Binge Spenders Pray For Relief
— andy

So it's come to this in the LOTB?

If all the brightest minds in HarrisburgÂ’s government canÂ’t solve the cityÂ’s financial problems, maybe God can.

That seems to be the thinking in PennsylvaniaÂ’s capital city, where Mayor Linda Thompson and a host of other religious leaders are about to embark on a three-day fast and prayer campaign to cure the cityÂ’s daunting money woes.

It takes a few paragraphs, but the article eventually touches on Harrisburg's real problem:

In short, irresponsible public spending combined with crippling fixed costs and an inability to grow have sent Harrisburg’s leaders to their knees in search of spiritual guidance—and perhaps a little extra generosity from the collection plate. (emphasis added)

Yeah, and if I had a dime for every time I woke up with a killer hangover in college and said, "God if you let me live through this, I'll never drink again!" I could probably patch that hole in Harrisburg's budget. But once I felt a little better, I'd just put the dime towards a suitcase of Milwaukee's Best.

I imagine pretty much the same thing will happen here.

Posted by: andy at 08:26 AM | Comments (110)
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Top Headline Comments 6-21-11
— Gabriel Malor

SumMER! Summer! SUMmer! It's SUMMER!!

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:00 AM | Comments (583)
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Tommy Christopher on Larry O'Connor's Podcast
— Ace

Patterico says he's going to call in. Fun, fun. Listen here.

Tommy Christopher says he believes everything besides the real names in his story are true, including the fact that there was no inappropriate conduct.

When Larry O'Connor asks, "How do you know that, since they deceived you at least once already?," he says he has a corroborating witness:

Gennette Cordova.

Kind of starting to wonder about Tommy Christopher's objectivity here.

Posted by: Ace at 08:28 PM | Comments (157)
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Overnight Open Thread
— Maetenloch

VDH: The Metaphysics of Contemporary Theft

Here VDH discusses the normalization of casual thievery and lawlessness in central California:

1) I left my chainsaw in the driveway to use the restroom inside the house. Someone driving buy saw it. He slammed on the brakes, stole it, and drove off. Neat, quick, easy. Mind you there was only a 5-minute hiatus in between my cutting. And the driver was a random passer-by. That suggests to me that a high number of rural Fresno County motorists can prove to be opportunistic thieves at any given moment.

2) On the next night, three 15-hp agriculture pumps on our farm were vandalized — all the copper wire was torn out of the electrical conduits. The repairs to each one might run $500; yet, the value of the wire could not be over $50. I was told by neighbors that reports and descriptions of the law-breakers focused on youthful thieves casing the countryside — in official parlance a “gang,”

3) A neighbor has a house for sale. It is unoccupied and rather isolated. I saw someone approach it on Friday, and drove over to ensure he was lawful. It was the owner’s assistant, who lamented that someone had just stolen all the new appliances out of the house — carting off the refrigerator, dishwasher, stove, and microwave. ...Don’t the appliance thieves have homes, and if so, do they have locks on the doors to protect their investments from the likes of themselves?

Sadly VDH's observations remind me of the experiences of white farmers in Rhodesia who decided to stay when Mugabe took over. No matter how armed and committed you are, if a large enough proportion of the surrounding population is determined to steal your property (and/or kill you), it's simply an untenable situation in the long run. And now the farmland confiscated by Mugabe from the white farmers is under-farmed or simply lies vacant to the detriment of all concerned.

In more cheery CA news Companies Are Leaving California in Record Numbers. Which isn't really surprising given that California ranks #49 in the nation in business climate. And it turns out that retired San Francisco city employees get more in retirement benefits than the average working private worker in the city earns.

Once a significant proportion of your population survive off of the money and property of those who actually produce, then collapse is probably inevitable. And like in Zimbabwe the talented and ambitious either flee completely or give up and retreat behind safer gated streets and homes in the cities if they can. Eventually - even in a super-resource-rich state like CA - you run out of people to steal from. more...

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:44 PM | Comments (671)
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Obama To Announce Afghanistan Drawdown Plan On Wednesday
— DrewM

The long expected second act to Obama's December, 2009 new Afghanistan speech. Not surprisingly....we're drawingdown.

The president must decide the pace and size of reductions to a 30,000-strong troop escalation which he ordered surged into the conflict in December 2009, a deployment which brought the US garrison to 100,000 soldiers.

