When I find myself getting down about how many fools there are in the world, I go read E. Nough's blog and am reminded that somewhere out there in the ocean of idiocy is at least one person with a thinking, reasoning mind.
In this article on watching The Exorcist, Kathy Shaidle has the best description of the Brady Decade that these eyes have yet beheld:
...a decade-long, morning-after mourning of the innocence it had wasted the entire Sixties trying frantically to lose.
Maybe it was because my father took the air-conditioning out of our South Florida home during that decade, but for me the main sensation I get when I think of the years of Earth Tones, Leif Garrett, and Dodge Darts is a greasy, sweaty feeling.
Kim rules, everybody else (including me) drools:
And for those Perpetual Handwringers who wonder when we're all going to Get Over It and Move On, my answer is:Never.
To use one of my favorite quotes from the movie Tombstone: "You called down the thunder; well, now you've got it."
I also like Rumsfeld's quoted statement about all the Taliban fighters "pouring" into Afghanistan: "The defense secretary said this week the Taliban's regrouping gave the U.S. an advantage, since larger groups of Taliban fighters are easier to find and attack." Dumbasses. A further note to the French: this is what a culture that has never grown up on cowboy movies thinks is a real smart move. "Hah! We shall throw all our mighty warriors at the American forces at once! When the infidels see so many of us coming to kill them, they will be overcome in terror and turn to flee! Then we shall cut them down with our swords!" Sure, Ahmed, we'll skedaddle right on out of there, just as soon as we press a few of these here buttons...
Now this is dedication to blogging. He'd better not go into that "I'm gonna hang up my blog hat" crap again because then I will just have to laugh and laugh at him.
As for me, I can't imagine giving up my blog over something like trolls making nasty comments or family members complaining that I never spend time with them anymore (that's one of the advantages of having family members consisting of one cat -- when she whines I just pick her up and hold her upside down for a while; she hates that), or snooty columns about how bloggers are narcoleptic -- no, narcotic -- no! "narcissistic," that's it -- and by some coincidence the writers of these snooty columns often happen to be people who have had a Webbe Logge since the days when the internet was chiseled onto sandstone tablets with flint tools, and the only people who even owned computers were men whose t-shirts never completely fit over their bellies. Anyway, none of those jokers will ever make me stop blogging. I mean, blogging annoys so many people -- why would I ever think of stopping?
From Social Reject:
If being a Christian turns you on, makes your day, gets you going, motivates you, lights your fire...hey, TERRIFIC! Just don't be such a damn BITCH about it.
Yes. (You can substitute "Buddhist," "atheist," "Libertarian," "Muslim," "Wiccan," "Republican," "Democrat," and so on for "Christian.")
Angie Schultz weighs in on the Prince of Brightness, Richard Dawkins, and his latest idiotic campaign to make people less tolerant of atheists. (I know he thinks that this "bright" silliness will foster tolerance, rationality, clear up teenage acne, cure cancer, and feed the starving, but it won't.) And she reminds me what word I was looking for in my earlier post but couldn't remember:
This article reeks of smug. Great waves of smug roll from it and envelope my keyboard. It falls to the floor and wafts over the carpet. Anybody know where I can buy some smug remover? I'm fresh out.
They aren't Brights, they're Smugs.
Update: Aaron Haspel has more to say as well. And while I have used the word "meme" to describe kewl innernut trends, I felt vaguely dirty about it, so I won't any more.
So far this is my favorite Lileks photoshopping. And I'm probably not even going to go see the movie.
That's the left -- or whatever they are, the Against Anything George W. Bush Does contingent. They don't have a leg to stand on. The latest evidence: according to Steve H., they can't even hold their own against Bill O'Reilly -- and it was three against one. (Steve H. also wins the award for Best Cruel Putdown. He says of Al Franken, concerning that dreadful Stuart Smalley movie, that he is "[t]he guy who wishes he was half the filmmaker David Spade is." Ouch ow ooh, that stings even me just reading it here.
