KFOX-TV:

There is typically an American flag that flies high in front of METI Inc., a federal contractor in East El Paso. But instead, the flag is lying flat inside and the flag pole is on the ground outside after a storm last Sunday.

“The wind and the rain knocked over the flag pole, causing the flag pole to lie on the parking lot overlooking Boeing Drive,” said Rebecca Orozco with METI Inc.

But it is the condition in which employees found Old Glory that shocked everyone, until they checked their surveillance video.

“After watching the surveillance videos we noticed that it was a good Samaritan who we suspect was a homeless man that came to the rescue of the flag around 1:40 in the morning,” Orozco told KFOX.

In the surveillance video you can see the homeless man in driving rain and wind carefully folding up the American flag military style and then placing the flag pole off to the side.

“It was an amazing experience to see that, it was very heartwarming to see that a homeless man or a good Samaritan who was walking around that area at that time of the day in the rain will come to the rescue of the U.S. flag,” said Orozco.

Orozco said she wouldn’t expect that kind of act in a late night storm from anyone, especially someone who has so little to give.

“Knowing that so many people have turned their back on him, he never turned his back on this country,” she said.

KFOX found the man who didn’t turn his back on the flag. His name is Gustus Bozarth.

“It’s a small respect, folding the flag like that,” said Bozarth.

He lives in the back of a warehouse just feet from the flag he saved. His only comforts are a small television and his two loyal cats named Lynx and Bobcat.

Bozarth said he’s roamed all over this country, and while working security in Tampa he learned how to properly fold the flag.

Despite being homeless, he still has so much love for his country and so much respect for his flag.

“For American freedoms, freedom for America, freedom for a lot of Americans,” Bozarth told KFOX.

“A homeless man who has nothing at all, he still holds on to his flag, he still holds on to the hope of his country, and that to me says a million words,” said Orozco.

METI Inc. officials hope to have the flag back up as soon as possible.

Does this ever invite commentary:

Police in Wellington are investigating the sudden death of a man at Reading Cinemas.

The 23-year-old’s body was found by a staff member at the Courtenay Place theatre, shortly before 8.30pm last night. It is believed he had been watching Twilight: Eclipse.

A cause of death has not yet been identified.

I’m not a big fan at all of Twilight movies, I’ve discovered. I’ve come to see them as a viciously swirling potpourri of all the things I do not want to see in movies ever again. Most of those things, anyway.

I found this out by way of FARK, where I also discovered two of the best comments:

Dr.Zom: “Twilight is like soccer. They run around for 2 hours, nobody scores, and its billion fans insist you just don’t understand.”

Hsaiotei: Lone man in theater full of teenage girls. Either fapped to death, or the subharmonic vibration of all that pubescent “Squeeeeeee” liquified his brains.

Can’t add anything on to that.

After I handed down my sub-bedrock review of that piece of crap New Moon, my girlfriend asked if we’d ever be watching Eclipse in the theater. Pig will fly first.

Like they used to say on The Man Show “Movies Men Don’t Want To See” segment: I wouldn’t watch that steaming turd if you super-glued my nut sack to a cannon ball and fired it into the theater.

Don’t wanna die, after all.

Click the pic.

Via FARK.

At dawn the telephone rings…

“Hello, Senor Rod?” This is Ernesto, the caretaker at your country house.”

“Ah yes, Ernesto. What can I do for you? Is there a problem?”

“Um, I am just calling to advise you, Senor Rod, that your parrot – he is dead.”

“My parrot? Dead? The one that won the International competition?”

“Si, Senor, that’s the one.”

“Damn! That’s a pity! I spent a small fortune on that bird. What did he die from?”

“From eating the rotten meat, Senor Rod.

“Rotten meat? Who the hell fed him rotten meat?”

“Nobody, Senor. He ate the meat of the dead horse.”

“Dead horse? What dead horse?”

“The thoroughbred, Senor Rod.”

“My prize thoroughbred is dead?”

“Yes, Senor Rod, he died from all that work pulling the water cart.”

“Are you insane?? What water cart?”

“The one we used to put out the fire, Senor.”

“Good Lord!! What fire are you talking about, man??”

“The one that destroyed your house, Senor! A candle fell and the curtains caught on fire.”

“What the hell?? Are you saying that my mansion is destroyed because of a candle??!!”

“Yes, Senor Rod.”

“But there’s electricity at the house!! What was the candle for?”

“For the funeral, Senor Rod.”

“WHAT BLOODY FUNERAL??!!”

“Your wife’s, Senor Rod. She showed up very late one night and I thought she was a thief, so I hit her with your new Taylor Made Super Quad 460 golf club.”

SILENCE……….. LONG SILENCE………

“Ernesto, if you broke that driver, you’re in deep shit!”

I don’t participate in threads underneath my cross-posting at Right Wing News, because I notice when you get what I refer to as the “is-not-is-too” effect — and I expect this is a term I need not define — it makes the comment thread explode. That’s a legitimate thing to have happen over at a place like here, a “some guy’s blog” blog. I’m really not happy with encouraging it anywhere else.

But certain things demand a response. And I thought this was completely awesome.

I cross-posted my thoughts about how conservatives disagree with liberals & how liberals disagree with conservatives; my point being that the ways & means of disagreement are not the same, it’s an asymmetrical divide. These people we nowadays call “liberals,” according to the evidence that has come to my senses, seem to have a worldview built around some folks belonging & other folks not. And as you endeavor to answer the obvious question “belonging to what, exactly?” every answer you get back, that stands up to scrutiny, is sinister.

They can accept some ideas and not others. They won’t tolerate the idea of anyone walking around thinking a thought that is sacrilegious, but at some point during a conflict they manage to make their peace with the idea that you’ve got a wrong thought — in fact, invariably, pronounce that all of your thoughts are wrong. And this is just fine. There is a spooky smug satisfaction in their aggressively non-threatening faces, whereas just minutes before they were getting all riled up that anybody anywhere might be disagreeing with them about something. See, they’re confused about the goal. They don’t know what it is they want: 1) All persons and things in existence must agree with them; 2) All persons and things that disagree with them, must be marked that way; 3) All such persons and things in disagreement must be walled off, and made ineffectual. They shift rather breezily among these, it seems to me, because they’re not thinking clearly.

