Category: Uncategorized

The surreal legend of the American amazon continues to grow:

Maj. Jill Metzger, a personnel officer, was last seen at a Zum shopping center in Bishkek, according to the Air Force. In response, 22 OSI agents have been dispatched to Kyrgyzstan to aid in the search. Col. Joel Reese, 376th Air Expeditionary Wing Commander, has sworn “not to rest” until Maj. Metzger is found.

Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet republic, is 75% Muslim. It’s also infamous for the brutal tradition of “bride kidnapping,” where brides are kidnapped and forced into marriage by Kyrgyz men.

I sincerely hope they recover Miss Metzger alive, unharmed and healthy. And I fully recognize that any military officer can be captured by enemy forces.

But even the most sour-faced lesbian feminist couldn’t miss the irony and black humor if it turns out that an American military officer is forcibly married to her Muslim kidnapper. Some conservatives worry about cutting and running having a negative effect on the way in which the American military is regarded? This could make it a laughingstock.

The Baseball Savant is curious:

Be honest, if you were to start competing in UFC, how well would you do? I’ll give you the context of training time and getting back a good nutriton/supplment regiment.

What’s the talley?

I haven’t watched any UFC other than the first three, but I assume that I’d probably be forced to tap out in the first round. I’d have reasonable size for a middleweight, as 185 is an ideal fighting weight for me so there’s a reasonable chance that I’d have somewhat of a speed and strength advantage over my opponent.

The problem is that I’m an upright fighter and I’m not all that comfortable when forced to grapple, as it plays to neither my strengths nor my training. I don’t know if UFC is still as grappling-heavy as it was at the beginning, but while the 12-15 locks and holds that I know are more than sufficient for everyday situations, it would be a serious disadvantage against someone who is at home on the ground, to say nothing of a Royce Gracie sort. Unless my opponent screwed up and gave me window for a KO strike while coming in, the probabilities are high that I’d end up locked up and tapping out.

I did win the only UFC-style match I’ve ever fought, however, as I choked out a friend and fellow Dragon who had beaten me for the trophy in a conventional karate tournament a few months before. We were very evenly matched in terms of strength and skill, (he had a bit more of both at the time), but in the shoot fighting match I think my speed and height (read: longer arms) made up the difference since neither one of us really knew how to wrestle.

I should note that another Dragon did quite well in one of the UFCs, I think he came in second in the light heavyweight class, but he could not only kick my ass without much effort, he was a formidable jiujitsu wrestler as well, so I don’t see how that’s useful information.

In any event, I have zero desire to enter the Octagon these days and I don’t think Spacebunny would regard it with favor either.

This is why I consider Bill Simmons to be a sports fan who happens to write for ESPN, not a sportswriter:

To the dumbest round of preseason stories: glowing features about Art Shell’s coaching comeback with the Raiders, which proved the age-old adage, “If you let enough time pass in sports, people are bound to forget just about anything.” Shell’s 14-year absence from the sidelines had nothing to do with color; he was a terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE game coach. Do you know why we started using the phrase “bad clock management”? BECAUSE OF ART SHELL!!!! During the last two minutes of a half, Art Shell’s math skills made Herm Edwards look like Will Hunting. Really, nobody remembers this? For God’s sake, that’s why he got fired! That’s why I’ve been making “Art Shell School of Clock Management” jokes in my column for the past 10 years! That’s why he hasn’t worked since!

Everyone forgets this, too, but those Raiders teams were almost criminally loaded; it’s astounding they never appeared in a Super Bowl, although they did end up going down as the greatest Tecmo Bowl team of all time. In real life, they committed 12-15 penalties per game under Shell and were a mortal lock to blow any close game…. Unfortunately, no channel shows old Raiders games from the Art Shell Era, so nobody remembers how he stood frozen on the sidelines as the announcers said things like, “Wow, ANOTHER holding penalty on the Raiders; that’s their 10th today!” and “I’m not sure Art Shell knows that you can’t carry over timeouts from one half to the other.” Watch what happens this season. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Except for the hardcore baseball analysts, the sports media grasp of recent history is almost as bad as the mainstream media’s grasp of national and world history. As the Sports Guy points out later in the piece, the combination of a terrible game coach with the dumbest quarterback in the league should make for an fascinating season. This is why I didn’t draft any Raidess… throw in Randy Moss getting frustrated by Week 5 and you’d have to think that the Bay Area would feature the worst two teams in football if it weren’t for the ongoing debacle that is the Houston Texans.

But I don’t think the Sports Guy has to worry about a lack of material this year, even with the absence of the Mikes. I mean, the season hasn’t even begun yet and we’ve already got starting quarterbacks being benched and naked Lions coaches being arrested. As for the latter, the only thing missing was that Matt Millen or his wife weren’t somehow involved.

Forget the NBA, I love THIS game!

