Vox Popoli

CN feels less alone now:

Much to my surprise, I was leafing through Sports Illustrated’s 50th Anniversary issue and in the sports trends timeline section, Intellivision Football was featured to represent sports in the video game era. I was the only kid I knew who had it back then. Everyone else was pretending those Space Invaders on a blinking green and yellow Atari screen were football players.

Obviously, the movers and shakers of tomorrow were Intellivision fans. I was hugely into NFL Football, although I couldn’t find anyone to play it with me since I owned my brother and few people had the patience to play the real-time 15-minute quarters. The Sports Guy is an Intellivision guy too, of course.

One of my great video game triumphs was matching up with my cousin Todd about nine years ago. He’d been talking and talking about how good he had been at NFL Football when he moved to town, but he didn’t realize we had at least one of everything at the Digital Ghetto. (And I mean everything, Bally, Vectrex, Sega Nomad, you name it. An Intellivision was downright mainstream and we had all the models). Anyhow, we played a quarter and I beat him something like 35-0. Like riding a bike….

However, Big Chilly owns the single most impressive video game moment I’ve ever seen. We had a massive Christmas party and hooked up game systems all over the house. Big Chilly practically missed the whole thing, however, as he’d been challenged to a game of 1942, which he’d never played before, on the Atari Jaguar. He blew through the entire game without losing a single plane, chuckled, and handed the controller to an awestruck Micron before heading upstairs.

Eric Muller notes that I’m not the only non-left, non-academic, non-ethnic critic of Me So Michelle’s race-based lockup advocacy:

This is getting tiresome. Another radical-left, civil-liberties-absolutist, ethnic-grievance-industry-supporting rag rips apart Michelle Malkin’s “In Defense of Internment.”

This time, it’s the Wall Street Journal.

The review is actually pretty soft on the Gestapette, from my perspective, but then I think I’ve adequately demonstrated how little the media knows about history in general and military history in particular.

I wonder how far over the line you can go before a journalist will notice? I mean, I expect that even the average ABCNNBCBS sort will blink if you relate something to the way Julius Caesar’s Xth legion battled Rommel in North Africa. But change Rommel to the Desert Fox, and it might just fly right over their heads.

66. During the course of O’REILLY’S telephone monologue on August 2, 2004, he suggested that Plaintiff ANDREA MACKRIS purchase a vibrator and name it…. It became apparent that Defendant was masturbating as he spoke. After he climaxed, Defendent O’REILLY said to Plaintiff: “I appreciate the fun phone call. You can have fun tonight. I’ll appreciate it. I mean it.”

I have no idea if Brave Sir Billy has been bad, very bad, or not, but the whole thing is beyond question really, really funny. The cheesy porn talk does sound like something Bad Sir Billy might say, as those who’ve had the misfortune to run across the purple prose of his fiction will note.

We’ll find out soon enough if the whole thing is just the fictional creation of Miss Mackris or not. And if it isn’t and The Factor is a superfreak, then I, for one, won’t shed a tear. Well, I might, but only because I’m laughing. If you live like a whore, don’t be surprised when you find yourself going down like a whore.

Ashley Fernandez, a 12-year-old, attends Morgan Village Middle School, in Camden, N.J., a predominantly black and Hispanic school that has been designated as failing under state and federal standards for more than three years. Rotten education is not Ashley’s only problem. When her gym teacher, exasperated by his unruly class, put all the girls in the boys’ locker room, Ashley was assaulted. Two boys dragged her into the shower, held her down and fondled her for 10 minutes.

The school principal refused to even acknowledge the assault and denied her mother’s request for a transfer to another school. Since the assault, Ashley has received numerous threats, and boys frequently grope her and run away. Put yourself in the place of Ashley’s mother. The school won’t protect her daughter from threats and assault. The school won’t permit a transfer. What would you do? Ashley’s mother began to keep her home. The response from officials: She received a court summons for allowing truancy.

Then there’s Carmen Santana’s grandson, Abraham, who attended Camden High School. After two boys hit him in the face, broke his nose and chipped his teeth, Abraham was afraid to go to school. Guess what. His grandmother was charged with allowing truancy when she kept him home while she tried to get permission for him to finish his senior-year studies at home. Lisa Snell reports that “more than 100 parents have removed their children from Camden schools because of safety concerns. The school district’s response: a truancy crackdown.”

This isn’t really that hard to handle. Give the kid a kitchen knife, let him take it to school and quietly place it on his desk during his first-hour class. Thanks to zero tolerance, he’ll be home by lunchtime with orders to stay out of school for the rest of the year.