That, or there’s some Armageddon ahead. Some sort of secularist “rapture.” Those of us who disagree with liberals and are wrong, will never be made right — and that is quite okay. How come that is, is my question. They still hunger for their perfect paradise full of people with clean thoughts, free of contamination of & by us knuckle-draggers who believe scores should be kept in competitive school games, and Sarah did a good thing by keeping Trig. We’re allowed to go on thinking that, and things are still alright — even though they plainly don’t have the maturity to actually accept this. The implications are a little ominous.

Anyway. Huck Upchuck seems to me to be a somewhat cerebral liberal. Suffering all of the popular maladies that interfere with clear-headed thinking, but still possessing some measure of grace in an ability to recognize good manners in others who don’t agree with him about every little thing. This shows some capacity for thinking as an individual, so I’ll probably plug him into the blogroll if it seems like the right thing to do.

But the myopia revealed in this comment was & is stupefying, I say:

Freeberg: I hope you’re paying attention to this thread, because down in the nitty gritty of it you can find this from The Dick Nixon, directed at me:

Considering Nixon despises each and everyone of you liberal POS’s who enabled The Obamateur to fuck the country up, Nixon could really care less about

1. Your opinion.
2. your opinion.
and 3. your opinion.

We should have left you banned.

I hope you take note, and think to revisit your thesis. After all, you did write this:

It’s about hate, too. How many conservatives do you know who would like to put Barack Obama and Joe Biden in a big iron pot, fill it with oil, light a fire under it and watch ’em cook? Heard a lot of that kind of hate lately? Me neither.

I think The Dick Nixon’s comments qualify, don’t you?

Eh…nope.

Frankly, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I had a co-worker in an office who would argue things this way. There is A and there is B. I have discerned common attributes between A and B, and from these I have determined A and B are exactly the same. Since A and B are exactly the same it invalidates whatever point of yours I am seeking to attack…

And so, he saw no difference whatsoever between the Islamic radicals who attacked us on 9/11, and Timothy McVeigh who blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Except, of course, that McVeigh was white! So I must be a racist for wanting to do something about these other people, and the only way I could ever redeem myself was to go after McVeigh with the same level of energy and ambition, or something.

But, uh, McVeigh was already dead said I. This somehow didn’t seem to matter. It was a difference between A and B, and all differences between A & B were being shunted aside.

Huck, I really do think my meaning was clear so I see no reason to go back and re-write it. But I will spell it out for you. When I talk about putting a liberal figure in a big iron kettle and boiling him in oil, I am not talking about something like banning from a blog. Boiling in oil is not the same. I am talking about physical and deadly injury — audibly fantasizing about it. Lusting after it. Causing excruciating agony in the person who is the object of hatred, just to show how odious you find his thoughts to be…

If anything, the other person’s dismissal could have been thought to correlate to my other comment about liberals. Up above. The breezy, casual dismissal of the person with the wrong-thoughts, accompanied by the smug smirk. But even that connection doesn’t really work. My complaint about the lib-dismissal followed by smug smirk, as I’ve said, is that these are liberals who clearly have a goal in mind where everyone in existence agrees with them, and there’s nobody left alive who disagrees. And once you cross that line with them, suddenly they know every thought in your head is a wrong one, and that’s okay. Like I said: It’s ominous. Makes you want to know what the liberal knows. Is there some giant flyswatter somewhere about to hit you?

When a conservative tells a liberal “I really don’t care about your opinion” it’s usually a way of toppling the liberal from a pedestal of gigantic ego. It’s usually directed toward liberals who fall into the common trap of thinking — I got this idea that popped into my head, therefore, that’s just the way things are. Corporations are evil. We can sit down and talk to our enemies and life will become all happy.

Swing and a miss, Huck. Banning someone from a blog is not the same thing as boiling him in oil.

To the blogroll this gentleman goes, straight-away.

I love me some Johnny Quest. When I was a kid I envied Johnny but wanted to grow up to be Race Bannon. Race was all man. He could whip anyone in a straight up fight and usually had a firearm close to hand. He wasn’t afraid to use it either. He regularly killed or otherwise caused the death of particularly evil Bad Guys or their Henchmen. Boat, explosion, firearm, tar pit, bridge or cliff, many a monster (both human and inhuman) met their fate at the hands of Race. Johnny, Dr. Quest and Hadji even got in on the action from time to time. The deaths were invariably met with steely resolve and honesty. No guilt or chest beating about the miscreant’s childhood or how it was all society’s fault. “He got what he deserved Johnny.” “There was nothing we could do Johnny.” “It was his choice Johnny.” Johnny was taught that choices have consequences, that right would always triumph and that justice and defense of self and the defenseless were worth fighting and even killing for.
:
Every afternoon we’d sit on Papa’s chair and watch together. Where possible, we never missed an episode. Time I cherish, spent with a grandson I love more than my life and a fun part of my job as his grandfather.

A small thing without a doubt. There is so much more I have to teach him. I am acutely aware that he’s watching me, soaking in what I do, what I say, how I carry myself and interact with others. He has questions he doesn’t even know to ask. Knowledge he needs but isn’t yet aware of consciously. But he does instinctively know that I have at least some of his answers and he’s determined to get them from me. As I am determined to give them to him. To the best of my ability.

Hat tip to blogger friend Daphne.

Update: Oops, dude’s already there. Well, I shall have to make it a point to visit him more often.

A day of thanks for blessings, worrying about the future, and wishes for gifts.

For the thanks, new sidebar addition and fellow Cassy Fiano guest-poster Jim Fister speaks for me.

I can’t help but think how lucky I am to be in a country like this, especially on Independenc day. The flag is already flying. I can look back on the brave men who signed their death warrant in signing the Declaration, and I can look back at all the people who fought for independence and in the wars of aggression since.

Today, I think of the men and women who are still fighting for my independence, and that of all the people who agree and disagree with them in this nation. They don’t fight just for the people who like them, or who say thanks. They fight for the nation as a whole, and the principles for which it stands. And they don’t just fight, some stay home and support their family members, always wondering about the safety of the husband, the wife, the son, the mother…

It’s a debt that’s difficult to even know how to repay. But in a small way, at least I can provide a rest for two people who need some time together, and that little favor will repay in a small part the huge debt I owe to all our troops who are busy keeping us safe.

