The New Puritans - When Did Liberals Become So Uptight?

Well it turns out that immanentizing the eschaton during your kids' play-dates is like stressful and hard.

The Puritan parents I encounter are nearly all liberals, and they represent the persistence of two unfortunate tendencies liberals have inherited from the Puritans, queered along the way by Progressive-era reformers. The first is the fun-smothering tendency of Progressive-era moral uplift, the tendency that brought us Prohibition and the first laws proscribing opiates and narcotics. (Today, we try to ban large cups of soda.) The second is an interest in hygiene that could be quite salutary-as when reformers pushed clean water and other public-health measures-but could also fetishize symbolic, pernicious forms of sanitation and purity, as in Margaret Sanger's support for eugenics.

Reason #7 For Not Taking Tactical Advice from High Functioning Tards

A man in Vancouver, Washington has been arrested for taking the advice of Vice President Joe Biden and blasting away with his gun at his home to scare off intruders.

"I did what Joe Biden told me to do," Jeffrey Barton, 52, told a local TV station. "I went outside and fired my shotgun in the air." Barton pleaded not guilty Wednesday to one count of of illegal aiming or discharging a firearm

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:53 PM | Comments (866)
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This guy keeps misspelling "America" as "Detroit," which seems odd, because they're not really even that close.

But keep in mind, he means America.

WR Mead wrote about this today, under the headline "Obama to Detroit: Drop Dead."

This is where blue governance has brought Detroit in the end: not even a liberal Democratic administration will step in to save the pensions of thousands of public workers and African Americans, condemning countless innocents to having their pensions and health benefits gutted in bankruptcy court.

...

Detroit has been spending on average $100 million more than it has taken in for each of the past five years. The cityÂ’s $11 billion in unsecured debt includes $6 billion in health and other retirement benefits and $3 billion in retiree pensions for its 20,000 city pensioners, who are slated to receive less than 10 percent of what they were promised...

And now DetroitÂ’s desperate request for a bailout has been turned down by the Obama White House.

Progressive politicians, wonks, and activists can only blame big corporations and other liberal bogeymen for so long. The truth is that corrupt machine politics in a one-party system devoted to the blue social model wrecked an entire city and thousands of lives beyond repair. The sooner blues come to terms with this reality, the greater chance other cities will have of avoiding DetroitÂ’s fate.

But we won't: ObamaCare is Detroit.

The media wants to talk a bunch about the Zimmerman case and have "national conversations" about lessons we need to learn from a 45-second confrontation involving two people.

Notice they don't want to have national conversations about what lessons we can learn from 51 years of True Blue Democratic administration in Detroit.

Incidentally, today's game on Twitter is retweeting all the liberals and liberal groups who tweeted about Romney saying "Let Detroit go bankrupt" before the election.

That last link via @mamaswati.

Posted by: Ace at 04:03 PM | Comments (485)
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And she herself is offering up a "Prove it, Ladyliars" defense of Filner.

Posted by: Ace at 03:33 PM | Comments (114)
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That said, this may just be a signal from Holder to the Community Organized Community that he's "with them" and all that crap. And also, of course, further harassing an innocent man because a bloodthirsty social-justice crowd demands it.

Because it looks pretty unlikely the feds will take actual against Zimmerman, apart from harassing him and making sure his life remains upside-down and inside-out.

Current and former Justice Department officials said Monday that bringing civil rights charges against George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black 17-year-old in Florida, would be extremely difficult and may not be possible.

In related news, the sun apparently rose today, and I say this not because I witnessed it but because I can infer it: Jesse Jackson calls Florida an "apartheid" state, calls for a boycott.

I just checked my watch against Jackson's declaration: Yup, keeping perfect time. Jesse Jackson is more reliable than an atomic clock with a CPA license and which just converted to Mormonism.

Meanwhile, Charles Barkley supports the verdict.

He adds this:

Like I said, the main thing I feel bad for, it gives every white person and black person whoÂ’s racist a platform to vent their ignorance, you know. ThatÂ’s the thing that bothers me the most. Because I watched the trial closely, and I watch all these people on television talking about it. A lot of these people have a hidden agenda, you know. They want to have their racist views, whether theyÂ’re white or black. The bias, it definitely comes out. It was a bad situation. We all lost, and I feel bad for his parents. You never want to see anybody lose their kid.

Yeah this is what I'd like to have discussed some: the black racism of an unthinking, reflexive idea of black solidarity and getting vengeance on the white man. And I specify black racism not because I don't think there's white racism -- there is -- but we endlessly discuss white racism.

Whites have it relentlessly drilled into their heads that it is wrong to reflexively side with a white person simply because he shares a few more expressed genotypes than a black person. As I've shamefully admitted, I'm not really against a certain amount of pro-social Politically Correct nattering. Within limits, I think it's a useful sort of thing. (Note: Within limits, and among those limits is the idea that it remains a form of social hectoring and not a legal requirement.)

But are blacks subject to the same strictures? That they should be made to feel a little bit less for reflexively saying "Black man good, white man bad"?

I don't think they are because you're not even allowed to mention the specter of black racism -- or, if racism isn't the right word, black racial solidarity -- and furthermore there are scads of black organizations which more or less explicitly advocate for the idea of black racial solidarity and "black man good, white man bad."

If this is an unhealthy, ignorant, irrational, and unsophisticated style of reasoning when whites engage in it, is it somehow more ennobling when blacks do it?

I don't think so. And furthermore I think there's a certain amount of racism-of-lowered-expectations and racial condescension when white liberals apparently take the position that "Well, what can be expected?"

