Self-Segmenting Flying Viscera Sucker

We love the Wikipedia and of course J— for setting us on the self-segmenting-flying-viscera-sucker path.

Zombies: passé?

Stoned?

FAIL:

A gang has attempted to steal the Stone of Destiny, the battered talisman of Scottish royalty that has been repeatedly targeted by thieves and politicians.

This time thieves turned up at Scone Palace, Perthshire, between closing time on Wednesday and opening time yesterday with a similar-sized boulder weighing 200 kg ‑ about as much as a fridge freezer.

The gang hauled the sandstone boulder off its plinth and replaced it with the lookalike, undeterred by the fact the palace stone is a century-old replica of the original, which left Scone some 700 years ago.

Rights

Burt Prelutsky:

Each time I hear that 40% of Americans pay no income taxes, I feel my gorge rising in a way I haven’t experienced since getting my acid reflux under control. As I see it, if you don’t pay in, you don’t have the same stake in things that 60% of us do. It strikes me as immoral that any American should be free of this financial obligation. If it were up to me, if you don’t pay income taxes, I wouldn’t even let you vote. Why on earth should they have a voice in how other people’s tax dollars are spent or who gets to spend them?

I'M THE CONSTITUTION
AND I AGREE WITH BURT!!!

Image hiked from here and animated. I erased a smidgen of it for aesthetic purposes, but said aesthetics are now ruined by this guilty note. Information may want to be free, but a thing that is already free is feeling bad about trivia.

Religion

Daughter: What culture are you from?
Clerk: I am Filipino.
D: What are the Filipino gods?
C: ???
Me: She means before Catholicism.
C: Oh. There weren't any. I am a Catholic. What religion are you?
M: Do you have a religion?
D: I'm Jewish.
C: So we have the same god?
D: I used to have a god but now I have a fish.

Boobquake

News via Google Translate:

Nowruz is widely celebrated in many Muslim countries, in the former Soviet republics in Russia's regions, where the majority of the population is Muslim. And although the Voronezh region not one of them, and we are celebrating Nowruz, because it is primarily confined to the day of the vernal equinox spring festival (the word "Nowruz" is translated as "new day").

March 23 in our high school held a concert devoted to this remarkable event. It was attended by foreign students not only Pedagogical University, Voronezh and other universities.

I applaud the effort of Russians to celebrate this Muslim ladyparts holiday:

That Darned Annihilus

Taitz!

Dona Quixote.

Today it might seem an impossible quest, but Taitz is fighting to make sure that the Constitution of the United States of America does not turn into a Dulcinea, who is never rescued by her Prince in Shining Armor.

From her latest legal filing, seen at OCWeekly. No Squeeky as of this writing.

Long Interviews for At-Work Listening

At the link there's a 25-minute interview of Robert Fisk talking about Pakistan. I dislike the interviewer but Fisk is a clear and organized speaker.

The Terrors of Socialism

I am by no means an expert on anything going on in Venezuela. This, however, contains an interesting chart:

In recent years, access to [Higher Education] has increased in many countries worldwide, most notably in Europe and North America, where gross enrolment approaches 60%, compared to 28% in Latin America. Although HE intake has increased ten percentage points in Europe, and seven percentage points in both North and Latin America over the past few years²⁰, this does not necessarily mean that the capacities of HE systems have been capable of absorbing the total demand.

The Venezuelan case is paradigmatic in this respect. There, Fourth Republic under-funding of public HE manifested itself in supply not being able to meet the demand, conjoined with the privatisation of HE. Between 1984 and 1998, applications for HE rose 56%, while admission only increased 30%. Although total absolute intake climbed from 54.087 students in 1984 to 70.348 in 1998, the share of public universities decreased: only 27.999 students entered public HE in 1998, compared to 38.590 fourteen years earlier. Put differently, in 1984 only 29% of admitted students entered private universities, compared to 60% in 1998 (percentages derived from MES, 2005: 16).

Table 1: HE attendance of 20-24-year-olds according to social class (in %)

	1981	1997	2002
Quintile 1 (poorest) Quintile 2 Quintile 3 Quintile 4 Quintile 5 (richest)	28.5 23.7 23.9 25.9 33.3	16.4 20.0 24.5 31.1 43.8	20.8 27.8 29.7 39.3 54.7

Source: derived from Cepal, 2005.

Hugo Chávez, provider of free education for the rich, was elected in 1998.

