Archive Listing
July 31, 2011 - July 24, 2011

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

DON'T FORGET THE GLOSSARY. Ordinarily I don't post if I have nothing to add. But this is too good not to post. And even the usual airy-fairy Hotair characterization seems, uh, appropriate. We wouldn't want to drown out the sound file with our impolitic falling-on-the-floor guffaws, now would we?

Oh. Yeah. We do have a little something to add. An entry from the Y2000 Who's Who in Shuteye Nation. (Hard to think we've been tracking this asswipe for 10 years, isn't it?)


CORRECTION: It's not called the Gross National Product anymore. It's called the Gross Domestic Product. A change that came in the same year, I suspect, when Democrats switched from commie red to existentially blue on the electoral map and Republicans from patriotic blue to raging racist red. That kind of thing.

LOVED THAT CONAIR. So needless. I like this guy as an actor. Why must he insist on driving me (and 150 million other Americans) out of his audience?


Because he thinks he's a highly educated intellectual? If so, then why drop out of college in your first year? I don't get it.

Oh, that's right. I forgot. His background is available to see at Wiki:


I can see the 'too much fire in the belly thing.' For acting. But it pretty much eliminates your credibility when it comes to anything else. And all he does is hurt himself.  He can't spell. He can't write a grammatical sentrence. He can't think (as if Twitter allowed for that anyway...)

It's not like his career is on fire. What's he done since ConAir, the high point of actions pics before The Expendables? A few horror movies? I don't get it. Somebody please explain.

The closest I can come to understanding is the experience I used to have when I was a management consultant travelling on planes all the time. I realized that your seatmates were more likely to tell you the truth about their lives than they would their closest friends. I was particularly interested in lawyers. They always told me they hated their lives. Hated being lawyers.

Maybe it's the same for actors. Despite all the money. When people love and admire you, it's never you they love and admire. Only a character you played. Maybe as you approach your middle years, that becomes a cross to bear (or should that be "bare"?) You're old enough that you should be a grownup. But you're still nothing but a face. You want to matter, even if it cuts your future audience in half.

Help me out here.

The thing is, there are consequences to our decisions. You became an actor. You're good at emoting. You have a knack for memorizing lines. You have money. People turn your way when you speak. But you dropped out of NYU before you turned 20. A trade you made. When people turn your way, they're looking at your face. Period. They're not looking for you to educate them. That's what you gave up. You're a high school kid who became a movie star.

What am I missing? Why should we listen? Why should we care? Why should we keep coming to your movies if you're intent on being a sanctimonious dick?

Monday, August 30, 2010

 
HARVARD CLASS OF JFK. The title of this post was inspired by an essay by Laura Brod over at Hotair's Green Room. It's called The Little Glass Box of the American Left and it says, in part:


But isn't that what identity politics are all about, as practiced by the left? There's the Little Black Box of African-American racialist politics, the Little Brown Box of hispanic amnesty politics, the Little Hypochondriac Box filled with people who want to see their doctor every week and get their drugs for free, the Little Senior Box of frightened Social Security and Medicare recipients, the Little Green Box of "save the planet" totalitarians, the Little Card-Check Box of union members who want what they want regardless, the Little Homosexual Box peopled by those who want you to not only watch but cheer their bedroom activities, and the Little Atheist Box of secularists who want the Judeo-Christian God (exclusively) run out of the body politic, so that there's more room for the Little Muslim Box, the Little Buddhist Box, the Little Wiccan Box, and the not-so-little I-Hate-America Box.

All of these are supposed to be defined by a handful of box-specific issues whose only point of commonality is that they give the government more power to tell everyone in the country what to do. Democratic unity consists of chaining these separate, discrete boxes together into a permanent voting majority under the absolute control of a federal establishment run by Ivy League lawyers consisting of (overwhelmingly) white men and (a few useful idiot) white women.