Steve H. feels (well, observes and mocks), the pain of the left:
This reminds me of the left's sad attacks on President Bush. He hasn't screwed any interns, he hasn't bombed any aspirin factories, he's organized and disciplined, no prosecutor has ever narrowly chosen not to file rape charges against him, he hasn't committed perjury, he hasn't misappropriated the FBI files of his enemies, he hasn't sent the IRS to audit members of the opposition, and he hasn't been accused of stealing money in a real estate scam. So the press drops bombshells like, "His daughters have fake ID's!"
Not to mention all the "Soooo, where are the WMDs then, Mr. Smartypants!" accusations. You would think that at least someone would say that we are doing at least as good a job as the UN inspector team did -- better, even. You can't say that we don't have the wherewithal to go inspecting anything we please in Iraq now. But god forbid anyone point out the silver lining to the flea-turd hunters on the left.
Last night I turned on the teevee and caught the tail end of a perplexing remake of Carrie. In this version, the filmmakers forsook the flashy crucifixion-by-kitchen-implements/self-crushing-by-telekinetically-imploded-house ending in favor of a lowkey bathtub-drowning/heart-attack end for Carrie and her mom. They would have done better, as Tim Blair did with some other scripts, to rewrite the film using comments from Free Republic.
There's a new scourge. What are you doing here? (Scroll down to the latest scourge -- it's a Blogspot site, you know.)
Uh oh -- someone get a net! Bob Geldof has escaped the compound and made statements critical of Robert Mugabe and the EU concerning food aid to Africa, and even worse, praised the Bush administration:
Bob Geldof astonished the aid community yesterday by using a return visit to Ethiopia to praise the Bush administration as one of Africa's best friends in its fight against hunger and Aids.
This will make the Bush=Hitler brigade fly backwards around their cages multiple times.
(Via Instapundit.)
Mrs. du Toit has a warning for society. I had the same thoughts watching and reading the shenanigans of antiwar activists. Radical behavior beyond a certain point will change society all right -- but not in the direction that the radical activists want to go. That might fulfill their martyrdom fantasies in the short run, but in the meantime people that they supposedly wanted to "help" and who do not enjoy living on the lam will suffer.
Mr. Bill Whittle weighs in against magical thinking. I told my Medieval Humanities professor that the majority of people in the world were still in thrall to the sort of superstitions that supposedly had been banished by the Renaissance, or maybe it was the Enlightenment. I'm not sure he believed me, but then again he was from some place like Pakistan, so maybe he did.
Stupid trolls, why are you bothering me instead of discussing reasons why Star Trek sucks? Come on -- we can't all be suffering over the Fate of Man Person Bipedkind all day. Put down your Chomsky Bibles and peruse Happy Fun Pundit: Top 10 Things I Hate About Star Trek. You'll feel... cleansed.
Read Dan from Happy Fun Pundit on the reasons why it was good that the president flew the plane, and then shut up. Please. (Though far be it from me to abridge your free speech rights -- go right ahead and keep on talking about how a dangerous stunt like that was merely a cynical campaign photo op, or that he was all "Third World Massa" acting, or whatever your damage is. Just so long as you don't mind sounding stupid.)
I really am getting sick of some things.
LOL! Every once in a while Glenn Reynolds gets off a zinger. This is a good one (because it agrees with my sentiments, of course), in response to some fruity praise some writer guy is getting for his anti-genetic-engineering book being 'brave':
What really interests me is that people think that they've made a moral argument against genetic engineering when they say that the idea "sickens" them. The idea of sodomy "sickens" some people, too. So does the idea of interracial marriage.
So you feel ill. Why should I care? After all, pompous, empty-headed moralizing sickens me, and nobody's stopping that.
Tell me about it.
When Jonah Goldberg is bad he's horrid, but when he's good he's even better. Jonah on the reaction to the "crushing" of the Dixie Chicks' "dissent" :
The New York Times's Paul Krugman got his dress so high over his head about all of it, he compared some radio-show stunt in a parking lot with Dixie Chick albums to the book burnings which marked the Nazi rise to power. Ah, subtlety, thy name is Krugman.
