It's Too Late (For Biden My Time)

Be careful when you laugh at Burning Man: they have six ways from Sunday to get back at you

Bill Maher knocks Colbert, other late-night hosts for pandering to liberal fans (never noticed)

Pseudo-Science Makes Its Way to New York Because It Still Has Dreams Of Hitting The Big Time

Two females became 'pregnant from sexual interactions with transgenders' at a New Jersey prison and now comes the question they should've asked before the Judge sentenced them:

“What Is This, A Gang Bang?”

 

The Right: Keep 'Em Talking And We're Done With 'Em

They seem to have all attended the same Fascist Waving School, too

So I've been gone - what Wisconsin-type "wisdom" do we have from Pee-Wee McBrainstorm this week?

“I mean, I think for most people who are concerned about [pregnancy from rape], it’s in the initial months where they’re most concerned about it,...”

You know, while I was away, I've been studying Wisconsin's slavery history and, I'll be damned if this comment doesn't fit within the rest of that state's sick and callous heritage like a glove: 

It's probably a great place to raise not-just-stupid-but-racist kids, too - as I've seen,...

Tim Tebow's Faith-Based Boot, A Bible To The Face, $25 Whores, Religiously Killer Parents, And The Barbarians

Patriots Release Tim Tebow

Police: 

Alleged Ohio Robber Hit Clerk With Bible

Women sell positive pregnancy tests 

on Craigslist for $25 each

Parents charged with manslaughter 

in daughter's death

‘Barbarians Are Barbaric’

They're Training Arab Men (To Fear Women's Sexuality)

Abort! Abort!

An Argument For Abortion (But It's Not What You Think)

Save your kids the embarrassment, Ladies:

Whether you kill 'em at birth, or they make it out, they're just not safe,...

 

Master

Between the constant "nudging" of hippie politico control freaks, the historical cult influence of hippie politico control freaks, and the cult marketing to and of hippie politico control freaks, you'd think the West might catch on:

This picture, parents being told by midwives, by obstetricians – by people whom they have to be able to trust – that if they spend money that they probably can't afford, on a service that probably doesn't work, they'll be doing the best for themselves and their babies – this is why profit has no place in healthcare.

Wha-wha-what? Come on: 

When that profit comes from exploiting marks (which is all this is) it works just fine,....

 

Thinking About Being Nice (Not Just Believing It)

“...The 'We need God to be good' case falls apart. Countries worthy of consideration aren't those like North Korea and China, where religion is savagely repressed, but those in which people freely choose atheism. In his new book, Society Without God, Phil Zuckerman looks at the Danes and the Swedes—probably the most godless people on Earth. They don't go to church or pray in the privacy of their own homes; they don't believe in God or heaven or hell. But, by any reasonable standard, they're nice to one another. They have a famously expansive welfare and health care service. They have a strong commitment to social equality. And—even without belief in a God looming over them—they murder and rape one another significantly less frequently than Americans do.

Denmark and Sweden aren't exceptions. A 2005 study by Gregory Paul looking at 18 democracies found that the more atheist societies tended to have relatively low murder and suicide rates and relatively low incidence of abortion and teen pregnancy.

So, this is a puzzle. If you look within the United States, religion seems to make you a better person. Yet atheist societies do very well—better, in many ways, than devout ones.

...The Danes and the Swedes, despite being godless, have strong communities. In fact, Zuckerman points out that most Danes and Swedes identify themselves as Christian. They get married in church, have their babies baptized, give some of their income to the church, and feel attached to their religious community—they just don't believe in God. Zuckerman suggests that Scandinavian Christians are a lot like American Jews, who are also highly secularized in belief and practice, have strong communal feelings, and tend to be well-behaved.

American atheists, by contrast, are often left out of community life. The studies that [Arthur Brooks] cites in Gross National Happiness, which find that the religious are happier and more generous then the secular, do not define religious and secular in terms of belief. They define it in terms of religious attendance. It is not hard to see how being left out of one of the dominant modes of American togetherness can have a corrosive effect on morality. As P.Z. Myers, the biologist and prominent atheist, puts it, "[S]cattered individuals who are excluded from communities do not receive the benefits of community, nor do they feel willing to contribute to the communities that exclude them."

The sorry state of American atheists, then, may have nothing to do with their lack of religious belief. It may instead be the result of their outsider status within a highly religious country where many of their fellow citizens, including very vocal ones,...find them immoral and unpatriotic. Religion may not poison everything, but it deserves part of the blame for this one.”

