Archive Listing
August 3, 2009 - July 27, 2009

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

LOOK IT ALL UP, CHUMPS. There was once a nation called France, which believed that life was to be lived through all the senses even as they created some of the greatest works of architectural engineering and artistry in the world, in addition to their skeptical philosophies, mind-expanding conceptual painting, and deathlessly sensual poetry. We can still admire them for their gift of the Statue of Liberty; the western masterpice called Paris; the technological aspiration represented by the Eiffel Tower; the wineries of Champagne and Bordeaux; the precociously decadent music of Debussy, Satie, and Piaf; the scientific contributions of Pasteur, Lamarck, and Descartes; writers like Voltaire, Rousseau, Rimbaud, Moliere, Hugo, and Dumas; the mechanical esprit of Bugatti, Delahaye, and Turbo Lago; and the nudes of Degas, Renoir, Manet, Rodin, and French cinema.

Now it turns out that the thousand-year duel between French Catholic faith and cynical French ennui has finally been decided. Robespierre and Vichy trump Napoleon and de Gaulle. Foucault trumps Joan of Arc. The EU trumps Voltaire. And De Sade trumps Bastiat. What's left is grinding, defeatist, even enthusiastic submission to barbarism. A truly French icon is now to be offered up on the altar of cowardly sacrifice.


It's rare that the best case for a nation can be made without words, especially when that nation has produced some of the greatest users of words in recorded history. But here's a brief (very) sample. [To be added later if I still feel like it: IP readers who don't think graphics are 'silly' can register their votes in the comments. HINT: The Talbot Lago is the automotive equivalent of Bardot. Still, I'd hate to disturb the 7-minute frosting of hope Mal is living on these days.] And here's a look at the iconic woman France is now throwing under the bus along with its own heritage as a civilized nation.


Put them all in haute-couture burkhas.


They'll all look the same then. Just like the rest of the European zombies.

P.S. I couldn't resist. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the Talbot Lago.


And, what the hell, a Delahaye too.


How are the mighty fallen.

Sunday, June 01, 2008

XOFF NEWS. After days of in-depth research, the Obama campaign has selected a new church affiliation for the candidate that is expected to boost his popularity in Democrat constituencies where he has been weak.

"We didn't want to depart too strongly from the kind of tradition Senator Obama has been used to -- a vigorous, enthusiastic, pentecostally joyous congregation whose devout beliefs reflect working class concerns and backgrounds," explained campaign spokesman George Axelrod. "At the same time we wanted to take the opportunity to do some outreach and create a new bond between the Senator and typical white people from embarrass--, uh, embattled states like Kentucky and West Virginia."

These criteria led to the choice of a Pentecostal Baptist Church in Jolo, West Virginia. In announcing his decision, the Senator said, "Michelle, the kids, and I are truly looking forward to next Sunday's service, and I feel sure that the majority of hard-working white Americans will soon see that whatever our religious differences may have been before, they are now a thing of the past. Jolo Baptist is probably exactly like the church next door to all of you who don't live in California, New England, or Chicago."

The tornadoes that struck large parts of the nation yesterday are believed to have been caused by a collective sigh of relief from the Democratic National Committee.

Here's a little more about Jolo.


If sanity is the measure, we're sure the Senator will feel right at home. Electorally, we'll just have to wait and see.

Friday, May 30, 2008

THE FUTURE. Our loyal and beloved commenter Mal wants hope. Excuse me. Hope with a capital H, italicized and boldfaced. I'm not sure this qualifies but it might, and mights are what hope is all about. Everybody should tune in to Glenn Beck's TV show on Headline News tonight to hear Ray Kurzweill discuss the coming 'Singularity."

What's that? In Kurzweill's own words:


Kurzweill is an optimist. He thinks it's all going to work out for the best. By 2025, we won't be able to recognize the civilization we're living in viewed from the standpoint of today. Which means that all the issues which seem so critical and dark right now will probably be wholly irrelevant. YAY! He foresees, in the very near future, human beings who are trillions of times more intelligent than we are.


