Presented as a Public Service: Psychotherapy - A New Approach
Labels: Modern Life, The Real World
"Every gross brained idiot is suffered to come into print." ~ Thomas Nash (1592)
"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."
--Archilochus
Glenn Reynolds:
"Heh."
Barack Obama:
"Impossible to transcend."
Albert A. Gore, Jr.:
"An incontinent brute."
Rev. Jeremiah Wright:
"God damn the Gentleman Farmer."
Friends of GF's Sons:
"Is that really your dad?"
Kickball Girl:
"Keeping 'em alive until 7:45."
Hired Hand:
"I think . . . we forgot the pheasant."
Labels: Global Warming, Suicide of the West, Tin Foil Hats
Before a citizen can be charged with a crime, an officer has to cite a violation of law. Yet in announcing the road closures accompanying the World Bank protests, the police department said, “Only pedestrians with business in the area and proper identification will be permitted access.”I see a lawsuit. I see a gray-bearded gentlemen in late middle age getting himself arrested. I see a great deal of fun ahead.
Which statute requires law-abiding citizens to produce ID to walk down a sidewalk? What law says that citizens must explain to police where they are going and why?
A call to the police departments general counsel asking that question was not returned. Unfortunately, there likely is some badly written statute that the Metropolitan police can contort into affording them sweeping powers — similar to the Secret Service’s ability to operate virtually unchecked by claiming it is protecting someone or something.
Such laws are more dangerous than any group of protesters.
Labels: Modern Life, The Real World
Labels: The Real World
This country’s meager tax take puts its economic prospects at risk and leaves the government ill equipped to face the challenges from globalization.See? Low taxes = bad economic prospects. High taxes = equipment to face globalization. Please note the entire absence of analysis (nay! the absence of definitions!) of what it means actually to be "equipped", or precisely what "challenges" are posed by "globalization." And, of course, we needn't worry our little heads about anything so retro as pondering whether those challenges (whatever they might be) are best faced by bureaucrats, armed with my money (after subtracting their skim).
Politicians on the right have continuously paraded the specter of statism to rally voters’ support for tax cuts, mainly for the rich. But the meager tax take leaves the United States ill prepared to compete. From universal health insurance to decent unemployment insurance, other rich nations provide their citizens benefits that the United States government simply cannot afford.Well of course tax cuts benefit "the rich," since they're pretty much the only folks who pay taxes these days. (Depending upon your definition of "the rich." When it comes to the "soaking" thereof, that nasty cold damp trickles down deep into the socks of the middle class.) And do you really want that lady down at the DMV to be the one deciding whether your kid -- who's just hit her head pretty hard -- really, really needs that "free" Government-provided MRI? We didn't think so.
Labels: Suicide of the West, Terrorism
"In the annals of human evil, off-loading a pet is nowhere near the top of the list," writes Caitlin Flanagan in the current issue of The Atlantic magazine. "But neither is it dead last, and it is especially galling when said pet has been deployed for years as an all-purpose character reference."
Labels: Hillary Watch, Politics
Rutgers' running back Ray Rice (27) escapes the grasps of South Florida's George Selvie (95) during the first half of college football action at Rutgers Stadium in Piscataway, N.J. Thursday, Oct. 18, 2007. Rutgers defeated South Florida 30-27.An alternative might be: "Ray Rice stiff-arms punk, tosses wannabe to ground, runs for big gain."
Labels: Hopeful Signs, Rutgers
Labels: News of the World, Tin Foil Hats
Forget the question of “bad” versus “good” for a second. These people got rich by glamorizing behaviors and values normal people simply cannot afford. The working-class teenage girl who tries to follow in Madonna’s or Paris’s or Pam’s footsteps isn’t going to follow them into the pages of People magazine. She’s going to follow those footsteps straight off a cliff. And yet, the bad guy in our culture is the person who says so.
Labels: Suicide of the West
NEW YORK -- Something remarkable happened at 44 Henry St., a grimy Chinatown tenement with peeling walls. It also happened nearby at a dimly lighted apartment building with trash bins clustered by the front door.The explanation is no doubt Mrs. Clinton's well-known affinity for the little people.
And again not too far away, at 88 E. Broadway beneath the Manhattan bridge, where vendors chatter in Mandarin and Fujianese as they hawk rubber sandals and bargain-basement clothes.
All three locations, along with scores of others scattered throughout some of the poorest Chinese neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, have been swept by an extraordinary impulse to shower money on one particular presidential candidate -- Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Dishwashers, waiters and others whose jobs and dilapidated home addresses seem to make them unpromising targets for political fundraisers are pouring $1,000 and $2,000 contributions into Clinton's campaign treasury. In April, a single fundraiser in an area long known for its gritty urban poverty yielded a whopping $380,000.
-- snip --
The Times examined the cases of more than 150 donors who provided checks to Clinton after fundraising events geared to the Chinese community. One-third of those donors could not be found using property, telephone or business records. Most have not registered to vote, according to public records.
And several dozen were described in financial reports as holding jobs -- including dishwasher, server or chef -- that would normally make it difficult to donate amounts ranging from $500 to the legal maximum of $2,300 per election.
