I was looking for this thing I said, I asked Google about it…I was expecting to be taken to The Best Quotes of 2009, of which I snagged the #11 spot…but I ended up being led to Yahoo! Answers. To my surprise, I must say.

What do you think of this quote?

‘Intellectualism has become the readiness, willingness and ability to call dangerous things safe, and safe things dangerous.’ — Morgan Freeberg

One of my former co-workers was amused by this reply:

Considering Freeberg is a Zionist, Military Industrial Complex advocate, it would make sense that she would put down those who might question the integrity of the actions of her type.

Boy, those Ron Paul fans. Nobody can ever accuse ’em of hurting themselves jumping to conclusions. Yeah, Mom wanted me to be a girl, but it wasn’t in the cards. Don’t know about the “Zionist, Military Industrial Complex advocate” thing…I do like the smell of scorched gunpowder on a Saturday morning. But I’m supposed to be Jewish or something? Sorry, baptised Presbyterian…couldn’t do the Zionist thing…bacon’s yummy. Although I do appreciate Topol’s performance in Fiddler On The Roof. Then again, who doesn’t?

But my favorite reply was this:

It means that Morgan Freeburg is not smart enough to understand the conversation. Which infers he is also not qualified to determine what is dangerous, and what is safe. Furthermore, he wants to maintain the status quo because he feels safe here or there if he means going back to the time of his imagined youth.

Hah! So the quote calls out the intelligentsia as a bunch of schoolyard-level arguers, who are trying to sell dangerous things as safe and safe things as dangerous, simply by elevating themselves to the level of “intellectualism” and calling anybody who doesn’t agree, stupid. Like a third-grader. And this yokel responds by…well, the first thing he does is prove the point absolutely true, since he knows not one single thing about me but has figured out I’m “not smart enough to understand the conversation.” Misspells my name when it’s right in front of his stupid face. Misuses the word “infers.” And then garbles the last sentence in such a way…well…it’s really not worth my time or effort to figure out what’s missing from that, I’ll leave it to the Microsoft Word grammar checker. Not my job.

But all this before the issues have even been defined. And I have the feeling that the guy who originally asked the question, was looking for something just like this.

I’m also partial to “More fear mongering from the right wingnuts is what I think.” Holy cats, lighten up dude.

For the record: It’s now been two years, plus a couple months since I said it…on the occasion of the Fort Hood shooting. My long-term memory is showing some signs of age, and is no longer infallible assuming it ever was. But as far as what I had in mind, I think the “calling dangerous things safe” had to do with Islamic weird-beards and Jihad bullshit and Saddam Hussein. You’ll notice our “intellectuals” have been pretty consistent in lecturing us that we have nothing to worry about there…and none of them have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, in terms of substantiating such reassurances to us. Just whistlin’ dixie, as they say.

And the “calling safe things dangerous” would be carbon in the atmosphere. Oh, yes, if you have one of those powerful, capable minds, you’re grousing away like Chicken Little about what’s going to happen to Mother Earth…probably driving a huge truck that gets four miles to a gallon, but who cares what you do, listen to what you say. That makes you an intellektshewel.

To borrow a favorite catchphrase from our current President — Let Me Be Perfectly Clear. This is a lamentation. The “has become” is intended to be a sad commentary on where we have taken ourselves. Our intellectuals, almost by the very definition of the word, have become people who are no longer attached to the necessity of living in reality. No, think on this carefully: What does Paul Krugman have to lose, personally, if he is wrong about the effects of stimulus spending? Not one thin fuckin’ dime. Well forgive me for saying so, but that’s why he has the opinions he has — he can afford to. He labors under no necessity of being right, feels no incentive to be right, doesn’t see the point. So he just spouts.

The architect who designs a five-story building, and then walks on the top floor when it’s all built, ready to tumble forty feet if he made a calculation wrong — he lives in a completely different world. Did you see Atlas Shrugged Part 1? Remember the train ride, minute after minute…you were probably wondering what the fuss was about. Well, read the book, there’s like a two or three thousand word essay surrounding nothing but the dumb ol’ train ride. I’ll tell you what that was about: If something wasn’t done right, the people indside the train woulda been dead before they knew what hit ’em. But…they knew it would be okay. Why? Because they had faith? No, because they worked within a web of trust. They knew what worked and what didn’t work. They weren’t “intellectuals.” They lived in a world where things worked or else they didn’t work. So they made their decisions out of logic, reason, and common sense; and their victory ended up being everybody else’s. It has been ever thus.

These “intellectuals” will never see that world, and they don’t want to, because they know they aren’t ready for it.

A man has no use for nature’s reality, when he’s been busily creating his own.

I’d be dancing on air if I heard any of the contenders today pull off something like this.

Update: Reagan had the good fortune to have done his campaigning & presiding in an earlier age, before the Obama Girl with the Dragon Tattoo came along.

Love him or hate him, Karl Rove sums it up accurately here:

It’s a whole lot of debt for not that many jobs saved. The White House says they were not involved in the ad in any way, but if you listen to what Rove actually said during the interview, that’s not the issue.

Hat tip to John at Verum Serum, who actually likes Clint Eastwood and his ad. But ultimately, reality wins every time, and “halftime in America” is not about reality.

For a few minutes, anyway, since she lost a bet.

Looks cold out there.

Gerard Van der Leun reprints the reason he stopped voting democrat, and although I have a feeling he’ll be reprinting it again, we’d like to preserve it here:

The monsters from the id that now control the Democrat Party have transformed that party into a mob of undead extras from The Dawn of the Dead. It’s an indecent and disgusting spectacle and I suspect there’s more than a few million long-time Democrats who are revolted by it. That certainly seems to be creeping into the polls. No matter the good it once did, the Democrats today present as sick and crazed political party that is so greedy and hungry for power that it will do anything, including selling its country down the drain, to get it back.

Regardless of the race of the Democrats’ current leader and failed president, Martin Luther King’s dream of judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin has been transformed into a tawdry thing; a dried husk in which they wrap their skeletal remains, a hollow phrase spewed by the ascendent race hustlers of the party and lapped up by their acolytes.

