You gotta see it because The Anchoress says it is wonderful, and The Anchoress does not lie.

Unknown photographs from when Adams was, if only for a few days, an urban photographer.

I don't recall what I was searching for when I came across the Ansel Adams photographs of Los Angeles at the beginning of World War II, but I don't think it was a handsome rendering of Half Dome or a Moonrise in New Mexico. It was something much more gritty. On reflection, it might have been photographs of my original elementary school, Benjamin Franklin in Glendale. In any case I was running a search in the Los Angeles Public Library's immense online collection of photographs when something in a record caught my eye, the name "Ansel Adams." The image attached to this record was of a parking lot with a cars jumbled together around a prominent No Parking sign.

I don't normally associate Ansel Adams with ironic snapshots of parking lots or small format urban photography at all. Like you, a photograph by Adams means the classic evocation of the great American wilderness. It never crossed my mind that he had photographed any of the cities of men, much less Los Angeles. But there it was. Maybe, I thought, there were more.

Continued...

Tania Cagnotto of Italy competes in the 1m Womens Springboard Diving at the Stadio del Nuoto

A must see collection of how people get into the swim: Dive right in @ The Big Picture

[Godwin says, in passing, this morning:

The point is that almost all "news" is completely irrelevant, just a distraction that ultimately serves to obscure what I call The Eternals. It takes no intelligence whatsoever to be a producer or consumer of MSM "news." -- One Cosmos: And That's the Way It Isn't: News and Meta-News

He's right, you know. And he reminds me.... "Meantime life outside goes on all around you." ]

It is so silent here that the softest of noises can wake me. This morning it was the rush of wings and mutterings from the two doves that seem to have taken up residence in the foliage outside my bedroom window. In the half-life between dream and waking it seemed I was back in a bed chamber in that small town north of Paris where two doves had nested in the tree just beyond our balcony in that past, gone year.

It was just after first light, 5:45 by the red numerals on the coffee pot in the kitchen. I took the pot and filled it with water, put in the beans, and started the device. As it whirred and chuffled away, I walked out onto my deck that looks out over the brindle hills and down to the Pacific a mile or so away.

The sea seemed ruffled in large smooth circles, slate in the fading shadow of the hills but, as it rolled out towards the horizon, shading up into a charcoled blue, then to a gray blue haze at the horizon rising up into rose that gave off abruptly into clear and fresh blue.

Hanging just above the line of rose was the full moon gleaming gold in the exact center of all that I could see.

I watched it slide down the sky for some time, then I went back into the kitchen for coffee. When I came out to look again, it was gone.

Unexpected beauty rising in the center of all you can see. Take your eyes away and then look again and its gone. But the day goes on and the light rises around you and you know, with an abiding faith, that beauty will astonish you again when you least expect or deserve it; that it will come to you out of the dark on a rush of wings. There are many ways of this world and that one is not the least of them.

I thought for a moment about turning on the news to see what had transpired in the rest of the world while I slept. I decided against it. Held halfway between a death and a life, between Good Friday and Easter, I'd already learned the news of the day.

---

March, 2005And again here by Gary Snyder.

Left, Michael Crowley: Still a poster-boy after all these years.

As the dew dries to crusted smegma on the Obama rose, we need to find better metaphors for the Obamallationist media that's looking for a way to rinse the acrid taste out of their morning-after mouths.

Yes, with every passing day spin is getting more and more difficult and desperate for those that stapled their scrotums to the axles of Obama's juggernaut. To paraphrase their jug-eared idol,

Continued...

'Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall....

Continued...

"I'm the Doctor. You wait on the Waiting List!" The short and simple annals of the poor often record the keenest insights into what's in store for the rest of us in our Brave New Dystopia. They've been showing up to be on the government, free health-care waiting list for decades. We're next.

Listen to this chilling Obamacare anthem @ Blip.fm | Vanderleun | Dr. Octagon – Waiting List

Here are the lyrics from Kool Keith's 1996 solo album Dr. Octagonecologyst

You enter, step in the room, four, five
My over compressed thoughts and ways make you get live
You are the patient, and i, your black doctor,
Medical bills, insurance, cash in the ceiling.
Dioxalyn fingerprints here ever since
I got my white suit pressed, out the cleaners,
X-ray shades, with hard shoes and some razor blades
Who's the brother that's sick, and needs the operation?
Bullets removed from your head, grand central station
I gotta cut off your ear, first behind your neck
Rip out the stomach, and open rectum's to dissect
Shine the light, inside, roaches crawling in your throat
I have no tools, my hammer's done, my drill is broked

I'm the doctor,
You wait on the waiting list,
Patients been here since this morning I dismiss.

Continued...

Receptionist: How do you write about New York Times columnists and editors so well?
Melvin Udall: I think of a slug, and I take away reason and accountability.

-- As Good as It Gets (1997) - Memorable quotes

Thomas Friedman, bad writer, world traveler, and all around bon vivant, wants YOU to pay to save the planet. Just Do It

Yes, this bill’s goal of reducing U.S. carbon emissions to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 is nowhere near what science tells us we need to mitigate climate change. But it also contains significant provisions to prevent new buildings from becoming energy hogs, to make our appliances the most energy efficient in the world and to help preserve forests in places like the Amazon.

Awww, poor widdle Amazon rain forest.

When not abroad fellating Arab potentates or hectoring you to reach for your wallet, this is how Thomas Friedman lives.

The gall of these non-elected, self-selected nattering flatulators is without limit.

HT Sasquatchian @ Planet Gore on National Review Online

Nine.

One to change the light bulb.
One to scream out "Racist society!" to the neighbors.
One to berate the black police officer on the scene.
One to berate the Hispanic Police Officer on the scene.
One to call the (black) Mayor.
One to call the (black) Governor.
One to call the (black) President.
One to begin booking the talk shows.
One to start production on the documentary film.

by GCOTHARN @ The End Zone

Like you, I tire of the tendentious bullshit swirling about health care these days. The subject has become like a media-powered Sawsall being plunged into my eyes at every click on the great wheel of the web.

Gleaming in the current center of "the converstation" (dispicable term, what?) is the breathless contention some people think is an argument: "Why these Democrats and assorted Obamallationists can't even explain what is in it!"

Bullshit. Of course they can explain what is in it. They wrote it. They simply don't dare to do so. It would blow the gaff. Wide-open and to smithereens.

To know what's in the health-care bill, just take a lesson from that kindly old mass-murderer Lenin. It's a simple case of "Who -- Whom?" A classic as explained here from when Time was a magazine and not a lump of irrelevant woodpulp:

Marxism was posited on the ideas of a single absolute truth, the predestined victory of the cause, and the fallibility and expendability of the individual. Therefore it lent itself to the suppression of dissenters and the extermination of opponents. Lenin, with his knack for hortatory pungency, reduced the past and future alike to two pronouns and a question mark: "Who—whom?" No verb was necessary. It meant who would prevail over whom? And the question was largely rhetorical, implying that the answer was never in doubt. Lenin and those who followed him would prevail over "them," whoever they were. -- The Specter and the Struggle - TIME -- Jan. 04, 1982

"Who—whom?" Who shall be forced to give up the health care that they like (most Americans), and whom shall receive health care they (supposedly) ain't got -- for free -- at a cost to everyone else of trillions in dollars and immeasurable quantities of freedom and privacy and security.

Who (shall give)? You and hundreds of millions of others. Anyone who has a job, or makes things, or owns things that can be taxed. And then have a fee for this or that levied (for the common good). And then taxed again.

