Saturday, December 10. 2005
Crude, Nasty, and In Poor Taste Our Editor made me post this "I'm Dreaming of a White Trash Christmas" image on a continuation page (see below) so as not to contaminate the elevated and refined tone of the Maggie's Farm front page. As if we thought we were Powerline, with a magisterial dignity to maintain. We love barbecue and beer, right? How many barbecue, beer, Bush (?), and Botticelli blogs are there out there?
Continue reading ""
Friday, December 9. 2005
The White Flag ad has been released. Ankle Biting has the link. I'd call that gentle push-back. Or maybe iron fist in a velvet glove? What do churches do when Christmas falls on a Sunday? NYT. My humble opinion? You have church. It's the Sabbath. You do the Christmas Eve service, then you do a brief, joyful Christmas Morning service. Whoever comes, comes. It beats drinking Spicy Clamato and vodka at 10 AM and listening to carols and tossing wrapping paper into the fireplace. Well... for me it does. Cannot say it always would have. And always thought the combination of carols on the player and boxes of presents was just wierd and phony anyway. Not that I do not love the music - love it to death. All the same, Christmas Eve is what it is about. A Holy Night. How taxation on unearned income effects savings. Marginal Revn. Disarming Canadians further. And it isn't working. RTLC. Pretty soon, only criminals will have guns. I have heard that the ducks and reindeer favor Canada-style gun laws. But the crims couldn't care less. Indeed, the less guns people have, the better for the crims. A store for gizmos. The Wired Store.
Why bulls hate winter. Hope this works: WhyCowsHateWinter.mpe
Narnia Comments Collected at Blogs4God - thanks, Instapundit.
Right now, in southern New England. Dang point-and-shoot camera is too slow to catch the beauty of the flakes falling heavily this morning. The first good snowfall is always magical. If you don't have 4WD this morning, you'll have a bad day. Looks like about 8". If Danny doesn't show up to plow the driveway and the front of the barn in about ten minutes, I'll do it myself with the tractor, if I can get it started. I kind of hate to head off to Hartford without cleaning things up first. For the little wifie, you know? She has horses to care for. Not that a little snow slows her down. 
France hopes to improve image. Good idea. It needs it. And not just image - reality, too. For gun buffs and military fans: A letter from a soldier re Iraq weapons, tactics, etc., at Atlas. Gotta love that gun that shoots around corners, but gotta hate 9 mm for stopping bad guys. One quote: "Fun fact: Random autopsies on dead insurgents show a high level of opiate use." No surprise there: on the morning of Austerlitz, Napoleon gave the soldiers a triple shot of brandy - would have given them opiates if he had 'em. Dutch courage. I enjoyed his "thumbs up" for the Mossberg 12 ga - cheap, simple, low-tech gun for ducks or bad guys in close quarters. Low tech always best in bad conditions. For under the tree for someone: The new Sony R1 camera. My problem with such wonderful toys is that, by the time I learn how to use 1/20th of what they can do, they're obsolete. We all have favorite charities to whom we'd give lots of money, if we had it. Charity Navigator has all the info. An amusing Kerry verbal gaffe. Sensible Mom A book: Why do Men Have Nipples?: Hundreds of Questions You'd Only Ask Your Doctor After Your Third Martini Effects of economic growth and population growth in the Galapagos
Thursday, December 8. 2005
Department of Media Bias Yet one more. Confederate Yank.
 Campus Recruiting
The Solomon case reaches the Supreme Court. And the good punditry, here. Look, we all know this isn't really about gays - it's about anti-military and anti-America. Gays are just being used as a pawn in this game, which was going on way before gays were "gays." Indeed, gays are foolish to let themselves be exploited in this way by the anti-American crazies, who have always latched onto the most convenient or fashionable excuse for their America-bashing efforts. I want to see what would happen if gay-slaughtering Al Quaida recruiters handed out fliers in Harvard Yard. Nothing. Free speech, right? And multi-culturally sensitive. When will we see poorly-paid but devoted military recruiters given the same respect as the pin-striped fancy guys from Morgan Stanley, GE, and Shearman & Sterling - all of whom depend on our guys and gals in uniform for their freedom and prosperity?