Not only that. We're going to be richer than our wildest dreams. This is a quote from the first paragraph of the piece:


Cool. There are some things I could do with $40 trillion. For one thing, I'd buy a new air-conditioner for my office. One that doesn't freeze up in July and August. (And on warm days in May.)

I also think the Singularity vastly simplifies the child rearing challenge. Just teach them to be honest, virtuous, adaptable, and good-humored. It looks like everything else will be taken care of.

Of course, this may be the kind of idea that's more acceptable to the old than the young. For example, I'd probably have felt threatened in my salad days at the prospect of being a trillion times dumber than the smart ones. It doesn't bother me anymore. Something I learned from dogs. After a childhood filled with scary-smart terriers and German Shepherds, I've come to realize that greyhounds -- who are truly deep-down dumb (something the rescue organizations don't promote nearly enough) -- are much much happier than the high IQ breeds like terriers, sheep dogs, retrievers, and standard poodles.

In fact, when the Singularity comes, I'm going to have myself remanufactured as an eternally four-year-old greyhound.


It's going to be great. And for once I'm not even being ironic. Irony is totally lost on greyhounds.

OUR FAVORITE ELOISE. Michelle Malkin, bless her heart, thinks symbols and images matter. Probably because she's an evil gook bitch. Here's the current dustup as reported by Waterglass.com.


Hey. Waterglass. Was this cool?


But if enough people do it, and most of those people think it's cool, it's basically okay, right? That's why we wrote this post back in March of 2006. And this update. And other closely related entries.

Actually, Waterglass, it does matter. Some things are so simple they lose their impact as soon as a talented intellect goes to work on them. The obviously insane becomes somehow defensible, dismissible, no big deal.

That's why we continue to love the OTHER Rachel. The simplistic, all-cards-on-the-table, ditzy one. She knows what she thinks. Halleluiah! (Yeah, she's disregarded our ecxcellent advice about slimming down her ridgeback, but we're pretty sure she's at least mulling it over.)

For example, this is a Rachel who has written the best policy about reader comments I've ever seen on the Internet:


There. Perfect. My guess is, she would know that Rachael Ray shouldn't be wearing a kaffiyeh to advertise an American commercial establishment and, if she did, should apologize for having done so. It's NOT complicated. It's common sense.

Like the way Rachel Lucas (the common sensical one) reacted to discovering that muslims hate dogs. She knew immediately that this was important information and probably fatal to any policy of peaceful coexistence between them (barbarians) and us (civilized people).

That's why I continue to have hope for America. Because we've got a good supply of Rachels who are better than what Waterglass calls our "our European betters." [Scoff]

We're big fans here at Instapunk, Rachel. But please do schedule an intervention for Sunny.

Now. As to the other Rachael. STOP IT. You're cute. But not THAT cute.

Thursday, May 29, 2008

GETTING AHEAD. It's the job of the media, left and right, to pound this McClellan item for days. But it's not a story, just a postscript. We already said everything that needs to be said long ago. Before the administration belatedly fired this incompetent sack of shit, we wrote:


We also said everything worth saying about insider books:


That about does it. Nothing to add.

HAVE SOME OBAMA BEANS. Last night I had the privilege of attending a corporate function, a dinner honoring a high-tech business unit's employee anniversaries. I was there as a guest and had no personal knowledge of the people who were being celebrated for 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, and 40 years of service to their company. I did know the executive who emceed the rite of recognition. He's a 40-year-old man (a kid by my reckoning) engaged in a constant battle to apportion his time appropriately to his job, his family responsibilities, and his volunteer efforts for the working-class Catholic parish he was born into. Not for the first time, I found myself awed and humbled by his ability to excel at these overcommitments. During the past year, he has managed a painful reorganization (and RIF) of his workforce without losing their dedication or affection, seen his eldest daughter blossom into a devoted nursing student with a work-study schedule as consuming as his own, and acquired a fluency in Spanish that enables him to keep up with the changing demographics of the parishioners he helps in his "spare" time.