Until 2004, with the exception of Guiliani’s second term as mayor, I voted the Democrat ticket in every election since 1967. In 2004, offered the Insane Clown Posse of John Kerry and John Edwards, I voted for George Bush. The spectacle of the last four years of various Democrats reaching for the gold ring did not inspire me to change my view. Only the dead enjoy parties in a crypt. Not even Roman columns improve the Charnal house atmosphere that fumes through the party today.

From the party that gave us FDR, Truman, JFK and even, yes, LBJ, the Democrats have gone through a process of gradual but inexorable devolution to the party of such weak, tepid and compromised souls as Carter, Clinton, Kerry, and now Obama – the ultimate bargainer, the race hustler with an Ivy League sheepskin. But these chestless men the Party puts up are only the shadows cast by the compromises it has made within itself. It has made many compromises over the years, taken in many “causes” each one more dubious and rotten than the last.

As a result of this unremitting ideological promiscuity, the “progressive” party has become progressively more diseased from each submissive encounter. The gangrene that has rotted the body of the party has transformed it into some transnational Dorian Gray. Strutting and noble and handsome when preening before the cameras and the crowds, but putrid and pestilential when you see it as it is in the dull light of its polluted “new morning.”

Politics is a profession founded on and fueled by hypocrisy. This we all know. But, at the same time, we also need a politics that somewhere within it has a shred of uncompromised decency, the understanding of honor, and more than a little courage. None of these qualities exists in the Democratic Party today.

I was once married to a democrat myself, although I didn’t realize it until the third year after the divorce. That’d be eighteen years ago, last conversation I ever had with her — I think she was calling me to try to get me to sign a car over to her or something…from this experience I have a pretty good idea where all the “gangrene” set in, where the original infection point was.

It’s the bear at the table. You’ve seen the picture, you know what it represents. It is the mutation of the instinctive drive, common to every species in the kingdom, to seek out nourishment. The self-sustenance instinct. Once that’s been transformed into an “occupy” movement, that’s it for cakes…from that point forward, every li’l thing you want or think you need, that you don’t have yet, is some unforgivable transgression against your “basic human rights” or something. Wherever a transgression has been committed, someone, of course, must have committed it. That’s what triggers everything else. That’s what causes people to look at their friends as enemies, and their enemies as friends. After all, the friends are friends because they provided in the past, which means we know they can do it, and they’re not providing now — why, how dare they?? And the enemies must be friends because they’re not involved in any way in this latest occupy. As for the strangers who are neither friend nor foe; well, they need to join our movement, and why haven’t they already? The idiots! Don’t they know how to vote their interests?

I see Robert at Small Dead Animals has discovered the clip of the saintly diesel truck driver getting cussed out by the cow with exactly the attitude I just described…

(Potty mouth language not safe for a work or family environment.) No, I don’t know if this is a democrat or not. But I’d be willing to bet money, because this is exactly the problem we see coming from the “tolerant” ones: We all need to get along and respect each other, and in order for that to happen, you have to do exactly what I say and you’re just a terrible person for not already doing it.

The politicians keep it going, but the politicians are not the problem. They are merely salesmen, rushing in to fill a void. Like the tiny fruit flies that invade your space when you don’t throw out the banana peels fast enough, they are merely a symptom of a deeper cause.

The one hundred and twenty-second award for BSIHORL (Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately) goes out this Super Bowl Sunday to commenter Jim Klein, who says over at Daphne’s place…

The cost of information and its distribution has been steadily decreasing over time, to the point where it’s effectively zero now. This means that the trillions we sink into the “educational system” will be ever more plainly a complete waste of resources. Sure, there’ll always be a value in critical thinking, but that’s the one thing public education doesn’t teach anyway.

Bravo! Although in about fifty years, it will seem like belaboring the obvious. Hell, it could be called that right now.

The model is simply outdated. You reach majority age and then go into this cloister…a cloister with a name attached to it, and therefore a brand. The brand name is recalled fondly by the alumni, and maybe by those who wanted to go there, and simultaneously it is mocked and derided by those who invest their loyalty in its competition.

And then you attend lectures by these professors…you pass if you successfully parrot back what they lectured to you, and fail if you don’t. Your passage signifies not only your command of the material, which all by itself is a mistaken assumption since it’s mostly just mimicry. But also, your raw intellect, your teachability, your competence in tasks both rudimentary and advanced.

You have a diploma, that means you can apply for jobs and win arguments. The central focus of the jobs and the arguments may or may not have anything to do with the curricula…but hey, it’s all good because “they” must have known what they were doing when they gave you your shiny diploma…who is “they”? Nobody knows and nobody cares. If you lack the diploma, are you doomed to miss out on every job opportunity? No, not necessarily. If you have one, are you going to get the job? No, not necessarily. What about the arguments that you win, is that assured? Well, only if all who are assembled to hear the arguments, subscribe to this seventeenth-century idea of “whowever attended the most prestigious institution must be correct.”

If you pay your tuition and get your diploma with your major in — whatever — and still can’t get a job, hey no problem. Just Occupy.

This was an event worthy of note, if only just barely, and I realized there’s two months worth of dust on it now and I don’t have any kind of record of it.

The Muppets go over the line, and some morning Fox news program calls ’em out on it.

This makes Kermit and Miss Piggy unhappy.

First thing I notice about the press conference is, there is skill going into the puppeteering, which is commendable. Little nudges and head bobs and gestures, the kind of talent that that arrives only with experience and give-a-damn. Good to see. Second thing I notice is that the distinctive voice-lilt of Kermit did meet a demise after all, along with the man behind it Jim Henson. It’s a good imitation they have here, but an imimtation is all it is.

Regarding the Fox broadcast: High points and low points. There is enough quality in it that when the libs attack Fox for calling out the elephant in the room, they are deserving of some chastisement for not having invested the seven minutes in watching the segment before investing the hour or two popping off about it, for the argument is succinctly and compellingly made: Give it up for awhile, it’s a kid’s movie for heaven’s sake. On the other hand, I tire quickly of the interrupting and the cross-talk. No one got interrupted here except Caroline Heldman, with whom I happen to disagree, but that doesn’t make it any more tolerable. I wish they’d stop this. They can.