For the worrying about the nation’s problems, if you’re into dwelling on that kind of thing (and you should be at least some of the time), the best compilation is over here (hat tip to Linkiest):

For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
:
During the first quarter of 2010, the total number of loans that are at least three months past due in the United States increased for the 16th consecutive quarter.
:
Barack Obama is calling for a “civilian expeditionary force” to be sent to Afghanistan and Iraq to help overburdened military troops build infrastructure.
:
43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved for retirement.

And as far as the gift wishing, I would fall back on my 42 definitions of a strong society.

My own birthday is coming up and people are wanting to know about my gift wish list. I’d give it all up if my country could secure an everlasting lock on only one of those 42 things.

Now that’s a picture that oughta come in handy.

Wonder if they’ve got a fully-automatic version. Large caliber.

From Gerard’s Tumblr page.

I was wondering if this should make it in. When my face got all discolored as I tried to keep oatmeal off the keyboard, and I barely succeeded at this, I knew I had my answer.

Hat tip to Joan of Argghh!

The morning idjit-broadcast was running while I was gathering up my money clip and sunglasses and cell phone. The lighter side of the news was running off, for the moment, about blended families.

They can work, said the leggy anchor-babe. She started rattling off some names which included John and Elizabeth Edwards.

I paused from lacing up my sneakers. “Did I hear that right?” I asked.

“Yup,” said She Who Listens To The Morning Drivel.

“It’s as if they rise at midnight every morning and have a quick planning session about what they can do to stop people from taking them seriously anymore,” I said.

“Pretty much,” said She.

A quick kiss, and off I went to bring home the bacon.

Whaddya think? When the camera’s no longer rolling is the anchor babe just smacking herself in the forehead saying “Aiiieeee! Can’t believe I said that!” …?

Yeah, that there is pretty much my textbook definition of a bad idea.

Okay, so we’ve got James Bond becoming Jason Bourne; Superman’s a deadbeat dad; Indiana Jones is communicating with extraterrestrials; John Connor becomes a wimpy little she-male so he can make his bride look all big and tough; now the Champion of Themiscyra is being re-made into a Private Vasquez knock-off.

This is a bigger issue than skimpy star-spangled panties. The overall trend is that iconic, individualist characters are losing their identities. They’re being neutralized and reincarnated as stock characters.

It’s an abandonment of history. And that brings many perils. It’s a manifestation of a younger generation that is disinterested in what came before — they want all the things that will consume their attention, to be positioned for that consumption behind a narrow selection of avenues. They want comfort as they supposedly broaden their horizons; more comfort than can be realized while one is truly broadening one’s horizons.

It is also an abandonment of individuality. There have been some awkward moments through the years as James Bond is presented to a newer generation, but up until now Bond has held his ground. Quitting smoking has been about the only significant nod to the changing times. He was who he was; you could take him or leave him. But no more. And perhaps as a direct result of that, Bond’s having trouble finding money to make his next film. Of course he is. What point is there to having him around?

A similar fate awaits Wonder Woman, I think. She has amnesia about her past, wears long pants, and is a street fighter. Gee. Like that’s never been done before. What’s next? I know! We can go La Femme Nikita, she can get busted and hired by a super secret Government agency under an assumed identity, and she has to complete the missions they give her or they’ll throw her in jail.

I wouldn’t have been opposed to a partial re-tooling and re-vamping. The invisible jet has been a joke for about as long as it’s been around. But making her into something she’s not, is just too much. It’s a suicide pact.

Update 7/2/10: James Hudnall at Big Hollywood is giving a very thoughtful treatment to the makeover, although by “thoughtful” what I really mean is “scathing.” Some of his points have a lot of merit. The owners/creators of this particular character, in the decades and generations past, have been caught paying an excess of fealty to the feminists. And it’s easy to see why.

From the very first time a pencil met paper to sketch out this character, the purpose has been to show that women possess potential superior to men. I suppose when a young artist picks up the tradition it’s only natural to listen to the militant feminists when they tell him “Yer doin’ it wrong.” But that’s no excuse for ignorance. If Wonder Woman is a symbol of the idea that a woman’s way is the right way, and she always has been that from the very beginning, then her costume is a feminist banner and so was the costume it replaced, and the costume that replaced, and so on. There is no victory over the patriarchy here.

Kind of reminds me of when the guy used the word “niggardly” in a city council staff meeting and ended up getting canned, even when he opened the dictionary and proved the word had no racist connotations. Perception-over-reality and all that. Facts don’t matter because “we all” see things a certain way.

So Diana Prince is in pants. Take that, chauvinist scum!

Thanks to blogger friend Joan of Argghh! for calling us out over there.

Steve Sailer:

…[T]he winners of WWII, America and Britain, kept their old-fashioned elitist colleges like Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and Cambridge old-fashioned and elitist. The losers, like Germany, France, and Italy, after the war trashed their great universities on the altar of egalitarianism by going to open admissions. (In the U.S., CCNY was the only famous college to take the Spirit of ’68 seriously enough to dump selective admissions.) Today, that’s why ambitious Korean and Chinese students want to go to American or British universities, not to Continental ones: We won The War.

The French, not being fools, however, kept a number of small elite colleges, the grandes écoles, to publicly educate the small number of people who keep the place running. Not surprisingly, blacks and North Africans have a hard time passing the entrance exams to the French equivalent of Caltech at rates equal to whites.

Because entrance to the best grandes écoles effectively guarantees top jobs for life, the government is prodding the schools to set a goal of increasing the percentage of scholarship students to 30 percent — more than three times the current ratio at the most selective schools. But the effort is being met with concerns from the grandes écoles, who fear it could dilute standards, and is stirring anger among the French at large, who fear it runs counter to a French ideal of a meritocracy blind to race, religion and ethnicity.

France imagines itself a country of “republican virtue,” a meritocracy run by a well-trained elite that emerges from a fiercely competitive educational system. At its apex are the grandes écoles, about 220 schools of varying specialties. And at the very top of this pyramid are a handful of famous institutions that accept a few thousand students a year among them, all of whom pass extremely competitive examinations to enter.

… The problem is not simply the narrow base of the elite, but its self-satisfaction. “France has so many problems with innovation,” Mr. Descoings said. Those who pass the tests “are extremely smart and clever, but the question is: Are you creative? Are you willing to put yourself at risk? Lead a battle?” These are qualities rarely tested in exams.