Whom (shall receive)? The poor shall be marched to the front of the line; their ragamuffin children with protruding bellies on their shoulders for the photo-op. But right behind them will come.... the slackers, the lazy, the whacked-out, the grifters, the hustlers, the useless, the career recipients of endless government hand-jobs, the hard-core unemployable, the 17% of crack whores that do not work for the government, and a few million others that form the hard, adamantine core of Obama's and the Democrats' aptly named "base."

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," is what's going on here. Except this time the add-on is "Even if you don't need it or want it, because little Susie the crack whore does. P.S. We're gonna slip in some language to pay for her abortion too, just because it will piss you off."

That's the bottom line and that's all it is. Little wonder they don't dare explain it, but I for one wish they'd cut the crap for once. It really is getting hard to breathe. If not, maybe we can at least get an industrial sized bullshit snorkel out of the deal. We'll need it.

There's a lot of brouhaha and rumbles of mutiny being heard around the 'sphere today about Obama's first slide into negative polling territory. Most of those that despise him, and they are legion, are happy for the first time in many months. But I'd suggest they curb their enthusiasm.

It is true that the economy is unlikely to have a miraculous turn-around, and it is equally true that there is going to be some sort of a health-care fiasco foisted onto this perishing republic since the Dems are too dumb and too deep in the mire to "let the kid die." But in all this swirl of endless blather about said health-care bill, the people getting happy about the Obama drift down are forgetting that he's got a hole card. When he flips that card over it says, "Afghanistan."

There's two things that I think about when I think about Obama and Afghanistan.

1) As I have written about before in The Road to a Democrat Led Defeat of America Goes Through Afghanistan, and spelled out in Afghanistan Bananistan: The 10 Point Plan, Afghanistan is Obama's "Get out of bad election results and/or get re-elected free card." He can pretty much use it any time he needs it to become "The man with the vision to bring peace to America." All he has to do to keep the card fresh is to give our forces there just enough rope for them to twist, hang, and die slowly in the wind. If you've been paying attention, that's just what has been taking place.

2) Will Obama be so cynical that he will actually let American troops dies for a cause that he knows for certain he'll end as soon as it becomes politically necessary? Silly rabbit, of course he will. Obama has no love for the American military as he has shown again and again over the years and as he will demonstrate convincingly as soon as it suits his own purposes. This is a man who has no respect of honor and valor since he not only has neither but is, as I have written in some detail, Not Man Enough to Be President. It is a deep tragedy of our moment that our military has as a commander-in-chief someone who not only does not value their sacrifice, but will use it for his own self-serving and cynical ends.

Look for "Obama: The President of Peace" opening sometime next year. Maybe sooner if the daily rushes start to look really bad.

A few days back Amazon snuck in the back door of everybody's Kindles that had purchased a copy of a certain edition of 1984 and deleted it. (Yes, Amazon has the keys to the backdoor of all their Kindles, and apparently they thought they had the right to just come into your electronic library and take something back. Oh sure they credited you for it, but that's not the point is it?)

For details on this dumb move and why there's a lot of evil potential in Kindle, see Jason Perlow's JEFF BEZOS IS WATCHING YOU.

Amazon has been at some pains to keep the Kindle's rep pure and at greater pains to hide sales figures. Both of these items suggest that Kindle is not the iPod of print that Amazon want's everyone to believe. I know I don't. This latest move of Amazon Dumbth was brimming with irony since the title was "1984." Very damaging stuff since it's easy to make this sort of theme into a meme that will not die, and it has become that. I had a conversation about it with a colleague just this evening over dinner.

Now I'm back home and I have to say I am impressed not only with the speed of Amazon's apology, but with it's straightforward tone as well.

Barack Obama, President of the United States, could learn a lot about how to salvage a sinking brand from Jeff Bezos, President of Amazon. This is how to apologize. No weasel words. No "calibrated" words. Just "I was wrong / We were wrong / We'll use what we've learned to do better."

An Apology from Amazon

Jeffrey P. Bezos says:
This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our "solution" to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

With deep apology to our customers,

Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com

That is how a full human being says they're sorry. Presidents take note. Or not. Preferably not.

Obamallatio ™ I'm just putting this up to stake the claim for future generations of wordsmiths. Obviously a subset of fellatio involving the media, the credulous, the brain dead, the foolishly optimistic, and Andrew Sullivan. Let's work on the definition together, okay?

Googling about I see that the oddly named Swampthing in Korea@ Fark comments typed the term out on 2009-01-22 @ 07:34:20 AM

Okay, now the Obamallatio is getting creepy....

I'm putting that down to the "million farkers typing randomly write obamallatio sooner or later" theory. I, however, have trademarked the term for use on extra-small condoms and dental dams.

Error slut Alessandra Stanley is at it again at the New York Times with An Appraisal - Cronkite’s Signature Mix of Authority and Approachability. Now there are corrections and corrections, but by any order of magnitude this is a whopper.

Correction: July 22, 2009 -- An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite’s career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite’s coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30. Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. “The CBS Evening News” overtook “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” on NBC in the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970. A communications satellite used to relay correspondents’ reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of “The CBS Evening News” in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International.

I'll give her a pass on the "editing error" of UP vs. UPI since that's laid off on some functionaries at the times that are laughably referred to as "editors." The rest of the roster, however, is just down to the kind of sloppy drivel that Stanley has become infamous for. I'd call for a special Dumbth Award with oakleaf cluster for getting the date of the moon landing wrong 3 (Three!) days before the 40th anniversary of same, but it is all too typical of this Timesian's bumbling career of error.

Craig Silverman @ CJR sums up her recent career score in Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, Wrong with

Stanley has been responsible for nine corrections so far this year. By my count in Nexis, she had fourteen corrections in 2008, twelve in 2007, and fifteen in 2006. Averaging just over a correction a month is not something to be proud of. But that’s still better than before she attracted so much attention. Stanley had twenty-three corrections in 2005, the year everyone noticed her predilection for error, and twenty-six in 2004. Perhaps the decline in corrections between 2005 and 2006 was in part due to the attention focused on her.

But it goes beyond that when we reflect that the correction itself references an "editing error." With an error rate such as Stanley's you have to ask if there was any editing oversight at all on the story? Slim to none would be my guess.

This also raises into high relief the "fact based reality" of a lot of Times stories. After all, it cannot have been news to the newspaper that Walter Cronkite was, for many years now, on the way out. It cannot have escaped the people responsible for obituaries at the Times that they'd best keep their files up-to-date and factually bulletproof. Are these files kept in a New York Times fact lock-box so that scribblers such as Stanley can't access them? Is Wikipedia blocked at the Times much as Twitter is blocked at the White House? Or has the culture of lies, misdirection, "unnamed sources" that have no names, Obamallatio ™, and obfuscation set in so deeply at the New York Times that they just don't give a damn any longer?

I suspect it is the latter. Maureen Dowd avoids it all by just pulling her pungent quotes from "unnamed sources" out of her email or her ass. Maybe Stanley should do the same. The lingering question about her continued employment turns the crude question "Who do I have to blow around here to get a job" on its head to become, "Who does Stanley have to not blow at the New York Times to get fired?"

Barack Obama: Another dangerous religious zealot in the White House | I Hate the Media - Fun with Liberal Media Bias

Obama: We haven’t selected a permanent church home in DC….my Faith and Neighborhood Initiatives Director Joshua DeBois, he has a devotional that he sends to me on my Blackberry every day. That’s how I start my morning. It’s got a passage, a scripture, in some cases quotes from other faiths to reflect on.

Desire Grover is making sense out of Gates' stupidity.

Continued...

