"An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it."
"You never hear bad news."
"[Berkeley law professor Nancy K.D.] Lemon's Domestic Violence Law is organized as a conventional law-school casebook — a collection of judicial opinions, statutes, and articles selected, edited, and commented upon by the author. The first selection, written by Cheryl Ward Smith (no institutional affiliation is given), offers students a historical perspective on domestic-violence law. According to Ward:-- Christina Hoff Sommers, with more of Berzerkeley's insanity - that, somehow, passes as an education at the (expensive) University of California at Berkeley - but not in The Chronicle Review.
'The history of women's abuse began over 2,700 years ago in the year 753 BC. It was during the reign of Romulus of Rome that wife abuse was accepted and condoned under the Laws of Chastisement. ... The laws permitted a man to beat his wife with a rod or switch so long as its circumference was no greater than the girth of the base of the man's right thumb. The law became commonly know as "The Rule of Thumb." These laws established a tradition which was perpetuated in English Common Law in most of Europe.'
Where to begin? How about with the fact that Romulus of Rome never existed. He is a figure in Roman mythology — the son of Mars, nursed by a wolf. Problem 2: The phrase 'rule of thumb' did not originate with any law about wife beating, nor has anyone ever been able to locate any such law. It is now widely regarded as a myth, even among feminist professors.
A few pages later, in a selection by Joan Zorza, a domestic-violence expert, students read, 'The March of Dimes found that women battered during pregnancy have more than twice the rate of miscarriages and give birth to more babies with more defects than women who may suffer from any immunizable illness or disease.' Not true. When I recently read Zorza's assertion to Richard P. Leavitt, director of science information at the March of Dimes, he replied, 'That is a total error on the part of the author. There was no such study.' The myth started in the early 1990s, he explained, and resurfaces every few years.
Zorza also informs readers that 'between 20 and 35 percent of women seeking medical care in emergency rooms in America are there because of domestic violence.' Studies by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an agency of the U.S. Department of Justice, indicate that the figure is closer to 1 percent.
Few students would guess that the Lemon book is anything less than reliable. The University of California at Berkeley's online faculty profile of Lemon hails it as the 'premiere' text of the genre."
"After telling the world of his pride in his dead son and love for his grieving grandchildren, Joe Jackson turned back into the family compound.
"Until medicine became effective, there was no push to say we absolutely have to do medical treatment [on sick and dying children]. There wasn't this notion of deference (to religion) until medicine began to work and to become institutionally powerful."
"The content of pop songs is generally restricted to two essential modes: I Love You and I Hate Myself. In its limitations it resembles binary code. What should not compute, but unfortunately it does, is our insistence that the world’s greatest musicians should impoverish their own imagination by working in such a confined space."
"Once, when I was a lad, I was verbally assaulted on the streets of New York by a paranoid schizophrenic. This raving lunatic came at me waving his hands wildly in the air with spittle and shrill curses spewing from his mouth in equal measure. I had been walking along lost in my own meditations and was so startled by the attack that for a moment, I couldn’t process it. I wondered: had I unwittingly done something wrong? It took me a moment to understand that, no, it had nothing to do with me, really. I had simply violated the borders of the poor fellow’s internal world. The abuse was, in some sense, his way of defending his fantasies from the threat of my reality.-- Andrew Klavan, cracking me up - which happens a lot offline - online, not so much, on Pajamas Media.
Arguing with a leftist is something like that."
"As women start to gain more of the social, economic, and political power they have long been denied, it will be nothing less than a full-scale revolution the likes of which human civilization has never experienced.
"I know there has been an increase, I now believe the figure is 12."
"Scientists have achieved a new milestone in brain imaging: we have seen a memory in the process of being formed. Using brain cells from a lowly sea slug, which actually makes a good model for our brains, images were captured of proteins forming between the neurons. These proteins distinguish the memory as a long-term one rather than short-term, as the proteins solidify the memory in the neurons. This process had been suspected but not visualized until now."
"In my imagined utopian future where foul language has lost its sting, people will have to be more creative if they wish to offend. David Tredinnick, the Tory MP for Bosworth, recently showed us how it's done when it emerged that he'd spent £510 of public money on astrology software and attendant tuition - a purchase so foolish it makes a duck island seem like a vital heart operation for the child of a constituent.
"Adultery, unlike a frisky bachelor lifestyle, connotes a reckless dishonesty at odds with our basic notions of integrity. Because it shows a lack of respect for the most important commitment that most of us will ever make. Because it indicates that the adulterer will always place his selfish desires above those who depend on him."
"Ayres and Pelossi [sic] and Soros and Huffington and the rest of the late 1960's cabal of Jacobin new agers finally found the perfect vessel to pour all their work into and win power in an American election. I wonder if the recent Honduran experience will replay itself here when we reach the time that free elections no longer gurantee these operators their ruling powers?"
