Oh for the love of...

Rhetorical question, because it has no answer: Are people just getting more narcissistic, dumb, and awful, or do we just have more reporting on the narcissistic, dumb, and awful?

I don't really object to this on moral grounds. I suppose my question is simply: Why? Why do you want a semi-nude shot of you and your maids of honor hugging each other?

What does this do for you, inside? What message does this send, what hurt does this heal?

I think people just want to be Movie Stars Like They See On The Covers of Magazines, and such tasteful (?) nudity is common there. So I guess this is some kind of Star Fantasy for brides-to-be.

Or something.

Oh, and there's porny boudoir shots, too. I guess maybe that's... I don't know, marital aid? I guess that's a gift for the husband, so I guess I get that more.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to pop off and kill myself.

A Rope, A Chair & A Rafter

My last remaining comforts in this world.

Posted by: Ace at 03:25 PM | Comments (308)
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Remember, Piers Morgan won The Celebrity Apprentice, not The Celebrity Genius.

This is a crap post so I'll add this from @rdbrewer4 and hope that makes it into something.

Posted by: Ace at 02:59 PM | Comments (137)
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We are supposed to trust them, despite their constant lying to us.

McCain cast himself as a border hawk for 2008 and then again in 2010, and of course voted against the border fence today (which he previously vowed to build).

McCain is particularly proud of his personal honor. So why does he lie so frequently, so casually, and so thoughtlessly to us? Why does he break promises without a hint of remorse?

Well, let me explain: Honorable behavior is only owed to the honorable. That has historically been the rule of martial honor/chivalry -- other honorable knights were owed honorable conduct, but not brigands and ruffians.

Point is, the overly-proud-of-his-personal-honor McCain feels free to break his Word of Honor to conservatives because he considers brigands and ruffians to whom no honor in conduct is owed.

So absolutely, sign me up for your Amnesty Bill, John McCain! As I know your promises to me mean absolutely nothing -- I am too low, socially, to be owed your Word of Honor -- of course I'll happily accept your new promises about your future intentions and about the alleged "triggers" in the bill.

Senator John McCain

He's kept every promise he's made to Chuck Schumer.

Posted by: Ace at 02:10 PM | Comments (240)
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A recent Matt Lewis column mentioned a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman, which was published in 1985. Yes, It's Old (TM). Its central thesis struck a chord with me: That freedom and reason will be lost in America not in an Orwellian way, but in a Huxleyan one. Orwell's vision was of a government ruthlessly suppressing books and changing written accounts of the past in order to change the thinking of the present.

Rick Tempest spoke about this at the end of the most recent AoSHQ podcast. Rick doesn't read much, so when he does finish a book, it's like The Only Thing He Can Talk About.

Anyway, Huxley's vision was that no totalitarian state was needed for such a descent into infantilization and restriction of thought: That all that was necessary was that the means of distraction and infantilization be provided to the population, and the people would voluntarily choose that path, no Mintruth needed, no black-armored thought police required. Orwell's vision was therefore of a forcible lobotomy, conducted by the state; Huxley's was one of a voluntary one, people checking in to an outpatient clinic every day to have bothersome parts of their brains excised.

The idea of the book (which, frankly, is better than the book itself) is an elaboration of Marshall McLuhan's aphorism, "the medium is a message." Which is something Rick Tempest never understood until reading this book. The aphorism stands for the proposition that every medium -- whether it be writing, speaking, song, epic poetry, telegraph reports, news journalism, or television -- has embedded deep within it a preference for certain modes of expression and certain types of stories, and thus each medium contains within it an embedded philosophy of thought which cannot be wholly separated from the actual content of the communication.

Thus, the medium itself, to an extent not appreciated enough, is part of the message it carries.

Now, Postman's book contrasts two different media, print and television. His book documents the long fall of America from a print-based method of political discourse to a television-based one. The early New England colonists, he points out, had a literacy rate of 95%, which was unheard of in the world at the time (and is rather high even today). They consumed printed material -- pamphlets, books, all of it -- and even spoke in that fashion. For example, he notes that Lincoln's speechifying, which may sound overly-complex for spoken argument today, was in fact fairly common of the style of rhetoric at the time, and people had no particular trouble following it.

Nowadays, we've lost our ear for long spoken sentences with lots of dependent clauses, and it's all we can do to make sense of them even in print, where we can take our time parsing them out.

This is part of his point: The method of communication breeds a certain method of thought in a population. To Americans living from 1730 to 1870, Lincoln's speeches were not overly-complicated or difficult to follow. They were accustomed to long complicated thoughts in political speech.

