christian?
As a Christian? What in the WORLD…Christ was a prophet who lived two thousand years ago around the land surrounding the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. Y’know, I can’t bet a large amount of money on this, but I got a feeling He might’ve seen some thigh.
So this is a Christian thing, this taboo, you say Mister Bell? Wow. Now we’re getting somewhere! If you could somehow find some support for that, that right there might be enough to make me an atheist. Or convert to something else, anyway.
I’d like to know how this works, exactly. What does being religious have to do with forcing ladies with nice-looking legs, like Sarah Palin, to cover ’em up? Womens’ legs are evidence of intelligent design, the way I see it. You know that thing going around about how bananas are an atheist’s nightmare, because they possess so many attributes all of which seem to be orchestrated toward making them easier to eat? The same is true of the female gam. Designed by an intelligent Higher Power, to be observed and appreciated.
Christians have a problem with women wearing shorts? My goodness. I learn something new every single day.
Well, someone does have a problem. There are a couple comments by the Celebuzz link that is the source of the pictures, that are, shall we say…not terribly well thought out. Just a few. Also, there’s a poll in which, as of this writing, five percent of the respondents think Gov. Palin is being a floozy. And the tabloids are eating this up, because somewhere out there is someone who will find this useful. Useful to show others.
Sarah Palin seems to have a lot of this stuff swirling around her, like she’s a gravity well for it. By that I mean, things that are proxy-offensive — getting the cackles up in second-parties, who are getting offended on behalf of someone else. I have not yet met anyone who is personally offended by the fact that Alaska’s Governor owns a tanning bed, for example, and I’ve become knowledgeable of very, very few people who are personally offended that her campaign-clothes cost $150k. The people who are making the noise about these things, seem to be trying to provoke others. And consistently failing at it.
So what’ve we got here. She wears shorts by the pool and has a fantastic looking pair of legs, which she keeps tan with the help of a tanning bed she bought with her own money. She wore, but will not keep, some expensive clothes (I really have no idea how much loot McCain’s, Obama’s or Biden’s clothes cost, and I don’t think you know either). She gave an interview in front of a turkey butchering turkeys.
And then there’s all the bullshit…she banned books, Trig Palin is not her kid, she shoots wolves from helicopters, she doesn’t know what the Bush Doctrine is or where Africa is.
They say her fifteen minutes of fame is just about up.
I really don’t see how such a thing is possible. The urgency factor that is involved in certain people stirring up stupid-rage toward her, is just so high. High as in — not a comparative, but a superlative. Do not mistake my intended meaning, here, for something synonymous with “a notch or two above average” because that is not what I mean at all. I mean…shattering records. I’ve never, in my lifetime, seen anything like this. Not even toward our lame-duck President.
We get bored with people when we don’t care about ’em anymore. And somewhere, someone, be they numerous or be they just plain loud…cares an awful lot about Ms. Palin.
Now, I want to see Sarah Palin wearing shorts with an animal being killed behind her. In fact, make sure she’s wearing $150,000 shorts. Blood spattering everywhere. That would make my day.
Okay, okay, fine. I’ll write something about this “Sarah Palin gave interview with turkey butchering going on behind her” stuff. And I’ll completely avoid the obvious — that if it was Joe Biden or His Holiness The iPresident-Elect Man-God…the same people who are calling Gov. Palin a stupid dumbshit for choosing the wrong background, would be squealing with delight about what a wonderful interview it was and how dare you blame the august luminary for a background that is the cameraman’s responsibility. Or the news producer’s. Whatever.
I’ll avoid any mention of that whatsoever.
I think this is much more worthy of comment. Food is death. If you eat, you kill. Period.
How sick a culture do we live in if real, live, grownup adults writing for real, live, grownup newspapers are only finding out now for the first time that meat comes from animals? Aren’t we supposed to shun the shrink-wrapped vision of the food chain? Aren’t we all supposed to be more nuanced than that?
But now it’s only okay to eat meat (anything else is a sick slutty “celebration of death”) if we never-ever-ever-ever acknowledge that what we’re eating came from an animal? And what exactly are people who work in the farming business supposed to make of all this? What will happen to them when people finally find out what it is they actually do?
