I'm reaching out to some folks to help cover my absence. If you'd like to do so, please email me.

Although I will check in on the blog, to the extent I do anything it will be of the maintenance level. If there isn't a post for hours, I might put up an open thread or just a link to something else, just to keep the blog from flatlining in between the morning headline post and ONT. But that'll about be it.

But I do need some time away (you may notice that from my awful output lately) and so the blog might be pretty quiet for nine days. Hopefully it'll be nice and busy with cobloggers and guest posters. I'm a little worried on that front, though, because if people are feeling like I'm feeling, I'm thinking they might need a break too.

To add something to this post: Governor Cuomo of New York is apparently competing with Dave In Texas for the Crap Tree Trophy. What the hell is this? And why is there a silver tiger and sliver leopard apparently guarding this abomination?

Are they afraid someone would steal this tree, if it weren't guarded by Christmas Tigers?

In related news, Bob Guccione just called, he wants his sense of style back.

Posted by: Ace at 11:42 AM | Comments (379)
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Apparently, having been rejected by the liberal media elite, Romney now finds himself in the curious position of owing them something anyway.

I sense a pattern here. A pattern that involves endless obligations to work for free or donate money to the liberal machine, even if -- nay, especially if -- you actually oppose the liberal machine.

The nation is heading toward the “fiscal cliff,” but have no fear: Mitt Romney is coming to the rescue — of Marriott International Inc.

In his first public comments since election night, the defeated Republican presidential nominee issued a statement Monday announcing his next step. An appeal to national unity? A charitable initiative?

No, he announced that he was rejoining the hotel chain’s board of directors. “It is an honor to once again be able to serve in the company of leaders like Bill Marriott,” said Romney’s statement, distributed by Marriott.

It was emblematic of the tone-deaf, I-have-some-great-friends-that-are-NASCAR-team-owners moments that contributed to his loss. The country is in a crisis, political leaders in a standoff, and Romney is joining his buddyÂ’s corporate board.

Romney is a private citizen now and free to do as he chooses. But itÂ’s not as if he needs the money; the $170,000 in cash and stock that Marriott directors received in the most recent year reported is but a sliver of the $20 million or so Romney takes in annually from his investments.

...

Romney’s post-election behavior has been, in a word, small. Never again, likely, will his voice and influence be as powerful as they are now. Yet rather than stepping forward to help find a way out of the fiscal standoff, or to help his party rebuild itself, he delivered a perfunctory concession speech, told wealthy donors that Obama won by giving “gifts” to minorities, then avoided the press at a private lunch with President Obama.

So what he wants is for Romney to agitate on behalf of Barack Obama and convince those crazy Republicans to give in for the sake of the country, before Obama is forced to shoot his hostage.

Isn't that always the way? Always demanding that Republicans force other Republicans to be Democrats.

Since Obama built his campaign on absurd opposition to everything Romney urged, what role could Romney possibly have? He couldn't advocate his own positions; Obama trashed them. So yeah, Romney is now supposed to join Obama push the policies Obama can't, so Obama can play more golf.

Forgive the blasphemy, but Jesus Christ Almighty.

Amusing... That it turns out that maybe the country needs Romney's financial acumen after all.

Maybe should have thought of that before.

PS, let it burn.

Posted by: Ace at 11:15 AM | Comments (257)
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Oh, sure, teachers are la creme de la creme. Obviously so. Obviously these rocket scientists could be drawing enormous salaries in any number of prestigious brain-work fields, such as furniture repossession and department store greeting.

Anyone want to argue this organization isn't explicitly communist? There was old claim, offered by class-conscious communists, that the petit bourgeoisie, the lower middle-class, were the most zealous defenders of the Unjust Capitalist Class System because, having just a bit of the benefits of the Class System, they were the most highly invested in preserving it.

Let me adapt that line of thinking and suggest that the most marginal government workers -- whose who could not possibly succeed in any demanding field, and in fact are only kept in their own jobs by union measures which make firings more costly than they're worth -- are the New Vanguard of Socialism.

Let me posit that while Ashely Judd may have a faux intellectual preference for socialism, it's the people whose next meals depend on an expanding and richly-funded government who are viscerally pro-government.

