Of course because they're the practical ones because they have to be because they get left holding the bag with the baby in it.
Hattip Glenn Reynolds
Tuesday, September 30, 2014
“For all the talk of feminist revolution and male resistance, it seems that women are in some ways more traditional than men when it comes to marital norms.
CATHY YOUNG: What Women Still Want In A Husband.
Of course because they're the practical ones because they have to be because they get left holding the bag with the baby in it.
Of course because they're the practical ones because they have to be because they get left holding the bag with the baby in it.
One way the populist worm may turn.
Lots of incumbents are vulnerable to this type of ad. It's a powerful piece. I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like it. Worth your time.
Killed for looking at a BB gun while black and male.
There is an epidemic of bad Samaritans in our nation. People who put the worst interpretation on what they see and immediately call the police in which in this case got an innocent young man killed by trigger happy SWAT-holes.
Neighbors don't treat neighbors that way.
Details at the link.
Details at the link.
http://danaloeschradio.com/anti-gun-hysteria-results-in-two-deaths
Monday, September 29, 2014
My Top ten books
General observations. When choosing best books we are dominated by our circumstances: I speak English and live in the early twenty first century. I detest academic tomes and books where people presume to tell you how to live. Prose style is important to me - if it's not well written it can't be important. I also cannot understand how you can have a greatest book list with no fiction, poetry or drama on it. Aside from the Bible it is literature that struggles with the eternal questions. A non-fiction life is flat, lacking in the things that truly make life worth living - as an example: the 'great' non fiction books as a rule aren't funny and you gotta have funny. Therefore my first three books are fiction, first, Drama:
Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare - JC is my favorite of all his tragedies. Caesar was a great man who because of his pride destroyed everything that he cherished. It reminds me that even when we are within our rights we can make horrible destructive choices for others. It also reminds that we must choose which side we're on. There are no neutrals in life.
Poetry: The Waste Land by TS Eliot - First of all Eliot is from the 'Lou (woo hoo) but even more importantly TWL is a piece of secular prophecy - it reflects the cacophony, alienation and despair of what in 1922 was the looming deluge. This honor, belief and dignity destroying 'modern' civilization continues to tear at our souls and with each passing year fewer and fewer of us even understand what is happening. Eliot the High Church snob saw this and despaired. Even his disjoint and disorienting modernist style serves to communicate the roaring bedlam that the world has become.
Prose Fiction: Huckleberry Finn by Samuel Clemens: HF is a book that reminds us that when we flee our problems we often are simply driving ourselves deeper into the heart of darkness. That to try to live rightly is agonizingly difficult and yet the only option if we are to keep our selves.
The Protestant Bible: While not fiction it is not truly non fiction either because it speaks of things that depend on our faith. It's about God and our relationship with him and all that foofera but I treasure it because of the incredible characters that fill its pages. This was the first truly human book - the first to treat human beings as persons rather than symbols or categories. It remains the greatest explanation of why we are here and why we're important. It was through this book that mankind first received the gift of dignity.
There are a couple of popular science books on my list. Genome by Matt Ridley and Quantum Reality by Nick Herbert - The Genomic/Evolution and Quantum Mechanics theories are the two most culturally influential ideas of our age regardless of how accurate our understanding of them turns out to be. The Genomic/Evolution theory has pushed God from the center of the action to the edge (though not necessarily from the center of reality) while the Quantum Theory has dethroned certainty. You see ripples of these ideas everywhere. These books are a bit old but the point is not the details but the impact on the lens that we see the world through.
Modern Times by Paul Johnson. Johnson ties together the anomie of The Waste Land (#2) with the dislocation driven by the theories underlying Genomic/Evolution (#5) and Quantum Reality (#6) with a Catholic sensibility (#4 minus apocrypha) into a coherent narrative that explains how we have gotten here and what is happening to us. And he's a damn good prose stylist to boot.
The Blank Slate by Stephen Pinker is a brilliant summary of what science knows about our natures. In it the atheist Pinker surveys over one thousand studies confirming the traditional 'tragic' view of human nature as imperfect and unperfectable creatures while adding lots of fascinating detail to the picture. It rubbishes all utopian fantasies whether by Marxists or Church ladies. A word of warning: don't look at his photo on the back page because his perm will give you nightmares. Woof!
The Road to Serfdom by Fred Hayek. Not really economics but instead true moral philosophy of the highest order without the miserable aridity of academic philosophy. A U Chicago man (my fair school) as well. The anti-Krugman and anything that gives Pauly K conniptions has to be good.
Liberal Fascism - I agree with David Shane. Jonah Goldberg's book explains our politics and specifically why the pursuit of power for its own sake in our world is so dangerous. Much of what our elites are doing from Rape hysteria to Climate hysteria to Redskin hysteria is inexplicable without understanding what Jonah has laid out. Completely and totally freaked John Stewart of the Daily Show out - which is always a good sign.
Okay, that's my ten but I demand the right to add one more:
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams - Actually three very good books (four and five are much weaker), The Hitchhiker trilogy reminds the arrogant part of each of us that no matter what we invent, write, build or achieve, sometime in the future someone is going to make a rude joke of it or use it in naughty ways. And if that doesn't give you humility, nothing will. Eventually everything becomes funny, particularly us.
Also, this exercise reminds me why I try to avoid being challenged to do things by gosh darn academics - it takes so much time and it ends up making you sound pompous as hell. Darn you David Shane!
Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare - JC is my favorite of all his tragedies. Caesar was a great man who because of his pride destroyed everything that he cherished. It reminds me that even when we are within our rights we can make horrible destructive choices for others. It also reminds that we must choose which side we're on. There are no neutrals in life.
Prose Fiction: Huckleberry Finn by Samuel Clemens: HF is a book that reminds us that when we flee our problems we often are simply driving ourselves deeper into the heart of darkness. That to try to live rightly is agonizingly difficult and yet the only option if we are to keep our selves.
The Protestant Bible: While not fiction it is not truly non fiction either because it speaks of things that depend on our faith. It's about God and our relationship with him and all that foofera but I treasure it because of the incredible characters that fill its pages. This was the first truly human book - the first to treat human beings as persons rather than symbols or categories. It remains the greatest explanation of why we are here and why we're important. It was through this book that mankind first received the gift of dignity.
There are a couple of popular science books on my list. Genome by Matt Ridley and Quantum Reality by Nick Herbert - The Genomic/Evolution and Quantum Mechanics theories are the two most culturally influential ideas of our age regardless of how accurate our understanding of them turns out to be. The Genomic/Evolution theory has pushed God from the center of the action to the edge (though not necessarily from the center of reality) while the Quantum Theory has dethroned certainty. You see ripples of these ideas everywhere. These books are a bit old but the point is not the details but the impact on the lens that we see the world through.
Modern Times by Paul Johnson. Johnson ties together the anomie of The Waste Land (#2) with the dislocation driven by the theories underlying Genomic/Evolution (#5) and Quantum Reality (#6) with a Catholic sensibility (#4 minus apocrypha) into a coherent narrative that explains how we have gotten here and what is happening to us. And he's a damn good prose stylist to boot.
The Blank Slate by Stephen Pinker is a brilliant summary of what science knows about our natures. In it the atheist Pinker surveys over one thousand studies confirming the traditional 'tragic' view of human nature as imperfect and unperfectable creatures while adding lots of fascinating detail to the picture. It rubbishes all utopian fantasies whether by Marxists or Church ladies. A word of warning: don't look at his photo on the back page because his perm will give you nightmares. Woof!
The Road to Serfdom by Fred Hayek. Not really economics but instead true moral philosophy of the highest order without the miserable aridity of academic philosophy. A U Chicago man (my fair school) as well. The anti-Krugman and anything that gives Pauly K conniptions has to be good.
Liberal Fascism - I agree with David Shane. Jonah Goldberg's book explains our politics and specifically why the pursuit of power for its own sake in our world is so dangerous. Much of what our elites are doing from Rape hysteria to Climate hysteria to Redskin hysteria is inexplicable without understanding what Jonah has laid out. Completely and totally freaked John Stewart of the Daily Show out - which is always a good sign.
Okay, that's my ten but I demand the right to add one more:
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams - Actually three very good books (four and five are much weaker), The Hitchhiker trilogy reminds the arrogant part of each of us that no matter what we invent, write, build or achieve, sometime in the future someone is going to make a rude joke of it or use it in naughty ways. And if that doesn't give you humility, nothing will. Eventually everything becomes funny, particularly us.
Also, this exercise reminds me why I try to avoid being challenged to do things by gosh darn academics - it takes so much time and it ends up making you sound pompous as hell. Darn you David Shane!
The many trahisons des clercs: Catastrophic Global Warming Edition
Katabasis is a mainstream climate scientist who has become horrified at the dishonesty of the proponents of Anthropogenic Global Warning. The tentative, incomplete and heavily caveated conclusions of the scientists are wildly exaggerated by the politicians and politicized scientists. Katabasis particularly holds climate scientists who are 'keeping their head down' and avoiding confronting how their science and reputations are being exploited by power mad authoritarians. Here is his conclusion:
Cook, Mann and many of the other members of ‘the team’ are wilfully deceptive. They should have been laughed off the stage, not applauded. I’m not willing to accept the ‘Noble cause corruption’ narrative and neither, it seems, are some others. This isn’t just individual failure, it’s institutional. And that’s where it really sticks in the craw for me. And it drives much of my anger, as well as that of the people who I have successfully introduced to climate scepticism/realism.
The wellspring of that anger deserves proper articulation. There’s a quote attributed to Martin Luther King that I have always liked that is apposite:
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
If any of those reading consider themselves part of the ‘climate mainstream’, then I urge you to meditate on the above carefully when reading what follows as it applies to you on several levels.
When I am introducing someone to the sceptical range of views an exercise I often use is to give them a link to the IPCC WG1 report (now AR5, previously I linked them to AR4). I then invite them to pick three chapters at random – any three whatsoever (other than the Summary for Policymakers (SPM)) – and skim them (or read them in full if they have the time) and come back to me with their impressions. I experience the same response every time and indeed, it matches my own. Reading the report’s individual chapters (sans the SPM), one comes away with the impression of a scholarly, ponderous document. Lots of caveats, uncertainties, doubts, gaps and so on are clearly articulated. In short, it is what one generally expects from academic output. Then the anger flows in. It is a painfully sharp contrast to the mainstream narratives. Within those there’s disaster lurking at any moment, around every corner. It’s always ‘worse than we thought’. The climate science establishment are unanimous in agreeing that thermageddon is imminent – they’re 95% certain, in fact! About every aspect of the topic!
At this point the brakes screech. The red lights start flashing. As I get older each year, the people I introduce to sceptical books, blogs and insights become ever younger. They move ever closer to that group of young men and women just entering adulthood who have not seen global warming for their entire lives. Yet they’ve been indoctrinated right from the very start. Many come out of our education fearful for the future, as our host has amply demonstrated.[6]
They are told incessantly that the world is dying, there isn’t much hope without urgent and extreme action, and it’s all their fault for living with some creature comforts. We’re drowning in something, but it isn’t rising sea levels. It’s prognostications of doom in a legion of screaming litanies that continually fail to occur as advertised. Why hasn’t action been taken? It’s those evil ‘deniers’ and their tobacco/oil/[insert idiocy] industry backing spreading doubt and preventing action. Except it isn’t. The ‘mainstream’ of climate science is chock full of doubts, including about the hysterical prophecies of the reverend Al Gore and sychophants. The heart rate rises, respiration increases. A state of low level adrenal emergency is entered. Why didn’t they tell us? Why have our school teachers, our media, our parents, our climate science establishment not reined in the irresponsible activist-scientists and their supporters in advocate groups? Angry? You bet.
