Category: Uncategorized

Duly noted from Down Under:

Britain’s Prince Harry will not be deployed to Iraq after military commanders decided it would be too dangerous, Britain’s Ministry of Defense said on Wednesday. Instead, Prince Harry will continue his tour of duty in British nightclubs.

An anti-U.S. Afghan rebel leader said he had information that Osama bin Laden is alive but keeping a low profile by not issuing statements, according to a video aired on Sunday. He also had information that Osama is missing the spotlight and has reportedly been back in the studio mixing some new audio tapes and working with different producers.

The Taliban said today it had arrested a close aide to the rebel movement’s slain commander Mullah Dadullah for treachery that led to his killing. It is rumoured that they plan to take him out to dinner and discuss the terms of his resignation from the movement.

John Hawkins unearths the basic schizophrenia in the right-wing blogosphere:

1) If you were assigning a letter grade to how George Bush has performed as President since the 2006 elections, would it be…

42% — C
33% — D or F
25% — A or B

2) Which of the two following groups better represents your stance on illegal immigration.

89% — The Minutemen, Tom Tancredo, Jeff Sessions.
11% — George Bush, John McCain, the Wall Street Journal.

5) It has been said that if we haven’t seen enormous progress in Iraq by September of this year, that Congress may cut off funds for the troops or set a timeline for the troops to pull out. Do you think we should…

91% — Stay in Iraq at least until we feel confident that the Iraqis can handle their own internal security after our troops leave the street.

09% — Set a timeline for the troops to leave Iraq or cut off funds for the troops if we haven’t made big progress by September.

The majority of Americans support ending the occupations and ending migration. The right-wing blogosphere is split. The Republican Party supports both.

And that, in a nutshell, is why Hillary is your next president. She doesn’t have to take strong positions on either of the two major issues, it’s enough for her to sit back and let the Republican candidates slit their own throats for her.

Perhaps these successful, bright and adventurous women should consider taking a beginner’s class in logic:

in New York City, in many (if not most) adult courses, the women are numerous and the men are few — for approximately the same reason that men behind the wheel don’t ask for directions. It goes against the male grain to acknowledge ignorance about a subject, said professionals who organize classes….

At JackRabbit Sports, the running, swimming and triathlon classes are filled mostly with women, said Lee Silverman, the owner. At the Brooklyn store, for example, the beginning running class has 18 women and 2 men, and another running class has 13 women and 2 men.

Curse those shamelessly arrogant men who believe they are capable of figuring out how to run without being taught! No wonder “runs like a girl” is considered an insult.

My favorite quote was this one: ““You think if you do something you’re passionate about, you’ll find him,” said Ms. Hill, 45, an executive assistant who lives in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.”

It’s a mystery why she’s still available. I suggest that if she tried doing something that MEN are passionate about, she would significantly increase her chances of meeting one that she likes. I don’t care how passionate a woman is about embroidery or saving the warming planet of gay whales, if she wants to meet normal men, she’d be better off lifting free weights, shooting guns or playing golf. And if she wants to meet intelligent men and doesn’t mind them being either freakishly skinny or seriously overweight, she should try playing wargames or getting into a science fiction-related fan following.

This isn’t that difficult. The Onion long ago figured out what the New York Times can’t.

Upon arriving at DragonCon, Melcher found himself disappointed in the dating pool, noticing a gender ratio decidedly skewed toward males.

“I guess girls aren’t into dragons and superheroes as much as guys are,” Melcher said. “That fact really hit me when I first walked into the main exhibition hall: Talk about a total sausage fest.”

Though a distinct minority, some females were present at DragonCon.

“There was this one girl dressed up like Black Canary. She had the boots and the fishnet stockings and everything,” Melcher said. “I couldn’t really talk to her, though, because there was a pretty dense crowd of guys around her at all times.”

Ladies and gentlemen, your Republican president!

Base Betrayed [Kate O’Beirne]

I just talked with a veteran conservative activist whose group doesn’t engage on the immigration issue but who is glum about the expected reaction of the conservative grassroots to the immigration deal. “We’ll all be hurt. They’ll just stay home,” he predicted. “They’ll figure they didn’t support Republicans in order to federalize education, create a big, new entitlement program, and grant amnesty to illegals.”

