David Stein (on Facebook): “Right now, America’s being held hostage by an insane, bitter, vengeful, leftist black man who believes that real or imagined slights entitle him to harm decent people and terrorize a nation. But enough about Obama. Some dude named Chris Dorner’s holed up in a cabin.”
Whenever Obama says “jobs,†pour eight percent of your drink down the drain.
Take a shot whenever Obama mentions the word “gun†or other Second Amendment-related terminology.
When Obama engages in class warfare, stab the richest person in the room with your broken beer bottle (which was broken, of course, by smashing it on said gentleman’s head).
When Obama mentions “green energy,†swirl your drink in a windmill-like fashion and pour it down the drain.
When the president says “debt†or “deficit,†take one of your friend’s beers and promise to pay him back later.
If Obama says “It’s the right thing to do,†scream “YEAH IT IS!†and chug your whole drink.
If Obama says “Let me be clear,†take a shot of vodka or translucent alcohol of your choice.
If Obama mentions technology or technology education, “mupload†a drunk “selfie†to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
When the president uses the passive voice, hit your neighbor the right, and blame your neighbor on the left.
Drink a vodka with Red Bull every time Vice President Joe Biden looks like he’s about to fall asleep.
If Speaker of the House John Boehner’s complexion looks particularly orange, pour a screw driver.
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows! –Act 1, Scene 3.
Gagdad Bob manages to combine Catholicism, Pope Benedict XVI, kid’s baseball, Title IX, liberal guilt, and Barack Obama into a terrific rant. Which muse do you suppose makes a specialty of inspiring rants?
[P]ostmodernism, is opposed in principle to hierarchy (or pretends to be), which is the secret to why it cannot recognize or tolerate quality in any dimension, right down to the most trivial activity. It is why all the kids on my son’s baseball team are forced to engage in the ritual of receiving a meaningless trophy at the end of the season.
Talk about a fake benediction! Humans don’t have the power to forgive bad baseball playing.
This refusal to acknowledge hierarchy is also how the the left can confuse a person with a single meaningful accomplishment or ability with Obama.
The Daily Mail reports on spectacular accusations made by Benghazi: The Definitive Report, an eBook published yesterday, which apparently reveals the inside story behind the exposure and resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus.
David Petraeus was betrayed by his own bodyguards and vengeful high-ranking enemies in the CIA, who made sure his affair with his biographer was exposed to the public. …
Senior CIA officers targeted Petraeus because they didn’t like the way he was running the agency – focusing more on paramilitary operations than intelligence analysis. They used their political clout and their connections to force an FBI investigation of his affair with Paul Broadwell and make it public, according to ‘Benghazi: The Definitive Report.’
‘It was high-level career officers on the CIA who got the ball rolling on the investigation. It was basically a palace coupe to get Petraeus out of there,’ Jack Murphy, one of the authors, told MailOnline. …
Perhaps the most startling accusation in the book is that Petraeus’ affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell was leaked by the members of his personal protection detail.
The authors say that senior intelligence officers working on the 7th floor of Central Intelligence headquarters in Langley, Virginia, used their political clout to ensure that the FBI investigated the former Army general’s personal life.
They then told Petraeus that they would publicly humiliate him if he didn’t admit the affair and resign.
A lot of fact-checking will have to be done to substantiate the claims by Webb and Murphy. But from my own reporting, I have learned that no one runs afoul of senior CIA officials — or John Brennan — lightly or without peril. CIA officials angry at the Bush administration’s treatment of the agency in 2006 helped elevate the Valerie Plame affair into a national scandal and crippled much of the White House’s ability to conduct foreign policy. In the end, there was precious little evidence of any real security breach or wrongdoing beyond a perjury conviction of Scooter Libby, a top aide to Vice President Cheney.
Lightning strikes the Vatican after the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI
Dante Alighieri took a dim view of Papal resignation, consigning Pope Celestine V, who resigned his office after serving only five months in 1294, to the anteroom of Hell.
Virgil describes the residents of that region of the Underworld:
Questo misero modo
tegnon l’anime triste di coloro
che visser sanza ’nfamia e sanza lodo.
Poscia ch’io v’ebbi alcun riconosciuto,
vidi e conobbi l’ombra di colui
che fece per viltade il gran rifiuto.
“This miserable state
Holds the sad souls of those
Who lived without infamy or praise.
Commingled are they with that caitiff choir
Of Angels, who have not rebellious been,
Nor faithful were to God, but were for self.
The heavens expelled them, not to be less fair;
Nor them the nethermost abyss receives,
For glory none the damned would have from them.” …
When some among them I had recognized,
I looked, and I beheld the shade of him
Who made through cowardice the great refusal.
———————————-
The (regarded by the Church, and scholars generally, as apocryphal) Papal Prophecies allegedly received in a vision by St. Malachy, 12th century Bishop of Armagh, interestingly predict that there will only be one more pope after Benedict.
The next pope will preside over the Church in a time of persecution. The city of Rome will be destroyed, and the Last Judgment will arrive.
The prophecy says (in Latin):
In psecutione extrema S.R.E. sedebit.