I know him to be, as well, a loyal lifelong Democrat. So as I watched him graciously honoring his company's employees for their longevity and individual achievements on the job, I couldn't help thinking about Obama's Wesleyan address. The ringing call to "public service" sounds good and even inspiring, but in the context of what I witnessed last night it is also ignorant, narrow-minded, and insulting to a huge percentage of the American populace, whether they choose to recognize the insult or not. Yes, it was a corporate function, but as I listened to the well crafted summaries of individual careers, accomplishments, and personal traits of the honorees, I saw -- even as an outsider -- that they hadn't given all those years to one organization because they were in thrall to Obama's contemptuously labeled "money culture." They had committed their lives to exacting and difficult disciplines they were good at, and along the way they had undertaken serious risks to accomplish goals they believed to be important. (In fact, by any objective standard, the goals were important, to all of us, but to say more might make it possible to identify them, and that I won't do.) Yet in our uniquely American way, the tributes to each person mingled memories of extraordinary brilliance and principle on the professional level with anecdotes about personal foibles and -- a constant thread -- all the other things they somehow managed to do for family, charities, and each other. Those in attendance understood all the nuances. They laughed, they applauded, they chimed in with their own approving comments, and they were respectfully silent when the weightiest accomplishments were being described. They were a community and, though I hate to utter a cliche that was repeated several times without irony or any expression of dissent, a family.

I'm not being saccharine. There are bad companies as well as good. There are corporations in which people are valued exclusively for cutthroat devotion to profit. But in my own personal experience I have observed that bad companies, like bad people, eventually get what's coming to them. And there are good companies that forget the need to make a profit and so expire at great personal cost to the people and families who depended on them. It's important to remember, though, that the historic success and affluence of America lies in the fact that so many companies of all sizes are very much like the one I'm telling you about. Unlike Wall Street money machines or Ivy League law firms, most corporate entities in America exist to provide goods and services that people need, want, or depend on without knowing how or why. And regardless of the profit motive built into the capitalist economic model -- the most successful economic model ever discovered -- the people who make it all work are in "public service" to a much greater degree than any not-for-profit example cited by Barack Obama at Wesleyan.

Where do you want the most talented mathematicians, chemists, engineers, biologists, computer jocks, and managers to spend their time? In a lifelong feel-good allegiance to some vast international Peace Corps, unloading sacks of U.N. flour in third-world nations? Or pushing themselves to wring every last drop of productivity out of the one supreme talent they were born with and educated to use?


Last night I saw the America that Obama knows so little about he feels free to piss on it. And, yeah, it really does look something like this:


For a while there, it made me mad at Obama, for his blindness, his arrogance, his half-baked experience of the country that's given him so much opportunity, his wife's pampered resentment of things no one should take for granted. But then I had a different thought. I realized that he is one of the clearest examples we have yet had of the emergence of an isolated aristocracy reminiscent of the Brits' class system. Eton, Harrow, Cambridge, Oxford, and ultimate divorcement from the vitality and creative accomplishments of real life. When they realized that their inbred, genetically damaged, and over-educated gang of dukes and earls and "honorable" untitled younger sons couldn't ever achieve anything of value, they consigned them to careers in politics.


Clearly, it's been a civiization-destroying move for the Brits. But maybe, just maybe, Obama has hit on a better solution.

Perhaps Wesleyan grads should all join the Peace Corps. And take their Williams and Amherst chums with them. And the graduates of all the Ivy league colleges and graduate schools, and Stanford and Berkeley and Brandeis and the University of Chicago and everywhere else 1400 SAT scores guarantee colossal mis-education. Ship them overseas. Put them to work vaccinating famine victims against chlamydia. Teaching malaria-stricken tribes how to put condoms on bananas. Building mud-brick government offices for the distribution of welfare checks people could cash if they ever learned how to write their names. Would it do any good? Yes. It would keep the fairy-dust fanatics away from the rest of us.

All that's left is convincing Obama to go with them. Overseas. To right all the wrongs of a world he hasn't taken even the first step toward understanding.