-- Paul Bloom, trying to explain the conundrum of atheism in a religious society, for Slate.com.

Questions For The Cowards

Why didn’t Colin Powell and Co. jump ship in, say, June or July, and endorse Obama after many months of campaigning when his positions were already well known? That is, why wait until late October when, after the financial meltdown, Obama surged in the polls? Had Powell come out even in the first week of September, he could have demonstrated that although Obama was down by three points, he was willing to stick his neck out with a principled endorsement that may well have made him persona non grata in a McCain-administration Washington.

Why didn’t the media or McCain just ask Obama a few of the following questions: Why did you keep emailing and phoning Bill Ayers for three years after 9/11, when the country was gripped by fear of terror, and Ayers, like bin Laden, said that he had not done enough bombing, and had no regrets about the terrorism he had committed?

Why did Obama say in 2004 to the Chicago Sun-Times that he went to Trinity Church every Sunday at 11AM, and then later claim he had not been there that regularly once Rev. Wright’s venom was disseminated to the general public? Is Obama for, or not for, a simple yes or no, missile defense, nuclear power, off-shore drilling, and coal-powered electrical generation? There might be legitimate answers, but surely the public could profit by them, rather than worry over the Palin pregnancies, wardrobe, or Tasergate.

Why did the greatest furor against Palin originate with women, both liberals like a Gail Collins, Maureen Dowd, or Sally Quinn, or conservatives such as a Peggy Noonan or Kathleen Parker?

So far, none of them has adduced the necessary arguments that would justify their venom against Palin: they have not demonstrated that Vice Presidential nominee Palin has less government or executive experience than does Presidential nominee Obama; they have not shown that she has said anything in two months as disturbing as what Joe Biden says almost any day, and, in that vein, they have written few columns about Biden’s lunatic assertions, such as FDR addressing the nation on television as President in 1929, or that our nation’s enemies will test Barack Obama, and his reaction will so disappoint the American people that his polls will immediately sink; they have not shown that Palin’s ideas about shrinking government and keeping taxes low are less sound than Obama’s in time of economic downturn to raise aggregate taxes and expand government. So whence the vitriol, especially the frequent invective about Palin’s family, education, accent, or mannerisms, or the rather sexist suggestions that her looks bewitched either McCain or others?

Why do so many conservatives think that an Obama-elect might be prove a centrist, and so why do they use phrases like “I pray” or “I hope” that Obama might turn out, well, not to be Obama?

Jimmy Carter did exactly what he promised: raised taxes, grew the government, told the world he had no inordinate fear of communism, trashed our allies as retrograde right-wing authoritarians—and we got the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian hostage-taking (have we forgotten that the “Great Satan” originated as a slur against Nobel laureate Carter?), communism in Central America, the Cambodian Holocaust, and spikes of 12% inflation, 18% interest, and 7% unemployment.

For his first two years (until 1994 Gingrich’s ‘Contract with America’ revolution, and Dick Morris’s ‘triangulation’), Bill Clinton, as promised, raised taxes, raised spending, tried to ram through socialized medicine, and by fiat wanted to force the military to accept those openly gay.

So why would any conservative think that Obama—friend of Ayers, Khalidi, Meeks, Pfleger, and Wright, veteran of mysterious campaigns in which rivals in 1996 and 2004 simply dropped out or were forced out, erstwhile advocate of repealing NAFTA, controlling guns, stopping new drilling and nuclear plants, zealot for bringing all troops home by March 2008, advocate of a trillion dollars in new spending, and raising the tax burden on the 5% who now pay 60% of the aggregate income taxes, supporter of more oppression studies and racial reparations—would not likewise try to govern as he has lived the last 20 years?

Why would anyone think that an Obama would not wish to enact the visions of those who first backed him—the Moveon.org crowd, ACORN, The Huffington Post, Sen. Reid, Rep. Pelosi, a Chris Dodd or Barney Frank—rather than the late pilers-on like Colin Powell or Scott McClellan?