Update:
I never thought about this. Looks like Vegans are gonna have to starve to death…
I can get crops to grow by simply putting seed in the ground. The rest of my job is to kill, kill, kill. Kill weeds. Kill insect pests. Kill vertebrate pests. Whether by herbicide, pesticides, shooting, trapping, stomping, you name it — I spend far more time killing than I do making something grow. Mother nature takes care of the growing. I have to remove the competition. There have been days when I’ve trapped 50+ pocket gophers and shot 100 ground squirrels – before lunch. They needed killing, and the next day, more of them were killed because they needed killing. At other times, I’ve shot dozens of jackrabbits at night and flung them out into the sagebrush for coyotes to eat.
Hat tip: Gerard.
And here’s that video of the clueless dolt Sarah Palin using the wrong background for her interview. Really. Seriously. Is this supposed to be evidence of her dimbulbishness? On what planet? What about the news crew? Does Sarah Palin say “Hey, why don’t you shoot me over here?” and the camera crew that is so much smarter than her, says to itself “aw…gee…darn…the Governor has chosen a poor background…can’t say anything about it, with her being the Governor and all…”
An Emperor Has No Clothes situation?
You people call yourselves the “reality based community.” Heh.
Personally, I think it’s pretty funny.
And…that’s about all I have to say about that. Happy Thanksgiving. Go out and get a real turkey. Sucker’s been killed anyway, don’t want it to go to waste.
…is to take it seriously.
That’s why I ride my bike to work every single day. I tell everybody who asks, it’s about being a moderately fat middle-aged guy as opposed to a grotesquely fat middle-aged guy, and not only that, but UNLESS EVERYBODY STARTS DOING THIS RIGHT NOW THE EARTH IS GONNA DIE!!!! An umptyfratz-many esteemed scientists have told us so so it must be true.
I deadpan that last one. Just for fun. It makes me happy when I get funny looks. I wouldn’t have gotten funny looks on that one just a couple years ago.
The most devastating thing you can do to a stupid idea is to take it seriously.
Or, elect it to be your next President.
Earlier today, I noted that Barack Obama’s team has started hinting that they will move back towards John McCain’s position on interrogation techniqiues. Now supporters of Obama who have criticized the Bush administration’s position on indefinite detention have begun rethinking that policy as well:
As a presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama sketched the broad outlines of a plan to close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba: try detainees in American courts and reject the Bush administration’s military commission system.
Now, as Mr. Obama moves closer to assuming responsibility for Guantánamo, his pledge to close the detention center is bringing to the fore thorny questions under consideration by his advisers. They include where Guantánamo’s detainees could be held in this country, how many might be sent home and a matter that people with ties to the Obama transition team say is worrying them most: What if some detainees are acquitted or cannot be prosecuted at all?
That concern is at the center of a debate among national security, human rights and legal experts that has intensified since the election. Even some liberals are arguing that to deal realistically with terrorism, the new administration should seek Congressional authority for preventive detention of terrorism suspects deemed too dangerous to release even if they cannot be successfully prosecuted.
“You can’t be a purist and say there’s never any circumstance in which a democratic society can preventively detain someone,” said one civil liberties lawyer, David D. Cole, a Georgetown law professor who has been a critic of the Bush administration.
You can’t? That’s all we’ve heard from the close-Gitmo crowd for the last seven years. Indefinite detention supposedly violates American values, we’re losing the war if we adapt to the threat against us, blah blah blah. Certainly Barack Obama never gave any indication of nuanced thinking along the lines of indefinite detention during the last two years while campaigning for the presidency. In fact, Obama made the absolutist case that Cole now belatedly rejects in June 2007:
“While we’re at it,” he said, “we’re going to close Guantanamo. And we’re going to restore habeas corpus. … We’re going to lead by example _ by not just word but by deed. That’s our vision for the future.
