Maggie's FarmWe 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. |
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Thursday, October 15. 2009What's It All About, Alfie?Dear Sweden or Finland or wherever: Thanks so much for sending along the handsome coaster. Please forgive us for taking so long to send our regards, but we'd really only been living here for a few weeks when it showed up, and we were a little unsure what to do with the thing. I'm just an intern here, and new on the job, so I don't get to decide anything. But there was something spiffy-looking about the package the little gold candy dish -- or whatever it is supposed to be -- came in, and I couldn't help myself, and kept fishing it out of the trash no matter how many Czars came by my desk and round-filed it while yelling at me to get back to editing Rush Limbaugh's Wikipedia page. I asked Adele, the girl that's been here the longest, what I should do with your merit badge, but she told me that anything that showed up for our first year here, whether it's an oil painting, a North Korean nuke, or a recession, should just get forwarded to the Texan fellow that used to live here, because nothing could be really addressed to us yet. Our new boss is still trying to finish up some work he had left over when he quit his job as a Chicago Alderman or something, and he's in Denmark at a trade show, still handing out his old business cards until they run out. Adele's old and still an intern, and the catty girls say she couldn't even get Clinton to grope her, so I just sort of brushed it off and kept the neato emblem thing here. It says here there's some kind of money that goes with your disk with the picture of Andrew Sullivan on it, but that makes me sort of suspicious. 1.4 million dollars it says here, but maybe that's a typo and you guys meant yen or kronos or Canadian dollars or those big stone rings or whatever you guys use instead of real money with Presidents on it. I'm sorry, you sound like nice people, but it smacks of a "You May Already Be A Winner" letter that's addressed to: Occupant. My mom told me Ed McMahon is dead, and the days of a man showing up at your house with a big cardboard check for no reason are long past, and we should all be suspicious of anyone that promises you money for doing nothing. Besides, ever since we hired Acorn to do the census, we had to keep way more than that in small unmarked bills in my desk, and I don't want you sending me any more. There's barely room for my Carmex, Post-It notes, and all my Apple gear as it is. Tell you what: why don't you split up the money and send a little to every person in America. None of us are good at math here, so I'm not sure how much that would be, exactly. I even asked my only friend here, little Timmy from Treasury, to figure it out, but he says carrying the zeros gets him every time. Timmy's nice and told me not to worry about the exact figure, somehow the President will end up with every penny of it eventually. Thanks so much, Amanda from the secretarial pool.
Posted by Roger de Hauteville
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10:11
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Monday, August 17. 2009Is That Giuseppe d'Idraulico Floating Face Down In The Canal?Well, it appears they closed down the manifestly un-American and unconstitutional flag@whitehouse.org. Don't worry, though, you can still get your Stasi jollies telling the executive branch hall monitors at whitehouse.gov/realitycheck that someone you don't like is chewing gum in class and is hiding a pack of smokes in their gym locker. Friday, August 14. 2009Arise From Nowhere. While You're Able
Boy, the world sure is a mysterious place to the New York Times.
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21:09
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Monday, July 27. 2009Say What? Don't call me Whitey, Skippy.If there's a more loathsome person in the news right now than Henry Louis Gates Junior, I've missed them. It's amazing the amount of attention you can get playing your one-note piano with your foot on all the pedals for the media and academia these days.
Listen to him for a minute and a half, and you can see he's a second-rate intellect with a third-rate sense of respect for his fellow man. Perfect for Hahvahd, now that I think of it. Just like the Widener-shunning alum Teddy Kennedy, only teaching instead of sleeping in class, and driving the affirmative action bus over a cliff instead of an Oldsmobile off a bridge. I can't advise riding with either of them. But then again, a policeman responding to a burglary call isn't in a position to skip talking to Skip. Being wrong at the top of your voice, and a jerk in the bargain, is the sum total of the prestige the Harvard nameplate offers, I guess.
Just when you think you've heard all the drivel you could imagine coming out of the guy's mouth or pen, you hear another topper. According to the AP, on his application to attend Yale, he wrote:
It's really hard to be incoherent, obsequious, and imperious and insulting at the same time, but it appears he's been managing it his whole life. That approach is not without its charms, after all. It's the official foreign policy of the United States right now, for instance.