The Telegraph addresses the abhorrent concept of the wifely duty:

Why is it suddenly fashionable for women to brag about how little sex they have with their husbands? Because in their quest for independence, writes the provocative American writer Caitlin Flanagan, today’s exhausted working women have neglected one thing…

So pity the married man hoping to get a bit of comfort from the wife at day’s end. He must somehow seduce a woman who is economically independent of him, bone tired, philosophically disinclined to have sex unless she is jolly well in the mood, numbingly familiar with his every sexual manoeuvre, and still seething over his failure to wipe down the worktops after cooking the kids’ dinner. He can hardly be blamed for opting instead to check his email, catch a few minutes of Match of the Day and call it a night.

Given the curious alchemy of feminism, which transforms anything women choose to do into a crucial element of liberation doctrine, confessing that one has given up sex has become a very right-on and empowering act.

Perhaps you’re more likely to wind up in a sexless marriage if you’re foolish enough to marry a career woman, but at least you can count on getting screwed in the divorce.

I’ve never quite understood why some women get their thongs so twisted about the idea that there is a sexual duty attached to marriage. After all, no one is making anyone get married these days. I’d like to see how many men would still marry if their fiance informed them that she did not see providing sex as her responsibility. I’m guessing that figure would be below 5 percent.

What I find weirdly irrational about most married women, even the more traditional wives, is their screwed up sense of priorities. No wife has a problem with her husband eating at a restaurant or hiring a cleaning lady, and yet many of them place a higher priority on everything from cooking, cleaning and watching TV than on having marital sex. It makes no sense, especially in today’s pornotopia.

I repeat… why do sports editors insist on foisting this ignorant self-centered Chick Split on us? Perhaps you recall what I said last time about the lunacy of assigning women with no interest in sports to write about them for a sports page read primarily by men:

I’m a 26-year-old woman born in upstate New York, raised in bucolic Connecticut suburbs and educated by friars in brown robes at a small college in the Berkshires. I listen to public radio. I drink nonfat lattes while thumbing through the L.A. Times in black, plastic-framed reading glasses. I display a Human Rights Campaign bumper sticker on my car. I had a vegetarian phase.

I hate to pigeonhole myself, but I’m not supposed to like the Ultimate Fighting Championship. I’m supposed to think it’s barbarically primal, and offensive, and artless.

But you met me at a very strange time in my life.

After my first trip to Las Vegas, my attitude is different. I was completely riveted by UFC 62.

Short Translation: “ohmigod, you would totally think that i’m, like, so above that icky boy stuff, but, like, i actually liked it! can you believe it?

Subtext: “I’m a college-educated career woman and feminist with all of the approved female sensitivities pursuing a media career, so please cut me some slack and understand that I’m being ironic when I pretend to like this grotesque exhibition of neanderthalic male violence to which my patriarchist editor sent me only in order to keep my job. Sweet goddess, if they don’t put me on camera within six months, I swear by Gaia’s gargantuan vulva that I’m sending another application to the New York Times Style Section.”

Seriously, ESPN couldn’t find a single writer anywhere in the country who actually follows UFC? I don’t follow it at all, and even I watched the first four.

Catkiller! comments asthe Original Cyberpunk explains a principle of union labor:

I worked for the parks commission for two summers chalking and raking baseball fields and keepign stats. I always had a deadline–game time. The cool thing was doing girls’ softball twice a week. Since I did the write-ups for the paper, there was always a group of desperate girls around me after games.

So, who wants to break it to him?

Another from the “Women are fascists” department:

The confrontation at Hewlett-Packard started innocently enough. Last January, the online technology site CNET published an article about the long-term strategy at HP, the company ranked No. 11 in the Fortune 500. While the piece was upbeat, it quoted an anonymous HP source and contained information that only could have come from a director. HP’s chairwoman, Patricia Dunn, told another director she wanted to know who it was; she was fed up with ongoing leaks to the media going back to CEO Carly Fiorina’s tumultuous tenure that ended in early 2005. According to an internal HP e-mail, Dunn then took the extraordinary step of authorizing a team of independent electronic-security experts to spy on the January 2006 communications of the other 10 directors—not the records of calls (or e-mails) from HP itself, but the records of phone calls made from personal accounts. That meant calls from the directors’ home and their private cell phones.

When feminists tell everyone that the business world needs more female executives because they will do things differently than their male counterparts, it would be helpful if they would explain precisely what they mean by that.

Ann Coulter’s support of Tony Blair is the one position she has ever taken that I cannot at least somewhat defend. Go, and take Cool Brittania and George W. Bush with you:

“Tony Blair’s administration has been dealt what may turn out to be a fatal blow by the resignation of seven members of his Government.Tom Watson, the under-secretary of state for defence, wrote to Mr Blair this morning telling him that it was no longer in the interests of Labour or of the country for him to remain Prime Minister. This afternoon six parliamentary private secretaries – MPs on the lowest rung of the Government ladder – also handed in their resignations.”

