cowperthwait | lies, evasion, spin, circumspection and cleverly veiled hype

Winter comes to San Francisco, whipping the streets and their hobbled denizens with misty drizzle and temperatures in the upper 40°s for the next three days before we crack 50° again midweek. It's as miserable as it sounds.

Time, obviously, to bust out the electric blanket.


My new electric blanket has two temperature controls, corresponding to two halves of the blanket for two halves of the bed. This manifests a series of assumptions made by my electric blanket's manufacturer.

• Anyone who purchases a king-sized electric blanket must have a Sleep Partner...
• ...with whom one disagrees about proper bed warmth.
• This dispute otherwise, surely, would have rent a marriage in two — wars have been started for less!

Thank heavens, therefore, for this solution, by which the dueling Sleep Participants can retreat to opposite halves of the bed and enjoy solid, solitary slumber under custom-calibrated climate.

I, of course, have no Sleep Partner. I can't imagine I ever would, were this person and I to hold such a fundamental disagreement as How warm, on a scale of 1–10, should this bed be? Call me a romantic.

( Read more... )

[Now-former Libertarian Party senatorial candidate Sonny] Landham had previously raised some eyebrows because, prior to breaking into mainstream movies in the 1980s, he was a porn actor, starring in the title role of the movie "Big Abner" and as Lane the Milkman in "The Trouble with Young Stuff."

—Billy Lone Bear: Sonny Lone Candidate, Louisville, KY, Courier-Journal

Asked if he stood by his comments in the earlier Guardian interview, [John Deady, co-chair of New Hampshire Veterans for Rudy] said:

"I most assuredly do. I've been very concerned about this Muslim thing for quite awhile. The average American does not know beans about what the Muslims are about. I am talking about the Muslims in general. I don't subscribe to the principle that there are good Muslims and bad Muslims. They're all Muslims."

In the earlier interview with The Guardian, Deady said of Muslims: "We need to keep the feet to the fire and keep pressing these people until we defeat or chase them back to their caves or in other words get rid of them."

…

When I asked Deady if this was also a reference to all Muslims, he said: "I am talking about Muslims in general."

…

Deady also said at one point: "I'm not a bigot really. I may sound like one. But I'm only quoting what's factual."

The [Giuliani] campaign didn't immediately return a request for comment.

—Rudy Surrogate: "I Don't Subscribe To The Principle That There Are Good Muslims And Bad Muslims", Talking Points Memo

Q: How long do you think Don Asmussen has been waiting for a way to use the tepee joke?




… Brit Teacher Pardoned by Sudan | Mitt Romney's Beliefs | Immigration Flip-Flop? …

But which opponent is behind the plot?



… Disturbing Photo of Cheney Procedure Leaked | Teacher Angers Islam …

( Christian Charity Raising Money To Feed Non-Gay Famine Victims )

Q: When will the NYT stop holding Kansans up for ridicule?
A: Not as long as Kansans can still be depended upon to say shit like this:

In the Wichita churches this summer, Obama was the Democrat who drew the most interest. Several mentioned that he had spoken at Warren’s Saddleback church and said they were intrigued. But just as many people ruled out Obama because they suspected that he was not Christian at all but in fact a crypto-Muslim — a rumor that spread around the Internet earlier this year. “There is just that ill feeling, and part of it is his faith,” Welsh said. “Is his faith anti-Christian? Is he a Muslim? And what about the school where he was raised?”

“Obama sounds too much like Osama,” said Kayla Nickel of Westlink. “When he says his name, I am like, ‘I am not voting for a Muslim!’”

—The Evangelical Crackup, NYT, 28 Oct 07

Jeff Sousa, AB 04, takes a break from abusing undergraduates of his very own:

• No, the University shouldn't mandate stat. "That seems pretty specialized to the social sciences." [Yeah, and we comprise the majority of your College… —JEC]


• But the University should mandate a new course "that deals with the conflicts between the East and the West. It would be pretty fascinating to have a course that started with Herodotus. Xerxes' invasion. The Crusades. Zionism. 9/11. Iraq. Iran. Etc."


• On Western Civ: "I don't think it would be any big loss not to start with Greece and Rome. I feel like you pick that up tangentially through a number of other courses."