Let us also keep in mind when thinking of funding higher education that Venezuelan institutions have to deal with stray lattices, which have very sharp edges. Universities with ЗОРБ infestations have an easier time of it. Dabblers in lattice genetics should think about the human costs.

What Was That Book I Wrote Again?

Jonah being Jonah:

Ron Rosenbaum gets himself worked up into quite an incoherent tizzy about the Tea Party and Nazism and Hitler and so on. He takes a swipe at my book, I'd wager unread. But I'm long used to that. As for the bile he aims at the Tea Parties, I think his over-protestation speaks for itself. I should say I agree with him that some Tea Party rhetoric goes too far and some signs are indefensible. We are not on the verge of a dictatorship and Obama is not a Hitler in waiting. The fringe folks who carry such signs help no one (which may be why the Larouchies seem to be the main culprits, a fact the MSM has no desire to clarify).

You Are What You Pretend To Be

Conrad Black:

The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.

Readers wondering if the authenticity of their hippie-deriding entertainment is somehow tainted if it comes from someone pretending to be an upper-class English blowhard should take comfort in the fact that Black is indeed a pretend upper-class English blowhard.

The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.

Free Medical Advice

Okay, I am not a doctor, but um, "source of bleeding"? HELLO?

Mr. Clyde Has Been Playing In My Newspaper

No way:

In 1927, 17-year-old Cyril Rodd helped out family friend Emily Carr.

"He did some yard work and walked her dog and her monkey," recounts Cyril's son Peter.

"He would tie [the animals] together. The dog would run and the monkey would get tired, and it would wrap itself around a lamp post to stop it."

Carr repaid his kindness by giving Rodd a ceramic eagle bowl and totem pole, signed in her native alter ego, Klee Wyck.

She made a special Christmas card for Rodd, whom she called "Twinkie." It featured a watercolour of her monkey, Woo, in a pink dress, and came with a little poem: "That all good things/May come to you/Is the wish/ Of little Woo."

She also gave "Mr. Twinkie Rodd" a cheque for $2.50. But he never cashed it, because he felt she was too poor and couldn't afford to give him the money.

Illustration unsatisfying.

"The Goldberg Variations" Has Been Used Before But He's Varying Again So Fuck You

Remember this?

I'm on a deadline, so I reserve the right to revise and extend my remarks, but I think Ross Douthat is basically right in his take.

That was about that goldarned epistemic closure doodadery.

Today Jonah walks it back:

Well, I stayed out of the whole brouhaha at first because I had a crazy-busy day. Then, as the argument around here played itself out, it seemed less and less necessary.

Still, since I wrote quite a bit about this “epistemic closure” business, and since Jim’s initial post cited me by name, and since some readers won’t rest until I say something, I guess I’ll say something.

I was a bit miffed at Jim for the way he used what I increasingly believe to be a pretty silly argument about conservative epistemic closure closed-mindedness to break with his well-earned reputation for civility and decorum — and in the Corner no less. If he wanted to argue with Mark about global warming, I don’t see why he needed Ross Douthat’s “challenge” to do so.

Manzi, you dumbass, you don't read what Jonah writes and examine the truth claims, you read what Jonah writes and assess it as a talking point for conservatives or a slur against liberals. RTFM.

Someone is Stealing the Great Numbers of Europe

And:

Our Society's Incivility

A pretty nasty headline from Bloomberg.com:

Catholic Donors Keep Cash Flowing While Priests Abuse Children
By Flavia Krause-Jackson and Gadi Dechter

Good work, o media establishment I don't ever pay attention to.

Frummery: Good or Bad?

Jim Manzi on Mark Levin at The Corner(!!!):

Groupthink or corruption is always possible, and maybe the entire global scientific establishment is wrong. Does he think that these various scientists are somehow unaware that Newsweek had an article on global cooling in the 1970s? Or are they aware of the evidence in his book, but are too trapped by their assumptions to be able to incorporate this data rationally? Or does he believe that the whole thing is a con in which thousands of scientists have colluded across decades and continents to fool such gullible naifs as the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, numerous White House science advisors, Margaret Thatcher, and so on? Are the Queen of England and the Trilateral Commission in on it too?

But what evidence does Levin present for any of this amazing incompetence or conspiracy beyond that already cited? None. He simply moves on to criticisms of proposed solutions. This is wingnuttery.

