MEAT - It's What We Eat

In case you haven't guessed tonight's theme is Meat!
But first a short film that will explain the importance of meat and meat accessories...

And we eat a lot of meat. In fact we're almost the world champions in meat consumption at nearly 270lbs per person per year. So who eats more than the US? Australia? Nope. Germany? Nope. England? Nope.

It's tiny little Luxembourg where they manage to eat 300lbs per capita each year. It's time we close the meat gap. That or start intercepting meat shipments headed towards the Duchy.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:40 PM | Comments (791)
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His dozens of fans rejoice!

After several days of deliberation and discussion, I have determined that suspending Keith through and including Monday nightÂ’s program is an appropriate punishment for his violation of our policy. We look forward to having him back on the air Tuesday night.

2 days? That's not even one per donation.

I didn't think MSNBC would fire him but I thought Olby might quit. He's left jobs at ESPN, Fox Sports and MSNBC once before after having spats with management. $7 million/year is a fairly healthy reason to hang on. Besides, if Pelosi gets to keep her job after the mid-term debacle, why shouldn't Olby?

I wonder if there will be a Special Comment(tm) about this. If there is, I'm sure he'll identify the real culprit here...Fox News.

On the upside, we'll still have Keith Olbermann to kick around.

Posted by: DrewM at 05:17 PM | Comments (93)
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Quite a lot of information here...with a number of surprises

• 65% either support or are neutral about the Tea Party "movement", only 31% oppose.


• The Democrat party's unfavorables (53%) exceeded the Republican party's unfavorables (52%).


• Obama was "not a factor" for only 37%.


• Gays/Lesbians went 31% for Republicans.


• Union households went 38% for Republicans.

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 02:44 PM | Comments (323)
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So hereÂ’s a list of the best magazine articles of all time that I came across it a while back. It was compiled by kk.org based on readerÂ’s votes. And itÂ’s a pretty good list - at least five of the articles included are ones I would have listed off of the top of my head if asked. So far IÂ’ve read about half of the articles and theyÂ’ve all been uniformly excellent. Great writing and style can take something you have minimal interest in and make it a fascinating read.

So here are the first ten - but the next fifteen are just as good:

Gay Talese, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." Esquire, April 1966.
Hunter S. Thompson, "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved." Scanlan's Monthly, June 1970.
Neal Stephenson, "Mother Earth, Mother Board: Wiring the Planet." Wired, December 1996. On laying trans-oceanic fiber optic cable.
David Foster Wallace, "Federer As Religious Experience." The New York Times, Play Magazine, August 20, 2006.
David Foster Wallace, "Consider the Lobster." Gourmet Magazine, August 2004.
John Updike, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu." The New Yorker, October 22, 1960. About Ted Williams career framed by his last game.
Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream." Rolling Stone. Part I: November 11, 1971; Part II: November 25, 1971.
Richard Ben Cramer, "What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?" Esquire, June 1986.
Jon Krakauer, "Death of an Innocent: How Christopher McCandless Lost His Way in the Wilds." Outside Magazine, January 1993. Article that became Into the Wild.
Susan Orlean, "The American Man at Age Ten." Esquire, December 1992. [Ed.'s note: Not available in Esquire's online archive, but you'll find it with a little searching. Also republished in Orlean's The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup and Glass's The New Kings of Nonfiction.]

But there’s one article that I think ought to be listed in the top 25 as well - Vannevar Bush’s "As We May Think” published in the July 1945 issue of Atlantic Magazine. Vannevar Bush was Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during WWII and also one of the organizers of the Manhattan Project. And in this article written while battles were still raging in the Pacific he predicted how information could be accessed in the future. And was amazingly accurate!

What he calls “the memex” is basically what we know as the World Wide Web, accessed via hyperlinks on PCs. By page 6 he’s taken us to about 2009-era technology. Read the last two pages to see what the 2020s and 2030s will be like. And Bush didn’t just predict the future - he also helped create it. Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the mouse, word processor, and hyperlinking, was directly inspired by Bush’s essay to create much of our modern computing interface. Personally I’m kinda looking forward to the last page of Bush’s article finally happening.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 12:28 PM | Comments (110)
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One of the advantages of strawmen and Enemies' Lists is that they're so usefully adaptable. You can press these bogeymen into service to explain any of your own team's failures.

"What happens to MSNBC post-merger?" she wrote in a blog post last month. "Right now, itÂ’s providing the only response to Fox News. Comcast wonÂ’t want to irritate Fox - you canÂ’t be a pay-TV distributor without Fox News, in the same way that you canÂ’t be a pay-TV distributor without ESPN. Fox News is a truck running downhill."

Meanwhile, people not part of the Community-Based Reality have a different culprit in Olbermann's downfall -- shockingly enough, it's Olbermann's ego.

Network sources tell Playbook that Keith Olbermann was suspended because he refused to deliver an on-camera mea culpa, which would have allowed him to continue anchoring “Countdown.”

Apparently his claim -- which he won't say publicly, either because it's a transparent lie or because it would make him look pretty stupid -- is that he didn't know he couldn't donate to candidates without disclosing it and/or clearing it with his superiors.

Wait, his superiors? Keith Olbermann has no superiors. I mean his bosses. (Wait, he doesn't have those either; he giggled at his own wit in the past saying "Phil Griffin thinks he's my boss.")

Olbermann is about to make a $7 million per year mistake.

MSNBC is apparently putting out the word (to Politico) that he isn't all that crucial to their lineup any longer, and I think this is only 75% a bluffing/negotiating position.

