the opposite of right is...

jacobson summarizes:

"Sites on the left are echo-chambers in which like-minded individuals come together to tell each other how smart they are, in the comfort of a platform provided to them by ideological gurus... who lead these bloggers to pre-determined fundraising and political action while deluding the bloggers into thinking they are part of a grassroots movement so they can feel good about themselves. Right-wing bloggers, by contrast, exhibit the rugged individualism that built this country, defeated fascism and communism, and put men on the Moon."

forget fired

this mug would get me lynched at work

another travel note

i've been to nyc twice. that was three times too many.

Arizona Iced Tea Boycott?

guess what i'm thirsty for all of a sudden

update: oh it's from new york? boycott!

;)

Thelma and Louise II

The phrase "pitfalls of unchecked power" takes on a whole new meaning:

"(Just) like Thelma and Louise when they knew the jig was up, the Democratic Congress has decided it might as well put the pedal to the metal and go over the precipice with a crash and a bang. Unfortunately, they've got an already pummeled economy in the back seat with them."

brace yourself, and read it all.

states i've visited

here's a neat way to make a map of the states you've visited.

here's mine currently:


visited 31 states (62%)


...and i hope to add between 3 and 7 more (of the north central ones) this summer.

racist hate crimes

la raza (spit) was for them before they were against them

earth day

from completely different premises, george carlin still got the holiday right. iowahawk's take is a close second.

weekend pics

quite a bit of driving this weekend, and took a few pictures you might enjoy... (click on thumbnails to embiggen)

---

i've heard that llamas like to have their picture taken - looks like that's true:



...but this chihuahua couldn't care less:



random doors:



random vehicles:



random number:



flowers, trees, etc.:



it wasn't all pretty though - this swarm was hovering over the heat of my parked car - yuck!:



(a couple of these images were *slightly* adjusted in contrast to more accurately represent what i saw.)

rooneyism

"...and why is it that the more people there are involved in solving a problem, the less sensible their solution is going to be?"

(another thought from recent personal experiences, sadly.)

update: i take that back - idiocy can happen no matter how small the management team is.

war crimes

who knew they happened so close to home?

"let them drink tea!"

mme. boxer-antoinette was rumoured to have said...

homophobe!!! gaybasher!!!

don't be a hater, o-man!!!

;P ;)

we're all in jeopardy

it's funny because it's sad...

who's in charge here?

i've had this site linked for a while in my sidebar, but haven't really promoted it. who's in charge here? is a site that's "interested in who appears to be the leader" in the publicity photograph of a random musical group. despite occasional f-bombs, there's still a fun discussion every week. for no good reason, the number of comments has been dwindling lately, so go check it out and participate if you like.

automotive advice

i hear a click and clack sound coming through the vents...

revenge of the nerds?

not exactly:

I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular. Why?

To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question to ask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to imagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smart doesn't make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm you in the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why?

The key to this mystery is to rephrase the question slightly. Why don't smart kids make themselves popular? If they're so smart, why don't they figure out how popularity works and beat the system, just as they do for standardized tests?

One argument says that this would be impossible, that the smart kids are unpopular because the other kids envy them for being smart, and nothing they could do could make them popular...

In the schools I went to, being smart just didn't matter much. Kids didn't admire it or despise it. All other things being equal, they would have preferred to be on the smart side of average rather than the dumb side, but intelligence counted far less than, say, physical appearance, charisma, or athletic ability.

So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be popular.

If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at him... Of course I wanted to be popular... But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things...

I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. They occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. An American teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year.

I don't mean to suggest they do this consciously. Some of them truly are little Machiavellis, but what I really mean here is that teenagers are always on duty as conformists...

The problem is, the world these kids create for themselves is at first a very crude one. If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is "Lord of the Flies"... Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me... I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid...

What bothers me is not that the kids are (imprisoned in schools), but that (a) they aren't told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they're called misfits.

it's long, but read the rest

(emphases mine, sadly from experience)

the cure for socialism

...is not more socialism

it's fab

No, "fab" is not an opinion, it's the acronym for Future of American Broadband, whose six goals are:

1. 100 million US homes should have affordable access to 100 Mbps download/50 Mbps upload broadband Internet connections.
2. The US should be the leader in mobile network innovation, and the US should have the fastest and most extensive mobile networks in the world.
3. Every American should have access to “robust” broadband, and “the means and skills to subscribe if they so choose”.
4. Every community in the US should have access to 1 Gbps broadband for schools, hospitals, and government buildings.
5. The implementation of a wireless, interoperable public safety network available to all first responders.
6. Every American should be able to use a broadband connection to analyze their energy consumption (power, water, etc.)

The good news is that the net is getting stronger.

The bad news is that the net is getting stronger.

the body as machine

interesting illustration - is there any wonder why the best industrial music comes from germany? ;)

making a taxing day less taxing

lileks, of course. it is funny, but he does make the point:

"there just maybe might be a limit to the number of millstones you can pile on the economy’s chest"

change i can believe in

ron paul's polling even with obama. i'm not a ron paul supporter, i'm just happy about how fast the pendulum of opinion can swing away from the nanny state.

"It turns out that watching Goldman Sachs, the United Auto Workers, public employee unions and a raft of other vampires drain the treasury at America's weakest moment in a generation will make a person pretty hacked off"...

Libertarian sentiment has finally gone mainstream.

A movement that said that people should do whatever they wanted as long as it didn't hurt anyone else couldn't compete during the culture wars that began in the 1960s.