Bolton at the UN: NY Sun Christmas book ideas: Hanson's book on The Peloponnesian War. And two ideas from RWN's list: Gates of Fire by Pressman and Basic Economics by Sowell. How many errors in Wikipedia? Some, for sure. Blogger News Network. Still, a great resource. I still prefer the Britannica. Hillary's flag trick. Newsmax. No, it didn't backfire. She wanted that negative comment from the NYT. NYT playing along? Well, consciously or unconsciously. Clever and devious? Yes. Wise? No. It's the Sistah Soljah triangulation that Dick Morris devised for Bill. Watch her follow Dick's old plan in every detail: you wink at your base and make a few meaningless centrist-sounding maneuvers. Simple to do, if you throw honesty out the window. But, what the heck...careers are at stake. More real hope for spinal cord injuries. Science Daily
Wednesday, December 7. 2005
John H. shows quantification of press bias: P'line. They do this to all Repubs, and they have done so for many years. And they always select one "good Repub", to seem fair. Once upon a time, it was Nelson Rockefeller. Now it's McCain. But if he runs - watch out. It's always the guy they want to run - and lose. Algeria vetoes condemnation of Netanya blombing. Blocking market forces in conservation of grazing lands. How can they block this? The Commons. There's a moral to this story. Tom Brewton takes on the anti-war people, the 60s counterculture, the culture of hedonism and the juvenocracy:
"The counter-cultural effect was certainly a long-lasting, industrial-strength one. Today, liberal/Progressives give lip service to “supporting our troops,” but their actions make clear that military personnel are for them objects of cynical disdain, while they have made entertainers and athletes the most glamorous and astronomically-highly-paid group in history. Hedonism, not patriotism, is the McLuhan TV ‘massage’ for liberal-Progressives." Read entire. It's an excellent thoughtful rant.
Winning and Losing All credit to Pennywit-Multifaria for highlighting this quote by Ann Applebaum, arguing in the Washington Post that "Iraq may turn out to be a mixed bag": "[W]hat if all of this vocabulary -- winning, losing, victory, defeat -- is simply misplaced? There are, after all, wars that are not actually won or lost. There are wars that achieve some of their goals, that result only in partial solutions and that leave much business unfinished. There are wars that do not end with helicopters evacuating Americans from the embassy roof but that do not produce a victorious march into Berlin, either. There are wars that end ambivalently -- wars, for example, such as the one we fought in Korea."
Right. But what are our goals? 1. Get rid of Saddam. 2. Kill a bunch of terrorists. 3. Establish some political freedom in the middle east (hopefully friendly with the US). Three out of three ain't bad. Maybe we already "won," and just don't know it. Mad bombers breed like rats in the middle-east - you can never get rid of all of them - they are part of life. Witness Netanya.
Dems will go down on Iraq and Alito: Chapman. Wish they would learn - or glad they don't learn - that there would be lots more Dems if they didn't pander to their wackos. Hillary gets it. "Raise the white flag, boys." Morrissey on the Dem. approach to warfare, at Daily Standard What liberal media? Nice find, Lee. Israeli bomber? Leonard Wood and running empires: Max Boot in WSJ
Remember Pearl Harbor - and remember this photo (as if you could forget it): The Enemy Press in the US: Horowitz Conspiracy theorists, from neoneocon: "What's the origin of the need to see a conspiracy behind every unpleasant event? One reason is the desire for order and control--even though, paradoxically, conspiracy theories posit a shadowy world out of the control of most of us. But, like children who want everything to have a reason and an explanation, conspiracy theorists can rest assured that at least someone (if only the conspirators) is in control and that there are few accidents, few random terrible and unpredictable events that we cannot control." For Christmas - The Bob Dylan Store Book for Christmas: The Martini and other tasty related subjects. Steyn rips into the eco-cultists. Telegraph The Birds of Baghdad: Michael Yon. Who knew he was a bird-watcher too?
Tuesday, December 6. 2005
A Note from Netanya An email from our pal Nathan in Netanya yesterday (author of our weekly - each Tuesday - Aliyah Diary): Bombing in Netanya yesterday. Quite terrible. The guard who was
killed, grabbed the fellow by the shoulder as he appeared suspicious.