Whereas imposing a quota will suddenly produce creative risk-takers. Right. That’s why Google was founded by Michelle Obama. [emphasis mine]

This is not exclusively a French problem. But it’s a pretty bad one.

Take a moment to think about the big picture of testing things. How can a test be flawed? There are two levels of sin here: A test can be non-productive, or it can be counter-productive. A non-productive test is blind and therefore random. Think of the airport passenger safety screener. If his metal detector is unplugged from the wall all day long, that’s what I’m talking about.

The next level beyond that would be profiling for terrorists. When you find a match, or when you X-ray the boarding party and find some individuals with crotch-bombs and shoe-bombs and liquid chemicals and guns — you wave them on to the plane and frisk the white-haired blue-eyed Scottish grandmothers.

These kinds of tests, I’m afraid, are counter-productive and not non-productive. They look for people who can follow instructions well. They look for the elite within that…and end up finding people who can follow extraordinarily nebulous instructions better than most anyone else.

Within a small sample this doesn’t do much damage. Over a larger one, it’s going to ultimately mean you’re sifting out the most creative resourceful people. Overall, the people who are best at responding to empathic signals from a stranger, are going to be the ones who aren’t very creative.

They will be confronted with an unorthodox situation, and their response will be to insist on a sequenced, numbered list of procedures to follow.

And in general, this has been precisely what has taken place. Inside of France and outside of it.

Hat tip to Dyspepsia Generation.

Kathleen Parker says Barack Obama is our first female President.

…Obama displays many tropes of femaleness. I say this in the nicest possible way. I don’t think that doing things a woman’s way is evidence of deficiency but, rather, suggests an evolutionary achievement.

Nevertheless, we still do have certain cultural expectations, especially related to leadership. When we ask questions about a politician’s beliefs, family or hobbies, we’re looking for familiarity, what we can cite as “normal” and therefore reassuring.

Generally speaking, men and women communicate differently. Women tend to be coalition builders rather than mavericks (with the occasional rogue exception). While men seek ways to measure themselves against others, for reasons requiring no elaboration, women form circles and talk it out.

Obama is a chatterbox who makes Alan Alda look like Genghis Khan.

The BP oil crisis has offered a textbook case of how Obama’s rhetorical style has impeded his effectiveness. The president may not have had the ability to “plug the damn hole,” as he put it in one of his manlier outbursts. No one expected him to don his wetsuit and dive into the gulf, but he did have the authority to intervene immediately and he didn’t. Instead, he deferred to BP, weighing, considering, even delivering jokes to the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner when he should have been on Air Force One to the Louisiana coast.

I do find this a little bit unfair to the fairer sex. The criticism against His Eminence isn’t quite so much all-talk-no-action (although it is some of that); it’s that His motivation in any given situation is to adjust the emotional tenor. All vibe, no outcome.

This isn’t quite realistic. I’ve personally known of some chicks who can kick male ass all over the place when it comes to taking control over an outcome.

But Barack Obama, sad to say, is not one of these ladies. He’s one of the lesser girls…the unpleasant shrews…the ugly-girlfriends…the mothers-in-law. The available energy all goes into some dictatorial effort to tell lesser beings how they are supposed to feel.

To make a decision that alters the state of things — that takes balls, sad to say. And we don’t have a President with balls…sad to say. We won’t have one until Sarah Palin’s hand goes on the Bible in 2013. Until then, the closest we get is control-freakishness about our feelings.

Hat tip to blogger friend Rick.

By “The Davids” what I mean in this case is Frum, although there are others. People who sell themselves as reformed or repentant conservatives, to other people who have no idea what a conservative really is and are never going to know. Conservatives who are “social moderates,” long to reach “across the aisle” — who voted for Barack Obama, not as a protest against the George W. Bush free-spending (heh!), but because “There’s Just Something About Him!”

It’s becoming a protracted back-and-forth. Miss out on this, and you miss a lot.

The conservatism I know is not a movement at all, nor is it a resistance. It is the ability to store and recall memories over the longer term, with a willingness to use it. It is the decent attention paid to history, when it tells us:

Charismatic people can make shitty bosses.

The people who live in a country don’t become wonderful people because of the laws passed in that country.

That government governs best which governs least.

An economy thrives when the conditions in which it operates involve certainty, and it withers in the face of excessive risk.

Decent wonderful people have stupid ideas pretty often.

In fact, it isn’t that rare an occurrence that a raging idiot has a unique idea that turns out to be the right one. (Therefore, when you hear of a new idea, discussing the attributes of the person who came up with it is a complete waste of time.)

When you raise taxes to fix a shitty economy, it doesn’t work.

People really need to experience success and failure as individuals. If consequences are equalized across a society, the passion dissipates, and work without passion is always an inferior effort.

There aren’t that many paychecks being signed by poor people.

People become naturally fractured and balkanized from each other when they speak different languages, profit from different advantages, or labor under unique burdens.

People don’t work hard to maintain assets that were given to them.

With apologies to our current President — or maybe, without ’em — there really isn’t any particular point at which you’ve made enough money.

Anyway. Brock, Brooks, Frum, Weigel — there’s just something about that name “David.” They get a business opportunity and suddenly, there’s an awakening. (Not with Weigel of course, he was busted in a scandal; not that he was fooling anybody.) Oh my! We have to do this one thing — elect Obama, pass ObamaCare, whatever. I’m still a conservative mind you! Although I’m ashamed at some of my fellow conservatives, because it’s true we’re all a bunch of bigots. Except me! But I’m still a conservative. Just a moderate one.

If conservatism was a movement, some of this would make sense…or might possibly make some sense.

But it isn’t. Conservatism, boiled down to its essentials, is an insistence that weighty decisions need to be based on reality, because reality is not relative. It rests on a certain foundation, and that foundation is a constant thing, laid from the cement of the laws of the universe. You don’t get to opt-out of it. So-and-so is funny, such-and-such is boring, this guy has a Nobel Prize, this guy is charismatic-or-whatever, he’s black, he’s gay, she’s a chick — these are distractions, and that is all they are.

They don’t change the outcome. Or maybe they do, but if they do then a wrong is being done. And it’s probably a great wrong, greater than other wrong it seeks to remedy.

I perceive of three palpably different attitudes out there about government running things.

