Month: February 2005

No, I don’t think it’s “Adult ADD”

A few weeks ago, posting on the glories of “the holy bean,” I commented that until I had my first cuppa joe in the a.m. I stood in danger of setting my coffee cup down and forgetting where I’d done so.

It’s worse. Now, it seems, I cannot even remember to drink my coffee until I’ve had a coupla cups.

Learning what cold coffee tastes like, and not liking it…

Ahhhh! That’s better. Another sip, down to the bottom of the cup, another three or four IQ points added to today’s usable brain cells.

I just have to remember to go get another cup. Should be easier now that I’ve at least had some coffee…

Iraqi citizens Kill 5 terrorists

Wound 8, burn their car, have a party. Just go read the post.

(This is all over the place, and I really don’t recall where I saw it first, since I had so many pages loaded and was flipping back and forth between them. This one’s the best, though, IMO.)

Happy Dance! Happy Dance! Happy Dance! (Now, go kill some more, folks.)

Brings to mind a thought by a character, “Ding” Chavez, in a Tom Clancy novel, Rainbow Six, that pretty well sums up “understanding” terrorists:

“…the best thing about the inside of a terrorist’s mind was a 185-grain 10mm hollow-point bullet entering at high speed.”

How deeply deceptive are the MMPs about climate change?

Russel Seitz argues that we are not getting the straight dope from the MMPA [duh]. But he does so so very intelligently that you may be sure that you’ll not hear about it from any of the branches of the mass media Podpeople’s Army. Nope, not on ABCCBSNBCCNNFOX. Nor on so-called “public” tv or Discovery or darned near any newspaper or magazine.

That’s probably in large part because the study of climate change is simply too complex for a sound bite or headline.

Read his essay, A War Against Fire. You can do it, you’re not only smarter than the MMPA thinks you are, you’re smarter than they are (and you can bet less than 1% of the MMPA can or will read Seitz’ essay).

(This is one of the really Good Weeks on Jerry Pournelle’s site.

…in which graphologists are revealed as dumb-as-doornail, low-rent b.s. artists

Flapdoodle in the last few days about Tony Blair’s “doodles” at the Davros meeting. British MMPs (and they call themselves “journalists”—yeh, of somewhere near Dan Blather quality, it seems) got ahold of some doodles that were purportedly those of Tony Blair at the World Economic Summit at Davos, Switzerland. The promptly went out hunting some “graphologists” they could coax away from their tea leaves and crystals long enough to “analyze” the doodles and discover that Blair was a meglamaniac under great stress and probably very ill physically to boot.

Good going guys. The doodles were Bill Gates’ doodlings.

Oops.

h.t., another one of the alert folks (Tracy) at Jerry Pournelle’s site.

UPDATE!

I’m bumping this post from last week to the top because new info reveals it to be the result of inexcusably sloppy “reportage” by The Telegraph. [duh] I should have known better than to trust any MMP mouthpiece… [sigh]

See the background at Jerry Pournelle’s Thursday Mail page for this week.

Can there be any doubt that Europe is in the running to make Sodom and Gomorrah look like a Sunday School picnic?

This just in from Germany (link to The Telegraph article via Drudge):

A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing “sexual services” at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.

Huh? The government says she has to take a job as a whore or they’ll cut her off? Yep.

The waitress, an unemployed information technology professional, had said that she was willing to work in a bar at night and had worked in a cafe.

She received a letter from the job centre telling her that an employer was interested in her “profile” and that she should ring them. Only on doing so did the woman, who has not been identified for legal reasons, realise that she was calling a brothel.

Under Germany’s welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job – including in the sex industry – or lose her unemployment benefit…

…”There is now nothing in the law to stop women from being sent into the sex industry,” said Merchthild Garweg, a lawyer from Hamburg who specialises in such cases. “The new regulations say that working in the sex industry is not immoral any more, and so jobs cannot be turned down without a risk to benefits.”

So, Germany is becoming our age’s Gomorrah (France is already our age’s Sodom, well, along with San Francisco… )

at least it hides some of the ugliness…

I searched the web for an up-to-date picture of Tom Shales (the one on the Washington Post website was obviously out of date). Took a while, but I finally got a good shot of his best side. You know, the one he uses to say the kinds of things found in his Wapo article dated today.

Oops. Forgot to mention, h.t. to Betsy Newmark for the link to the Shales article.

And another thing… surely someone would have told Shales by now that a blue suit with a red “power” tie might offset some of his homliness, eh? After all, it’s all about perception, Tommy baby.. Right?

Is it spreading? Time will tell

I have no idea if this represents a sea change in MMPA “thinking” or not, yet. For one thing, I only “watch” Fox, among the MMP “news” channels (too strong a word, really, since I mostly leave it on in another room when I’m working on something else). But the strange turn of events I’ve noticed is this: since Sunday, the word “terrorists” seems much more common in replacement of the disingenuous “insurgents” that was de rigeur before. Now, when thugs attack civilians or non-combatants in Iraq, one is as likely—at least on Fox, it seems—to hear them referred to as terrorists as insurgents.

Interesting. Of course, this could just be my ear picking up on a word that seems out of place in a MMPA account, but I hope the nomenclature is undergoing a change toward reality.

…but healthy ones, finally

Believe it or don’t [heh]. In today’s Chicago Sun-Times, dted-in-the-wool leftist Mark Brown asks fellow lefties the tortured question, “Was Bush right?” He closes the article with

If it turns out Bush was right all along, this is going to require some serious penance.

Maybe I’d have to vote Republican in 2008.

Maybe? Hedging his bets all the way, but finally asking some serious questions. Just read the whole thing.

(h.t. Drudge)

John Podhoretz zings the Jean Fraud sKerrys of the so-called “Democratic” Party

… the junior Eeyore from Massachusetts, John Forbes Kerry, who had the distinct misfortune of being booked onto “Meet the Press” yesterday only 90 minutes after the polls closed in Iraq — and couldn’t think of a thing to say that didn’t sound negative.

“No one in the United States should try to overhype this election,” said the man who actually came within 3 million votes of becoming the leader of the Free World back in November.

No? How about “underhyping”? How about belittling it? How about acting as though it doesn’t matter all that much? That’s what Kerry did, and in so doing, revealed yet again that he has the emotional intelligence of a pet rock and the political judgment of a . . . well, of a John Kerry.

Just read the whole thing.

Life According to Frank J

Frank J, proprietor of IMAO, has another one of his, ummm, pieces of fiction up on life in the Bush administration. A sample:

The phone rang at her desk. “What?” Condi demanded.

“It’s your auto mechanic, Dr. Rice. It’s going to take longer to get out those dents than I thought. What exactly did you hit?”

“A California Senator. What of it?”

“Well, there’s dents in the front and back…”

“And there is a little thing called the reverse gear. Now get it done!”

[heh]

More at the link. Go thou and read.