Category: News

Class, compare and contrast the following essays/columns:

• Kim du Toit’s The Pussification Of The Western Male, which details how the modern American male is shackled and coddled by the State and society into a “civilized” passive consumer.
• Val MacQueen’s Tech Central Station column A New Stockholm Syndrome, which explores how Swedish society has become so passive that citizens stand idly by while a leading political figure is stabbed to death in a mall.

As long as the number of points of contrast outnumber the comparisons, we’re okay. But I suspect the gap is shrinking.

Andrew Sullivan links to a gushing review of a John Kerry ad that attempts to turn George W. Bush’s carrier landing into a slam against the president. Here’s how the blank Slaters describe the ad and infer its meaning:

The second shot is Bush, in the infamous shot after he landed on the deck of the carrier, dressed in an olive-drab flight suit (military garb and straps were in last season) with a helmet tucked under his arm. The ad suggests that this was a phony costume to go with the false label on the big ship. Bush had no right to wear military garb, because he never served in the real military, only in the Texas Air National Guard, which kept him far from Vietnam. This juxtaposition is a page out of the Bush family’s own political playbook: It’s Michael Dukakis playing soldier in a tank.

The National Guard is not the real military?

A damn fine sentiment to express when National Guardsmen are dying the same as “real” military men in Iraq.

I blame the yahoos at Slate (Jacob Weisberg wrote the particular assertion) first, but damn Senator Kerry, too, and anyone, active military or not, for casting aspertions on anyone who served.

Ravenwood has a post which features an incredulous exchange between Paula “Zipppppppp” Zahn and Tucker Carlson wherein they discuss why people under thirty don’t think the Iraq invasion and occupation are a bad thing. Carlson zooms in with this insight:

It does surprise me. I mean, I think the theme throughout all of these numbers is hopefulness. People under 30 just are much more optimistic about America’s future. They feel more secure in the job market with the economy. They think things are getting better. They think Iraq is going better than people over 30 do.

How can that be? Don’t they realize it’s Vietnam!

Pardon me while I shake the doughnuts off of my cluebat.

Note to big thoughtless media players out there: Vietnam is not an apt or immediate metaphor for anyone under forty. I was born in 1972, and I was 3 when Saigon fell. I don’t remember any of it. Someone who’s forty today will have some preteen memories of it, but thirty year olds were born in 1973 and don’t remember the Miracle on Ice, either.

You might as well compare the Iraq invasion to the Crimean War. Your average thirty year old has the same immediate access to each. In a book. So just hitch your trousers a little higher, show us some more of those sexxxy black socks under your sandals, and go back to your regular poor Boomer behavior of worrying that you’ll have a single, non-Federally funded financial responsibility between the end of your career and the end of your retirement.

Thank you. That is all.

Headline in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Criticism of Inner Belt project angers Olivette! Anything but that!

What’s the beef?

Les Sterman, the executive director of the East-West Gateway Coordinating Council and professional funding teat-sucker, said that the federal government really doesn’t need to spend $24 million dollars on an interchange where I-170 meets Olive because it doesn’t have as much traffic as previously predicted. This, of course, upset the professional funding teat-suckers in Olivette, where the $24 million dollar interchange would have been added.

“Show me a community that doesn’t want $24 million in federal funding and I will show you Olivette, because that is the only one,” said [Larry] Gerstein [director of the Olivette Community Connection].

While Gerstein acknowledges Sterman has no financial stake in whether the interchange is built, he insists Sterman should not be using his position to evaluate the merits of the interchange, which is a topic of local debate.

Because, obviously, the taxpayers in Mississippi and Wyoming should alleviate non-existent (sorry, light) traffic congestion in a relatively affluent suburb of St. Louis.

Show me a community that would let the pork return to its source and I’ll show you Olivette, who is not one.

Finally, the credit reporting agencies are putting your credit information directly into the hands of third world workers unbound by United States laws. That’s efficiency in identity theft.

Your paranoia shidoshi recommends you open as many credit cards as you can in the next three weeks, max them out, buy a new Porsche, get a mortgage, and have a ball. Remember Brewster’s Millions. Whatever you can consume, creditors cannot seize. So buy a couple cases of good wine, some exceptional chocolate, charter a jet, and fly a couple dozen friends to the Bunny Ranch. But don’t pay the bills!

You see, once you’ve reached a point that no one will give you change much less a credit card, no one will give someone who steals your identity a credit card, either!

Sometimes, the easy answers elude us, but that’s why I am the shidoshi, and you are the student.