Chris Rock explains it all for you. Pay attention. There will be a test, you intellectually insane moron.

Mugshot Moment: Gates is ready for his close-up.

Continued...

In Defense of Readers "The best readers are obstinate. They possess a nearly inexhaustible persistence that drives them to read, regardless of the circumstances they find themselves in."

From a $500 million treasure ship to an epic kegger party in Peru 4000 years ago there's a lot of Sexy News from the World of Archaeology

World's dumbest amusement park ride: Pedal-Powered Monorail in New Zealand

The Return Of Scipio envisions The Coming Dialogues Of Melos "World peace -- or even peace over a substantial part of the globe -- is a very rare thing."

Dateline: Beijing -- Internet Adds 12th Website

Will designer brains divide humanity? Why should they be any different from natural brains?

Higher than Everest: Everest revealed from above in British balloonist's breathtaking panoramic shot of world's highest peaks

Newest bogus restaurant suit: Man sues Claim Jumper, claiming condom was in his soup

Sippican Cottage sez I Finally Located A Real Good Country Song. Indicator For Genre: Everyone Involved Is Probably Dead

Lowering the Bar: Man Has Perfectly Believable Story About Why He Was Naked In a Cemetery

On advertising "Any economy which charges ever less for ever more intrusive ads will eventually be successful not in creating wealth but in driving the readers away, until the only ones left to heed the ads are all the other ads." [Found on the wonderful blog this is a working library Recommended. ]

Good news. You're immortal.Bad news. You live forever as a small clump of jelly.

Attempted Suicide-by-Cop: You just know that this ends badly. Very badly.

When he is about to unleash a whopper of special magnitude, Obama emits a tell-tale sign. He prefaces it with "let me be clear" or "understand this." -- Power Line - Obama's Ethics

[Full image in PDF Bumperstrip format suitable for sticking is HERE. PDF @ 3.5 Megabytes.]

"Let me tell you how it will be....
Here's one for you nineteen for me....
Don't ask me what I want it for,
If you don't want to pay some more...."

As someone wise put it to me today, after watching the shameless fellatio festival called a Press Conference, "Can you imagine a claim any more cynical and absurd than that the government will control costs by finding and eliminating inefficiencies?"

Continued...

Is that an iPod in your pocket or are you just spontaneously combusting? Seven-Month Investigation Turns up 15 Incidents of Fiery iPods @ Wired.com

Backgrounder with documents: Here's the details that prove "It's not the flaming iPod, it's the cover-up." Apple Downplays Fiery iPod Incidents @ KIRO Seattle

This one goes out to all those who had big dreams for Obama and are now, like Ann Althouse, waking from that dream into the nightmare. Ann's almost there even though she's burying the lede deep inside Althouse: David Brooks: "Liberal Suicide March.". C'mon, Ann, you can do it. It takes a big hair babe to admit when she was wrong.

Heart also went big for Obama and every sued the RNC for using "Barracuda." They too may be having buyers' remorse now or when their way-new taxes bite them in their big hair sometime next year.

From, not without irony, the lyrics to "These Dreams:"

There's something out there
I cant resist.
I need to hide away from the pain.
There's something out there
I cant resist.
The sweetest song is silence
That I've ever heard.

Funny how your feet
In dreams never touch the earth.
In a wood full of princes
Freedom is a kiss.
But the prince hides his face
From dreams in the mist.

These dreams go on when I close my eyes.
Every second of the night I live another life.
These dreams that sleep when its cold outside.
Every moment I'm awake the further I'm away.

Earth to Althouse and Heart: "Wake up and smell the agenda!"

I just caught myself wondering....

What if you could put a mental web-cam inside people's heads and run a search for secret, unspoken thoughts that began, "Those goddamn (ethnic slur)'s..." or similar pattern?

Would the frequency of such thoughts be up or down from the recent past in this new 'post-racial' era?

Boyle bumps Obama: It's over when the fat lady sings:

The stakes were particularly high for NBC, which airs the most-watched show of the summer, "America's Got Talent," at 9 p.m. This week, the reality hit includes a heavily promoted interview with "Britain's Got Talent" singing sensation Susan Boyle.

Sources said that NBC demonstrated reluctance to carry Obama's news conference live. Faced with the prospect of only one or two major broadcasters -- CBS and ABC -- covering the event, the White House moved its start time to 8 p.m. -- Most will carry Obama press conference; time shifted after NBC balked

Hot? Chinese? Urine Luck!: Is this the world's most crowded swimming pool?

The hurrier I go the behinder I get: Obama's legislative strategy moves in two gears — heedlessly fast and recklessly faster.

Coming Soon: The Blackberry-Only Twitter, "Thumber."

Althouse: Bloggers delighted over Obama's appreciation of their willingness to write propaganda for him.

Beyond the capacity of the mind to boggle: Bailouts could cost U.S. $23 trillion

President chomps cheeseburger, BIG NEWS. President goes out for ice cream, BIGGER NEWS! President eats fish eggs of endangered species with top Russian thug, ... not news, move along, nothing to see here.

The President: One hundred and eighty-three days ago the Democratic Party, and my personal body slaves the hack media, brought forth on this continent, a new Won-derful, conceived in Hawaii (so I am told), and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal but some are more equal than others.

Now we are engaged in a great boondoggle of bills, testing whether that nation, or any nation so confused and so eviscerated, can long endure trillions of dollars in debt while the slacktard half of the population pays nothing in taxes for their government cheese.

We are met on top of a 1,018 page health-careless boondoggle bill. We have come to dedicate a vast portion of that bill's gob-stopping debt, as a final resting place for those who previously worked their whole lives that free enterprise might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should fleece them.

But, in a larger sense, we can not fleece -- we can not bamboozle -- we can not steal -- enough with this boondoggle bill to pay for our addiction to free shit from Uncle Sam. The entrepreneurs, living and dead, who struggled to build up their businesses and capital, have not socked away enough for our poor power to tax or extract.

The rich and sorta-rich will note, and long remember how we tax here, but they can never come up with enough cash to pay for what we enacted here.

It is now for you, the vaguely solvent but earning less than $250,000, rather, to be dedicated here to paying for the unfinished make-work which they whom we have fleeced hairless have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for you to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored and bankrupt rich we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave their last full measure of taxation -- that you middle class schmucks here highly resolve that these rich shall not have been taxed into the poorhouse in vain -- that the working class and the middle class of this nation, under Me, shall have a new birth of oppressive taxation -- and that punitive government taxation of the people, by the armed might of the state, for the people who can't get their ass in gear but need an ever expanding bag of goodies from Me, shall not perish from the earth.

-- for Apollo

The moon marked out the edge of heaven.

On this, our scriptures all agreed.

The moon was fixed, it could not fall.

The moon would fill our final needs.

Continued...

[Archival from 2006 but still, in light of recent events, worth repeating.]

If your life on the web is running too s l o w, if your browsing and grazing at this site or that is just b o g g i n g   d o w n, what do you do?

Like any good cybernaut, you look for the "techno-fix."

There are, of course, many fixes to find. New connections, new computers, new hard drives, new browsers, new plugins, and more. But the first thing everyone should do is to take the cure common to all cyberspace slowdowns. You click on your browser menus and tell it to "Clear History."

"Clear History" works wonders for your cyberlife. As you move within the web, your History grows, and the more History you hold the slower your web brain, your browser, thinks and acts. Thinking slowly and acting slowly may be wise in life, but it takes the zip out of your online drive.

