Category: Uncategorized

This is getting ludicrous:

99 Masonville Marauders
71 Greenfield Grizzlies

90 Winston Reverends
71 Cranberry Bogs

66 Burns ICU
65 Mounds View Meerkats

64 Village Valkyries
48 East Mesa WhiteTrash

49 W.C. Silver Spooners
38 Black Mouth Curs

The Meerkats have scored 452 points, good for fourth in the league. Naturally, they’re FOUR games behind the 5-2 Valkyries, who have scored 31 fewer points, and three games behind the 4-3 Silver Spooners, who’ve scored 89 less.

I’m starting to feel like Mike Martz in St. Louis.

Christopher Hitchens offers a fittingly ridiculous defense of the ridiculous term “islamo-fascism”:

Does Bin Ladenism or Salafism or whatever we agree to call it have anything in common with fascism? I think yes. The most obvious points of comparison would be these: Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. (“Death to the intellect! Long live death!” as Gen. Francisco Franco’s sidekick Gonzalo Queipo de Llano so pithily phrased it.) Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined “humiliations” and thirsty for revenge. Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia).

I could make a better case for calling atheism “atheo-fascism”. After all, atheist governments have historically been far more lethal than ANY fascist government – although the original Fascist government was, itself, atheistic – and atheists are equally “obsessed with real and imagined persecutions and thirsty for revenge”. And atheists are far more anti-Jewish than most theists today.

But it would be stupid, just as Hitchens’s defense of the term is abysmally stupid.

There is virtually NO similarity between the historical Fascist program and the Islamic Jihad. One is nationalistic, the other international in scope. One is utterly indifferent to questions of morality, the other is obsessed with it. One is heavily based on economics and politics, the other is almost entirely concerned with religion.

Read Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Manifesto. There is not a SINGLE ONE of the seventeen policies that would apply to radical Islam. Not one! I highly doubt any radical Muslim wants the secular state to seize all the possessions of the Islamic clergy or to grant women’s suffrage; radical Islam is closer to the complete opposite of fascism than it is to being a form of it.

And given his past ideological identity and his recent and all too predictable call for the mass-murder of Muslims, it is amazing that the ex-Marxist and current atheist Hitchens should have the nerve to call anything “a cult of murderous violence”.

John Leo writes about dear darling Hamline:

Troy Scheffler, a graduate student at Hamline University in Minnesota, thinks that the Virginia Tech massacre might have been avoided if students had been allowed to carry concealed weapons. After e-mailing this opinion to the university president, he was suspended and ordered to undergo “mental health evaluation” before being allowed to return to school.

Punishment for expressing an opinion is not unusual on the modern campus.

Small Minnesota wannabe universities are among the worst for this sort of thing; when you’re number 202, you try a LOT harder. You haven’t met a true over-the-top left-wing would-be eurosophisticate until you’ve met a few of the sort that frequent Carlton, Hamline and Macalester.

They don’t speak anything but Midwestern English, have never been anywhere except a weekend trip to New York City, but the one thing they can achieve in their humble parochial environs is to out-angst the French Existentialists and out-PC the Ivy League.

And they do. One reason Pharyngula is so reliably deranged is that he suffers from the same disease, except that he’s at a community college in Morris, far from the bright lights and big city excitement of St. Paul.

Isaiah emails with an unusual perspective on the nature of American-Israeli relations:

considering the pro-arab nature of bush policy, it is risible to wade in the muck of the israel lobby argument. just when did this “palestine nation” ever exist? and yet the planned vivisection proceeds. based on persian rhetoric and actions, israel has every right to wipe tehran off of the map. best that this would happen without one cent of U.S. aid. not likely to happen while the jewish state remains a vassal of washington. careful, your shirts may be turning brown.

Is it really pro-Arab to invade and occupy an Arab country for four years? Regardless of whether “this palestine nation” ever existed or not, it exists now and has been recognized by the United States government, which is all that any American should require. Ethnic Jews living in the West are not in a reasonable position to argue against Palestinian nationhood on the grounds that ethnicity is the sole legitimate basis for nationality.

And what, precisely, are the actions that give Israel “every right” to wipe Iran off the map? Pursuing nuclear weapons technology? By that logic, Israel has every right to wipe Washington, London and Paris off the map as well. As for rhetoric, there is no shortage of damnable rhetoric on all sides; if verbal threats justify lethal action, I possess dozens of licenses to kill.

Finally, I note the idiocy of attempting to equate libertarianism with National Socialism. Libertarians don’t even wear uniforms; if we did, cobalt blue ties and hot pink miniskirts would be prominently involved.

Keep that in mind when you’re reading National Review and they’re pushing Giuliani, Thompson and now Huckabee:

RE: Paul’s Simplistic Understanding [Mark Hemingway]
I’m not voting for Ron Paul because it’s not expressly prescribed in the Constitution.

First Letter to Paul from a Federalist [Mark R. Levin]
As for Ron Paul, his understanding of the founding is simplistic and inaccurate. Yes, the Founders believed in individual liberty. But they believed in a whole lot more.

That’s It? [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
I could actually watch another hour this time. Without Ron Paul.

Come on Wendell [Kate O’Beirne]
Time is short – ignore Ron Paul.

You Spoke too Soon, Levin [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
Ron Paul is talking, so I’m tempted to turn to Desperate Housewives.

Kate and Kathryn Jean demonstrate once more the complete insanity of women’s suffrage. Subjects like fiat money, unconstitutional wars and utterly predictable foreign policy consequences are just too difficult and boring for their pretty little heads; these so-called professional political commentators are simply not interested in anything more sophisticated than brief sound bites about “the children” and “the future” and promises to keep them safe from the scary Islamo-bogeymen.