This has all changed since the television became the chief conveyance of not merely pop entertainment but, crucially, of political expression and culture itself. I will not belabor the long litany of sins he lays at the feet of television. Suffice to say that he believes that much of the superficiality and stupidity of the modern world is due to television's promotion of a certain style of thought, which is to say a certain style of thoughtlessness: Fast cuts, short sentences, information stripped of context, a disdain for abstractions -- indeed, a disdain for anything that cannot be filmed occurring in the here-and-now.

And the carnival barking-- Dear Lord, the carnival barking. Everything on TV is the best, the latest, the most spectacular, the weirdest, the most shocking. That sort of endless Hype of the Present Moment seems to give a big middle finger to All History Which Has Come Before.

Now, Postman is a liberal Democrat (or so parts of his book seemed to indicate), and, in 1985, he thought that television and the particular style of stupidity it encouraged was Reagan's secret weapon.

I disagree with that conclusion but I agree with Rick Tempest that most of his other conclusions are spot-on.

Rick Tempest's big disagreement is as to which side of the politico-cultural war television's maudlin, emotional, hot-button-pushing, no-abstract-thought-or-hypotheticals-allowed style of discourse favors. I think that there's a softness of thought to television-based thinking that strongly favors a regime of Political Correctness and thereby strongly favors soft liberalism as a default, risk-free safe harbor for the stupid.

Anyway, interesting idea, I think. I don't know if I'd recommend the book so much as I'd recommend the idea, which I've just shared with you. It's a decent book, though. Although, oddly enough, for a book which rants against superficial analysis, its evidence of TV's dire impact on our thinking is very anecdotal, superficial, and news-clipping-ish. You think that a book about the virtue of rigor and depth would exemplify that itself.

And yet, a fast easy TV-like read.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:56 PM | Comments (352)
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The Senate, by a 54-39 vote, rejected an amendment put forth by John Thune that called for the completion of a border fence between Mexico and the U.S.

Senators on Tuesday rejected building the 700 miles of double-tier border fencing Congress authorized just seven years ago, with a majority of the Senate saying they didnÂ’t want to delay granting illegal immigrants legal status while the fence was being built.

The 54-39 vote to reject the fence shows the core of the immigration deal is holding. The vote broke mostly along party lines, though five Republicans, including Sen. Marco Rubio and the rest of the billÂ’s authors, voted against the fence, and two Democrats voted for it

[Update] The five Republicans who voted against the Thune Amendment are Flake, McCain, Rubio, Murkowski, and Graham. Two Democrats voted for the Thune Amendment, they are Pryor and Manchin. more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:26 PM | Comments (319)
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Yes, I think that's it.

My God.

They're very loyal to fellow members of the Tribe, aren't they?

Flashback: @rdbrewer4 reminded me that Babsy was quick to gently cup Anthony Weiner's package of spin, too.

Posted by: Ace at 11:41 AM | Comments (232)
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I mention this because Elijah Cummings has released the transcripts of the interviews with the IRS agents conducted so far, and so far, he says, none of them report admit to any White House direction.

Merely that the targeting was supervised directly from Washington, despite Lois Lerner's initial claims that this was all a few rogue operators in Cincinnati.

Elijah Cummings, and Salon, think this is a Big Victory for Team Obama that so far, in the earliest stages of the investigation, before the agents who actually performed the targeting have been questioned under oath and without their supervisor Holly Paz being present during the interview, they have only narked a little bit on the Washington Nexus and the higher-level players there.

So here are the transcripts, part I and Part II.

Posted by: Ace at 11:20 AM | Comments (94)
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Like many things, it took a joke to put this into play.

People feel more comfortable discussing tricky subject areas with jokes.

So, apparently Leno mentioned the amnesty bill for "11 million documented Democrats," and now it's being used as a laugh-line among Republicans, and finally people are talking about it for real.

I'll tell you one thing: The Democrats would never be talking about giving voting rights to 11 million undocumented Tea Partiers.

Posted by: Ace at 10:33 AM | Comments (273)
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House veto?

I kind of don't believe him, and I also kind of think that a majority of our elected Knaves & Fools will support the bill, but at least there's a chance.

“I don’t see any way of bringing an immigration bill to the floor that doesn’t have a majority support of Republicans,” Boehner told reporters following a closed-door House GOP conference meeting…

According to a member who attended the meeting, Boehner argued against the Hastert Rule, but assured his colleagues that he would adhere to it on immigration.

On Monday, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher warned that Boehner should lose his gavel if he moved forward on immigration without majority support, saying it would be a “betrayal” of the party…

Asked by reporters if he agreed with Rohrabacher’s assessment, the Speaker considered the question and replied “maybe.”