At the same time, a policewoman driving by saw the same fellow and
shouted out to the guard to pull the man's hand from his bag. She
jumped out of her car and ran towards them. As the man blew himself
up, she fell to the ground four meters away.
One question asked here, is whether the guard should have simply shot
the man. But, there is also concern here that being too quick on the
draw (as happened with a soldier and a 15 year old a few weeks back)
can kill innocents. Not easy at all. I was in Netanya studying
Hebrew; quite safe from the bombing, but somber the mood afterwards.
Four killed on the spot; a half dozen critically wounded and some
dozens wounded. Life continues, but it dampens people's spirits. The
mall where it happened was splattered with blood for hours afterwards;
the tiles on the wall lifted away and pock-marked from shrapnel.
Too many are suffering. It does seem to me that the palestinians have
a talent mostly for destruction. Saul Bellow once wrote that the Germans
were good at two things: making cars and killing Jews. Seems that the
palestinians have only got the knack for half the job. Update from Nathan today: Those confirmed dead include Eliyah Rosen, a 39 year old mother of
three, a psychologist; Daniel Golani, 45 , who had come to the mall to
look at opening a store; Naim Amram, 26, the guard who apprehended the
bomber, but did not shoot him, a graduate from the air force;
Alexhandra Garmitzki, 65 , from Ukraine, whose only son is a doctor;
and Keinan Tzoami, 19, who requested delay in army service in order to
help his father's carpentry shop. Zichron L'vracha.
The policewoman, Shoshana Atiay-Deloya had drawn her gun as she ran
towards the bomber, but didn't shoot as there were too many people
around.
What Opie wants for Christmas: a Flybook. Got that, Santa?
Five types of people you meet in every office. Which Type are you?: Blogcritics EU OKs airline blacklist. A good idea, and it's about time. Travelwire Thornton at VDH, on Sowell: "The cause of this sorry state of affairs is the transformation of a once-noble Civil Rights movement into the Civil Rights industry, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party and the Social Welfare Plantation. This collection of academics, activists, pundits, bureaucrats, lupine lawyers, and all-around busybodies has reduced the discussion of race in America to a crude melodrama in which the prime mover is white racism, and black people are kept helpless victims in chronic need of rescue by big-hearted liberals and race-tribunes like Jesse Jackson. The economic and political gains made by black people are ignored, while the true sources of the problems and dysfunctions afflicting many black communities are obscured."
Read entire.
Monday, December 5. 2005
DNC supports illegal immigration. There's a winning formula...if you let foreigners vote. (Why not let the whole world vote? A lame doofus Kerry by a landslide, with the French vote. Wasn't he French, or just look French, or whatever?) CA Yank Got an idea - the UNternet: Let the UN start their own internet. Why didn't the UN think of that? All it takes is a big server and a good programmer. And they can build in all the controls China and the other dictator countries want, from the ground, up. It will be a big hit - Go For It, UN! Competition between free speech and bureaucratic totalitarianism. A good fight. Star Wars. They can call it the UNternet. A piece on the UN and the internet here: Belmont The Prof. beats up on Jefferson. As always, he has a point. Tommy had a way with words, though, didn't he? Fla. taxpayers supporting terrorist-founded school. Very bad idea. LGF
A changing approach to global warming: 
Science Times Neckties are coming back: CSM Triangulate this. Hillary heckled: Newsmax Child sex tourism on sale at Amazon. Travelwire. Hey Congress - I want my MTV: Reason Gay marriage now OK in UK: BBC. The Scots seem thrilled.