Some analysts also expect him to chart a clear glidepath of withdrawals which will lead up to the planned assumption of security control of Afghanistan by the country's nascent defense forces in 2014.

Obama will also be expected to explain to Americans that his surge has wrought slow, but significant progress, particularly in southern Afghanistan against the Taliban and foreshadow operations in key eastern districts.

White House officials also say that since Obama came to office, and poured new resources into a war that they say was neglected by the George W. Bush administration, there has been significant progress against Al-Qaeda.

In December 2009, Obama laid out a new war strategy designed to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al-Qaeda, break the momentum of the Taliban and to offer the Afghan government space to move towards a security takeover.

"We have made significant progress towards achieving those goals," White House spokesman Jay Carney said Monday.

"Obviously, the most sensational and significant data point in that progress, of that progress, is the elimination of Osama bin Laden," he said.

"But there has been enormous progress in disrupting and dismantling al-Qaeda in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region beyond and below Osama bin Laden."

So, we're declaring victory and coming home? Meh, it was always going to be this way. I just hope that there was enough progress in the last year and a half to justify the sacrifice of life and cost.

We went to Afghanistan to capture or kill those responsible for 9/11 and ensure that the country couldn't be the launching point for more attacks. From that stand point, we've probably done as much as we really can. We're not going to be pulling out completely any time, so we'll still be able to kill as many jihadis as possible there and in Pakistan.

If victory is defined as turning Afghanistan into something approaching a normal country...I'm not sure there's much of an appetite in this country for much more of that.

It will be interesting to see how Obama actually frames this in his speech.

Posted by: DrewM at 04:48 PM | Comments (116)
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Barack Obama, Genius
— Ace

Pretty decent video contrasting what the media says about Sarah Palin, compared to Obama's actual gaffes.

No 57 states here, oddly.

A couple of these are pretty ticky-tack, but that's okay, I guess. What's less okay is the insistence by this video that Obama says "All Timers" when, having heard it three times myself, he clearly correctly says "Alzheimer's." Coming right at the beginning of this documentation of the Human Highlight Reel, that's going to cause a lot of people to stop watching.

But they shouldn't. Apart from that one and some ticky-tack cases of being tongue-tied, this video does demonstrate that Even A God Can Say Dumb Shit.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 04:32 PM | Comments (72)
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Open Thread
— Ace

Actually, knocking off early.

Posted by: Ace at 01:59 PM | Comments (329)
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World's Stupidest Reviewer Claims Green Lantern Is Racist Because Kilowog Is Black Or Something
— Ace

Armond White is one of the worst reviewers on the planet. While many reviewers are simply stupid and tasteless and reflective of a very lame and very safe middle-of-the-road middlebrow temperament, Armond White gets "cred" by saying stupid things almost deliberately.

And now, The Green Lantern is racist. In fact, everything is racist, pretty much. But let's start with the Green Lantern.

"Duncan voices a character named Kilowog, a member of the Green Lantern Corps, brother from another planet... Duncan’s speech patterns seem to dictate the character’s physical appearance; he looks like a police suspect sketch (a dark-skinned, menacing hulk as if derived from the British racial epithet “golliwog”). Essentially emulating the famous Lou Gossett Jr. badass drill sergeant role, Duncan suggests that racist stereotyping exists even among alien cultures."

Michael Clarke Duncan's speech patterns dictated the physical appearance of Kilowog?

I wish there were some way to check this claim against facts.

Oh wait, there is.

Kilowog in the film:

Kilowog as he's been drawn for 25 years:

Kilowog as an action figure:

Apparently that is a figure assembled April 2010 from parts scavenged from other toys. Correction: No it's not; it's a stand-alone toy. The guy there is just figuring out what prior molds the various pieces of Kilowog came from.

See, Armond White: Kilowog has always looked like this. He has always been a very large, sort of pig-faced alien.

He would have to have deep booming bass voice. That's why he's voiced by large, deep-voiced actors, sometimes white and sometimes black.

Including Michael Clarke Duncan, Henry Rollins, Michael Madsen, Diedrich Bader, and either the President or the Voodoo guy from Major League, Dennis Haysbert.

But oh, let's not bother to google this for five seconds and discover Kilowog is a long-lived character who has always been the big, bad-ass, loveable lunkhead alien for 25 years and haslooked pretty much like he does in the film for all this time.

Let's assume they cast a black guy for the role and then said, "Hm... what should Kilowog look like? (snaps fingers) I've got it! Let's make him a Space Negro!!!"