At about the same time Gates was playing passive aggressive with a Yale admissions office likely bending over backwards to let him in anyway, another man, a much more pleasant and charming man, and a snappier dresser, uttered the same sort of line, but without any malice. Hoping to burst the tension in the words by uttering them along with his fellow man, and he didn't discriminate about who his fellow man was. Viewing the words as an obstacle to get past, not a cow to be milked. You can only utter half the line now. It's a testament to what Skip Gates and his ilk have accomplished in the intervening years. Everyone used to be able to say both words with impunity, but generally didn't, if for no other reason than it was the mark of bad manners. Now only the pallid portion of the words can be uttered with malice, and often are, thanks to the tireless efforts of Skip Gates et.al. It's still not enough. There will never be enough for the Convent of the Sisters of the Perpetually Afflicted they're running over at Harvard, and in many other, big, important white buildings all over this marvelous country.
Don't call me whitey... Skippy.
Posted by Roger de Hauteville
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21:25
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Sunday, July 19. 2009The Rarest Thing On The Internet
The rarest thing on the Internet is an author thinking deeply and then writing simply and elegantly. So rare as to be practically non-existent. Practically, but not completely. Gerard at American Digest is such a person:
It's three years old and rerun, so you know it's not 20/20 hindsight talking. Clear History at American Digest. Wednesday, July 15. 2009They Shoot Horses, Don't They?This following spreadsheet debacle tote board has earned a lot of Internet ink today. From BizzyBlog: There's a lot of John Galt talk associated with it, including the title of the BizzyBlog blog entry. I don't care for it. What is understandable is not always commendable. What is predictable is not always to be aquiesced to. Continue reading "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" Monday, July 6. 2009This Is Not The "O" Face I Was Looking Forward ToSaturday, July 4. 2009Happy Independence Day!It's not July Fourth without John Philip Sousa:Stars and Stripes Forever with a nifty tribute to the American military.� Saturday, June 27. 2009The Citizens Are Revolting!In a republican democracy, we elect officials in lieu of deciding everything in a mob all the time. But it's refreshing from time to time to petition these officials directly with our concerns. We must water the tree of liberty every once in a while, n'est-ce pas? They do in Santa Cruz, California, and they record it for our edification. The one woman there assures us that she does not water the tree of liberty in public, though. Wednesday, June 24. 2009The CentenarianOur blogfriend Gerard at American Digest has a story to tell, and tells it. All writers know what it is to retreat into a world of your own making inside your head. What if it was all you had?
The whole thing's here. I'd read it if I were you.
Friday, June 12. 2009Hey Jenny Slater. Hey Jenny Slater. Hey Jenny Slater
The Letterman thing exposes something. Something other than what's being discussed.
It's difficult to write, and in turn, tell jokes. Really funny people rarely tell jokes. They outline a narrative in a humorous way. If you sprinkle in a funny turn of phrase here and there, those are jokes, but they're not the point. If you've ever seen a good comedian appear in a nightclub when they're working on new material, it's generally really disjointed and unfunny. There's no thread running through it yet, and the jokes bomb or get a laugh, but you can't get a wave to ride on. A monologue done nightly is just watercooler chat. The day's happenings in a stream. But Letterman's DOA joke about Sarah Palin's daughter wasn't really topical, and it wasn't funny, and it stuck out like a sore thumb. It was an excuse to be vicious, and it showed that Letterman had been waiting for quite a while for any chance to say something unpleasant about someone he really doesn't like.That's why it seemed so jarring. Letterman likes to trade on his midwestern homeliness, and likes the association people have always made between him and Johnny Carson. Carson was from the midwest, too, of course, and Carson liked Letterman and had a lot to do with his success. It always rankled Letterman that he didn't replace Carson. He's become bitter about it, and it shows. But the impetus of the joke that bombed is exactly why Letterman never replaced Carson. Carson was talented, and funny, and wry, and light on his feet, and he was every bit the equal of every star that sat across from him. He knew what to talk to stars about, because he was a star. Letterman was always a kind of lame-o Lucifer to Carson's Archangel, and everybody knew it. Letterman made his name by being the king's fool. The king suffered someone aping him, to amuse him, but a fool is always a fool. You're allowed to say what you want, but there's no promotion ever in the offing. You get to hang around until you put your foot in it. And when you displease your sovereign, you get the ax, not the hook. Letterman's congenital problem manifested itself in spades. He is a Beta male in an industry filled with Beta males. Even the industry's a Beta. He's not even an entertainer -- his job is to talk to and about entertainers. They say politics is show-business for ugly people, and the similarities are manifest. Politics is often home to Beta males that try to cut in front of the big men on life's campus by the side door. Same deal. That's why they get along famously. Continue reading "Hey Jenny Slater. Hey Jenny Slater. Hey Jenny Slater" Sunday, June 7. 