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Jaws as G-rated human-animal friendship picture. link

Somebody took some typical Chinese restaurant menus and ran the radicals through a translating program, one very much like Google’s language tools or Alta Vista’s Babelfish, producing predictably comedic results.

Mike Reed has a web-site devoted to a gallery of the types of belligerents infesting Internet discussion forums. I recognize myself in more than one of his specimens, and my regular correspondents in many others.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi reaffirms the
Democratic Party’s promise to remain marginalized

The Onion reports:

WASHINGTON, DC—In a press conference on the steps of the Capitol Monday, Congressional Democrats announced that, despite the scandals plaguing the Republican Party and widespread calls for change in Washington, their party will remain true to its hopeless direction.

“We are entirely capable of bungling this opportunity to regain control of the House and Senate and the trust of the American people,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said to scattered applause. “It will take some doing, but we’re in this for the long and pointless haul.”

“We can lose this,” Reid added. “All it takes is a little lack of backbone.”

Despite plummeting poll numbers for the G.O.P nationwide and an upcoming election in which all House seats and 33 Senate seats are up for contention, Democrats pledged to maintain their party’s sheepish resignation.

“In times like these, when the American public is palpably dismayed with the political status quo, it is crucial that Democrats remain unfocused and defer to the larger, smarter, and better-equipped Republican machine,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said. “If we play our cards right, we will be intimidated to the point of total paralysis.”

Katherine DeBrecht has published another of her satirical children’s books. The new one evidently features various leftwing Hollywood celebrities popping out the hamper to tell the kids what to do and think, while urging them to buy expensive consumer goods. This is a sequel to her earlier Help! Mom! There are Liberals Under My Bed!

John Derbyshire suggests drastic measures:

Top ten reasons why Postmodernist philosophers should be burned alive in public squares atop piles of their books. (All taken from Stanley J. Grenz’s A Primer on Postmodernism.)

10. Whether we take the signified or the signifiers, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. (Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p.120.)

9. Knowledge … creates a progressive enslavement to its instinctive violence. (Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, and Practice, p.163.)

8. No longer a coherent cognito, man now inhabits the interstices, “the vacant interstellar spaces,” not as an object, still less as a subject… (Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method, p. 286.)

7. Understanding belongs to the being of that which is understood. (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, p.xix.)

6. Post-modernism signals the death of such “metanarratives” whose secretly terroristic function is to ground and legitimate the illusion of a “universal” human history. (Terry Eagleton, Awakening from Modernity, p.194.)

5. Does truth, then, arise out of nothing? It does indeed if by nothing is meant the mere not of that which is, and if we here think of that which is as an object present in the ordinary way, and thereafter comes to light and is challenged by the existence of the work as only presumptively a true being. (Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p.71.)

4. The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning. (Michel Foucault, What Is An Author? p.159.)

3. It is these predicates … whose force of generality, generalization, and generativity find themselves liberated, grafted onto a “new” concept of writing which also corresponds to whatever always has resisted the former organization of forces, which always has constituted the rmainder irreducible to the dominant force which organized the — to say it quickly — logocentric hierarchy. (Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, pp.329-330.)

2. Truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that this is what they are. (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, p.47.)

1. In the naming, the things named are called into their thinging. Thinging, they unfold world, in which things abide and so are abiding ones. (Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, pp.199-200.

Hat tip to Brian Highes.

Let’s hope this kid does not go into politics when he grows up. video

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Hat tip to Kathryn Jean Lopez.

Cruel, very cruel.

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Time, Inc. yesterday launched a long-awaited humor web-site aimed at young men. The web site is called Office Pirates. (What is this Gen Y thing about pirates anyway?)

One video featuring an older boss who can’t cope with email was kind of fun. Leland Wire