There is liberation in the limitation of paying cash.

A peaceful, frolicking lion in the Dickerson Park Zoo in Springfield, Missouri, kills the female lion that shared its cage.

It’s the circle of life, it’s the wheel of fortune, and the lioness landed on Bankrupt.

These are the animals to whose level some in our society would like to return.

Appease North Korea….make our children pay for our perfidy.

Thanks, bud. Go back to private life now, and keep your bad ideas–which didn’t work so well when you implemented them–to yourself.

(Link seen on Drudge.)

Apparently, there’s some feel-good story circulating that tells of how ordinary people supported soldiers on leave by giving up their seats on flights out of BWI to the traveling soldiers. Hmm. Here’s the story, according to Snopes:

Dear Friends and Family,

I hope that you will spare me a few minutes of your time to tell you about something that I saw on Monday, October 27.

I had been attending a conference in Annapolis and was coming home on Sunday. As you may recall, Los Angeles International Airport was closed on Sunday, October 26, because of the fires that affected air traffic control. Accordingly, my flight, and many others, were canceled and I wound up spending a night in Baltimore.

My story begins the next day. When I went to check in at the United counter Monday morning I saw a lot of soldiers home from Iraq. Most were very young and all had on their desert camouflage uniforms. This was as change from earlier, when they had to buy civilian clothes in Kuwait to fly home. It was a visible reminder that we are in a war. It probably was pretty close to what train terminals were like in World War II.

Many people were stopping the troops to talk to them, asking them questions in the Starbucks line or just saying “Welcome Home.” In addition to all the flights that had been canceled on Sunday, the weather was terrible in Baltimore and the flights were backed up. So, there were a lot of unhappy people in the terminal trying to get home, but nobody that I saw gave the soldiers a bad time.

By the afternoon, one plane to Denver had been delayed several hours. United personnel kept asking for volunteers to give up their seats and take another flight. They weren’t getting many takers. Finally, a United spokeswoman got on the PA and said this, “Folks. As you can see, there are a lot of soldiers in the waiting area. They only have 14 days of leave and we’re trying to get them where they need to go without spending any more time in an airport then they have to. We sold them all tickets, knowing we would oversell the flight. If we can, we want to get them all on this flight. We want all the soldiers to know that we respect what you’re doing, we are here for you and we love you.”

At that, the entire terminal of cranky, tired, travel-weary people, a cross-section of America, broke into sustained and heart-felt applause. The soldiers looked surprised and very modest. Most of them just looked at their boots. Many of us were wiping away tears.

And, yes, people lined up to take the later flight and all the soldiers went to Denver on that flight.

That little moment made me proud to be an American, and also told me why we will win this war.

If you want to send my little story on to your friends and family, feel free. This is not some urban legend. I was there, I was part of it, I saw it happen.

Sounds nice and patriotic, but let’s zoom back into the announcement from United, shall we?

“Folks. As you can see, there are a lot of soldiers in the waiting area. They only have 14 days of leave and we’re trying to get them where they need to go without spending any more time in an airport then they have to. We sold them all tickets, knowing we would oversell the flight. If we can, we want to get them all on this flight. We want all the soldiers to know that we respect what you’re doing, we are here for you and we love you.“

Let’s separate the United “we” from the American people “we” for a moment, and translate that shall incensed blogger “we”?

We, a failing corporation in a failing industry now offer some shoddy customer service; as we, said failing corporation, have overbooked the flight to maximize our corporate revenue at the expense of the convenience of our customers, now ask you to give up your tickets to our customers because we American citizens all want to support our troops, right?

What a cynical, manipulative bunch of hooey.

In Arizona, a county rented some space for a court, and when it couldn’t come to an agreement with the land owner for a lease, it opened up a can of eminent domain and took it over.

“This means municipalities can identify a space they want and force a landlord to lease it to them,” said Mike Freret vice president of development for Orsett/Columbia Ltd. “It may mean that if the space they want already has a business owner in it, they could boot them out.”

Tom Irvine, who represented the county, said that’s exactly what it means.

Finally, the tyrants are feeling comfortable to explicitly state their belief that The State grants property rights. Soon, the Bill of Rights will also be recognized as retractable fiats issued by the Elect(ed).

Most important right, and it’s only in the Constitution indirectly. That oversight will cost us and our children.

Here’s a sordid story. In New Mexico, a twelve year old (misnomered in the story as a teen) puts some change in the school soda machine and gets two sodas. Woo! He’s a hero to his fellow students. When a teacher sees him, teacher says stop that. Student continues. Teacher disciplines student with two days of in-school, whatever that means. And suddenly Rio Rancho, which has nothing to do in the long autumn evenings until cable television reaches their hamlet, talks and talks about this.

