Saturday afternoon found us at UCLA for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, where we had been summoned from New York to sit on a panel discussing "the future of news" with L.A. Times editor Jim O'Shea and ABC-TV's Mark Halperin. The moderator was the Times's foreign editor, Marjorie Miller. All agreed: The future of news is uncertain, though the Web is likely to be an important factor. [...]
Two truthers, a man and a woman, were standing in line to ask questions. The man prefaced his by saying, "I'm not going to ask the 9/11 question again." (We don't remember what he did ask.) When it was the woman's turn, she went into a long disquisition about how FDR had advance warning of Pearl Harbor, and "buildings don't fall at 10 stories a second," and finally she asked, "Where is our Bob Woodward to bring the story out?"
Our answer: "Rosie O'Donnell."
The woman started speechifying again and finally was shouted down by the crowd, which was strongly left-leaning but apparently not insane. (Emphasis mine)[...]
Ingredients: Peanuts (blanched and unblanched), cashews, almonds, Brazil nuts, pecans, macadamia nuts, vegetable oil (peanut, cottonseed, soybean and/or sunflower seed), salt.
ALLERGY WARNING: CONTAINS ALMONDS, BRAZIL NUTS, CASHEWS, MACADAMIA NUTS, PECANS, PEANUTS. MANUFACTURED IN A FACILITY THAT PROCESSES MILK, EGGS, FILBERTS, PINE NUTS, PISTACHIOS, WALNUTS, WHEAT, SOYBEANS. (Emphasis in original)
I hereby announce my retirement from the National Football League.
What? Well, no, I never actually worked for the NFL. Or for any NFL team. Never actually played, never had my name on a roster, never got invited to a training camp, or a pre-draft workout, or even a draft-day party.
So maybe “retirement” isn’t exactly the word. The point is: this year, I will not be entering the NFL draft.
It’s the end of an era.
Every year since, roughly, 1988, I’ve made myself available for the NFL draft. Every year, I’ve sat by the phone, waiting for the call. It never came. [...]
Okay, so I’m being ridiculous. I never played college ball. I was a mediocre lineman in high school. I’m slow, clumsy, can’t get rim on the basketball court, and my spirals are, shall we say, shaky. [...]
[April 28] 1958 - Field Training Begins for Janesville Police Officers
On this date field training commenced for 49 members of the Janesville Auxiliary Police Corps, as they accompanied regular officers on their patrols and beats. When their duty assignments required uniforms, they wore helmets, belts, and Civil Defense armbands. The auxiliary cops helped direct traffic, assisted at accidents, took notes on investigations done by official cops and were on the lookout for stolen vehicles. [Source: Janesville Gazette]
I tried to avoid having a booth at Earth Day today; honestly I did. I am getting so stinkin' uncomfortable with the whole global warming business, the totalitarian nature of all the demands, the whole earth worship thing. . .but I got a free booth, and capitalism won out. [...]
I get to have a booth at our local Earth Day Festival, comrade, because of our biodegradable cleaning supplies. As usual, though, the ecological crowds bought exactly zero cleaning supplies. Instead, they were buying vanilla, and candles, and dry oil body spray. I even sold a hat and a shirt!
Whatever. The money is green.
When a publisher first approached Robert Gellately about editing a psychiatrist's interviews with Nazi war criminals, he wasn't so keen on the idea. [...]
Now the book the Florida State University professor fine-tuned - "The Nuremberg Interviews" - is being heralded for giving the world new insights into the chilling thoughts of Nazi leaders responsible for the Holocaust, the systematic extermination of more than 6 million Jews during World War II. [...]
"There is this kind of inner logic behind the outer madness," Gellately said of the book's 33 interviews. "That's the horror of the thing." That's because, Gellately said, for the most part, these Nazi rulers were as normal as next-door neighbors. "I think we all have an idea about what makes the Nazis tick. Some of us think they were demonic or crazy ... Really, two people in the book are like that, but they are not the interesting ones," Gellately said. "Most of the other ones are like you and me. They are well-educated, rational, sensible."
They pour out their thoughts to Dr. Leon Goldensohn, a U.S. Army psychiatrist, who kept detailed notes of his interviews with the war criminals and witnesses awaiting trial in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1946. [...]
"They had a sense of duty, perverted, but they were rational, kind of cold, calculating killers," he said, "not this emotional, go-out-and-shoot-their-friend-in-the-woods kind of thing. You can't prove these were guys that actually hated the Jews or actually ever hit anyone." [...]
