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In fact, I paid good money for the affliction. But I haven't found it hinders my dating prospects.
Maybe Ms. Meghan should consider the appeal of a gal who sprinkles the word "like" into every sentence as if it's a Tourettes-like tic. I've found that to be as bad as a cold sore, for inspiring respect and attraction in the opposite sex.
But that's just me.
The most charming and handsome peep on the Neo-Con side sets the record straight on the notion of settling for less, vis a vis the so-called Conservative Party of Canada...
With all due respect to my intellectual betters, though I have no doubt there will be valid criticisms to be levied against the new Atlas Shrugged movie, this one seems to be so obtuse as to have come from someone who hadn’t even bothered to read the book…
O’Rourke goes on to make a point I’ve made here previously, which is that Shrugged’s producers really should’ve considered either: a) setting the film in some sort of ‘alternate’ future, in which trains were not considered the most vital means of transportation (requiring some alteration of Rand’s basic storyline), or; b) simply setting the film in an ‘alternate’ version of 1957, when the novel was actually published.
I suppose as a shallow observation this would ring true, but if the movie stayed true to the tenor of the novel, even the first time I read it the theme that stood out most prominently to me was that of a future America in social and industrial decline. Starting from the first page, it is obvious that it’s humming industrial engine is slowly breaking down, losing all its vital parts. The entire book is sprinkled with tiny vignettes that serve as marks of the decline – towns where roads have been neglected back to dirt and impoverished hovels reverting back to horse and cart for travel, due to a decline in manufacturing and rationing of fuel.
When Rand spends so much time painting the picture of an environment where technology, innovation and success have been stifled for decades, what could possibly lead the reader/watcher to expect a future where cross-continental travel is accomplished by any means that would require those vital incentives to exist?
At the dawn of the industrial revolution, a cross-continental railroad was a symbol of the height of man’s accomplishment. We have progressed much further since then, but if you project forward into the beggar’s nightmare we seem to be descending into – one so prophetically detailed by Rand in the novel – it seems foolish to believe that the inevitable decline wouldn’t degrade things to the point where we too have to revert back to the railroad as the only reliable long distance transportation left. Her story begins when other more advanced technologies have already been squandered or lost to incompetence. But Rand was careful to warn that the decline wouldn’t stop there. It would simply be the tipping point where the loss of the railroad, as the last vestige of a better world, would signal our full plummet into darkness – a darkness symbolized by the loss of all electrical power on the eastern seaboard, at the novel’s end. If you honestly expected the future laid out by Rand to include anything more futuristic than a rusting railroad, then I respectfully think you’ve sorely missed the whole point.
So many of us have been conditioned to see the dystopian future as highly repressive yet technologically advanced beyond imagination. It is to the credit of authors like Orwell and Zamyatin that they were able to leave that imprint as a general assumption of the totalitarian future. But I once read a criticism of this template, from Rand, that technological advancement and innovation requires freedom for an individual to think and experiment, and in a totalitarian state where those are repressed or punished no such advancement is possible. With this I completely agree and would even point out that this very concept is borne out in reality whenever one looks to the east of us, at the state of North Korea.
In this context, when you really do think about it, who are the silly ones here? The ones who build a story in the future around a railroad, or the ones who expect a future as painted by Rand to have anything better?
***
And one last thing on P.J. O'Rourke's smarmy comment about John Galt presumably being played by a raincoat...In the book, a shadowy figure in a raincoat was all we saw of Galt until the second of the novel's three parts. It's part of the suspense. It's disappointing to see such a shallow toss off from someone who usually engages in more depth.
To my favorite salacious stalker...
Wow. There isn't a lot that I have to say in response other than that if a Conservative prime minister needs to be forced to stop spending money that he doesn't have, then he isn't particularly conservative. And, amazingly enough, electing a lot of Conservatives was supposed to be the cure to stop the Liberals from pissing away a ton of money, even though they, y'know, balanced the books and everything. At what point is electing Conservatives going to stop costing so much fucking money?
And why do I feel like I have to keep bringing up the contradiciton of the so-called "Law & Order" party bear-hugging and giving slobbery kisses to Mr. The-Law-Don't-Apply-to-Indians, "Caledonia" Fantino?
Sheesh! Yer makin' ma head hert!
***Via Kathy...Fantino's do-nothing policy still reigns in Caledonia. Now he wants your vote, and so do the two-faced hacks that share the party banner with him. SHAME.
Your required reading assignment for the day...
