We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Mothers Day special: Osama's wife left OBL's cave for home but returned to him once in mansion in Pakistan.
Yes, we men would all live in caves if not for women; and, in Osama's case he might still be living!
And, OBL's current roommate isn't too pleased with him in paradise. (Careful of language, and hilarious from Iowahawk.) A clean language sample: "So it's been pretty much like that here since Mumbles showed up. Every day, it's calisthenics, fwip-fwip-fwip SEAL time, human shield time, pa-papp pa-papp, zwip-zwip-zwip, Excedrin headache #1. Just like that infidel movie of yours, Groundhog Day, except you really don't want to know what they use the groundhogs for. Trust me."
A quip I saw: Osama gets killed, and we get 72 versions from Obama.
Now that I'm actually using Windows 7, I'll have to take back all of those cruel, nasty, horrid things I said about it in my initial review.
I hereby take them all back.
So, to sum up:
— If you're an average user who just grabs the ol' email and surfs the 'ol web, then Win7 is a great step up from XP or Vista. It's quicker than older versions in almost every way you can name.
— On the other hand, if you're a geek like me who wants a tough, robust operating system that you can tweak and reconfigure and generally thrash about, then you want Windows 7. You don't get any of the tweaking and reconfiguring and thrashing stuff — but the increased speed makes up for everything.
No, the Chairman of the City University of New York did not say that Tony Kushner, a la praise that was given to Mussolini, "made the trains run on time." Instead, Benno Schmidt Jr. -- formerly of Yale -- says something similar (Reconsidering, CUNY Likely To Honor Kushner):
“But it is not right for the board to consider politics in connection with the award of honorary degrees except in extreme cases not presented by the facts here,” he wrote. “The proposed honorary degree for Mr. Kushner would recognize him for his extraordinary talent and contribution to the American theater. Like other honorary degrees, it is not intended to reflect approval or disapproval for political views not relevant to the field for which the recipient is being honored.”
A meeting is to be held Monday to overturn the rejection by the CUNY Trustees to not grant Tony Kushner an honorary degree. The venue is a smaller Executive Committee, which Mr. Schmidt apparently feels he controls.
Of course, anything Tony Kushner gets is intended, as he always makes clear, to honor his politics as well as his playwriting, which is indistinguishable from his politics. Just see any Kushner play, and try treating it as a non-political vehicle."
Tony Kushner is an extremist, libeling Israel and Catholics, and even taken to task by other gays for shoddy literary/political work, as Andrew Sullivan points out (before Sullivan proceeds to himself libel Israel, using edited and false quotes from an anti-Israel hate site):
To say I am embarrassed to be defending Tony Kushner is an understatement. I was one of very few gay men with HIV who found Angels in America to be pretentious, boring propaganda, and like most propaganda, endless and laden with stereotypes and cartoon figures. In the internecine fights in the gay movement in the 1990s, we were on opposite sides. I'd rather have pins stuck in my eyes than attend his new play, ominously titled "The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures," which like other Important Plays, clocks in at four hours. His sad attempt to exonerate traitors like the Rosenbergs was once perverse; now it just seems at odds with reality. I have no beef with him personally, I should add, although after writing all that, he may feel somewhat differently toward me.
And, as pointed out in the Heidegger link above, Kushner's literary works aren't that great, except to liberals who go in for Kushner's bashing of others they dislike.
Mr. Schmidt says, "“Freedom of thought and expression is the bedrock of any university worthy of the name.” So are standards, Mr. Schmidt.
Letter from CUNY Trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld in the New York Times:
Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, remembers Tony Kushner's words about Catholics:
As a general rule, objections to anyone being considered for an honorary degree take on weight only when there are serious reasons for doing so. An honorary degree is a statement from an academic institution that meritorious service should be recognized, but it is also a statement, ineluctably so, about the characterological attributes of the honoree. For example, a gifted orator may properly be denied if what he espouses is hatred.
Tony Kushner is a talented creative artist, but he is also someone who espouses hatred. CUNY trustee Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld correctly identified Kushner as a man whose relentless assaults on the democratic state of Israel effectively disqualify him from being honored by John Jay College, a CUNY institution. On that account alone, Kushner is not deserving of an honorary degree. But there is more.
When the Terrence McNally play, "Corpus Christi," was performed in New York in 1998, Kushner not only defended this vile work—it portrayed Christ having sex with the 12 apostles—he lashed out at the Catholic League for exercising its First Amendment right to freedom of speech. Never did we call for censorship. All we did was hold a demonstration.