The first one sees no problem whatsoever about one more thing being run by the government. Nationalize Starbucks. Put price controls on milk and cereal. It doesn’t even matter if we can’t outlaw gravity, we should pass the laws anyway because if we don’t then it says we want to be heavier.

The second says government can’t run a damn thing. Anything it touches turns into a committee project, and committee projects all turn to crap. It is King Midas in reverse.

The third attitude is sensibly moderate. It says there are some things that need to be run by government because they cannot be run by anyone else. Government will certainly screw things up here and there, but with the things that are properly under its control, if the political will is there then the job will get done.

I used to have the last of these three attitudes. I am gradually swiveling around to the second.

So while the boy was still living with us, we had a little bit of a “Whoah!” moment when he was in his room and we were watching Season 1 Disc 1…in which young King Henry was receiving a Lewinsky from Mary Boleyn. The scene was very graphic and we decided from then on whether the rug rat was in his room or not, this was best viewed after bedtime. Except we’re starting to value a responsible bedtime for ourselves as well, so it was informally understood we’d start carving our way through this after the boy went to live with his Mother.

Well, The Squeeze forgot all about it. She was very clear this was something not-for-her…you know what not-for-her means in the land of Woemen and Netflix. It’s kind of like a motorcycle. Yes you’re allowed to buy it, and no it won’t lead to a fight…but it’s all yours. Once that’s done you aren’t required to do your lady a special favor, per se…just, if you ever get a hankering to do something like that, just keep in mind you haven’t done it lately because this doesn’t count.

You know the drill, guys.

Funny thing was — she fairly leaped to the Netflix queue to order Disc 3. Oh and here we are, we just got done watching about as much of Disc 3 as we could, which was about half of it. That “Report Disc Problem” thing had to get done right now, toot-sweet. As if the house was on fire. No, she’s not willing to admit I brought in a “win.” But it’s pretty obvious by now I’ve created a monster.

Well I’m the guy who wanted to watch it in the first place. Now I’m getting a little bit irritated.

Item #12 on my List Of Things I Don’t Ever Want To See In Movies Ever Again plainly states:

If two guys are going to be screwing the same woman, or simply getting into a fight over her, I don’t want them to have the same haircut, body build or skull shape. There’s no reason for it. If one’s clean cut, the other one can look like a gorilla. If one’s 6′2″, the other one can be 5′8″. If one’s got a runner’s body physique, the other can look like the Michelin Man. I can’t follow the story if I can’t tell these guys apart.

Charles Branden is played by the guy who played the little pipsqueak in the Count of Monte Cristo remake. He could be Henry VIII’s twin. Someone’s got it in their li’l casting-and-grooming head that the men’s fashion du joir is all shaved down on top, nearly bald, mid twenties, 5′ 10″ or so, kinda scowly kinda pouty.

Have you seen a portrait of King Henry? Three hundred pounds or so, big ol’ body, great big fleshy round head. Yes I know he’s younger in this. There are portraits of a younger Henry too. Looks like a stocky, muscular football player dude. With a big ol’ fleshy round egg-head.

Charles Branden — big ol’ massive square head. Hair like Chewabacca.

It even got her confused. Charles Branden’s screwing Princess Mary, which is his point of historical significance here…and they got it all steamy, suitable for a Showtime unrated miniseries, bare breasts and buttocks galore. My Lady protests “So he’s not supposed to be screwing Ann Boleyn while he’s still married, who’s he doing here??” Woops, wrong dude. Can’t tell the dudes apart. Nice to see it happening to someone else.

Another beef I have: Nothing is happening. Oh there’s lots of jockeying for power, lots of stuffy Middle English talking going on, lots of speculation about who’s lost their virginity and when. I get it. Middle-aged white churchmen are getting all bossy about fornicating, what positions are to be used, when, where, what pieces of paper are supposed to be dispensed that says it’s all okay…and it’s all an exercise in futility because everyone’s fucking like crazed ferrets. The bee in my bonnet is that by the time I’m into episode 8 of something, I want to see at an absolute minimum 7 things to have happened. I think this is only reasonable.

The King is concerned about having an heir. His wife hasn’t given him one. So he meets Anne Boleyn and starts proceedings to have his marriage annulled. That’s one thing.

His sister has started to sleep with Charles Branden and that pisses him off. That’s another thing.

The Pope has been driven from Rome by the Holy Roman Emperor, and His Holiness is less than receptive to King Henry’s request. That’s two-and-a-half things.

Oh yeah, and Henry Fitzroy has died. That’s a fourth thing. But I’m wading my way through a lot of dialogue, not terribly well-written at that, for not very much. I find myself mentally calculating how many minutes would be needed to tell the story properly. I’m thinking at a decent pace of storytelling it could all be wrapped up inside of three hours.

It irritates me to see this story retold and retold for consumption of females. I know exactly what they want to get out of it: Women were oh so oppressed during that time, bought & sold like packs of meat to expand some dynasties, and whittle down others. And that is true. And so Henry VIII whittled his way through six wives, chopping off anybody who didn’t give him a son — which is only partly true.

Historians wrote so much about what took place here because of what came afterward. This is where the great divide between Catholics and Protestants came from…and this whole “King’s Great Matter” was just a piece of it, the primer cap for the bullet. The fact that he only chopped off the heads of two of the six, essentially destroys what these ladies are trying to find in the story. Well not really. The guy’s still scum. But the whole conveyor-belt revolving-door meme just isn’t sustained here.

You want to see girls treated like sacks of meat? Pretentious patriarchal snobs passing bills of attainder, tut-tutting folks of a more fertile age about who could bury the bone with who? Sick, loveless marriages created solely for the purpose of preserving dynasties and starting new ones? Check out Henry’s immediate ancestors.

Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville. Richard, Duke of York, and Cecilly Neville. Henry V and K(C)atherine de Valois. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. Peter The Great of Russa. Louis XIV of France. William The Conqueror and Mathilda of Flanders. Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Charlemagne and his bazillion-and-one wives.

Following the death of Henry V, Parliament passed a bill that made it illegal for the widowed queen to ever marry again. Can’t get stuffier than that, now can you? The Queen’s response was far more satisfying than a “that’s not fair” or “fuck you” or “I quit” or “back to France I go.” She beat all of those with a two-word nugget of deliciousness: “Too late.” She already had a spouse picked out, and as icing on the cake, it was her stable-boy. Their issue would germinate a family tree that looked like a plate of spaghetti when it was done, and in another half century would take over the entire kingdom.