• On why nobody yet has suggested a Hum sequence: "Hum is sort of like 'English ... College!': fire up the bull-shit engines. I mean, how was Media Aesthetics?"

Previously:
What is our childrens should be learning?

I mean, my complaint isn't that LOLTerrorists are offensive. It's that they're stupid. There's no need to resort to cultural explanations ("my joke fell flat because your people are humorless") when the truth is simpler.


Comments section shoutout:

Hey bellatrys and nashville...
try "My honor student got beat up by your pastor's kid for being gay."

When I first saw the T-shirts and bumper stickers featuring Islamic Rage Boy and the caption "My child beheaded your honor student," I got a chuckle out of it. Muslims, however, are unable to see the absurdity in it. Not only do they not find it funny, they cannot understand how it can be funny, simply because they do not understand the concept of absurdist, satiric or ironic humor.

... Islam, on the other hand, has very strict rules about what is funny (very little) and what kind of jokes one can crack (very few). Seriousness is prized as a virtue.

—Christopher Orlet (condescending asshat) blames the theater operator, not the audience

Sorry, Christopher. I'm not a Muslim, but I still think your jokes are stupid. Mayhaps they're just not funny.

[E]ven the most thinly qualified of middle east experts must know that Islam, as with any other civilisation, comprehends the sum total of human life, and that unlike some others it promises superiority in all things for its believers, so that the scientific and technological and cultural backwardness of the lands of Islam generates a constantly renewed sense of humiliation and of civilisational defeat. That fully explains the ubiquity of Muslim violence, and reveals the futility of the palliatives urged by the softliners.

...

The operational mistake that middle east experts keep making is the failure to recognise that backward societies must be left alone, as the French now wisely leave Corsica to its own devices, as the Italians quietly learned to do in Sicily...

...

The middle east was once the world's most advanced region, but these days its biggest industries are extravagant consumption and the venting of resentment.

—Edward Luttwak (prick) in Prospect

The reports describe a female guard who detainees said handled their genitals and wiped menstrual blood on their face. Another interrogator reportedly bragged to an FBI agent about dressing as a Catholic priest and "baptizing" a prisoner.

Some military officials and contractors told FBI agents that the interrogation techniques had been approved by the Defense Department, including directly by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

—FBI details possible Guantanamo Bay mistreatment, th' AP.

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach him now.

"We need to stop illegal immigration totally and reduce legal immigration and end the diversity visas policy . . . allowing many persons from the Middle East to come to this country," Goode said in the letter. "I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America."

—Rep. Virgil H. Goode Jr. (R - VA) embarrasses his district, his country, and civilized humankind.

Roy "Constitution, Schmonstitution" Moore makes my head spin. To avoid any possibility of misleading excerptism, I'm running the whole toenail-nibblin' quotation.

Today, some believe that it does not matter what we believe or before Whom we take our oath. But as Keith Ellison is demonstrating, it does matter.

To support the Constitution of the United States one must uphold an underlying principle of that document, liberty of conscience, which is the right of every person to worship God according to the dictates of his conscience, without interference by the government. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, in his "Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States" in 1833, observed concerning the First Amendment that "The rights of conscience are, indeed, beyond the just reach of any human power. They are given by God and cannot be encroached upon by human authority without a criminal disobedience of the precepts of natural, as well as revealed religion." Justice Story echoed the sentiments of Thomas Jefferson in his Bill for Religious Freedom in 1777 in which he stated that "Almighty God" (El Shaddai in Hebrew) "hath created the mind free and manifested His supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint." It was a specific God who endowed us with a freedom of conscience with which government could not interfere.

—"Muslim Ellison should not sit in Congress", WorldNet Daily (where else?).

Our freedom from religious persecution comes from big-G God, therefore ... we ... have to ... religiously persecute! Tada! Wait, what?

EDIT
Bbbbonus:
"I'm an American to the bone," he said. "For me, it is strictly about Islamo-fascism."

"I don't hate Islamic people," he said. "We need to love these folks, go after them and love them, one at a time. We need to crucify them with Christ."

—Baptist Convention told: Muslims 'are here to take over our country', S'Louis Post-Dispatch