Posted by: Ace at 09:31 AM | Comments (232)
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I'm a US Citizen, natural-born and raised, dammit. And it's a distinction that makes a difference to me.

Apparently, though, "US citizenship" is an antiquated device; a relic from an earlier age when Obama's "Founding Founders" were all racists who never embraced or never could have conceived of the transnational "world without borders" view favored by our current President and the creepy, neo-totalitarian progressive radicals that prop him up.

Here is the Obama White House attempting to quell concerns over the intrusive reach of his NSA/Prism operations. Note the terminology:

President Obama: "If you are a U.S. person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls and the NSA cannot target your emails."

— The White House (@whitehouse) June 18, 2013

Got that, you US person, you? You're totally safe and all.

Here was my Twitter reaction to it, after spending some time in contemplation of the President's semantic change:

I bet the Founding Founders are proud to have created a country full of US persons. Whoever they are.

— Jack's Not 4 Turning (@jackmcoldcuts) June 18, 2013

Isn't construction "US persons" revealing? I think it's an Obamaism to cater to illegal aliens...an "inclusive" phrase for non-citizens.

— Jack's Not 4 Turning (@jackmcoldcuts) June 18, 2013

That's further proof of Obama's disdain for America/Americans. He'd rather reinvent the language than stand for concept of citizenship.

— Jack's Not 4 Turning (@jackmcoldcuts) June 18, 2013

See, had Obama said "US Citizens" (likely the most common usage which a President would normally employ in a "reassure the nation" statement) he would have done something unforgivable to the left. This transgression would even have occurred if he had used the phase "US residents" (as it could have been interpreted to only include citizens and resident aliens): he would have not been offering reassurances to America's newest privileged class: illegal aliens.

But the construction of "US persons", why that covers pretty much anyone found within the borders! It's about as inclusive as you can get while defending a program operating within the boundaries of the United States. And if we have to sacrifice the concept of "citizenship" to promote "inclusiveness", why that's just a sacrifice we have to make, isn't it?

No.

Hell no.

See, I'm of a mind that the most valuable and precious status a person can hold in this world is that of "US Citizenship". I believe in American Exceptionalism, and I do believe that Americans are different than anyone else in part because we have a common history and unique culture that prizes liberty and elevates individual freedom and governmental restraint (2nd Amendment, anyone?) in a manner that 99% of foreigners simply don't share. The American experiment is different...and it is that innate difference, I would argue, that has long saved America from falling headlong into the depths of Statist tyranny that has long sought favor and refuge in the Socialist halls of 20th Century Europe, or that has expressed itself historically in the Totalitarian/Authoritarian rule of Asian empires (WW2 Japan, Current China), the dysfunctional Banana Republics of Central and South America, or the increasingly Theocratic Islamist spread of the Middle Eastern Mullahs.

"US Citizenship" is a bulwark against those excesses. As long as it stands for something, and carries its historic definition it means that we have a people who have been conditioned to stand guard as the last, shining city on the hill against those who would snuff Lady Liberty's light, or enclose her in a burqa, as soon as look at her. It's also why it should be difficult to obtain in the first place.

And, per Obama's tweet, that, apparently, cannot be allowed to stand.

Make no mistake, Obama's phrasing here is not accidental. It, like the Gang of 8 Amnesty bill has, as a core feature, the intention to water down and overwhelm "American Citizenship" by extending it to tens of millions who have no natural conception of what it means, or what its value truly is. It's about diluting the concept of American Exceptionalism to the point where Americans adopt the Obama approach: where Americans are "exceptional" just like everyone else. Remember his quote on the subject?

I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.

A world where everyone is exceptional means a world where no one is exceptional. To Obama, that's a feature not a bug. It's a major reason why the Amnesty bill, and all those who embrace it, from lowly pro-Amnesty blog shills to glorified elected Senators, must be both repudiated and defeated.

I will also add this: in my family, there is a strong tradition of military service. I grew up listening to my Great grandfather recount tales of World War 1, my Grandfather recount tales of his service in WW2 and Korea, and my Father recounting his service in the jungles of Vietnam. These men fought, and very often bled, in the service of their fellow countrymen. I am proud of them, each and every one.

They didn't put it all on the line to protect "US persons". They put it all on the line to protect "US Citizens." They understood the difference.

So don't tell me it's a meaningless semantic change, Mr. President. I know better. And I'm convinced that there are still enough of us remaining who do as well. I hope so, anyway, because I shudder to think of how emboldened the left will become once they have convinced themselves that the last remnants of those who understand our unique tradition and history, and our traditional preference for limited government and individual liberty, have finally been overwhelmed.

Posted by: Jack M. at 08:04 AM | Comments (268)
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