Tell me the female Showtime audience wouldn’t lap that one up with a spoon.

But always, it’s all about the six wives of the fat guy. It certainly does become tiresome. And not very educational. But I know for education I should be turning to The History Channel, or better still, to books like the ones from which I learned this stuff in the first place…

I just don’t see why the good stuff has to remain confined there.

Yup, I agree with that.

Scott Adams, according to the evidence that makes its way to me, is being asked with increasing frequency lately to solve people’s computer problems. I suppose if you’re a former tech-weasel who escaped cubicle-land by becoming a mega-gazillionaire cartoonist, this would be the one trap you cannot escape so long as you maintain contact with people.

Just a few months ago he wrote a column about this that had me cracking up. So true, so true…

There are three types of users who ask for help: Runners, Watchers, and Squatters.

Runners are all too happy to abandon their workstations for as long as it takes you to solve their problems. When the runner is gone, you can think through a variety of potential solutions, try some things, and really dig in to the problem. Personally, I don’t mind runners, although it makes me feel as if I should be getting paid for my services.

Watchers are the most thoughtful users. They might offer some useful information when asked, such as passwords. Perhaps they will compliment you on your computer skills and intuitions. And the Watcher is there when you find your brilliant solution. It’s nice to have a witness sometimes. The only danger with a Watcher is that sometimes you get a talker.

The third type of users is Squatters. A Squatter will not leave his or her Chair of Control, and will insist on being the one to operate the mouse and keyboard. In theory, this shouldn’t be too bad, at least for simple problems. But the Squatter will only give you a half listen. The other half of the squatter’s brain is going rogue, occasionally checking in with you to say, “Click what?”

I have found, generally, that the group to be encountered with the greatest frequency is a sort of a hybrid between the watcher and the squatter. You are to type in the commands, while the person you are helping is to occupy the chair. This juxtaposition is customized down to the fraction of an inch for the comfort of the watcher/squatter, not you. If the keyboard is so much as angled a few degrees in your direction, it’s only because you brought it up.

Occasionally I encountered a watcher/squatter would would refuse to move. I drew the line there. At first, it was for practical reasons: I needed to assume control over the console because I didn’t yet know what the problem was. And then the hulking mass would move, but their disposition would be unsweetened. As in: The nerve of me not knowing how the guy screwed up his computer.

I just don’t do it anymore. My back can’t take it. They have to relinquish or I’m outta there, and they can tell my boss whatever they want.

I try not to be like Nick Burns The Company Computer Guy. “Move!!”

So if you don’t want to be a rude butthole, and people start cornering you with their computer problems, what do you do?

That’s easy. You develop a pattern of communicating that is so incomprehensible and wretched that smartass cartoonists start making fun of your first name.

Received via e-mail…

Twenty-two years ago, a certain family relative initiated the first steps of his divorce in what has now become the customary American way: He invited me over to the apartment he shared with his wife, to tell me how much my life would be improved by a bottle of shampoo that was so incredibly concentrated that it would last me six months. I really needed to get in on this.

I do believe my hostility against the Cult of the Personality began there.

It was perhaps a dozen years after that, a young fellow who had previously been my next door neighbor, and since then hadn’t had anything whatsoever to do with us, dropped by. I’d had a girlfriend and he’d had a girlfriend, and since I moved away those two crazy kids went off and got married. He’d called ahead and I think we had some dinner ready, we offered an extra couple of plates but they’d have no time for it they were in such an incredible hurry. We thought it was a little odd to be looking up someone you hadn’t spoken to in a couple of years, on an evening in which you were so busy you couldn’t even sit down to a home cooked meal.

So they swung on by and delivered their pitch. I don’t recall any products in particular so perhaps the timing was not to their benefit. First words out of his mouth were “This is not MLM,” repeated a couple of times, then he proceeded to drop a pitch for MLM. We didn’t buy, and within a year they were divorced.

This has only happened to me twice, but the similarities between the two episodes still creep me out. The man does all the talking, making sure to put a smile in his voice. Which can be a bit creepy. The woman hovers around in the background, quietly, trying to find something constructive to do. Rather like a stalking panther. Nothing smiley about her at all. That will make perfect sense, of course, in a month or two when she petitions.

Oh and always there is some name. The founder of the organization, “This Giant of a Man” who is, in unstated terms, head & shoulders above the rest of us.

I’ve come to loathe everything about this. I still believe in the liberty of private citizens to engage freely in contracts with each other…but would I be contradicting myself to demand some exceptions to this? It doesn’t seem anyone else is. People demand “sensible regulations” all the time and still insist they’re good capitalists.

I have given up on figuring out if an impending divorce pushes a young couple into MLM, or if MLM causes the divorce. Most likely is: A youthful marriage causes free spending, which causes tight finances, which causes an immersion in MLM and a divorce. But I don’t really give a flying crap what it is anymore.

We don’t have to keep this legal in order to be good capitalists. We don’t need to limit how the transgressors are punished in order to remain a civilized society. In fact I would insist a civilized society would bring on the pain. Stocks. Leg irons. Whips. Dunking stools. Electroshock.

The fantasy that a man can bail himself out of a financial jam with his happy-talky Guy-Smiley amazingly wonderful charisma-or-whatever, goes way back. It is ancient, always popular, and it is particularly destructive to all who come into contact with it. It’s probably ruined more lives than that other dream of dropping out of school to become a basketball star, or rock musician.

Yes, I have some compassion. I would say a lighter sentence is in order for the “freshmen,” those suckers who just got done “investing,” and have yet to re-coup, than for the more senior members who have typically been more successful at turning a profit. Three hours in the town square being pelted with rotten vegetables, I’d say they’ve paid their debt to society. Really, most of ’em probably need nothing more than a firm whack on the side of the head. For the others, we’d need a deep dark dungeon.

Public viewing is not compatible with what I’d have in mind for them.

My girlfriend just handed me a grilled-cheese sandwich and a cup of tomato soup — and I wolfed ’em down! I’m brilliant! Brilliant, I say!

After I get done writing this blog post I’m going to hit the Publish button. That’s brilliant!

The remote control for my DVD player went tits-up so I’m playing movies on my old XBox console. That’s brilliant!