And that’s just among the general public. What of those of us who have, or have had, a continuing relationship with academia? Some of the reactions I’ve witnessed there have eclipsed even my white hot reaction.
Of my friends and family who take an interest in sincere discussion on these issues, those with a more political bent I sent to Pointman’s blog.[7] Those of a more philosophical to Ben Pile’s.[8] For those of my friends pursuing academic careers however, I sent them to Duarte’s holdout. Duarte does two things particularly well – he provides a comprehensive and scholarly critique of recent Cook and Lewandowsky offerings. He also proffers a very particular kind of outrage. That of the academic betrayed.
I felt exactly the same when I turned fully to climate scepticism/realism. As I discussed this week with Barry Woods and Richard Drake, I was working in a lab at the time. I still regarded the scientific and academic establishments as the last hold out for hope. It didn’t matter that political and economic wrangling was hopelessly fragged. Science and the quest for an ever clearer insight into the ways of the world, led by paragons of integrity, would see us through. Or so I naively believed. Discovering that a substantive area of science had let itself be presented in such a monstrous form in the public eye was an extremely bitter pill to swallow indeed.
I discovered that being a climate sceptic in the ivory towers was dangerous. It’s why I maintain a veneer of pseudonymity still. I can’t express the anger or bitterness at the sense of extreme betrayal in the written word, though I’ve often burst my top with expletives on the subject online and off. To find that the bladder bursting conniptions of our literati concerning our imminent doom as a result of our carbon sins is in fact an exaggeration of the facts off the scale even when compared to the famous UK ‘dodgy dossier’ on Iraq was, for a budding academic, the worst betrayal.
I didn’t sign up for this. Duarte didn’t sign up for this. Nor did any of my friends and colleagues in my age group who planned a career either in, or closely related to academia. The covenant has been broken. It’s precisely this kind of hyperbole that they should exist in order to rein in, to let cooler heads prevail. But there’s no ponderous pontification here, the overheated chicken littles run the roost whilst the ‘mainstream’ of climate science appears to sit comfortably, keeping eggs warm for the future. I’ve met a few of you in person now. You tell me, quietly, that you don’t agree with the hysteria at all, and that it’s clear from your published work.
Not good enough.
Some of you may remember from my report on the ‘RSclimate’ event that I challenged Mat Collins on this issue. That’s the same Mat Collins who is the Joint Met Office Chair in Climate Change. When I asked why he and others didn’t attempt to rein in the hysterics, who do not represent what the IPCC actually says, he said it wasn’t his responsibility. More recently, at the Walker Institute annual lecture, on climate change communication, myself and Barry Woods questioned none other than the government’s chief scientific adviser himself, Mark Walport. I put it to him that AR5 did not support catastrophic conclusions with any certainty. He responded that when he said climate change was going to be ‘bad’ he did not mean ‘catastrophic’. He failed to provide a definition of ‘bad’. This was the keynote lecture for a climate change communication outfit. If he can’t communicate something so important that is so very easily misconstrued into the worst case scenario to someone like myself who is relatively well informed on the topic, what hope the general public?
In short, there seems to be no stomach amongst the ‘mainstream’ climate establishment to do anything very much to counter the incredibly pernicious effect of our Cooks, Manns, Lewandowskys and Hansens. You don’t seem to realise that the public already lumps all of you together and some of us who know better are at the end of their tether in trying to maintain that distinction. The effort is a law of diminishing returns – why should we attempt to lift you out of a hole you continue to keep digging deeper? History won’t care what your inscrutable paywalled article actually said. Neither will the general public. They’ll care that you didn’t speak out when you should have. That you allowed everyone who raised objections be painted as part of some shady conspiracy funded by billions in filthy lucre. That you allowed their children to be terrified by a vision of monstrous and hopeless futures. The anger is going to continue to grow until a significant portion of the climate mainstream steps up to the plate, and would be well advised to do so before the leash well and truly snaps.
Whilst I’m loathe to use a Socialist Worker Party slogan here, this one is entirely apt:
If not us, then who? If not now, then when?
A groundhog trapped in the land of the angels - failing to come of age in 1970s Jakarta
They say that boys develop slower than girls and I believe them.
When my son graduated the sixth grade - excuse me, but when did people start graduating the sixth grade? My Grandfather only made it to the sixth grade but they didn't hold a bleeding graduation for him did they? No they sent him off to work as a tool monkey on oil rigs - imagine the educational credentials you need to be a twelve year old tool monkey. But my son's school had to have a graduation ceremony where every kid was expected to recite a poem or somebody's used speech or bang on a piano and if they screwed up would cause their parents to lose face with all the other scheming, grasping social climbers that infested Ladue like termites on a Baobab tree. So parents would hire teams of professionals to turn their lackluster spawn into a poor facsimile of a pop star for one lousy rendition of a 3 minute song so they could one up the Friedmans only to be upstaged by the Korean scholarship kid playing flawless Chopin. Bloody private schools. Or when I'm thinking more clearly: bloody overachieving immigrants.
But I digress. As I was saying, it was when my son graduated the sixth grade that I first realized something quite shocking: among the thirty or so students graduating there were 15 little boys in matching blue blazers and mommy's best bowl cuts and a few little girl equivalents. Then there were 11 or 12 beautiful, poised young women who seemed to have strolled into the wrong ceremony. I turned to my (ex) wife and said: I don't remember it being like this when I was their age. She looked at me dismissively and said: "it still is" - no, that's no true, she didn't say that but she was thinking it. What she really said was "Oh yeah, that's the way it is at that age".
I had no idea.
Not a clue, not even a hint of a clue of the immense chasm between boys and girls. Which is funny because I lived it. No that's not quite right: I writhed in agony over it for years on end. I was a small, late developing and particularly testosterone challenged young man (young man being what older adults call you when you exhibit absolutely no evidence of manhood whatsoever). And I had no idea what was really going on. Yes, I had had the "talk" and had played tether-ball while the girls had all the "extra talks" which in retrospect wasn't fair at all. Not only were they emotionally, physically and for all I know spiritually more mature, they also got more coaching - how in the devil did they expect me to cope with such an extreme power imbalance?
Badly.
For I was Protoman - in theory male but lacking virtually all evidence thereof, a subterranean dwelling groundhog like creature who when I first came to the surface in seventh grade encountered such dazzling creatures, such angels, so unlike the grubs and roots that I had lived with my whole life that I was blinded and like Punxsutawny Phil forced to retreat and await the end of my puberty winter six years hence. Were I wiser, I would have stayed underground or gotten sent to a military school or boys reformatory or supermax prison or some other place less harrowing than American style secondary coeducation was for me.
But of course I didn't.
Because I had fallen in love. With all of them. Well almost all of them or at least in love with the idea of being in love with all of them which admittedly - given my lagging hormonal chemistry - was a rather foolish thing to do. But as I stipulated earlier I had absolutely no idea that the girls that I saw walking around my school had in the space of a few short months moved light years beyond the kids that I used to beat at Indian leg wrestling. And crucially, that I had stayed stuck firmly in the same shrimp sized space I had always inhabited. It was this dichotomy between my self image: "Debonair man about campus", my reality: "Pure boy containing no less than 10% pimples by weight" and the changed status of the girls around me: "Goddesses" that was the source of so much pain and suffering through my junior high and high school career. Take for example the problem with my locker.
At my international school in Jakarta we had those little lockers that stacked five one on top of the other and I had the middle one. The two lockers above me were occupied by two of the tallest, blondest girls that I had ever met. They were from Germany and Holland respectively and they had breasts. At about exactly my eye level. They would come up between class talking in their (in my humble opinion) sexy Germanic accents and stand there with their lockers open expecting me to weave between their - I mean them - to get to mine. Sometimes they would drop things on me and I would pick them up for which they thanked me the way a young Marlene Dietrich must have thanked Humphrey Bogart for saving her from Nazis, turning me into a gibbering, crimson ninny. To this day I attribute my "C" in Algebra I to poor locker placement. I cannot understand how the school could be so lax as to not consider the threat of psychological trauma to boys like me when allocating locker space.
Then there were the Bikinis. There is this notion among church ladies and other paragons of virtue that small revealing bathing apparel is immoral. I don't know about immoral but for protomen like me it was definitely stressful. Particularly in Jakarta which is five hundred miles away from the equator and warm all year round. And given that one of the 'hot spots' for teens centered upon an American club with a large pool and a notable lack of air conditioning, bikinis were de rigueur. Bikinis weren't a big problem in the fourth grade but the bikini issue began to rear its curvaceous head in sixth grade and was a roaring monster by seventh, expanding in certain directions every year thereafter. I'm not really sure girls understood just what an impact all the bikini-age had on the boys around them. Perhaps it was a special topic covered while we were playing tether-ball. Something along the lines of "OK girls here's something that will drive the boys nuts but the key is that you can't ever let on that you know it's making them gaga. Here are the three key maneuvers guaranteed to temporarily cut blood supply to the male brain reducing their ability to cope by the equivalent of ten IQ points". Me, I think I generally lost twenty because encountering bikini clad teen girls limited my vocabulary to single syllable words and "ums" and I had an incredibly difficult time answering simple questions with anything but a strong, declarative grunt.
Now I'm all "yay" bikini - except for my daughter of course - but back then I honestly don't know how I made it through holidays like spring break and Christmas what with all the exposed Goddess flesh.
To get girls to pay attention to me I often would 'hang out' with guys that I thought girls liked or at least that girls stood near for extended periods of time in the hopes that whatever attracted girls to them would rub off on me. One time I was hanging with a couple guys who seemed to be friends with the Girl of My Dreams du jour. They were using a code that I later found out had to do primarily with girls' private parts. This code was not one that I was familiar with as I tended to learn all of my more salacious vocabulary and details from my (much faster developing) younger brother. So I was standing with these....gentlemen when The Girl drove up on her minibike. I bobbed, gulped and choked in lieu of a greeting while my friend - we'll call him "Tom" began the intricate dance of insult that he had been dared into by the other kid present who we will call "Brian" for want of a more appealing name. Tom began this particular dans macabre with the classic veiled innuendo to which the young lady (young lady not implying lack of maturity as young man clearly does) in question responded with a firm nolle prosque to which Tom countered with the appropriate (unbeknownst to me) insult. Which caused her to make a face - at which time I - thinking the joke quite different than the one that Tom was trying for - laughed. Earning me the most withering glare that I had ever experienced from an incumbent Girl of My Dreams who then proceeded to fire up her mini bike and drive off. I have to confess that I never had the courage to look her in the eye again - and we rode on the same school bus every day. It was a particularly tragic loss to me because she had the Suzuki. And the thing was: I didn't even know what the hell anyone was talking about.
Our school, not being in the bible belt - actually we were in the Koran belt but that didn't apply to us - had a lot of dances. Dances that included slow dancing without anyone walking around trying to stick their hands in between the dancers - what is it about certain people that they get their kicks at finding couples who are enjoying their dance and try to stick their damned hand in between them like it's some blue stocking menage a trois? Honestly, don't teachers get enough at home?
But I digress. Slow dances sans handsy teachers turned out to be a problem for me. Surprisingly I was able to get girls to dance with me but when things got close "He" reared his ugly head and I had to break the clinch to "get something to drink", "go the bathroom", "burp", or some other lame excuse. Little did I know that girls considered "His" arrival as simply an occupational hazard of slow dancing with boys, not that they particularly wanted "Him" to show up during "Color my World" but what were they going to do? This paranoid obsession of mine became a particular problem when a truly beautiful girl of Polynesian extraction took an uncharacteristic interest in me at the annual Sadie Hawkins day dance. I know, it freaked me out too. She kept asking me to dance fast dances over and over again clearly expecting me to reciprocate on the slow ones but I knew she was only doing that because she didn't know about "Him". As soon as she found out about "Him" what would she think of me? So I wasted an entire evening alternatively dancing with and ignoring the most beautiful girl that had ever shown the slightest interest in me.