He left out purple-fingered nation-building to elect a legitimate and democratic jihad, but otherwise, yeah, pretty much. When Hillary gets elected, I’ll be the one pointing and laughing at all of your sad Three Monkey faces. Nice work losing the House and Senate, you politically astute “pragmatists”. Well done putting the Lizard Queen on the Cherry Blossom Throne, all you “he’s only doing it in order to unveil his double-secret super-conservative plan to save the nation” voters.

Maybe you will all finally see and hear some evil once your party finishes its third trip to the guillotine. I know you’ll certainly be speaking plenty of it.

And yet, I have no doubt that you’ll all run right back into the warm embrace of Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Prager and Jonah Goldberg and Sean Hannity and Bill Bennett and all the other Radio Republicans… I mean, you’ve got to know their opinions, they’ve collectively got such a smashingly excellent record over these past few years.

Don’t forget, we are at war!

Bush is such a disaster, the Democrats don’t even want to impeach him anymore. But after the 2008 elections, I bet there will be a lot of ex-Republicans who will wish they had.

The OC asks a good question:

Which are the 25 books that someone should read by the age of 25 in order to be considered properly literate?

I’ll have some comments and my 25 later. And I’ll probably mock yours….

It’s later, and I’m amused by how many people included books that are supposed to sound impressive and very few people actually read, or very good books that most people should read but don’t.. Unless you’re making a subtle point intended to prove that virtually no one is literate, this is, I think, completely missing the point.

Since I consider myself to be literate, by definition any book that I have not read cannot be necessary for literacy. That knocks out more than a few books commonly listed, such as Portrait of the Author as a Young Man. (And while I have read Ulysses, it is by no means necessary.)

I should also note that I left out the OC’s spotting of a religious tome, because whereas the Bible is necessary to be considered literate, the Bhagavad Gita and the Koran are not. Most literate people have read neither. Anyhow, without further ado, here’s my list of 25 books which I believe is absolutely necessary to have read in order to be considered literate.

The Iliad
The Odyssey
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Plato’s Republic
The Annals

The Decameron
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
Candide
A Christmas Carol
Anna Karenina

Don Quixote
The Three Musketeers
The Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe
Crime and Punishment
Brideshead Revisited

1984
The Name of the Rose
The Glass Bead Game
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
The Hound of the Baskervilles

The Lord of the Rings
The Chronicles of Narnia
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Foundation
The Code of the Woosters

There’s a few books you may not have read that aren’t absolutely necessary to be considered literate, but I’ll nevertheless look at you somewhat askance if you haven’t: The Tale of Genji, The Dark is Rising, Watership Down, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, The Divine Comedy, Madame Bovary, a collection of short stories by Guy de Maupassant, a Poirot novel.

In which I answer a question posed by a commenter at Fetch Me My Axe:

I like this logic, could be very interesting to apply it to other areas of life. Let’s see if we can think of some other things without which civilisations survived for thousands of years that we have today…

Cars;

Computers;

Universal suffrage (the Athenian city-state, for example, had very restricted suffrage in its democratic system, very few men, even, were allowed the vote);

Human rights are a fairly new invention, as is the concept of a “war crime”;

I wonder how many of these, and many other innovations it’s possible to list, the author of the above quotation would advocate doing without…?

I would recommend doing without universal suffrage, “human rights” and “war crimes”. The first subjects the citizenry to rule by an elite without accountability, the second is a popular fiction which is dependent upon those rights not conflicting with the granting authority – read your Universal Declaration of Human Rights and check out Article 29 section 3 if you didn’t understand that – and the concept of “war crimes” inherently presupposes a supra-national power that poses more potential danger to humanity than either war or war crimes.

I’m okay with cars and computers, though. You could certainly make a case against cars, but I don’t think it would be ultimately convincing.

I’ve never read “The Purpose-Driven Life”. And for all I know, Rick Warren is a genuine man of God. But based on his own public statements, it’s pretty hard for the casual observer to believe that:

In the New Yorker interview published in September 2005, Warren is quoted as saying: “I had dinner with Jack Welch (former chief executive officer of GE) last Sunday night. He came to church, and we had dinner. I’ve been kind of mentoring him on his spiritual journey. And he said to me, ‘Rick, you are the biggest thinker I have ever met in my life. The only other person I know who thinks globally like you is Rupert Murdoch.’ And I said, ‘That’s interesting. I’m Rupert’s pastor! Rupert published my book!'”