Here’s the school district’s story:

Rio Rancho Public Schools issued a written statement: “On Monday a teacher observed Mason manipulating the soft drink machine at the school. The teacher advised Mason that getting two sodas for the price of one is the equivalent to stealing. When the teacher observed Mason doing the same thing again on Tuesday, she wrote him up.”

That sounds about right to me. Young Mason is taking something for which he did not pay, and worse, he’s doing it repeatedly and showing his friends how to do it. When the teacher said stop, young Mason did not stop. So discipline follows.

But witness poor Mason’s trauma:

The boy said the teacher called him a thief and accused him of trying to teach other students how to steal. He was written up, given a two-day in-school suspension and the incident will appear on his permanent school record.

“It makes me feel very sad that I’m going to be thought as a thief later on in my life,” Mason Kisner said. “Heck, I might not get in a good college or get a good job because on my permanent record it will say that when I was a kid, I stole.”

Someone should explain to young Mason that he’s being taught a lesson here, and that he should not game the system or steal or commit fraud, because it’s wrong and because it will eventually carry a longer sentence than two days of in-school suspension (do you suppose that means hanging him by his wrists in the main hallway?).

That someone probably won’t be Mason’s father, who’s too eager to jump into the tantrum:

“I’m flabbergasted, bewildered, dumbfounded. I can’t think of another word to describe how I feel about this incident,” said Edward Kisner, the boy’s father. “What kind of character is this showing Mason?”

. . . .

“I’m very disappointed I haven’t gotten a phone call from the school rescinding Mason’s suspension at this point,” said Edward Kisner. “You know, when you say you’re wrong, it’s not a sign of weakness.”

Obviously, he has no idea of character, but probably a good grasp of weakness.

(Link seen on Fark.)

• You complain about revisions to the cuts of cloth in Levi’s 501 blue jeans.
• You cover this for a major metropolitan newspaper with all appropriate indignation for the rights of the common man.

Buried in this Washington Post story about the now-canceled program by which Army units could disburse seized Iraqi funds to solve immediate problems, we have this nugget of wisdom from some flack who’s never worked an honest day in his life:

“Soldiers are not development workers. There is industry skill, a body of knowledge that goes with it. You can’t just say ‘There’s a pothole over there and get it filled’ and fix a country,” said Dominic Nutt, a spokesman for Christian Aid, a British humanitarian group.

Oh, indeed, I am sure there’s some spreadsheet-writing, wining-and-dining-bureaucrats, and tooling-around-in-dark-SUVs one must do before directing someone to fill the potholes.

Perhaps the appropriately named Nutt is a fan of such Top-From-The-Outside solutions that have been so effective in, well, in NGO theory. But those who fix the potholes do more for the people of the country than those who Fix The Country.

The most important things to remember about this story about the attorney gunned down outside the courthouse:

Dramatic television footage showed Curry, 53, of Simi Valley, trying to hide behind a tree as the man police identified as Strier fired several times.

…

Strier, a heavyset man with graying hair and glasses, calmly walked by stunned reporters before an off-duty sheriff’s reserve officer tackled him.

The media, defenders of Truth but not, apparently, an individual physically threatened man, filmed and watched this happen without coming to the poor shootee’s aid and then let the shooter walk by them before being tackled, not shot, by an off-duty sheriff’s reserve officer, someone who was not a full-time law enforcement officer.

So keep that in mind, when the media picture the mass of Americans as defenseless sheep, they’re projecting.

(Link seen on Ravenwood’s Universe.)

Addendum to my box cutters post:

You know all the box cutters found individually on planes throughout the country? Your paranoia shidoshi has a surprisingly simple explanation. Call it Occam’s Boxcutter if you will. Is it terrorists doing dry runs to see what they can successfully smuggle? Is it an underground of students out to humiliate the TSA?

Or is it simply honest Americans that suddenly discover that they have put their boxcutters in their pockets and suddenly find themselves committing a felony at 42,000 feet?

Believe you me, I would wipe my fingerprints off of it and put it in the seat beside me, too.

9-year-old arrested for waving toy gun. Cop’s gun on him. Taken down and cuffed. His mother busted for trying to point out to the cop that it’s a toy gun.

Sometimes I get the feeling that the cops think they have to shoot the elephant to keep we natives in line.

(Link seen on Drudge.)