When you "Clear History" your browser forgets all the places it has been, all the things that it has seen, all of what it has learned. All that bitsludge is wiped away and your browser's internal brain is made as smooth as a baby's bottom, as blank as a goldfish's brain. Things run faster, you get loaded more quickly and will probably stay loaded longer. You flash but you don't crash. Why would you? You've "cleared your history."

I probably didn't have to tell you to "Clear History." You knew it. Pretty much everyone knows it. But this better browsing tip seems, like many other dubious cyberspace insights, to have oozed out into the real world, into the world dimensional.

And when 2D goes 3D there's always a problem.

Continued...

No longer a problem in the way-new America.

We are a "Can-Do! Yes, we can." society. One of the really amazing upticks in American society, as I noticed in a brief walk around various neighborhoods in sodden Seattle, is that we have almost completely cleaned up the streets of our cities.

How well I remember those tours through the various skid roads** of the cities I have lived in -- Los Angeles, New York, Boston, and San Francisco --in days of yore. Gone now. All gone. And their wretched refuse along with them.

Take a walk yourself and you will see that it is true.

Nowhere in today's brighter and more-caring American cities will you see those terrible social wrecks on the streets. Yes, no longer will you find "Bums," "Junkies," "Drunks," "Bull-Goose Raving Lunatics," or "The Hard Core Unemployed" on our sidewalks. They are all gone, a fading memory.

Indeed all that are left, strangely rising up from the background noise of the streets, are the blameless and harmless "Homeless."

They are the last social class to be saved by our loving and caring society and their continuing expansion in our cities is a mystery which yearns for a caring social solution.

My own is simple and solves two lingering social problems at once: "Feed the homeless to the hungry."

Problem solved and it is a two-fer. Paging Dr. Swift!

---

**The first skid row was Skid Road (Yesler Way) in Seattle, where logs were skidded into the water on a corduroy road for delivery to Henry Yesler's lumber mills.

From the insightful folks @ RedPlanetCartoons
HT: Word Around the Net

The faux-conservative's answer to both Paris and Perez Hilton, Meghan McCain, showed up for an interview with that clarion tuba of Gay media, Out Magazine looking a bit more, er, "fulfilled" than she has of late.

We note the glow in the cheeks. The Mona Lisa "knowing" in the eyes. The tell-tale swelling of the breasts that literally bends the pink triangle out of space and time. The thickening of the abdomen that no "SILENCE=DEATH" slogan can quite obliterate.

In the spirit and tradition of Andrew Sullivan, I feel it is my DUTY to ask if she is with child or with cheeseburger. And if the former, is there proof that the father is not Levi Johnston?

And if true, when will we get to see THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE?

Like Sullivan, I'm just asking.

And don’t just keep it to yourself!

Send the link to all of your very best friends!

And make sure you don’t miss further instructions! Join the Bureau’s effort today because, you know, this future isn’t that far off!

A public service message from The Health Administration Bureau

HT: No Moss Here - What you can expect from ObamaCare.

[Via email today. Hey, it's new on the Web if it is new to me. Okay?]

Dear American liberals,  leftists, social progressives, socialists, Marxists and Obama  supporters, et al:

We have stuck together since the  late 1950's, but the whole of this latest election process has  made me realize that I want a divorce. I know we tolerated  each other for many years for the sake of future generations,  but sadly, this relationship has run its course. Our two  ideological sides of America cannot and will not ever agree on  what is right so let's just end it on friendly terms. We can  smile and chalk it up to irreconcilable differences and go our  own way.

Here is a model separation  agreement:

Our two groups can equitably divide up the  country by landmass each taking a portion. That will be the  difficult part, but I am sure our two sides can come to a  friendly agreement. After that, it should be relatively easy!  Our respective representatives can effortlessly divide other  assets since both sides have such distinct and disparate  tastes.

We don't like redistributive taxes so you can  keep them. You are welcome to the liberal judges and the ACLU.  Since you hate guns and war, we'll take our firearms, the  cops, the NRA and the military. You can keep Oprah, Michael  Moore and Rosie O'Donnell (You are, however, responsible for  finding a bio-diesel vehicle big enough to move all three of  them).

We'll keep the capitalism, greedy corporations,  pharmaceutical companies, Wal-Mart and Wall Street. You can  have your beloved homeless, homeboys, hippies and illegal  aliens. We'll keep the hot Alaskan hockey moms, greedy CEO's  and rednecks. We'll keep the Bibles and give you NBC and  Hollywood.

You can make nice with Iran and Palestine  and we'll retain the right to invade and hammer places that  threaten us. You can have the peaceniks and war protesters.  When our allies or our way of life are under assault, we'll  help provide them security.

We'll keep our  Judeo-Christian values.. You are welcome to Islam,  Scientology, Humanism and Shirley McClain. You can also have  the U.N.. but we will no longer be paying the bill.

We'll keep the SUVs, pickup trucks and oversized  luxury cars. You can take every Subaru station wagon you can  find.

You can give everyone healthcare if you can find  any practicing doctors. We'll continue to believe healthcare  is a luxury and not a right. We'll keep The Battle Hymn of the  Republic and the National Anthem. I'm sure you'll be happy to  substitute Imagine, I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing, Kum  Ba Ya or We Are the World.

We'll practice trickle down  economics and you can give trickle up poverty your best shot.  Since it often so offends you, we'll keep our history, our  name and our flag.

Would you agree to this? If so,  please pass it along to other like minded liberal and  conservative patriots and if you do not agree, just hit  delete.

In the spirit of friendly parting, I'll bet you ANWAR  which one of us will need whose help in 15 years.... 

Sincerely,
John J. Wall
Law Student and  an American

P.S. Also, please take Barbara Streisand  & Jane Fonda with  you.

---

I hope that works but I also wonder, "If there's such a thing as a shotgun marriage, can there also be a shotgun divorce? Mossberg owners want to know."

Remembering Apollo 11

Lift-off of the Saturn V rocket, carrying astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin Jr, along with 6,700,000 pounds (3,039,000 kg) of fuel and equipment into the Florida sky, bound for the Moon, on July 16th, 1969.

The rocket was rising faster, slanting a little, its tense white flame leaving a long, thin spiral of bluish smoke behind it. It had risen into the open blue sky, and the dark red fire had turned into enormous billows of brown smoke, when the sound reached us: it was a long, violent crack, not a rolling sound, but specifically a cracking, grinding sound, as if space were breaking apart, but it seemed irrelevant and unimportant, because it was a sound from the past and the rocket was long since speeding safely out of its reach—though it was strange to realize that only a few seconds had passed. I found myself waving to the rocket involuntarily, I heard people applauding and joined them, grasping our common motive; it was impossible to watch passively, one had to express, by some physical action, a feeling that was not triumph, but more: the feeling that that white object’s unobstructed streak of motion was the only thing that mattered in the universe.

What we had seen, in naked essentials—but in reality, not in a work of art—was the concretized abstraction of man's greatness. -- Ayn Rand

Velociman writes for me when he says,

Once upon a time we were a great nation that strived for the stars. No more. Now we are ashamed of glory, because some fucking crackhead might feel neglected if we don't dote upon her, and slather her with our largesse at the expense of the Great Things. -- Velociworld: We Choose To Go To The Moon

I'm still hoping we don't get to the point where Charlton Heston will speak for all of us: You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!

... but every so often I gets my doubtins'.

Or, "Gosh, he has rediscovered the 20's and Hugo Gernsback." -- Chuck

Sixteen provocative minutes with "the man who helped usher in the environmental movement in the 1960s and '70s has been rethinking his positions on cities, nuclear power, genetic modification and geo-engineering. This talk at the US State Department is a foretaste of his major new book, sure to provoke widespread debate." -- Stewart Brand proclaims 4 environmental 'heresies' | Video on TED.com Recorded June 2009.

