Open thread.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:09 AM | Comments (366)
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College football action today, in full swing.

Full. Swing. All times eastern.

Buffalo at Ohio St. (2) at noon.

Toledo at Florida (10) at noon something.

Rice at Texas A&M (7) at one. Johnny Football at one forty-five.

Nicholls (?) at Oregon (3) at 4:00pm

Alabama (1) at Va. Tech at 5:50pm

Eastern Washington (3?) at Oregon St. (something) at 6:00pm

Georgia (5) at Clemson ( at 8:00pm

and on Sunday, Sunday Sunday (really?) Ohio at Louisville (9) at 3:30pm

So there's the top ten action for the, weekend now I guess. Is this Sunday thing new? I guess pre-season NFL action left that door open.

Have a great weekend morons, watch some football, grill some meats. Put a helmet on in case of trouble.

OH, and a reminder that @MikeTalley73 set up a couple of college football pickem groups if you feel like playing 16167 16172 16176 password is: paulanka

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 06:55 AM | Comments (271)
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Because who visits the Whitehouse and how often is none of your effing business citizen serf, so just STFU and move along.

President Obama and his successors in the Oval Office are not obligated to make public the names of individuals visiting the White House, according to a decision of the federal Circuit Court for the District of Columbia made public Friday...

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 05:16 PM | Comments (165)
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I'll have to post over there myself this weekend.

Make sure you visit the site and maybe offer a kind word.

Posted by: Ace at 02:22 PM | Comments (62)
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Trust me, this is all more interesting than you're probably thinking right now.

Robin Thicke is the son of Alan Thicke, which makes him irredeemably Canadian. Despite this pathetic joke of a backstory, he currently has America's #1 single, and it is the longest-surviving #1 on the charts for two years. It's currently the number-two selling record of 2013, with five million copies sold, and will easily beat the number one selling record, which only has sold 5.7 million copies. As "Blurred Lines" is not yet even beginning its fall down the charts, it will definitely sell 6 million and probably 8.

In addition, it's the number one song in half the countries around the globe, and where it's not number one, it tends to be in the top 5.

Here now some interesting things about the song, which you can mention at dinner parties or with music-oriented youths who attempt to rob you at gunpoint.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 03:00 PM | Comments (1011)
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Obama's impotent 'sham across the bow'. Not only have the leaks weakened the value of any strike now, but telling your enemy that you're only going to launch a few missiles and then hit the links won't do any good. Top. Men.

This administration already has had a habit of spilling the classified beans for political gain, on drone "kill lists" and cyberwarfare against Iran for instance.

But in previewing his all-for-show mini-attack on Syria, Obama might as well be telegramming Hitler that there are these five beaches in Normandy where something interesting might happen at 6:30 a.m. on June 6.

Posted by: CDR M at 06:20 PM | Comments (726)
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So: Let's evict white liberals from their self-segregated tony suburbs and diamond-studded city neighborhoods and force them to relocate in poorer districts.

The idea is precisely the one put forth by Allison Benedikt: they'll finally have "skin in the game" as regards economically distressed neighborhoods, and therefore will be incentivized to use of all of their abundant money and all of their long-rumored talents to improve the living conditions therein.

Let's do this.

Don't think about it. Let's just do it.

That's the new paradigm. Thinking is for queerz.

You have a problem, you start passing laws and abrogating freedom.

Or, in Benedikt's terms: Let's not coerce, per se. Let's just say that any liberal who doesn't do this voluntarily is a terrible, morally-bankrupt person.

A more limited version of this -- and a more serious version -- is Meghan McArdle's formulation.

And I am on the record as saying that if you oppose vouchers, you have a moral obligation to send your kids to public schools in a horrible urban school district, rather than “skimming the cream” from said school district by decamping to the suburbs as soon as your spawn reach school age.

Precisely. If you oppose vouchers, you are morally obligated to treat your children with the same disdain you treat other people's children. If you support the Teacher Unions No Escape policy, you must suffer it yourself.

Posted by: Ace at 11:57 AM | Comments (230)
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Remember how Barack Obama was going to unite the world and build coalitions and finally respect the authority of the UN?