And I mean "viscerally" as "in their guts." The government keeps their bellies full. This is not just an ideological preference for them.

As I've noted before, the union's shock troops, those most committed to the union, are precisely those who know their jobs depend only on the union requiring governments to keep marginal-to-incompetent workers on the payrolls.

Better teachers may be pro-union, but they also know they could get jobs, and keep jobs, without the union. Also, being more on the ball, they believe they could actually change careers, if need be.

But the shock troops of the union? No, those are the malignant incompetents who are unemployable without a powerful organization demanding employers overlook their incompetence.

There's a difference between a political belief and a survival belief.

By the way, Ed Asner, who narrates this, is an out-and-proud communist and also a 9/11 Truther.

This is from the California Federation of Teachers. Quick, let's give them more power. more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:44 AM | Comments (216)
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This sounds kind of creepy, because it is. Or at least it seems to be. The "scum villages" would not be a matter of voluntary choice; you'd be shipped there, involuntarily, after an official order. So it would be coercive.

This is the problem with socialism. Here's what Amsterdam wants: They want their city inhabited by upstanding, pay-your-own way sort of people so that the city can be prosperous and a major tourist draw and also so everyone can make (and keep) more money. (Yes, I said this twice.)

But they have socialist laws (I assume-- and I'm quite sure I'm right) which block the natural market mechanism for this sort of thing. To wit, as a city gets more prosperous and more desirable to live in, property values and rents should naturally rise, thus making it very difficult for anyone making less than, say, a lower middle-class salary to live there. But they have laws on the books to prevent that sort of natural property value escalation, because they don't like the un-socialist elitism by exclusivity that creates.

And yet they still want to drive out the non-prosperous.

This is always the weird and creepy thing about socialism: If you've got this desire, then why not simply end subsidies for low-income residents and stop building projects in the city? No, they can't admit that; they want to keep those measures on the books. But they'll correct the problems with those anti-liberty laws by creating even more anti-liberty laws, these new laws not even being restricted to the realm of economics, but taking that full step towards physically seizing citizens and physically moving them against their will to a new State Created Ghetto.

It's bizarre. The problems of anti-freedom laws are never corrected by more actual freedom, but only by truly Orwellian new anti-freedom laws.

So, here we go: forcible evacuation to camps, I mean villages, for scum.

The “scum villages,” as critics have called them, would lie in isolated areas and provide only basic services to their unwilling residents. According to details of the plan reported by Der Spiegel and the BBC, residents will live in “container homes,” under the watchful eye of social workers or police. The residents themselves might not make very good company. According to the BBC, they’ll include families that engage in repeated, small-scale harassment, like bullying gay neighbors or intimidating police witnesses.

Posted by: Ace at 09:53 AM | Comments (376)
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I would usually dismiss this as something that just isn't going to happen, but the country is becoming more liberal, more stupid, and more celebrity-addled.

Ashely Judd wrote a "political" or something piece for the Daily Beast a while back, which I wrote about at the time. She's an adherent of Trivial Feminism, a pop philosophy which concerns itself wholly with Weighty Matters such as Body Image and Healthy Weight. (See what I did there.)

The last time we saw this Sage she was pondering why "The Patriarchy" was talking about her Puffy Face on gossip blogs. You know, all those gossip blogs written by, and read by, heterosexual male members of The Patriarchy.

[Ashley Judd:] The Conversation about womenÂ’s bodies exists largely outside of us, while it is also directed at (and marketed to) us, and used to define and control us. The Conversation about women happens everywhere, publicly and privately. We are described and detailed, our faces and bodies analyzed and picked apart, our worth ascertained and ascribed based on the reduction of personhood to simple physical objectification. Our voices, our personhood, our potential, and our accomplishments are regularly minimized and muted.

[Me:] "The Conversation." Something to control women. As you'll see, it's created by The Patriarchy.

Seriously? I can't imagine the last time I thought about Ashley Judd, nevermind the last time I had The Conversation about her face or body or whatever.

Little secret: Men don't have The Conversation about most women. They have The Conversation about women they specifically think are hot or near-hot. They argue about who is hot and who is not hot.

But the point is, you sort of have to be in the mix of People Who Might Arguably Be Hot to have The Conversation centered around you.

