Category: Uncategorized

Bill O’Reilly is one of the first faux conservatives to begin banging:

The United States needs a new strategy to deal with this ominous threat. Slugging it out in Iraq may be necessary, but there might be another way. President Bush needs to level with the American people and begin putting this country on a war footing. That means a limited draft and a major commitment to defense. The president needs to shake things up and get people’s attention.

I find it truly absurd that some commentators think that people will take the war seriously when the politicians don’t. Very few countries in history have ever allowed citizens of enemy countries to roam around freely, so the warmongers had better understand that until the politicians address immigration, no one will believe that they are serious about making war.

Any bets on how long that proposed “limited draft” would remain limited? Anyhow, America’s smaller families will not countenance a draft, even if several cities are bombed. In such a scenario, most parents still will not assent to putting their only sons at risk on the ground as they’ll vastly prefer to see enemy cities nuked first.

As if the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism wasn’t enough, I note the sinister connection between these two violent incidents:

A graduate student from the University of Central Florida remains missing Saturday after he was pulled underwater by a large sea turtle, according to Local 6 News. Officials said Boyd Lyon, 35, vanished Thursday afternoon about three miles north of the Sebastian Inlet and 400 yards out to sea, sheriff’s officials said.

Less lethal, but potentially more disturbing news, reaches us from the Florida front:

Residents in Winter Park, Fla., are angered over the city’s response to a squirrel that attacked at least seven people this month, according to a report. The squirrel attacks happened at Winter Park’s Central Park over the last several days. A 3-year-old boy was bitten by the animal several times and has a two-inch wound on his leg, according to the report. Another child was reportedly bitten on his calf and a man sitting on a park bench was attacked by the squirrel. He suffered a bite and scratches on his arm…. City employees captured the animal this week. Winter Park received notice from the Florida Department of Health Epidemiology stating that the results on the squirrel were negative for rabies.

The key words there are “negative for rabies”. Clearly, this was a premeditated attack and undoubtedly we can expect Sciurufascist extremists to attempt taking human hostages in an effort to free their captured treehadist.

Karen de Coster explores women’s distaste for libertarianism:

Women, as you know, will be so wonderfully protective of their children, family, and those with whom they sustain emotional relationships. They will hover and guard and oftentimes over-protect the ones they love. This is the nurturing feature. Yet these same women will trust a bunch of unfamiliar, self-aggrandizing, control-freak, government bureaucrats to rear and nourish and sustain and educate their children? In the jailhouses known as public schools, we went from the school lunch trough to the freebie breakfast, and if that’s not enough, we now have weekday and summer breakfasts, as well as after-school dinner spoils – all taxpayer funded. And the children are herded off to these meals with hardly a thought. If women can so easily come to believe that their child’s nutritional life is not their responsibility, it’s no wonder that so many women have no problem whatsoever with the overriding concept of cradle-to-grave, welfare-state status quo.

Heck, even most females in the animal world don’t dare trust outsiders – humans or other critters – around their young. Try to approach a mother duck and her babies, and the reaction from Mom is predictably aggressive. Yet the compliant human being invites the critter known as the welfare state into her home, and onward it moves to all areas of the house, taking with it an entire generation of self-sufficient beings. Women have been taught – via the New Deal welfare mindset and modern left-feminism – that the State replaces the male head-of-household, thus leading them to the collective Big Daddy, the central planners. Hence, this is where they turn for the quick answer.

I have never understood why anyone would wish to turn any responsibility at all over to the government. From George Bush down to the fat black women at the DMV, the people drawn to government employment – which they mysteriously prefer to call “service” in a blatant violation of the English language – are less intelligent, less capable and more self-serving than the average individual. Why anyone would want to allow individuals such as these to make important decisions in his stead, let alone claim the majority of his potential time with his children, remains utterly baffling to me.

On a tangential note, I finally got around to reading “Guns, Germs and Steel” this week, and it’s interesting to note how the author considers centralized authority to be not only an aspect of warmaking, but one of the more significant ones. Or, as another man once wrote, War is the health of the State.

It becomes a little harder to deny every day:

Germany was rocked by the revelations last night that Günter Grass, its greatest living author and doyen of the Left, was a member of Hitler’s elite Waffen-SS. The Nobel laureate, who has been the country’s moral guide for decades, admitted in an interview published today that he became a member of the infamous Nazi corps at the age of 17.

The 78-year-old said he was driven by feelings of guilt to reveal the details of his “shameful” past in his autobiography, Peeling the Onion, due to be published next month.

I can’t even begin to tell you how amusing this is to me. Whether one points out that Mussolini was an influential member of the Italian Communist party or that famous left-wing intellectuals were Nazis, the modern left will apply Goebbel’s strategy of the Big Lie and deny, deny, deny.

It’s funny enough that Democratic senator Robert Byrd is a former KKK member. But for a doyenne of the Left like Gunter Grass to not only be an ex-Nazi, but ex-Waffen SS, that’s just hilarious.

As for the idea that the National Socialists were right-wing simply because they hated Jews and made a policy of killing them, I would direct the readers attention to the position of every single left-wing European political party on Israel. I’ll give you a hint: they don’t like it so much.

So much for the oft-heard “Hitler was a Christian” argument:

A BIBLE featuring Adolf Hitler’s version of the Ten Commandments has been discovered.

The dictator ordered the book rewritten to remove all references to Jews.

In the Nazi bible, found in a German church, the regime who stole, murdered and plundered their way across Europe scrapped the likes of Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal and Thou shalt not covet your neighbour’s wife.