Seriously, who talks like that? Could you drop any more names there, Rick? Or is your big, shiny, shellacked head just too chock full of big thoughts to recall any more at the moment?

JohnG expresses a reasonable fear:

We’re at brink, at this moment, of handing the jihadists the greatest recruiting tool – our withdrawal in shame and defeat from Iraq – in the history of Islam.

That’s true. But what he’s either missing or glossing over is that this became INEVITABLE once the decision to stick around Iraq and play Purple-Fingered Nation Builder was taken. The history of what passes for democracy in Turkey, Indonesia, Palestine and Algeria proves that the Bush administration signed up America’s troops for an impossible task.

So, instead of leaving behind a shocked and awed Middle East, we’ll leave an encouraged and emboldened one. This isn’t news, some of us have known that would be the result since 2004. Check my column archive, you’ll see that’s why I went from supporting the wars to unseat Saddam Hussein and the Taliban to vehemently and viciously criticizing the Afghani and Iraqi Occupations.

It’s called biting off more than you can chew. We’re not the first great military power to make that mistake, we won’t be the last. If we’ve learned from our mistakes, there will probably be one more surge to provide some level of cover for our pull-out, plus the establishment of a quasi-independent Kurdish state that will allow us to claim some lasting positive legacy there.

If we haven’t, we’ll invade Iran.

The other possibility would be to destablize the entire peninsula by removing five or six area regimes, pulling out and letting the various factions occupy themselves with fighting it out for the prize. The danger there would be the possibility a strong and unified Caliphate being established, which the Law of Unintended Consequences suggests would likely be the case.

In case you’re too thick to have grasped this yet:

Hazleton Mayor Lou Barletta, who gained national prominence by targeting illegal immigrants living in his small northeastern Pennsylvania city, cruised to the Republican nomination for a third term on Tuesday – and unexpectedly won the Democratic nomination, too.

Barletta trounced GOP challenger Dee Deakos with nearly 94 percent of the vote. And he beat former Mayor Michael Marsicano for the Democratic nomination by staging a last-minute write-in campaign, all but guaranteeing himself another term, unofficial returns showed.

I find it very, very telling that despite the overwhelming popularity of shutting off the migration spigot with Democrats and Republicans alike, none of the media anointed front-runners will even consider grasping the nettle. Sure, they’ll flip-flop on abortion and taxes and homogamy and anything else the public demands….

But turning the nation over to Mexicans and Muslims? That’s non-negotiable. That’s a must. That’s progress.

Towards what?

The basket looks like the Pacific Ocean to John Derbyshire.

Ron Paul was asked: “Are you running for the nomination in the wrong party?” I forget what he said, but the actual answer is “Yes.” Ron should be the candidate of the Constitution party. The Republican party is not a reliably conservative party. It is a slightly right-of-center party that American conservatives vote for grudgingly, because they believe that only the two big parties can ever win the presidency, and Republican administrations are very slightly more likely to very occasionally enact conservative measures than are Democratic administrations.

That pretty much describes why I am not a Republican and why I find it impossible to harbor any sympathy for those conservatives who blindly elect to put their trust in the Republican Party year after year, then inevitably complain about how they have been betrayed.

Immigration: Striking how utterly clueless all the candidates (except Tancredo) were about this issue until a few months ago. Now they are all desperately having to unwind their idiotic remarks of the previous Era of Immigration Ignorance. Guys, this has been talked about by thoughtful people for YEARS. It’s over a decade since Peter Brimelow published Alien Nation. Did you really not give a nanosecond’s thought to this huge, momentous issue until last summer? Really? Good grief. We are governed by morons.

Word ’em up.

Ron Paul put forward the “blowback” theory, which I first heard on or about Sept. 12, 2001, from Pat Buchanan, and which is perfectly plausible, though in my opinion an over-simplification. Rudy: “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that before.” For goodness sake, Rudy. Don’t you READ? The reality is, Rudy, that entire books have been written to promote the blowback theory. Have your staffers read some of them & write up abstracts for you. You NEVER HEARD of this theory? Gimme a break.

Giuliani is either a quasi-illiterate moron or a lying weasel. No wonder the moronic Three Monkey Republicans are ecstatic about putting forward a pro-abortion New York liberal as the new Ronald Reagan.