The worst thing about this story, that I haven’t so far seen anyone pick up on, is the fact that this organization, Velvet Revolution, which was started by a convicted drug smuggler and terrorist, and which advocates violence against Bush administration officials and other leftist hate-targets in this country, appropriated its name from the 1989 non-violent revolution in Czechoslovakia that saw the overthrow of that country’s communist government.

Also their website is hideously designed.

I can tell how old the person is who wrote this article by the title. Hint: no one has “leaned forward” to change the tv channel in thirty years. Everyone uses their remote control now.

A note to gay people and other people living “alternative” lifestyles (like, say, women who choose to be childless spinsters, ahem): part of not joining in on some part of mainstream, “normal” society is the fact that you will never have 100% approval from everyone. This includes your family; in fact your family is going to be the main stumbling block to anything you want to do that disturbs their idea of what sort of person you should be, whether that is deciding to be a writer instead of a doctor, moving to a faraway town away from your family, or being gay instead of straight. And when you get away from your family, you’ll meet jerks.

This is a fact of human life, and has been ever since there have been humans. It will never change. For some reason our culture has developed the notion that 1) everyone should approve of everything, that there should be no disapproval ever; and 2) that without 100% approval of 100% of society life isn’t worth living. This is both ridiculous and unattainable, and if you ask me is more the cause of suicide among young gays than some phantom “homophobia,” not to mention much of the dysfunction among the rest of the populace. In earlier ages it was a lot more dangerous to be different in any way from the mainstream — you could be put in prison for acts which are now celebrated on television — and yet many of the odd and the deviant went on to do whatever they wanted anyway and even attained fame and fortune. The problem with society today isn’t that we are so gosh-darned mean, it’s that we no longer feel it necessary to instill people with strong characters so they can deal with life’s shit. Instead we told them that shit had been outlawed. But you can’t outlaw shit.

There will always be frail, weak people who can’t take it. There’s not much that we can do about that either, except to not make things even worse by telling them lies and giving them false expectations of a perfect, kindly world where nothing bad will ever happen. It’s the same thing as telling people who make $30,000 a year that they should be able to afford a $500,000 home, all they have to do is sign up for this no-down, 50-year, adjustable rate mortgage, because the market would “always” be strong. Only it’s human nature we’re asking to sign on the dotted line. Don’t do it. The house always wins.

Update: hey, you know the remarks Paladino was supposed to have said (that the tweet I linked to above referenced)? Well guess what: he didn’t say them or even write them. His speech was prepared by someone else. (Big mistake that, IMHO, but pols do it all the time these days.)

Okay, this made my head hurt:

PAMELA GELLER’S apartment, in the fashion of the blogosphere, doubles as her office.

It’s the very first sentence in a New York Times article on Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs. What hurts my head is the fact that it’s totally meaningless. What does it mean??? “In the fashion of the blogosphere” (the what now?) her apartment is also her office? I mean, most people have computers at home now, and some have them in separate rooms that they call their “home office,” and some just have apartments without an extra room so the computer has to be put in the main room or the bedroom, and and and… Do they mean that people who don’t have blogs don’t have home offices? No of course it can’t mean that but the sentence is meaningless, stupid and pointless, and proves that the sort of people who work for the Mainstream Official™ News organs are not required to be able to do more than see lightning, hear thunder, and vote Democrat. The New York Times needs to go out of business. I can’t wait for the news that it’s been bought by some rich person (hopefully Rupert Murdoch) for a dollar.

(I didn’t read the rest of the article. Something with as stupid a first sentence as that promises nothing but a waste of time. Via Althouse.)

I can’t believe I wasted so much of my life doing this:

[...] don’t watch TV, and that goes double for PBS. PBS makes you just as stupid, even if it lets you pretend that you’re smarter than other people.

This guy hasn’t watched tv since the 60s.