I like that Barkley casts this in terms of some "venting their ignorance." It's not a pretty thing when an ignorant white guy starts spouting off conclusions without knowing much of anything about a case besides the skin color of the respective parties; and it's equally ugly to see black people doing it. It's ignorant and shameful in both instances, but apparently white liberals are too racially condescending and racist themselves to expect better.

Oh, and the alternate juror in the Zimmerman case supports the verdict too, and notes there was simply no damn evidence presented by the state on the key legal questions.

Corrected: I said this guy was "apparently black." Apparently my soulpatterns and mindthoughts were confused on the point.

No, what really happened was I kept hearing about a black juror (the one who was kept off due to being a Fox Watcher) and I confused that one with this one. Plus, in the video, his hands looked black to me... but I think he's just in shadow.

Ah: Okay, commenters are telling me I'm not crazy: I thought I read this a.m. that he was black, and they're saying yeah, a lot of people said that this morning, but they were wrong.

Posted by: Ace at 02:29 PM | Comments (312)
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Do you remember the confusing story here? Cohen was observed sending text messages like "ILU" (I love you) to a much younger woman, young enough to be his daughter.

But then it was revealed that the woman was his daughter, an illegitimate one he'd had back in, I don't know, the 70s, but only found about about recently. And since he'd found out, he'd been acting as a father towards her, secretly.

Okay. So there was all that.

Now, it turns out, she's not his daughter.

The woman whom Rep. Steve Cohen has been claiming is his out-of-wedlock daughter is not, according to a paternity test revealed on Thursday.

CNN had a paternity test done on Victoria Brink with CohenÂ’s participation, although the Tennessee Democrat did not appear on camera. The test found no chance he was the 24-year-oldÂ’s father.

In a statement, Cohen said he was “stunned” at the result.

“I was stunned and dismayed at the results. I still love Victoria, hold dear the time I have shared with her and hope to continue to be part of her life,” he said.

Okay so what does this mean? Either Cohen was wrong and has been fathering a girl who isn't his, or... he was lying, and for some reason thought that it was better to say "she's my illegitimate daughter" than "she's my new young girlfriend."

Meanwhile, the daughter actually had a dad and everything. And the test found that the man who raised her as if he were her father... was in fact her father.

So for some bizarre reason the mother and daughter apparently thought the father (an oilman) wasn't the father, and that a man who wasn't the father was the father.

I don't mean to upset you, but, believe it or not,
this man's sex life is far more interesting than yours.

The actual father was stunned to find out his wife had cuckolded him, and now is equally stunned to find out she didn't cuckold him, she just had an affair and believed she cuckolded him.

And as a further weird implication to all this: Having now established some kind of mistaken emotional bond with each other, incorrectly believing themselves to be father and daughter, they are now officially... free to date.

Any bets?

So, this will all soon be a European comedy film, most likely Italian, which I absolutely will never see in my life, because it's creepy.

Posted by: Ace at 01:27 PM | Comments (317)
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It's the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history.

You can read more about it here.

The Motor City faces $20 billion of long-term liabilities. The Wall Street Journal's Matt Dillon says those holding onto $11 billion in unsecured debt are basically staring into the abyss, facing the prospect of getting next to nothing from the city's obligations.

The pension funds want to block Orr's attempt to drastically reduce the amount of benefits owed to current and former city workers.

Apropos of nothing, the last time Detroit had a Republican Mayor was 51 years ago.

[Update] In completely unrelated news, they're remaking Robocop. Is this Chapter 9 bankruptcy just a creative marketing ploy by MGM?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:17 PM | Comments (533)
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It’s made from cows. Not salmon, or pigs or lambs or turkeys or broccoli. And ideally it is made from fattened cows with beautiful intramuscular fat that speckles the meat (more about marbling later), like delicate snowflakes on a red velvet portrait of your favorite butcher. Perhaps I am being doctrinaire, but think about “going out for a steak.” What comes to mind?

Posted by: Open Blogger at 02:00 PM | Comments (239)
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Earlier they had said their eavesdropping/or whatever they're doing is limited to two degrees of separation: Once they suspect someone of being a terrorist, they monitor him, plus the people he communicates, plus the people who the people he communicates with communicate with. Two steps away from the suspect himself.

Now they confess it's three steps away.

This isn't a minor thing: A study by the University of Milan found that everyone on the internet is connected to everyone else by an average of 4.74 steps. It's not that Kevin Bacon can be linked to everyone else by 6 degrees of separation; it's that most everyone can be so linked.

When you start with your (say) 40 connections, then extend that to 40 connections of each of those 40 connections, and then 40 connections of the 40 connections of the 40 connections, well, that's 64,000 people being monitored for each actual suspected terrorist. (This assumes, incorrectly, that all of those connections are fresh and not duplicative of each other; but you get the sense of scale. Even assuming 75% of those connections are duplicative, we're still taking 10,000+ under surveillance for each actual suspected terrorist ).

Posted by: Ace at 10:21 AM | Comments (575)
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A bit late in grabbing on to that now-dissipated Sharknado buzz, but pretty good. more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:00 AM | Comments (18)
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He says he made this decision, himself you understand, because he just couldn't pump out quality of the caliber Hardball is known for and keep the Sunday morning The Chris Matthews Show running at the high level of excellence we've come to associate with Chris Matthews and functional alcoholism.

It's my decision, Dad. Do you understand? I'm not going to my room because you said so; I'm going because I made that choice. Do you understand Dad? Do you?

Anyway, this is the story as it's put out to the press, and as Matthews signed a deal to continue his horrible Hardball show, one can imagine that both parties agreed to not say they were no longer interested in the Sunday show in order to not erode the appeal (such as it is) of his weekday night show.

I suppose it's possible he's telling the truth. I do figure he's lazy. But it sounds an awful lot like he wants to spend more time with his family to me.

Posted by: Ace at 08:59 AM | Comments (422)
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