And here's a sample of what he has to say about Hollyweird's concept of democracy:
Democracy means never being criticized. And, the refusal to sponsor speech you don't like amounts to having one's "right to work" repealed. This is childish. Oh, I don't mean childish as in silly, I mean literally this is childish. This is the way children talk and think, especially in our gitchy-goo self-esteem culture. Not understanding the difference between their desires and rights, they insist they are entitled to do whatever it is they are doing. No matter what they do with their crayons, children expect to be told "That's so good. Good for you." Any criticism elicits a tantrum about the unfairness of it all. Maybe it's because Hollywood types live as King Babies and are never told they're wrong about anything, or maybe their view of democracy is one in which they are the customers of expensive restaurants and the rest of the world are simply waiters. Waiters are supposed to receive criticism with intelligence and geniality but never, ever, talk back.
Posted here mostly because I just wanted to have these quotes within easy reach, to reread and savor.
Adendum: and here's what he has to say about this weekend's hacking of the site:
Speaking of free speech for me but not for thee, you may have heard that NRO was hacked over the weekend by someone who can neither spell well nor tolerate the free expression of views he disagrees with. The homepage went down for part of Sunday and was replaced with a message reading "Hacked by DarkHunter ... Freedom for palestian and Iraq ... gr33tz to #USG and #teso channels." Maybe the radio signals in this guy's fillings garbled the text.Anyway, I thought about delivering a "we're gonna get you, sucker!" diatribe and a defiant call-to-arms like Cyrus in The Warriors: You can't stop NRO! Caaaaannn youuuuu diiiiigggg itttt!?" But you know what? That's what these date-less wonders want: some attention. I'm sure this guy or someone else with too much time on his hands could hack us again if they were determined to do it. As the old adage goes, you can't stop someone from making a jackass of himself forever. So, good for you DarkHunter, I'm sure your inflatable wife and dog are very impressed.
ROTFL. The guy who hacked Actors Against War was a lot funnier. (And you know, it is curious how these hackings and other internet site problems always seem to happen in groups: my hosting service, Cornerhost, has been having problems -- not hacking, but something else that is as of this moment still keeping SgtStryker.com from being completely up. My site was out a few hours this weekend.)
Okay, now Jim Treacher and Kevin Parrott are both my heroes. Post the letter, Kevin!
Update: he did!
Why am I so sure that it really did go something like this? Except Jacques probably said something a lot fruitier than "dude" all the time. I'll bet he kept saying "Mon vieux." That's what the French dudes say when they are trying to be chummy.
That's right -- I'm going to take this quote from a post that Colby Cosh wrote, which is the Best Quote Ever (that I have seen, so far) on the weird phenomenon of the completely hopeless reponse of the left to the removal of a fascist tyrant from power, and keep it on my blog for posterity:
How are antiwar liberals hoping to reach Americans if they can't sympathize with such a simple human sentiment as exhilaration over dethroning and possibly killing a dictator/torturer? How emotionally plastinated and downright cockamamie do these people have to be? They're the new Nancy Reagan: telling people to "say no" without giving any indication of ever having been high.
And I may just print it out and frame it too. I mean, Holy Donut-Rolling Jebus on a Motorcycle, what is it with these people? Saddam wasn't even a Communist! His Baathist Party was some sort of freakazoid offshoot of Nazism with Arab flavoring. He has more palaces than baby Doc! Gold fricking toilet seats! While Iraqi children, as we were famously reminded about every thirty seconds not too long ago, were Starving Because of the Sanctions. But now that the old torturer is out of power and his statues are being toppled and the formerly oppressed Iraqis are dancing and kissing Marines, the peacenuggets are crying in their herbal tea. You'd almost think--
Nah. Even the peacenuggets couldn't be that bad.
You know how Robert Fisk's last name became a verb that was used to describe the process of dicing up idiot op-eds (Like Fisk's) and applying the Clue Hammer and the Reason Wrench to them? Well, now there is a new verb to be made: to "rall" -- as in to completely gut, eviscerate, and flay the spewings of a total dumbshit, such as Steve does to Ted Rall's latest. Enjoy.