As environmentalists celebrate the 34th annual Earth Day, some in the green movement are now advocating "diaper-free" babies to help save the planet. [...]
"There is a way to have a baby and NOT use diapers," says one website advocating diaperless babies. Parents are urged to get in tune with their infant's body signals and hold babies over toilets, buckets and shrubbery or any other convenient receptacle when nature calls.
One advocate suggests bringing a "tight-lidded bucket" along to serve as a waste receptacle when mothers take their babies out in public. [...]
Umbra Fisk, advice columnist for Grist Magazine..."People around the world who have no access to diapers manage to raise children, and a small group of parents in diaper-rich countries have decided to follow their lead. Around here, it's called 'elimination communication' or 'diaper-free,'" Fisk wrote. [...]
"The concept is logical and simple: Infants give recognizable signs of imminent peeing and pooping; it's possible to learn your infant's signs; infant pee isn't frightening; and if you train your kid to ignore their outputs, you'll just have to go back and retrain them when traditional potty-training time arrives," Fisk explained. [...]
"When David was born, I started to think about the kind of world I was making for him to grow up in. The thought of garbage spewing and sprawling landfills filled me with horror. And right along with this horror were those little mother's helpers, disposable diapers...rotting, but never really going away in all their plastic glory," Natec wrote. [...]
Scott Noelle, editor of the Continuum Concept website...In my mind, diapers became the symbol of the Evil Empire of Western Parenting in which babies must suffer to accommodate the needs of their parents' broken-continuum culture: a controlled, sterile, odorless, wall-to-wall carpeted fortress in which to live with the illusion of dominion over nature," wrote Noelle, on the website livingharmony.com. [...]
"How I longed for a simple, dirt-floored, baby-friendly hut like that of a Yequana family," he wrote. [...]
"Although my ideas are in the earliest stages of development, they are, in my mind, worth investigating."
"One of my favorites is in the area of conserving trees which we heavily rely on for oxygen. I propose a limitation be put on how many squares of toilet paper can be used in any one sitting."
"Now, I don't want to rob any law-abiding American of his or her God-given rights, but I think we are an industrious enough people that we can make it work with only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where two to three could be required."-Sheryl Crow 1
France began choosing a new president Sunday with millions of voters undecided and millions more voting for the first time, making the selection of two final candidates highly unpredictable.
The successor to Jacques Chirac, ending 12 years as head of state at the close of his second term, will face a large and listless economy and an alienated young Muslim population, among a host of problems.
Only four of the 12 candidates, including conservative front-runner Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist Segolene Royal, who was No. 2 in polls, had a real chance of making it to a final round of voting May 6. [...]
Sarkozy, blunt, reformist and pro-American, was frightening to many French. Royal presented a smiling, feminist mother-figure. Scholarly farmer's son Francois Bayrou could pull off a surprise win, and the anti-immigrant nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen was still counting on big support, in hopes of repeating his shock 2002 second-place finish.
Sarkozy, long leading in polls, is ready to build a new pro-American French foreign policy, and proudly shook President Bush's hand last year. He talks of a "rupture" with the past, including painful reforms of worker-friendly labor laws to make France more competitive. He has toned down his rhetoric in the campaign, but many predict he will revive it if elected.
Royal said she would never shake Bush's hand without letting him know what she thought of his policies first. She says her France would be different because she would be its first woman president. She has tilted away from some of her Socialist Party's policies, but her economic plan would lean left and reverse some reforms of the Chirac era.
Sarkozy and Royal are both in their 50s, carry iPods and appealed to young voters in Internet campaigns. Both infiltrated the political system from the outside _ Royal as a woman, Sarkozy as the son of a Hungarian immigrant. [...]
[...] During the period from about 1960 to the fall of the Berlin wall at the end of 1989, the message of the Red left was that Capitalism was exploiting the world, America was destroying the world, and the only solution was for the international intelligentsia to run the world.
Contrast this with the much-improved message of the modern Green left, which is… that Capitalism is exploiting the world, America is destroying the world, and the only solution is for the international intelligentsia to run the world. [...]
So case closed -- nature is a much better excuse for organized misanthropy than claiming to represent something as troublesome as other humans. In fact, Environmentalism is the highest manifestation of what I call a “Third Party” cause. Third Party causes work like this: Suppose you’re a jerk and you act like it for no reason. Why, I and others will all think you’re a jerk. But now, suppose you inform everybody that you are not just a jerk, you are angry for a cause, a good cause -- the sort of cause that makes you acting like a jerk entirely understandable, because you’re full of righteous indignation (as opposed to the petty kind.) You’re not a jerk at all; you’re a champion for some helpless Third Party, say, workers and peasants… or darters and pheasants. It doesn’t matter exactly, because you’re just too damn mad/concerned/upset/outraged/caring to piddle about details. My goodness, the Earth is in danger -- out of my way, idiot! [...]
