Is there nothing that Obama can’t do?
Found Under: Best American Poems
[…]
Pop takes another shot, neat,
Points out the same amber
Stain on his shorts that I’ve got on mine and
Makes me smell his smell, coming
From me; he switches channels, recites an old poem
He wrote before his mother died,
Stands, shouts, and asks
For a hug, as I shink, my
Arms barely reaching around
His thick, oily neck, and his broad back; ’cause
I see my face, framed within
Pop’s black-framed glasses
And know he’s laughing too.
~ BHO
Hanging In
A Western Penchant for Destruction:
The West has a penchant for impatience in war that has given us the Western way of war. We seek decisive engagements where the enemy can be crushed. Victor Davis Hanson spells it out convincingly in Why The West Has Won. To the Western mind, there are better things to do than “build” nations from scratch or get bogged down in protracted dirty little wars. The Western way is focussed solely on getting things over as quickly as possible … it was so with the Greeks and Romans … and it is so with us. The result is that when faced with armed conflict, the West has always sought decisive and crushing confrontations which allowed its citizen to get back to focussing on wealth creation and individual pursuits.
Western warfare tends to be incredibly costly in lives and treasure as a result, and when non-Western forces seek war with the West it is best they avoid head-on confrontation. In modern parlance, we often hear the phrase “Go big, or go home” bandied about. It represents perfectly the Western Attitude; besides, how can one go about pursuing excess while simultaneously wasting money on Afghan schools?
But Glenn Beck Is The Crazy One
After a reign of nearly 80 straight weeks, the One is
finally pushed from the cover of Time magazine…
Blog Notes
I’m taking a sick day (migraine). See you later.
But Glenn Beck Is The Crazy One
Reader Tips
Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) edition of Late Nite Radio. Tonight we feature some social/political satire from Britain, in the form of a recurring series of sketches from the Armstrong and Miller Show, which premiered on BBC 1 in 2007. In these skits Alexander Armstrong and Ben Miller superimpose the attitudes and dialect of stereotypical, modern-day, rights-entitled youths onto two RAF airmen in WWII. The absurdity of it all manages to be darkly instructive, caustic and amusing in equal measure.
Without further ado, then, here are Armstrong and Miller’s WWII RAF sketches parts 1, 2, and 5.
I don’t want to be restricting your rights and stuff, so, like, leave your Reader Tips and this and that in the comments.
Tommy Douglas: Not Dead Enough
I quit when medicine was placed under State control…Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I would not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward…Men considered only the ‘welfare’ of the patient, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said only ‘to serve’…Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce…It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it–and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn’t.” (Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957)
The last Canadian trained doctor to practice in my home town left for the US in 1968.
Tommy Douglas: Not Dead Enough
But Glenn Beck Is The Crazy One
Breaking: ACORN suspends operations. (link fixed)
And another epic fail for a gatekeeper media that has failed to notice the walls are tumbling down around them.
Is Your Teachers Feeling?
“Mary Smith was explaining the sexual harassment policy and was emphasising that faculty had to report suspicions of sexual harassment by any faculty member to the college administration. She was stating that the feelings of the offended were proof of the offensive nature of the behaviour. ”
The First American Prime Minister In Waiting
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
The Hill Times, 2009 – “Warren Kinsella, a former senior Liberal Cabinet staffer who played a key role in the 1993, 1997 and 2000 federal election campaigns, will head the war room…”
Warren Kinsella, 2006 – “I objected to the manner in which his supporters trampled on democracy in a Toronto riding – literally locking out opponents. I objected to his support of George W. Bush’s illegal war in Iraq. I objected to the fact that he mocked Canada (Link dead) during the three decades he was abroad, and that he likened Israeli policy to the fascism of apartheid. I objected to what I perceived to be breathtaking arrogance – calling Canada a “herbivorian boy scout” one day, then jetting up here to run it the next.”
h/t EBD
Increasing US Dependence On Foreign Oil
Is there nothing that Obama can’t do?
The Obama administration opened a new front in its effort to impose $31.5 billion in taxes on oil and gas companies, saying that the nation puts too much emphasis on oil and gas at the expense of other industries.
The chief economist in the Obama administration’s Treasury Department testified before a Senate panel that current subsidies “lead to overinvestment” in the oil and gas industry. That went beyond previous statements about the need to protect taxpayers and was the clearest signal yet that the federal government hopes to end its role in nurturing domestic oil and gas production.
“To the extent that current subsidies for the oil and gas industry encourage the overproduction of oil and natural gas, they divert resources from other, potentially more efficient investments, and they are inconsistent with the Obama administration’s goals to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and build a new, clean energy economy,” Alan Krueger, the Treasury’s chief economist, told the panel.
Looks like America picked a bad day to quit unemployment.
More reaction here.
h/t Adrian
Not Watching For The Asteroid
The Gibson Doctrine “HAHAHAHAHA. HEHEHE. I didn’t even know about it. Um. So, you’ve got me at a loss. I don’t know. Uh. Uh. But my goodness, if it’s got everything including sleaziness in it, we should talk about it this morning”.
Reader Tips
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite
Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, here is Lester Young with
Oscar Peterson, Barney Kessel, Ray Brown, and J. C. Heard
performing Stardust in 1952 (3:31). Adolphe Sax is smiling.
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
But Glenn Beck Is The Crazy One
Yowza.
h/t Shippedout
Tony Blair’s Britain
Where the foxes caper unmolested, the government packs your school lunch, and “doctor, it was the strangest thing… every day of my holidays, I woke up with a headache…”
h/t Robert B.
The First American Prime Minister In Waiting
Y2Kyoto: “Melting ice cap opens up Northeast Passage to British ships”
“You see the dynamic all the time”….
One newspaper (or broadcaster) runs a story and, within hours, the rest of the media pick it up and repeat it, sometimes with their own spin, but with the basic facts unchecked. Thus, a core error gets repeated and repeated until it becomes part of the narrative, pulled out for ever more whenever the issue is raised, becoming part of the received wisdom, simply by dint of constant repetition.
Discussing with one senior official a particularly egregious example of an error-ridden story which had spread through the system, in frustration he described the process as akin to journalists eating each others’ turds.
h/t Mystery Meat
Nest Of Spies
… but including intelligence officers from at least 20 nations including allies, the book says, the infiltrators are stealing an estimated $20 billion to $30 billion annually worth of cutting-edge research in products and technologies, other scientific, business and military know-how and political secrets.
[…]
Over 371 pages, the pair expose an astonishing parade of spy-vs.-spy and espionage stories, from Tretiak and other Russian post-Cold War escapades to allegations of India’s suspected involvement in the 1985 Air India disaster.
They reveal the hidden hand of Chinese intelligence in getting the House of Commons in 2007 to shame China’s old enemy Japan for its treatment of foreign women during the Second World War, allege political assassinations within Canada’s ethnic diaspora and explain how reductions to CSIS’s counter-intelligence budget mean some of the service’s elite agents, assigned to monitor suspected foreigners, no longer work weekends in Canada’s big cities.
But their chief message is denouncing “the silence and inaction” of a succession of federal governments more interested in trade and diplomatic relations than crime and punishment, demoralizing the relatively few CSIS and RCMP managers and counter- espionage agents who haven’t been re-assigned to post-9/11 counter-terrorism duties.
Available at Harper Collins