Archive for August, 2008
26 Aug 2008

Catharsis

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1:04 Obama supporters’ video mocking Hillary.

Democrats are such nice people.

Hat tip to Larry Johnson.

25 Aug 2008

Charity Begins at Home

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The Republican Party of Texas produced this anti-Obama ad, which I think makes a very telling point.

0:33 video

25 Aug 2008

Obama: Liberal Magic Think in Action

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George Will notes how liberals like Obama believe government can simply order new energy sources to come into being.

Obama recently said that he would “require that 10 percent of our energy comes from renewable sources by the end of my first term — more than double what we have now.” Note the verb “require” and the adjective “renewable.” …

What will that involve? For conservatives, seeing is believing; for liberals, believing is seeing. Obama seems to believe that if a particular outcome is desirable, one can see how to require it. But how does that work? Details to follow, sometime after noon Jan. 20, 2009.

Obama has also promised that “we will get 1 million 150-mile-per-gallon plug-in hybrids on our roads within six years.” What a tranquilizing verb “get” is. This senator, who has never run so much as a Dairy Queen, is going to get a huge, complex industry to produce, and is going to get a million consumers to buy, these cars. How? Almost certainly by federal financial incentives for both — billions of dollars of tax subsidies for automakers and billions more to bribe customers to buy cars they otherwise would spurn.

Conservatives are sometimes justly accused of ascribing magic powers to money and markets: Increase the monetary demand for anything, and the supply of it will expand. But it is liberals such as Obama who think that any new technological marvel or other social delight can be summoned into existence by a sufficient appropriation. Once they thought “model cities” could be, too.

Where will the electricity for these million cars come from? Not nuclear power (see above). And not anywhere else, if Obama means this: “I will set a hard cap on all carbon emissions at a level that scientists say is necessary to curb global warming — an 80 percent reduction by 2050.”

No, he won’t. Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute notes that in 2050 there will be 420 million Americans — 40 million more households. So Obama’s cap would require reducing per capita carbon emissions to levels probably below even those “in colonial days when the only fuel we burned was wood.”

Liberal statism is a cult, fundamentally based on a narcissistic belief in the omnipotence of the calculative powers of human reason employed by an educated elite, to which class its subscribers by some curious coincidence invariably belong.

25 Aug 2008

Environmentalists Turned Dragons into Maneaters

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The Wall Street Journal describes how policies imposed by environmentalist outsiders are making it difficult for human residents of Eastern Indonesia to co-exist with Varanus komodoensis.

These locals have long viewed the dragons as a reincarnation of fellow kinsfolk, to be treated with reverence. But now, villagers say, the once-friendly dragons have turned into vicious man-eaters. And they blame policies drafted by American-funded environmentalists for this frightening turn of events.

“When I was growing up, I felt the dragons were my family,” says 55-year-old Hajji Faisal. “But today the dragons are angry with us, and see us as enemies.” The reason, he and many other villagers believe, is that environmentalists, in the name of preserving nature, have destroyed Komodo’s age-old symbiosis between dragon and man.

For centuries, local tradition required feeding the dragons — which live more than 50 years, can recognize individual humans and usually stick to fairly small areas. Locals say they always left deer parts for the dragons after a hunt, and often tied goats to a post as sacrifice. Island taboos strictly prohibited hurting the giant reptiles, a possible reason why the dragons have survived in the Komodo area despite becoming extinct everywhere else.

For us, giving food to the dragons is an obligation, our sacred duty,” says Hajji Adam, headman of the park’s biggest village, Kampung Komodo.

Indonesia invited the Nature Conservancy, a Virginia-based environment protection group, to help manage the park in 1995. An Indonesian subsidiary of the group, called Putri Naga Komodo, gained a tourism concession for the park in 2005 and is investing in the conservation effort some $10 million of its own money and matching financing from international donors.

With this funding and advice, park authorities put an end to villagers’ traditional deer hunting, enforcing a prohibition that had been widely disregarded. They declared canines an alien species, and outlawed the villagers’ dogs, which used to keep dragons away from homes. Park authorities banned the goat sacrifices, previously staged on Komodo for the benefit of picture-snapping tourists.

“We don’t want the Komodo dragon to be domesticated. It’s against natural balance,” says Widodo Ramono, policy director of the Nature Conservancy’s Indonesian branch and a former director of the country’s national park service. “We have to keep this conservation area for the purpose of wildlife. It is not for human beings.”

When people hunt deer, it poses a mortal threat to the dragons, which disappeared from a small island near Komodo after poachers decimated deer stocks there, officials say. “If we let the locals hunt again, the dragons will be gone,” says Vinsensius Latief, the national park’s chief for Komodo island. “If we are not strict in enforcing the ban, everything here will be destroyed.”