Labels: Politics
Labels: Food
Labels: Suicide of the West
And the more exposure I get to the Islamophobia phenomenon, the more I dislike it. It is now quite an industry. Huge numbers of Americans, people who would not have been able to spell the word "Islam"seven years ago, now spend their leisure hours poring over the Koran and its supplements looking for evidence that Islam is root-and-branch evil. Some of them have gone to the trouble to learn Arabic, or at any rate enough Arabic to be able to discourse confidently on the difference between a mawla and a halif. There's something unpleasantly autoerotic about the whole enterprise—something of seeking for glee in the contemplation of other people's misbehavior. Something defensive, too, as I said in my Islamophobophobia column: some fear (in my opinion justified) that the Islamo-crazies are giving all religion a bad name and thereby fortifying the ranks of unbelievers—who, in the minds of many Islamophobes, are the real enemy.
On the other hand, Islamophobes, though I think unintentionally in some cases, are making a contribution to the much larger cause of undermining the multiculturalist myth: i.e. that peoples from any place, in any numbers, can be settled in a Western society without causing dramatic changes to that society in directions likely to be undesirable. To that degree I think they are doing useful work. I therefore part company with them with goodwill and a cheery wave, and, while I continue to think that they are a bunch of crankish obsessives, remain ready to join with them in matters of common interest.
Labels: History, Hopeful Signs, Immigration, Islam
Whatever may be said about the U.S. House of Representatives committee vote concerning the use of the term “genocide” in reference to Turkey’s atrocities against the Armenians during World War I, two facts are indisputable: It was gun confiscation that made the atrocities possible. And it was the possession of firearms that saved many Armenians.If you're convinced that BushHitler's storm troopers may break down your door at any minute, and rip you from the loving embrace of your favorite farm animal, wouldn't it make more sense to have a weapon close at hand?
Labels: Suicide of the West, Terrorism
Labels: Hopeful Signs, The Real World
Lt. Michael P. Murphy, 29, from Patchogue, NY. Murphy was killed by enemy forces during a reconnaissance mission, Operation Redwing, June 28, 2005. Murphy lead a four-man team tasked with finding a key Taliban leader in the mountainous terrain near Asadabad, Afghanistan, when they came under fire from a much larger enemy force with superior tactical position. Mortally wounded while exposing himself to enemy fire, Murphy knowingly left his position of cover to get a clear signal in order to communicate with his headquarters. While being shot at repeatedly, Murphy calmly provided his unit’s location and requested immediate support for his element. He returned to his cover position to continue the fight until finally succumbing to his wounds.We suppose the Times will get around to reporting this event some time or other. The Los Angeles Times found space to do so, as did the Washington Post, last Thursday.
Labels: New York Times
Labels: Modern Life
Labels: Moonbattery, Tin Foil Hats
Ancel Keys, a prominent diet researcher a half-century ago . . . became convinced in the 1950s that Americans were suffering from a new epidemic of heart disease because they were eating more fat than their ancestors.
There were two glaring problems with this theory . . . . First, it wasn’t clear that traditional diets were especially lean. Nineteenth-century Americans consumed huge amounts of meat; the percentage of fat in the diet of ancient hunter-gatherers, according to the best estimate today, was as high or higher than the ratio in the modern Western diet.
Second, there wasn’t really a new epidemic of heart disease. Yes, more cases were being reported, but not because people were in worse health. It was mainly because they were living longer and were more likely to see a doctor who diagnosed the symptoms.
Labels: Hopeful Signs, Moonbattery
Labels: Politics, Suicide of the West
"They just had a little more fire than we did," [Southern Cal] sixth-year senior Hershel Dennis said.The victorious Cardinal (receiving 4 votes in the Coaches' Poll) extend their sympathy to Rutgers (44 votes), who dropped from the top 25 after 54 weeks with a loss at home to (now #17) Cincinnati.
Labels: Dumb Rich Kids, Football, Hopeful Signs, Palo Alto, Rich Kids, Stanford, the O.C., USC
Given the hothouse ideological atmosphere of today’s legal academia, it’s quite possible that administrators at Long Island’s Hofstra Law School had no idea that they’d touch off a furor when they invited Lynne Stewart, the disbarred felon and radical lawyer, to lecture on legal ethics. It’s not, after all, as if they were bringing in someone really controversial—someone, say, like Larry Summers or Donald Rumsfeld.I have no desire to listen to Lynne Stewart speak on legal ethics, but probably not for the same reasons that have caused the instant controversy. Ms. Stewart is an old, hard-Left ideologue, and accordingly, lawyer or no, has no "legal ethics" as that term is normally understood. If she can promote the cause, that's what's important, and outdated notions of "right" and "wrong" are hopelessly bourgeois, and irrelevant to the ongoing class struggle. Because of this, she has nothing to say -- she operates in a world wholly foreign to Western liberal democracy. It's not that she's a bad person, or that I'm awed by the irony of it, it's just that she's irrelevant to any serious discussion of legal ethics.
Labels: Popular Culture, The Real World
Labels: Travel