Now, to the meat of the matter: Professor Heldman nailed it (around 6:20) when she made the “they’re doing it so we get to do it too” argument. “Marketers have access to children…if marketers have access to our children, why shouldn’t we be telling them about the truth of the corporations.” The “truth” she managed to get out here was: Deepwater Horizon exploded killing eleven people; and, gas costs four dollars a gallon at the pump so people have to make choices between driving to work and feeding their kids. Both of these unfortunate things she somehow manages to chalk up in some undefined way to corporate greed or something — so the “truth” must be told.

Enter villainous puppet Tex Richman.

I’m seeing some problems here myself. Three, in fact. First of all, there is the issue with personal values. Like the host summed it up at 2:28 “We were dead broke…my parents would see someone wealthy driving by, they’d be like, see that guy? He started a business, he worked hard, you can be like that someday; not pointing the finger at Tex Richman and saying he’s a bad guy.” I have to acknowledge and understand there are people out there who want to raise their kids differently, I guess they have the attitude of “I’m jealous of people who do better than I do, so I’m damn well going to make sure my kids are the same way (and yours too).” It’s a terribly sad thing, but it’s a reality. Well, incest is a reality too…how come one of those is sidelined and criminalized as it should be, and the other one is out in the limelight?

Second problem is this monopolizing and shameless usage of the bully pulpit. “If marketers have access to our children, why shouldn’t we be telling them about the truth.” I wish time permitted a more scrutinizing exploration of that pronoun “our” as in, “our children.” I guess when you make a muppet movie, you become a parent to every kid who goes to see it, or something? Or is it “our” as in, property? Or is this some reference to Hillary Clinton’s it-takes-a-village; if that’s the deal, it occurs to me that the “marketers” are part of the village, too, and they also would be able to lay claim to the children. But the problem I identify here is the attitude — we-get-to-do-this. Uh no, you don’t get to do that, those are other people’s kids. You’re supposed to be entertaining them by showing them a quality movie — one that’s built for kids.

Third problem: The ridicule. This is why it’s important to actually watch the seven minutes. There is something happening here; when it serves the interests of the whatever-ya-calls-em…neo-communists, Alinsky-ites, Occupy people, anti-capitalists…when they get the feeling it’s time to yank off the veil, or drop the fig leaf, choose your metaphor — they do it. With flourish and bumptiousness and finger-waggling, well of COURSE we’re trying to convert these kids! It’s only right! So we know there’s something there…it’s just intellectually dishonest to engage in this ridicule of “Look at Fox News what they’ve lowered themselves to, they’re going after the Muppets now and calling them communists or something!” Well, when you hear from all sides and evaluate the arguments, you see the Muppets are being communists. In fact, they’re putting a decent level of effort into it. It’s become a rather tight and simple exchange: What the hell are you DOING demonizing the oil companies? This is a kids’ movie! And the greenie yells back: What are you doing NOTICING? This is kids’ movie! Why bring an elephant into the room, expecting nobody will notice, and then when someone points it out “hey, there’s an elephant in the room” start heckling them about it, when everyone understands damn good and well that there is an elephant in the room?

Ah, I know the answer to that. Proggies just want to win.

So Miss Piggy doesn’t like Fox News. Okay, then. Next time some moonbat starts making his snide little “we all know Fox news isn’t really news” snippets to get a nurturing chuckle out of the like-minded, I’ll know he takes his advice on what to watch from Miss Piggy. Maybe that’s showing my age; I’ve been around longer than Miss Piggy, and when she first hit the scene, her role was one of Muppetized ignorance. Maybe that’s not true anymore? I dunno. But back in the day, she existed as an emblematic reference to those among us who know very little and cannot be told anything — they may possess the faculties required for learning new things, but they may as well not because they aren’t taking it in. They think they’ve got a lock on it all, already. I’ve found that to be generally true of people who look down with condescension and derision upon Fox News, without watching it, making their snide comments about it only because they see other people saying the same thing.

Maybe she should been made a sheep.

Update: Apropos to the ignorance of those who insist there is nothing going on here and there’s some urgent need to not call out Hollywood for being a left-wing anti-corporate hate-fest; my favorite gal finished up her shift last night and stumbled in about 10:30 or 11:00, in need of just an hour or so of some idle chit-chat and Netflix Instant entertainment before hitting the sack, so we watched an episode of Quantum Leap, where Sam goes back to his hometown, the one with the bank robbery.

I noticed that once the plot was defined about fifteen minutes in, you really couldn’t do a better job of getting all left-wing-ey and communist-ey than what they managed to churn out here. The three brothers are robbing the bank, so that they could pay that same bank, so that their mother could get out from underneath an unfair loan through which the farm was about to be foreclosed. Got all that? The bank is being robbed and it’s the bank’s fault.

There are other examples far, far too numerous to mention. And no, just because some of them are in Muppet movies doesn’t mean it’s a silly or frivolous issue. The capital-D Dads and capital-M Moms who say beneficial, productive things to their children like “See that rich guy? He worked hard, maybe you can be like that someday” are being crowded out…drowned out…silenced. Deliberately. And it’s been going on for years and years.

Captain Capitalism has his reasons for avoiding it. Said reasoning is sound, and avoiding it does appear in hindsight to be the wiser course.

This is quite bizarre:

The California owner of a Honda Civic Hybrid car has won her unusual small-claims court lawsuit against the auto giant over the vehicle’s failure to deliver the promised mileage.

A Los Angeles Superior Court commissioner has awarded Heather Peters $9,867.

Peters opted out of a class-action lawsuit so she could try to claim a higher payment for the failure of her Civic to deliver the 50 miles per gallon (21.26 kilometers per liter) that was promised when she bought it.

Informed of the decision by The Associated Press, Peters exulted, “Wow! Fantastic.”

“I am absolutely thrilled. Sometimes big justice comes in small packages,” she said. “This is a victory for Honda Civic owners everywhere.”
:
Peters claimed her car never came close to the promised 50 mpg (21.26 kpl) and that it got no more than 30 miles per gallon (12.75 kilometers per liter) when the battery began deteriorating. She still owns the car and wanted to be compensated for money lost on gas, as well as punitive damages, amounting to $10,000.