What's that he's dusting off his shoulder? Nah. Not the fairy dust.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

PSAYINGS.5A.19. All the kiddies are saying they want CHANGE. Of course, there's nothing new under the sun, and the would-be agents of change are usually trying to turn the clock back to a time they liked better. For example, this site has already had occasion to warn you about the nature of the change promised by the Hillary campaign when it was still riding high and not in fear of Obama. Part of Hillary's fall from grace is no doubt due to the large number of people who still remember the so-called "Golden Age" of the Clintons. Thus, the Democrat electorate has decided to look even further back in time -- to the Seventies -- which are being recreated for us at frightening speed by the power of mass nostalgia.

No, dears, it's not just the cyclical nature of world events. It's the fulfillment of a deep subconscious yearning of long standing by the Democrat power structure. They're obsessed with returning to the days before the Reagan Revolution, when they owned the presidency and overwhelming control of both houses of Congress. The last time that state of affairs existed was in the Carter administration. Note how many current circumstances reflect the conditions that were either immediate precursors of Carter's election or concomitant with his presidency:

1. The rash, irrational, and self-destructive determination by a head-in-the-sand Democrat Congress to defund a vulnerable ally we had spent much military blood and treasure supporting as part of a global foreign policy strategy. (THEN: S. Vietnam; NOW: Iraq.)


2. The refusal to deal with a crisis in energy supplies -- and consequent runaway pricing -- by authorizing more nuclear plants and freeing the hated oil companies to develop new domestic sources of petroleum and more domestic refinery capacity. (THEN: The preferred socialist solution, a "windfall profits tax" that raised gas prices higher while all nuclear plant projects were stopped in their tracks. NOW: The preferred solution, a windfall profits tax that will raise gas prices even higher while still prohibiting domestic drilling, refinery expansion, and new nuclear plants in favor of the food-destroying ethanol boondoggle and various windmill/solar/hydrogen/Learjets-for-the-rich "alternative" approaches that will punish the poor for the purpose of "saving" a planet which is more-or-less impervious to our existence.)




3. A Democrat "change strategy" for the future based on lowered expectations, draconian dis-incentives for consumption and economic growth, and a concerted effort to blame the capitalist system and ordinary Americans for the leadership's impoverished vision of the future. (THEN: Carter's "malaise" speech. "NOW: Obama's "we can't eat all we want" speech.)


Yes, we're ramping up for the big throwback. Kids who have always had everything they could possibly want are bound to just love the hell out of being told they're selfish little pigs who need to be punished. (SQUEAL! The new metrosexuality!) I'm not going to try to disabuse them of the joy the return of the Seventies will bring them in that respect. They're probably even too sunk in their bored ADDS stupor to realize just how fatal the new double-nickel speed limit will be to people who have a hard time staying awake despite the simultaneous inputs of iPods, iPhones, and MySpace transactions. That argument will have to wait for the grim new statistics about how many indispensable "Millennial Generation" centers of the universe have been scraped off the nation's roads after falling asleep at the wheel on highways designed for 70 mph cruising.

But what I can do is offer a glimpse of the sartorial hell that went -- and undoubtedly will go -- with the Neo-Seventies Obama Era. Actually, I can do that with a single link.

I can also offer them an anthem (ref. audio file). Maybe they can figure out some way to rap/remix/alternalize it.


They better. Or we're all completely screwed.

REAL TYPING. Nobody else pay any attention to this. The apprentice is in pain. The Boss is obligated to help.

This (above) is an exact replica of the machine 'Kinesis' was first typed on. Nobody hates typewriters more than I do. (Nobody!) I'm not even going to say it's good for you. It isn't. Typewriters are responsible for more bad writing than any invention since the ball-point pen. Just hang in there.

There's a poem that sometimes helps some poeple. (Well, not usually.) But it's all I can come up with.


Yes, it's sad, and even sorrowful, and tragic, and moving, and immersed in searing desolation. But it can't compare with the agony of the man who has lost his computer, and must now bleed his soul's blood onto lined paper, with mechanical keys, or even a Bic pen. Yea, the path is dark, and it is my own dim memory I quote, when I repeat these dread lines:


Where? Up shit creek. That's where.

I couldn't be more sympathetic. Not without a flagon of Colt .45 mead anyway.

Uh, get back to work. Wandering is for post-modern silly-asses.

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