They don't have The Conversation about fading actresses, you know.

Straight men have never discussed Oprah's weight fluctuations. Because she was never hot.

Ditto Carnie Wilson. Guys do not talk about Carnie Wilson. Women do.

Christina Aguilera? Maybe. She was hot once. Maybe getting there again.

I know this is a cruel thing, but men's cruelty really consists of saying nothing at all, doesn't it?

It's really a woman thing to knock the looks of someone who isn't really a stand-out in the first place.

I'm not trying to say Men Are Better. I'm trying to say Men Are Different, and we are not sitting here worrying about Ashley Judd's puffy face.

Now, if Megan Fox got bad plastic surgery, we'd notice, and say something.

Ashley Judd?

Sorry, that's a woman thing.

After discussing The Conversation about her Puffy Face, and the various speculations about what is causing it (which I didn't read, because I don't care), she gets to villain.

That women are joining in the ongoing disassembling of my appearance is salient.

They are not "joining" it; they are driving it. They are well-nigh the sole participants.

Patriarchy is not men. Patriarchy is a system in which both women and men participate.

She's determined to rope me into this.

I did not notice the Puffy Face and still, as I write this, have not bothered to look fro a picture showing your allegedly Puffy Face.

I do not care.

Women care. Not men.

The point of this semantic game is to do precisely what she claims she's not doing -- she says "The Patriarchy is not men," but in that case, why use the words "The Patriarchy," which, if you look it up (Latin roots!), is all about men?

She does a little soft-shoe to change the definition to mean "Not necessarily men" but insists on using a term that means "necessarily men."

I think my point here is that she's a shallow but pompous, empty-headed but faux intellectual wannabe and this will probably not play well, even given the shifting IQ level of this country. I know she won't talk about her Puffy Face and The Conversation and The Patriarchy on the campaign trail, but this sort of stupidity is in her bones, and she won't be able to avoid saying similar things.

Not that this is that offensive -- it's just that it demonstrates how trivial her thinking is. Must be nice to be a very rich woman in a very rich, technologically advanced country and think one of the biggest problems that grips us is The Conversation about female celebrities' bodies as had by The Patriarchy of people who aren't patriarchs.

I renew my objection that this is not thinking, and this is not philosophy-- this is a fake philosophy, an intellectual woobie and a spiritual poison, a trick by which the dumb can sound smart, and a trap by which the smart become stupid.

I don't know how I can prove this, but here goes anyway: Ladies (of the trivial feminism bent), there are truly interesting and important philosophical questions out there apart from Lookism and Positive Body Image and The Male Gaze and the rest of this very very low-IQ Easy Bake Oven Zen for Retards you get from Cosmopolitan.

I think that should sort of stand as a basic rule: If what you're saying can be said, and in fact frequently is said, in Cosmo, it's not philosophy and it's not politics. Sorry, it's not. As I wrote:

[W]hen I see a woman whom I rather like and respect filling her head with such nonsense -- thinking about Gender Issues, as it were, once every seven seconds -- I feel bad that she's been conned, and that her brain is simply not firing on all cylinders, clogged, as it is, with bubblegum and sillystring.

I guess it's not really my place to tell anyone else "You can be more than this. You can cast your gaze further than these comforting, but cramped, nearby shores."

So I won't tell them this.

But this is what I think about them. I think it's frankly sad, and I think it's actually a betrayal of women to fill their heads with this Cosmo Confuscianism -- and to insist to them that they're Not Really Women unless they are constantly deranging their thoughts with sabotaging their intellects with Meditations Upon a Bra-Strap.

I don't find it so terrible when I see dumb women do this -- fine. Dumb things for dumb people. Fools need their foolscap, too.

But when I see smart women so trapped in trivia, I do cringe a little. And I do nod -- very condescendingly -- when I hear assertions like "I am a serious, intelligent woman, and therefore I will now write about the silliest bubblegum mock-politics imaginable for the next hour, or the next ten years of my career."

I think my biggest problem with this form of Trivial Feminism is this: It's the constant insistence of, "I am more than my Gender."

And my response is the same as it's been for 20 years: "Yes, I agree. In fact, I always have agreed. I'm kind of waiting for you to not only say that, but to begin acting like you believe it, too."