That part doesn’t faze me much. Thirty is less than fifty; I’ve not had much experience with this problem — my cars have all performed more-or-less in the neighborhood of their advertised gas mileage, sometimes even a bit beyond that — but if I’m only getting sixty percent, I’m pissed. Probably not suing over it, but then again, it’s a litigatory world, and I must bow to the plain fact that everyone isn’t exactly like me, however many problems that may cause from time to time…

No, this made me do a double-take.

Peters, a former lawyer, hoped to inspire a flood of such lawsuits by the other 200,000 owners of the Hybrid Honda Civic model sold in 2006. She said that if all 200,000 owners of the cars sued and won in small claims cost, it could Honda Motor Co. $2 billion. [think they meant to say “in small claims court, it could cost Honda the two billion” or something.]

I wish they interviewed for this story a bit better. Did she hope to inspire a flood of such lawsuits in order to legitimize her own claim? Or, now that the case has been decided in her favor, she hopes to make it as expensive as possible for the defendant. Because the way the story reads, it sounds like the latter…like I said, bizarre…it ends up looking like she doesn’t care that much how well she’s compensated for her own complaint, she’s on a campaign to make sure Honda pays and pays and pays. If that’s the case, how am I expected to identify with her and her battle-for-the-underdog? This is what motivates you? This is what makes it worthwhile to get out of bed in the morning?

I know this feeling exists out there. We’re having a big ol’ back-and-forth right now about taxing the rich, and I’ve made the acquaintance & come to be aware of many who carry around and boast of great exuberance and excitement about this. Yeah, make ’em pay! Ostensibly to make the treasury more solvent…but they don’t know anything about the public debt, what it’s doing in relation to GDP, how big our government’s annual budget deficits are, how they’ve changed in the last few years and why.

In short, they do not care who gets what. They say they do, but they don’t. They care that large amounts of money are taken away from certain targeted people. Where the money goes, is strictly off their radar — they put on a big show of making sure things are “properly funded,” but the truth is the money could disappear into a hole as far as they’re concerned. They’re not all about creation, they’re all about destruction.

I’ve had girlfriends like this. Buy them something, they’re pleased as punch — until they find out it didn’t cost as much as they thought it did, and then there’s a problem.

There’s another issue here worthy of observation. These liberals are out there, with this taste for destruction. These scorpions from the frog-and-scorpion story. Don’t care who benefits, only care about who’s destroyed; don’t care if I live, as long as you die. The other issue of which I speak, is how they select a target to put in the crosshairs. We’re well acquainted with the pattern by now:

“Millionaires and billionaires flying around in their corporate jets.” Target.

Oil and gas companies. Target.

Government that nets a dozen times as much loot, or more, off each gallon compared to said oil companies: Not a target.

Banks, with their absurd fifty cent ATM fees: Target.

Government that taxed the money you’re taking out of the ATM: Not a target.

Kid that shoots up your kid’s school: Not a target.

His gun: Target.

Policeman who risks his life to save your kid from the kid shooting up the school: Target.

Terrorist who wants to kill you: Not a target.

Soldier fighting the terrorist over there so you don’t have to worry about the terrorist over here: Target.

I have commented before, with regard to human relationships, that the species seems to be split more-or-less down the middle between a) people who are nice to people who are nice to them, and dicks to people who are dicks to them; and b) the other kind who have it all bass-ackwards, being dicks to people who have been nice to them, and (making up for it by?) being nice to people who are dicks. I have also said, further, that these a) people and b) people should not meet — most of the difficulties we have come from these two kinds of people coming in contact with each other.

These are the people with crossed wires and messed up circuitry. If you follow them around all day and night, you’ll find they’re pretty consistent with their Stockholm Syndrome and their Narcissistic Personality Disorder and their other…well, let’s call ’em what they really are…mental problems. And the one sure-fire way to get on their bad side is to provide them with something they want or need. There the trouble starts.

This is why The Captain’s words make sense to me. Based on what I have managed to observe about modern liberalism…and I’ve collected a lot of notes on it by now, some written, some I carry around in my head, but they all make an impression on me…this has a lot to do with what liberalism is right now. Being dicks to people who make your life, and your way of living, possible. If someone provides you with the things you need and want, satisfies your demands, well, it’s curtains for them. How do they think they can get away with that? You’ll show ’em. Teach ’em a thing or three.

Now, I do not mean to say these other kinds of people, the ones who make an obsession out of the “be a dick back to whoever is a dick to me” thing, are all that. That’s some dysfunctional behavior right there…that’s not what keeps a society humming along. We honor and respect saints for a reason. But those people, those “be a dick to whoever’s a dick to me” people, are light years ahead of those other people, the ones with the crossed wiring, who reward kindness with dickish behavior and vice-versa.

If I had to choose between the two of them, and have just one kind running everything, I’d pick the vengeful dick type people. I really would. They’d bollux it all up for sure up at the top, but elsewhere there’d at least be a way for others to prosper, thrive, and co-exist in a more-or-less functional society. Plus there’d be some shenanigans going on that we could read about and it would be funny. Besides of which, we’ve had those kinds of people in charge before, quite a few places and quite a few times. Society can limp onward after that…but the crossed-wiring people, they’re just nuts. The real danger with them is that the damage, by its very nature, cannot be contained. If they make a mission out of destroying someone who was nice to them and provided them with what they needed, it just spikes their appetite and then they want more. They’re like sharks picking up the scent of blood, that way.

And color of skin doesn’t have a whole lot to do with it…

From Geeks Are Sexy.

Seems like there should be another layer in there…something dealing with altruism versus pragmatism or something.

Because he’s on Obama’s team, and if you’ve been paying attention, you know that‘s what they do…

This has been a constant. If the question is not convenient, there is something wrong with the person who asked it; something superlatively wrong. And then a sermon has to be delivered on the spot about how this is the worst person in the entire country or something…lots of halting sentences and theatrical exasperation, lots of play-acting like the situation is somehow multifaceted and nuanced and complicated when it really isn’t.