All in all, it seems entirely appropriate (and again, purely coincidental) that Earth Day is celebrated on Lenin’s birthday. One wonders whether the Greenies simply had to purchase some old mailing lists.
In September, 1993, Brenda Pratt Shafer, a registered nurse with thirteen years or experience, was assigned by her nursing agency to an abortion clinic. Since Nurse Shafer considered herself "very pro-choice," she didn't think this assignment would be a problem. She was wrong. This is what Nurse Shafer saw:
" I stood at the doctor's side and watched him perform a partial-birth abortion on a woman who was six months pregnant. The baby's heartbeat was clearly visible on the ultrasound screen. The doctor delivered the baby's body and arms, everything but his little head. The baby's body was moving. His little fingers were clasping together. He was kicking his feet. The doctor took a pair of scissors and inserted them into the back of the baby's head, and the baby's arms jerked out in a flinch, a startle reaction, like a baby does when he thinks that he might fall. Then the doctor opened the scissors up. Then he stuck the high-powered suction tube into the hole and sucked the baby's brains out. Now the baby was completely limp. I never went back to the clinic. But I am still haunted by the face of that little boy. It was the most perfect, angelic face I have ever seen."2
It's a good rule of thumb in American scandals that, no matter how big an idiot someone is, the outrage over him will always be more idiotic.
"Here are these tough women on top of the world and they are so fragile that a remark knocks them down. Hey, why wouldn't they have said 'F--- you? Who the heck is this fool Imus? We are queens of national basketball and there is no stopping us now. We can be and do anything we choose to be or do. . . . We don't need Al Sharpton to protect us. . . . ' But no, they look devastated and say they are damaged irreparably.''
[Steyn]Only in America: a team of champions who think they're victims, an old white fool who talks like a gangsta rapper and multi-millionaires grown rich on race-baiting who promote themselves as guardians of civility. Good thing there are no real problems to worry about.
Joy DeGruy Leary has copyrighted the title "Post-Traumatic Slave Disorder" on her web page and has capitalized on this disorder that she seems to have come up with by making presentations to governmental institutions and companies like the FBI, police bureaus, school districts, universities, the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, and Nordstrom's. In an essay for a volume titled Should America Pay: Slavery and The [sic] Raging Debate on Reparations, Dr. Leary defines the syndrome: "PTSS theory states that African Americans sustained traumatic psychological and emotional injury as a direct result of slavery and continue to be injured by traumas caused by the larger society's policies of inequality, racism and oppression."
It seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world's harvests fail.
They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well.
The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up. [...]
The human race, in apostasy from God, is deeply involved in a rebellious claim to autonomy and in the guilt which follows that claim. As a result of this omnipresent sense of guilt, there is an omnipresent demand for justification. The expression, "He's trying to justify himself," points to this demand by man for justification, and insistence on psychic or spiritual wholeness of health. A sense of guilt leaves a man feeling like a leaky, sinking ship: the energies must all be resolved to the repair of that breach. The psychology of the guilty man is this geared to self-defense, to spiritual survival, by means of an overcoming of the breach of guilt. The concern is a demand for salvation: the sinking ego wants to save itself, to find justification by making atonement for its guilt. [...]
A closely related activity is sadism, the transfer of guilt to an innocent party to reduce them to the same level of impotence and guilt. [...]
The reality of man apart from Christ is guilt and masochism. And guilt and masochism involve an unshakable inner slavery which governs the total life of the non-Christian. The politics of the anti-Christian will thus inescapably be the politics of guilt. In the politics of guilt, man is perpetually drained in his social energy and cultural activity by his over-riding sense of guilt and his masochistic activity. He will progressively demand of the state a redemptive role. What he cannot do personally, i.e., to save himself, he demands that the state do for him, so that the state, as man enlarged, becomes the human savior of man. The politics of guilt, therefore, is not directed as the Christian politics of liberty, to the creation of godly justice and order, but to the creation of a redeeming order, a saving state. Guilt must be projected, therefore, on all those who oppose this new order and age. [...]
...the caretaker state masks its tyrannical love under the name of 'social justice.'