I hope this will be Blair’s political death knell. He combined the worst traits of Bill Clinton with those of George W. Bush. Not only did he destroy the legacy of Margaret Thatcher, but he put Britain well on the road to becoming the EU province formerly known as Britain. May 31, 2007 is not soon eough to get rid of the man.

The NROniks are all but wetting themselves:

President Bush’s speech is a landmark event. As John says, the president’s pledge not to allow a nuclear Iran is a major policy declaration that could well result in a clash before long. My piece today, “Kingdom Come,” gives an inkling of why a president, faced with the implications of a nuclear Iran, might feel that he has no choice but to act. But the horror of it is, the points I cover only scratch the surface of the many frightening implications of an Iran armed with nuclear weapons.

I find it hard to take the bed-wetting over nuclear proliferation very seriously. What no one seems to grasp is that it is no more possible to prevent nuclear proliferation than it was to prevent hauberk proliferation during Charlemagne’s reign or rifle proliferation in the 18th century. Yes, there will likely be a hideous event or two, and yes, it’s more than likely that the reigning world power which believes it has a right to station troops in dozens of countries and forcibly occupy any country it likes will be the primary target.

But none of this changes the fact that technological proliferation is inevitable. If it were possible for the United States to prevent other governments from acquiring them, presumably the Russians, the Chinese and the Indians would not have them. Furthermore, logic strongly suggests that Iran does not want nukes in order to set off a few in Jerusalem or Washington, if they did they would have already acquired them from the Soviet Union, North Korea, Pakistan or South Africa and done so. They want them for the same reason everyone else does, to bring to an end the Lex Americana, which is applied at the whim of the President to any non-nuclear power. I think it would be very, very difficult to dispute the assertion that the Iranian regime is far more sane than its North Korean counterpart.

One need not be sympathetic towards the Iranian theocracy to recognize either of these two verities. And before anyone starts in on the “insanity” of the Iranian president, I would remind him of two things. First, the president serves at the pleasure of Ali Khamenei, who controls the armed forces. Even if he is crazy, which I seriously doubt, he isn’t in charge. Second, given that the international public enemy number one is always proclaimed to be crazy, one should harbor a certain amount of skepticism towards distant psychological diagnosis by the media. After all, there’s no shortage of Americans who claim that President Bush is also an insane religious nut who hopes to immanentize the eschaton by bringing about Armageddon.

If you want to play bully, (or if you prefer, world superpower), then don’t be surprised when people attack you at every opportunity. The Romans understood this. Americans don’t.

Unlike Zapata King, I can not only read a dictionary, but understand it:

Let me tell you the way it is, Supposed Super Intelligence. Word usage is determined by anarchy, not by The Fascism of the Vox Intelligentsia of Word Usage. If a word gets polluted over time, and its meaning goes from the specific to the general, that’s just the way it is. And though I don’t have a solid grasp on the etymology of fascist, though I’m sure if I studied what you’ve written I could make some progress in that direction, I can read a dictionary.

fas·cism
n.

1. often Fascism
1. A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
2. A political philosophy or movement based on or advocating such a system of government.
2. Oppressive, dictatorial control.

Okay, let’s see how these apply to the jihadists. They don’t have a system of government, don’t have a dictator, don’t have stringent socioeconomc controls, do suppress opposition through terror, (though not censorship), and aren’t belligerent or racist except for their Judenhassen. So (1.1) is out. So, obviously, is (1.2).

And so is (2), since the jihad neither possesses nor seeks dictatorial control. Terrorism is neither oppression nor control, indeed, it is generally considered a violent reaction to both, the weapon of those who lack the power for either. Furthermore, the jihadist terrorists seek religious dominance in the form of a Caliphate which would likely apply lighter taxation than most Western countries currently endure, impose far fewer dictatorial business regulations than we now enjoy and require strictures on personal behavior that aren’t terribly dissimilar to the societal mores of 100 years ago in the West.

True, their punishments are brutal and they’re not so big on the concept of freedom of religion, but as long as one pays one’sjizya, abides by the public etiquette and acknowledges the supremacy of Sharia, one will pretty much be left alone. I daresay OSHA and the IRS are more dictatorial and controlling, if less violent.

Ironically, Zapata King’s insistence on the nearly meaningless dictionary alternative fits the Saudi Arabian, Jordanian and Egyptian governments much better than it does their rivals in the jihad. Somehow, I doubt that’s who President Bush and his pet neocons had in mind when they were talking about the mythical “Islamo-fascist”.

There two obvious responses. The stupid one will be to state that if I like Islamic caliphates so much, why don’t I move there. The really stupid one will be to insist that the meaning of “dictatorial” and “control” don’t mean anything either. See the pattern?