"Check out this image: see that tiny speck of light, inside the blue circle? That's Earth, as seen from the vantage point of Saturn. We are so much smaller even than that." -- Discovery Space: Twisted Physics: In Praise of Insignificance

Continued...

"I will go around the country on behalf of candidates who believe in the right things, regardless of their party label or affiliation," she said over lunch in her downtown office, 40 miles from her now-famous hometown of Wasilla — population 7,000 — where she began her political career. "People are so tired of the partisan stuff — even my own son is not a Republican," said Mrs. Palin. -- Palin to stump for conservative Democrats - Washington Times

Humm, sounds like Governor Palin may be casting an even wider net than I supposed the other day in: How Sarah Palin Will Become the Most Powerful Republican

Abbie Donovan, 10, of Saco, Maine, sprinted across the chilly ocean water under a pier at twilight in Old Orchard Beach, Maine. -- Pictures of the Day

HT: Word Around the Net

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,  
Life is but an empty dream!  
For the soul is dead that slumbers,  
And things are not what they seem.
-- Longfellow

Rasmussen Presidential Approval Ratings since the Inauguration taken on the 9's of the month:
01/22/2009 +30
02/09/2009 +14
03/09/2009 +6
04/09/2009 +5
05/09/2009 +7
06/09/2009 +8
07/09/2009 -8

Interesting that on 6/9 it stood at +8 and now one month later it stands at -8.

But what, you ask... what, Uncle Gerard, does it mean?

What does it mean? As one Johnny Worthington says when you google "It don't mean shit,"

"Seriously... It don't mean shit... It's all in the marinade and spices bitches!!!"

A colorful man that Johnny Worthington, who seems to be a fellow off in Brisbane, Australia more than half in love with beer, but he does have a clue to the strange world of the polling universe.

Continued...

A little night music from my channel at Blip.

Set List:

♫ Bob Dylan – Forever Young
♫ Van Morrison – Queen Of The Slipstream
♫ Bob Dylan – What Was It You Wanted
♫ Gretchen Peters – American Tune (live)
♫ Nitty Gritty Dirt Band – Grandpa Was a Carpenter
♫ Eva Cassidy – People Get Ready
♫ The Band – Ophelia
♫ Bryan Ferry – A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall
♫ Yardbirds – Stroll On
♫ You Got Another Thing Coming
♫ Talking Heads – Life During Wartime
♫ Natalie Merchant – Carnival (LP Version)
♫ Richie Havens – I Was Educated by Myself
♫ Ben E. King – Stand by Me (Single/LP Version)
♫ David Bowie – Heroes (1999 Digital Remaster)
♫ America – A Horse With No Name
♫ Roll Me Away-Bob Seger-(Lyrics and Song)
♫ Linda Ronstadt – Life Is Like a Mountain Railway (2006 Digital Remaster)
♫ Van Morrison – You Don't Pull No Punches, but You Don't Push the River

A friend told me about this, but I thought I'd go see for myself. It's a bench above a grave in Seattle's Lakeview Cemetary. It's just about 20 yards above the graves of Bruce Lee and Brandon Lee. In this age of vapid celebrity those graves still receive a constant flow of visitors immersed in vanity. The remains of these celluloid heroes, these men whose life's work was mere pretending, still have tokens, incense, flowers and other offerings heaped upon them. It's as if the people who come, not knowing these men in life, seek a deeper unknowing of them in death. It's not about who they were but who their long trail of mourners were not.

It seems to me that the hundreds of millions now addicted to "celebrity" are like those addicted to a heroin of the soul. Like heroin, "celebrity" must be taken in ever increasing doses to fill a hole in the user's soul. And just like heroin, "celebrity" doesn't fill anything but only increases the emptiness. Which, of course, only increases the need and requires an ever larger dose of the illusion; of the shrieking unquiet voices. Standing above those graves you can watch them come and go, leaving their tokens and standing in groups beside the stones for one last photograph of their brush with dead celebrity.

This grave, on a rise above, is quieter but bears a simple poem on the sides of the bench as you walk around it. There's no name on the bench itself. That marker is off to the side a few feet. The bench itself is not a monument to vanity, but a simple gift left behind for any who may chance upon it. If you like you can sit down and rest for awhile on the poem cut into the stone. It's in sun and shade; a pleasant spot to watch the clouds scud across the sound and shred themselves into rain and vapor on the tops of the mountains to the west and to the east.

You might even bring a book to read and opening it to a remembered passage see,

.... For within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!

An elaborate thought and true enough. But somehow, in this place, the simpler poem on which you rest seems better and more apt even as, below you, the still living fans of Bruce and Brandon Lee pull up in their cars, leave their offerings, and drive away.

Hidden here is a photograph of the moment before a public execution in Yemen, that cool pool of advanced civilization on the Gulf. It's from Photo Journal's Pictures of the Day, and although not explicit, it is all the more terrible for it.

A man convicted of a heinous crime receives a public execution. "Pour encourager les autres." You might think it's hard to look at, but for the assembled Yemenis it seems, from the cell phone cameras held up to record it, just another day in old Arab Culture Land.

I ask myself what I think of this moment and the assembled men gawping in the background. I want to say something deep and insightful. Something I could go on about for several hundred words. But if I am honest with myself I really think something very blunt and much more concise. I think, "Democracy? Freedom? Prosperity? For these people? Why bother?"

No, I don't know exactly what that means, but I think I'll soon find out.

Continued...

Today's news from last November. Cutting edge then. Cuttinger edge now.

go straight to Reclusive Leftist's "Feminists and the mystery of Sarah Palin."

Read the whole thing and that includes the comments. It will give you insight, food for thought, and genuine UnObamabranded Hope.

What? Are you still here rather than THERE?

Click to enlarge

"This starry night sky sparkles above the Black Hills of South Dakota and the United States' Mount Rushmore National Park. The historic site features enormous sculptures of four US presidents; George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, carved into the southeast face of granite cliffs. Above the monumental symbols of the country's independence and early history, the night features stars of a familiar constellation to northern skygazers around the world, an asterism known as the Big Dipper in the constellation Ursa Major."

Takes your breath away, doesn't it? It should.

Continued...

The brilliant Chris Muir hits it out of the park in today's Day by Day.

Peck·sniff·i·an adj. Hypocritically benevolent; sanctimonious.

Is it my imagination or is Robert Gibbs now so out-front arrogant and condescending that even the whores of the White House Press Corps are beginning to feel insulted every time he opens his mouth?

More and more Gibbs, as can certainly be seen here, is proving to be the very model of that modern Obama apparatchik; a model updated for our era into the very glass and form of a Little Hitler reigning secure in the White House Dwarf Cavern.

We all know the contemporary type of "Little Hitlers." We meet them whenever we have to interact with people whose positions do not rest upon doing a good job but upon pleasing some master above them. Most often we see them in Government bureaucracies where rules are not announced to you until you break them. At which point you are instructed, in the patient smarmy tones reserved for pre-schoolers, to "fill out the proper form" or "obtain the proper documents," and then come back to wait in the longer line in the next building.

This is essentially what we see oozing out of the Gibbs creature in this clip. The same sort of small bureaucrat smarm packaged in one who has ascended to a status far beyond anything he hoped for while pleasuring himself to pictures of Janet and/or Michael Jackson in his adolescence. Instead he can now pleasure himself by

Continued...

Click to enlarge

In a land where neuters, unicorn riders, and moonwalking molesters are deified and canonized, we can forget that there are real men still walking the American earth. Here's one. Do you think she was glad to see him?