"Do not confuse me with somebody who cares very much what editorialists in Der Spiegel or other outposts of the European chattering classes think of any American president. I could not care less, in no small part because I believe that the interests of such people generally diverge from mine own. I note, however, that many of the cosmopolitan Americans who voted for Barack Obama did so because they were embarrassed by the Bush administration's reputation among foreigners, particularly European elites. They hated having to explain themselves over dinner in Paris, Brussels, and Frankfurt, and worried that most Europeans would not understand that we are not all unnuanced rubes. I therefore wonder how such people will react if anti-Obama sentiment in Europe grows to the point where they have to explain themselves all over again. Will they rise in Barack Obama's defense, agree with the foreign critique but deny that they voted for him, or explode from the cognitive dissonance?
"Fawcett's case had a,...component that potentially sent the wrong message to other patients. In addition to the traditional cancer treatment she was receiving in the United States, the actress traveled to Germany six times to receive a combination of natural supplements and immune treatments not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. These trips were chronicled in a moving documentary, Farrah's Story, that aired on NBC in mid-May. In seeking this type of therapy, Fawcett mirrored a choice made by actor Steve McQueen, who futilely traveled to Mexico in 1980 in search of a cure for his malignant mesothelioma. McQueen's Mexican doctors treated him with dozens of enzymes and vitamins, coffee enemas, and an anti-cancer drug called Laetrile, which was ultimately shown to be worthless.
"Jackson’s need to caper on stage at age 50 recalls the pathetic spectacle of Isaac Hayes, who driven to financial hardship after resigning from South Park after it came into conflict with Scientology, forced himself to continue performing even though he was physically incapacitated, even if 'performing' consisted of pretending to play the keyboard, speaking songs or stumbling through interviews.-- Richard Fernandez, showing he "gets" how NewAge is disastrously influencing society - without just saying (as I do) it's NewAge that's disastrously influencing society - which is why he qualifies (and I don't) for Pajamas Media.
The process through which a principal is captured by his servants is familiar to students of bureaucracy and even business. Once capture is consummated, the master and servant exchange places. The enterprise is run thereafter not for the benefit of the principal, but for those of the agents, such as when a country is run for the benefit of a government, or when a government is run for the benefit of its officials. In the case of Jackson, he may have been working — and made to keep working — for the benefit of the vast swarm of creditors, suppliers and hangers-on who attached themselves like parasites to failing host.
But the most deadly aspect of having ‘enablers’ is that they throw a veil over your eyes. A cordon sanitaire tells you everything you need to know. How you look; what people think; what foods are good for you; what 'medicines' will make you well; what your prospects are. It tells you everything you need to know; but tells it all wrong. Take Adolf Hitler. Up to the very end he was being treated by the good Dr Theodor Morell, 'well-known in Germany for his unconventional, holistic and alternative treatments', another way of saying he kept Hitler drugged to his eyeballs. But Morell was not alone. Hitler’s decision-making processes were ably informed by soothsayers, mountebanks, toadies and certified maniacs. They collectively did more to mess up the Third Reich’s decision making processes than any Allied disinformation plan. Hitler was 'destined' for victory the way some companies are 'too big to fail'.
But how many people, reflecting on the King of Pop’s fantasies, will ask themselves whether subprime mortgages, unfunded social security or borrowing our way out of debt makes any more sense than that last shot of Demerol? On a day when the House has passed the climate change bill, wouldn’t it be good to ask how much of what the public is being made spend is for the public’s own benefit, and how much for the continued livelihood of the armies of special pleaders who surround society with their policy pills and needles? Good, but unlikely. It is far easier to believe in promises and rely feel-good nostrums than it is to look in the mirror, even though we know what it will show. Jackson’s death when it came, wasn’t a surprise; probably not even to him. And the crash of public policy fantasy, when it arrives, will not be wholly unexpected."
"Senior Iranian cleric Ahmad Khatami (no relation to Mohammad Khatami, who visited the US in September 2006) demanded today that the leaders of election protests be executed."
"Former [John] Edwards aide Andrew Young says the ex-senator and his former mistress, Rielle Hunter, once made a sex tape, according to someone who has seen Young’s book proposal.
"Afterward they'll continue to believe you are a fascist, and say so behind your back,..."
"Obama has essentially endorsed the detention policies of George Bush without the courtesy of apologizing for slandering him over the last two and a half years. Obama and his allies screeched endlessly about indefinite detentions, and not just in Gitmo, either. They specifically railed against the holding of terrorists without access to civil courts in military detention facilities around the world, specifically Bagram, but in general as well. Not even six months into his term of office, Obama realized that Bush had it right all along.
"It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as 'deniers.' The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.
"For the circle of handlers who surrounded Jackson during his final years, their golden goose could not be allowed to run dry. Bankruptcy was not an option.