Petrus Romanus, qui pascet oues in multis tribulationibus: quibus transactis ciuitas septicollis diruetur, & Iudex tremendus iudicabit populum suum. Finis.
“In the extreme persecution of the Holy Roman Church, there will preside. Peter the Roman, who will pasture his sheep in many tribulations: and when these things are completed, the city of seven hills will be destroyed, and the terrible judge will judge his people. The End.”
———————————-
I thought I was pretty much the only pedant likely to know about the Prophecies of St. Malachy, but I found that the Irish Central was up on all this, and actually beat me to the punch in informing contemporary mankind on the world’s imminent end.
Carving of a head inv. 30001, Mammoth ivory/bone, c.26,000 years old, Provenance: Archaeological excavation 1936 Dolnà Věstonice.
Lent by: Moravian Museum, Anthropos Institute, Brno, Czech Republic
The above head of a woman, carved in Mammoth ivory, and found in Moravia in 1936 (or 1937) is thought to be 26,000 years old and represents the oldest portrait of a human being ever found.
It is one of a large number of items being featured at the British Museum’s current exhibition titled (Gawd help us!):”Ice Age art: arrival of the modern mind,” running 7 February – 26 May 2013.
Congressman Joe Courtney, who represents Connecticut’s Second District (essentially the whole eastern part of the state), was, I think, understandably offended when he found that Stephen Spielberg’s “Lincoln” (2012) depicts two out of three representatives from Connecticut (presumably including his own predecessor, Augustus Brandegee), voting against the Thirteenth Amendment— you know the one abolishing Slavery.
Courtney indignantly wrote Mr. Spielberg a letter of protest, noting that the Congressional Record shows that all four Connecticut congressmen, not three, (hardly surprisingly) voted for the 13th Amendment.
People from Connecticut, at the time, were generally Abolitionists. Of Mr. Brandegee, Bonesman, DKE, Yale Class of 1849, who represented Mr. Courtney’s part of Connecticut, a eulogist wrote at the time of his death in 1904:
He stood for high ideals through all his public life. At a time when the Abolitionist met scorn and contumely, he laboured zealously to free the slave. A member of Congress through the war, he became the trusted friend of Lincoln, and rendered signal service for the cause of the Union. And then and ever after he put aside official station for the simple life.
He was a knightly man – hypocrisy, shame, expedients, pretensions – the whole brood of lies and deceits – were his enemies. He fought them all his days and when the end came, passed over God’s threshold with escutcheon unstained and with plume untarnished.
Tony Kushner, the screenwriter, said Rep. Courtney was out of line.
Kushner responded in a letter of his own, which acknowledged that the scene in question is not consistent with the historical record. However, he proceeded to defend the changes as part of the filmmaking process.
Kushner admitted the following in his letter: “We changed two of the delegation’s votes, and we made up new names for the men casting those votes, so as not to ascribe any actions to actual persons who didn’t perform them. In the movie, the voting is also organized by state, which is not the practice in the House.â€
The screenwriter further explained the reasoning behind the modifications, writing, “These alterations were made to clarify to the audience the historical reality that the Thirteenth Amendment passed by a very narrow margin that wasn’t determined until the end of the vote.â€
Kushner distinguishes “historical drama†from actual history.
“Here’s my rule: Ask yourself, ‘Did this thing happen?’ If the answer is yes, then it’s historical. Then ask, ‘Did this thing happen precisely this way?’ If the answer is yes, then it’s history; if the answer is no, not precisely this way, then it’s historical drama,†he wrote.
The screenwriter’s note contained a bit of sarcasm.
“I’m sorry if anyone in Connecticut felt insulted by these 15 seconds of the movie, although issuing a Congressional press release startlingly headlined ‘Before The Oscars…’ seems a rather flamboyant way to make that known. I’m deeply heartened that the vast majority of moviegoers seem to have understood that this is a dramatic film and not an attack on their home state.”
The Thirteenth Amendment was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, by a vote of 38 to 6; by the House of Representatives on January 31, 1865, by a vote of 119 to 56. Passage was by “a narrow margin” in the sense that amending the US Constitution requires a 2/3’s vote of both houses.
But, you know how it is, “the film-making process” requires the artful manipulation of the audience’s emotions and powerful appeals to their prejudices. Screenwriters and directors need to be free to take certain liberties with mere historical facts in order to get their message across.
Responding to Texas Governor Rick Perry’s invitation to California businesses to move to Texas, where they can find “low taxes, predictable regulations, [a] fair legal system and [a] skilled workforce,” Jerry Brown sneered:
“Everybody with half a brain is coming to California.”
which does basically explain the political situation out there.
Yesterday, the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta (SMOM), the oldest surviving crusading order, celebrated the 900th Anniversary of its receipt of the Papal Bull, “Pie postulatio voluntatis,” from Pope Paschal II which approved the founding of a hospital in Jerusalem, and recognized the foundation as a religious order under Papal Authority, free to elect its own superiors, and immune to all other secular and religious authority.
Some 4500 knights of the Order from countries all over the world marched in procession and attended a Papal mass in the Basilica of St. Peter.