Living in an era that forces editorial cartoonists into witness protection, in a culture that barely bats an eye when the federal government prosecutes "indecent" films, the free speech battles of the past seem almost quaint by comparison. Recall that in 1968, a jury huffed that I Am Curious: Yellow, a plodding Swedish film that succeeded in making sex unsexy, was "utterly without social value." The decision was soon overturned on appeal, the forecasted moral collapse failed to materialize, and Swedish embassies across Christendom were left unmolested. Andres Serrano’s photograph "Piss Christ," the Brooklyn Museum’s “Sensation” exhibit, Robert Mapplethorpe’s bullwhip all provoked pickets, editorials, angry letters—and they all provoked debate.
In 1989, when Iran’s theocracy suborned the murder of novelist Salman Rushdie for having written a supposedly blasphemous book, The Satanic Verses, only a handful of intellectuals, habitués of both left and right, attacked the author for being impolite to "a billion" religious adherents. Author Roald Dahl whimpered that “In a civilized world we all have a moral obligation to apply a modicum of censorship to our own work in order to reinforce this principle of free speech.” Twenty years ago this was a shockingly contrarian sentiment, today it’s depressingly de rigueur.
Important to bear in mind, as you hear more calls for a law to curb incendiary speech.
Much like my friend Skippy, I don't much care for when a big-news tragedy hits and the hacks start lining up to parse every angle and split every hair. Case in point, Victor Davis Hanson - who I do honestly like as a rule - starts his recent statement on the political firestorm surrounding the shootings in Tuscon Arizona, with this catchy, yet disingenuous throw-away opener...
Very few Americans are fans of both The Communist Manifestoand Mein Kamp, as the Tucson killer, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, apparently was.
Not to ruin a perfectly inflammatory insinuation, but when you take into account the entire list from which these texts were cherry picked, it seems as though the pundit who decries those trying to score political points for one side of the aisle or t'other has deliberately selected for mention only the books that would fit his chosen narrative and elicit the most favorable agreement from his audience.
Sharing the killer's list of faves with these notable fascist and communist tomes, are such firebrand titles as The Wizard of Oz, To Kill A Mockingbird and We The Living - the last of which is most noted for being the virulently anti-communist screed authored by the notoriously anti-left wing Ayn Rand.
In fact, perusing the whole list gives one no further insight into Jared Loughner than the impression of a muddled, confused and contradictory mind. This can likely be attributed to the fact that whatever else he may be, Jared Loughner is a crackpot. Which leads me to wonder why anyone who is still in at least marginal control of their own faculties, would think that any logic, motive or sentiment can be garnered from an examination of the guy's reading habits.
He is insane. The things he does only make sense to him, and the voices in his head. Therefore, it makes perfect sense to hold in equally high esteem both Mein Kampf and Peter Pan - but only to him. Anyone else who professes to see some obscure logic, or who claims to have divined some masterful grasp of the kook's inner psyche from the list of his bathroom reading, is either equally addled with mental illness or is simply taking a few cheap shots in the dark as a way to pander to the base under the guise of the moral high road.
They're books...not tea leaves.
Perhaps too much political hay has been made of the public consternation shown by Moe Tucker, to a party which one would expect her to rally behind. It's not to say that the reams of analysis on this particular defection are wrong or even misguided. Most people who have cared to comment know a lot more about American politics than I ever will.
In my experience though, I have met folks who staunchly identify themselves primarily as rebels -- but not against anything in particular, other than the prevailing sentiment of the day. As such, they tend to switch allegiances part way through life and characterize it as some sort of revelation when in actual fact, it's nothing more than switching teams for the sake of perpetually being on the side of the societal underdog.
Back in Moe's heyday, being a rebel meant dying your hair funny colours, piercing strange parts of your body, listening to bad anarchist alt-rock and shouting for the take down of the establishment, etc. Now that those "values" or attitudes have become mainstream, these aging rebels need something else to be angry and disenfranchised about. What better underdog team these days, than the conservative side of the aisle?
Then again, maybe the complaints are genuine. They are certainly justified. I just suspect there are some people who will always assume the contrarian role on any question. And principled stands, these are not.
If this story is even a little bit true, the Conservative Party of Canada deserves to be blasted to political oblivion for at least a generation...
Julian Fantino, for years Ontario’s best known and highest-ranking cop, will be the Conservative candidate in the Vaughan federal by-election when it’s called by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the Toronto Star has learned.
A senior government source said “he’s going for it, no doubt” — even as the Prime Minister’s office tried to douse expectations that the former Ontario Provincial Police commissioner was making the leap to federal politics.
“I was told it was a done deal,” another senior Conservative said.
Fantino would be expected to ultimately land in cabinet if the Conservatives are re-elected.
Getting the retired and often controversial hard-nosed, law and order former Toronto police chief is considered a coup for the federal Conservatives, who have been courting him for some time.