Everything that applies to the glass box described by Laura Brod at Hotair also applies to the people who are supposed to occupy all the other little boxes. African-Americans who are pro-life, pro-choice when it comes to alternatives to the union-mandated incompetencies of government schools, and pro-small business because they own one or would like to are banished from the box (with prejudice and sometimes minstrel cartoons) as Uncle Toms. It's unimaginable to Harry Reid and other Dems that any American of Hispanic descent wouldn't prefer the Little Brown Box to border enforcement, the rule of law, and state governments that aren't bankrupted by non-paying parasites on local healthcare, education, law enforcement, judicial, and child welfare resources for which they pay taxes like other law-abiding citizens. The Little Senior Box is supposed to be a wholly owned subsidiary of the AARP lobby, with no thought about the burden and legacy of debt being piled up on their children or grandchildren or the potentially fatal results of having financially stressed governments more in charge of their declining years than doctors. It's impossible for progressives to imagine that people could care about the environment, ecology, and endangered species without believing these goals are best accomplished by a regressive tax on resources that are still available -- and safe in terms of all our environmental ideals -- if we'd only let people look for them. Et cetera.

Just a couple of additional points to be made about the "box" mentality. There's nothing liberal, tolerant, hopeful. or truly forward-looking about it. It regards all people as intrinsically selfish and devoid of individuality, human moraility, and capacity for unity. None of us can ever transcend the initial boxes we check on a government form -- sex, race or ethnic origin, age, education level, income, and medical condition. When we check a box in one of these categories, that's our box, now and forevermore, and in progressive political calculus we damn well better stay there or be ridiculed as racists, sexists, homophobes, nativists, anti-science creationists, blah blah. In point of fact, it's the grimmest kind of reductionism, the ultimate denial of the value of the experience of life itself. Only the wise white power lords of the federal government can be trusted to keep us from each other's throats as we slash at each other with the sharpest blades of our narrowest interests. The idea that these boxes might just be individual pots for seedlings whose produce grows freely upward and outward into a delightful natural garden that kens and glories in the whole is beyond the soulless, geometric view of human existence progressive box collectors prefer.

The second point is esthetic but not really subsidiary. Listen -- really listen -- to the song video up top. Pete Seeger is/was a liberal icon. Who was thinking of little boxes first? Pay particular attention to his repeated mentions of the most important little box of all -- The Little University Box. He and his ilk captured that box first. (And they're still drinking their martinis, aren't they?) And the box metaphor was the basis for how they set about conquering the rest of us. By a process of annexation, box by box, until they had a string of addends that looked to them like unity, as far as people of their collective mentality could ever understand unity. Note his tone -- the avuncular, friendly, approachable contempt of his "folk music." Note, too, the fatal error of scale that betrays the narrowness of his vision: he lists "business" as a box.

It may be. But it's one gigantically huge and kaleidoscopic box that contains 90+ percent of everything that real working people do to sustain themselves and each other. I don't need to do the butcher to candlestickmaker list. That's the box that contains almost all of us. But it's overridingly vital for them to keep us in a box and convince us that it's as small as all their other possessions.

It isn't.


The box that really isn't a box is the United States of America.

Do you remember the archaic term "melting pot?" This explanation won't make any sense to those of you who have never eaten a stew or vegetable soup. So if you're one of the ones who always eats all the ingredients of your meals separately, one dish for each ingredient, I apologize. My metaphor will fall flat. But the melting pot idea never suggested that a pea would stop being a pea, a potato a potato, a beef cube a beef cube, an onion an onion, etc, just because it was part of a delicious entree. The idea was that the stew was more than the sum of its ingredients, nothing lost and much gained.

Try eating a stew unmixed ingredient by unmixed ingredient, unwashed, uncut, unseasoned, unsimmered together, each with a sign that says, "I'm celery and I'm mad," or "I'm beef and I feel guilty for what I'm doing to your colon," or "I'm a Scottish leek. Don't eat me; I taste like shit." That's what we call the progressive dream. Tasty, ain't it?
 

UUUUH. Sorry. Just can't take him seriously anymore. There were five Marx Brothers. Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Zeppo, and Gummo. Only three of them were funny. Same with the other Marx brothers: Karl, Mao, Castro, Hugo, and Bummo.

Zeppo and Gummo quit to become Hollywood publicists. Hugo and Bummo quit to become sideshow clowns. Same thing.