Catch an Obama administration member with his hand in the cookie jar, and you’re a terrible person for seeing it.

This business about you-must-respect-the-office-I-hold is like a perfect campaign theme for why this crowd has to get sent home. Respect the office…meaning, as long as I’m in it, don’t subject me to any scrutiny or criticism even if it’s reasonable. The correct answer would be, yes Attorney General we respect your office, if we didn’t we wouldn’t have these hearings. We respect your office and that’s why we’re so concerned that the wrong person may be occupying it.

This is a separate and distinct criticism from Holder actually being guilty. Which I believe he is — but logically, it’s quite possible for him to be innocent, and still doing something else entirely wrong by engaging in this sort of behavior, and if he were guilty, he wouldn’t necessarily have to be doing this. It’s a completely separate transgression. And what really rankles me about it is not him doing it, but the reliability of it. Jay Carney does it pretty much constantly. Question comes out, the person to whom it’s directed doesn’t appreciate it, and you get this phony-baloney Omigaw! This is the WORST QUESTION EVAR! In human history! I’m just…I can’t BELIEVE you said that!

See it for what it is. It’s a crutch.

And Peurto Rico is a real place. What was that about respecting offices?

So is that representing some kind of official position? OWS hates Catholics or something? Or is it the girls that the movement hates? Either way, there’s some kind of negative energy going on here:

Barth Bracy, executive director of Rhode Island Right to Life, said their rally had to be cut short after the Occupiers began screaming and refused to allow a Catholic priest to deliver a prayer.

“This is their idea of civil speech but we believe it’s an outrage,” Bracy told Fox News & Commentary “They started heckling, chanting and blowing whistles. They shouted down a priest.”

Last week’s rally was held inside the rotunda of the state capitol in Providence. Bracy said the Occupiers, along with some pro-choice demonstrators, infiltrated the crowd of some 150 pro-lifers. He said the pro-life crowd was made up of senior citizens, mothers with young children, Cub Scouts, and school kids.

Bracy said one of the most egregious incidents occurred when an Occupier climbed to the third floor balcony and dumped a box of condoms on girls from a Catholic school.

“What kind of individual throw condoms at Catholic school girls,” Bracy asked.

I haven’t been able to find a story that describes whether these were used or not. I would assume it was the unusued kind…”box of condoms” sounds like you run into a drug store, buy a box, and there’s condoms in there ready for dumping out of a window (although I would think you’d want to tear the strips down into the individual items?). That does seem quickest.

I dunno…looks to me like, just general directionless left-wing-ish-ness. It’s rather absurd that half a year into it, we still need to be puzzling together what the beef of the OWS movement is.

I’ve noticed lefties have a tendency to come up with bullshit and then believe their own bullshit. Operative bullshit here would be: “The Tea Party movement is nothing but resentment against having a black man as president.” That belief was somehow carried into a war room someplace, where someone pointed out the lefties needed an answer to the Tea Party, and all assembled quickly fell upon the notion, just like a jackal throwing itself upon a half-eaten carcass, that there must be some appeal involved in getting a bunch of people outside marching, carrying signs, and talking to reporters. There must be nothing else required to make everything all fall in place because, heck, they couldn’t see anything in what the Tea Party was doing, and they were all-seeing and all-knowing, so there must not have been anything there.

Since then, they’ve been carrying their signs, yelling epithets at anyone who will listen, doing their camping, and hoping some message would congeal. They’re working from the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, and have become something of a cargo cult.

That’s my operating theory about OWS, anyway. Throwing condoms on the Catholic kids, I think, is just part of a much older resentment.

Hmmm…this is interesting:

The Rage Behind a Woman’s Stare

Yes, this is the headline of a Washington Post column (you may need a subscription to view it) about–you guessed it–women who do too much (thanks to the reader who emailed the article):

Like our love, women’s anger — the simmering rage toward our families, our mates and assorted males that can turn even the calmest woman’s expression into The Death Look — is always there. Even when it’s the last thing on our minds….

Surprised by my sudden bitterness, I asked, “Why do we keep doing so much with so little help?” “Because no one else will do it,” Ilena snorted. “Because we can’t live in a house that looks like a cyclone went through it,” I added.

Because we’re the wife, we agreed. The mom. The girl.

Millions of Death-Look-wearing women ask, “What can I do?” yet few embrace the obvious answer: “Stop!” Stop with the cleaning, the arranging, the cheerleading, the shopping, the whole relentless shebang. Some who do stop see their homes’ disarray devolve into a chaos that’s unbearable — for them, not their families..

I wonder what a Male Death Look would look like? A desperate look that says “Stop with the body guarding, fixing the faucet, mowing the lawn, earning much of the living, the light-bulb changing, the honeydo list…. and on and on.”

But we’ll probably never know because what men do is not valued by most female journalists and the white knight males who support them in their sexism. In addition, men keep their anger against women to themselves as complaining will only serve to get them tagged as a misgogynist or whiner. This needs to change.

I don’t know if I agree with that last one. Men who insist on absolute equality with all things are whiners, aren’t they? And the same goes for the women. Vive la Difference. Besides, something tells me if men are elevated to share equal privilege in bellyaching about the opposite sex, this is going to start off a chain reaction of events that will culminate in some expectation that I’ll be expected to do half the housework. That, in turn, is going to result in an inevitable lowering of standards…trust me…you do not want to go down this road.

There is a rather complex power-sharing taking place here, one we are not allowed to notice in mixed company because the first observation to be made is this: Dudes can do things chicks can’t. We all know it’s true, and we try to bury the truth deep down in all sorts of logical fallacies. The most attractive and appealing among these is to compare the impressive feats of a selected female champion against the efforts toward the equivalent by an average male…think of Mia Hamm engaged in a one-on-one against an average middle-age guy, let’s say one who luxuriates on a couch watching mens’ soccer games and was caught saying something disparaging against womens’ soccer. She’d clean his clock, of course, and all the usual suspects would smirk until their smirkers got tired…but…how fast can the fastest guy run? How much can the strongest man lift? Can the gals compete? No, not only can’t they, but we know they can’t and we customize the athletic efforts and competitions accordingly. We divide them because we know we have to.