When Matthew Shepard, the homosexual from Wyoming, was mercilessly killed by anti-gay thugs, Kushner blamed the pope! "Pope John Paul II endorses murder," he wrote in the Nation.
Kushner's vitriol against Israel, coupled with his Catholic bashing, make him unworthy of receiving a CUNY honorary degree. It may be that Kushner deserves to be in a Playwright Hall of Fame. But CUNY represents the norms of the academic community, and they do not counsel bigotry. Jeff Wiesenfeld raised the right issues, and made the right call.
Many people, rightly or wrongly and for better or worse, reject Psychiatric medicines which can be remarkably helpful things at times, but also emotion-blunting at times. Fortunately, it's a free country.
I have a friend who was a dog handler in Vietnam. He would take the dogs into the jungle, find the caves, then go into the caves. Scary as hell, even with the dogs. Last I recall, he and his wife have two little Shih Tzus.
“Tonight, I can report . . . And so shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta . . . I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden . . . I met repeatedly with my national security team . . . I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action. . . . Today, at my direction . . . I’ve made clear . . . Over the years, I’ve repeatedly made clear . . . Tonight, I called President Zardari . . . and my team has also spoken. . .These efforts weigh on me every time I, as Commander-in-Chief . . . Finally, let me say to the families . . . I know that it has, at times, frayed. . . .”
If you listen to the Lefty pundits, you'd think he was a battlefield hero now. Right decision for sure, but also a no-brainer if there ever was one. "Let's send some guys to kill Bin Laden, OK?" "Well, let me sleep golf on that for a few days..."
Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Here's the trailer.
Here's the WaPo review. I agree with the reviewer about art: It does not "advance" or "improve." In my view, it's just fashions in art and design that change.
Cut the damned funding off and figure out how to have a society where half the people are uneducated. The Great Society programs have ruined the nation financially and socially.
“But the disdain for American joy about bin Laden’s death goes deeper than mere snobbery or concerns about local Muslims. It’s not just that Western European intellectuals don’t like the United States—they never have—but their unwillingness to countenance aggressive Western self-defense against Islamist terror is a function of their loss of belief in Western civilization itself. Many on the continent seem to have lost any sense that their countries and way of life as well as their faith is something worth defending. When it comes down to it that, and not the faux sophistication of Euro elites, is the difference between America and Europe these days.
Military executes brilliantly. The usual nincompoops around White House err, and err, and err. PowerLine:
Military and intelligence professionals executed an important mission brilliantly, carrying out their assigned task of killing Osama bin Laden and dumping his body into the ocean. Ever since, the administration has undercut the professionals' achievement with a succession of now-inoperative accounts of the raid's climactic moments....
All of these narratives--apart from the disadvantage, in some instances, of being untrue--share a common defect. They assume that the SEALs are in the dock as accused murderers, and need to be seen as acting in self-defense. This is ridiculous.
I steal this from Theo only as an example of tasteless humor:
Hottest drink on campus this week: The OBL. Two shots and a splash of water.
Semi-related: I see that moonbat Michael Moore speculates that Osama was under a sort of house arrest cum protection by the Paki government or ISI. Sounds actually plausible. A caged rat.
Like you, I always find it particularly irksome when I do acrobatic stunts in my airplane and one of the wings suddenly snaps off. You look out the window and think, "Crap! I lost another wing! This is really getting irksome!"
Well, there isn't much to do at that point except get the dang thing back on the ground and glue on another wing.
Were Martin Heidegger alive today, would he be granted an honorary degree from the City University of New York (CUNY)? We might consider that question in the matter of whether playwright Tony Kushner should be granted an honorary degree from CUNY.
Perhaps so. Honorary degrees are granted for many reasons, influence – academic or political, fund raising, agreement with the honoree’s views, to get a cheap graduation speaker. The defense of granting honorary degrees to some whose non-academic writings or speech or activities are controversial is that these are separate matters from the influence of the person. On the other hand, an honorary degree honors the whole person, unless the granting writ specifically excludes certain aspects of that person’s works and describes why others are more important. Not done, so it is the person who is being honored. (Update: Statement by CUNY Trustee below.)
(See below re: Tony Kushner and why he shouldn't be honored.)
Good interview with George Leef, who contends that half of the kids who go to college in the US these days do not benefit and should not bother. Higher ed has become a self-interested industry with a greater investment in sales than in product...the product often being an unaccomplished, ignorant person with a piece of fancy paper in hand.
When you think about it, it is rather remarkable that there is no exit exam of advanced intellectual achievement. I would offer to design one. Maybe I will design one, just for fun (there will be Math because, in my reality, there is no higher ed without Calculus and Statistics).
