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LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION
Posted by Ron Coleman on December 5, 2007
I once fancied myself something of a neo-victorian. Perhaps there’s something to that. As Harvey says:
The venerable Archbishop of Canterbury has criticized America’s imperialism, saying that the United States wields its power in a way that is worse than Britain during its imperial heyday.
I find myself agreeing with him.
Me too. Read why.
Posted in Americana, Jocularity, Past is prologue | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on December 4, 2007
From Shannon Love, the distaff-side “Chicago Boy” :
Instapundit links to an article by Melanie Scarborough that purports to show that either a telecom engineer or the Bush administration is lying about the domestic “wiretapping” with the clear implication that Bush is the liar.
Unfortunately, her premise is based on a complete misunderstanding of how modern telecommunication works. Both parties are telling the truth.
It depends on the actual, physical, boots-on-the-ground facts. Something that journalists, and a lot of the rest of us, hardly ever care about before slinging our opinions.
Posted in Americana, Medialites, Nuvo-Techno | 3 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on December 4, 2007
I was shocked when I got an email from Princeton a couple of weeks ago announcing a new fundraising drive. Old Nassau wants to raise $1.75 billion. That’s new money, folks. Hardly surprising, according to BusinessWeek.com (via Above the Law):
The $5.7 billion in investment gains generated by Harvard’s endowment for the year that ended June 30 exceeded the total endowment assets of all but six U.S. universities, five of which were Ivy Plus: Yale, Stanford, Princeton, MIT, and Columbia.
The article is probably wrong about how austerely earlier generations of Ivy Leaguers and their ilk lived — I wouldn’t say they did at all, based on contemporary standards, and in some respects they still lived better than today’s college kids. Through the ’80’s Williams College students still had their beds made for them by chambermaids.
But something’s way out of whack here.
Posted in Americana, Gelt | 7 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on December 1, 2007
CONFESSIONS OF A PAPARAZZI, commenting on this blog item (which I guess he hit via a Google search, unaware of this one!), reports that Evel Knievel has died.
Posted in Americana | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ron Coleman on November 28, 2007
GLOOM FROM BRUCE FEIN: “The United States culture is decaying, growing steadily less capable of supporting a republican form of government.
He might be right, but Fein isn’t the one to make the argument. From what I can tell he’s rounded the bend — and no one has demonstrated to my satisfaction that he hasn’t.
Posted in Americana, Politics and Poker | 4 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on November 27, 2007
Maybe Glenn Reynolds knows the answer to this one — isn’t Tennessee right next to Kentucky?:
What do you want from a school that claims on its website to be devoted to protecting rights through “human sacrifice”? Is human sacrifice legal in Kentucky?
Full, sad story here and here. It’s not really so much to laugh that people will pay money for an unaccredited law degree — even people with accredited degrees from lower-ranked schools can usually look forward to a very non-legal, or very unsatisfying legal, career. It is a crime that people’s money is being taken this way; it’s a bigger one, though, that students fork over this magnitude of money on purpose.
Posted in Americana, Jocularity | 3 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on November 25, 2007
NewsBusters prints this excerpt from the transcript of NPR’s review of “Redacted” (via Instapundit):
The rape scene has led to a familiar charge, that De Palma is a misogynist who relishes violence against women. . . .
Another charge is that he’s anti-American or anti-troops. But it’s an act of sympathy to suggest that soldiers on their third tours of duty in a place where they have no knowledge of the culture, where they can’t tell who’s on their side and who wants to blow them up, stand a good chance of losing both their moral compass and their minds. Here, and in “Casualties of War,” De Palm[a] is dramatizing the idea that even decent people in such circumstances can convince themselves they’re entitled to do anything.
Here lies the road to the complete inversion of morality. As an “act of sympathy” for the troops, DePalma is supposedly taking the position that even the worst actors in the world — U.S. troops committing atrocities while on an imperialistic mission — are no worse than morally exempt from blame for such atrocities because of the moral incoherence all around them. The logic is unassailable:
- Bad guys might be good guys.
- Good guys might be bad guys.
- Hey, this is hard!
- Let’s rape someone.
This aligns well with the leftist conception that people the world ’round do not make their own choices at all, but rather are zombies. In America, choiceless voters are under the sway of Rush Limbaugh, religious fundamentalism, and Karl Rove. In the Middle East, suicide bombers are compelled to murder housewives and schoolchildren by their plight or by their rage. But it is relatively novel to see the left apply this to the faceless, heartless automatons of the U.S. military, even in the commission of their fictional outrages. Naturally we can expect NPR to lobby for the release of all soldiers incarcerated for improper conduct in the Iraqi theater immediately.
Soon we will recognize that everything — everything! — is George W. Bush’s fault, and that individual conscience is merely a bourgeois construct of kapital. It is so much simpler.
Cross-posted at Right Wing News.
Posted in Americana, Ars Longa, Medialites, O Mores! | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on November 25, 2007
William Teach makes a compelling case.
Posted in Americana, Medialites, Sisyphus | 3 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on November 22, 2007
James Lileks can’t stand them!
Eat them, not me! Can’t you tell by my posture and expression that I identify with you? I’m better than those
stupid birds. They deserve to be eaten. Here – let me go get you some gravy. Later, I can whistle Mozart, if you like. I love Mozart, don’t you? All of us smart bipeds love Mozart! Those stupid birds couldn’t sing two bars of “Turkey in the Straw.” Me, I’m not fond of the tune – it’s a little simple, don’t you think? Of course, if you appreciate folk music as an expression of the people – there was an article in Life magazine about that last week, did you read it? – then I suppose it has its place, but frankly I just think turkey culture is just too low, too base – yes yes, I’ll shut up, of course! Anything you say. Shut up it is.
Posted in Americana, Jocularity | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Ron Coleman on November 21, 2007
Originally published at Dean’s World, Thanksgiving 2006:
A million essays and blog posts will explore the topic of “being thankful” in the next 24 hours.
I’d say, based on a perusal of a Google search I just ran seeking a link to add to this post on my blog, that at least 80% of them talk about “being thankful” with no reference whatsoever to Whom (or even whom) one should be thankful.
It is an utter logical dead end. You cannot, by definition, have “thanks” without an object of thanks. It is meaningless.
thank
TRANSITIVE VERB:
thanked , thank·ing , thanks1. To express gratitude to; give thanks to: He thanked her for the gift.
2. To hold responsible; credit: We can thank the parade for this traffic jam.
You can’t have free-floating thanks. You can thank her for the gift, you can thank the parade for the traffic. You can’t just thank, however.
You can eat turkey. You can watch football. You get together with family and you can call it Thanksgiving. But not thanksgiving.
Whom are you thanking this Thanksgiving?
Posted in Americana, Faith and Works | 5 Comments »
