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.
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.
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.
"The stubborn yet false rumor that President Obama’s health care proposals would create government-sponsored “death panels” to decide which patients were worthy of living seemed to arise from nowhere in recent weeks."
Boy, the world sure is a mysterious place to the New York Times.
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:
"As always, whitey now sits in judgment of me, preparing to cast my fate. It is your decision either to let me blow with the wind as a nonentity or to encourage the development of self. Allow me to prove myself."
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.
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:
The History of your browser tells me where you have been and what you have seen, but your Bookmarks tell me who you are and what you believe.
Mark Twain remarked, "You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I'll tell you what his 'pinions is." Bookmarks are the corn pone from which your 'pinions are baked, but if you have the kind of soul that has run "Clear History" on your life your 'pinions are not likely to have any foundation in the long history of Freedom, but only yearn towards a Utopian tomorrow that never knows.
Much of the current disunity seen in our politics arises between those who ran "Clear History" in November of 2000 and those who saw History return with a vengeance in September of 2001.
One group is determined to deny History expunge the Declaration and shred the Constitution in pursuit of a utopia that's buried in a global network of mass graves. Another group are those who believe in the American idea and are determined let this new birth of freedom work its way across the world. Absent a defining historical event of global significance, this twain shall not meet. There is, of course, a third group of people who want to merely get on with their happy world untroubled by History, either cleared or present as a clear and present danger.
It's three years old and rerun, so you know it's not 20/20 hindsight talking.
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.
It's crappy to talk with glee about other people's misery. It's all I see, everywhere, among the pundit class. People with sinecures, full of 20/20 hindsight advice for people who did their best to participate in American public life and got creamed. Can we have a care for those under the wheels of this bus, please?
Going John Galt deliberately is such a petty thing to claim. It's the battle cry of the effete, the sheltered, the shiftless. Poor people don't have the luxury of going Galt; they go hungry. It's an inapt title, anyway, for the undesired effect of strangling investment in the cradle. But instead of pointing out that the malefactors that have prima facie contempt for all commerce that doesn't involve the government are dismantling the entire edifice of honest pay for honest work in the private sector, you're claiming you're deliberately trying to hurt your fellow citizens -- to use their misery as a club to beat your political foes. That marks yourself for contempt. Would you deliberately hurt your fellow citizens to prove a point? I doubt it, really I do; why would you say you'd welcome a chance to do it? It is pure ego that makes you claim you're doing it on purpose. "I meant to do that" belongs in a comedy sketch.
Sensible people who are well-off are very cautious right now, and have been since that day John McCain, already the last turkey in the shop, announced he was suspending his campaign and going back to Washington to look for another camera to get in front of. That was the day everyone knew you were going to get Studs Urkel, San Fran Nan, and Dingy Harry running your affairs for four years. A three horned anti-capitalist bull was born that day, no later. But I'm not talking about being sensible here.
People not so well-off were sensible, too, and borrowed money to purchase a house whose value was determined by credible third parties, and got creamed. They purchased items on credit lent at 9 percent and suddenly collected at 29 percent. They worked hard at jobs that ceased to exist overnight. They navigated the shoals of everyday life using the only buoys of information at hand to determine how to proceed. Now I watch wealthy people mocking them by saying they got what they always deserved. Working people shouldn't have a decent standard of living just by bumping along and cooperating and trying, should they? Let's call their house sprawl and their children dullards and their food junk and their autos hogs and tell them to get back to the trailer park where they belong.
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.
Our 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?
I'd be building the world's worst sandcastle on the beach in Balboa
as my father and uncle tossed a football back and forth on the hot
sand. I'd be waking up in the back seat of our 1951 Chevy and seeing my
grandparents' faces pressed against the glass as the first snow I'd
ever seen fell softly behind them in the twilight. I'd be with my first
wife on my wedding night at the Pierre. I'd be at my job on the better
days. I'd be in a taxi in New York going downtown at three in the
morning making all the lights. I'd go back to a warm field in a
California twilight and listen to the breath and laughter of a young
girl heard once and never again. I'd sit in the sun in front of a
rose-covered cottage in Big Sur. I'd be laughing on the Spanish Stairs
or weaving drunk along a cliff road on Hydra under a bronze moon and
above a wine-dark sea. I'd be high up in a hotel in Paris looking down
at the Seine in the rain. I'd hold my one-year-old daughter over my
head while lying on the grass in the Boston Public gardens in the
spring and see her face framed with cherry blossoms. Those and a
million other rooms in my Palace of Memory I'd visit over and over
again until they all ran together in a blur as the train, accelerating,
finally left the station and leapt towards the stars and beyond and,
finally forgetting all of that, I saw for a fleeting moment the mystery
complete.