The more a civilization advances, the deeper will its sense of sin become, because the increase of prosperity and cultural advantages will only increase the masochistic desire to pay for progress, which the individuals unconsciously believe requires atonement before enjoyment. As a result, the very liberating forces of civilization themselves call into existence the forces of enslavement. [...]
...Communism has used moral nihilism to prepare the way for passive political slavery: guilty men are more docile slaves.
...In the United States, as the nation has departed progressively from God, it has indulged progressively in a debunking of its history, in a general confession of many past faults, some often imagined. The hypocrisy of such confessions is striking: by confessing the sins of past generations, the present scholar or generation thereby implies its own superior virtues and it innocence of those sins. By the fact of such debunking or confession, it confesses also, very modestly, that wisdom is now born to us and is among us, so that confession again becomes a vehicle of pride. [...]
Again, Americans are repeatedly assured that American history is a long account of guilt, towards Indians, Negroes, minority groups, labor, Mexico, and, ultimately, all the world as well for refusing the to enter the League of Nations. This is defective history and perverse politics. Its purpose is the cultivation of guilt in order to produce a submissive populace.
More basically, the subtle indoctrination of humanistic scholarship infers that the Christian, and, in America, the Protestant in particular, is guilty because he is a Christian. The inference is that the Christian has no right to his identity; he must recognize all others and their rights, but he himself has none. The principles of the atheist must govern state and school; the wishes of all others have status before the law, and his have none. [...]
Wherever false responsibility is promoted, and ugly strategy of power is present. This strategy can be briefly summarized. First, make men feel guilty for all things and for everyone. Whatever happens on any continent or country is their responsibility and their burden. All the starving, needy, oppressed, and all the indigents, criminals, and diseased of the world are their burden, and they are guilty of evading their responsibilities if they do nothing about them.
Second, it is obvious that men cannot do much more than care for their own families. Therefore, ask them to exercise this imposed responsibility for the world by delegation, to delegate it to the state and the elite planners.
Third, by being given this world responsibility, the state and its elite planners become gods, governors of all things. They can now begin to remake the world in terms of their superior wisdom. God, after all, hardly had their superior and scientific intelligence.
Fourth, salvation has thus become the work of man. Man remakes man by statist law and action....
I never wrote it, but I felt it -- which is just as bad. I said it in private discussions with friends, some of whom tried to get me to see the whole picture, not just the picture I wanted to see.
My being a black woman, my knowing too many athletes who treat women like items to be purchased in a vending machine, and my witnessing enough athlete rape trials where accusers are overwhelmed by their fame and fortune -- it all tainted my perception and made me doubt your innocence.
I feel stupid now.[...]
BEIJING (AP) -- Along with spitting, run-down housing and bad manners, add unintelligible English to the list of things organizers of the 2008 Beijing Olympics want to ban.Seriously, can anybody understand anything Steve says?
Leviticus 19:15 declares: "You shall not commit a perversion of justice: you shall not favor the poor and you shall not honor the great, with righteousness shall you judge your fellow."Yes, I know, you already posted this, Steve. But it wasn't fair because I couldn't get into Blogger last night.
...
...the outlook of the left insists upon favoring the poor and the unfortunate—and thereby injecting unfairness and discrimination into the very core of politics and government. Favoring the poor, like favoring the rich, brings unequal treatment based on status, not actions. Justice requires rewarding good behavior, no matter its source, and discouraging and punishing bad actions, no matter who performs them.
The Reaping is about a small Southern town hit by 10 Biblical plagues brought on by a supposed Satan worshiper.[...]
As two dozen white Southern Christian bigots drove off in their shotgun filled pick-up trucks to kill an innocent child due to their white Southern Christian bigoted need to kill all things they don’t understand, one of them actually yelled, “Yee-Haw!”
I lived in the south for ten years. I’ve seen white Southern Christian bigots grab their shotguns and jump in pick-up trucks to kill something they didn’t understand. But no one ever yelled “Yee-Haw.”[...]
The favorite Director Scare is the screeching cat jumping out of nowhere. Cats don’t screech and jump. They may jump. They may screech. But they never jump and screech.
I grew up with cats, and never once did one jump and screech. And if one had I would’ve grabbed a shotgun and jumped in a pick-up truck to kill it.[...]
In the end, The Reaping is good for nothing more than yet another insight into how elite Hollywood views the South and religion. To them the South is filled with scary, pious, hypocritical fanatics, who are both unsophisticated and dumb. And naturally, religion has turned them ugly and worse. It’s okay for the Black Guy to be religious. For some reason Christianity isn’t threatening to Hollywood when the Christian is black. Maybe they find it cute and quaint.