"A construction worker, suspended from a crane, rescued a woman who fell into the Des Moines River in downtown Des Moines Tuesday. A man who also fell into the water died." -- Photo Journal

And then, for the man reaching out his hand, Jason Oglesbee, and the others involved in the rescue, it was back to work on Wednesday, "We have a bridge to build here," the supervisor said as his men went about their business. -- Des Moines Register

Rush Limbaugh: "This represents a successful assault on prosperity."

U.S. job losses spike in June, dampen recovery hopes WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. employers cut far more jobs than expected last month and the unemployment rate hit a nearly 26-year high of 9.5 percent, underscoring the likelihood of a long and slow recovery from recession.

BREAKING! The White House today announced that Sir Paul McCartney will open for President Obama's "Happy Days Are Here Again" tour.

Iraq takes a step toward sovereignty - The Big Picture - Boston.com

An Iraqi soldier gestures toward the camera at a checkpoint in central Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday, June 30, 2009.

• January 2012
  
• December 2011
  
• November 2011
  
• October 2011
  
• September 2011
  
• August 2011
  
• July 2011
  
• June 2011
  
• May 2011
  
• April 2011
  
• March 2011
  
• February 2011
  
• January 2011
  
• December 2010
  
• November 2010
  
• October 2010
  
• September 2010
  
• August 2010
  
• July 2010
  
• June 2010
  
• May 2010
  
• April 2010
  
• March 2010
  
• February 2010
  
• January 2010
  
• December 2009
  
• November 2009
  
• October 2009
  
• September 2009
  
• August 2009
  
• July 2009
  
• June 2009
  
• May 2009
  
• April 2009
  
• March 2009
  
• February 2009
  
• January 2009
  
• December 2008
  
• November 2008
  
• October 2008
  
• September 2008
  
• August 2008
  
• July 2008
  
• June 2008
  
• May 2008
  
• April 2008
  
• March 2008
  
• February 2008
  
• January 2008
  
• December 2007
  
• November 2007
  
• October 2007
  
• September 2007
  
• August 2007
  
• July 2007
  
• June 2007
  
• May 2007
  
• April 2007
  
• March 2007
  
• February 2007
  
• January 2007
  
• December 2006
  
• October 2006
  
• September 2006
  
• August 2006
  
• July 2006
  
• June 2006
  
• May 2006
  
• April 2006
  
• March 2006
  
• February 2006
  
• January 2006
  
• December 2005
  
• November 2005
  
• October 2005
  
• September 2005
  
• August 2005
  
• July 2005
  
• June 2005
  
• May 2005
  
• April 2005
  
• March 2005
  
• February 2005
  
• January 2005
  
• December 2004
  
• November 2004
  
• October 2004
  
• September 2004
  
• August 2004
  
• July 2004
  
• June 2004
  
• May 2004
  
• April 2004
  
• March 2004
  
• February 2004
  
• January 2004
  
• December 2003
  
• November 2003
  
• October 2003
  
• September 2003
  
• August 2003
  
• July 2003
  
• June 2003
  

What will it be about? Anything.

There are no limits to my subject material. I’ll write a poem about flowers. I’ll write a poem about dragons. I’ll write a poem about a flower that fights a dragon and you’ll be all smug and think, Well obviously the dragon would win. But don’t get too comfortable with that mindset because, like a stealth bomber ravaging your brainscape with heartfelt language, here I come out of the blue with all these poetic details explaining why the flower winning is not only plausible but necessary. -- McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Monologue:

If you enter “Dostoyevsky” into the search function of Twitter, you don’t come up with much interesting these days. --Dostoyevsky — Marginal Revolution

Clint is right. It IS halftime in America. We're down by about 5 trillion. Time to switch quarterbacks. -- Clint Eastwood's Chrysler Super Bowl Ad: The Untold Obama Connection - The Hollywood Reporter

Elementary school students learn what journalists do. “

Everyday exciting things happen” to journalists, according to a third-grade textbook found by the Stuff Journalists Like blog. “A good journalist works very hard to make sure his or her stories are interesting and true.”

No matter who you support this year, you have to admit Mitt Romney went about becoming president the wrong way.

Instead of wasting his time learning how business works and building a multi-billion-dollar company that really did save or create hundreds of thousands of jobs, Mitt should have lived off his daddy's fortune like Jack Kennedy. Chasing skirts and molesting teenage virgin is a lot more fun than figuring out how to revive an old business. Instead, Mitt Romney gave his inheritance to charity. Who does that anymore? -- ｫ Don Surber

The "O" Face Splat! Geek-in-chief Obama tests marshmallow gun "The Secret Service is going to be mad at me about this,"

Obama said, before energetically pumping a compressor and shooting the marshmallow gun, invented by 14-year-old Joey Hudy. Obama watched open-mouthed as the candy shot across the room before crashing into the wall near the entrance to the Red Room, an elegant state parlor which stuffed with rare 19th century French furniture.

The man who "got" Bin Laden. Yeah, right.

I'm sure there will be a lot of takers to explain that house as mental illness, but like I said: I'm not buying.

The person went feral. Back into a state of nature. It's the hunter-gatherer Eden ruined by Western Civilization that we're told we need to go back to that's on display here. She was living off the land. When the land is covered with stripmalls, pizza and Diet Pepsi represents the nuts and berries. --Sippican Cottage: So You Want To Be A Landlord

Planned Parenthood is very far from the uncontroversial organization the Susan G. Komen Foundation aspires to be. According to its most recent annual report, for 2010, Planned Parenthood sells abortions to nine out of every 10 pregnant women who come to its clinics.

And it's known throughout the country as an implacable and aggressive opponent of any meaningful restrictions on deliberate feticide.... Breast-cancer victims are only the latest hostages taken by Planned Parenthood. Unless the organization is finally held to account, they will surely not be the last. --Robert George and Carter Snead: - WSJ.com

I still like the Charles Murray argument which is, basically, that the poor are increasingly populated by the cognitively inferior and that taking away certain social controls has lifted the lid off of the crock pot.

The cognitively inferior need stringently enforced social codes in order to stay on the straight and narrow. So what has happened over the past several decades is that the cream of the crop are leaving the areas where dumb people reside, and the voice of morality has diminished. This is a double whammy on the dumb class. --Folgers ｫ Gucci Little Piggy

At 1,000 feet above the water... 40 knots too fast with the glideslope full scale deflection below us. Obviously, this is not going to work.

Me- Ok, this is not a stable approach. Let's go around and try it again. He says something that makes me laugh... Now? Me- Yes, now... Go around. -- Flight Level 390:

There is not enough money in the world to pay back America's national debt.

Total United States currency (paper and electronic entries in reserve accounts) sums to about $2 trillion. The national debt sums to over $14 trillion. If people ever really suspected that the U.S. monetary printing press was broken, there would be the mother of all bank runs. Bond holders would redeem their U.S. debt instead of rolling it over. Savers would hold tightly to any real currency. --Europe's Wile E. Coyote Moment

On the same day a report revealed the names of a number of top donors to presidential campaigns, President Barack Obama spent time with around 25 wealthy donors who paid $35,800 each to be with him behind closed doors at a Washington hotel. --President Obama Spends Afternoon With Wealthy Donors In DC ｫ CBS Washington

Voters this year look set to continue an odd pattern that's prevailed in presidential politics for a quarter century.