Remember how going it alone in matters of war used to be a bad thing, even when you went it alone in a coalition of 40 countries?

Yeah the media doesn't.

As I predicted (and look, this was obvious, I know, but I want to point out how predictable they are) in the podcast, Obama's decision to fight a war unilaterally (maybe the French will serve as cheerleaders) will be portrayed by the media as tough and heroic -- a weary sentinel keeping a lonely vigil on the ramparts of liberty.

And so it has come to pass.

Meanwhile, Obama claims he hasn't made a decision but also calls Syria's alleged gas attack a "challenge" to the world himself.

Let me suggest that when someone creates and propagates the paradigm, himself, that if he doesn't bomb a country then he has been successfully "challenged," he's decided to bomb that country.

Obama adds that he is thinking about a "limited, narrow act." Again, a purely cosmetic action to save face.

Which is not a good reason to

DROP

BOMBS

on countries which haven't attacked us.

He's broadcasting his plan to conduct a bombing campaign which is designed to be ineffectual. Its ineffectuality is its chief recommendation, he says.

They told me if I voted for John McCain, I'd have a president who bombed countries on shaky evidence without any coalition behind him or any authorization from Congress, all to appease his medieval sense of masculine honor, and they were right!

The Lines Have Become Blurred: So say administration people about the "red lines" which have become "Blurred Lines" which must be unblurred.

They think in pop-song thought-balloons.
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Posted by: Ace at 10:54 AM | Comments (417)
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On today's episode, Andy, Drew M., John E. and Rick "T-Bone" Tempest are joined by David Freddoso, Editor of the Conservative Intelligence Briefing. We discuss Syria, Amateur Webzine Slate's rapid descent into shameless clickwhoring,  Cory Booker's imaginary friend "T-Bone", and the Prius full of sad clowns that is MSNBC.

David is the author of three books that might be of interest to you: Spin Masters: How the Media Ignored the Real News and Helped Reelect Barack Obama (2013),  Gangster Government: Barack Obama and the New Washington Thugocracy (2011),  and the New York Times bestseller The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate (200 .

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Drew M. (@DrewMTips)
Gabriel Malor (@GabrielMalor)
John E. (@JohnEkdahl)
Andy (@TheH2 and @AndyM1911)

[Ace]: I wanted to get this up before 5 but I realize most of you won't listen until later (if at all). So use this as an open thread in the meantime. By the way, good show this week. I heartily recommend me.

Posted by: andy at 12:35 PM | Comments (250)
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Ann Althouse writes of Flaubert's La Dictionairre d'Idees Reçues, or "Dictionary of Received Ideas." A comical, cynical spoof of the Thoughtless Thoughts people are infected with.

This is what I think Jonah Goldberg was talking about in his Tyranny of Clichés.

It's these automatic thoughts that cling to the brain like parasites that destroy thinking and reason. Rather like, and I don't think this could possibly be a cliché, alien Body Thetans of idiocy that are interfering with the lucid functioning of our own spirit Thetan.

Amusing Ourselves to Death briefly noted the long, long history of Thoughtless Thoughts. In pre-literate cultures, when all knowledge was stored in human memory and recalled by verbal trope, it was useful to have cute and memorable aphorisms, appellations and other received wisdom in the form of canned cliché. Thus all dawns reflexively had rosy fingers, and were you to dig into the ground, you'd find some money rooting all evils.

Although we've long since gained the capacity to write and read, we've kept many of the Automatic Associations we've been taught.

Liberals, I think, are especially prone to this, for a bunch of reasons. First of all, they dominate the culture and the natural dialogue so their Thoughtless Thoughts crowd out all others. Perhaps there are some anti-gay people who would like to establish the Meme Thetan that Gays Are In Revolt Against God, but they can't, because liberals have established their own reflexive clichés about gays: They improve neighborhoods, like cupcakes a whole heck of a lot, and are perfect fashion accessories for women entering their middle years.

And beyond that, while liberals really like to think that they Think an awful lot (reflexive liberal Thoughtless Thought on liberals: Our major failing is that we're too reasonable and overthink things!!!), in fact, they don't think very much at all.

I think in terms of psychographics, Liberals are better Students than the right. Understand here that I speak of the group, not any individual case. I think Liberals are more educable, and conservatives more resistant to education.