Membership in the Order has been a coveted distinction for centuries. Such famous Americans as the late CIA Director William Casey and the late conservative writer William F. Buckley Jr. were knights of Malta.
The Order once enjoyed sovereignty of the islands of Rhodes and Malta in the Mediterranean. Although the Order is still recognized today as a sovereign entity, issues its own postage stamps and passports, and has diplomatic relations more than 100 countries, its territoriality is currently restricted to two buildings in Rome.
The Order of St. John is most famous historically for the heroic defense of the island of Malta by 500 knights assisted by a few thousand Spanish and Maltese auxiliaries against nearly 50,000 Turks in 1565.
I was in the lobby of the Parsons School of Design when I had the sudden urge to pee. So I located the restroom, and discovered THIS SIGN on the door. I pondered my predicament for a moment, when someone noticed my hesitation and said: “Go on in, it’s for everybody.”
I opened the door slowly. This was no single-occupancy restroom. This was a multi-stalled bathroom complex. Inside there were three girls, who all made awkward eye contact with me when I walked in. One of them shrugged her shoulders: “Yep,” she said, “we’re all in here together.” She didn’t seem too excited about the fact.
I chose a stall and shut the door behind me. Aiming for that sweet spot right above the water line, I tried to pee as quietly as possible. The toilet had an automatic flusher, so when I finished, I turned around and left the stall. I heard no flush behind me. Outside, ANOTHER girl was waiting to use my stall.
“This university believes that the way of the amateur is the only one to provide satisfactory results.”
–Master of Caius College, “Chariots of Fire” (1981).
As the Wall Street Journal reports, a Baltimore hairdresser is proving the college master right.
By day, Janet Stephens is a hairdresser at a Baltimore salon, trimming bobs and wispy bangs. By night she dwells in a different world. At home in her basement, with a mannequin head, she meticulously re-creates the hairstyles of ancient Rome and Greece.
Ms. Stephens is a hairdo archaeologist.
Her amateur scholarship is sticking a pin in the long-held assumptions among historians about the complicated, gravity-defying styles of ancient times. Basically, she has set out to prove that the ancients probably weren’t wearing wigs after all.
“This is my hairdresserly grudge match with historical representations of hairstyles,” says Ms. Stephens, who works at Studio 921 Salon & Day Spa, which offers circa 21st-century haircuts.
Her coiffure queries began, she says, when she was killing time in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore back in 2001. A bust of the Roman empress Julia Domna caught her eye. “I thought, holy cow, that is so cool,” she says, referring to the empress’s braided bun, chiseled in stone. She wondered how it had been built. “It was amazing, like a loaf of bread sitting on her head,” says Ms. Stephens.
A hairstylist by day, Janet Stephens has become a “hair archaeologist” studying the intricacies of ancient Greek and Roman hairstyles. As WSJ’s Abigail Pesta reports, she’s been published in the academic community on her research, which she says proves the intricate hairstyles were not wigs.
She tried to re-create the ‘do on a mannequin. “I couldn’t get it to hold together,” she says. Turning to the history books for clues, she learned that scholars widely believed the elaborately teased, towering and braided styles of the day were wigs.
She didn’t buy that. Through trial and error she found that she could achieve the hairstyle by sewing the braids and bits together, using a needle. She dug deeper into art and fashion history books, looking for references to stitching.
In 2005, she had a breakthrough. Studying translations of Roman literature, Ms. Stephens says, she realized the Latin term “acus” was probably being misunderstood in the context of hairdressing. Acus has several meanings including a “single-prong hairpin” or “needle and thread,” she says. Translators generally went with “hairpin.”
The single-prong pins couldn’t have held the intricate styles in place. But a needle and thread could. It backed up her hair hypothesis.
In 2007, she sent her findings to the Journal of Roman Archaeology. “It’s amazing how much chutzpah you have when you have no idea what you’re doing,” she says. “I don’t write scholarly material. I’m a hairdresser.”
John Humphrey, the journal’s editor, was intrigued. “I could tell even from the first version that it was a very serious piece of experimental archaeology which no scholar who was not a hairdresser—in other words, no scholar—would have been able to write,” he says.
He showed it to an expert, who found the needle-and-thread theory “entirely original,” says Mr. Humphrey, whose own scholarly work has examined arenas for Roman chariot racing.
Ms. Stephens’ article was edited and published in 2008, under the headline “Ancient Roman Hairdressing: On (Hair)Pins and Needles.” The only other article by a nonarchaeologist that Mr. Humphrey can recall publishing in the journal’s 25-year history was written by a soldier who had discovered an unknown Roman fort in Iraq.
Citing budgetary concerns, the United States announced today that it would discontinue regular Saturday drone strikes on U.S. citizens, beginning in 2014.
In announcing the decision, the White House spokesman Jay Carney acknowledged that the cutback in drone service was “bound to be controversial.†“In the United States, we’ve always prided ourselves on our ability to target our citizens with drone strikes, Monday through Saturday, regardless of the weather,†he said. “We know that losing Saturday drone service is going to take some getting used to.â€
, an eBook published yesterday, which apparently reveals the inside story behind the exposure and resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus.
