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And here I thought corporations were conservative because they are corporations:

A report issued recently by the Capital Research Center in Washington punctures illusions that tend to associate big corporations with right-wing or conservative causes. The report depicts a reality that is exactly the opposite. CRC researchers examined contributions made in 2004 by the foundations of the nation’s top 100 corporations to nonprofit organizations. The result: Corporate contributions to left-leaning groups totaled $59 million and to right-leaning organizations $4 million. That’s about 14.5 corporate dollars going to the left for each dollar going to the right.

Never mind the tautology, the idea that Big Government and Big Business are fundamentally opposed isn’t a 20th century notion so much as it is a 19th century one. Saying that corporations are inherently conservative is like saying robots are inherently liberal; an artificial construct has no political alignment apart from those who control it.

As most everyone knows, I don’t comment on family matters, partly because it seldom has much to do with me and partly because my family occasionally appears to border on the lunatic. This is the curse of living on the far side of the Bell Curve. Anyhow if you think the recent stir created by one family member is interesting, well, just wait and see what another one has in store for us all. (Fortunately, it’s about something to which not even the most imaginative government jackboot could object.)

I am quite proud of my father for standing up for his beliefs, even though I have considered his crusade to be a quixotic one from its inception. Because he is a brilliant man with an incredible capacity for excrutiating detail, I have no doubt that he is entirely correct with regards to his legal position; I also believe that being correct in these matters is largely beside the point.

For when in Rome, the saying goes, do as the Romans do. The saying does not say to obey the Roman law, for as anyone familiar with either ancient or modern Rome well knows, that is a very Protean beast indeed. The same is true in America today, where certain federal wiretapping was legal last week, is illegal this week, and presumably will be legal again soon without a single law being modified in any way.

The poverty and impotence of quasi-democracy, to say nothing of its fundamental hostility towards liberty and the rule of law, has been repeatedly illustrated across the globe. And yet, like other truly patriotic Americans, my father simply was not cynical enough to accept the idea that the de facto law of tooth and claw has replaced the law de jure. So, armed with little more than a lance of legal knowledge and a shield of Christian faith, he has waged a long, stoic and heroic battle against the beast, at great social, emotional and monetary cost to himself.

I am proud of my grandfather, who fought on Guadacanal and stormed the beaches of Tarawa and Saipan, even though I consider two of those battles to have been entirely pointless from a strategic perspective. In much the same way, I am proud of my father, even though I disagreed with the wisdom of tilting at these particular windmills. If I seem strangely unconcerned about all of this, it’s probably because it’s difficult to get overly upset about something you’ve seen coming for years.

By the way, I should like to thank the vast majority of my usual critics, who with a very few exceptions have refrained from attempting to expand the range of their critiques at my father’s expense. While it is a news story and is to a certain degree fair game, (I completely understand how hilarious this all must be for some of you), I’d merely hope people would attempt to refrain from making ridiculous speculations in public. I should also like to thank the investigating agents for their civilized comportment this week as well as the print and TV media for their unusually accurate representation of the facts involved.

I sincerely hope that the law will be obeyed by all parties concerned and justice will be done. Unfortunately, justice and the courts don’t appear to have much in common these days.

From NRO’s Corner:

Hizbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has been named the most popular figure in the Middle East in an Egyptian poll. Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal took second place and Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad third, said Saadeddin Ibrahim of the Ibn Khaldoun Center for Development Studies on Friday.

Researchers asked about 1,200 people from a range of backgrounds in 15 of Egypt’s 26 governorates to rank a list of 30 prominent people in the Middle East including writers, politicians, judges, statesmen and religious scholars.

I don’t think it’s possible to claim that Bush is both an idiot as well as a nefarious traitor to the national interest, but the evidence is stacking up that it’s either one or the other. And to think that his neocon pals wish to bring democracy to Iran next, since it’s working so well in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon and Afghanistan.

I don’t think this is what the Three Monkey crowd was expecting when they were telling us how we were always going to remember Purple Finger Day as a historic event.

Fred reaches the same conclusion from a different angle:

A feminist sees men exactly as anti-Semites see Jews. This is because she is an anti-Semite—the same template, the same bottle but with different wine. She has a more hair-trigger anger (“Men are sexist pigs”) because she can get away with it, a more bellicose incivility for the same reason, but the same (watch, and see whether I am right) lack of humor, obsessiveness, and the characteristic basing of her personality on the hatred.

Haters seldom know much about those they hate. It doesn’t matter to them, and just gets in the way. As anti-Semites are clueless about Jews, so feminists are clueless about men. Anti-Semites know that Jews rub their hands and say “heheheh” and want to destroy Western civilization. Feminists know that men don’t have feelings and want to oppress women, and hurt them, and degrade them. Yet they (both) think they know the hated enemy. They both pour forth half-truths, thudding clichés, carefully selected facts, and abject foolishness, and both are blankly unable to see the other side’s point of view or to concede it any virtue at all.

I have known only a few such feminists well, though I have read many. They have struck me, without exception that comes to mind, as fitting a peculiar mold: bright, very hostile and combative, but physically timid and pampered, hothouse flowers really, usually from fairly moneyed families and often Ivy or semi-Ivy schools. Often they have done little outside of feminism and would be helpless out of an urban setting. They have no idea how anything around them works—what a cam lobe is, how a refrigerator makes things cold, or how a file-allocation table might be arranged. Their degrees run to ideologizable pseudosubjects such as sociology, psychology, or Women’s Studies. They seem isolated from most of life.