I finished my beer a couple minutes ago, so I went out to the Daddy Fridge and got myself another. And this time I didn’t injure my foot doing so. That’s brilliant!

If a bill comes in, I pay it. If my ass starts itching, I reach down & give it a scratch. Brilliant!

If you think I’m mocking the lamestream media for their latest talking point about PrezBO’s sacking of General McChrystal, you’re absolutely right. (Audio available here.)

Oh Lord it’s hard to be humble, when you’re perfect in every way.
I can’t wait to look in the mirror, cause I get better loking each day.
To know me is to love me; I must be a hell of a man.
Oh Lord it’s hard to be humble — but I’m doing the best that I can.

FrankJ tries to criticize Arizona…and ends up failing at it.

Arizona is just a rogue state that doesn’t play by the rules — the way America is supposed to be. I heard federal officials went down there to yell at them, but they forgot their ID so Arizona deported them to Mexico. I wish we had more states like that.

Don’t be too hard on Frank though. I tried to read this without chuckling, and I failed at that.

Another hat tip to Gerard, and this one points to my former fellow Webloggin contributor Bookworm Room.

Obama has been in office roughly a year and a half. That’s long enough to get a handle on what motivates our president. He’s pretty binary. When he’s not partying with rock stars, he’s either apathetic or angry. Here, in no particular order, is a little list of Obama’s responses to both world situations and domestic policy initiatives that have occurred so far during his administration:

It breaks down this way: Eight issues arouse apathy in He Who Argues With The Dictionaries, and three issues arouse anger.

Graphic shamelessly swiped from No Sheeples Here

At this point, I don’t imagine Bookworm has ventured into the realm of reasonable dispute. His Eminence is, as she notes, a binary figure. When a coin lands on heads, there can be little argument that it has indeed landed on heads.

And now that we all agree on that…it does not appear the apathy-versus-anger response is being decided according to America’s interests, or a desire to defend the nation robustly or responsibly.

But that much is the opinion of Yours Truly. Why don’t you RTWT, and see if you agree. Here’s a hint: Overall, it seems apathy is the response when a thing happens that can really affect the outcome of something, and impact the lives of the little people. Anger, on the other hand, is the response when someone’s screwing with Holy Man’s P.R.

How come we have democrats, again? Something about Republicans being apathetic about the plight of the common-man? They’re just so cold and lacking in compassion? If your body was on fire they might keep you around long enough to light their cigars with it before they tossed you out the door?

We need to vote democrats into office so that we can have some leaders who will empathize with us. Who will feel some urgency when the hoi polloi are missing some things they have to have, or are being forced to tangle with financial hardships they cannot abide. Vote democrats into office, and maybe we have a shot at fixing problems like those.

And yet, here we are. We have a genuine crisis, and Holy Man is bored by it. He wants to play golf…if He’s feeling really engaged in the moment, for some reason, He’ll want to sell us some crap.

If someone’s messing around with His image, that’s when He’s spurred into some real action.

Apathy, anger. I like this approach. It is crude and binary, but it’s no more complicated than the thing it is set up to observe. I’m going to start watching Chairman Zero in this light, and I recommend you do the same. For as long as it fits. And I am presuming, reasonably I think, that it always will.

From 10 Super Drunk Soccer Fans, hat tip to Linkiest.

From Bad Astronomy.

My Dad’s a Dad. My brother is a Dad. There are no mothers in my family, which is a rather unhappy situation. Mother’s Day whistles right on by us. I harass my kid to call his mother, squeeze some money into his hand so he can get her something, and then I buy my girlfriend something nice to thank her for helping to raise him. That’s what passes for Mother’s Day, so you would think I would be Johnny-on-the-spot celebrating Father’s Day.

And I should. But Freebergs are never on-time buying gifts…hardly ever.

The girlfriend has been buying all of the food for the last two or three years. It’s just part of the way we’ve decided to divide up the bills. She has suffered a setback lately, so I insisted that she should stay home tonight and I’d take care of the shopping list after work. I came out at 3:30 this morning to answer nature’s call and saw the shopping list dutifully written out and draped across the keyboard of Blogger Central where I’d be sure not to miss it.

And so after work, per our agreement, I clocked out and set out on the streets of Niner Fiver Six Three Zed. I have some bills I need to pay; the late Father’s Day presents need to be acquired; we need the grub, and the remote has conked out on my beloved Memorex DVD/VHS combo player. It is this last one that perturbs me the most. The player is six years old — I acquired it very soon after “Kidzmom” walked out — and I have never had a lick o’ trouble with it. But button by button, the remote ceased to do my bidding and now it is altogether inoperable. The player itself still runs like a champ. But my failed attempt at interfacing it with a Panasonic universal remote, suggests that the problem is the unit’s planned obsolescence and it is time to graduate to another. For no reason but planned obsolescence. And you better believe that chaps my hide.

Without any way to direct the player to start and stop, I’m burning through Dukes of Hazzard episodes whole discs at a time. This is time consuming, and furthermore, I’m working my way through Season Six at a pace far too hasty for my liking.

I paid one bill. I got the foodstuffs. Man oh man…I tell you, The Good Lord did not build men for grocery stores. Talk about bringing back old, bad memories. This probably brings to a close a solid two years not having to step into a grocery store. It’s gotten much worse than I remember. People are text messaging now. I feel like the front of my grocery cart should have some cow-catcher device on it to shove people out of the way, as they remain transfixed on their little viewscreens.

No Father’s Day presents. None at all. I ended up having to jot out an apologetic e-mail, meekly asking if the dads had already acquired iPods. I needed to know. Retail electronics purchases have come to this — here, let me quote myself: “If I don’t have an i-thing, and I don’t know anybody who does, they have nothing to sell me.” Yes, that is it. Our “Electronics Department” has rechargeable batteries and it has games for the XBox 360 and PS3. Other than that, it has things that interface with an iPod. And some LCD television sets…that is all. The vast bulk of it is things that interface with the iPod. Cases. Cables. Batteries. Battery packs. Chips. Cards. Sockets. Alarm clocks. Boom boxes.

This is not good for Folsom. I have watched this place for a long, long time…a very long time. It has been very strongly and sensibly engineered around an objective of raising toddlers in a healthy environment, and this has worked out very, very well. Well guess what: The toddlers aren’t toddlers anymore. They are teenagers and young adults. The neighborhood parks are not as much a staple to life as they used to be. The kids have constructed social lives for themselves, if you want to call them that, that revolve around listening to personal tunes with little white earphone cords.