They will elect either a candidate with a famous father or with no father. The surviving serious contenders—Barack Obama, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney—all exemplify one of these two categories. For the seventh consecutive election, the winning candidate will be either a privileged prince with an adored, powerful patriarch, or an up-from-nothing scrapper with no relationship with his biological dad. -- Michael Medved: Presidential Fathers and Sons - WSJ.com

In 1993 geneticist Dean Hamer studied pairs of brothers

who were very loosely defined as “exclusively or mostly” homosexual. He claimed to find a pattern in a specific region of the X chromosome that such brothers seemed to disproportionately share. This was widely trumpeted in the media as the landmark discovery of a “gay gene.” But Hamer and others failed to subsequently replicate his results. In fact, a 1999 Canadian study contradicted them. Hamer is a gay man who has reportedly stated he hoped his research would help end intolerance toward homosexuals. He also later claimed he’d discovered the “God gene,” so take whatever he says with a grain of DNA. --Homosexuality: What’s Choice Got to Do With it? - Taki's Magazine

Hit the piste like Grizzly Adams’ gung-ho nephew with your very own Beardski. Part insulating ski mask, part fake beard; these spectacular accessories will make you look like the most experienced man on the slopes. --Beardski @ Firebox.com

Answer: you sold it for a mess of pottage.

When civilization abandoned institutional Christianity for liberalism, then abandoned Christian notions of decency and individualism for socialism, and then abandoned Christian notions of chivalry and truth for political correctness, and then abandoned Christian notions of the objectivity of truth, beauty and virtue for the roaring abyss of nihilism, civilization lost the engine and motive of its progress. When you stopped calling yourself sons of God and started calling yourself naked apes, you stopped climbing Jacob’s Ladder toward the angels, and slumped instead toward the jungle where Nature red in tooth and claw holds reign. -- Futurism and Shoepiles | John C. Wright's Journal

Where Christian virtues fail there liberty turns into license and licentiousness: pornographers admired as men of business. Wealth promotes an industry of envy, as lawyers, bureaucrats and politicians make it their daily business to loot what others produce. Medicine turns to infanticide, and the Hippocratic Oath languishes. Science goes mad, and says the universe is nothing but a carousel of atoms, and your brain a defective calculation machine that merely hallucinates self-awareness and free will. --Futurism and Shoepiles | John C. Wright's Journal

but rather of the candidates themselves. None of them are worthy -- at least at this point --€” of the presidency. A three-term congresswoman and a half-term governor are as unready as Barack Obama was in 2008. Let's not fight fire with fire. Let's use water. That usually works unless it is a grease fire. --The view from the fence « Don Surber

"The $4 million price tag is the least of it." -- The 1st of 14 screens @ Business Insider

It does not believe that most of the national debates are a tempest in a teacup

that can be settled amicably behind closed doors. It is uninterested in bipartisan great compromisers, it seeks fighters who will stand up for its agenda. It is not interested in the progressive voyage to the national future that has been taken up by both parties, what it would like is independence from their reign of policy terror. It would like to roll back the progressive policymaking of both parties. --Sultan Knish a blog by Daniel Greenfield RTWT!

Unearthed in a gravel pit at Piltdown in East Sussex and revealed to the outside world exactly a century ago,

those shards of skull were part of a scientific scam that completely fooled leading palaeontologists. For decades they believed they were the remains of a million-year-old apeman, an individual who possessed a large brain but primitive jawbone and teeth. --Piltdown Man: British archaeology's greatest hoax The Observer

U S Bases

What would you report home to Tehran after reading the Washington Post day after day?

I think you'd end up saying: "We can't compete with the Krauthammers. They are better than us at putting together words. Therefore we can't guarantee that the ruling class in Washington won't work itself into another frenzy like it did in 2003 and do something stupid. So, we'd better get ourselves a few nukes as a deterrent." --Steve Sailer's iSteve Blog: The Great Game ain't so great anymore

JUST ABOUT AS BAD A GAME AS YOU'D EXPECT FROM TWO MEDIOCRE TEAMS...

There are Year-Rounders who brave the 120ｰF summer inferno, and Snowbirds who land from as far as Canada with their souped-up RVs and pensions,

soul-searching Gypsy Kids who arrive by train with little more than the ragged clothes on their back, Spaz Kids and their electro-psychedelic outdoor parties, and Scrappers who risk life and limb to collect shrapnel from the gunnery range that flanks the camp, where Navy SEAL teams train year-round (and where rumor has it they prepared for the Osama bin Laden raid). That's to say nothing of the rowdy bikers who pass through, or the meth-addled loners on the outer edges inclined to greet a trespasser with a gunshot. -- Slab City: Living Off the Grid in California's Badlands

Once an honest and intelligent person opens himself to the facts,

it becomes very difficult to support big wind power on any basis whatsoever. Unless, of course, you are a big developer or investor in government subsidised wind farms. In that case, there are $billions to be made, without the need to provide any useful power to the public, whatsoever. A neat scam, if you can live with yourself. Just ask Warren Buffett. --Al Fin Energy:

those of the uninvolved and uninformed lives, the bar-raisers, the downright mean ones,

the never deserving of respect ones, the Vegas junketeers, the Super Bowl jet setters, the tuition stealers, the faux-Christians who do not pay higher taxes, the too much income makers, the tormenters of autistic children, the polluters, the enemies deserving of punishment, the targets to bring a gun against, the faces to get in front of, the limb-loppers, the tonsil pullers, the fat cats, the corporate jet owners, the one-percenters, the stupidly acting, the not paying their fair sharers, the discriminators on the “way you look”, the alligator raisers and moat builders, the vote deniers, the clingers, the typical something persons, the hunters of kids at ice cream parlors, the stereotypers and profilers, the cowards, the lazy and soft, the non-spreaders of money, the not my people people, the Tea party racists, the not been perfect and mistake makers, the disengaged and the dictating, the not the time to profiteers, the ones who did not know when to quit making money, and on and on. My God, man, how did Barack Obama & Co. conjure up so many demons? -- Works and Days » Are You "Them"?

“Slow traffic keep right” is such a simple rule to understand,

but evidently they’re issuing drivers licenses to people too stupid to understand that rule, who are probably also too stupid to figure out that passing a semi-truck might require use of the accelerator pedal. (Trust me, idiot: It’s down there on the floorboard of your car, probably somewhere on the right side.) If there were any justice in the world, state troopers wouldn’t be laying radar traps for guys doing 82 mph in a 65 mph zone, but would instead be issuing tickets to slow-moving idiots who take more than a few seconds to pass a semi-truck. -- Hate Hoax Busted by Cop’s Dash-Cam (Also: You Idiots, Get Out of My Way!) : The Other McCain

How exactly do we know, from the photo, that she is on the political left rather than right?  Seriously.  Here is her blog and profile.  Here is her Twitter feed.  How do we know?  And that we know — should it make you less confident in your own political beliefs?  WWRHS? -- Assorted links -- €” Marginal Revolution

The status quo must be thought of as a direction, not merely a state,

considering how predictable change has become. (Does anyone dispute at this point that, for example, gay marriage will soon be legalized, most likely by the courts?) Political action must address this change, must figure out where it stands relative to that change and act accordingly; if it limits itself to addressing the present, it may end up misdirecting its energy, addressing issues that will soon resolve themselves by pure inertia and ignoring issues for which the direction that inertia will eventually drive them in has not yet been decided. --Anonymous admits its irrelevance

If you had to write one big check for the whole twelve years of public education of the 88 percent or so of the entire population of the United States that doesn't go to private schools, at 2011 rates of $10,441 per person per year, it would be a check for thirty-three trillion, eight hundred forty-eight billion, eight hundred eighty-six million dollars. --Sippican Cottage: Bin Laden; Joe Biden; Whatever

Tru' dat, but every few days it seems that this whining "candidate" redefines "sore loser:"

"They outspent me five to one to quote destroy Newt Gingrich?" Gingrich said in an interview on CNN's "The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer." "You know, I think that doesn't deserve congratulations. I think that's reprehensible, I think it's dishonest, and I think it's shameful." --Gingrich: Romney didn’t deserve congrats – CNN Political Ticker

Sigh. The person who doesn't deserve congrats for the regularly scheduled destruction of Newt Gingrich is.... Newt Gingrich!