Repeat as needed.

Mark Steyn writes on the recent murder of an Englishman:

None of us can know for certain how we would behave in his circumstances, and very few of us will ever face them. But, if I had to choose in advance the very last words I’d utter in this life, “Tony Blair has not done enough for me” would not be high up on the list. First, because it’s the all but official slogan of modern Britain, the dull rote whine of the churlish citizen invited to opine on waiting lists or public transport, and thus unworthy of the uniquely grisly situation in which Mr Bigley found himself….

By contrast with the Fleet Street-Scouser-Whitehall fiasco of the last three weeks, consider Fabrizio Quattrocchi, murdered in Iraq on April 14th. In the moment before his death, he yanked off his hood and cried defiantly, “I will show you how an Italian dies!” He ruined the movie for his killers. As a snuff video and recruitment tool, it was all but useless, so much so that the Arabic TV stations declined to show it.

Even at the very end, there is always freedom. One can choose to die piteously or one can choose to die with valor. Steyn is correct in seeing in Kenneth Bigley’s sad fate a metaphorical testimony to the decline of Britain; where is the stiff upper lip and the arrogant courage that built an empire?

I am second to none in poking fun at the Italians, especially their historical military prowess, but no one can question the strength of their national character after having been shown how an Italian chose to die.

Uno spirito indomito;

C’e solo il tuo corpo

Che si hanno rotto.

From the UK Sun:

Official police figures show gun crime has doubled in the past five years, robbery is up 50 per cent and violent crime is up 83 per cent.

I’m looking foward to the moment when gun crime in Australia and the UK surpass that in the United States. It may take another 10-15 years, but that will be the final nail in the coffin of the gun control lobby.

“We will stop juvenile diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other debilitating diseases… When John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.”

– Democratic vice-presidential candidate John Edwards

I knew that Edwards was a snake oil salesman, but this is not only bordering on blasphemy, it is leaping far beyond the borders of ridiculousness. The extent to which imaginative lefties are able to project their desires onto JJ Kerry has astounded me, but I don’t think even the most fantasy-prone college girl on Prozac will be able to swallow this one.

The upside is that we now have a new and presumably less offensive phrase to swear by. I think “John F. Kerry on a popsicle stick” has a certain ring to it.

A state education official says she’s concerned about the growing popularity of homeschooling in Mississippi. Peggy Peterson, director of compulsory school attendance enforcement with the Mississippi Department of Education, said she fears that some children may not be receiving top quality education instruction from their parents.

Mississippi Department of Education statistics show that the number of families homeschooling in the state has increased since 1999, when officials began monitoring enrollment. A total of 11,063 Mississippi children were homeschooled last year, up from 8,768 in May 1999. Lauderdale County alone had 281 families homeschooling their children in May of this year.

Smart State education rankings: 47. Mississippi

but the new Duran Duran album with all five original members back together will almost certainly be on my Christmas list this year.

I’m betting Paul Sebastian has already ordered his from Amazon.

I have sat in on therapy. It is something to see. For starters, the whole routine is a vaguely sadomasochistic power trip. The Therapist is the domme, the patient a humble supplicant who must bare her soul, confess her psychic sins, embarrass herself, and obey. (A few New Age males go in for this stuff. It is overwhelmingly a woman’s racket.)

Therapy reminds me of nothing so much as a castrated religious order. There is the same proselytizing, the same zeal. Therapists see only two classes of people, those who are in therapy and those who ought to be. (“Are you saved?”) They exhibit the smug assurance of those who have seen the light, and have Truth in a half-Nelson. The difference is that, whereas religions usually say that you are responsible for your bad behavior and you ought to stop it, therapy tells you that you are never responsible for anything. No. It was your childhood. Or some chemical imbalance. The Church of Avoided Guilt.

The cult wants to get everybody. Repeatedly therapists assert that ninety-five percent of people suffer from “codependency,” and must go into counseling. See? We are all in a state of sin. The humiliation of baring one’s inmost thoughts to a condescending estrogenated Hitleress is a mix of self-flagellation and the rite of confession. It is the religious impulse de-Godded.

Therapy is nothing but a racket for the credulous. It does no good for anyone. Unlike medicine, one is never cured, but instead an addiction to being told that nothing is your fault is fostered. I’m convinced that 99 percent of the quasi-lunatics in therapy would be better off either a) being sent on a missions trip to an impoverished land where people actually have problems or b) getting a dog.

The only benefit to therapy is in the case of couples, where a third party referee can be helpful. But even then, you’d do just as well – better, probably – simply pulling in a stranger off the street.