— Victor Davis Hanson, asking the kinds of questions the journalistic pack will soon be out of work for not asking, while working for Pajamas Media

Sam Harris Doesn't Speak For Me

I got a call today from one of my best friends, asking me if I'd read Newsweek magazine recently; specifically Sam Harris's article on Sarah Palin called, "When Atheists Attack". I told him no; that though I am an atheist, I'm not a huge fan of Sam Harris, and don't trust the stance he's taken in the dialogue on atheism - because he's another angry Buddhist - which I regard as a spiritual con, beyond weird, a sign of elitist liberalism, and - as practiced in the West - part of the NewAge (rhymes with sewage) movement that I despise.

My friend, who sits on the fence in regards to a lot of political and theological arguments, read me a few of Harris's paragraphs about Palin that he found troubling. But, while doing so, my friend also gave me further reason to dislike the elitist Harris even more.

Let me explain:

See, I'm not like other atheists in a number of ways: though born an atheist, I've always considered the battle, and taken-offense, over "In God We Trust" on money (or the phrase "Under God" in the Pledge Of Allegiance) to be silly. For me, God is not "dead" but merely outgrown his usefulness. I understand why, mostly as a response to communism, presidents say "God bless America", and why these gestures were made historically, so they don't bother me a bit. They're nothing to rail against. They're anachronisms, kitschy, and (though I'm loathe to admit it) touching, threatening my atheism not one iota. I guess I'm saying I find many atheists, and the planks they stand on, petty, laughable, and weak, and that's also how I feel about Harris's critique of Palin as well.

Harris starts off with the confession that he "was genuinely unnerved by Sarah Palin's performance at the Republican convention" because it was "the most effective political communication" he'd ever seen. Considering how much we in the general public knew about Palin at that juncture, what was Harris afraid of? Why wasn't this man, who I suspect is a feminist, overjoyed to see this "sexy" woman (Harris's word) break the glass ceiling of presidential politics? He claims it was because "if anyone could make Christian theocracy smell like apple pie, Sarah Palin could", but I suspect - as the early, and hypocritical, attacks on Palin indicated - it was mostly because this married mother of five clearly wasn't a card-carrying member of the so-called "progressive" movement. Some elitists, who appear outwardly reasonable, have even gone so far as to declare she isn't even a woman.

Ladies and gentlemen (especially the gentlemen) I ask you: is Sarah Palin not a woman?

Whatever the case for his anxiety, Harris wasn't giving this new face on our national stage a fair break, as he indicates while discussing her Charles Gibson interview.

Harris says he was "relieved to discover, as many were, that Palin's luster can be much diminished by the absence of a teleprompter" - without uttering a word on how elitist Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's celebrated stumbling without a teleprompter affected his mood. Harris adds that he "didn't much care that she did not know the meaning of the phrase 'Bush doctrine'", but as Charles Krathammer (the man who coined the term) has pointed out, that great "gotcha" moment apparently hasn't yet registered with "progressives" like Harris - or even the New York Times - as Charles Gibson's gaffe - not Palin's - three weeks later.

It should be needless to ask whether misunderstanding (or being in denial about) the correctness of Palin's answer is a really dumb way for Harris to start his condemnation, from the self-exalted position of being an educated elitist, shouldn't it? Whatever - I'm nobody to elitists - so I'm asking anyway, in my own crude street-wise fashion:

Who you think you fooling, Sam?

Which brings me to the biggest problem with Harris's paper overall - it's ham-handed attempt to defend elitism. During our current Senate hearings over the federal bailout of Wall Street, when discussing the average American, one politician said "I don't think we give our citizens credit for the smarts they deserve." Neither does Sam Harris. He says "Sarah Palin's ignorance is guaranteed because of how she has spent the past 44 years on earth" - basically spitting on the entirety of her life - before he attempts to take her to task for:

A) Sarah Palin's being a Christian (though this notoriously angry Buddhist admits "she shares this belief with mil-lions of Americans"). He also doesn't like that Palin is a confident Christian, though possessing confidence himself somehow doesn't hamper Harris from defending his indefensible position as a Buddhist - nor does it shut him up. Amazing.

B) Sarah Palin's quoting of Abraham Lincoln ("The New York Times later dubbed her response 'absurd'" Harris says, after already showing us - with their Gibson analysis - that he and the NYT can't be relied on for accurate analysis).

C) Sarah Palin as the subject of a bunch of Harris's own personal assumptions about what her religious beliefs might be, filled with qualifiers like "Palin very likely believes,..." and "Palin may even imagine,..." and "Palin seems as though,..." Honestly, this is just a collection of guesses that say more about what Harris believes than Palin. Which is just plain weird. I mean, Harris went to college, didn't he?