2009The Plunder Economy: Mission Accomplished!I tried to explain how the fun new plunder economy works to my friends the Republicans. Not interested, I guess. I'll try once more. The only people listening to you, when you put on your tinfoil helmet and yelled as loudly as you could that Obama was closing only auto dealerships that belonged to conservatives, were other conservatives. They got the message. Just not the one you thought they would. Hey, here's a letter from Steny Hoyer and two other Democrats to President Obama:
Go on; speculate exactly how ***snicker*** Steny Hoyer knows these dealerships are "profitable." There's a bit more along this line in the rest of the letter. You can read the whole thing at Politico44. But allow me to translate for you: Car dealers are all conservative, more or less. They've constituted a cash cow for the Republican Party up until now. They have now gotten the message that it's not safe to be a businessman and donate money to Republicans. They got that message from other conservatives. They've now showed up at Steny Hoyer's door, and pledged their fealty, and I'm sure cash, to become rock-ribbed Democrats from here on in. There's an expression: Don't play checkers while the other side is playing chess. This is vaguely like that, except the right side of the blogosphere is playing checkers, and the Democrats are playing Kill the Man With the Ball. Keep it up, and you'll have the intellectual purity you seek. Intellectual purity is easy when you're all alone.
Thursday, June 4. 2009Got Apocalypse? I've rubbed shoulders with all sorts of kooks. True believers of the believingest kind, without much truth discernible in the final recipe. Holy rollers; snakehandlers. A few animists. Dopers, Buddhists, straight-up Leninists soldiering on long after Lenin lost interest. Knights of Columbus. People that wouldn't eat meat on Friday all the way to Sikhs that would stab you with their little dagger if you lit a cigarette next to them. People that speak Klingon. But in all my travels I've never encountered a bigger bunch of intellectual anti-matter apocalyptic paranoid delusional wharrgarbll cult nonsense than this item from ABC News. Think about that. If David Koresh and Ted Kaczinski got married and started sharing notes, they couldn't come up with a less reasonable worldview than one of the three major networks serving as a news outlet to the american continent. ABC must be hiring interns from The Onion, because this is listed under Science and Technology:
Well, they got it partially correct. I indeed "would rather not face" these "ideas," in the same way I don't want to face the ideas being yelled at passing cars by men who sleep on park benches and wet themselves regularly. So people with misspelled signs, unkempt beards, and who wash themselves in the bubbler in the public park are my go-to guys for such apocalyptica. Who are the "experts" that ABC News goes to for their volcano-maiden advice? Continue reading "Got Apocalypse?"
Posted by Roger de Hauteville
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09:48
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Wednesday, June 3. 2009Welcome to Maggie's Farm Ricola Butt-Trumpet ExtravaganzaPoor Bird Dog. He's not very sophisticated. He's settled for a second-rate bizarre Swiss instrument to annoy his neighbors with. Well, I can't sit idly by and let some Swisstafarian bang on a dented wok and let it be passed off as cutting edge Swiss weirdness. The guy's positively buttoned down compared to Eliana Burki and her swingin' alpenhorn. She's wearing a miniskirt and has lips like quadriceps. What's not to like? Friday, May 29. 2009Obama Thanks You For All The Free AdvertisingI'm not sure what to say to my Republican friends anymore. I honestly thought all the pearl clutching paranoids pulled the lever with the D next to it, but I guess I was mistaken. You ran the least attractive candidate possible for President and lost by a little and you're ready to commit suicide in your Ayn Rand bunker after you're finished homeschooling your kids. It's tiresome stuff. I'm going to try to explain it to you one more time. Obama, and all his accomplices in his co-prosperity sphere, are not "secret" anythings. Not secret muslims, socialists, communists, antichrists or Illuminati. He'd adore it if you spent the next eight years looking for his birth certificate, because he knows it's a colossal waste of his enemies' time, and that's a natural born fact. It's a straight plunder economy. Why are you so confused and surprised about this? You keep talking about all sorts of ill effects that are going to appear in decades and verify your wild hypothesis about the guy. But the effects are always immediate and visible. He's not playing a deep game here.I take that back. Maybe he is. He's confused a lot of people into thinking he's confusing. Poor Rich Moran. He's all shocked that maybe car dealership closings under the watchful eye of Democrat mandarins are going to fall along party lines, and figures it's earthshaking.
