Vox Popoli

I have nothing against Rebecca Hagelin, who is almost certainly a very nice woman, except for the fact that she titles her column “Heartbeat”, which with its cloying suggestion of just how much she cares about life, the universe and everything makes me want to set her hair on fire. But the notion that this woman should be discussing “what constitutes cool”, in any context, is as fundamentally wrong as your average liberal journalist even mentioning the word “economics”.

I am, beyond any shadow of a doubt, one of ten coolest nationally syndicated columnists at this particular juncture in the space-time continuum.* This isn’t saying much – just look at the Creators lineup; ye cats! – and I take no pride in this, it is simply the inevitable result of my encyclopedic knowledge of Public Enemy, post-cyberpunk fiction and techno-industrial music. And, of course, I ride the tank, which counts for something in shadowy, but significant circles. But the concept of cool morphs so quickly that I would not even think to pontificate on the matter, as the notion of paying any attention whatsoever to what is current among the latest angst-laden posings of over-fed, hormone-enslaved adolescents appalls me.

Look to Rebecca, then, all you who would be cool! Thus spake Vox.

*I haven’t actually considered a top ten list of cool columnists. Maybe we should do that. I’ll have to give the matter some thought. Goldberg’s got to be on the list, he’s got class clown all wrapped up. Coulter too, just because she’ll bring the smokes. Derbyshire? Definitely.

If Bill Clinton is, as once said of him, an unusually good liar, John Kerry is an unusually bad one. Everything about him speaks of his being full to the rim with the rich smell of fecal matter. I’ve considered him to be a quasi-psychotic piece of work ever since first hearing of his “Band of Brothers” which, in its overt attempt to draw attention to itself, rang false in light of the experience I’ve had in close relationships with three generations of warriors.

Veterans with real experience of war, real military heroes, don’t talk about it in public at the drop of a hat. Everyone with a grandfather who fought in WWII or a father who fought in Vietnam knows that it’s like pulling teeth to get them to talk about it, even in private. It’s only those who never served and what the front-line fighters call REMFs who boast about their bold and fearless exploits.

This is why Kerry was considered sketchy from the start by so many who otherwise mindlessly laud anyone who ever served in the military. Now that facts of his pathetic four-month service are coming out – like the patently false claims to have spent Christmas in Cambodia in 1968 that he has repeatedly and publicly made – these suspicions are being shown to have had strong foundation.

It still amazes me that the Democrats nominated this utter charlatan. Senators have a horrible Presidential track record, and Massachusetts liberals haven’t exactly distinguished themselves either. The Democrats would surely have avoided this debacle if they’d only had a few people familiar with the military – besides political officers like Wes Clark – in a position to influence the decision-making back when the DNC leadership decided to trash Howard Dean in favor of Kerry. But then, I suppose it’s hard to identify one specific stink when you’re wallowing in sewage.

I noticed this in Joani’s missive:

Some men can’t stand when a woman wants to better herself, improve her education, fulfill her purposes in life other than domestic duties.

I daresay that there’s not a single man on the planet who cares at all if she does this, as long as she doesn’t do it after telling him that she wants bear his children and stay home and take care of them. There are few things more obnoxious than the individual who suddenly changes his or her mind after someone else has made a commitment to them based on all the available information. This holds true for both sexes.

But I marvel at the women who seem to think that education and fulfillment can only come outside the house. The former is especially ridiculous in the age of the Internet. Domestic work is easy, if time-consuming, and perhaps if a woman did not sit down in front of the television for the 4.5 hours that are the reported daily average, she’d have more than enough time to educate herself. I found it interesting that one study reported that men have 30 more minutes of free time a day than women, which, strangely enough, corresponded rather closely with the 30 minutes less daily television watching reported by the first study. (Four hours a day is still ridiculous, by the way. Go read a book or something. Learn your culture. You’re blind from the facts on who ya are cos you’re watching that garbage.)

Of course, this requires personal discipline, something that is in obviously short supply among men and women today, who can’t even control what they put in their mouths, let alone their minds.

Rod Dreher patiently explains:

My editorial board colleague Ruben Navarrette, who is Latino, returned from the UNITY conference of minority journalists appalled by the naked partisanship his 5,000 fellow minority journalists displayed in the way they treated John Kerry, versus the way they treated President Bush. And he wrote a staff editorial about it. Here’s the first sentence: “Anyone who has ever harbored suspicions that there’s such a thing as a liberal media need only to have been in Washington last week to observe how thousands of minority journalists treated the two headliners to their conference: President George Bush and Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry.”

What’s ironic is that these idiot journalists seriously believe the President is conservative. People don’t realize that most journalists aren’t very smart or well-educated, and the affirmative action babies are sub the low par. They’re ignorant too – I once spoke with an editor at a major newspaper, who is responsible for covering tax-related issues, and he had no idea that the state’s revenue court judges were employees of the state’s revenue agency despite the fact that they had been so for more than 25 years.

39% – (R) George Bush (183 votes)

5% – (D) John Kerry (22 votes)

39% – (L) Michael Badnarik (184 votes)

18% – (C) Michael Peroutka (86 votes)

The extremely close results would cause me to conclude that two of you were clicking on (L) and (R) in an attempt to one-up each other, except that the number of votes is about what I would expect given the traffic. So… I just don’t know. Blog traffic today was a little higher than normal, but that may have simply been the excitement caused by the discussion of a cuddle party. MOOOOOOO!

Anyhow, it’s nice to see that Dark Window and a few of his friends stopped by, and I’m a little surprised that Peroutka wasn’t closer to Badnarik. Still, a pretty solid showing for the Constitution Party here in this little corner of the extreme right wing. Interesting, too, that George Bush has solid electoral support even if he doesn’t have a lot of vocal defenders posting here on the blog.