You disagree? Sideshow clown as Hollywood publicist? Try this video. TRANSLATION:


Huh? The Prez holds veto-proof majorities in both houses of congress and he's waxing bellicose about a minority BLOCKADE? Kewl! Truly inspired drollery? No. Mere publicityspeak, Bummo style.

I know. I know, you're tempted to say he's doing a pretty good impression of Groucho from Duck Soup:

But I don't see any teleprompters. Or any of the concupiscience. Or the wit. Or the self-conscious self-contradiction (That's what had us fooled at first.) He believes his own dumb punchline. Publicist. Oh well.

The various Marx Brothers "Droppos" all had the same weakness. When they tried to be funny, they weren't. When they tried to be serious, they were ridiculous. Something about pompous Patrician out-of-touchness we presume.


Did you wave at them? Good girls. We're proud of you.

All kidding aside. Two years in. Everything is still his predecessor's fault? Even if it were true, it's no sign of a man, a leader, or a president. He's just a nerd riding a little girl's bike with a silly helmet he thinks is proof against everything from bird droppings to flat-out stompings. The bird droppings are the last remaining fallout from the Bush administration. The stompings are the product of his own spectacularly misguided and destructive policies.


Good luck with that, Bummo. It really isn't funny. Even burlesque costumery can't cover that up.

So. If the Obama presidency were a parrot...


uh, yeah. You get the picture. Nailed to the perch. For two more years.

Friday, August 27, 2010

THE REAL FEMINISM. FINALLY. There's a lot of noise out there right now. Some of it is good, insightful noise. (Goldberg, Krauthammer, Jacoby, and Barone come to mind), but nobody knows what's going to happen in November. Everybody's treading water. The economy is sinking, the president is distracted and on vacation (Lobsters? Really?), a variety of Dems are jumping ship, and the polling numbers are either all or mostly junk. How do you choose what's worth focusing on?

The answer is Sarah Palin. Apart from Obama himself, she's the part of the national political equation that is new. I once pronounced her near-term presidential prospects as zero. Here was my reasoning:


But I also said:


I'm starting to take her very very seriously. Why? Several points.


To conclude. Sarah Palin's not Obama or anything like him. She understands the social networking scene and is as far ahead of her competition as Obama's minions were ahead of theirs. Her less than elite educational credentials are no longer as suspect as the people who have questioned them so contemptuously. She understands better than the Republican Party just how fed up the electorate is. I think she's running for president. When I think about Romney and Huckabee and that doofus from Minnesota, I think she's winning. Whatever the polls say.

And I think everybody who opposes her, Democrat and Republican alike, should be afraid. Very afraid. Because she's the 800-pound gorillagrizzly in the room. And I'm getting more comfortable with the idea of a Sarah Palin presidency. She's not going to call Marines "corpsemen." She's not going to bow to men who stone women to death for getting raped. She knows that you don't revive an economy or a nation by punishing the people who do all the work. She knows what the American military can do, she understands that lives she cares about are on the line, and she won't make deployment decisions lightly. She's not enough of an intellectual to do any of those things. And if she chows down on a king crab leg at a state dinner, she'll know what it really cost to land it on her presidential plate.


Capitalism isn't soulless exploitation. It's people taking risks for rewards that go way beyond money and trust fund checks. What Sarah knows that Obama never will. Thanks to Obama, I'm prepared, finally, to accept the risk of Sarah. Hell. I'm an American. Let's roll.

[ED NOTE. We like to think of this as Affirmative Action Blogging. Obviously, Puck Punk has gone a bit backward with his English after the Census and the Bender and all, but it's a hands across the border kind of thing, isn't it? They don't even have football in Canada (except for that weird CFL thing they do on a field the size of Area 51), but never mind that. He's trying really really hard here. It's the thought that counts, eh...?]