Hemingway is amusing, though. It’s a pity Levin didn’t see fit to expound upon what else the Founders believed, how those things ranked vis-a-vis individual liberty, and the various candidates’ positions upon them.

RR worries too much:

Vox, You were right about what Ann Coulter said, and Farah is wrong in his column today…. Please don’t back down. Please don’t apologise. Please.

Yeah, I wouldn’t lose any sleep over that. This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that Joseph Farah and I disagree on something. It happens, in fact, it’s bound to happen. He’s criticizing me, he’s not asking for an apology on behalf of anyone. I doubt he believes one is necessary, and in any event, he definitely knows me well enough to know that one isn’t forthcoming.

And as the fantasy football players here know, I have no problem with taking the occasional friendly fire.

This is what passes for the New York Times’s idea of rational debate:

Let’s concede an indisputable point: people should not be in the country illegally. But forget about the border for a moment — let’s talk about the 12 million who are already here. What should be done about them?

A. Deport them all.

B. Find out who they are. Distinguish between criminals and people who just want to work. Get them on the books. Make them pay what they owe — not just the income, Social Security, sales and property taxes they already pay, but all their taxes, and a fine. Get a smooth legal flow of immigrants going, and then concentrate on catching and deporting bad people.

C. Catch the few you can, and harass and frighten the rest. Treat the entire group as a de facto class of criminals, and disrupt or shout down anyone or any plan seen as abetting their evildoing.

Forget A. Congress tried a version of B, but it was flattened by outrage.

And so here we are at C. It’s a policy that can’t work; it’s too small-bore, too petty, too narrow. And all the while it’s not working, it can only lead to the festering of hate.

Oh, okay. Just “Forget A”. That’s all, don’t talk about it, don’t think about it, don’t even mention it except to dismiss it… just forget it. Never mind the fact that there have been dozens of successful mass deportations that did not occasion mass violence throughout history, or that there are more than 20 million illegal immigrants currently invading the USA, not 12 million. The NYT is very eager to avoid discussing deportation because a sizable minority of Americans already support it; within five years, that sizable minority will become a majority and by that time, the deportation debate will have moved on to include a portion of the legal immigrant population, a development that has already taken place in France, the Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland.

What “ain’t America” is Mexico. This is not only true in the political and national senses, (if not the continentally geographical), it is downright tautological.

From Profootballtalk:

The talk in league circles after yet another subpar performance from Vikings quarterback Tarvaris Jackson is that the franchise plans to target another starting quarterback for 2008.

Yes, QB does tend to strike one as being a rather obvious need, followed by WRs who can hang onto the ball. In fact, the QB position struck most Vikings fans as a rather obvious need last year, although I can’t say I’m unhappy with either the Adrian Peterson or Sydney Rice picks.

I finally became convinced that Tarvaris simply won’t cut it after seeing him miss on two passes to Wade. It wasn’t his inaccuracy that was the problem, although that is certainly an issue, but the fact that he was seen trying to argue the throws after the fact with Childress and then Wade. In the latter case, there was absolutely nothing to argue about; Jackson just threw it too late and too far behind an open receiver slanting deep across the middle.

UPDATE: Aaron Schatz reaches the same conclusion:

One more note: Tarvaris Jackson is awful, just awful. He’s a walking, talking advertisement for the Lewin Career Forecast. No accuracy, awful decision-making, constantly flustered by pressure.

I, too, like and admire Joseph Farah. But like many, he doesn’t always quite understand my somewhat dry sense of humor:

In his enthusiasm, he goes astray here, contending, “Vanity Fair has recently announced that a remarkable 51 percent of the Vanity Fair 100 Power List are Jewish in a country in which Jews make up approximately 2 percent of the population. Jews also make up 7 percent of the current House of Representatives, 13 percent of the Senate, and, according to John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of ‘The Israel Lobby,’ roughly 100 percent of George W. Bush’s foreign policy advisers.”

But does Vox Day really believe roughly 100 percent of George W. Bush’s foreign policy advisers are Jewish?

Well, no, he doesn’t. I wasn’t under the impression that Condoleeza Rice was related to Sammy Davis Jr. or anything like that. While the rest of the statistics are accurate as cited, the last one was a joke, which escaped more than a few people despite its obvious absurdity. That’s fine, it happens all the time because I find few things more amusing than talking over people’s heads right to their face. Farah, meanwhile, showed his own dry sense of humor in lauding my “selfless act of chivalry”. That was funny.

As for the Israel Lobby, Mr. Farah and I shall simply have to agree to disagree, as there are many people insisting that the USA fight Israel’s battles against Iran and other enemies. Israel’s wars, it is often asserted, are the USA’s wars, even though there is no formal military alliance between the two countries. Regarding history and the fact that Jews were welcomed in a number of places prior to not being welcome, I am, of course, verifiably correct.

When I wished to make a city out of the village of Speyer, I Rüdiger, surnamed Huotzmann, bishop of Speyer, thought that the glory of our town would be augmented a thousandfold if I were to bring in Jews.

Still, I quite like Joseph’s open way of handling these disagreements, as you’ll note that despite his labling my “nonsense” as “Buchananesque”, he doesn’t hesitate to publish Mr. Patrick J. Buchanan either. This is one of the many reasons I enjoy writing for WND instead of for other, more conventional publications.

And in other news, Tarvaris Jackson really does not look as if he’s going to cut it. I’m getting definite Quincy Clark vibe from him. And I’m still pretty dubious about Childress as well. Why does he keep having Jackson drop back and throw when he’s only completed two passes over three quarters and a sack will take them out of FG range?