Oh, man. That’s gotta suck. Vince Carter just dribbled the ball out of bounds with two seconds left and his team two points down.
Wow. That will live with him like a loud, drunk hobo that won’t leave his house. Ever.
In other news, I am sick with a sinus infection. Dammit. Lots of tomato juice, vitamin C tablets, and a little of that Walgreen’s version of NyQuil.
Christina Hoff Sommers has a great piece in The Weekly Standard on why feminists in America today are so weak in the face of the oppression and brutality bearing down on women in the Muslim world:
The women who constitute the American feminist establishment today are destined to play little role in the battle for Muslim women’s rights. Preoccupied with their own imagined oppression, they can be of little help to others–especially family-centered Islamic feminists. The Katha Pollitts and Eve Enslers, the vagina warriors and university gender theorists–these are women who cannot distinguish between free and unfree societies, between the Taliban and the Promise Keepers, between being forced to wear a veil and being socially pressured to be slender and fit. Their moral obtuseness leads many of them to regard helping Muslim women as “colonialist” or as part of a “hegemonic” “civilizing mission.” It disqualifies them as participants in this moral fight.
This is related to one of the great failings in the Bush Administration’s argument for waging this War against the Islamofascists: they have never seriously employed —nor even, to my knowledge, fully appealed to— the sense of universal right in making women the political equals of men in Muslim societies among the feminist element in our own society.
Only the grossest sort of ingrate would dismiss the value of that.
Yet, the most prominent women’s organziations in America do routinely dismiss it for the simple fact that they do not want to be seen as colluding with an unpopular President and his unpopular war. So the sweet ass of their moral responsibility to serve the universal principle of suffrage and full civil and human rights is covered by the political expediency of the times. They don’t have to bear the burden because Bush’s war gives them an out.
It is Bush’s war that will some day make possible the liberation for Muslim women that these broads here at home can’t seem to manage to care about —even though it would reflect well upon them and at least validate the efforts that were made on their own behalf by women far more “equal” to that task than they themselves have proved to be.
Chrysler’s being bought out by a company called Cerberus?
Cerberus? The three-headed dog of Hades?
CNN says that this private equity firm’s acquisition of both GMAC and Chrysler will [extend its reach in the market]. Sure. When you build the cars and set the terms?
Barons.
What’s the thing now with Zbignew Brzezinski? For us to not call what’s happening the “War on Terror”? Sounds good to me. Hell! It sounds great to me. I don’t use that term. I call this what it is: the War against Islamofascists.
A dhimmi like Brzezinski apparently believes so firmly in the incantatory powers of this generic or unfriendly or even incoherent phrase to traumatize and panic people that he admits it in public (emphases mine):
The “war on terror” has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration’s elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America’s psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us.
The damage these three words have done — a classic self-inflicted wound — is infinitely greater than any wild dreams entertained by the fanatical perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks when they were plotting against us in distant Afghan caves. The phrase itself is meaningless. It defines neither a geographic context nor our presumed enemies. Terrorism is not an enemy but a technique of warfare — political intimidation through the killing of unarmed non-combatants.
Brzezinski’s first sentence is a lie —and the premise of his argument declines from there. It simply isn’t true to say that America has done itself psychic harm with the fear reflected in the use of a mere phrase. Who the hell do you know who thinks one fucking thing about the terror alert level today? I don’t know anybody who says anything about it: even people who watch FOX News. So that’s a straight-up straw-man, Zbig.
And this college boy argument that the “war on terror” is a linguistic placebo ignores the fact that Presidents have been waging “war” against concepts and non-combatants for decades. Johnson declared war on poverty. Nixon declared war on drugs and cancer. There’s always some war to fight in America because that’s what we do to define ourselves and our purpose.
You’d think that a man whose fortunes have depended on the willingness of this country to fight Nazism and Communism would appreciate that, but he doesn’t.
ESPN’s reporting that Ricky Williams has failed his piss test and cannot apply for reinstatement to the NFL until September.
I used to just shake my head a little and make a distracted expression when I’d hear about Williams’ seemingly deliberate inability to not smoke until it occurred to me —just now— that there’s nothing “seeming” about it: it is a deliberate refusal to not smoke.