Sunday, December 4. 2005
 The nice girl next door: Murielle Degauque - Protein
Interesting gun - the XM109: RRWH. For popping rats at the dump? Gizz yer money: Blair and the EU beggars - Tangled Web Jihad - It's really all about killing Jews (and other infidels): Pres. Ahmadinejad of Iran: “We are in the process of a historical war between the World of Arrogance [the west] and the Islamic world... Is it possible for us to witness a world without America and Zionism? You had best know that this slogan and this goal is attainable, and surely can be achieved.” Is there any limit to limp "tolerance" and "understanding"? Do we not value our culture? Where is our Churchill? Read Steyn's comments. Time for a political offensive by the Admin? From Am. Thinker: "The Democrat Party has just entered the McGovern Zone. The nation is at war against deadly enemies and the Democrats are going into an election committed to capitulation. They are gambling everything on failure in Iraq. If, in six months, successful elections have been held in Iraq and we have begun reducing our troop levels there, only a few hardcore nutjobs will still cling to the idea that Iraq is a hopeless quagmire. That idea is all the Democrats have to offer and when it dies the Democrat Party itself will be teetering on the edge of extinction."
The pros like Barone and John Leo are going to drive the amateur bloggers, like us, out of existence. That's OK - we accept Darwin. And we are glad that Barone has a blog. Quote: "The impulse of intellectual elites in Europe, and North America as well, is to show their tolerance by tolerating intolerance of tolerance." Hey - ain't that Virtuous? Most ignored book on the NYT best-seller list: Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam From Gov. Blanco's staff emails after Katrina (NYT, via Drudge): (my bold print): "Bush's numbers are low, and they are getting pummeled by the media for their inept response to Katrina and are actively working to make us the scapegoats," Bob Mann, Ms. Blanco's communications director, wrote in an e-mail message that afternoon, outlining plans by Washington Democrats to help turn the blame back onto President Bush." and "She must temper her anger and frustration," Johnny Anderson, Ms. Blanco's assistant chief of staff, wrote a day after it became widely known that large crowds were suffering at the New Orleans convention center. "We have to work too hard to lose the public relations battle."" As Bird Dog always says, you cannot be too cynical to understand politics. They are not "good people": A "necessary evil."
Saturday, December 3. 2005
A defense of Hillary: RWNH Questioning the Gulf Stream science: Classical Values. Appreciate his looking deeper into the story. Dems ass over elbows in confusion. ACE Subway searches: legal or not? Calif. Yankee. If they're constitutional for airplanes, why not subways? They are just airplanes, with wheels instead of wings. All busses. Bird of Paradise considers Narnia. The declining interest in video games. Have they become too complex for people with day jobs? Vodkapundit
Katrina was just another battlefield of the culture wars: Reason Narnia already under ferocious attack from the Christian-haters. Chronicle of Higher Ed. How Shadegg moved Bush on immigration - a little bit. The Hill Art Town, USA. Paducah, KY? CSM Limbo to be erased from RCC doctrine. Not the dance, one hopes. Bird Isaac Hayes. Can you dig it? Good review at Blogcritics. Sexomnia? Drunksex
Friday, December 2. 2005
Iran should link up with the ACLU: Iran "will stop Christianity in this country." Atlas FIRE burns Univ. of Wisconsin: Bible allowed back. FIRE Norwegian govt hires philosophers for help in spending money. Too funny. Excellent piece on Scandinavian moral bankrupcy at View from 1776. Paul at Powerline: "The Democratic party -- part pacifist, part opportunist, part bureaucratic, part clueless -- is attempting to make the existence of a date certain for victory a condition for supporting war. This is a recipe for impotence."
Will Iraq ever be ready to defend itself? Dirty War in The New Republic. No Christmas Tree in Boston this year. Maybe no Christmas either. Blame Bush Whose politics are filled with hate? Michelle Overfishing in inland waters. Science Daily CIA discovers it's been using black highlighters. Onion
Thursday, December 1. 2005
Gen. Smith on Napoleon. Personally, I think Napoleon was half-crazy. Samizdata. International complaints about Google's eye in the sky: CSM Send a Christmas card to the ACLU (H/T, Michelle): Crosswalk Weakening of Gulf Stream will cool Ireland and England. Via Science Daily NYT will charge for the op-ed online. Real money? Are they kidding? IBD
1. El Al shows record profits. Must be the folks reading the Tuesday Aliyah Diary and heading to Israel for a visit. 2. Try this one:
1- Go to www.google.com 2- Type in "french military victories", without the quotes
3- Instead of hitting "Search" hit "I'm feeling Lucky"
4- Tell your friends before the people at Google fix it
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