We’re different, and it’s a product of evolution. I see the writer of the Washington Post piece figured that out for herself on page two:

More than once, I wondered, “Why can’t guys see what needs to be done right under their noses?” One day, while picking up the 700th wadded-up tissue from the floor, I realized the answer:

Hard-wiring. Prehistoric men were hunters. Stalkers of prey needed laser-like focus to track their quarry; every unnecessary detail faded. Centuries later, guys in my house were similarly riveted by SportsCenter and Playstation 2. Women, I realized, are hard-wired to be multitaskers-or multi-seers. The hunter’s mate needed eyes that could sweep vast landscapes, assess her child’s, mate’s and elderly kin’s wellbeing while locating food, medicinal herbs, poisonous plants.

And so men are physically more powerful…and to compensate, women take power…are given power…in other places. We allow it to happen, not because we’re entirely ignorant of it, or that we think women are better than men and deserve it — although there is plenty of each of those going on — but the real reason is we know it is necessary as a compensation device. Something happens at dinner that ticks a woman off, it is implicitly understood that the dynamic has been changed for everybody. Unless the woman occupies a position of very little power…let’s say she’s the girl who brings the food out and clears the plates. But if she’s one of the guests, look out. She doesn’t even have to be the most powerful woman. If there’s a mother-in-law/daughter-in-law conflict, everyone is affected. The “if she ain’t happy, he ain’t either” rule is activated.

The same does not happen at that dinner, if the males end up in conflict. They are merely asked to shush. And this is not a product of the femniist movement, it’s been going on at least since Shakespeare. Feminists absolutely hate to admit this, that females enjoyed any kind of power before 1920, but it’s true. Great-great-grandpa put his muddy shoes where the missus told him to, he didn’t dare put them anywhere else.

Men exert direct power, women exert indirect power. If it wasn’t true, the “death look” wouldn’t mean anything.

Making the rounds this week: How to be a really good climate change alarmist.

1: Be Condescending.

You are allowed to look down your nose at anyone who disagrees with you because you are SAVING THE PLANET! And, therefore, anyone who disagrees with you must be inferior because they don’t care about SAVING THE PLANET! You can be condescending in 2 ways; firstly, you can be avuncular and take the approach that you are dealing with people who are TOO STUPID to see your superiority and so must be guided gently but firmly into a proper subservient position. Or you can impersonate a dominatrix and whip and berate the idiots who disagree with you. For those who want to perfect this latter technique a few visits to the Open Mind and Deltoid blogs will bring you up to speed.

2: Be insulting.

Insults are allowed. And justified. Against those who disagree with you; because those who disagree with you are getting in the way of SAVING THE PLANET! Use comparisons; compare deniers to creationists, or tobacco addicts, or tobacco producers or anything to do with tobacco. You can say deniers are lackeys of big oil; or big coal; or big anything; except Big W, which doesn’t work. Use sesquipedalianisms; ‘Meme’ is good because Richard Dawkins uses it and he hates creationists and deniers; but be careful because so does Ian Plimer. Dunning-Kruger is also good but it can have blow-back, as can agnotology. Be personal; call Lord Monckton ‘monkey’ or ‘popeye’; it will reflect well on you; and it doesn’t matter what their qualifications are if, like Lindzen, Christy, McKitrick, they disagree with AGW and SAVING THE PLANET because their qualifications might as well have come out of a Cornflakes packet.

It stays that good all the way to the end. RTWT, as they say.

Nice, although I believe “crown jewel” is an English term, whereas this is decidedly French scenery.

Well, we shall have to find a way to make do. We learned to live with a bald French Starship Captain speaking with an English accent, so I’m sure we’ll adapt here. This looks easier than that anyway, and a lot more fun.

From The Chive.

Some of these are better than others…yes, it’s somewhat tedious the way they loop the laugh track, and I find the “Woo!” guy to be particularly grating.

But the material does change from episode to episode, and this one was particularly good.

And there’s no getting around it, Jodi Miller is a cutie.

Big infographic, 3000 pixels tall…

From here.

Hat tip to Kate at Small Dead Animals.

Socialism works great. It just needs you & everyone you know, to pick up the check and pay for it all. File under “people in debt don’t like anyone else to be out of debt.”

These have been up for awhile, but ya know, somehow they never get old:

And then, Sgt. Friday joined Sheriff Babeu and gave our Attorney General an earful:

Other times, he swears he smells the flowers in her hair…

Buffett translated.

Politico explains that “for the moment, the White House wants to keep the attention focused on Obama’s argument that it’s unfair to tax Buffett’s secretary at a higher rate than her boss.” My translation: The White House wants to keep the propaganda undiluted.

Burt Folsom wishes him one, but it isn’t all flattering:

If FDR were alive today, and healthy, he would be celebrating his 130th birthday–and possibly launching his campaign for a 21st term as president of the United States. How might his campaign in 2012 compare with that of Barack Obama, who says he admires FDR very much?

They both like class warfare elections because class warfare takes attention away from a failing presidency and puts the focus on their opponents, who are often trying to free up the economy for investment. In other words, much is similar in the re-election campaign of FDR in 1936 and that of President Obama in 2012.
:
In 1937, perhaps thinking of his next reelection campaign, he told two prominent Democrats, Senator Pat Harrison and Rep. Robert Doughton, that if they would form a “subcommittee to investigate tax avoidance,” that the Democrats would gain “at least 10,000,000 [votes]” by publicly shaming those who sheltered income. In other words, there were votes to be gained among the mass of lower-and-middle-income voters by making them envious of the high incomes earned by their employers.

The class warfare tactic worked for FDR in 1936, but in 2012 the opponents of that theme may be wiser, more articulate, and more effective. We shall see.

If that is what the 2012 election is going to be all about, then I have a question I hope resonates throughout the year:

What exactly is “fair share”?