We remained friends despite my deranged dancing behavior and it led to other incidents that I shudder to recall. For example, she was bigger than me. Not that she was fat, she was simply an older, much more mature, full figured girl normal for her age and I....wasn't. So we were at some event or party at the International club which had a pool even bigger than the American club and she of course was in a bikini (what was it with these girls and their bikinis?) and everyone was doing the game where you put your girlfriend on your shoulders and then they 'fight' - the sport has a lot of touching and grabbing and girls fake fighting so you can understand its appeal. Except I was with someone who outweighed me. So we solved the problem by me sitting on her shoulders which resulted in us rising to the top of the league tables but was not a particularly good sign for a budding romance. Indeed this party closed out the school year and by the time I came back to Jakarta in the fall my Polynesian princess had found an older man replete with whiskers, muscles and most importantly, a total body mass at least double mine. Sigh.
Then there was the girl in my Modern History class: V. She was great: beautiful, friendly, open, engaging - even to me - me! I thought she was a cross between Diana Goddess of the Hunt and that French lady they copied for the Statue of Liberty. So I maneuvered myself into permanent perch in the desk next to her the better to moon at her rather than pay attention to class. Until one day when she turned up in a dress. I mean a real woman's dress back in the days when they wore hose and heels and everything. And that was all it took. Well that and the fact that some much older, more worldly man, perhaps a junior, flipped her skirt up in my presence which allowed me to see absolutely nothing. But simply the concept that girls could wear such things and in theory one could go up to them and flip their skirt up so overwhelmed my imagination that I had to move several seats away from her so that I could regain my composure while Mrs. Barbour explained the difference between Cavalry and Calvary - not that I cared that day whether I was ridden or saved.
Eighth grade turned out to be particularly traumatic for me mostly because of my successes: I got into the school Musical, Bye Bye Birdie. Playing a teen. Me. A teen! All I can say is that they must have been scraping the bottom of the barrel to miscast me as a hip 50s teen - I would have been a more credible little brother to someone. And on top of this in a clear error of judgement rising to the level of negligence whomever was in charge of casting gave me a role as a dancer, And not some surreal dancer in leotards but a 50s sock hop dancer. With a girl. You know, dances that had dance moves and slinging the girl around and all that. They had yet to develop the acronym OMFG but that is in fact what I thought when I read that I was to be paired with my friend's older sister S. More like OMFG-WTF with extra skulls and daggers. And surprisingly when S found out she didn't have the typical response that girls unfortunate enough to be paired with me had: lodging a formal protest with the authorities and failing that, contracting a highly contagious disease that cleared up just after the event in question. No, she actually swallowed her pride and undertook the daunting task of turning me into someone who wouldn't completely humiliate her on stage. I repaid her mercy in the cruelest way possible by becoming completely infatuated. Which was a no brainer: beautiful? Check, seemed to tolerate me? Check, was constantly touching me and telling me better ways to touch her? Cheecckk! So you can see she was doomed to having Pimplestiltskin hopping around her until she ran me off.
Which happened pretty quickly after I took my younger brother's advice on how to handle 'babes' as he so eloquently put it. He said "you just go up to her and tell her you like her"
"Then what?"
"Whaddya mean what? You say that and if she says she likes you then bam! you're 'in'."
"Oh."
So I went with the little bro's advice which went over about as well as you would expect. For if she didn't get the point from my witty repartee she definitely got it from my crazed, desperate look. So aside from casting doubt on my brother's claims of romantic expertise the entire exercise was a huge, humiliating bust. Not that S was cruel - she let me down as easily as any demented kid could be. But it still felt like I'd run over myself. Over and over again.
You would think with all of my romantic false starts, hiccoughs, stumbles, trips and falls that I would have been particularly sensitive to the pain that others experienced playing the game of romance without a full deck. And you would be wrong. There was a girl in the grade below me, K. She had braces and was tall in that awkward way that teenage girls sometimes get: all knobby knees and elbows. One day she mustered the courage to ask me to the Sadie Hawkins day dance. I could tell what was going through her mind and knew how stressful it must have been for her but I still harbored dreams of repeating my Polynesian experience (and this time getting it right) so naturally a 'hot commodity' like me didn't want to be tied down by a member of the 'awkward squad'. So I made some ridiculous excuse and she reacted the way that I did in such circumstances: with equal parts embarrassment and disappointment. And the sad thing is I actually liked K and we would have had fun. But the saddest (and most karmic-ly appropriate) thing from my perspective happened five years later. I was back home for the summer and I spied perhaps one of the two or three most beautiful women I have ever encountered in my life. Honest. I am not exaggerating. She must have seen me staring because she turned and walked straight up to me but instead of telling me to buzz off and get a life, she said "Hi Bill". It was K, in town for her wedding.
Eventually Mr. T (I pity the man who ain't hairy and don't smell) showed up at my door. But deeper voice and actual muscles notwithstanding, when it came to the fairer sex I remained the same consummate ass I had always been. And the best example I can give of my supreme ass hattery (assitude? assness?) was my rematch with S if you can call yet another complete fiasco a 'match'. It was over a year later at our Concert Choir's end of year Anyer Beach junket and blowout weekend (what can I say? we were a peculiarly profitable high school choir) and after dinner somehow my friend C. and I ended up with S. and her friend R. Our friend M. probably would have joined us and kept me out of trouble had he not been on the lam because he had rashly smeared Afitson (Indonesian Ben Gay) on the toilet seat of the choir's largest Bass who in response was enthusiastically seeking M so he could use all of his badass bass-ness to as he so colorfully put it: "wring his scrawny little neck".
So we four strolled out onto the beach. It was a moonlit night (of course) and the waves were crashing and sighing against the shore while palm trees swayed in a breeze filled with the tantalizing scents of Java and Sumatra (of course). And in the distance there were flashes of heat lightning illuminating the waterspouts sinuously weaving around the doomed island volcano of Krakatoa. It was that bloody romantic. Barbara Cartland could have cleaned up had she put that setting in one of her bodice rippers. And it was in this almost comically charged environment that we plopped down onto the soft, dry sand to talk. Somehow C. ended up paired up with R. and I with my previous nemesis: S. Sigh. Thinking that C and R were trying to get something going and being a good and thoughtful friend I swallowed my embarrassed discomfort and sat there talking with S. We talked about this and that as I doodled in the sand. Eventually I drew a line and then absentmindedly made it into an arrow to which she added fletching and then - inexplicably - drew a heart around it in the classic Cupid money shot configuration.
And I froze. What did this mean? My mind began to race: "OMFG, OMFG, OMFG? Doesshereallylikemenow or am I just imagining things? WTF? OhGodohGodohGodohGod whatdoIdo? Is she looking at me, how do I look? What? How? Where?" As my brain descended into panic mode my body seized up. If someone had consulted my System Manager it would have shown my CPU and RAM pegging out at 100%. Now I know that this wasn't technically true but it seemed as if I entered a state of catatonic paralysis with my hand upheld, poised to write on the sand and that so locked was carried back to my hotel room and from there back home. Of course by the time my brain finally rebooted and I could function again my (imagined?) moment had passed. I knew this because in the interim my 'good friend' C had gotten together with S and not R as one would have reasonably expected. On the bright side M lived to smear toilet seats again, narrowly avoiding being strangled by the big bad Bass whose temper had cooled at the same rate as his burning backside did.
And it wasn't long after that that my family left Jakarta, moving to a place where scrub oaks swayed in a breeze filled with the rustic scents of Oklahoma cow pats, where exploding electrical transformers flashed, illuminating the killer tornadoes dancing in the distance and where handsy teachers ruled the land. But maybe, just maybe in Bartlesville, Oklahoma I would find the romance that had so eluded me in the tropics.
Epilogue
Contrary to my elaborate fantasies, I didn't suddenly turn into God's gift to womankind in Oklahoma. Apparently there was a strong global consensus on my many romantic inadequacies at that time. I actually didn't get an honest to gosh girlfriend until I was 20 which was about the time that I started shaving. Since then I've had three 'serious' relationships, if you count my marriage (and boy was it serious), interspersed with a few fiascoes for old time's sake. All three women were both uniquely beautiful and perplexing to me - I cherish my memories of each of them. I wouldn't say that I've been particularly 'lucky' at love (I remain, as ever, something of an 'ass' in this area) but I have realized that having another person who is uniquely yours and you theirs, someone who chooses of their own free will to intertwine lives with you is something that I have longed for ever since my first futile blunders in the seventh grade. And I don't suppose that will ever change. Because like most people, I need to be wanted and want to be needed.
Author's Note: Believe it or not these stories are all true. Or as true as I can make them over thirty years after the fact. I really was that big of a dope - ask anyone. Some of you may think that I have gotten some of the details wrong which is probably true as my memory today is certainly no better than my 'romantic moves' were back then. That being said, if you don't like my story make up your own damn memories - I mean faithfully record your memoirs for posterity. Then we can have a memory off. God help us.
When my son graduated the sixth grade - excuse me, but when did people start graduating the sixth grade? My Grandfather only made it to the sixth grade but they didn't hold a bleeding graduation for him did they? No they sent him off to work as a tool monkey on oil rigs - imagine the educational credentials you need to be a twelve year old tool monkey. But my son's school had to have a graduation ceremony where every kid was expected to recite a poem or somebody's used speech or bang on a piano and if they screwed up would cause their parents to lose face with all the other scheming, grasping social climbers that infested Ladue like termites on a Baobab tree. So parents would hire teams of professionals to turn their lackluster spawn into a poor facsimile of a pop star for one lousy rendition of a 3 minute song so they could one up the Friedmans only to be upstaged by the Korean scholarship kid playing flawless Chopin. Bloody private schools. Or when I'm thinking more clearly: bloody overachieving immigrants.
But I digress. As I was saying, it was when my son graduated the sixth grade that I first realized something quite shocking: among the thirty or so students graduating there were 15 little boys in matching blue blazers and mommy's best bowl cuts and a few little girl equivalents. Then there were 11 or 12 beautiful, poised young women who seemed to have strolled into the wrong ceremony. I turned to my (ex) wife and said: I don't remember it being like this when I was their age. She looked at me dismissively and said: "it still is" - no, that's no true, she didn't say that but she was thinking it. What she really said was "Oh yeah, that's the way it is at that age".
I had no idea.
Not a clue, not even a hint of a clue of the immense chasm between boys and girls. Which is funny because I lived it. No that's not quite right: I writhed in agony over it for years on end. I was a small, late developing and particularly testosterone challenged young man (young man being what older adults call you when you exhibit absolutely no evidence of manhood whatsoever). And I had no idea what was really going on. Yes, I had had the "talk" and had played tether-ball while the girls had all the "extra talks" which in retrospect wasn't fair at all. Not only were they emotionally, physically and for all I know spiritually more mature, they also got more coaching - how in the devil did they expect me to cope with such an extreme power imbalance?
Badly.
For I was Protoman - in theory male but lacking virtually all evidence thereof, a subterranean dwelling groundhog like creature who when I first came to the surface in seventh grade encountered such dazzling creatures, such angels, so unlike the grubs and roots that I had lived with my whole life that I was blinded and like Punxsutawny Phil forced to retreat and await the end of my puberty winter six years hence. Were I wiser, I would have stayed underground or gotten sent to a military school or boys reformatory or supermax prison or some other place less harrowing than American style secondary coeducation was for me.
But of course I didn't.