Posted by: Ace at 12:21 PM | Comments (61)
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Deficient messaging is the new last refuge of the scoundrel.

In a letter sent to fellow Democratic lawmakers Saturday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California expresses confidence that she will be elected minority leader and calls for the party to “further modernize” and “communicate” the message that helped them win the House in 2006.

...

Her focus on message implies that Democrats lost at least 60 seats and the House because of a failure to communicate effectively about the agenda the party delivered rather than public disapproval of the policies. ItÂ’s an argument that may resonate well with House Democrats who blame the White House for not putting enough energy into honing and promoting public relations campaigns in support of major legislative items.

"In addition, we must build the capacity for effectively communicating our message of job creation and opportunity for all, while supporting our signature achievements of health care, Wall Street reform, and Social Security and Medicare," she wrote. "In the 2006 election with our ‘New Direction’ and ‘6 for 06’ message, we spoke with great clarity and unity — and we won. Now, we must further modernize not only that message but the way in which we communicate with constituents."

This is getting silly. The problem isn't that the public didn't know what Democrats stand for, but rather that they did. No matter how many times Democrats tried to obscure that -- claiming to vote x% with John Boehner, claiming to have personally voted for John McCain in '08, refusing to identify themselves as Democrats at all, shooting a damn rifle through a mock up of the Cap and Tax bill -- they still lost. (Well, not the guy shooting a rifle but you get what I mean.)

And it wasn't just that that, of course. It was that the public told Democrats not to vote for ObamaCare as loudly and as directly as possible, and Democrats told them to go hang themselves.

This will not do. They work for us and not vice versa. We tell them the agenda and not vice versa.

Democrats are so arrogant and so disdainful of the public's beliefs and aspirations that even at this point they do not understand that, nor why giving a finger to the "Little People" was such a damaging move.

Deep in their hearts they really conceive of America along the lines of Brave New World, with a caste devoted to thinking, a caste devoted to doing, and a caste devoted to consuming.

They decided they would do the thinking for us despite the fact that we never actually asked them to take on this burden and in fact told them that we resented their even offering to do so. Let alone simply taking the responsibility from us against our will, against our wishes, and over our angry complaints.

ObamaCare must be repealed not just as disastrous policy but as an oligarchical insult to the entire idea of American democracy.

We heard your message, Nancy. Your message was "You don't count; what you think doesn't matter."

There is no way to sell that message to a nation that still has, by your way of thinking, antiquated and boorish notions about self-governance.

Thanks to Monty.

Posted by: Ace at 11:49 AM | Comments (179)
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I'm sure somebody still cares about football, somewhere in the world today.

Here, here's a science experiment.

If you didn't get your picks in on time, relax. You'll still beat me.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 09:25 AM | Comments (554)
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So I just showed up at my bro's house an hour early. Which is fine, I guess, if I wanted to spend an extra hour at my brother's house. To avoid things like this, you should turn your clocks back an hour because Ben Franklin had a retarded fucking idea about sunlight and seasons. FYI.

Thus endeth the Pee Ess Aay.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 07:04 AM | Comments (209)
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Usually recall efforts of this sort are launched by a few disgruntled cranks who get nowhere with them. This time its different. The prime "crank" is billionaire Norman Brahman, and he managed to get 112,000 fracking signatures on the recall petitions.

Alvarez, being a treacherous sleazy crapweasel not about to submit to the will of the people, is fighting it based on the idea that the recall petitions were authorized by a deputy courts clerk, not THE courts clerk.

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 06:46 AM | Comments (55)
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It's pretty much a grab-bag of stuff today, mainly books I thought about while posting to other threads during the week.

First is Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson. If you've ever wanted a brief introduction to basic economics, this is the book for you. It's only about 200 pages long, but is an excellent primer. Hazlitt's book is often associated with the so-called Austrian School of economics because Hazlitt was a fan of Ludwig von Mises, but it's really just a basic, classically-conservative statement of economics principles. It's appropriate for teens, too, so parents could do worse than to buy this book for their yard-apes to give them an idea of how economics works.

Amity Schlaes' The Forgotten Man is an absolute treasure to those wishing to debunk the hagiography that has grow up around FDR and the New Deal. Far from "fixing" the Great Depression, FDR's policies and actions during that time only made it worse and longer-lasting. One of the initiatives established during this time -- Social Security -- has turned into a fiscal catastrophe that I fulminate against on a regular basis.

Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath's Who Killed Homer? ought to be more widely read than it is. VDH and his co-author use the virtual extinction of Classical coursework in the academy to show how corrupted modern "higher ed" has become. They skewer the whole post-modernist, multi-culti sideshow, and since both men are (or were) professors, they speak with inside knowledge. This book was written more than a decade ago, and VDH often says that the situation is much worse now than it was when the book was written. (If you are interested in Greek military history but can't quite commit to Kagan's magisterial The Peloponnesian War, VDH's A War Like No Other is a good substitute.)

[UPDATE] Another thing I forgot to mention is the series of political pamphlets published by Encounter Books called "Encounter Broadsides". They're short (40 pages or so) essays on all manner of political topics, written from a rightish bent, by major conservative writers (VDH, Ambassador John Bolton, and others). I've read several of these on my Kindle, and their quality ranges from mediocre to excellent. I'm reading Stephen Moore's How Barack Obama is Bankrupting the US Economy right now. Think of these slim little books as a modern version of Paine's Common Sense, or The Federalist Papers.

Posted by: Monty at 05:55 AM | Comments (122)
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