It would be a good thing if this were widely used as a point of interest in the ongoing [debate] over the almost-incredible stupidity of the war on drugs and on marihuana, in particular, but some people have an interest in pretending that world-class athletes are somehow adversely affected by their use of marihuana. It isn’t true, though. Except, of course, as a legal and, therefore, professional matter. Otherwise, it is self-evidently stupid to suggest that these huge and powerful professional athletes are harming themselves with the recreational use of a plant.
Yeah, well. I know the sports community may speak to it, but it’s just going to be company man bullshit.
I like how the little kids in my neighborhood regard my driveway as the next best thing to driving their scooters in the street. Which they also do. But it’s mostly a safe street. I’m glad they don’t think I’m a mean old man.
It’s Friday night and I’m lovin’ on mi barrio. Mang.
Viva la taking it easy, enjoying some playoff basketball, and having the luxury of thinking about maybe going out for something or just fixing something here.
Using a sound level meter on the crowd? That’s cool. Quantify the quality of their love.
I could feast on a dress-store mannequin. I would lick drywall if I thought it would make my house’s toes curl.
Fuck this. I’m going out.
Do you think it’s possible that we’ll find out twenty years from now that George W. Bush actually commissioned Nancy Pelosi to go to visit Assad in Damascus and nuzzle his scrotality and leave some pellets in the tip jar?
It’s not too unthinkable —considering that any extended coverage by Big Media of such an act of seeming treachery would have been unlikely in almost all events.
Looks like the Democrats are trying to get a bill passed by which our Government will compensate residents of Guam who were killed or otherwise victimized by the Imperial Japanese Government during the Second World War.
Wouldn’t the Japanese be the obligors in this case?
Looks like the logic of reparations for aggrieved groups here at home is taking shape.
The profit we make of our ancestors is our own existence. Just in case you motherfuckers didn’t know.
Then again, where can I get paid for the discrimination and hatred directed at my Jewish grandfather back in the 1910s and 20s when he was growing up? Surely we can find a way to monetize that!
Professor Reynolds points us to this article in the Village Voice (emphases mine):
Barely a year after their reporters won a Pulitzer prize for exposing data mining of ordinary citizens by a government spy agency, New York Times officials had some exciting news for stockholders last week: The Times company plans to do its own data mining of ordinary citizens, in the name of online profits.
The news didn’t make everyone all googly-eyed. In fact, some people at the paper’s annual stockholders meeting in the New Amsterdam Theatre exchanged confused looks when Janet Robinson, the company’s president and CEO, uttered the phrase “data mining.” Wasn’t that the nefarious, 21st-century sort of snooping that the National Security Agency was doing without warrants on American citizens? Wasn’t that the whole subject of the prizewinning work in December 2005 by Times reporters Eric Lichtblau and James Risen?
And hadn’t the company’s chairman and publisher, Pinch Sulzberger, already trotted out Pulitzers earlier in the program?
Yes, yes, and yes. But Robinson was talking about money this time. Data mining, she told the crowd, would be used “to determine hidden patterns of uses to our website.”
What incredible asshole hypocrisy.
You should read this interesting farewell to Jacques Chiraq by Anne Applebaum over at Slate. Of the jug-eared proboscan’s legacy, Applebaum writes:
As I say, it’s a very important legacy: One of consistent scorn for the Anglo-American world in general and the English language in particular, of suspicion of Central Europe and profound disinterest in the wave of democratic transformation that swept the world in the 1980s and 1990s, of preference for the Arab and African dictators who had been, and remained, clients of France. In his later years, Chirac constantly searched, in almost all international conflicts, for novel ways of opposing the United States. All along, he did his best to protect France from the rapidly changing global economy.
It was, in other words, the legacy of a man who was deeply conservative, almost Brezhnevite in his view of the world - so much so that the word most often used to describe his political beliefs is “stagnation.”
I will always remember one thing about this faithless and deeply cynical man: that he stood, like the disgusting Villepin, as an obstruction to the invasion and liberation of Iraq so as to buy his Saddamite friends and their Ba’athist apparatchiks in Syria the time they needed to prepare against our military. When Chiraq finally kicks the bucket, I will probably hoot.
Of course, Applebaum also writes that Chiraq was right about Iraq for the wrong reasons. And she may as well have, too. Because that’s what makes reading History so interesting: there’s all those missed guesses.
All that carefulness in what we wish for.
All those lives that death allowed.