All sorts of stories are going around. Here's my conspiracy theory: After ten years of work, last summer the CIA believed that they tracked down bin Laden to an old ISI safe house in a city just north of Islamabad. After collecting all of the data they could, a SEAL team was trained for the killing job. When the government finally gave the OK, they secretly choppered in from Afghanistan in stealth choppers and shot up the place, while nabbing bin Laden's corpse and a pile of computer stuff. Then they left after 40 minutes without a scratch, but after blowing up one downed chopper.
But who could believe a crazy story like that? SEALs could believe it, because it's the sort of thing they do routinely. I think this turned out to be an easy job.
This is an awesome admission of categorical intellectual, political and
moral failure. For two decades greens have arrogated to themselves the
authority of science and wrapped themselves in the arrogant certainty of
self-righteous contempt for those who oppose them. They have equated
skepticism about their incoherent and contradictory policy proposals
with hatred of science and attacked their critics as the soulless hired
shills of the oil companies, happy to ruin humanity for the sake of some
corporate largesse.
He quotes Monbiot:
“All of us in the environment movement, in other words – whether we
propose accommodation, radical downsizing or collapse – are lost. None
of us yet has a convincing account of how humanity can get out of this
mess. None of our chosen solutions break the atomising, planet-wrecking
project. I hope that by laying out the problem I can encourage us to
address it more logically, to abandon magical thinking and to recognise
the contradictions we confront. But even that could be a tall order.”
So many people refused to drink the Kool Aid. I'd like to see the enviros and greenies get back to the sorts of rational conservation efforts which prosperous societies are the best at doing - and truly do care about. Conservation, minus the Socialism and totalitarian aspirations.
Here's the official reaction of the Mormon Church to the South Park crew's take-off on Mormons, "The Book of Mormon", that liberals love on Broadway -- with strike outs to insert the reaction that won't be issued by Imams, Hamas, Fatah's military wing, the Moslem Brotherhood, et. al. to photos of Osama bin Laden's final pose.
The production photos may attempt to entertain audiences for an evening, but the Book of Mormon Koran as a volume of scripture will change people’s lives forever by bringing them closer to Christ Mohammed and virgins.
President Obama KOs the photo entertainment. "It's who we are." -- Moral equivalence with Muslims heralding 9/11 photos and our soldiers and other innocents. - Question awaits: Will President Obama and Michelle have a date night on Broadway for the Book of Mormon?
Our post about hoarders the other day had me thinking about overeating. Overeating is hoarding fat cells. Once you create new fat cells, you can never get rid of them.
Odd and dysfunctional behavioral symptoms are all ways of dealing with uncomfortable internal states. Most people have at least one character defect or wiring defect which creates some sort of discomfort or uneasiness.
For some people, food is a center of existence and thus becomes a way of coping with being oneself, fending off boredom and a sense of emptiness - all of the cliches. In my line of work, we term this solution "orality." It works, in prosperous societies, and harms no-one but oneself.
For starters, this lady needs a physical job and needs to get out of the house. Her life is too easy, undemanding, and too dull. She'll end up on Disability, if she isn't already. Her son seems like a good kid, and wisely doesn't try to fix her. She has given up on life by taking on the victim role - she is a "victim of a food addiction."
I happen to be a doughnut epicure. I only care for plain doughnuts (God forbid, not "whole wheat"), deep fried in fat to a dark crunchy crust. If somebody insists on a dash of confectioner's sugar on top, that's OK but I'd be just as happy without it.
Cake doughnuts are revolting, like the ones at Bird Dog's favorite coffee joint or at the supermarket. You can feed them to kids and dogs, though, and they seem to thrive on them. Don't even talk about that Krispy Kreme gooey junk.
A real fried doughnut, and a cup of black coffee. Heaven. Then maybe a smoke to finish off the coffee. You do have to look around, though, to find places that make real doughnuts these days. Real doughnut-lovers know where they are.
In the rain, out my window today. That's an Eastern Cottontail baby, destined to be dog food, or hawk food, or owl food before reaching maturity. The odds are against baby bunnies. Cute things. I think the family lives under my shed, along with a Chipmunk family.
Now that I'm actually using Windows 7, I'll have to take back all of those cruel, nasty, horrid things I said about it in my initial review.
From the royal wedding to this: 
Carpe: 
I happen to be a doughnut epicure. I only care for plain doughnuts (God forbid, not "whole wheat"), deep fried in fat to a dark crunchy crust. If somebody insists on a dash of confectioner's sugar on top, that's OK but I'd be just as happy without it. 