Now that Obama has to live with these decisions and not simply snipe from the sidelines, the game appears to have changed. A month ago, the NYT’s editorial board scoffed at the Bush administration’s efforts to keep Gitmo detainees from being released as merely a way to avoid bad press and not to keep dangerous people from killing Americans. Suddenly, the New York Times discovers that the American system does allow for indefinite detention to protect society from dangerous individuals without full-blown criminal trials — as with the criminally insane.
Gosh, and all that “shut down Gitmo” stuff sounded so rational and sensible back in the olden days, when we were reassured it wasn’t really gonna happen soon.
So how far did you get when you parents told you to go ahead and run away from home?
I wish like the dickens I could patent this obvious truth, that some silly ideas seem attractive and sensible right up until they’re about to be implemented and then suddenly the beer goggles fall off. But I can’t. The earliest I became aware of it was when Carlin Romano said it after announcing in a book review that, according to Catharine MacKinnon’s “logic,” he just finished raping her. “People claim I dehumanized her,” he said. “In fact, I did worse — I took her seriously. The worst thing that can happen to a flamboyant claim is to be tested.”
That was way back in ’94. Since then, I have seen the wisdom of his words proven over and over again.
So this McCain voter is not weeping, wailing, or gnashing his teeth. He’s not stomping his feet or holding his breath until his face turns blue. He’s conducting his life, riding his bike to work…occasionally indulging in making an Obamaton squirm about driving that enormous SUV everywhere while the earth is dying. And, just reading the news to see how this hopey-changey goodness turns out. This McCain voter is very much like your mom and dad telling you to go ahead and run away from home, and watching to see what happens next.
This McCain voter is expecting — and not just a little bit — that what comes down the news pipeline, as all this hopey-changey goodness is nailed into place, resembles very much this first example. Oh no, Obamatons, your ideas are being taken seriously! What’re ya gonna do now?
Hat tip: Anchoress.
Dr. Clouthier is concise…
I can’t help but thinking that if Barack Obama specified what “change”, specifically, he believed in, the markets would calm down.
Boortz is more expansive…
The picture certainly isn’t rosy right now, and nobody can really explain why. The media, on the other hand, is certain that there is one recent event that is having no effect whatsoever on this economic slide; and that would be the election of Barack Obama.
OK … why don’t you try to put on an investor hat for a moment here. Let’s say you’re considering getting back in the stock market. You know that some stocks out there are at historic lows, and they’re bound to bounce back … right? So why don’t you just take some money out of your savings or out from under your mattress and plow it back into the market?
Let’s see if we can find any reasons why you might hesitate.
We have a president-elect who …
… has promised to raise capital gains taxes, perhaps even double them. So this guy is just waiting for you to jump into the stock market and make some money so he can seize a huge portion of it. Why jump now? Obama has been asked if he plans to go forward with his capital gains tax increase, but he’s not saying. Just hold off on your investments for a while until he tips his hand. If he goes the tax increase route you might want to consider trying to move your money offshore to grow until he’s out of the picture.… has promised to sign the so-called “Card Check” bill. Now again, you’re smarter than the average voter, and you realize that this unionization-through-intimidation idea is going to have an adverse affect on American business. As soon as the bill is signed union thugs (organizers) will start their petition drives at thousands of businesses across the nation. Large businesses and small businesses. America’s largest employer, Wal-Mart, will be one of the first targets. You don’t know how far this will spread, but you do know that every business that is unionized will be a poor investment for you. So you wait .. you wait to see what is going to happen with card check.
… has promised to raise income taxes on the largest jobs producing segment of our economy, small businesses. During the campaign you heard him say that he would not raise taxes on 95% of small businesses, but you know that most of the jobs rest with the remaining 5%, and that’s where most of the new jobs would be created. The ignorant voters bought his 95% line, but you’re not that stupid. You saw through his rhetoric. So, again, why jump into the market now? Wait until we see what Obama is going to do with these tax increases on America’s jobs-producing machine.
… has promised more business regulation. Obama is no fan of free enterprise. He loves government. Obama believes America is great because of government. You really think you need to wait before you make your investment moves until you see just what regulatory punishment Obama has in mind for the free market.
So .. think about it. We’ve only scratched the surface here. We could also talk about expanding the family leave act and many other little federal anti-business goodies. Invest now? Why? Doesn’t it make more sense to wait until you get a true measure of our new anti-capitalist president?