The deep end of the pool has plenty of room. Time to get out of the Gender Studies shallows.

Posted by: Ace at 09:07 AM | Comments (308)
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But we're not supposed to say Obama's a socialist. That's crazy.

Here's video of Charlie Rose and Norah O'Donnell talking about this awesome new word. Norah's spin is that people were looking up "socialist" to confirm that Obama isn't one.

Posted by: Ace at 07:51 AM | Comments (294)
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Damn you for inferring what I implied!

That's on you, bro.

What I was talking about here, and I'm sorry if that wasn't clear to everybody, was a gun culture. I never mentioned the Second Amendment. I never used the words gun control. People inferred that. Now do I believe we need more comprehensive and more sensible gun control legislation? Yes, I do. That doesn't mean repeal the Second Amendment. That doesn't mean a prohibition on somebody having a gun to protect their home and their family. It means sensible and more comprehensive gun control legislation.

Even if you had that you would still have the problem of what Jason Whitlock wrote about and what I agree with. And that is a gun culture in this country. It demonstrates itself in different ways. It demonstrates itself in the Wild West, Dirty Harry mentality of people who actually believe that if a number of people were armed in the theater in Aurora, they would have been able to take down this nut job in body armor and military style artillery. When in fact almost every policeman in the country would tell that you that would have only increased the tragedy and added to the carnage.

It also plays itself out, and Jason Whitlock had some insight into this. It plays itself out in the inner cities where teenage kids are somehow armed to the hilt. And it plays itself out, and this I know the whys and wherefores of, in the sports world, where young athletes are disproportionately armed.

The "teenage kids" have those guns illegally. Many will have records, and so cannot obtain a gun license. The rest will just never seek a gun license, because it's all but impossible to secure one in most cities. Same for any citizen.

So, the people he's talking about should not, by law, have guns, and yet they do. His preferred strategy? Let's have some more laws that criminals can ignore.

No, seriously, only the law-abiding abide the law. It's sort of implicit in the words themselves. Look them up in a dictionary, Bob. I'm not making this up.

No one ever explains why it's critically important to strip rights away from law-abiding persons.

I feel like using the gay marriage argument against them -- they are fond of saying "My marriage doesn't affect yours." How about, "My gun -- lawfully purchased, and lawfully used -- doesn't effect someone else's illegal gun, and their illegal gun doesn't affect mine."

Posted by: Ace at 07:10 AM | Comments (330)
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Idiocracy.

Curtis owes about $90,000 total in back child support and interest to the mothers of his children. Pictured in the above mug shot, Curtis will have to wipe out that debt before he can add heir number ten, ruled Boyle.

I've got to think this is somewhat related -- a majority of young voters, 59%, think government should do more to solve problems.

As the family withers, the government thrives. Government has become the one-stop shop to replace all personal inadequacies. The problem with that is "government" is just "everyone else." It's simply a mechanism to take from some what you need (or just want) but can't earn.

This won't end well.

Posted by: Ace at 06:48 AM | Comments (204)
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Via @AG_Conservative a story which enables Mitt Romney to say...told you so.

City Council member JoAnn Watson said Tuesday the citizens support of Obama in last month's election was enough reason for the president to bailout the struggling the city. (Click the video player to listen)

"Our people in an overwhelming way supported the re-election of this president and there ought to be a quid pro quo and you ought to exercise leadership on that," said Watson. "Of course, not just that, but why not?"

Nearly 75 percent of Wayne County voters pulled the lever for Obama in November.

"After the election of Jimmy Carter, the honorable Coleman Alexander Young, he went to Washington, D.C. and came home with some bacon," said Watson. "That's what you do."

Pay up you damn 1% types!

This is why I'm on Team Let It Burn. There's simply too great of a disconnect between the reality of our situation and what too many people think can and should be done. Four more years of this is going to put us well beyond the point of no return. Sometimes you need to let the old growth forest burn so that younger, healthier trees can take root and grow.

Related enough From yesterday, "Why Tax Hikes ArenÂ’t The Answer To The Deficit Or Debt In Two Overly Simplistic Charts"

Posted by: DrewM at 05:49 AM | Comments (349)
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Happy Wednesday.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:07 AM | Comments (330)
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