Hollywood treats no other culture in the world as poorly and with such contempt as they do the Southern Christian. And yet, they probably don’t even see their own bigotry. They just believe that what they portray is fact. Of course, that’s the worst kind of prejudice. The most dangerous. The most ignorant.
[...]The moderate and progressive left for all its claims of good intentions and intellectual righteousness has for some time been slipping into a form of totalitarian fundamentalism. The totalitarian progressive left is, I fear an, as yet, undiagnosed epidemic among the upper middle class and the academic and political elites of Western Civilization. As with most epidemics, it has been hard to define in its early stages. In recent years however, it has begun to manifest itself in ways that are impossible to ignore.[...]
The modern Progressive, leftist and liberal movements lack any real humor. What passes for humor in those precincts is actually more accurately classified as ridicule and mockery. While driving the other day I saw an excellent example, bumper stickers that read, “So Many Right-Wing Christians So Few Lions”.[...]
"In the Netherlands, where political dicourse had moved beyond 'culture war' platitudes, I felt light-years removed from the foolishness of fundamentalism. There, for the first time, I allowed myself to feel the rage that had built up inside me. Yes, I loved my country, but I also realized that I wanted to be away from it-away from the idiocy, the intolerance, the puritanism. More and more I felt that I belonged in Europe." (p. 10)
"The main reason I'd been glad to leave America was Protestant fundamentalism. But Europe, I eventually say, was falling prey to an even more alarming fundamentalism whose leaders made their American Protestant counterparts look like amateurs. Falwell was an unsavory creep, but he didn't issue fatwas. James Dobson's parenting advice was appalling, but he wasn't telling people to murder their daughters. American liberals had been fighting the Religious Right for decades; Western Europeans had yet to even acknowledge that they had a Religious Right. How could they ignore it? Certainly as a gay man, I couldn't close my eyes to this grim reality. Pat Robertson just wanted to deny me marriage; the imams wanted to drop a wall on me. I wasn't fond of the hypocritical conservative-Christian line about hating the sin and loving the sinner, but it was preferable to the forthright fundamentalist Muslim view that homosexuals merited death." (p. 33)
"In a war between people who had rock solid beliefs and people who are capable of nuancing away pure evil, who has the advantage?" (p. 161)
Unimpressed by his on-air apology or corporate promises of a tighter leash, angry critics of nationally syndicated radio host Don Imus called Saturday for his dismissal over his racially charged comments about the mostly black Rutgers women's basketball team.
"I accept his apology, just as I want his bosses to accept his resignation," said the Rev. Al Sharpton. He promised to picket Imus' New York radio home, WFAN-AM, unless the veteran of nearly 40 years of anything-goes broadcasting is gone within a week.
Nationally syndicated radio personality Don Imus speaks at the Radio and Television Correspondents Association dinner in Washington in this file photo of March 21, 1996. Imus apologized Friday, April 6, 2007, for making racially charged comments about the Rutgers University women's basketball team after the National Association of Black Journalists called for his immediate firing. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
Sharpton was not alone in his anger over Imus' description of the Rutgers' women as "nappy headed hos" during a Wednesday morning segment of his show, which airs for millions of listeners on more than 70 stations and the MSNBC television network.
Lovers of liberty live in this society, must be aware of the facts I have cited, and care about our future. How, then, could they not be alarmed by these facts? They are not because they have made two amazingly simple-minded assumptions about human psychology. Only if these assumptions were true would it be reasonable to follow Mill's principle and not to see the abusers of liberty as a threat. The first assumption is that it is possible and desirable for us to be free of personal and social interference with our liberty. The second assumption is that we are basically reasonable and naturally disposed to guard our physical, mental, and spiritual well-being; that if our liberty were guaranteed, most of us would live happily and productively. Both these assumptions are badly mistaken. Since Mill's principle rests on them, the principle is also mistaken.
An ideology is a worldview that makes sense of prevailing political conditions and suggests ways of improving them. Typical ideologies include among their elements a metaphysical outlook that provides a God’s-eye view of the world, a theory about human nature, a system of values whose realization will supposedly ensure human well-being, an explanation of why the actual state of affairs falls short of perfection, and a set of policies intended to close the gap between the actual and ideal. This last component—commitment to a political program and its implementation—is what distinguishes ideologies from religious, personal, aesthetic, or philosophical systems of belief. Ideologies aim to transform society. Other systems of belief do not involve such a commitment; if they do, they become ideological.