Because I had fallen in love. With all of them. Well almost all of them or at least in love with the idea of being in love with all of them which admittedly - given my lagging hormonal chemistry - was a rather foolish thing to do. But as I stipulated earlier I had absolutely no idea that the girls that I saw walking around my school had in the space of a few short months moved light years beyond the kids that I used to beat at Indian leg wrestling. And crucially, that I had stayed stuck firmly in the same shrimp sized space I had always inhabited. It was this dichotomy between my self image: "Debonair man about campus", my reality: "Pure boy containing no less than 10% pimples by weight" and the changed status of the girls around me: "Goddesses" that was the source of so much pain and suffering through my junior high and high school career. Take for example the problem with my locker.
At my international school in Jakarta we had those little lockers that stacked five one on top of the other and I had the middle one. The two lockers above me were occupied by two of the tallest, blondest girls that I had ever met. They were from Germany and Holland respectively and they had breasts. At about exactly my eye level. They would come up between class talking in their (in my humble opinion) sexy Germanic accents and stand there with their lockers open expecting me to weave between their - I mean them - to get to mine. Sometimes they would drop things on me and I would pick them up for which they thanked me the way a young Marlene Dietrich must have thanked Humphrey Bogart for saving her from Nazis, turning me into a gibbering, crimson ninny. To this day I attribute my "C" in Algebra I to poor locker placement. I cannot understand how the school could be so lax as to not consider the threat of psychological trauma to boys like me when allocating locker space.
Then there were the Bikinis. There is this notion among church ladies and other paragons of virtue that small revealing bathing apparel is immoral. I don't know about immoral but for protomen like me it was definitely stressful. Particularly in Jakarta which is five hundred miles away from the equator and warm all year round. And given that one of the 'hot spots' for teens centered upon an American club with a large pool and a notable lack of air conditioning, bikinis were de rigueur. Bikinis weren't a big problem in the fourth grade but the bikini issue began to rear its curvaceous head in sixth grade and was a roaring monster by seventh, expanding in certain directions every year thereafter. I'm not really sure girls understood just what an impact all the bikini-age had on the boys around them. Perhaps it was a special topic covered while we were playing tether-ball. Something along the lines of "OK girls here's something that will drive the boys nuts but the key is that you can't ever let on that you know it's making them gaga. Here are the three key maneuvers guaranteed to temporarily cut blood supply to the male brain reducing their ability to cope by the equivalent of ten IQ points". Me, I think I generally lost twenty because encountering bikini clad teen girls limited my vocabulary to single syllable words and "ums" and I had an incredibly difficult time answering simple questions with anything but a strong, declarative grunt.
Now I'm all "yay" bikini - except for my daughter of course - but back then I honestly don't know how I made it through holidays like spring break and Christmas what with all the exposed Goddess flesh.
To get girls to pay attention to me I often would 'hang out' with guys that I thought girls liked or at least that girls stood near for extended periods of time in the hopes that whatever attracted girls to them would rub off on me. One time I was hanging with a couple guys who seemed to be friends with the Girl of My Dreams du jour. They were using a code that I later found out had to do primarily with girls' private parts. This code was not one that I was familiar with as I tended to learn all of my more salacious vocabulary and details from my (much faster developing) younger brother. So I was standing with these....gentlemen when The Girl drove up on her minibike. I bobbed, gulped and choked in lieu of a greeting while my friend - we'll call him "Tom" began the intricate dance of insult that he had been dared into by the other kid present who we will call "Brian" for want of a more appealing name. Tom began this particular dans macabre with the classic veiled innuendo to which the young lady (young lady not implying lack of maturity as young man clearly does) in question responded with a firm nolle prosque to which Tom countered with the appropriate (unbeknownst to me) insult. Which caused her to make a face - at which time I - thinking the joke quite different than the one that Tom was trying for - laughed. Earning me the most withering glare that I had ever experienced from an incumbent Girl of My Dreams who then proceeded to fire up her mini bike and drive off. I have to confess that I never had the courage to look her in the eye again - and we rode on the same school bus every day. It was a particularly tragic loss to me because she had the Suzuki. And the thing was: I didn't even know what the hell anyone was talking about.
Our school, not being in the bible belt - actually we were in the Koran belt but that didn't apply to us - had a lot of dances. Dances that included slow dancing without anyone walking around trying to stick their hands in between the dancers - what is it about certain people that they get their kicks at finding couples who are enjoying their dance and try to stick their damned hand in between them like it's some blue stocking menage a trois? Honestly, don't teachers get enough at home?
But I digress. Slow dances sans handsy teachers turned out to be a problem for me. Surprisingly I was able to get girls to dance with me but when things got close "He" reared his ugly head and I had to break the clinch to "get something to drink", "go the bathroom", "burp", or some other lame excuse. Little did I know that girls considered "His" arrival as simply an occupational hazard of slow dancing with boys, not that they particularly wanted "Him" to show up during "Color my World" but what were they going to do? This paranoid obsession of mine became a particular problem when a truly beautiful girl of Polynesian extraction took an uncharacteristic interest in me at the annual Sadie Hawkins day dance. I know, it freaked me out too. She kept asking me to dance fast dances over and over again clearly expecting me to reciprocate on the slow ones but I knew she was only doing that because she didn't know about "Him". As soon as she found out about "Him" what would she think of me? So I wasted an entire evening alternatively dancing with and ignoring the most beautiful girl that had ever shown the slightest interest in me.
We remained friends despite my deranged dancing behavior and it led to other incidents that I shudder to recall. For example, she was bigger than me. Not that she was fat, she was simply an older, much more mature, full figured girl normal for her age and I....wasn't. So we were at some event or party at the International club which had a pool even bigger than the American club and she of course was in a bikini (what was it with these girls and their bikinis?) and everyone was doing the game where you put your girlfriend on your shoulders and then they 'fight' - the sport has a lot of touching and grabbing and girls fake fighting so you can understand its appeal. Except I was with someone who outweighed me. So we solved the problem by me sitting on her shoulders which resulted in us rising to the top of the league tables but was not a particularly good sign for a budding romance. Indeed this party closed out the school year and by the time I came back to Jakarta in the fall my Polynesian princess had found an older man replete with whiskers, muscles and most importantly, a total body mass at least double mine. Sigh.
Then there was the girl in my Modern History class: V. She was great: beautiful, friendly, open, engaging - even to me - me! I thought she was a cross between Diana Goddess of the Hunt and that French lady they copied for the Statue of Liberty. So I maneuvered myself into permanent perch in the desk next to her the better to moon at her rather than pay attention to class. Until one day when she turned up in a dress. I mean a real woman's dress back in the days when they wore hose and heels and everything. And that was all it took. Well that and the fact that some much older, more worldly man, perhaps a junior, flipped her skirt up in my presence which allowed me to see absolutely nothing. But simply the concept that girls could wear such things and in theory one could go up to them and flip their skirt up so overwhelmed my imagination that I had to move several seats away from her so that I could regain my composure while Mrs. Barbour explained the difference between Cavalry and Calvary - not that I cared that day whether I was ridden or saved.
Eighth grade turned out to be particularly traumatic for me mostly because of my successes: I got into the school Musical, Bye Bye Birdie. Playing a teen. Me. A teen! All I can say is that they must have been scraping the bottom of the barrel to miscast me as a hip 50s teen - I would have been a more credible little brother to someone. And on top of this in a clear error of judgement rising to the level of negligence whomever was in charge of casting gave me a role as a dancer, And not some surreal dancer in leotards but a 50s sock hop dancer. With a girl. You know, dances that had dance moves and slinging the girl around and all that. They had yet to develop the acronym OMFG but that is in fact what I thought when I read that I was to be paired with my friend's older sister S. More like OMFG-WTF with extra skulls and daggers. And surprisingly when S found out she didn't have the typical response that girls unfortunate enough to be paired with me had: lodging a formal protest with the authorities and failing that, contracting a highly contagious disease that cleared up just after the event in question. No, she actually swallowed her pride and undertook the daunting task of turning me into someone who wouldn't completely humiliate her on stage. I repaid her mercy in the cruelest way possible by becoming completely infatuated. Which was a no brainer: beautiful? Check, seemed to tolerate me? Check, was constantly touching me and telling me better ways to touch her? Cheecckk! So you can see she was doomed to having Pimplestiltskin hopping around her until she ran me off.
Which happened pretty quickly after I took my younger brother's advice on how to handle 'babes' as he so eloquently put it. He said "you just go up to her and tell her you like her"
"Then what?"
"Whaddya mean what? You say that and if she says she likes you then bam! you're 'in'."
"Oh."
So I went with the little bro's advice which went over about as well as you would expect. For if she didn't get the point from my witty repartee she definitely got it from my crazed, desperate look. So aside from casting doubt on my brother's claims of romantic expertise the entire exercise was a huge, humiliating bust. Not that S was cruel - she let me down as easily as any demented kid could be. But it still felt like I'd run over myself. Over and over again.
You would think with all of my romantic false starts, hiccoughs, stumbles, trips and falls that I would have been particularly sensitive to the pain that others experienced playing the game of romance without a full deck. And you would be wrong. There was a girl in the grade below me, K. She had braces and was tall in that awkward way that teenage girls sometimes get: all knobby knees and elbows. One day she mustered the courage to ask me to the Sadie Hawkins day dance. I could tell what was going through her mind and knew how stressful it must have been for her but I still harbored dreams of repeating my Polynesian experience (and this time getting it right) so naturally a 'hot commodity' like me didn't want to be tied down by a member of the 'awkward squad'. So I made some ridiculous excuse and she reacted the way that I did in such circumstances: with equal parts embarrassment and disappointment. And the sad thing is I actually liked K and we would have had fun. But the saddest (and most karmic-ly appropriate) thing from my perspective happened five years later. I was back home for the summer and I spied perhaps one of the two or three most beautiful women I have ever encountered in my life. Honest. I am not exaggerating. She must have seen me staring because she turned and walked straight up to me but instead of telling me to buzz off and get a life, she said "Hi Bill". It was K, in town for her wedding.
Eventually Mr. T (I pity the man who ain't hairy and don't smell) showed up at my door. But deeper voice and actual muscles notwithstanding, when it came to the fairer sex I remained the same consummate ass I had always been. And the best example I can give of my supreme ass hattery (assitude? assness?) was my rematch with S if you can call yet another complete fiasco a 'match'. It was over a year later at our Concert Choir's end of year Anyer Beach junket and blowout weekend (what can I say? we were a peculiarly profitable high school choir) and after dinner somehow my friend C. and I ended up with S. and her friend R. Our friend M. probably would have joined us and kept me out of trouble had he not been on the lam because he had rashly smeared Afitson (Indonesian Ben Gay) on the toilet seat of the choir's largest Bass who in response was enthusiastically seeking M so he could use all of his badass bass-ness to as he so colorfully put it: "wring his scrawny little neck".
So we four strolled out onto the beach. It was a moonlit night (of course) and the waves were crashing and sighing against the shore while palm trees swayed in a breeze filled with the tantalizing scents of Java and Sumatra (of course). And in the distance there were flashes of heat lightning illuminating the waterspouts sinuously weaving around the doomed island volcano of Krakatoa. It was that bloody romantic. Barbara Cartland could have cleaned up had she put that setting in one of her bodice rippers. And it was in this almost comically charged environment that we plopped down onto the soft, dry sand to talk. Somehow C. ended up paired up with R. and I with my previous nemesis: S. Sigh. Thinking that C and R were trying to get something going and being a good and thoughtful friend I swallowed my embarrassed discomfort and sat there talking with S. We talked about this and that as I doodled in the sand. Eventually I drew a line and then absentmindedly made it into an arrow to which she added fletching and then - inexplicably - drew a heart around it in the classic Cupid money shot configuration.