Personally, I think this is extremely offensive in that Mr. Reed entirely fails to take into account the way in which the emotionally scarring experience of near rape, potential rape and assumed rape leaves a feminist no choice to launch indiscriminate verbal assaults on men in much the same manner that Hezbollah hurls Iranian rockets at Israel.

I don’t think so. Clearly the entire study is a fraud and a cunning ploy of the Australian Patriarchy:

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Personal Safety Survey has finally emerged and along with its appearance, the statistical myths of feminist’s victimhood and women’s class oppression – particularly those relating to claims of epidemic violence against women – have immediately vaporised….

Men are more than twice as likely as women to be the victims of violence and are being physically or sexually assaulted or threatened at the rate of up to 2 incidents per second

Women are not the victims of family (domestic) violence as often as the quoted 1 in 4, nor even 1 in 8, nor even 1 in 10, but actually 1 in 100

Women are not being raped every 26 seconds, nor even every 90 seconds, as feminists frequently claim, but are in fact experiencing sexual assault – not necessarily rape – including both reported and all unreported incidents, at a rate of less than 1 per 5 minutes. This is a rate 91% less than that which feminists have previously claimed

The ratio of female to male family (domestic) violence victims in a home is not 99:1, nor 9:1, nor even 5:1, but is actually closer to 2:1

Of course, those figures would be even lower if only it had been possible to take Jamie out of the equation. He’s a veritable one-man lacrosse team. Still, it’s hard to blame the poor feminists. Barbie always said that math is hard.

So declareth Jim Rose:

After pickled sheep, unmade beds and painting with elephant dung, some questioned where modern art could go next. Kira O’Reilly will provide her own answer today by spending four hours naked, hugging a dead pig – at the taxpayer’s expense.

The controversial Irish performance artist will invite one person at a time to watch her sit in a specially-constructed set and perform a ‘crushing slow dance’ with the carcass in her arms. She claims the bizarre exhibition is an attempt to ‘identify’ with the pig, which she cuts with a knife during the show.

I think the exhibit should be entitled “Portrait of My Unwanted Child as a Deceased Pig”. I’m no longer concerned about seeing civilization arrest its decline into barbarism, I’m simply enjoying the spectacle.

Bring on the gladiators!

I was talking to one of the guys in my fantasy football league about the Sports Guy’s new mission to standardize the rules when he burst out laughing. It turned out that one of the other guys had just emailed him a certain newspaper article along with the comment “Did you see this? We are so going to post on this all %$*#ing season long!” As I’ve said before, it’s hard to get worked up about the lesser yappers on the Internet when you hear worse from your friends…. Take your best shot, Burnsie, that’s all I have to say.

Anyhow, it’s time to attend to the truly important matter, which is to say the inaugural season of the Vox Popoli Football League. If ya’ll can remind me who wants in, I know we’ve got the White Buffalo, the Pan-Gargler and Astro (I think) coaching for Equus Pallidus. We need six more, so who else wants in? I seem to recall we had about the right number up for it before.

The draft is Sat Sep 2 10:00am central, live online at Yahoo. I think we’ll go with 15 players and four keepers, standard scoring to keep it simple. And fear the small, but numerous jaws of the mighty Meerkats!

It would probably be less painful. The Sports Guy revenges himself on Cleveland fans in his AL review:

10. Cleveland
Not sure what happened with these guys. The Indians would have made a much better roto team.

(Note: Normally I’d have more to say, but I’m tired of Cleveland readers complaining every time I write something even mildly negative about one of their teams, no matter how accurate that assessment might be. Now I’m thinking that Cleveland fans are like women — if they ask you how they look, just tell them, “You look fine, you look great” or else you’re in for 20 minutes of pure hell. So to recap, the Indians look fine, they look great. Let’s move on.)

That’ll larn ’em.

From the Telegraph:

A hawk is terrorising a cathedral city where it has attacked two joggers and killed a pet. Experts are trying to catch it before it strikes again. They fear it could seriously injure a young child. The Harris hawk, which has a 3ft wingspan, is roaming the skies above Lichfield, Staffs.

Diane Jackson-Bond, 44, described yesterday how she was left bloodied after being attacked while running along a country lane. Miss Jackson-Bond, a former policewoman, said: “I had seen the bird and thought that it was following me but put such ideas out of my head and carried on jogging.

“Moments later it flew down on to my head with such a force that it almost knocked me sideways. It had its talons embedded in my skull and it was agony. I managed to shoo it away briefly but then it came back at me.”

Forget the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism! What are Bush and Blair doing to protect American citizens and subjects of Her Majesty’s Government from this tripartite anti-human onslaught by air, land and sea?

Relating to Senator Allen’s use of a strange and apparently derogatory term:

What does Macaca really mean? Three Virginia Republicans confirmed to the Hotline that several Allen campaign aides and advisers are telling allies that the word was a made-up, off-the-cuff neologism that these aides occasionally used to refer to tracker S.R. Sidarth well before last Saturday’s videotaped encounter.

According to two Republicans who heard the word used, “macaca” was a mash-up of “Mohawk,” referring to Sidarth’s distinctive hair, and “caca,” Spanish slang for excrement, or “shit.”

By a timely coincidence, I was reading an April New Scientist last night and encountered the following term:

“That name [o macaco ingles, or “English monkey”] refers to only one of the two species of uacari, the one with the bald red head, Cacajao calvus….”

So, I suggest that Senator Allen was referring to the man as a monkey.