But, while the deer population remains stable in the park, many dragons these days prefer to seek easier prey in the vicinity of humans. They frequently descend from the hills to the villages, hiding under stilt houses and waiting for a chance to snap at passing chicken or goats. Much to the fury of villagers, park authorities, while endorsing the idea in principle, so far haven’t acted on repeated requests to build dragon-proof fences around the park’s inhabited areas. The measure is estimated to cost about $5,000 per village.

“People are scared because, every day, the dragons come down and eat our goats,” complains Ibrahim Hamso, secretary of the Kampung Rinca village. “Today it’s a goat, and tomorrow it can be our child.”

A year ago, a 9-year-old named Mansur was one such victim. The boy went to answer the call of nature behind a bush near his home in Kampung Komodo. In broad daylight, as terrified relatives looked on, a dragon lunged from his hideout, took a bite of the boy’s stomach and chest, and started crushing his skull.

“We threw branches and stones to drive him away, but the dragon was crazed with blood, and just wouldn’t let go,” says the boy’s father, Jamain, who, like many Indonesians, goes by only one name.

Unlike in the U.S. and many other Western countries, park rangers here don’t routinely put down animals that develop a taste for human flesh.

A few months later, Jamain’s neighbor Mustaming Kiswanto, a 38-year-old who makes a living selling dragon woodcarvings to tourists, and whose son had been bitten by a dragon, was attacked by another giant lizard after falling asleep. In June, five European divers, stranded in an isolated part of the park, said they successfully fended off an aggressive dragon by throwing their weight belts at it. …

To the villagers in Komodo, the recent incidents provide clear evidence of an ominous change in reptile behavior. “I don’t blame the dragons for my boy’s death. I blame those who forbade us from following custom and feeding them,” says Jamain. “If it weren’t for them, my boy would still be alive.”

Officials at the Nature Conservancy’s Indonesian headquarters in Bali dismiss such widespread belief about a connection between the attacks and the ban on feeding the dragons as “superstition.” The group and its Komodo subsidiary reject any responsibility for Mansur’s death.

The boy “shouldn’t have crouched like a prey species in a place where dragons live,” says Marcus Matthews-Sawyer, tourism, marketing and communications director at Putri Naga Komodo. “You’ve got to be very careful about extrapolating and drawing any conclusions.”

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

25 Aug 2008

Tender-Minded Liberals

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As they assemble in Denver to worship the Obamessiah, James Lewis wonders how is it possible for liberals to be so gullible?

The Democratic National Convention is a great time to reflect on the Conundrum of The Century: Why are our liberal buddies so amazingly gullible? Why do they fall for the most obvious scam artists? Why, when Hillary crashes, do they slobber all over the next edition of God’s Anointed on Earth? …

The Left could be divided up into fools, prophets and knaves. The knaves are just the Edwards-Clinton-Obama types, expert hustlers who can bring the crowds of suckers to their knees — just watch the Convention. There’s a sadistic-sociopathic kernel in some of the knaves of the Left; they’re not satisfied with exploiting dupes, they need to rub it in. That’s what brought down Bill Clinton; he had to stick it to more and more of his victims, to prove that the old mojo still worked. These are not nice people. Some of them are malevolent. …

What staggers me is the lib masses — “masses” is a very Marxist word — who always come back for more, even after they find out they’ve been duped again. These are the people who are honestly disappointed by John Edwards’s cheatin’ heart. They were shocked by Monica’s Blue Dress — but not enough to blame Bill Clinton. He was an innocent victim.

The sucker masses include our “professional media,” slack-jawed dupes, every single one. They just never admit they’ve been had. Even Dan Rather couldn’t bring himself to admit that he had been suckered out of his job as the Most Trusted Man in America by some wild-eyed Bush-hater out of Texas.

The liberal masses are True Believers, the little old ladies of both sexes, who hate-hate-hate George W. Bush so much that when one Saviorette gets dirt on her skirt they desperately beat the bushes for a New Messiah to replace last year’s model. Liberal victims are terribly out of place in the bloody jungle of politics. They should never vote. They are too needy emotionally, and their yearnings drive them to worship any idols in sight. They can’t accept that John Edwards would ever lie to them. Or Bill Clinton. Or Barack the Savior. Never! …

William James called the libs of his time the “tender minded,” in contrast to the “tough-minded” people who try to stay in touch with reality, like farmers, plumbers and accountants. If your toilet leaks all over the floor you can’t deny reality; but if you’re in the media game, fantasy-mongering is your bread and butter. It’s a huge difference between human beings.