For all the acreage and all the capital and all the sweat that has been invested in retail here, you cannot really buy that much in Folsom. Men my age — and the women, even moreso, I suspect — are concerned about our midsections, so you can buy lots of machines that are supposed to exercise your tummy. And Jamba Juice, books, arts & crafts, all sorts of things you can buy just about anywhere else. So retail-wise, there’s no reason to come here.

Home-wise, there’s not much reason to come here either. We have lots of middle-age empty-nesters who bought their houses so they could raise their babies, and now the babies have grown and left. For college.

The traffic lights and signs are erected for the purpose of fighting you as you drive through them. Fighting you not regulating you; they nurture an inimical relationship with you that you can feel as it wafts through the air.

I have joked before — in a dark way, not in a “hah hah” kind of way — that the Folsom motorists who make the traffic such a stressful experience, being the assholes they are, are actually sympathetic figures. Their wretched behavior is a symptom and not a cause. You get this way when you have such a modest list of errands to do within a patch of four square miles, and it takes you two and a half hours. I feel it happening to me.

Perfect slogan for Folsom: “What’s up with this jerk riding my ass, he acts like every second counts, where’s he going in such a hurry? And what’s up with this asshole in front of me? He’s going to make me late!”

It’s like being in a zombie movie. They harass you and harass you and harass you, and then one of them bites you and you become one of them.

Even better slogan for Folsom: “I’m never in the way. You always are.”

The morale of this story? Shop on time for Father’s Day. On Amazon. That’s the way the world works now. And whoever is in charge of buying the food in your household — by which I mean, going out on foot and bringing it — if it isn’t you, then you really should think about going out of your way to do something to thank them.

I’m going to be forty-four pretty soon. When I do certain things and they, just by their very nature, cause my blood pressure to go up, I experience a sharp drop in my interest in doing them. You’ll notice people twice my age show precisely this tendency, and on average enforce it twice as strongly.

I think we’re going to be ordering some groceries brought to our doorstep more & more often in the months ahead.

I just finished checking out what Debbie Schlussel had to say about several of my blogging compatriots. It took me a few minutes, not a whole lot, but it isn’t an exercise I wish to repeat because I have to go to work.

Unfortunately, no sooner had that been done than I see by my e-mail updates that Sammy Benoit is also complaining Debbie Schlussel is sliming him.

I just don’t have the time for this.

My comments at Cassy’s place are as follows:

The one point to be made about all this, is this is my experience when I did the appropriate homework and made every attempt to give Debbie the benefit of the doubt. I read HER material, and when I was done reviewing it, there was NOTHING there. I’ve had this experience with Schlussel before. She holds a law degree from the University of Wisconsin. The woman cannot logically make a point. Speculating on it, I would say she possesses a number of appealing attributes that bring all kinds of coveted credentials and accolades to people who don’t deserve the privileges that go with them, and do not command the talents they should require. She’s female, attractive in her own way, skinny, blond, driven and mean.

In high school, every girl-clique has a ringleader, the “Alpha male” of the group. This one has the final word on who’s on the outs, who’s headed there, what boy is to be thought-of as cute. She has the final word on these things because she is accustomed to having it, and for no other reason; and she’s female cute skinny driven & mean. My speculation is — that’s Debbie. When she presents an argument, it all seems to boil down to “You’re not evaluating what she has to say, she’s evaluating you. You’ve got one shot to show Debbie you’re a decent person, and if you fuck it up you must be an antisemite.” And what I really find disturbing and troubling is, I’ll bet my last $10 that in the course of pursuing that law degree, this worked out for her just fine. Everything is a 15-year-old-girl argument. “She didn’t do what I said! We’ll all just HATE her forEVER!!!”

Great googly moogly Deb, try decaf.

Over in Europe, in several countries it is illegal to deny the holocaust took place. Now, I really don’t have much information about who, if anybody at all, is being prosecuted over this. Probably the dregs of society, and maybe the streets are actually safer because of those laws.

But…oh dear, here goes my name, onto that list…it is a blessing that such a law is, for now, unworkable here in the United States. It’s not just the free speech aspect of it. Such a law encourages people to think the Debbie Schlussel way. You know, you have these “pure” people who are right about everything, and impure people who are wrong about everything. You become an impure person if you are connected to another impure person, or connected to a person who is connected to a person who is connected to a person who is impure. Once that happens you can’t ever be right about anything ever again. You’re an intellectual leper.

I’m sure, if the issue is holocaust denial, in some cases that is entirely appropriate. But this is not the way grown-up adults do their reasoning. People are people, ideas are ideas. Like the guy on the radio said a few months ago: “If you can somehow manage to find, in this day and age, a real, live, Nazi from Hitler’s Third Reich and everything…and that Nazi happened to be opposed to the Obama health care plan. The Nazi might be right, I’d say, about that one, solitary thing.”

Schlussel is bright in her own way, but she’s allowing whatever legal talents she has, to atrophy. By “legal” I really mean forensic; conducting rational discourse about a point. She has allowed herself to become accustomed, for how long I do not know, to an environment in which once you “slime” whoever your opposition is in the moment, the job’s done and you move on. And it says something when she goes on the warpath, and suddenly everyone who’s anyone finds themselves tossed into the Schlussel-icky-people-barrel within 24 hours of each other. Guess I’m headed there myself.

She is, in the final analysis, becoming precisely what she hates. That’s a shame.

First they came for Cassy Fiano and I didn’t say anything because I wasn’t Cassy Fiano…then they came for Emily Zanotti and Sammy Benoit…

Should I even give this one an intro. It hardly seems necessary, I thoroughly enjoyed every single paragraph of this take-down.

It doesn’t really prove very much. It’s more of an exercise in creating doubt about the opposite. But the doubt it creates is, to say the least, significant. And it always entertains me when left-wing blogs yank things. The pattern that continues to emerge is that they aren’t acting to keep the conversation on an even keel, it’s more about promoting the beloved agenda and making sure anything that might bring harm to it, is kept hidden from view.

Today’s dedicated liberals embrace diversity in all things except thought.

Hat tip to Kate at Small Dead Animals.

Hat tip to Rick.