Ontario Progressive Conservatives were also trying to woo Fantino to run at the provincial level.
If Julian "Caledonia" Fantino is the Conservative's idea of "most eligible bachelor", they have no business wrapping themselves in the fake mantle of "law and order" they have been assuming of late.
The bigger question I have, is why Fantino wouldn't run to be MP of Haldimand County? Hmmm?
...but not the least bit surprising.
I have a son who will be due for university in 2 years. You can imagine how short the list of choices has become, when ridiculous fiascoes such as this, are the order fo the day at an institution of "higher learning".
The Morlocks are now, officially, in charge of learning in this country.
Looks to me like Francois Houle better watch out for an incitement charge.
BCF has more, including a picture of a spokesmodel(?) for Students united, who looks oddly familiar...
I, for one, always thought that smarmy, obnoxious road runner had it coming...
How many classic cartoons were based on the premise of the perennially hapless hunter – Elmer Fudd tracking Bugs Bunny, Wile E. Coyote chasing Road Runner – caught in booby-traps of their own making?
For novice PC Leader Tim Hudak, his party's protest over the Liberal government's proposed harmonized sales tax produced a couple of unforeseen outcomes.
[..]
Hudak said that, irrespective of rules, sometimes "extraordinary measures" are warranted. With that utterance he undercut his own law-and-order positioning and his credibility on long-running issues of civil disobedience.
What Hudak essentially did was give licence to civil disobedience any time anyone feels sufficiently aggrieved to arbitrarily take "extraordinary measures."
How will he stand, for instance, against any future native highway blockades in support of land claims? How can he say his right to extraordinary measures trumps anyone else's?
How can he go to Caledonia, say, and denounce native blockades and occupations there that his own caucus members have long railed against but, in essence, mimicked?
Regarding the "land claims" logic, being used here to widdle down the credibility of the opposition: Doesn't it stand to reason that by the same token, the government's efforts to forcibly remove the caucus "protestors" undermines their credibility in the face of the utter lack of action they've taken with the protestors currently entering their fourth year of occupation on disputed land in Caledonia?
Maybe Hudak and Co. decided to go with a tactic that's proven to work with this government. See? The Indians can still teach us a few things.
Carrie Prejean needs to put on her "big girl" pants (or any, at all) and come to understand one very important fact of the big bad world out there...you should never put anything on film, that you wouldn't be willing to admit to in public.
To be perfectly frank, I don't give a hoot if she humped the entire high school football team and posted the video on YouTube. She's a grown up, and she does it just like the rest of us (I presume). A few tawdry nipple shots and a masturbatory display are hardly something that, in this day and age, one should be made to feel ashamed of. What is striking is how little heat the men involved in this steamy flaying are taking, for the less-than-gallant action of releasing what was supposed to be a private correspondence.
The reason little miss poster-girl-for-traditional-marriage is having the constant vapors over this, is because both she and many of her supporters held her up as a paragon of virtue, pure as the driven snow and unimpeachable. BIG MISTAKE. She is obviously none of those things and because all of the focus was on presenting her in that light, the honest discussion that spawned from her pageant appearance is now lost in the scandal of cover up and equivocation around her reputation.
I thought it was really shabby, the way she was treated by the insufferable Perez Hilton and I think it was disgraceful that the pageant officials appeared to allow his bigotry to influence her win. I also think the debate that sprung from her ordeal was an important one to have.
It's a shame that not enough people of the puritanical Republican bent understand that honesty is a virtue held in much higher regard, by more people, than modesty. And immodest behavior is not, on it's own, a good reason to disregard a person's character.
This is a young, attractive, single woman, who apparently likes to have sex. She shouldn't be pretending she's not, and she shouldn't have to make apologies for it. Now what she is guilty of is dishonesty and hypocrisy. Those are both good reasons to cast her aside.
See? Now that's how it's done!
Because you just knew I would.
If Megan McCain wants to plump her girls up to her chin and put a little "Is baby hungry?" look on her face, why do we care about this?
I mean, I know why her dad might care or maybe a boyfriend or little brother. They would all have reasons to care, though not even really good ones.
But why do we? And by "we", I really mean the stodgy, snipey stiff-wads who tsked and tutted and tossed around the word slut, because a pretty, single girl had the temerity to act a little saucy!
No wonder conservatives have a reputation for being stiff. Jesus. Grow up people. There are plenty of other reasons to complain about having Megan McCain under the conservative banner. But having -- and not being ashamed of -- an ample bosom is not one of them.
By that yardstick, I suppose I wouldn't make a very good conservative either, when what this movement could really use is a few more like me.