As many words as he used, Boortz missed one that’s on my mind a bit lately.
The dialog President-elect Obama really wants to start, it seems, is one He isn’t quite ready to admit He’s willing to start, let alone admit that He is exuberant about starting it.
And that dialog has to do with whether or not the time has come to give up on capitalism.
A casual observer of everday news should be able to tell you that if He is ever backed into a corner about this lawn-dart motion the market is doing, He will just lapse into a litany about FaPoBuAd (failed policies of the Bush administration). (Thanks, small-tee-tim the godless heathen!) A more curious, conscientious and thoughtful follower of our national events will figure out the iPresident-elect Man-God is just about as enthusiastic about capitalism and free enterprise, as He is about the country He is about to start ruling. Which is to say, not very much at all.
He’ll blame the market for the problems He and His kind have caused.
(“His kind.” Can I say that? Only one way to find out, I s’pose…)
We’ve already seen it with the subprime mess. He’s a community organizer; He brags about being a community organizer; community organizers browbeat banks into making bad loans; bad loan paper caused the subprime sinkhole. And now that the whole scenario has played out He wants to blame it on free entrprise running around all half-cocked, like a little kid with a children’s menu failing to keep his crayon inside the lines or something.
So with a friendly congress, we’re bound to see some more regulation…of the very kind that made the problem in the first place.
As Neal points out, investors aren’t like ordinary voters. They tend to understand cause and effect. They have to; you must believe in cause-and-effect in order to be an investor, otherwise, to you it’s nothing more than a gamble. I suppose there may be an investor here & there who sees it that way. But that isn’t descriptive of the ones who make the real money. They need to see some concrete reasons why their dollars are likely to come back, with some extra, before they send those dollars anywhere.
So for the time being, it just isn’t happening.
Oh well. Blame Bush. It’s always been an easy thing for the flaccid mind.
Republicans lose voters (H/T: Frank, who thinks this guy’s delusional, and I agree) with their evil stupid plans to force women to have abortions, to keep paraplegics like Christopher Reeve in their wheelchairs, and to assert the will of an elite cultist relition over their entire country by means of theocratic rule.
The democrats lose votes with their evil stupid plans to inject pointlessness into things…like making money…following the law…defending the country. Every little thing anybody can do — except oppose Republicans — they want to make a little bit tougher, a little bit less rewarding.
I know this about Republicans because I read it in smartass backwoods newspaper columns like the one linked above.
I know this about democrats because people actually talk about it. Joe The Plumber isn’t the first one I’ve heard raising this obvious point: If I want to buy a business and hire employees, and President Obama is going to raise my taxes, what’s the freakin’ point? What’s the point of doing anything? Why follow immigration laws, why hire people, why get married, why buy a house.
As for whether they want to do these things, I know the democrats want to do what I think they want to do because they tell me so.
I’m not sure Republicans really want to do the things attributed to them. Not a hundred percent. Because when the accusation is directed at them, and then someone justifies it, they always have to invent something on the spot to make it complete. A big chunk of it is always pulled out of thin air. I’ve not heard a Republican presidential candidate say “when you force women to have babies, it’s good for everybody!” I’ve not heard one say “when you force everyone to be protestant, it’s good for everybody!” I’ve not heard one say “when you make old people choose between their last drug prescription and the next can of pet food they have to eat for dinner, it’s good for everybody!”
In other words — wowee, those Republicans sure sound foolish and dangerous, when I pretend they said things they didn’t say.
But I know damn good and well what Barack Obama said about spreading the wealth around. It wasn’t the first time I heard that, either. There’s no need to pull that out of anywhere. They’re saying they want to do it.
We’re a funny people. We pretend to be so centrist, objective and balanced. But we debate the awful horrible fictitious things Republicans are going to do if we leave them in charge…that they haven’t done, even though they’ve been in charge…versus, the idiotic things democrats do every single time they’re in charge, without fail, that with a casual skimming through the pages of recent history, we’d know haven’t worked out too well for us. If we were willing to put in the time or energy to do it.