D) The "end time" beliefs of what seem to be members of Sarah Palin's parent's church, which she left back in 2002. People, Sam Harris appears to do lousy research, just like other meditating followers of the Maharishi cult. This is probably because of too much meditating, which tends to dull and warp the mind. It even causes some people to think they can fly but, as far as I know, Harris hasn't written Newsweek anything about that condition. I wonder why?

E) Sarah Palin's pregnant daughter.

Harris makes a comparison between Bristol Palin's pregnancy and the circumstances - and conservative condemnation - of Jamie Lynn Spears (above) and her family. But there is no comparison because, if I'm not mistaken, Bristol Palin and her sisters were never Mouskateers, the stars of children's T.V. programs, teen icons, prime examples of decadence in our time; nor has Sarah Palin appeared to be heading an out of control family in front of the American public and the world. And I can assure Harris that if one of Barack Obama's daughters eventually decides to shave her head, publicly come apart at the seams, and starts attacking cars with umbrellas before a sea of photographers, "the dysfunction in the black community" will be all anyone will be talking about. Well, next to what a lousy parents Barack and Michelle Obama turned out to be. Which, actually, might come first after all.

I mean, we thought we knew them so well.

F) Sarah Palin "didn't have a passport until last year."

This last one is rich. We're talking about the very definition of elitist now!

Look, except for during slavery and World War II, I'm the only member of my family to have traveled the world, and all it did was confirm for me that average "common sense" Americans can be brilliant, and someone like Sam Harris can be a pampered ignoramus. Or as Samuel Johnson put it:

"What I gained in France was learning to be better satisfied with my own country."

Seems to me Sarah Palin knows this already.

What I'm saying is, Sam Harris and I have both been to France - big whoop. Let's look at a few other famous quotes about France to see what we learned:

"[France is] a relatively small and eternally quarrelsome country in Western Europe, fountainhead of rationalist political manias, militarily impotent, historically inglorious during the past century, democratically bankrupt, Communist-infiltrated from top to bottom."

-- William F. Buckley, Jr. (that doesn't sound good.)

"France is the only country where the money falls apart and you can't tear the toilet paper."

-- Billy Wilder (no wonder they switched to the Euro.)

"I would have loved [France] - without the French."

-- D.H. Lawrence (I can concur.)

"If you want [the French] to like you, you have only to spend a little money."

-- Ernest Hemingway (he shot himself after the experience.)

"To the French, lying is simply talking."

-- Fran Lebowitz (who also doesn't sound enthused.)

Yesiree Howdy! By hanging out amongst the simple honesty of the American people of Alaska, "Our Sarah" appears to have really missed out on a lot, huh? Spending a few days with people practiced in the art of lying probably would've done Sarah Palin a world of good!

Or so says the self-important (and quite possibly lying) Mr. Harris.

Which makes me want to ask my poor, average, public school-educated American readers something:

How often have you had to suffer working under some jackass with a college degree who wouldn't know his head from a hole in the ground? Someone who you knew you could top in the same position? It happens to this particular black guy (with just a couple of years of college) all-the-time. If anything, I think one of the biggest problems today isn't those of average intelligence taking over important positions (Harris's fear) but those of the so-called "educated classes" ruthlessly protecting positions they don't exhibit the common sense to hold. (Look at the current financial crisis.) As James Randi is fond of saying, today, a Ph.D. is just a license to shoot your mouth off - usually about things you know nothing about - hardly proof of competence or wisdom.

And they're the people in charge.

Harris says, referring to the conservatives in fly-over country, "When it comes to politics, there is a mad love of mediocrity in this country." Well, right you are, Sir. But I would like to add that the same terrible affection for the not-too-bright permeates the elitist Left on the coasts to a greater degree.

And, if you ask me, Sam Harris fits the bill perfectly.

If you also think this is so, don't forget this is:

Sex On The Brain

"Judged by its results – not a bad way of judging – sex education has been an utter failure. The increase in sex education here in recent years has coincided with an explosion of unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease (STD) far worse than anywhere else in Europe. Since the government’s teenage pregnancy strategy was introduced in 1999, the number of girls having abortions has soared. You might well be tempted to argue that sex education causes sexual delinquency."

-- Minette Marrin, picking a fight with people who would rather make "love", for the Times Online.