But after two wars, a $12 trillion debt, a financial crisis and the most politically tone-deaf president in modern history, Americans may have finally given up on big government.

movies

lileks, on "titanic"'s music:

really – the visuals were excellent, but you can’t recollect them without thinking of the plot or hearing Enya cooing, or threatening to coo. The main theme isn’t bad, in a formless sort of melancholic adolescent notion of romantic loss, but most the score is a bore, stuffed with the sort of tics and riffs Horner threw into all his 90s soundtracks. The four-note trumpet tattoo. The crazy piano glissando. Anvil strikes. Could have been worse; could have been Elfman, and then we would have seen the Titanic sink to the sound of overwrought ironic oompah-oompah melodies.

imao, on "300":

I think we should all rewatch 300 to see strategies that worked against the Persians. There’s a big difference, though, since in that movie their leader is very tall while Ahmadinejad can fit nicely in a shoebox.

imao, on "thief" ...or "the sting" ...or "the heist" ...or something:

I just wish this day didn’t feel so much like take a big portion of my earnings from last year and throwing it in a pile and burning it. What am I paying for these days? Defaulted mortgages caused by earlier jackassery of the government? It would be nice if the government at least humored us, sending us pictures of terrorists getting blown to pieces labeled, “Your taxes paid for this.” Then I’d at least feel my thousands of dollars were going to something useful. Instead I keep hearing about million dollar grants to some random museum in a Congressman’s district that didn’t even request money.

Here’s what we should do. I assume a lot of the Congressmen use some credit union or something in D.C. We should find a way to hack into all their accounts, steal all their money, and then spend it on completely useless crap like everything from the Sharper Image catalog. Then they’ll know what it feels like.

many tiny ropes restrained gulliver too

for a short time.

i'm not paraphrasing

As a counterpoint to militant atheism's claim that the Bible* promotes subjugation of women and homosexuals, the vast majority of the Koran** promotes violence against all unbelievers.

* the book of the true God
** the book of the fakir

the title could have been shortened

...to "Huckabee is correct":

Mike Huckabee, a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2012, says the effort to allow gays and lesbians to marry is comparable to legalizing incest, polygamy and drug use.

Huckabee also told college journalists last week that gay couples should not be permitted to adopt. "Children are not puppies," he said...

Huckabee told the interviewer that not every group's interests deserve to be accommodated...

"That would be like saying, well there's there are a lot of people who like to use drugs so let's go ahead and accommodate those who want to use drugs. There are some people who believe in incest, so we should accommodate them. There are people who believe in polygamy, should we accommodate them?" he said, according to a transcript of the interview.

link list

the side effects of ethanol

the financial crisis was foretold

the financial crisis was exaggerated

half of voters "strongly favor repeal" of obama's healthscam

"unprecedented diversity"

hunting for the new hunt brothers

most of these help prove one comment that "everything the democrats touch turns to (dung)".

Apollo 13

houston, we've had a problem - forty years ago

dual- quad- hex- core computer processors

how about dual x quad x hex core computer processors?

welcome to canada

ann coulter found some canadians less welcoming than my sister and i did when we traveled there several years ago. maybe toronto is just nicer than ottawa?

tsunami warning

Caused by a large O followed by many zeroes...

observation of a conversation

Beware of any romantic involvement with any person who has more concern about "the relationship" than they have concern about you as a person.

freedom isn't free

a discussion, not of soldiers' noble sacrifices, but of trade-offs in power vs freedoms.

it makes as much sense

On Daylight Stupid Time, via Dustbury:

"Why don’t we move the calendar forward by two weeks in the spring, and back two weeks in the autumn. Then we would get an extra month of summer!"

“What part of no don’t you understand?”

Pelosi, Reid and Obama understand. They just don’t care. It’s the progressive way.

cost/benefit

unfortunately, this is only satire

czar wars

There is something troubling about Americans’ newfound willingness to accept and submit to czarist authority.

bad news

i like reruns, but not of the cuban missile crisis:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced the offer by Russia (that) officials would discuss the possibility of setting up a "satellite launcher and a factory."... The two countries are also discussing new weapons deals, Chavez said in televised remarks, without giving details.

Chavez's government has already bought more than $4 billion in Russian weapons since 2005, including helicopters, fighter jets and 100,000 Kalashnikov rifles. Chavez said last year that Russia agreed to loan Venezuela up to $2.2 billion for additional arms deals.

but don't worry about that, just keep worrying about those angry white males...

update 1: i'd also like to avoid reruns of the french revolution, please:

In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, Burke, a Protestant, asked the French, "From the general style of late publications of all sorts, one would be led to believe that your clergy in France were a sort of monsters, a horrible composition of superstition, ignorance, sloth, fraud, avarice and tyranny. But is this true?"

update 2: iowahawk put a lot of research into another kind of bad news.

a matter of perspective

the tick praises the ant for being larger than the flea:

"Over all, the numbers were: 9.92 million viewers for NBC; 8.27 million for ABC and 6.45 million for CBS.

Is this a signal that viewers are abandoning network newscasts in droves?

Not really. The number of viewers still watching the three shows together — more than 24 million in the first quarter — continue to dwarf any news program on cable."

So that means about 276 million Americans did not watch any MSM news, right?

step on a crack

break gaia's back

Constitutionality

update & bump: No fooling - a 14-year-old has written a book on conservatism: Defining Conservatism: The Principles That Will Bring Our Country Back.

This blog got two referrals from two posts on similar topics:

• The Declaration of Independence
• The Constitution as liberals see it

Even more odd is that I've been thinking about this topic for a couple of days now - What the Constitution really means, how it has been twisted (predominantly by the left), and how America can "have its foundation repaired".

Your thoughts on the matter would be greatly appreciated. There may be a follow-up to this post *IF* my inspiration can hold out.