bad pun

just one last post before my vacation starts:


Q: Which part of the brain is responsible for the big stretch and deep breath a person takes upon waking?

A: The Pons Daily Yawn.


:D

vacation all i ever wanted...

vacation had to get away...

don't expect many posts here for the two weeks after this friday.

p.s. it is pure coincidence that i'm commemorating discovery channel's "shark week" with a sightseeing trip to the notoriously shark-free south dakota and wyoming ;)

both or neither

In bizarro world, thousands of headlines would read "Crushing of Dissent in Obama's AmeriKKKa!!!"*, and nobody would have ever heard of James Byrd Jr. and Jasper TX.

In bizarro world, the networks would have bent over backwards to show the entire Rodney King video, and only the edited portions of the Shirley Sherrod video.

Both kinds of racism are bad, mmmkay?


* Looking further, the band that was cancelled is pornographically vile, filthy, and sick, but not apparently racist.

update: the plot thickens

now why didn't i think of that?

i had both the guitar and the model...

black plague

Al-Qaeda cell killed by Black Death was developing biological weapons

here's hoping all terrorists get their hands on it - without gloves - and die without spreading it.

and now for something completely different

the kaye effect explained

what would i do for a klondike bar?

pay 50% of retail price, max.

;)

the florida virus

viewpoint is having trouble with a corrupt slumlord at the moment:

(slightly edited)

Personally, I suspect I may be wasting my time by appealing to anyone at Mid-America Apartment Communities simply because, given the evidence so far, it appears that the mentality of greed is all-pervasive in the corporate culture of MAAC. Any modicum of ethics and integrity was sacrificed at the altar of Almighty Profits long ago...

Well, today marks the one-week anniversary of our moving debacle but I have to say I... believe there are still some business people of integrity. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same thing for the folks at The Lighthouse at Fleming Island in Florida.

On the morning after the flood, I visited Laura Hulsey - Community Manager laura.hulsey@maac.net (904) 278-6006 and instead of expressing any concern or interest for our situation, any inquiry as to our well-being, she matter-of-factly made it clear in no uncertain terms that I would be receiving an invoice for the costs of the water damage cleanup. My lightening-quick instincts told me this was an evil, otherworldly creature that relishes every opportunity to abuse and oppress tenants. One look into that cold, stupid, lifeless stare of hers makes it intuitively obvious to even the casual observer that this is so.

Years ago I learned what I call the customer's algorithm. Here's the pseudo code:

while (level of service not = acceptable) do {
escalate efforts by contacting someone higher up the corporate food chain
if ((unethical mentality flows from top down = true or
entire corporate culture = polluted or
evidence of integrity = false) or
(satisfied))
then {
quit
}
}

This provides a simple way to discover the integrity and ethical fabric of an organization. In this case, I was led to Mr. Glenn Evers - Regional Manager glenn.evers@maac.net (904) 363-2300.

I spoke with Mr. Glen Evers two days ago and, after listening to my side of the story, he indicated he would get back to me before the end of business yesterday. When that didn't happen I was cautiously optimistic that he might have found reason to believe that I shouldn't be held liable for the water damage cleanup. I was sadly mistaken. This morning the ice lady, Laura Hulsey, called. Her idea of compassion is to give me the opportunity to pay for the expense in four installments.

Our worst fears were confirmed recently when we went to the local Home Depot and as soon as they learned it was The Lighthouse that we were dealing with, they literally expressed their condolences. Apparently the abusive reputation of The Lighthouse is well known locally and, trust me, it's now, as they say, about to go "viral"...

i'm just doing my part to spread this virus ;)

don't look at that man behind the curtains pulled over your eyes

Due to some needlessly arcane technical reasons, spam filters on some of my email accounts have been non-functional, so I've had the internet equivalent of a sewage leak into my inbox lately. Ever the optimist (hah!), I looked upon this as a learning experience, and have deduced that there are only three spammers in the entire world!

One is a Nigerian fiduciary, one is a talkative exhibitionist in her late teens, and the other is a bald impotent Russian pervert who's trying to sell a truckload of wristwatches.

mlb all star game bloopers

tonight's game was supposed to be about baseball's all-stars, but some hollywood "stars" (a.k.a. attention whores) hijacked the show to lecture us about their pet causes*. yyyaaawwwnnnnnnnn. can we please get on with the game?!?!?

* (it's not a commentary on the causes themselves, just the lecturing)

"green" is the new "avocado"

Many things may be learned from the collapse of greenie hysteria:

Malthusian panic attacks alternating with utopian dreams of universal accords, anti-growth politics and anti-capitalist resentments dressed up as environmentalism aren’t going to help us.

Alcohol abuse, war, nuclear weapons and excessive emission of greenhouse gases are all bad. Those facts, however, do not make Prohibition, the Kellog-Briand Pact, the nuclear freeze or the Big Green treaty movement smart, effective or good...

...sensible and thoughtful people who want humanity to live fuller, richer lives in a cleaner and more sustainable world need to get past the naive and crude policy ideas that currently dominate green thinking and start giving these questions the serious attention and careful thought they deserve.

duh

it's so obvious, even actors are starting to understand!:

"The curse of longterm unemployment is that if you pay people to do nothing, they’ll find themselves doing nothing for very long periods of time,” Ferguson said. “Long-term unemployment is at an all-time high in the United States, and it is a direct consequence of a misconceived public policy.”

despite zer-o's efforts:

He is not teaching you how to think. He is not leading you through carefully orchestrated steps of information to help you make educated conclusions which you can look back at and question to better conclusions as you mature. He is doing the opposite. He is standing inside of reality and constructing a house of mirrors and deconstructing your ability to think logically. He’s telling you that what you “know” is not real... and some people are inclined to follow him down into a final state of babbling, blithering idiocy...