And I froze. What did this mean? My mind began to race: "OMFG, OMFG, OMFG? Doesshereallylikemenow or am I just imagining things? WTF? OhGodohGodohGodohGod whatdoIdo? Is she looking at me, how do I look? What? How? Where?" As my brain descended into panic mode my body seized up. If someone had consulted my System Manager it would have shown my CPU and RAM pegging out at 100%. Now I know that this wasn't technically true but it seemed as if I entered a state of catatonic paralysis with my hand upheld, poised to write on the sand and that so locked was carried back to my hotel room and from there back home. Of course by the time my brain finally rebooted and I could function again my (imagined?) moment had passed. I knew this because in the interim my 'good friend' C had gotten together with S and not R as one would have reasonably expected. On the bright side M lived to smear toilet seats again, narrowly avoiding being strangled by the big bad Bass whose temper had cooled at the same rate as his burning backside did.
And it wasn't long after that that my family left Jakarta, moving to a place where scrub oaks swayed in a breeze filled with the rustic scents of Oklahoma cow pats, where exploding electrical transformers flashed, illuminating the killer tornadoes dancing in the distance and where handsy teachers ruled the land. But maybe, just maybe in Bartlesville, Oklahoma I would find the romance that had so eluded me in the tropics.
Epilogue
Contrary to my elaborate fantasies, I didn't suddenly turn into God's gift to womankind in Oklahoma. Apparently there was a strong global consensus on my many romantic inadequacies at that time. I actually didn't get an honest to gosh girlfriend until I was 20 which was about the time that I started shaving. Since then I've had three 'serious' relationships, if you count my marriage (and boy was it serious), interspersed with a few fiascoes for old time's sake. All three women were both uniquely beautiful and perplexing to me - I cherish my memories of each of them. I wouldn't say that I've been particularly 'lucky' at love (I remain, as ever, something of an 'ass' in this area) but I have realized that having another person who is uniquely yours and you theirs, someone who chooses of their own free will to intertwine lives with you is something that I have longed for ever since my first futile blunders in the seventh grade. And I don't suppose that will ever change. Because like most people, I need to be wanted and want to be needed.
Author's Note: Believe it or not these stories are all true. Or as true as I can make them over thirty years after the fact. I really was that big of a dope - ask anyone. Some of you may think that I have gotten some of the details wrong which is probably true as my memory today is certainly no better than my 'romantic moves' were back then. That being said, if you don't like my story make up your own damn memories - I mean faithfully record your memoirs for posterity. Then we can have a memory off. God help us.
Ginsberg is no longer being pushed to resign, she's being shoved
Bitch needs to go now because diversity, feminism, power, whatever. If she goes Reid will take the nuclear option to pack the court. Because rules are for the other guy.
The statists are about power. Nothing more, nothing less.
http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/
South Park is obnoxious and beautiful
Almost no one will challenge the new liberal Victorianism. Except South Park God bless 'em. Why is it that our left leaders preach diversity and enforce orthodoxy? Trey Parker and company hold a mirror to the self righteous ogender, race, class and language bigots.
In the first episode of their 17th season they take on the pathetic Redskin con artists. Long may they skewer.
http://reason.com/blog/2014/09/28/south-park-slur-shames-redskins
California now regulating young adult sex
The proggo left believes that they can manage people's lives better than the people themselves. This breathtaking arrogance now extends to sex on college campuses. There is a reason why California is one of the poorest states in the nation. Details at link.
http://reason.com/blog/2014/09/29/jerry-brown-signs-bill-telling-college-k
Sunday, September 28, 2014
The authoritarian statists will use any excuse, any opportunity to grasp more power and truncate liberty
It's who they are, it's what they live for. Imagine a world run by self righteous blue stockings and you're in our 'progressive paradise'.
THE WHOLE POINT OF A TRAGEDY IS THAT IT OFFERS AN OPPORTUNITY TO CRACK DOWN ON TROUBLESOME MINORITIES:Sandy Hook Commission Calls For Government Crackdown On Homeschools. “The onerous new rules for homeschooling families somehow make sense in the minds of commission members because Adam Lanza massacred 20 young children and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. in December 2012 — when he was 20 years old.”
THE WHOLE POINT OF A TRAGEDY IS THAT IT OFFERS AN OPPORTUNITY TO CRACK DOWN ON TROUBLESOME MINORITIES:Sandy Hook Commission Calls For Government Crackdown On Homeschools. “The onerous new rules for homeschooling families somehow make sense in the minds of commission members because Adam Lanza massacred 20 young children and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. in December 2012 — when he was 20 years old.”
Unfortunately these proto fascists are experts at the artful non-sequitur.
What makes for a creative society?
Ross Douthat has a provocative piece that ties cults to the underlying creativity and ferment of a society. Some argue that fewer fringe groups implies a lack of experimentation and adventure in the society.
It seems to me that increasingly intolerance of anything but social liberalism and the concentration of more and more power in a centralized administrative state supervising an increasingly nominal market capitalist economy are signs of stagnation and fear. Our elites fear change so we don't get the creative destruction we need to move foward. Whole sectors of our economy and society have been subsumed in a deadening miasma of regulation, law and subsidy, leading to stasis and fear rather than dynamism and courage.
God help us every one.
It seems to me that increasingly intolerance of anything but social liberalism and the concentration of more and more power in a centralized administrative state supervising an increasingly nominal market capitalist economy are signs of stagnation and fear. Our elites fear change so we don't get the creative destruction we need to move foward. Whole sectors of our economy and society have been subsumed in a deadening miasma of regulation, law and subsidy, leading to stasis and fear rather than dynamism and courage.
God help us every one.
It's time that police violence gets as much press notice as criminal violence. 150 paramilitary assaults a day on American homes is both evil and insane.
And so it came to pass: a nation founded to escape arbitrary punitive government has created perhaps the most arbitary and punitive criminal justice system in the world enforced by an immense array of heavily armed thugs who assault people's homes and maim and kill their family members and pets without ever being held accountable. The English Lobsterbacks were never, ever this arbitrary, brutal and lawless.
The war on drugs would have been impossible for the government to wage for the last 40 plus years without support from the media. Earlier this month, a DEA agent shot a grandmother reaching for her child during a raid that found no drugs. In the summer, a SWAT team in Georgia threw a flashbang into a baby's crib, critically injuring it. There are more than 150 such raids each day in America, so there are a lot of horrifying stories that come out of that, on a regular basis. Rarely, if ever, do such stories break out of the local news and into the national news cycle. But, writes Ed Krayewski, that's changing.View this article
The media is finally waking up to the out of control enforcement state. Remember: Don't trust law enforcement or the court system. They're not on your side, they're on their side.
The war on drugs would have been impossible for the government to wage for the last 40 plus years without support from the media. Earlier this month, a DEA agent shot a grandmother reaching for her child during a raid that found no drugs. In the summer, a SWAT team in Georgia threw a flashbang into a baby's crib, critically injuring it. There are more than 150 such raids each day in America, so there are a lot of horrifying stories that come out of that, on a regular basis. Rarely, if ever, do such stories break out of the local news and into the national news cycle. But, writes Ed Krayewski, that's changing.View this article
The media is finally waking up to the out of control enforcement state. Remember: Don't trust law enforcement or the court system. They're not on your side, they're on their side.
Gail Collins Religious Nut in the Church OF the CO2 Sky Monster
She makes so many false assertions that she must be reading from scripture rather than science. With each passing year the 'elite' beclown themselves more on these issues. The good news is that they are rapidly destroying any credibility they have. Here's was Silly Gail says:
The results are awful. The penguins are dwindling. The polar bears are running out of ice floes. The cornfields are drying. The southwest is frying.
The results are awful. The penguins are dwindling. The polar bears are running out of ice floes. The cornfields are drying. The southwest is frying.
Only these assertions aren't supported by the facts:
Penguins dwindling: if they are it isn't because it's not cold enough or there isn't enough ice because the extent of sea ice around Antarctica is at an all time record high since records have been kept.
Polar bears running out of ice floes. Not likely given the North pole's ice cap has expanded by over 60% in the last two years and is now more extensive than it was in 2007. By the way, Polar bears lived in the prehistoric north when there was no ice cap. And their numbers are at a modern high.
The cornfields are drying: NOAA and everyone else says that the droughts being experience or other extreme weather events cannot be attributed to global warming. They are just weather. As if we didn't have droughts in, say the 30s?
The Southwest is frying: I live in Texas and Texas has had a cool summer. Was extra hot and dry a couple of years ago but again, weather.
I thing Gail Collins may be as ridiculous as Ezra "We're all going to burn" Klein of Vox (he really did write that in a serious piece). Perhaps if they read more widely or consulted someone not handing out the koolaid. But then they might lose their authoritarian, coercive faith and they would be lost.
Saturday, September 27, 2014
And of course "tolerance' is really about intolerance of ideas that they find threatening
From Glenn Reynolds:
I THINK THE TOLERANCE POLICE PREFER TO TARGET THEIR DOMESTIC POLITICAL ENEMIES: “If we’re giving no quarter to intolerance, shouldn’t we be starting with the mutilators and the honor killers?”
The thing to remember is that talk of tolerance and diversity is mostly just a political weapon for white people to use against other white people. It’s not about actually helping anyone.
I THINK THE TOLERANCE POLICE PREFER TO TARGET THEIR DOMESTIC POLITICAL ENEMIES: “If we’re giving no quarter to intolerance, shouldn’t we be starting with the mutilators and the honor killers?”
The thing to remember is that talk of tolerance and diversity is mostly just a political weapon for white people to use against other white people. It’s not about actually helping anyone.
The Dems War on Women rhetoric is a joke isn't it?
I mean ludicrous lies like one in five rape fraud that HBO keeps retailing aren't going to be believed by adults are they?
Not if Jon I Ernst gas anything to say about it.
Ernst is ebullient when campaigning. And the Democratic Party’s single idea — the trope that Republicans live to wage a “war on women” — leaves Ernst bemused: “I am a woman, and I have been to war and this is not war.” A 5-foot-2 grandmother, she is a National Guard lieutenant colonel who served in Iraq.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-joni-ernst-and-bruce-braley-battle-in-iowa-senate-race/2014/09/26/fdeefde0-44e1-11e4-b47c-f5889e061e5f_story.html
Horst Wessel would be proud
MARCH IN FAVOR OF TOLERATION AND CIVIL RIGHTS at which attendance is compulsory.
Hood college groups require participation in protest March filled with Freshman who had no idea why they were there.
Forcing people to participate in marches for causes they don't believe in is something that groups with "Socialist" in their name seem to do a lot of all over the world. The Germans were big on this back in the 30s as I recall.
F**k politically correct euphemisms: bring back the Department of War
And while we're at it get rid of "People of Color" and bring back blacks, whites, and yes, redskins. And screw gender because I never have. And heteronormative and transgressive and...well just go to any gender or racial studies department and look for words that you don't recognize but sound stupid and stop saying and writing them. And cruelly mock anyone you know that does. Remember: you need to be cruel or they'll fall back into sillyness.
George Orwell had important things to say about all of the 'smelly little orthodoxies' that fraudulent language promotes and protects in his "Politics and the English Language".
George Orwell had important things to say about all of the 'smelly little orthodoxies' that fraudulent language promotes and protects in his "Politics and the English Language".
The essence of Imperialism.
This from the comments section of Carpe Diem:
In Africa, India and other developing places, 1.2 billion people live without access to electricity, and many more live without an adequate supply. They want a more energy-friendly future with “luxuries” such as light bulbs and clean cooking facilities, not to mention improved sanitation. Energy-starved nations are not well-positioned to take advantage of economic opportunities, better living standards and improved human welfare.
With today’s technologies, greenhouse gas emissions are closely tied to energy production, so the president’s call for lowering emissions is akin to a call for constraining energy expansion in these nations. Such an outcome would have large-scale negative impacts, not only to those directly affected but to the world as a whole.