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.
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:
Dear President Obama:
We are writing to express our concerns about General Motors’ and Chrysler’s decision to close profitable automobile dealerships across the country, and urge you to ask GM and Chrysler to delay final action on proposed closures pending further review of the decision to consolidate dealerships and the process by which Chrysler and GM selected the dealerships to close.
Closing these dealerships will put over 100,000 jobs at risk at a time when our country is shedding jobs at an alarming rate. We also question the criteria being used to determine which dealerships should be closed and the fundamental fairness involved in this effort. It is our view that the market rather than leaving it up to the manufacturers whose poor leadership contributed to their demise. Furthermore, we believe car dealers will be key players in any effort to revive the American auto industry...
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.
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:
It's an idea that most of us would rather not face -- that within the next century, life as we know it could come to an end. Our civilization could crumble, leaving only traces of modern human existence behind. It seems outlandish, extreme -- even impossible. But according to cutting edge scientific research, it is a very real possibility. And unless we make drastic changes now, it could very well happen. Experts have a stark warning: that unless we change course, the "perfect storm" of population growth, dwindling resources and climate change has the potential to converge in the next century with catastrophic results.
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?
Poor 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?
I'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.
This story is about ready to explode. All the ingredients are there for a gigantic political scandal that would shake the Obama administration to its foundation and perhaps take down several high ranking officials. All that's needed is one connecting piece of evidence that would tie the White House Automotive Task Force to some political arm of the Democratic party.
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.
People join PETA because they think they understand the relationship between man and nature better than a guy who goes out in a rice paddy, at night, with a spear, to kill the feral hogs that are trying to eat every last grain.
Geez, Bird Dog. You kids these days with your newfangled Greek lyre and pan-flute noise music. I kick it old school -- Phoenecian, baby! 3400 years ago, the oldest known written melody was scratched out in cuneiform.
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 robo-dweeb hep cat has tightened up his funky lyre and banged out that paean to Nikkal, the Moon Goddess:
Man-o-man, you're L7 if you didn't tap a toe to that one. Hurr Hurr Hurrian, baybee!
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?
The House bill streamlines President Obama's $3.6 trillion proposal and seeks to trim the deficit to $1.2 trillion in 2010, compared to the president's figure of $1.4 trillion.
"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.
But it is also true that a man may live and satisfy his wants by seizing and consuming the products of the labor of others. This process is the origin of plunder.
Now since man is naturally inclined to avoid pain — and since labor is pain in itself — it follows that men will resort to plunder whenever plunder is easier than work. History shows this quite clearly. And under these conditions, neither religion nor morality can stop it.
When, then, does plunder stop? It stops when it becomes more painful and more dangerous than labor.
It is evident, then, that the proper purpose of law is to use the power of its collective force to stop this fatal tendency to plunder instead of to work. All the measures of the law should protect property and punish plunder.
But, generally, the law is made by one man or one class of men. And since law cannot operate without the sanction and support of a dominating force, this force must be entrusted to those who make the laws.
This fact, combined with the fatal tendency that exists in the heart of man to satisfy his wants with the least possible effort, explains the almost universal perversion of the law. Thus it is easy to understand how law, instead of checking injustice, becomes the invincible weapon of injustice. It is easy to understand why the law is used by the legislator to destroy in varying degrees among the rest of the people, their personal independence by slavery, their liberty by oppression, and their property by plunder. This is done for the benefit of the person who makes the law, and in proportion to the power that he holds.
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. 
The Letterman thing exposes something. Something other than what's being discussed. 
I'm not sure what to say to my Republican friends anymore. 
You're never going to understand the contemporary fringe left until you understand what happened to Oliver Cromwell. 