In the 19th century New England grew tender-minded folk in large batches, flocking to hear uplifting speeches from Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York City was for tougher characters at that time, and not many liberals survived there until the sentimental middle class grew big and prosperous. By the 20th century New York City was taken over by libs — they called themselves “progressives” — with well-known results: street crime, violent schools, family breakdown, broken windows and ugly graffiti, and of course biggest scammers of all running City Hall.

Read the whole thing.

24 Aug 2008

“We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him”

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Greg Pollowitz titles the Lynn Sweet picture.

24 Aug 2008

Obama Campaign Responds to Falling Poll Numbers

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Iowahawk reports new Obama surge aimed at vital Reagan democrats.

With new polls showing Barack Obama’s once-commanding lead over John McCain all but evaporated, the Obama campaign announced today it has begun deploying its vast volunteer army of downtown hipster douchebags to help reconnect the presumptive Democratic candidate with middle-American voters.

“Unlike Iraq, this is one surge that is actually going to work,” said Obama campaign manager David Axlerod.

Sources within the campaign say the new strategy was prompted by recent national poll trends indicating McCain pulling even with, and in some instances even overtaking, Obama. More troubling for the campaign were internal tracking polls that show the candidate losing significant ground in key Midwestern, Southern and Western battleground states. As the numbers dropped, some within the campaign were left in stunned disbelief.

“It really didn’t make sense,” said Carly Voorhees, an East Village experimental performance poet, Cooper Union graduate student and member of Obama’s 600-expert foreign policy team. “We knew in theory there were a handful of stump-toothed biblebillies and neocon dead-enders out there, but by all rights we should have had at least a 60%-75% lead. Even after Barack threw that awesome victory rave in Germany, the numbers kept deteriorating.”

“At first we were stumped,” she added. “Then it dawned on us — McSame’s subliminal attack ads were stoking the deep-rooted, latent racism of white middle America. We needed to warn these uneducated simpletons that McSame was exploiting their superstitions and genetic bigotry. The big question was — how?”

At first, the Obama team looked into major media buys in key battleground states. But with a campaign budget already strained by price increases in arugula and Hawaiian airfare, the impact was deemed to be minimal. Instead, they turned to a key campaign asset — a dedicated cadre of young urban hipster douchebags willing to take Obama’s message of change to America’s small town streets and rural blacktops. An intensive eVite recruitment campaign on websites like the Daily Kos and Huffington Post yielded over 1,500 volunteers for the potentially dangerous mission.

“I couldn’t be prouder of all of you wonderful young indy rock assholes,” said Axlerod at a swearing-in ceremony at the campaign’s official training center in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “You represent our party’s finest, the best of best — you are our Douchebag Delta Force.”

Highly motivated, and with skills ranging from post-modern gender theory to espresso cafe blackboard chalk art, the volunteers were eager to get to work on the campaign trail. But before deployment Obama officials insisted that all recruits undergo an intensive training regimen to prepare them for the rigors of life in Red Country.

“A lot of the plebe douchebags come in here full of swagger, thinking all it takes is a few hours of FM country music endurance training, and I have to tell them they have no idea what they’re up against,” says Ethan Dodge, a Seattle conceptual theater set designer and veteran douchebag of Obama’s Iowa caucus campaign. “Believe me, I’ve been to Dubuque. I know.”

To toughen up the recruits for the task ahead, Dodge and other drill instructors take a direct approach.

“We tell them straight up: we aren’t your mommy or daddy or your au pair. There aren’t any independent lesbian film festivals in Youngstown, and just because Iowa has a lot of farmers it doesn’t mean they are going to see a lot of Sunday chill-out farmers’ markets,” says Voorhees. “After that shock wears off, we tell them about how the natives drink Pabst unironically.”

“Sure, it scares some recruits off,” admits Dodge. “But the ones who stay are much less likely to crack under the pressure of a two week isolation from American Apparel or Urban Outfitters.”…

Whether Obama’s douchebag heartland surge will ultimately succeed remains to be determined, but longtime political analyst and What’s the Matter With Kansas? author Thomas Frank thinks the basic strategy is sound.

“Unfortunately this election comes down to winning the hearts and minds of whitebread, middlebrow, middle-class, middle-Americans,” says Frank.”This effort shows that Obama troops are willing to reach out and condescend to them, one-on-one, no matter how pathetic and stupid they are.”

Read the whole thing.