Some would point to this manner of speaking and brush Obama off as a classic liar unable to keep the lies straight, but I disagree...

We used to call this method: Baffle them with b***s***. But this is Obama, so we need to immortalize his ruthless use of rampant stupidity to make even a starving man feel full, and inspire a strange vomitous awe in those of us watching this new philosophical perversion in action.

another example:

The facts of the matter are as follows. Obama has no interest in plugging the (bp gulf oil spill) hole or cleaning up the oil because he needs the catastrophe to grab as much power as humanly possible. I am actually impressed at how much power he has to shut down coverage of the colossal damage being done and the creeping destruction of the entire state of Florida, thousands – THOUSANDS of miles of beaches soon ruined and a tourist economy devastated, punishment for voting Republican I guess. If this were Bush we would know about every fish larvae killed and be hearing a million reports of the disaster, but Bush could not have kept the press out of the spill areas. Obama – for some weird reason – can. Why is that? How is that possible? It’s impressive and terrifying all at once.

language lessons

update: i have no way of knowing if they read this post, but more recent tv ads for the chevy silverado have the same announcer with a much-less-emphasized accent. texas rangers fans and i thank them for that increased intelligibility. ;)

to the ad agency in charge of a certain pickup ad: you might sell more of that vehicle if your announcer didn't pronounce its name "ticzouss adeejon chooobee sibblydoddo"

the lie is falling! the lie is falling!

or, how i learned to stop worrying and love the present day

iran, so far away

one way, or another, iran's thugocracy should be gone soon

tweet twit

CNN fires journalist for tweeting her praise for Islamofascist

CNN International has fired one of its senior editors after she published a Twitter message lamenting the death of a Lebanese Shi'ite cleric... the Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, an early mentor of the militant group Hezbollah who died in Beirut on Sunday.

Nasr, a 20-year CNN veteran based in Atlanta, departed from the channel after "a conversation" with Parisa Khosravi, a CNN senior vice president...

A CNN spokesman said: "CNN regrets any offence her Twitter message caused. It did not meet CNN's editorial standards."

"It did not meet CNN's editorial standards" just means "she should have praised terrorists on-air, not on-line."

and now for something completely different

the name "sidecar" takes on a whole new meaning

opposing theories

my money is on adam smith... or maybe john galt...:

Mario Rizzo and Gerald O’Driscoll point to dueling letters to the editor from 1932 in The London Times by John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek on whether government spending can help cure contemporary economic woes. The letters, unearthed by Richard Ebeling, show that today’s debates over economic policy are, in many respects, a rerun of the debates of the 1930s.

this comment summarizes the fight:

The question is: do we believe economic theories that had been around and verified by 150+ years of observation and practice; or do we believe an economic theory postulated by a political activist who proposed his ideas during an economic recession in order to increase their play in his target audience (governments)? Keynes provided a convenient cover for expansion of government power, which was part in parcel with the current theory of expanding government on a ‘scientific basis.’ It didn’t matter that the science was wrong or absurd (e.g. eugenics), it only mattered that it sounded good and gave cover to expanding government power.

losses

it's like... kids ain't thinkin'... n' stuff... ya know? ;)

Loss of... the ability to formulate and enunciate properly constructed sentences that reflect clear thought -- is growing at a staggering rate in the United States. Even among students whose academic aptitude is well above the national average, my years as an undergraduate business professor show that four out of five will make grave spelling errors in written assignments or exams, and about half that regularly commit grammatical blunders...

What is being lost is the capacity to think in terms of cause and effect, of distinguishing between differing levels of argument, and particularly any appreciation for abstraction. Increasingly, students expect to be spoon-fed with concrete examples, operational instructions, mechanical repetitions, and pictorial representation. The loss of language is but a symptom of the loss of thought -- and losing thought means losing much more...

Students have constantly been told that there is no essence and meaning to things, and that they are only what they want themselves to be. They have been fed a heavy diet of relativism and indoctrination in one of the changing variants of collectivism -- feminism, socialism, and nationalism being only the most prominent among them. They are taught what to "make" of themselves, how to "construct" an identity in a category that is politically desirable, but not to discover what -- or rather who -- they are and for which purpose they are in the world.

via nicole via dustbury

as true as ever

A reminder of what some of us have long known: the president is trying to destroy America:

The real goal of "health care" legislation, the real goal of "cap-and-trade," and the real goal of the "stimulus" is to rip the guts out of our private economy and transfer wide swaths of it over to the government to control. Do not be deluded by the propaganda. These initiatives are vehicles for change. They are not goals in and of themselves except in their ability to deliver power. They and will make matters much worse, for that is their design.

This time, in addition to overwhelming the government with demands for services, Obama and the Democrats are overwhelming political opposition to their plans with a flood of apocalyptic legislation. Their ultimate goal is to leave us so discouraged, demoralized, and exhausted that we throw our hands up in defeat. As Charles Rangel* said, "the middle class will be too distracted to fight."

These people are our enemies. They don't use guns, yet, but they are just as dangerous, determined, and duplicitous as the communists we faced in the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, and bush wars across the globe, and the Nazis we faced in World War II.

and some of his friends have bigger goals.

a mixed message

Happy birthday America! Get well soon!

out of touch

the pot calling the kettle bl... um... ferrous-american?

update: see also...