And there's a flip-side to this: People who are more "educable," as I call it, are also more pliable, more deferential to Assumed Authority, more dedicated to the goal of Pleasing Teacher. Less likely to rebel, less likely to quesiton.

This is why they make, on paper, such fine administrators of the National Bureaucratic state. And why they make, in reality, such terrible ones.

There's an old bit of Received Wisdom I heard about the Chinese Bureaucracy, an idea and innovation squashing institution that nevertheless persisted for over a thousand years (and still does). It persisted so long because, while it is bad, it was never quite awful enough to spark a revolution. It was always on every Emperor's to-do list to reform the bureaucracy -- but always at number 12 on the list.

No Emperor ever gets to number 12 on his list. No Emperor ever gets much further than Number 3.

And so a fundamentally poor cadre for administering the state limped along for over a thousand years, retarding Chinese advancement... but its effects were merely subtly pernicious.

Had the Chinese Bureaucracy been worse, China would have done better.

And so it is with Liberals, as far as group psychographics. They're overinvested in repeating back What Teacher Said and underinvested in questioning received wisdom.

I've been on about this basic point for years. I can't credit someone as a thinking person when I ask him for his first reaction to the word-stimulus "USAToday" and I can predict his response -- "McPaper" -- as precisely as I can predict that a cow will come trotting toward the barn when I ring the milking bell.

(Caveat: I have no idea if there's such a thing as a milking bell.)

No one who reacts with the precisely predictable conditioned behavior of a moth drawn to a light-bulb can be credited as fully "thinking."

As Jonah Goldberg argues (I take it-- I haven't read the book), part of the reason for the liberal dominance over the culture and lately politics as well is that it is extremely hard to argue someone out of a proposition he was never argued into in the first place. The public did not decide Barack Obama was extremely intelligent, cultured, articulate, and spiritually uplifting. The public had this word-cloud about Barack Obama drilled into their heads for two years so that when they finally saw the man speak, in all his umming and uhhing glory, there was hardly any space in their minds for their own analytical and impressionistic portrait of Barack Obama. The neurons necessary for storing such electrical wisdom were already all taken up by Extremely Intelligent, Cultured, Articulate, Spiritually Uplifting.

Oh and possibly actually The Second Messiah. Or, to our Jewish friends, just The Messiah.

Sometimes I catch a little heat from commenters who object to my going off-script, as it were, to get into these sorts of Not Really Politics topics.

I have to tell you that if you're conceiving of "politics" as the surface game of just shouting back and forth that abortion either is, or is not murder, I don't think you understand how people's minds are actually shaped. People talk in the language of reason but they actually think, or rather do not think, in the language of myth.

Any effort to reclaim the nation for the Enlightenment and for Classical Liberalism must begin with Breitbart's oft-quoted motto, "Politics is downstream of culture."

Defects in political thinking -- such as an embrace of socialism -- are merely the symptoms. To address the actual disease, one has to first treat the underlying disease, which are defects in thinking, period, and minds fevered by all the superstitions spread virally by the plague-rats of Chomsky, Marx, Zinn, Chuck Todd, Brian Williams, Anderson Cooper, and the rest of the forever chattering National Greek Chorus of Dumb.

I could go on. I usually do. But I'll wrap up.

I don't think most people grasp what Breitbart's slogan means. It's not just knowing what's going on on Girls, for crying out loud. It's understanding that people's political landscapes are just the surface expression of deeper structures of thought and tectonic plates of superstition.

And having blathered on too long, I'd like to suggest our own sort of Devil's Dictionary, or Dictionary of Received Ideas, those reflexive, look-ma-no-thinking Thoughtless Thoughts the American public has been conditioned to believe without even realizing they believe anything of the sort.

Easiest and most prominent starting entry:

RIGHTWING. Should be followed by "extremist." Possessed of something called "Lizard Brains." Usually found beating their wives, bashing gays, and shooting black people for no reason at all. Hate Science. Grizzled veterans of the War on Women. Opposed by pragmatic, rational, non-ideological centrist problem-solvers (see Democrat).

Posted by: Ace at 09:57 AM | Comments (361)
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