24 Aug 2008

Fade to Black: Best Reactions to Biden (ongoing thread)

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Michael Silence:

The kid and the grandpa:
Obama was 11 when Biden entered Congress. I guess they’re going fishin’ together.

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Howie Carr
:

Joe Biden does bring one big constituency with him – the Hair Club for Men.

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Glenn Reynolds:

He’s at least as fresh a face as Madeleine Albright.

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J.D., a Little Green Footballs Commenter (no. 67) observes:

Joe Biden? I feel the same way I did at the end of the last episode of “The Sopranos.” Sure, some people considered the go-to-black ending nuanced, but as far as I was concerned, the producers punted. They chose a non-ending because they couldn’t decide on a strong ending. …

This has the potential to become very very ugly.

24 Aug 2008

Joe Biden: Stupid, Arrogant, Dishonest

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During the 1988 democrat nomination campaign, Joe Biden tells a reporter exactly who has the bigger IQ, and goes on to outline his own distinguished academic career.

2:38 video

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Chris Reed corrects most of Biden’s mistatements.

The tape, which was made available by C-SPAN in response to a reporter’s request, showed a testy exchange in response to a question about his law school record from a man identified only as ”Frank.” Mr. Biden looked at his questioner and said: ”I think I have a much higher I.Q. than you do.”

He then went on to say that he ”went to law school on a full academic scholarship – the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship,” Mr. Biden said. He also said that he ”ended up in the top half” of his class and won a prize in an international moot court competition. In college, Mr. Biden said in the appearance, he was ”the outstanding student in the political science department” and ”graduated with three degrees from college.”

In his statement today, Mr. Biden, who attended the Syracuse College of Law and graduated 76th in a class of 85, acknowledged: ”I did not graduate in the top half of my class at law school and my recollection of this was inaccurate.”

As for receiving three degrees, Mr. Biden said: ”I graduated from the University of Delaware with a double major in history and political science. My reference to degrees at the Claremont event was intended to refer to these majors – I said ‘three’ and should have said ‘two.’ ” Mr. Biden received a single B.A. in history and political science.

”With regard to my being the outstanding student in the political science department,” the statement went on. ”My name was put up for that award by David Ingersoll, who is still at the University of Delaware.”

In the Sunday interview, Mr. Biden said of his claim that he went to school on full academic scholarship: ”My recollection is – and I’d have to confirm this – but I don’t recall paying any money to go to law school.” Newsweek said Mr. Biden had gone to Syracuse ”on half scholarship based on financial need.” Says He Also Received Grant

In his statement today, Mr. Biden did not directly dispute this, but said he received a scholarship from the Syracuse University College of Law ”based in part on academics” as well as a grant from the Higher Education Scholarship Fund of the state of Delaware. He said the law school ”arranged for my first year’s room and board by placing me as an assitant resident adviser in the undergraduate school.”

As for the moot court competition, Mr. Biden said he had won such a competition, with a partner, in Kingston, Ontario, on Dec. 12, 1967.

Mr. Biden acknowledged that in the testy exchange in New Hampshire, he had lost his temper. ”I exaggerate when I’m angry,” Mr. Biden said, ”but I’ve never gone around telling people things that aren’t true about me.” Mr. Biden’s questioner had made the query in a mild tone, but provoked an explosive response from Mr. Biden.

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Biden failed to mention in his impromptu vitae that he was nearly thrown out of law school for plagiarism.

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Back in 2001, in Newsweek, Michael Crowley provided a less-than-flattering profile, beginning with the following anecdote:

It’s a bright early October morning on Capitol Hill. Joe Biden is bounding up the steps of the Russell Senate Office Building, wearing his trademark grin. As he makes for the door, he is met by a group of airline pilots and flight attendants looking vaguely heroic in their navy-blue uniforms and wing-shaped pins. A blandly handsome man in a pilot’s cap steps forward and asks Biden to help pass emergency benefits for laid-off airline workers. Biden nods as the men and women cluster around him with fawning smiles. Then he speaks. “I hope you will support my work on Amtrak as much as I have supported you,” he begins. (Biden rides Amtrak to work every day and is obsessed with the railroad.) “If not, I will screw you badly.”

A dozen faces fall in unison as Biden lectures on. “You’ve not been good to me. You’re also damn selfish. You better listen to me…” It goes on like this for a couple of minutes. Strangely, Biden keeps grinning–even fraternally slapping the stunned man’s shoulder a couple of times. When we finally head into the building, Biden’s communications director, Norm Kurz, turns to me. “What you just witnessed is classic Senator Biden.”

Meet the current chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

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Crowley also identifies Senator Biden’s Achilles heel.