A BREAK FROM THE HOCKEY...FOR NOW. I want to apologize to all bodies at The Punks for being away for a long time. I become many upset when my Canadiens lose to the Phyler in the anyshell playoff and I have the hard time coming to a grip on that. At that time I am very happy to be making so much money at my job for the census, but I spend every of my money at the liquor store to go on the bender at my sadness. When I wake up, I have find out all the census job are go away, even for my boss. But he shows me how to collect the insurance of the unemployments, so that is a good news because I still have money to watch the TV. I am many luck to have this kind of good friend. But this is not why I make the writting of this post now.

The new season of the hockey is come soon, but The Punks do not want me to write about this. They say no one in America has a like of the hockey even for the playoff, so why I will write about the regular season? Instead they ask me to cover another sport, and since we are in America the only option is to make talk about the anyfell footballs.

The first part of the anyfell is always a very big deal called The Daft. It has this name because of the many stupid, spoiled college children who start to make a billion of U.S. dollars on this day for no reason except of the anyfell player union. I wish our anyshell union in the hockey was so good as this because the college children who go in the hockey do not make any of the money or even have the dental insurance. A union like this could help before very much during the anyshell LOCKOUT, not strike. But I suppose it is a good thing for the anyfell children to make this money right away since many of them are never good at the actual playings of the footballs, so they must make all their monies in a short time.


But then there is a break of many month after The Daft when every body must watch the news of all the veteran player make what they call the holdup. The holdup is when a player sign already before a contract to be making a billion U.S. dollars, then after they sign it they think they should make two or three billion of the U.S. dollars instead because they are many special and have many anger at the new college child of the team who makes a higher money only for sitting on the bench and not making the play. There is an argue about this and the holdup man stay on vacation while all other player of the team start the practicing. The end of the holdup happen when the owner gives out the extra billion U.S. dollars to the veteran, and then the owner makes a raise of the prices for the ticket and the beer in the anyfell game to pay for the holdup. This is why they call it a holdup, because it is the robbery of the anyfell fans.

The thrird part of the anyfell year is making the occur at this moment. It is The Preseasoning. This is the time when there are games but no one makes the effort of a care to win it, yet the anyfell fan still must pay to watch. May sports have a Preseasoning, but the anyfell has the most worst. The only big news that happen in The Preseasoning of the anyfell is when the veteran man of the holdup is becomes l'injure in the first game and all the watchers at the anyfell stadium must think about how they pay so much money for ticket and beer for the salary of the holdup man and the college child that now sit on the bench next to each other for all season.

Beside that, there are so many of this games in The Preseasonings where there is no meaning and none of the anyfell player make the try to win, but the ESPN and Tony Kornholer want to make the anyfell fan think they should see this games anyway. So I have a time at my favorite bar of the sport down on the street and watch some games of The Preseasoning so I can report about it to you and you will know about all the news of l'import that happen in the anyfell. It is a possible that some of this informations are not completely right, because I did have a lot of the drinks at the bar while I watch, but I keep a good notes of what happen, so I think it is all most of the truth.

This game is of an interest to the Punks because the new throwerback of the Redmen is Donaldvan McVick, who before this is many years on the Bird team of Phylerdelphia. But now he is old and the Phyler Birds have the brother of Donaldvan to play throwerback, the man who likes not the dogs so much. The owner of the Redmen always has a good time to pay too much money to the players who are not very good or always make l'injure, like this man. I think the owner gets so much of the enjoy from this because he must have the hatred for all anyfell fan who live around the Washington. Because as you see, the Redmen are still making the bad games.

This game shows what becomes of Donaldvan's brother, Michael McVick. He still can not have the good game, as when before he plays on the team of the Atlanta Birds. Why so many teams of bird names in the anyfell? Anyway, Terral Owens, the gay catcher man that used to catch the throw from Donaldvan, is now catch for the Tigers and he has a good game. He catches five or ten of the touchdowns, which in the footballs scores about one hundred points. In the hockey you only get one point when you score. Sorry, I know I am not supposed to make the compare of the hockey to the anyfell.

This game is in the Seattle, where all year it is many rain. I am not so sure about why I make a note of this game. I think it is because the colors of neon green with mustard yellow on the TV makes my stomach to feel upset at the time I watch it. There is a stain of the vomit on my note page that makes a smudge of the ink I write with, so I think the true reason will be forever le mystery.