This is the very essence of imperialism. The environmental left, having the good luck to reside almost exclusively in wealthy Western countries which can afford their boutique energy schemes, seeks to keep other nations poor and energy starved while the benefits (a supposedly cleaner environment) flow to them.
http://www.aei-ideas.org/2014/09/wednesday-afternoon-links-17/
The end of Braille?
App can read any text out loud. Prediction: government subsidies for braille books will be larger in real terms in 20 years time than they are today. The Federal Stupor state rolls on. Until the collapse, that is.
http://www.medgadget.com/2014/09/knfb-reader-for-blind-people-reads-any-text-anywhere-video.html
NYT commits fraud on income distribution by using Picketty and Saenz's fraudulent data
One thing both the fascists and communists have taught us is that if you control the "facts" you control reality. And since the US has experienced massive tax changes that have led to more reported income some proportion of increasing upper income distribution is spurious. Not that gutter Marxists like the NY TIMES will ever honestly admit that. Instead they will continually repackage fraudulent statistics in new and creative ways in their quest for more power.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/09/27/upshot/the-benefits-of-economic-expansions-are-increasingly-going-to-the-richest-americans.html?smid=tw-nytimes&_r=2&abt=0002&abg=0&referrer=
Friday, September 26, 2014
Eric Holder turned the Department of Justice into the Department of Obstruction of Justice
And as Nick Gillespie says in Time:
Holder exists to protect the president and his policies. Worse, his successor will almost certainly take up exactly where he leaves off.
Eric Holder’s Legacy: Duplicity, Incompetence, and Obliviousness
Holder exists to protect the president and his policies. Worse, his successor will almost certainly take up exactly where he leaves off.
Or as he so eloquently puts it in the his column's title:
Another thing that men with guns are good for: Shooting crazed head hacking muslims before they kill again
Stopped by “a good guy with a gun.”
Lewis confirms that Hufford was stabbed several times and that Nolen “severed her head.”
At that point, Lewis claims Nolen met 43-year-old Traci Johnson and began attacking her with the same knife.
Officials say at that point, Mark Vaughan, an Oklahoma County reserve deputy and a former CEO of the business, shot him as he was actively stabbing Johnson.
“He’s a hero in this situation,” Sgt. Lewis said, referring to Vaughan. “It could have gotten a lot worse.”
Lewis confirms that Hufford was stabbed several times and that Nolen “severed her head.”
At that point, Lewis claims Nolen met 43-year-old Traci Johnson and began attacking her with the same knife.
Officials say at that point, Mark Vaughan, an Oklahoma County reserve deputy and a former CEO of the business, shot him as he was actively stabbing Johnson.
“He’s a hero in this situation,” Sgt. Lewis said, referring to Vaughan. “It could have gotten a lot worse.”
Hattip Instapundit.com
FBI upset at Apple/Google for new encryption that "places people beyond the law"
There was a time in this country when people had both liberty and privacy. The progressive fetish to ever more minutely manipulate our lives has put paid to liberty and the proggo shock troops in law enforcement trample privacy so the can ensure that we are not breaking any of the hundreds of thousands of rules.
Which don't seem to apply to the government or its proggo masters. The New encryption is just the people fighting back against the statist thugs.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/09/apple-google-default-cell-phone-encryption-concerns-fbi-director/
Beheading at Oklahoma plant being considered ‘workplace violence’ and not terrorism
Just like the Fort Hood murders were. Perhaps we need a new category: murder by muslim to reflect their penchant for slaughtering infidels. Islam is a dead end that has failed to cope with modernity so they've reverted to a perverted medieval fantasy world that allows them to lash out and murder in the name of God. It is nihilism masquerading as faith and it is destroying Islam by destroying it's legitimacy in the eyes of the world.
And when the collapse comes it will come with terrifying swiftness for the followers of Allah - it will suddenly become obscene and unacceptable to be a muslim in most of the world. Which will be a good, healthy thing. Like a healthy body rejecting a deadly virus.
Hattip Twitchy
And when the collapse comes it will come with terrifying swiftness for the followers of Allah - it will suddenly become obscene and unacceptable to be a muslim in most of the world. Which will be a good, healthy thing. Like a healthy body rejecting a deadly virus.
Hattip Twitchy
The Fed caught working for those it is supposed to oversee - NPR
I am shocked, shocked to find regulatory capture going on in the banking industry. Of course the regulatory environment in the US has gotten so lunatic Ober the last six years that it is literally impossible to abide by the regs. Which is catnip for the politicos who extract rents for issuing regulatory indulgences.
http://nypost.com/2014/09/26/tapes-showing-meek-oversight-of-goldman-are-about-to-rock-wall-street/
Glenn Reynolds on the "Campus rape epidemic fraud"
Campus sex hysteria is an engineered moral panic. Its purpose is to justify targeting, punishing, and isolating the people the panic-engineers don’t like. Nothing that counters the chosen narrative, however sensible, can be tolerated. Because it’s not about helping women. It’s about demonizing and marginalizing men.
Let me be clear, as a great man likes to say: This is not a case of good intentions gone wrong. It is a case of bad intentions given free rein. Forbes should be ashamed to play the role of useful idiot here.
Colleges really are the most cynical, amoral institutions in our nation. Places where nothing matters but power and sex. They certainly are not bastions of liberty.
I used to think Forbes was different but their just like all the other feminist cowed mouthpieces
Bill Frezza was fired for writing a column that told the truth about drunk college women and was fired for it.
With one stroke they've destroyed the reputation that Malcolm Forbes spent a lifetime building. Steve Forbes must be a real schmuck to let this happen.
http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/195673/
Texas is on a deregulation jag.
And Greg Abbott intends to radically cut back the thicket of anticompetitive licensure requirements for certain fields. Texas goes from strength to strength.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2014/09/22/texans-created-over-a-thousand-local-businesses-after-texas-eased-restrictions-on-selling-food-made-at-home/
The shale revolution is following the standard innovation S curve
..where it consumes a lot of investment for little benefit until the tech and process are perfected sufficiently to reliably cahflow. Then tons of people pile in and experienced and scale economies take over along with hundreds of refinements in the tech. The result is almost vertical gains in productivity for a time until all of the obvious innovation extensions are exploited and the innovation rate slows down.
Fracking is at the steepest sweetest phase of the curve right niw and it's a wonder to behold.
http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-brain-trust/092314-718598-shale-production-per-well-rises-despite-pessimists.htm?p=full%20#axzz3ER9izdtk
The most frightening consequence of the Current Administration is that it has led China to conclude that the US won't fight
The rather aimless, poll driven and wishful Obama foreign policy threatens to lead China into the greatest miscalculation of US resolve since Pearl Harbor. China is widely reported as believing that the US won't intervene to save it's friends in Taiwan, Japan, and Korea - an impression they did not get from George W Bush.
The real threat is that China's miracle economy stalls and retrenches causing mass unrest and China's rulers are panicked into foreign adventures to rally public opinion to them. Call it the Galtieri Gambit after the General in charge of the Argentine junta who invaded the Falklands to divert public opinion away from his faltering rule.
Only if China does so it will be a disaster the likes of which haven't been seen since WW2. God help us every one. As Kissinger said:
As Henry Kissinger says of the Korean War, “We did not expect the attack; China did not expect our response.” Of such miscalculation, devastating wars are made.
Read the whole frightening thing.
http://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2014/09/26/chinas_deadly_miscalculation_in_the_making_107464.html
Thursday, September 25, 2014
Groundhog dropped by de Blasio died a week later
A metaphor for the City of New York?
God help them every one.
http://nypost.com/2014/09/25/groundhog-dropped-by-de-blasio-died-of-internal-injuries/
It's a weird feminism that encourages women to think of themselves as weak.
For some reason our society valorizes the weak and sanctifies failure. Not a good sign for the future. It's probably why the Chinese believe they can beat us in a war.
What if it's the very trendy liberalism of modern western society that is the very signal to the world's predators to begin their rampage? What do our "smelly little othodoxies" really cost us?
http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/female-students-are-not-damsels-in-distress/15902#.VCQLAFAo7qA
Sign that the End is Nigh
One broker reported that parents interested in living near their boarding-school children now represented over 30 percent of her business.
Hattip Marginal Revolution
http://mobile.nytimes.com/times-insider/2014/09/17/notes-on-a-new-micro-trend-among-affluent-parents/?hpw=&rref=garden&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpHedThumbWell&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
Jon Stewart is a manipulative highly ideological liar. Don't go on his show, don't watch his show.
Megan McCardell documents a litany of lies and broken promises, dishonest editing and the worst form of gutter journalism. He gets away with his unethical behavior because he claims he's not a journalist and the Daily Show isn't news. But millennials treat it as news and Stewart encourages them. Read the whole thing at the link.
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-09-23/don-t-ever-appear-on-the-daily-show
They're fighting back against police and prosecutors theft in Philly
Asset forfeiture is a crime committed by our stationary bandits: the police, prosecutors and judges.
What happens when those charged with enforcing law become criminals? Link.has details.
http://ww2.nationalpost.com/m/wp/blog.html?b=fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/09/22/david-weigel-dont-steal-the-government-hates-competition
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
All of a sudden Arctic Sea Ice Extent is no longer significantly below the long term satellite mean
Of course I believe satellite measurement has only existed since 1979 so there isn't a robust data set. Nevertheless the current Ice coverage variation from the long term mean is not statistically significant and is a significant rebound from the lows in 2012. Another piece of evidence that whatever is happening isn't particularly unusual. Not that it will stop anyone from shrieking at the top of their lungs that the sky is falling. Hattip WUWT.com
Well at least she's not racist. Academics say that Michelle O's food standads are "Classist and Sexist"
But how can the bride of the Second Jesus sin? How can the Second Jesus have a bride for that matter? Does she have to go to Calvary too? Does He? Or is this a fat free salvation in food? Michelle is awfully 'yuppo' for the downtrodden isn't she?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Is just a chip off the old (fascist) Kennedy block
He wants to prosecute and imprison climate dissenters. His Grandad was a notorious fascist sympathizer, his uncle was at war with everything up to an including the word peace. His dad was Joe McCarthy's second lieutenant and his Uncle's hitman. RFK Jr is just a Kennedy without the horndog. Which makes him worse because it makes him less human and more cruel.
Somebody needs to find Bobby J a girlfriend
Monday, September 22, 2014
Things are proceeding as I had foretold.
The vaunted ISIS falls apart when it comes into contact with those fighting for home and hearth. There is no capable, competent military force in the middle east except Israel. None. May the Islamists flail and flail and flail till they all fall down.
Washington: quit pretending these jerks are supermen. They're just cowards with guns.
I partially retract my criticisms of Yale
It turns out that the Yale Muslim Student's Association put out a letter protesting Ayaan Hirsi Ali's speech at Yale that listed a number of 'supporting' groups that had not in fact endorsed the letter. From this day hence they will be called the Yale Muslim Liars Association. Not that being caught out as pathetic liars will deter them. Their religion explicitly says that any crime done to non-believers in the name of Islam isn't a crime. Which is why Islam must be considered a global crime syndicate. Anyway, I gladly take back all the nasty things I said in this post.
David Gelertner, a Yale Professor and brilliant writer of "Drawing Life" the best living memoir I have ever read summarizes her visit:
The attempts over the last decade to silence Ayaan Hirsi Ali range from death threats to polite suggestions that she be barred from campuses. They have served only to heighten her stature—and Hirsi Ali is already impressively tall. She has a stately bearing, dresses quietly and tastefully. She speaks slowly, with a rich and robust accent. And you’ll never see a less affected speaker at a podium.
She began by thanking Yale in contrast with Brandeis University. The latter had, only a few months earlier, first offered and then rescinded an honorary degree and an invitation to appear at their commencement ceremony. Yale will probably get more credit than it deserves for the comparison: It was not the university but William F. Buckley, Jr. Program, a conservative undergraduate group, that invited her to speak on campus. Perhaps Yale will follow through and do the decent thing and award her a degree this spring term. That would mean something. It would turn Yale into a bastion of freedom overnight, at a time when American universities are threatening to become an elaborate, extremely expensive practical joke.