In the course of history, many different and incompatible ideologies have held sway, all of them essentially speculative interpretations that go beyond undeniable facts and simple truths. Resting on fallible hypotheses about matters that transcend the existing state of knowledge, they are especially prone to wishful, self-deceiving, anxious, or self-serving thinking—to unchecked flights of fantasy and imagination. Reasonable people therefore regard ideologies, including their own, with robust skepticism and demand of them conformity to elementary standards of reason: logical consistency, the explanation of indisputable and relevant facts, responsiveness to new evidence and serious criticism, and recognition that the success or failure of policies derived from them counts as confirming or disconfirming evidence.
The source of Robespierre’s deepest convictions and of his certainty about them was his unquestioning commitment to an ideology he had largely derived from Rousseau, whom he regarded as “the tutor of the human race.” This ideology led him to believe that politics was an application of morality and that a good government was based on moral principles that ineluctably cause the interests of individuals to become indistinguishable from the general interest. Put another way, uncorrupted human beings intuitively recognize and act in the general interest. Any divergence between individual and general interest indicates the individual’s immorality and irrationality. If any individual fails to see that his true interests are the same as the general interest, he must be forced to act as if he did see it, for his own good.
But who are those uncorrupted human beings who know what is in the general interest? Robespierre answers: “There do exist pure and sensitive souls. There does exist a tender, but imperious and irresistible passion . . . a profound horror of tyranny, a compassionate zeal for the oppressed, a sacred love of one’s country, and a love of humanity still more holy and sublime, without which a great revolution is no more than the destruction of a lesser by a greater crime. There does exist a generous ambition to found on earth the first republic in the world. . . . You can feel it, at this moment, burning in your hearts; I can feel it in my own.” The plain message when the bombast is deflated is that, since the people have been corrupted, they cannot be trusted to know what is good for them, but he, Robespierre, knows, because he is uncorrupted.
Castigating Robespierre more than 200 years after his death would have little point if he were not the prototype of the ideological frame of mind that is very much with us today. If we understand him, we understand that it is utterly useless to appeal to reason and morality in dealing with ideologues. For they are convinced that reason and morality are on their side and that their enemies are irrational and immoral simply because they are enemies. Negotiation with such people can succeed only if we have overwhelming force on our side and have shown ourselves unsqueamish about using it. Justifying its use to the electorate of a democratic country—used to thinking of politics as a process of reasonable negotiation and compromise—must involve showing in sickening detail the monstrosities committed in the name of the ideology. And that is the point of reminding ourselves of the crimes of the long-dead Robespierre.
It's been said (mostly by columnist George Will) that you can tell who the real conservative is by asking, "Who would you have voted for in 1912?"Note: somehow I think Will would say "for whom would you have voted," but maybe that's just me reliving the dinner table every night while growing up at Grandpa John's house.
These days, we should probably settle for people knowing who the candidates even were, never mind having a preference. Nonetheless, for the record, they were Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. You wouldn't know it from T.R.'s cult of personality in Republican circles today, but Taft was the conservative in the race.Goldberg concludes:
One question remains for conservatives: Where the heck is our Taft?Well, if Fred Thompson gains another hundred pounds or so...
DARWIN, Australia - An environmental group said Tuesday it had captured a "monster" toad the size of a small dog.What do you suppose he meant by "rampant?"
With a body the size of a football and weighing nearly 2 pounds, the toad is among the largest specimens ever captured in Australia, according to Frogwatch coordinator Graeme Sawyer.
"It's huge, to put it mildly," he said. "The biggest toads are usually females but this one was a rampant male ... I would hate to meet his big sister."
Frogwatch, which is dedicated to wiping out a toxic toad species that has killed countless Australian animals, picked up the 15-inch-long cane toad during a raid on a pond outside the northern city of Darwin late Monday."Frogwatch." Cool. I wonder if they have t-shirts. This could be a marketing bonanza for them.
Cane toads were imported from South America during the 1930s in a failed attempt to control beetles on Australia's northern sugar cane plantations. The poisonous toads have proven fatal to Australia's delicate ecosystems, killing millions of native animals from snakes to the small crocodiles that eat them.
As part of its so-called "Toad Buster" project, Frogwatch conducts regular raids on local water holes, blinding the toads with bright lights then scooping them up by the dozen.
"We kill them with carbon dioxide gas, stockpile them in a big freezer and then put them through a liquid fertilizer process" that renders the toads nontoxic, Sawyer said.Eeeeewwww.
"It turns out to be sensational fertilizer," he added.