And Hitler got his theorists to alter the Commandments – and add two more – in a bid to further the Aryan ideal for the book Germans With God.

I don’t think even the most die-hard atheist will disagree that rewriting the Bible with you in the place of the Almighty tends to smack of a deep and fundamental disagreement with the most basic precepts of the Christian faith. This doesn’t surprise me, as I’ve cited evidence of Der Fuhrer’s plan for a National Socialist Church designed to replace the organized Protestant Church in Germany before, but this is evidence that everyone can easily grasp.

Of the homeschooling closet:

I’ve been hesitating to discuss this decision my family has made because of the public way in which I operate this blog. Being a school teacher, it’s a bit of a risk for me to openly share my thoughts about my own children’s education. But, in the final analysis, that’s the best reason to just come out and talk about it. They are my children. I am a free American. This is my home. My wife and I choose to homeschool our children.

Our reasons will come as little surprise to my regular readers. I have been to the puppet show and seen the strings. Moreover, I grow more and more uneasy about the way in which our current public education paradigm was formed. The characters who haunt the history of modern public schooling are a rogues gallery of socialists, secular humanists and humorless utilitarians. To cut my children from that cloth just seems the height of absurdity.

Reason #1: We are not post-modernists. We believe there is a right and wrong, a good and evil, a truth and falsehood. The best public education can deliver is an unbiased presentation of the multifaceted views represented in our nation and the world….

Reason #2: We gave an alternative method of public schooling a try and it failed to impress. All we seemed to get was more busy work and more extraneous rules….

He presents five reasons in all. In my opinion, they’re all solid but the fifth one is far and away the most convincing.

Joe Lieberman gets his head handed to him:

With the nation watching, Connecticut Democrats thronged to the polls in unexpectedly high numbers Tuesday to reject Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman and endorse his anti-war challenger, Ned Lamont. Unofficial results showed Lamont winning 52 percent of the vote, defeating a three-term incumbent who had come to be defined by his defense of the war in Iraq despite an advertising blitz begging voters to judge him on a progressive labor and environmental record.

Lieberman, 64, a vice presidential nominee in 2000 and a presidential hopeful only two years ago, conceded at 11:03 p.m. in a Hartford ballroom packed with national and international press, then defiantly announced he would press on as a petitioning candidate, forcing a three-way race in November.

Now, conventional wisdom would have it that the Lieberman defeat compounded by his decision to run as an independent would have the Republican commentariat dancing in the aisles. But instead, the August 9th editorial from The Editors of National Review is entitled “A Friend in Need” and explicitely endorses the pro-abortion, pro-tax Democratic vice-presidential nominee over a Republican they term a “non-conservative nonentity”. Because, of course, Joe Lieberman’s support for war in the Middle East washes all of his other sins away, leaving him white as pure, conservative snow.

And a snow job is precisely what it is. This is neither pragmatism nor principle, it is naked and unadulterated prostitution to the political elite. Because, as Andrew Stuttaford points out, nothing matters as much as Dear Leader and his Global Struggle.

Then there’s the fact that the Lamont win makes it even more likely that the November vote will be a referendum on (a) a president whose ratings are, well, choose your grim adjective and (b) a war for which public support has ebbed substantially.

Katy asks a fair question:

Ok…not to be argumentatives…but would the same logic follow for fellows? Are they attracted to women who mistreat them as well?

Without a doubt. These would be the guys who are drawn to women who are “spunky” and “independent”, who are able to “put them in their place”. Needless to say, that place is at the woman’s feet. A friend of mine was recently dumped by a woman who was ludicrously inappropriate for him, this marks either the fifth or the sixth consecutive disaster, all of which were predictable from the start. As I’ve told him, in a rational world he wouldn’t be permitted to select his own dates.

I’m posting this on Berzerker Prime, the massive new machine that is replacing the failing Mtech. It’s a ProStar, which means that it’s from essentially the same manufacturer, Clevo, but it seems as if all of the minor design flaws have been eradicated and replaced with a few useful idiosyncracies. It’s far too soon to pass judgment, of course, but the initial impressions are positive.

Now, to see if Total War: Rome actually works on this thing.

The Sports Guy on Matt Millen:

Q: If Isiah and Matt Millen were in the same fantasy league (any sport), what would be the end result? Is it even possible to mutually lose to each other? Would this bring the world to a sudden and violent end?
— Chris Lang, Stevens Point, Wis.

SG: Are you kidding? Isiah would KILL Matt Millen. Other than his complete disregard for the salary cap and luxury tax and lack of a discernable long-term plan, Isiah has one major flaw as a GM: He runs the Knicks like they’re a real-life fantasy team and tries to accumulate as much talent as possible without giving any thought to how that talent might mesh together. For a fantasy league? That’s perfect, right?

Meanwhile, Matt Millen has been a complete disaster in every possible sense: he hires the wrong coaches, drafts the wrong players, signs the wrong free agents, screws up the cap, builds around the wrong guys, turns on his own players, doesn’t have any semblance of a master plan … you could make the case that he doesn’t have a single strength as a sports executive. At least Isiah had some decent drafts and targeted players with talent (Marbury, Curry, etc.); he’d be a good fantasy GM as long as it wasn’t a keeper league. Matt Millen would be terrible in any scenario. The only way the Matt Millen Era would be worse in Detroit is if he were announcing the games as well.

Oh… yeah… unh… you just can’t help but shimmy when you hear a beat like that. I feel like I’m channeling Morris Day!