Hirsi Ali was introduced by Harvey Goldblatt, a professor of Slavic languages, who praised her courage and especially her work on women’s rights, and reminded the audience that part of a serious academic environment is listening to opposing viewpoints. That this reminder should be deemed necessary on a university campus is striking, but even more striking was the almost pleading tone. There was a hidden acknowledgment of helplessness, like a Wild-West saloon owner sidling up to the local outlaws and saying, “Please, y’all, we don’t want any trouble here.”
The protesters who had warned against a rabble-rousing speech to be delivered by an ideological firebrand must have been doubly disappointed. Hirsi Ali is a gentle, thoughtful speaker. There were no red-meat “applause lines”—though she did often get applause. Her thesis was simple: Any attempt to deal with Islamic terrorism is doomed unless we acknowledge its connection to Islam. Every religion has a “core,” and the core of Islam is to submit to the will of Allah. (That is, in fact, what the word “Islam” means—submission to God. Hence also the title of Hirsi Ali’s film collaboration with Dutch director Theo van Gogh criticizing the treatment of women in Islam. Van Gogh was subsequently murdered by an Islamic extremist.)
She insisted that there are not, as some suggest, “many Islams”—but there are several sets of Muslims: The first group are radicals who want to force the entire world into Islam by eradicating everything else. The second group, the vast majority, are in a “state of cognitive dissonance”—torn between the strict teachings of the first group and their own consciences, which revolt at the terrorists’ behavior. The third group, perhaps the smallest, are reforming Muslims, who suggest, for example, that mosque and state should be separate. Members of the third group are excommunicated, exiled, threatened, murdered.
David Gelertner, a Yale Professor and brilliant writer of "Drawing Life" the best living memoir I have ever read summarizes her visit:
The attempts over the last decade to silence Ayaan Hirsi Ali range from death threats to polite suggestions that she be barred from campuses. They have served only to heighten her stature—and Hirsi Ali is already impressively tall. She has a stately bearing, dresses quietly and tastefully. She speaks slowly, with a rich and robust accent. And you’ll never see a less affected speaker at a podium.
She began by thanking Yale in contrast with Brandeis University. The latter had, only a few months earlier, first offered and then rescinded an honorary degree and an invitation to appear at their commencement ceremony. Yale will probably get more credit than it deserves for the comparison: It was not the university but William F. Buckley, Jr. Program, a conservative undergraduate group, that invited her to speak on campus. Perhaps Yale will follow through and do the decent thing and award her a degree this spring term. That would mean something. It would turn Yale into a bastion of freedom overnight, at a time when American universities are threatening to become an elaborate, extremely expensive practical joke.
Hirsi Ali was introduced by Harvey Goldblatt, a professor of Slavic languages, who praised her courage and especially her work on women’s rights, and reminded the audience that part of a serious academic environment is listening to opposing viewpoints. That this reminder should be deemed necessary on a university campus is striking, but even more striking was the almost pleading tone. There was a hidden acknowledgment of helplessness, like a Wild-West saloon owner sidling up to the local outlaws and saying, “Please, y’all, we don’t want any trouble here.”
The protesters who had warned against a rabble-rousing speech to be delivered by an ideological firebrand must have been doubly disappointed. Hirsi Ali is a gentle, thoughtful speaker. There were no red-meat “applause lines”—though she did often get applause. Her thesis was simple: Any attempt to deal with Islamic terrorism is doomed unless we acknowledge its connection to Islam. Every religion has a “core,” and the core of Islam is to submit to the will of Allah. (That is, in fact, what the word “Islam” means—submission to God. Hence also the title of Hirsi Ali’s film collaboration with Dutch director Theo van Gogh criticizing the treatment of women in Islam. Van Gogh was subsequently murdered by an Islamic extremist.)
She insisted that there are not, as some suggest, “many Islams”—but there are several sets of Muslims: The first group are radicals who want to force the entire world into Islam by eradicating everything else. The second group, the vast majority, are in a “state of cognitive dissonance”—torn between the strict teachings of the first group and their own consciences, which revolt at the terrorists’ behavior. The third group, perhaps the smallest, are reforming Muslims, who suggest, for example, that mosque and state should be separate. Members of the third group are excommunicated, exiled, threatened, murdered.
Ms. Ali is a truly admirable person. I hope someday to meet her and tell her face to face.
Politico: Lois Lerner: "I was so innocent that I had to take the Fifth to avoid incriminating myself"
So Politico gives Lois a puff piece while she stone walls them on anything really newsworthy. Attaboy Shills. But what do you expect from the Washington Insider's Favorite Web Site? Objectivity? Honesty? Shame? Naw, shillage is all you can expect and all you'll get. Read the whole smarmy thing at the link.
The UN's MyWorld Survey Results are in and fighting Global Warming is....last?
It's funny, the People are telling the UN to focus on economics and healthcare and education while the UN is focusing on a trace gas. Clearly an example of how un-Democratic and un-Representative the UN is. Dictators and Bien Pensants rule the Global Apparatchitocracy. Which is why we should disregard and defund it. Here's the summary by way of Bob Tisdale and WUWT.com.
The survey data can be found here.
The survey data can be found here.
The latest Kickstart Campaign from the Friends for Whatever Barack Obama wants
And this one is particularly exciting! Don't get left behind when The One does something world historical! From Second City.
The most open Presidency Evah!
Journos, whistleblowers decry Obama’s tightening noose on news, information.“The administration uses FOIAs as a tip service to uncover what news organizations are pursuing. Requests are now routinely forwarded to political appointees. At the agency that oversees the new health care law, for example, political appointees now handle the FOIA requests.”
Well in fairness to the Obami when you subordinate all of life to politics, everything is political.
Hattip Glen Reynolds
Well in fairness to the Obami when you subordinate all of life to politics, everything is political.
Hattip Glen Reynolds
It's Illinois so by definition lawless
Illinois "Judge" rules in favor of SWAT raid on Twitter account holder who parodied Peoria mayor. Free speech is such an inconvenience.
Hattip instapundit.com
Frank Fleming: Hillary has to be careful to not let the fact that she's not particularly good at anything distract from how she's a woman.
Indeed. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are the logical apotheosis (apotheosises? Apotheosi?) Of identity politics: identity without capability. Because anyone capable would have achieved something that would have upset someone. Better to be pure identity.
Hattip Glenn Reynolds
Why doesn't the Republican party push to clean up Washington?
Because like 90 percent of Dems, half of all Republicans are DC insiders or wannabes. And they want a more powerful (and profitable) centralized state that gives them maximum flexibility to 'get things done' for their careers. Jay cost outlines a principled (and therefore DOA) alternative at the link.
http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/195383/
Given the rape epidemic on campus is it wrong to send your daughter to college?
Watch this video of our President, Vice President and several Senators from the compassionate pro woman party describe the sexual assault epidemic on our college campuses. According to them one in five young women is raped while in college. And it must be true or the establishment press would have poured derision on the claim wouldn't they? After all you can believe what the press tells you about politician's claims can't you? Particularly about Democrat claims.
By my calculations a large University like Texas at Austin experiences over 25 sexual assaults every night during the school year. And that understates the tragedy because according to victims many are raped over and over, night after night in their own beds by the same rapist or sometimes in the rapist's bed or in the back of cars, or on the floor, or in front of the fireplace or on the kitchen counter. Golly, the sirens from the police responding to calls on sexual assault must fill the night air around major universities. We should probably increase police response tenfold. But wait! The Obama administration has issued new regulations that instruct (with swingeing fines for non compliance) Universities not to call the police when find a young woman has been sexually assaulted. They are supposed to let the rapist run free while the campus disciplinary committee develops its case. No doubt to smoke the little pervert out when he sexual assaults again. I admire the subtle brilliance of the Obama administration - but they always said Barack Obama was the smartest Man at Harvard Law - and I believe them.
But what does it say about Universities that these paragons of liberal rectitude have rates of brutality towards women that are ten or twenty times that of the far less enlightened young hoi polloi not in college? What is it about the college environment that produces such immense rates of evil in our young men? And immense rates of naive stupidity in our young women? Is it the "overall anything goes" message from the faculty and staff? Is it all the liberalism and hatred of America? Is it just the generalized scorn for 'traditional morality'? Whatever it is it seems obvious that you wouldn't want your daughter to attend an American college. And because the poison that colleges extrude seems to be producing vile, perverted behavior in men, why would you want your sons to attend either?
Perhaps the Muslims are right: women are only safe in their father's home until they move to their husband's home. But President Obama also tells us that marriages are hotbeds of sexual assault and violent abuse towards women as well. Clearly young men and women have too much freedom - we need to organize them into quasi military organizations so that they can be properly segregated and supervised and serve the State rather than sin against it. Something like the WPA for every one - you know - an Americanized Konsomol. We could call it the Obama Youth. And then they could graduate into the Obama Social Army - a cohesive Corps of Community Organizers that Saul Alinsky (PBUH) could only dream of.
Thank God we have the Smartest Man at Harvard Law leading us.
By my calculations a large University like Texas at Austin experiences over 25 sexual assaults every night during the school year. And that understates the tragedy because according to victims many are raped over and over, night after night in their own beds by the same rapist or sometimes in the rapist's bed or in the back of cars, or on the floor, or in front of the fireplace or on the kitchen counter. Golly, the sirens from the police responding to calls on sexual assault must fill the night air around major universities. We should probably increase police response tenfold. But wait! The Obama administration has issued new regulations that instruct (with swingeing fines for non compliance) Universities not to call the police when find a young woman has been sexually assaulted. They are supposed to let the rapist run free while the campus disciplinary committee develops its case. No doubt to smoke the little pervert out when he sexual assaults again. I admire the subtle brilliance of the Obama administration - but they always said Barack Obama was the smartest Man at Harvard Law - and I believe them.
But what does it say about Universities that these paragons of liberal rectitude have rates of brutality towards women that are ten or twenty times that of the far less enlightened young hoi polloi not in college? What is it about the college environment that produces such immense rates of evil in our young men? And immense rates of naive stupidity in our young women? Is it the "overall anything goes" message from the faculty and staff? Is it all the liberalism and hatred of America? Is it just the generalized scorn for 'traditional morality'? Whatever it is it seems obvious that you wouldn't want your daughter to attend an American college. And because the poison that colleges extrude seems to be producing vile, perverted behavior in men, why would you want your sons to attend either?
Perhaps the Muslims are right: women are only safe in their father's home until they move to their husband's home. But President Obama also tells us that marriages are hotbeds of sexual assault and violent abuse towards women as well. Clearly young men and women have too much freedom - we need to organize them into quasi military organizations so that they can be properly segregated and supervised and serve the State rather than sin against it. Something like the WPA for every one - you know - an Americanized Konsomol. We could call it the Obama Youth. And then they could graduate into the Obama Social Army - a cohesive Corps of Community Organizers that Saul Alinsky (PBUH) could only dream of.
Thank God we have the Smartest Man at Harvard Law leading us.
More significant than boycotting the NFL
Russian peace march draws tens of thousands in support of Ukraine.
Sunday, September 21, 2014
Obamacare complexity sows more chaos
Here's an article in USA today about tax credit clawbacks by the IRS that will reduce refunds to hundreds of thousands of taxpayers. They'll be thrilled. Here's the 'commonsense explanation':
The next open enrollment period begins Nov. 15. But notices were sent this week to some consumers whose incomes don't match up to such things as 2012 tax return information.
On Monday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said at least 279,000 households reported incomes that still don't match what the government has on record. Supporting documents are needed by Sept. 30.