Biden’s mouth does him as much harm as good. ” He gives Castro-length speeches,” says one exasperated Senate staffer. In Democratic caucus meetings, he is famous for declaring, “I’ll be brief,” and then talking the room into a stupor. (Biden’s colleagues have been known to burst into laughter when he makes that promise.) People who know Biden also warn that his loose talk often reflects muddled thinking. In his classic study of the 1988 presidential candidates, What It Takes, Richard Ben Cramer wrote, “Joe often didn’t know what he thought until he had to say it.” In one recent committee debate, recalls an observer, Biden delivered a rambling explanation of his opposition to a foreign aid amendment, by the end of which he had seemed to talk himself out of his original position.

23 Aug 2008

Obama Picks Biden

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What does this choice tell us?

Biden is the safe choice. Though always far too much of a lightweight to make an effective presidential candidate, it’s kind of like standing the average fellow next to the class wimp in the gym. When you contemplate Biden versus you-know-who, Biden suddenly seems like an impressive political figure with a long record of accomplishment and a statesman capable of bringing a major load of experience and depth to the ticket.

By current democrat party standards, Biden is a moderate, and he is on record criticizing the nutroots base’s extremism and urging democrats to run closer to the center.

Obama’s only real political record consists of a plethora of radical associations, so the choice of Biden has to be seen as a defensive move, representing a timid quiver of fright by an increasingly nervous deer (Obambi) trembling as the first rumbles of the avalanche which is going to bury him can be heard far off in the distance.

Personally, I don’t like Biden in the least.

He has always struck me as precisely what you’d get, if there was some magical process that could subtract the beer belly and florid nose from the old-time Irish saloon-keeper-cum-precinct-boss that would at the same time polish him up into a fashionable modern yuppie.

Biden is notorious for his hair implants. A typical photogenic democrat, he’s glib, shallow, and self-important, and he can be a vicious bully to representatives of the other party or judicial nominees.

23 Aug 2008

A Rather Expensive Utamaro

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Kitagawa Utamaro (1753?-1806), Mono omou koi (Reflective Love),
from the series of five prints entitled Kasen koi no bu (Anthology of Poems: The Love Section), c. 1793-94

Estimated to sell for $1,000,000 – $1,500,000 at the Christie’s auction sale of Japanese & Korean art scheduled for September 18, 2008 at Rockefeller Center in New York.


Jeffrey Olson
‘s excellent description reads (in part):


Her underrobe lies loose about her neck, as in a casual moment at the end of a day, and her eyes are unusually compressed to give the sense of the heavy-lidded stare of the daydreamer. Features or dress that might define personality or status or period are absent. Utamaro is using “delicious approximations” to decant the sensation from the scene.2
The visual glory of Reflective Love begins with the contrasts between the planes of color. The violet inner robe and matching silk hair tie are breathtaking. Purple, one of the most fugitive hues, tends to fade to grayish brown. The muted colors of the Reflective Love in the Musée Guimet prompted Richard Lane to remark on Utamaro’s subdued palette.3 Its cool tone conveys a somber mood, a brooding over something lost or never to be. The impression here—the vermilion lips and cuff lining, the velvet swirl of hair—is stirring (fig. 1). The underrobe is in a traditional tie-dyed dappled pattern (kanoko shibori moyo) that appears often in Japanese prints, usually on undergarments. Utamaro uses it to stage intimate settings, as here. The middle robe has the trellis design of plain-weave robes from crossing warp and weft threads. The fabric of the outerrobe represents crepe treated with wax resist so that the clusters of plovers and dots, symbolizing clouds or waves, appear white against the dyed grey.
The pink mica ground is exceedingly rare. …

Shibui Kiyoshi (1899-1992), a collector and scholar of Japanese woodcuts, offered that the pink mica of Reflective Love represents the light of a lantern. Extending his implication that the background is not simply a costly gloss, but is intended to establish mood by suggesting the time of day, one might equally see the pink as crepuscular. To take another step, consider the poem by Fujiwara Teika (1162-1241) using the same pivot, “vacant reverie” (omoi), to which Emperor Komyo linked his poem in the sequence mentioned above:

kino kyo Yesterday, today–
kumo no hatate nino matter how I gaze in vacant reverie
nagamu tote toward the cloud tips
mi mo senu hito no tinted in the evening, how can I know
omoi ya wa shiru the feelings of one I cannot see?
(Fuga waka shu X: 954)

2:19 recording.

23 Aug 2008

Obama Handbag

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Obama’s has his own seal and his own salute. Obviously he needed his own handbag. And it willl go beautifully, too, with his Donatella Versace signature collection.

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