Continue reading "Obama Thanks You For All The Free Advertising"
Posted by Roger de Hauteville
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10:59
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Tuesday, May 19. 2009George W. Cromwell
You're never going to understand the contemporary fringe left until you understand what happened to Oliver Cromwell.
Maureen Dowd got caught plagiarizing a blogger in her New York Times column the other day. But calling the lockstep mindset she's channeling "plagiarism" is superfluous. She's cribbing the homework of someone who writes something called Talking Points Memo, after all. They can all finish one another's sentences, or start them to get the ball rolling. Makes no never mind. They never have an original thought, just endless permutations of the same drivel about George W. Bush. They all think if they rearrange the words a little one more time, George Bush will be guilty and Karl Rove will be arrested or Alberto Gonzales won't be able to rent movies from Netflix or... something. Or maybe they'll all be tried in absentia in some weird traffic court based in a European country whose GDP is less than Al Gore's electric bill, and George will be forever unable to travel to some frosty HMO masquerading as a country to pick up the Nobel prize they'll never award him anyway. It seems like trying to invest heavily in tulip bulb futures at this point to any sane observer. George wasn't running in the last election; he's very, very unlikely to stand in the next one. But still they persist. If you are a monomaniac, you try to convert others to your mania. Smart people give you the cold shoulder immediately. If you listen a little, you're going to have to listen a lot. It's the reason you don't make eye contact with people yelling at traffic in the street. It doesn't pay to seem interested and polite. Continue reading "George W. Cromwell"
Posted by Roger de Hauteville
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01:02
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Saturday, May 16. 2009The Meek Shall Inherit The Earth -- After This Guy's Done With It, No Sooner
Oh yes; he's barefoot.
Posted by Roger de Hauteville
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08:52
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Tuesday, April 28. 2009The Savior? That's Funny. I Mistook Him For The Guy On The Left In The Village PeopleSaturday, April 25. 2009You Can Do It. We Can HelpAh, spring. Time to spruce up around the farm. Dear! I'm heading down to the Depot to pick up a few things.
Norm says it'll be easy and fun as long as we're all wearing our safety glasses.
Thursday, April 23. 2009I Got Phoenecian Pneumonia And The Ugaritic FluGeez, Bird Dog. You kids these days with your newfangled Greek lyre and pan-flute
The text consists of: "Akkadian terms written in a Hurrianized manner and enscribed in Ugaritic Cuneiform script." (Big deal. According to our current Treasury Secretary, so are the instructions to TurboTax) You can read all about the tablet and the people that read Hurrian well enough to decipher it here. In the meantime, some Man-o-man, you're L7 if you didn't tap a toe to that one. Hurr Hurr Hurrian, baybee!
Saturday, April 18. 2009That Word. You Keep Using It...Democratic representative from Illinois Jan Schakowsky says you're "despicable" because you don't want to pay the government whatever the hell they want whenever the hell they want it without whimpering. Let's compare and contrast two "community activists," shall we? Congresswoman's Husband Gets Jail Time For Bank Fraud Tuesday, April 14. 2009World's Greatest HeadlineUntil today,the greatest news headline evar- the gold standard, really - has been:
But now a new competitor in the WTF sweepstakes, 8 pica division, is in, and it's a daisy: Japanese Popstar Dressed As Pineapple Robbed In Malmo I'd like to give the author credit, but these things write themselves these days, don't they?
Posted by Roger de Hauteville
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14:54
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Friday, April 3. 2009Welcome To The PlunderdomeCongress approves $3.5 trillion budget plan. If you need a laugh, read to the end:
"Streamlines." I see everyone went to Creative Non-Fiction class at Community College, and emerged with only an Unintentional Humor merit badge. Whatever. I'm simultaneously amused by Republicans talking about creeping socialism. You're creeping socialists, too; you just want to spend other people's money on the things you prefer.
But this Senate/Congress/TOTUS tripartite turd isn't anything like creeping socialism. Everyone in the chattering classes is so far wrong about this thing they can't even understand that creeping socialism isn't the bad end result we should expect, it's the infomercial come-on for the plunder economy someone's really after. Socialism is the carrot, not the slippery-slope outcome stick. Forget socialism; this is feudalism redux. It's the Chicago way. Man can live and satisfy his wants only by ceaseless labor; by the ceaseless application of his faculties to natural resources. This process is the origin of property.
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