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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
In case y'all didn't know alrady, Lotus Feet is Zoltan's sockpuppet. Isn't it cute the way he uses it to agree with himself? Classic sockpuppetry. Pathetic.
In the past decade, India has seen an epidemic of Hindu terrorism that reached its nadir - I hope - in 2002, when almost 2,000 Muslims were slaughtered in the state of Gujarat. That massacre, like so many others, had been whipped up by Hindu-nationalist parties, in response to an earlier, smaller instance of Muslim violence. -- via sysprog
This rather trumps vicious New Yorkers at a Wal*Mart opening. India's been at least our equal in mob actions for quite a few decades now. In both the good and the bad of it.
Hypocrisy and deceit have been a staple at New Whore Times since at least the Vietnam War, which it originally endorsed.
In fundamental ways the NYT is worse than the transparently dumb Fox News: it has a prestige it doesn't deserve.
I hope Obama does the smart thing in Ibero-America, starting with lifting the embargo on Cuba, to the benefit of all.
Manny
Perth, Australia
Damn it, those pirates aren't following the rule of law!
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/29/world/europe/29pirates.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
They have always put the Administration's version in as the lede (yes, that's the correct spelling). Probably always will. Only further in the article do they question the veracity of it. It's called "being the newspaper of record". If you want to find out the truth then you must, as Michael Moore points out, read the NYT from back to front.
Surprised I need to tell you about this.
Damn it, those pirates aren't following the rule of law!
I think you have this backward:
"The legal regime is in existence, sustainable, and there’s no problem with that," said Rüdiger Wolfrum, professor and director at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and a leading jurist here. "There is a certain political hesitation to forcefully engage in anti-pirate acts."
Rule of law--damn it!--doesn't equal political determination which, after all, is one of our problems (and I'm thinking here of--need I say it?--torture, wiretapping, etc., etc., etc.).
By the by, you read the NYTimes?! You traitor, you. Conceal this from GoodCelery! if you see him at the market.
~
Quiet. The sun is sleeping.
I am listening to Al Green.
How to Mend Broken Heart?
Eat a bowl of pork & beans.
You got be reading Psalms.
Ah, not tonight, my friend. I'm sober, somber and serious. Isn't that a happy trifecta? I seek illumination and enlightenment wherever I can find it, sober or not, and (let me tell you) it's one hard, long and lengthy search. I've traveled the path of Buddha (that is, if he trod Easy Street, just south of Broadway) but just got lost and had to take a cab home. Damn that Grand Design!
~
Whatever works and will still prove reliable after eighty.
Bah. Bug's got me enjoying Al Green, and Al Green's lalapalooza.
Rush L., and the bunch of other quacks talk like lips got bunions.
You can't teach dead ducks, or a bunny in a mortuary cats tricks.
from "The Oxford History of the British Army" (2003) By David G. Chandler, Ian Frederick, & William Beckett
Colonel Blimp: a character invented by David Low (1891-1893), cartoonist and caricaturist, pictured as a rotund pompous ex-officer voicing a rooted hatred of new ideas. Hence blimp, a person of this type. Also blimpery, blimpishness, blimpism, behaviour or speech characteristic of a blimp; blimpian, blimpish, typical of a blimp.
* * *
David Low met Horatio Blimp in a Turkish bath near Charing Cross in the early 1930s. The cartoonist had decided to invent a 'character' typifying the prevailing tendency towards what he called dogmatic doubleness. ("Look at those foreign agitators sapping the Constitution! We need a dictator like Mussolini.") Ruminating on a name--Goodle? Boak? Snood? Glimmer?--he hit upon Blimp.
The associations were perfect. A blimp was a gas-bag with the fuselage of an aeroplane slung experimentally underneath, and later, with equal felicity, a barrage balloon. His name was settled. What of his occupation? There were a number of inviting possibilities. Lord Blimp? Bishop Blimp? Dr Blimp? Turning these over in his mind, Low overheard a conversation between "two pink sweating chaps of military bearing close by. [...]" Something clicked. "In the newspapers that morning some colonel or other had written to protest against the mechanization of cavalry, insisting that even if horses had to go, the uniform and trappings must remain inviolate and troops must continue to wear their spurs in their tanks. Ha! I thought. The attitude of mind! The perfect chiaroscuro! Colonel Blimp, of course!"
His name somehow defined his expostulations, with their invariable choleric preface.
"Gad, sir Yeats-Brown is right. Wars are necessary--otherwise how can heroes defend their countries?"
"Gad, sir, Churchill is right. The Govt. has evidently made an irrevocable decision to be guided by circumstances with a firm hand."
"Gad, sir, Lord Rothermere is right. We must have a bigger Army to protect the Navy, and a bigger Navy to protect the Army. Only then can we fight the French and the Italians and the Abyssinians and keep the war from spreading."
Blimp was at once distinctive and ubiquitous. In appearance as in attitude, he had the great advantage of being instantly recognizable to almost everyone. His posture and physique--the ox-headed Saxon strain, as Robert Graves put it--his wagging finger, his walrus moustache, his habitual bath towel: all this was quintessential Blimp. As his creator [David Low] explained:
The need for defence of My Country is ever before Blimp. Let it not be imagined that "My Country" carries any narrow proprietoral, or even territorial, implication; for it would be inadequate and unjust to picture Blimp defending to the death our Turkish bath merely, or limited to preventing with drawn sword enemies from diverting the course of the Thames.
Neither take it that the people who inhabit the lands over which the flag of Blimp and me proudly floats are "My Country". The Colonel greatly admires, as we all do, an ideal British working-man whose most notable characterics are Sturdy Independence coupled with Unquestioning Obedience; but in the world of reality the truth must be told that to Blimp the British working-man in bulk is an almost intolerable nuisance, with his everlasting grumbles about under-nourishment and his inconvenient yearnings for selfish improvement. Any display of Sturdy Independence in that quarter and Blimp calls the police.[...]
[...] So the blimp class was born. It is a constant reference in the writings of George Orwell, who preferred the term blimpocracy and used it like a truncheon ("the huge blimpocracy which monopolizes official and military power and has an instinctive hatred of intelligence"). In 1940 it was a question of unblimping. Orwell wrote in his diary: "Under the stress of emergency, we shall unblimp if we have time, but time is all." [...]
- - from "The Oxford History of the British Army" (2003)
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
Salon headlines in your mailbox