What can you do to avoid tax-time problems?
Experts say people need to realize early on that they should report changes in income and other changes in one's life, such as a marriage, throughout the year. See HealthCare.gov to report "income and life changes."
Of course, many people may have no idea that they'd need to report changes.
The IRS put out some more details on the issue mid-month.
What should you report? A move, an increase or decrease in income, a marriage or divorce, the birth or adoption of a child, whether you started a job that offers health insurance and whether you gained or lost eligibility for other health care coverage.
Finally an establishment "warmist" that is honest about the state of climate science
Ex Cal Tech, Obama appointee , expert on modelling he has spent the last year interviewing key climate scientists and developing a point of view on the state of climate science. His conclusion: the science is nowhere near being settled and the current models are worthless as guides to the future climate. He argues for a red or skeptics team to pressure test all IPCC findings. He's going to be as popular as a turd in the punchbowl. And he just may save the science establishment from a catastrophic own goal. Read the whole thing at the link.
Saturday, September 20, 2014
Leftists pervert history to glorify the state and its demigods: The Roosevelts as dieties
Ken Burns doesn't so much report history as manufacture collectivist parables and deities. There isn't much truth in this Republic anymore. Whether it's the fraudulent AP history taught to our brightest students, the ludicrous global warming catechism, the Choo Choo cargo cult or the drunken keynsianism that passes for fiscal and monetary policy, the things we a told that just ain't so are legion. They cement the bien pensants in power and America in its steady decline into despair.
This is how civilizations die: one convenient lie at a time.
http://m.nationalreview.com/article/388430/progressives-enthroned-amity-shlaes/page/0/1
The National Science Foundation finally admitted on Climate Change its the National Science Fiction
They funded The Immensity aka: Climate Change The Musical and just like the real one it flopped. Lousy impresarios, lousy scientists. Great party hacks, though. More at the link.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/09/where-the-nea-meets-the-epa.php
Friday, September 19, 2014
Henry Hazlett on Marxism, Progressivism, Obamaism...whatever.
And is it any wonder that people who believe this are unable to foster the conditions for growth and innovation? President Obama: call your servuce.
The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects - his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity.
Henry Hazlitt
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/670650-the-whole-gospel-of-karl-marx-can-be-summed-up
If the Efficient Market Hypothesis were false then large institutional investors would be diving into, not bailing out of hedge funds
Just sayin'. More sayin' at the link.
http://www.aei-ideas.org/2014/09/hedge-funds-are-for-losers-you-might-as-well-invest-in-index-funds-and-burn-a-big-bunch-of-100-bills-every-year/
Jewish college students under attack at colleges all across America
You know the Nazi party became dominant on German campuses long before it gained power in Germany. The Nazis were environmentalists, opposed to factory farming and food additives, opposed to academic distinctions and status and in favor of students having a much greater say on campus policy. Jewish persecution got its start on college campuses where jews were heavily overrepresented. The SS was explicitly modeled as an elite force to attract college boys.
Colleges always breed utopian extremism. Which is why we need less of them. Particularly the ones that claim they will mold young men and women. Because the "molds" they use are obscene.
http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/19349/
Serve the left, get college credit!
So will negative credit will be given for students who think for themselves ?
Another brick in the wall that colleges are building between themselves and intellectual freedom, true diversity, relevance.....reality.
http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/19346/
Thursday, September 18, 2014
Left wing rich: anti science, anti vaccination and out of their minds
So why would you give credit to any movement led or supported by so many rich ignorant luddites? These people will even screw their own kids to sustain their superstitions. More at the link about the West LA whooping cough epidemic and the whooping loons who have caused it.
Hand grip strength an indicator of life expectancy
The stronger the grip, the longer you'll likely live - it's an overall measure of strength and vigor. And strength is a great predictor of health and longevity. I can tell with my father who is very thin and weak from eight years of Cancer.
My goal is to be come "The Claw"
My goal is to be come "The Claw"
Apparently Barack Obama intends to run the war as a parody of Vietnam
With His Oneness reprising the role of LBJ: micro manager from hell.
President Barack Obama plans to exert a high degree of personal control on the targeting of strikes in Syrian territory once the U.S. air campaign against Islamic State in Syria begins. We report that officials have said the targeting protocol might go so far as to require that the military obtain presidential signoff for each strike. Mr. Obama met with his top military advisers in Tampa yesterday, but he hasn't given the green light for an attack on Syria.
President Barack Obama plans to exert a high degree of personal control on the targeting of strikes in Syrian territory once the U.S. air campaign against Islamic State in Syria begins. We report that officials have said the targeting protocol might go so far as to require that the military obtain presidential signoff for each strike. Mr. Obama met with his top military advisers in Tampa yesterday, but he hasn't given the green light for an attack on Syria.
You just can't make this stuff up, gang, no one would believe you.
Hattip WSJ
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
For a flaky, weird place Austin has particularly authoritarian cops. Wait, authoritarian is the definition of quirky leftism.
Austin Police Officer Tries To Paint Police Accountability Groups As ‘Domestic Extremists’ In FOIA’ed Emails.
Anybody who has an issue with the gun totin' bebadged is a 'terrorist'.
Hattip Instapundit.com
Anybody who has an issue with the gun totin' bebadged is a 'terrorist'.
Hattip Instapundit.com
Evidence that deemphasizing the "canon" is having an impact
New York Times reporters don't know who Shylock was and apparently don't think anyone else does either. A-effing-mazing. More here.
ideas, concepts, senses, affections, a bloody reading list; fed with the same
leftist cant, filled with the same "I Rigoberta Menchu" drivel, subject to the same intellectual diseases, heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same hot air blatheirng
as a Literate man is? If you call him a stupid prick, will he not whine? If
you tickle him, will he not scream harassment? If you poison him with politically correct nostrums will his intellect not die?
And if he gets Shakespeare wrong, will he not denigrate it as old and dead and white and male? If he is ignorant in this, then he will report ignorantly in everything.
Here is the beauty part. New York Times reporter Michael Barbaro opened himself up to the rather powerful inference that he is clueless in something like Bidenesque proportions with his tweet below. This whole “shylocks” thing was over his head.
He is a Timesman. Hath not a Timesman eyes? Hath not a Timesman brains,ideas, concepts, senses, affections, a bloody reading list; fed with the same
leftist cant, filled with the same "I Rigoberta Menchu" drivel, subject to the same intellectual diseases, heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same hot air blatheirng
as a Literate man is? If you call him a stupid prick, will he not whine? If
you tickle him, will he not scream harassment? If you poison him with politically correct nostrums will his intellect not die?
And if he gets Shakespeare wrong, will he not denigrate it as old and dead and white and male? If he is ignorant in this, then he will report ignorantly in everything.
Thus Saeth the Bard (with some help)
The Portland model stinks
Everyone says that Portland, Oregon is the 'best' city because it is 'planned' using 'smart growth' techniques, however the 'smart growth' that Portland has achieved has come at an incredible price: massive bills for choo choos that a smaller and smaller proportion of all commuters ride, absolutely chaotic traffic for a city as small as it is and one of the lowest cost of living adjusted standards of living among major American urban areas. It turns out that the cargo cult of no building on plains, trains and no new roads for automobiles is a recipe for a not particularly dense city that is remarkably poor. Attaboy Portland, that's some "Smart Growth" you've got there. Other cities who are thinking of getting "Smart" like Minneapolis St. Paul should pause before they crash their burgs in the name of this latest great urban cargo cult. Wendell Cox of Demographia explains in this piece:
Ms. Bosker suggests that China may be poised to follow the "Portland model." A planner is quoted: “Portland is a really great model.” That, I would suggest, depends on your perspective.
The Portland model has its philosophical roots in the British Town and Country Planning Act of 1947. As early as 1973, Sir Peter Hall and his colleagues characterized the Act having had the "reverse effect" an important policy goal, to benefit less affluent households, by virtue of the house price escalation that ensued.
Portland has drawn an urban growth boundary around the city beyond which development is generally prohibited, and within which there is insufficient space to maintain competitive land prices. Portland has also has sought to attract people out of their cars by both building an extensive light rail system and (being) loath to provide new highway capacity to meet demand.
After more than 30 years of its urban containment ("smart growth") policy, Portland's urban density remains at only 1,350 per square kilometer (3,500 per square mile), less than one-quarter that of China's cities with more than 500,000 population (5,750 per square kilometer/14,900 per square mile). Los Angeles is twice as dense as Portland. Portland's urban density is closer to that of the world's most sprawling large urban area, Atlanta, than it is to that of Los Angeles. Planning whipping boy Houston is only 15 percent less dense than Portland.
And here's the brilliant outcome of Portland's 'transit strategy':
Portland is no model to copy, unless all you care about is inputs (like light rail and not building freeways and suburban housing). The outputs tell a completely different story. In 1980 (the last data before the first light rail line was opened) 65.1 percent of commuters drove alone to work. By 2012, that figure had increased to 70.8 percent. Transit was down from 8.4 percent to 6.0 percent. Approximately one-quarter as many people worked at home as commuted by transit in 1980 (2.2 percent). By 2012, more people in the Portland metropolitan area worked at home than rode transit (6.4 percent).
This is not surprising. Portland's "model" transit system (now with five light rail lines) can get the average commuter to only 8 percent of the jobs in 45 minutes. This is not very attractive in contrast to travel by automobiles, which provides access to virtually 100 percent of the jobs in less time (30 minutes).
Meanwhile, Portland's anti-highway policies have been rewarded with some of the most rapidly increasing traffic congestion in the United States. In the early 1980s, Portland ranked 47th worst out of the 101 US urban areas ranked by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. By 2011, Portland's traffic congestion had deteriorated to sixth worst, a stunning failure for a city with a population that doesn't even rank the top 20. Meanwhile, Houston, castigated for its wide freeways, has improved from the worst traffic congestion in the middle 1980s to four positions better than Portland (10th), despite adding having added three times as many new residents as Portland.
Oddly it is the American cities that haven't been 'smart' about their growth that have delivered the outcomes that people who come to cities want. Again from Cox:
If outputs are more important than inputs (which I suggest is true), then US cities do very well. They have the highest incomes in the world, occupying 36 of the top 50 positions in gross domestic product per capita. They have some of the most affordable housing in the world, if cities following the Portland model are excluded. They have shorter work trip commutes and less traffic congestion than their peers in other high income world nations. And, they are poised for huge progress in environmental protection. The US Department of Energy forecasts large reductions in gross greenhouse gas emission from the national automobile fleet in the coming decades.
Overwhelmingly, the growth of cities happened because rural residents sought higher standards of living and an escape from lower incomes and poverty, in rural areas. Few, if any moved to cities for wise urban planning, for "soulful financial districts" or to commute by light rail. Overall, US city outputs correspond very well with the purpose of cities --- which is why they attracted residents.
But "Smart Growth" city outputs correspond very well with the purpose of planners, politicians and the developers who fund them: to maximize their power and the value of the favored developer's property.
A pity about all the poverty. From my post Jelly donut progress - why are trendy places so damned poor and unequal?
As you'll note, the high cost of living in Portland (almost all due to high housing costs) results in Portland having the 43rd out of 50 highest median adjusted annual wage: as bad as NYC and almost as poor as massive poverty standouts LA or San Diego. This contrasts with faster growing and equally trendy Austin where the cost of living is 90% of the national average and real median wages are more than 25% higher than in Portland.
Cities that are being pitched this ludicrous cargo cultish mixture of superstition and stupidity should consider very carefully whether they really want to hand power over their children's standards of living to unaccountable bureaucrats and divert billions of dollars from road construction to white elephant trains that with every passing year will transport a smaller and smaller share of all commuters at greater and greater costs. I mean unless you like to be bullied and impoverished by bureaucrats.