Hoping for another visitation from ye olde Proverbs 5:3

Valentine's Day gift ideas for the nerd in your life.

Over 700 abandoned settlements bear the collective name The Dead Cities of Syria....

Between the cities of Aleppo and Hama there is a limestone massif and it is here these ancient settlements were built by their once prosperous peoples. The area is about thirty kilometers in width yet is several times longer – extending to almost 140 kilometers in length.... An extensive and fascinating photo essay @ Kuriositas

Kenneth Boehr, Clara Lazen's science teacher, handed out the usual ball-and-stick models used

to visualize simple molecules to his fifth-grade class. But Clara put the carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen atoms together in a particular complex way and asked Boehr if she'd made a real molecule. Boehr, to his surprise, wasn't sure. So he photographed the model and sent it over to a chemist friend at Humboldt State University who identified it as a wholly new but also wholly viable chemical. -- | Popular Science

No fool like an old.... etc. A Day With Warren Buffett Offers Wealth of Photo Opportunities

The ritual ends with a photo shoot. Each student gets to take two pictures with Mr. Buffett. The first one is a serious shot, the second is a funny pose of their choosing.

Would the ritual ended with sepaku for the hilariously named "Sage of Omaha."

Obama: 'I have fallen on my knees with great regularity' - Investors.com

No, that's not a typo: 1.2 million people dropped out of the labor force in one month!

So as the labor force increased from 153.9 million to 154.4 million, the non institutional population increased by 242.3 million meaning, those not in the labor force surged from 86.7 million to 87.9 million. Which means that the civilian labor force tumbled to a fresh 30 year low of 63.7% as the BLS is seriously planning on eliminating nearly half of the available labor pool from the unemployment calculation. -- | ZeroHedge

To all Roman Catholics who voted for Mr Barack Obama: SUUUCKERS! -- | John C. Wright's Journal

Re: The Planned Parenthood Paroxysm --

It is a fresh reminder that the left fully absorbed and adapted the Brezhnev Doctrine: once they capture an institution, they aren'€™t giving it up.  How dare a private foundation stop coughing up the dough.  It explains why "diversity" means conformity to liberal views in newsrooms, college faculties, and Hollywood studios.  It's why the left reacts with howls of outrage every time you propose reducing taxpayer funding for NPR and PBS, even as the left disingenuously argues that NPR and PBS receive only a "tiny"€ amount of tax subsidy.  It should also remind us how the left will fight every battle to shrink government like it was Verdun.  Which suggests one obvious conclusion if you're an incoming Romney Administration: go big.  Go after everything at once.  -- | Power Line

An hour's worth of C-SPAN Q&A: Diana West, Syndicated Columnist, Universal Uclick - YouTube

Diana West, discusses her weekly online column syndicated in over 100 newspapers nationwide. She writes about cultural and political issues from a self-described conservative viewpoint. She talks about some themes in her columns, including the spread of Islamic law throughout formerly non-Islamic areas of the western world and her opposition to the war in Afghanistan.

a scared mother of four on food stamps, or her selfless Community Activist advocate.

No one champions the simple strivers, those who take care of themselves and in the process alleviate society of one more charity case, and along the way create wealth via 'gains from trade' implicit in market transactions. A simple prosperous mensch who does not hypocritically claim he primarily works for others is off the radar, implicitly insulting to any intellectual making considerably less than him. The kind of change Murray is talking about will not happen until productive, successful people again feel pride in their distinguishing learned characteristics, including the willingness to shame people who do not have them. -- Falkenblog: Charles Murray Reiterates Willpower

As for Romney and his disregard, real or putative, for the poor,

I would suspect he has actually done more for the poor than anyone else in the presidential sweepstakes, by virtue of the tithes he has paid to his church and the whopping taxes he has actually paid. While we might carp and squeal about his tax rates, the actual amount of cabbage he has forked over in his career to the federal government must cover a sizable acreage indeed, and we assume that even given the spectacular ineptitude of that same government in distributing assistance to the needy without leakages of Mississippi dimensions into various private spillways and sluice gates, a fair amount of Mitt's earnings must have found its way into the pockets of the deserving. -- | The Daily Cannibal

Obama's After Lunch Schedule as given by a commenter on: Just What Does Barack Obama Do All Day @ The Daily Caller

2:00 PM: Golf with Plouffe
5:00 PM: Dinner with the wookie
6:00 PM: Sneak a cigarette
6:15 PM: Watch Oprah on Tivo
8:00 PM: Smoke a joint and have sex with a male campaign staffer
8:05 PM: Done with sex
8:10 PM: Watch the wookie scarf down everything in the White House refrigerator
9:00 PM: Hold the wookie's head as she "purges" her snack
9:30 PM: Watch Ray Maddow fantasize about sex with him
10:00 PM: Pass out

I rarely encounter men I feel immediately threatened by.

The ones I do are 1) really big-ass black guys with hardcore street cred, 320 pounds and a lot off tattoo chatter on their arm, 2) Mexican psycho dudes with tattoos on their face. See the commonality? Once you etch shit in your face you are telling the world that you have ceased belonging. This is a clear signal of danger. Animals use subtle aromatic spear to ward off predators. Man now uses skin ink. Heavy skin ink. -- Men in East L.A. that scare me ｫ An Unmarried Man

The formal statement of Anathema goes like this:

Wherefore in the name of God the All-powerful, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, of Blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and of all the saints, in virtue of the power which has been given us of binding and loosing in Heaven and on earth, we deprive Barack Hussain Obama himself and all his accomplices and all his abettors of the Communion of the Body and Blood of Our Lord, we separate him from the society of all Christians, we exclude him from the bosom of our Holy Mother the Church in Heaven and on earth, we declare him excommunicated and anathematized and we judge him condemned to eternal fire with Satan and his angels and all the reprobate, so long as he will not burst the fetters of the demon, do penance and satisfy the Church; we deliver him to Satan to mortify his body, that his soul may be saved on the day of judgment.

That would pretty much work for me. What about the Catholics among us?

☛ Thinking Right Archives ☚

• Links
• Links

• Untying the Knot
• Ansel Adams' Lost Los Angeles
• Arcs of the Divers
• Waking at Dawn
• Gatesgate Moves MSM From the Tank to the Toilet
• Freedom's Walk
• Redistributing the Health
• "Presidents was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get."
• Rewriting "As Good As It Gets"
• Thomas Friedman: Fatter Footprint Than Al Gore
• How many Black American Princesses does it take to change a light bulb?
• Puzzled over health care? Ask Lenin's question, "Who -- Whom?"
• What Obama Can Do to Reverse His Negatives in 2010
• How to Apologize
• American Digest Word Mint: Obamallatio ™
• Fact Checking? At the New York Times? Shirley, You Jest.
• The Blackberrian Faith of the President
• "Uppity Blacks vs Blue Collar Whites: Shame on Prof.Gates"
• "I support the President but I am against all his policies." At Last, A Bumpersticker to Bring Us Together!
• Dear Professor Gates, Watch and learn how not to get your ass kicked by the police!