I was encouraged to see President Obama say thirty percent on a million dollars. It sounds specific enough, but questions remain. I do not know if that is a million dollars adjusted gross income; nor do I know what the thirty percent is, is that an overall rate or a marginal tax rate? There are residual questions about what the effect of such a policy would be if it were to pass, and there are more questions about whether it would pass.

I have other questions about the persuasive power of such a proposal, although my questions do not concern whether the persuasive power is there, since I’m sure it is. I’m more concerned about who these voters are. Who are they? They’d stay home otherwise…maybe vote for a Republican…but with a little bit of “rich should pay their fair share” in the chilly November air, they’ll brave the nippy weather and a few raindrops to put Obama back in office, so He can raise someone else’s bill. That motivates them.

Who are these people, exactly? The generations come, the generations go, and I must be really dense because I’m still not getting it…I don’t even begin to understand this…

Victor Davis Hanson, hat tip to Gerard: Perpetual campaign mode isn’t working.

The State of the Union could have been written by a computer program. All the now familiar Obama furniture was in the room: the mock outrage at “them,” the psychodramatic first-person boasting (as in, “I will oppose…,” “I will not work with…,” “I will decline…,” “I will not stand by…,” “I will not cede…,” “I will not walk away…,” “I will not back down…,” “I will not go back…”); the now customary rear-view-mirror jab at his fading predecessor; the monotonous promising that something is so bad that we must have a new program for it (each year the same threat, the same solution, the same failure); and the silence about the Obama legacy of stimulus, debt, and ObamaCare.

But the people are tired and simply by now shut their ears.

The President’s approval numbers seem to have bottomed-out on bedrock. On the other hand, that bedrock is rather high, somewhere in the range of low 40’s.

On the other hand, President Obama, like all politicians nowadays, is something of a scavenger. He doesn’t drive a high approval rating; he receives it, as bleed-off, a hand-me-down of sorts from whatever agenda to which He is seen by the electorate as harmoniously aligned. He says He is in favor of X, and if X is okay with the public, then His popularity ticks upward a little bit. But…only if He seems sincere about it and has the history to back it up.

In other words, at this point He doesn’t even have agility going for Him anymore. He would not be able to, say for example, tout the benefits of allowing the job creators to keep more of their money so they could create more jobs, and keep the government out of the process. Even if He were inclined to take a position like this, He’d be called out and it wouldn’t work. He has to do what mediocre public speakers do, and stick to His knitting.

President Obama does do better at public speaking than the average bear. But at this point, that is nothing but a footnote of recent history. He enjoys all the momentum that would be enjoyed, at this time, by any other leftist democrat — as a champion of one side of many discussions that polarize us. That is the source of His forty percent. There is no other except…well…maybe some white guilt thrown into the mix. That, and the sheer inertia that imbues a sharp ego and dull wit that can’t admit it made a mistake at the ballot box three years ago.

It must be an awful job to be an Obama speechwriter; the job seems to have no impact on anything whatsoever. Maybe there is no such thing.

Becoming a Old Buzzard at the Taco Bell:

$5.37! That’s what the kid behind the counter at Taco Bell said to me.

I dug into my pocket and pulled out some lint and two dimes and something that used to be a Jolly Rancher. Having already handed the kid a five-spot, I started to head back out to the car to grab some change when the kid with the Elmo hairdo said the hardest thing anyone has ever said to me.

“It’s OK. I’ll just give you the senior citizen discount.”

I turned to see who he was talking to and then heard the sound of change hitting the counter in front of me. “Only $4.68″ he said cheerfully.

I stood there stupefied. I am 61, not even 65 yet? A mere child! Senior citizen?

I took my burrito and walked out to the Taurus (some have described this wonderful ride as a old man car) wondering what was wrong with Elmo. Was he blind? As I sat in the car, my blood began to boil. Old? Me?

I’ll show him, I thought. I opened the door and headed back inside. I strode to the counter, and there he was waiting with a smile.

Before I could say a word, he held up something and jingled it in front of me, like I could be that easily distracted! What am I now? A toddler?

“Dude! Can’t get too far without your car keys, eh?” I stared with utter disdain at the keys. I began to rationalize in my mind.

“Leaving keys behind hardly makes a man elderly! It could happen to anyone!”

I turned and headed back to the Taurus. I slipped the key into the ignition, but it wouldn’t turn. What now? I checked my keys and tried another. Still nothing.

That’s when I noticed the purple beads hanging from my rear view mirror. I had no purple beads hanging from my rear view mirror.

Then, a few other objects came into focus. The car seat in the back seat. Happy Meal toys spread all over the floorboard. A partially eaten doughnut on the dashboard.

Faster than you can say ginkgo biloba, I flew out of the alien vehicle.

Moments later I was speeding out of the parking lot, relieved to finally be leaving this nightmarish stop in my life. That is when I felt it, deep in the bowels of my stomach: hunger! My stomach growled and churned, and I reached to grab my burrito, only it was nowhere to be found.

I swung the truck around, gathered my courage, and strode back into the restaurant one final time. There Elmo stood, draped in youth and black nail polish. All I could think was, “What is the world coming to?”

“Did I leave my food and drink in here”? At this point I was ready to ask a Boy Scout to help me back to my vehicle, and then go straight home and apply for Social Security benefits.

Elmo looked puzzled and announced a little too loudly, “Got no clue.” I walked back out to the truck, and suddenly a young lad came up and tugged on my jeans to get my attention. He was holding holding a drink and a bag.

His mother a cute thirty something explained, “I think you left this in my truck by mistake.”

I took the food and drink from the little boy and sheepishly apologized.

His mother offered these kind words: “It’s OK. My grandfather does stuff like this all the time.”

All of this is to explain how I got a ticket doing 85 in a 40. Yes, I was racing some punk kid in a Toyota Prius. And no, I told the officer, I’m not too old to be driving this fast.

As I walked in the front door, my wife met me halfway down the hall. I handed her a bag of cold food and a $300 speeding ticket. I promptly sat in my rocking chair and covered up my legs with a blankey.

The good news was I had successfully found my way home.

Sorry to all you that are having problems reading this. I can’t find that darn font button.

It should be against the law to put such small type on a computer.