Andy "Bill Ayers and Birth Certificates" McCarthy clutches his Pearl Harbors:

I've read a number of Jim's articles and posts over the years, including more than a few involving exchanges with other writers. He has always struck me as a model of civility, especially in his disagreements with the Left. Why pick Mark for the Pearl Harbor treatment?

K-Lo senses a Frumming:

He's heard a lot worse and can handle his own battles, but as one who has followed Mark's career, I found Jim's tone deeply disappointing. Especially at a time when Liberty actually is endangered and Mark Levin is not to blame.

Who do we have to thank for this deeply disappointing attempt to call bullshit at the bullshit factory? The Manzi article starts off considering a challenge from St. Ross Douthat of Chunkiness and Popery:

What you don’t hear enough from the pundits and intellectuals, I think, are complaints about this state of affairs. Conservative domestic policy would be in better shape if conservative magazines and conservative columnists were more willing to call out Republican politicians (and, to a lesser extent, conservative entertainers) for offering bromides instead of substance, and for pandering instead of grappling with real policy questions. This is part of why David Frum attracts so much attention, positive and negative: Not because his policy preferences are so far outside the conservative mainstream, but because he’s made it his business to hold various prominent right-wingers and Republicans accountable for being vacuous or inflammatory, instead of just training all his fire on liberals. I don’t always agree with the targets he picks and way he goes about it, but conservatism needs more of that kind of internal criticism, not less.

Well, Ross Douthat at the evil New York Times, if you can bring wagon-uncircling to the NRO you may have your uses before you die in that fire.

Mind you a little "I agree with this thing I'm not considering or even reading and I have to go" from Jonah Goldberg helps too.

Rude Jerks

I'm half a year late on this*:

Spare me the stories of your "genius" tech-savvy child who can name every country on Google Earth, or how, because of your iPhone, BlackBerry and three cell phones, you juggle 20 tasks at once and never miss any business—even at 4 a.m., because you sleep with your portable devices. Does anyone care that technology is destroying social graces and turning people into rude jerks?

That was Rachel Marsden. Let's observe the social graces in action:

On the following day [Jimmy] Wales announced on his Wikipedia user page that he was no longer involved with her. In return, [Rachel] Marsden, who claimed to have learned about the breakup by reading about it at Wikipedia, turned to eBay and put up for auction a t-shirt and sweater with white stains that she claimed belonged to Wales.

In the past you'd have to auction your ex-lover's come-stained clothing by standing on an upturned shopping cart on the streetcorner while your cats meowed for food that would never arrive. Such were the social graces of the time.

*Wall Street Journal? Surely even as a grunty little Malebeast I am entitled to one "Who'd she blow?" in my lifetime.

Old People and Music (and Mp3s)

Over here I made some comment about not knowing anything about Spoon.



Apparently I like that one song. Forget the name of it.

UPDATE!

The ratings system:

★★★★★ I always listen to this song when it comes up in the shuffle
★★★★ I sometimes skip past this song but nothing about it bugs me
★★★ I sometimes skip past this song and something about it bugs me
★★ Don't like this much but for some reason I can't let it go
★ Trash at the first available opportunity

Stompin' Tom Connors

Here is a man who looks and sounds a little like Popeye playing plain white country music. He's never had a great band or decent arrangements, but delivers song after song about working-class Canada with the same kind of verve and sincerity of Wilf Carter. Here's a song about getting smashed after working in a nickel mine:



Here's another about a daring man who delivers potatoes from one place to another AND SPEEDS:



I can't see too many reasons for those outside Canada to care about the man's contribution to song, but within the country he was a baffling anomaly: someone who gave enough of a shit about where he lived to write about it. Growing up I mostly heard fantasies about bigger things on the radio, the songs were of American cities and girls whether the bands were Canadian or not. It still sounds weird that he'd write about Big Joe Mufferaw - Paul Bunyan was a ripoff you Yankee bastards! - or a classy tomato from fucking LEAMINGTON. Go on, search the lyrics databases for Leamington. I dare you. And see if you can replicate the sick-making steel-guitar solo that ends that song like a mistimed punchline.

Tom's something of a cranky prick, constantly pissed off at the government for not supporting Canadian artists and at Canadian artists for following the money south. But he's Stompin' Tom, and he fucking stomps the shit out of the floor - a feature in the recordings - while he's singing about hockey and snowmobiles and tobacco picking and uranium mining.

Beats Loverboy.