Stupid.

Armond White specializes in this sort of stupid, attention-getting provocation, and, further, is the world's worst movie reviewer.

Google says so.

Thanks to GM.

If Armond White Counted... Which he doesn't, because no one pays him any mind, but if he did: Hollywood would simply stop hiring black talent for fear of the next idiotic thing Armond will accuse them of.

Hemidall, the big Asgardian who stands guard at the Rainbow Bridge and whose eyes can see everything in the universe?

Yeah, that actor got a lot of notice for his presence in that role, and will soon get roles in American productions all over the place.

But not if Armond White had his way.

Because Armond White looked at this character and somehow got from it:

"Butler."

Oh did I mention that Kilowog is sort of beloved as everyone's favorite Green Lantern (possibly ranking ahead of the Green Lantern of Sector 2014, Earth)?

Does that count?

Or is the World's Worst Reviewer just going to ignore the fact that Kilowog is a hero in his absurd 1972-Black-Panther-Open-Mic-Comedy-Night routine of every black actor being cast as some kind of Steppin Fetchit?

Update: A lot of people are telling me I'm being unfair to Armond White. Commenters say he's actually... conservative-ish in knocking down liberal nonsense?

I have to say I don't read him very often. I've seen his reviews in, what, the Voice? Is that where he is? And I've generally not liked him.

Never got a conservative vibe off him. But I'm not familiar with him, so who knows.

One thing I thought was sort of unfair even as I was writing about it -- and so I stopped writing about it -- is a recent attack of sorts on him, noting that he's liked a lot of movies critics didn't like and has disliked a lot of movies critics did like.

I was going to mention that, then realized: 95% of movie critics are awful so actually I guess that's a point in his favor.

In any event, apart from a general "I don't really dig this guy" vibe picked up from a couple dozen reviews, I don't know his work, and who knows, maybe he's a better critic than I'm crediting him for.

Posted by: Ace at 01:10 PM | Comments (203)
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Christopher Hitchens Reviews David Mamet
— rdbrewer

The condescension on display at the outset of Christopher Hitchens' review of David Mamet's The Secret Knowledge On the Dismantling of American Culture tells you exactly where the review is headed:

This is an extraordinarily irritating book, written by one of those people who smugly believe that, having lost their faith, they must ipso facto have found their reason.

"By one of those people." It is off-putting. Minimizing. An appeal to stereotype and consensus. It is lazy, and it is meant to switch-on prejudice. "Oh, yes, one of those people!" Because, you know, there are all those people out there. It has the ring of insult, of saying "the other." It's reptilian to the degree it attempts to mark territory that leaves Mamet on the outside.

And isn't it the other way around? A person's faith is their reason, their rationale--the thing that explains it all to them, whatever the religion in question may be. Having lost one's faith, wouldn't it be more accurate to say the opposite, that a person has lost their reason?

Although it is a short article, Hitchens repeated use of isolated examples as the basis for general claims, largely insinuated, feels relentless. This appears to be Hitchens' instinctive, go-to form of argument. But he knows better. It is deliberate. People do this when they have nothing else. They resort to the faulty when there is no sound argument to be had.

Perhaps that is why Hitchens finds Mamet's book irritating. It forces him to use a few rhetorical tricks over and over, rather than constructing a persuasive, valid, and sound appraisal of the book. And he knows that. It's frustrating for him. I suspect that these analytical flaws stem from the fact Hitchens knew the conclusion he desired to reach from the outset. This is no more-objective-than-subjective review of a book. It is a collection of territorial grunts shoehorned into the space between premise and conclusion.
more...

Posted by: rdbrewer at 12:37 PM | Comments (214)
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Rasmussen on Generic Congressional Ballot: Generic Republican 43%, Generic Democrat... 37%?
— Ace

Nate Silver believes Rasmussen has a "house bias," as every pollster does, but in Rasmussen's case the bias is a being a little too Republican in sample. Rasmussen isn't bad about this -- but he does seem to oversample Republicans/conservatives.

Other pollsters oversample Democrats more, of course.

Point is, Nate Silver has persuaded me there is, I think he said, a +2 or +3% oversample in Rasmussen's numbers for Team GOP.

Still.

It does not appear the MediScare thing is the silver bullet for Democrats, and it does not appear people are buying into the Endless Recovery Summer claims.

Posted by: Ace at 11:38 AM | Comments (233)
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