Merry Christmas to all you old buzzards out there,

Gary

Wisdom from my Hello-Kitty of Blogging account…

Rather fascinating thing that’s going on here, we’ve got these famous and high-profile people using the word “Republican” to describe themselves when they don’t believe in any Republican things. I’m thinking of Meghan McCain and Ron Paul, each one of whom in fact is very passionate about some singular favorite issue, and their position on the favorite issue is *opposed* to the Republican position but, although they don’t care much about any other issue, they nevertheless repeatedly call themselves Republicans…

What is this? Is it a false flag attack? Or maybe the GOP has failed to brand itself properly and safeguard its trademark, effectively leaving an asset lying around in the dirt, unsecured, and now the unscrupulous are doing what the unscrupulous do, which is take it…

If they want to win 2012, the GOP needs to fix this. I say “democrat” and you IMMEDIATELY know what I mean…you use the word “democrat” and everyone IMMEDIATELY knows what you mean…it means to make hard work and good decision-making futile. There, just a few words [capture] it all. The democrats have this, it is definitely an advantage since people vote for things reliably only if they understand them. Republicans need to get this [back?].

Yeah, what-up with that? I keep hearing how the ranks of the independents are swelling right now because Republicans and democrats both have bad names. But does that tell the whole story, if the Republican party is suffering from the pestilence of people pretending to be among their members, when they really aren’t?

Followed up with…

When you think about it, MM&RP are doing exactly the same thing to the Republican party that Barack Obama is doing to the United States, which is to say: I love you, I’m one of you, and because I have so much love for you and you are in error, I must change you so you are picked up & put where you need to be. And for those who are studious about it, it isn’t hard to see this is a destructive effort…one feels a hint of embarrassment stooping to the level of actually pointing it out, it should be obvious…

The issue is one of trademark dilution. This is why Miss America winners are dismissed and replaced when they pose for Playboy. Your girlfriend can’t get a job at Hooters and then wear her uniform as a Halloween costume. Aristotle’s Law of Identity, A is A and all that. To violate this fundamental law of thought is a wrenchingly destructive thing for any brand name that means anything. It causes a loss of that meaning, through dilution.

What am I saying about the problem with our public debt if I vote Republican? There are a lot of people with strong opinions about this who call themselves Republicans…I think most of them would give an answer pretty close to what a Tea Party guy would say about it, that it’s out of control, our spending has to be brought back into something sane and that means cut, cut, cut — military last. That’s a good answer, it’s my answer, I agree with it. The problem is though, that there’s too much chaff in the wheat. And most of the problem of contamination comes from Republicans who are elected to Congress to do this cutting, instead doing the opposite.

But then you have these “Republicans” like Congressman Paul, who bloviates to such excess about what the military should not be doing, that it’s difficult to nail down what he thinks it should, in fact, be doing. I don’t know why, or if, he thinks we should have one. And when he calls himself a Republican and gets away with it, it doesn’t say good things for the party. It says they are tolerant and inclusive to a fault, which some people might like…I suppose…but what good is that. It does a lot of damage, because it means when I say what I think about the debt situation or the military situation, even if the legacy of the Republican party is to agree with my statements, I end up really just speaking for myself. It’s no longer a done-deal that this is the Republican position. You can’t really be accepting of much of anything, if you don’t reject anything.

The practical observation is this: This situation does not inspire anyone to go vote. It does not rouse people out of bed early on a rainy November morning to go to some public school annex building on their way to work, and stand in line.

Now the democrat party has managed to work the same situation to their advantage. I said up above that their mission is to make hard work a futility, and that is true, but they have all these voters who don’t believe in that, are actually very hard workers, and yet will vote for them anyway. So that party, too, has a problem with trademark dilution, except it doesn’t do them any harm at all, in fact it tends to work to their benefit. Now why is that?

I think what’s happening here is, obviously the two parties are pushing different ideas, and the ideas being supported by the Republican party rely on clarity for their persuasive power whereas the ideas being supported by the democrats, do not. You say, we’re gonna take that rich guy down a peg or two…if I’m of a mind to support a mission such as that, I’m not likely to jump off the bandwagon just because a new question has been created about whether or not I will be a beneficiary of this. In fact, if yet more questions arise about whether or not I’m sufficiently comfortable that maybe I should be made a target, I’m still not likely to become antagonized toward the movement even as it seeks my destruction. It’s a fascinating trait of human behavior. The democrat voter hollers himself hoarse about “I’m smart because I’m voting my interest”…his guy wins, and a new tax plan is created to do the righteous damage against those evil rich people…the tax brackets creep downward, over time, and he finds his own taxes going up because it turns out he’s one of the bad guys. His fidelity is not disrupted or disturbed even a tiny bit. A casual shrug, and some cliched recycled remark about “Oh well, we are to be judged by how we treat the least among us” or some such. (And judged by who?)

I don’t know how to explain this because I don’t understand it. In Year One, there’s all this me-against-the-world, Occupy Wall Street antipathy toward — someone or something. I’m getting slighted! In Year Two, it’s easily and breezily replaced by guilt, the emotion polar-opposite from what was there before. So the faithfulness to the party remains absolute, because it’s never really tested.

This is an enigma, since it doesn’t work that way for the Republicans. It seems anyone who challenges Ron Paul’s Republican credentials instantly receives this predictable rhetorical beat-down for insisting on “purity tests” or “lock-step loyalty” (I see it’s happening in the Facebook thread now). Well, I’m not asking for a purity test; I’m just asking that things be a little bit definable. It shouldn’t involve any sort of conflict, it seems to me everyone ought to be on my side on this thing, because I perceive there’s a widespread frustration — especially on the Republican side — with the difficulty involved in sending clear and simple messages to the cirlces of power where meaningful decisions get made, through the process of our elections.

Thanks to Google+ friend Melissa.

For small-tee tim the godless heathen, who I named.

Say what you will about me, lads, but as far as I’m concerned, the most sensual and inviting part of her body is…her smile. With her long flowing hair coming in at a close second.

And no, there’s nothing wrong with the rest of it either.

Happy Friday, everybody.

You too, Dylan.