And yet I doubt that the November elections will look anything like this, unless those Swift boat vets really manage to tattoo their version of events on the nation’s consciousness.

“It started out as a joke,” said Baczynski. “Now we talk about cuddling all the time. It’s just been amazing.”

MOOOOO!

Curiosity is a big driver for people who attend cuddle parties, and it is a better way to meet people than going to a bar, getting drunk and spending the night with someone just because of the need for some affection, she said. A cuddle party is really about communication and not therapy, say the organizers.

Before any touching begins, participants gather in a circle to hear the rules and voice any questions or concerns. The first rule is that the event is not clothing optional, pajamas must stay on and sex is not permitted. Participants team up into pairs and to ensure the boundaries of what is permissible are clear, they practice saying “no” to the question, “May I kiss you?” An introduction to cuddling ensues, first by hugging three people. People then get in a circle on their hands and knees, rub shoulders and moo like cows. After a bit of swaying, everyone falls to their side, which puts them into an easy cuddling position.

Cuddle parties are intended for people who are emotionally sound.

Emotionally sound? Sounds like that’s water under the bridge, about three states up. This has to be a con. Please, tell me someone was just messing with the reporter.

POLLS CLOSED

I wish I’d done this a few months back, so we’d have some basis of comparison. Anyhow, please don’t try to mess around with this by voting more than once. I think it will be interesting to see if the Republicans outnumber the two third parties or not. I don’t think so, but it’s also possible that the third party types are more prone to post here.

The Truth Laid Bear isn’t afraid to predict the future:

I’m going to go on record and predict that the Swift Boat Veterans kerfuffle won’t just be a major negative for Kerry: it will be a campaign-killer. One thing that those of us who spend far too much time hyperanalyzing politics and world events tend to forget is that for the general public, stories like this are absorbed only as vague and general impressions.

Up until now, Kerry has gotten a pass on his Vietnam time: the general impression has been “He talks about it too much, but he was some kind of war hero back in Vietnam”. Now, there’s an alternate perspective: “Not only does he talk about it too much, but he’s actually a liar.” From the 10,000 foot view of the average voter, the Swifties don’t have to prove their case in a court of law for Kerry to take damage: they just have to throw a bit of doubt onto the lily-white image he’s portrayed thus far. In that, they’ve already succeeded.

But it’s not that bad: it’s actually much worse. The biggest problem for Kerry is that the Swifties’ attacks confirm what we really want to believe about him anyway. He’s been so damned annoying about his Vietnam record that we secretly want to think the worst of him, and now the Swifties have provided a rational basis for that gut-level irritation that Kerry inspires when he blathers on about his war record.

That’s my instinct too, but then, I’ve thought that Kerry was toast ever since the Massachusetts Supreme Court made homogamy an issue. The inimitable strategerist Bush failed to take advantage of that, but he doesn’t need to do anything about this huge hole in the prow of the Kerry campaign. Hitting a mine indeed.

Federal prosecutors in Seattle have charged 15 people involved in a marijuana smuggling operation with violations of the Patriot Act, the bill hastily passed by Congress in the wake of the 9-11 attacks to protect the US from foreign terror attacks. That’s a first, at least for the Seattle office, one government lawyer told the Seattle Times.

And no, clarified Assistant US Attorney Todd Greenberg, the Canadians and Americans under arrest were not sending their proceeds to Al Qaeda. They were indicted for conspiring with a Canadian marijuana-smuggling operation to deliver $3.4 million in profits from Washington state back

to British Columbia.

Still, all 15 were charged with one count of “bulk-cash smuggling,” a Patriot Act offense. For years, federal law has made it a criminal offense to take more than $10,000 out of the country without reporting it, but the Patriot Act changed that from a mere reporting violation to a felony punishable by up to five years in prison and the forfeiture of the cash in question.

And although there was no terror connection, invoking the Patriot Act was still appropriate, said Greenberg. “They’re trying to get money from here to support crime somewhere else, so it’s a way to crack down on that,” he remarked cryptically.

That certainly didn’t take long. The Patriot Act hasn’t even been around for three years, and already it’s being used for other purposes. A nice conflation with the equally fraudulent War on Drugs here. I note in passing that no country that bans the unreported transport of personal wealth can reasonably consider itself to be free.

Ron Paul writes:

To understand the nature of our domestic response to the September 11th, 2001 attacks, we must understand the nature of government. Government naturally expands, and any crises- whether real or manufactured- serve to justify more and more government power over our lives. Bureaucrats have used the tragedy of 9-11 as an excuse to seize police powers sought for decades, such as warrantless searches, internet monitoring, and access to bank records. It should be no surprise that the recently released report of the 9-11 Commission has but one central recommendation: bigger government and more spending at home and abroad….

Every generation must resist the temptation to believe that it lives in the most dangerous time in American history. The threat of Islamic terrorism is real, but it is not the greatest danger ever faced by our nation. This is not to dismiss the threat of terrorism, but rather to put it in perspective. Those who seek to whip the nation into a frenzy of fear do a disservice to a country that expelled the British, fought two world wars, and stared down the Soviet empire.

Liberty is lost through complacency and a subservient mindset. When we accept or even welcome automobile checkpoints, random searches, mandatory identification cards, and paramilitary police in our streets, we have lost a vital part of our American heritage. America was born of protest, revolution, and mistrust of government. Subservient societies neither maintain nor deserve freedom for long.

Offering protection in exchange for power is older than prostitution. If you value security over freedom, you are a slave at heart and you deserve to be treated like one.