Look for Ace around the crack of 2pm, as he and and John E. were up until the wee hours of the morning with a pretty funny riff going on Twitter that I'd title "Syrias You Guys".

And then it really gets going ...

Posted by: andy at 02:32 AM | Comments (397)
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Longing and Myth

Then came the sound of a musical instrument, from behind it seemed, very sweet and very short, as if it were one plucking of a string or one note of a bell, and after it a full, clear voice-and it sounded so high and strange that he thought it was very far away, further than a star.

The voice said, Come. Then John saw that there was a stone wall beside the road in that part: but it had (what he had never seen in a garden wall before) a window. There was not glass in the window and no bars; it was just a square hole in the wall. Through it he saw a green wood full of primroses: and he remembered suddenly how he had gone into another wood to pull primroses, as a child, very long ago-so long that even in the moment of remembering the memory seemed still out of reach.

"While he strained to grasp it, there came to him from beyond the wood a sweetness and pang so piercing that instantly he forgot his father's house, and his mother, and the fear of the Landlord, and the burden of the rules. All the furniture of his mind was taken away. A moment later he found that he was sobbing, and the sun had gone in: and what it was that had happened to him he could not quite remember, nor whether it had happened in this wood, or in the other wood when he was a child. It seemed to him that a mist which hung at the far end of the wood had parted for a moment, and through the rift he had seen a calm sea, and in the sea an island, where the smooth turf sloped down unbroken to the bays, and out of the thickets peeped the pale, small-breasted Oreads, wise like gods, unconscious of themselves like beasts, and tall enchanters, bearded to their feet, sat in green chairs among the forests.

But even while he pictured these things he knew with one part of his mind, that they were not like the things he had seen-nay, that what had befallen him was not seeing at all. But he was too young to heed the distinction: and too empty, now that the unbounded sweetness passed away,not to seize greedily whatever it had left behind. He had no inclination yet to go into the wood: and presently he went home, with a sad excitement upon him, repeating to himself a thousand times, "I know now what I want." The first time that he said it, he was aware that it was not entirely true: but before he went to bed he was believing it (The Pilgrim's Regress by C.S. Lewis, p. 8 ).

On Rejecting the Witch's World

“All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder. I'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one more thing to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all of those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side, even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can, even if there isn’t any Narnia” (The Silver Chair, Chapter 12).

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:45 PM | Comments (513)
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Check out my J-Date profile.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:25 AM | Comments (681)
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Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. -- 1 Corinthians 13:4-8

Love keeps no record of wrongs. This is to me the most lovely phrase in the Christian Bible. It is a call not just to forgive others, but to prevent resentment and anger from festering in your own heart. However, the passage does not occur in isolation; it exists in a deeply moral context where the believer is assumed to be always thinking and acting in a Godly way. This passage is not a call to suspend moral judgement.

Empathy -- the ability to understand, or even vicariously experience, someone elseÂ’s feelings -- is a vital part of a normal human beingÂ’s emotional makeup. Empathy is projected; you actually try to cast yourself into another personÂ’s mind and feel what they are feeling. In a sense, when you empathize with another person you try to become that person in some small way. Sympathy, on the other hand, is purely internal: you feel sadness or pity or compassion, but it is not projected.

A human being devoid of the ability to empathize or sympathize with others is a moral monster. We label people like this as sociopaths because we understand that there is something fundamentally wrong with them.

As vital as empathy and sympathy are, though, they carry a great danger. Emotion unanchored by a moral sense can lead to much harm. There is vast moral chasm between empathizing with the victim of a serial killer and the serial killer himself. And it is possible to over-empathize with others, to subordinate yourself to the emotional weather of other people to such a degree that your own emotions and feelings get dulled or even lost. more...

Posted by: Monty at 04:10 AM | Comments (212)
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Life is far too ridiculous to even bother to explain.

European and Arab nations joined Tuesday to condemn Syrian dictator Bashar Assad for gassing his own people as the United States pondered possible military action in its first direct intervention in the Syrian civil war.

France, the United Kingdom and the Arab League said Syria must be held responsible for the attack.

"France is ready to punish those who took the decision to gas the innocent," French President Francois Hollande told a meeting in Paris of French ambassadors.

Yes, France is ready to punish them by ordering Americans to punish them.

As they say, France is willing to fight this war until the last American standing.

Another racecrime hoax. Why you'd almost think there was some sort of disproportionate advantage that society confers on racecrime reporters to make people think it's even worth it to commit serious fraud to do so.

A teacher has gotten 15 years for raping a student who then committed suicide.

Did I say 15 years? I meant 31 days. The judge suspended the sentence, entirely, except for a month's sentence.

Infuriating. Monstrous.

Lady Gaga, who I don't care for, is having a huge Best Friend Breakup with Perez Hilton, whom I actively dislike.

I don't care about this either. Might as well link it as I close the tab though.

MTV's Kennedy continues to be provocative and partly nude.

Obama's NSA scandal is hurting the US tech industry. Big companies that offer cloud storage are losing market share, because buyers have concerns that data stored there is basically subject to US government intrusion at any time. And they have those concerns because data stored there is basically subject to US government intrusion at any time.

And this is not peanuts we're talking about, either:

Translated into hard dollar amounts, another report this month from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) said US cloud providers stand to lose $22-$35 billion over the next three years because of the publicity surrounding the PRISM program.

Is this a surprise? Thanks to @rdbrewer4 in the sidebar, the brains of introverts are better, I mean different, than those of extroverts.

[A] 2012 study by Harvard psychologist Randy Buckner found that people who identify as introverts tend to have larger and thicker gray matter in certain areas of the prefrontal cortex, a highly complex brain region associated with abstract thought and decision-making. People who identify as strongly extroverted, on the other hand, tend to have thinner gray matter in those same prefrontal areas—which hints that introverts tend to devote more neural resources to abstract pondering, while extroverts tend to live in the moment.

Yeah I didn't see that coming.

And here now an adorable puppy being gently woken up. And then he starts yapping, but it's good yapping, not like Woman Yapping.

Now everyone just Shuddup so I can hear myself thinking about misogyny and Schopenhauer.
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Posted by: Ace at 04:09 PM | Comments (559)
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The funny thing is, even Slate's readers -- who are themselves very liberal -- are revolted by the stupidity.

@johnekdahl thinks this is a deliberate attempt to get links by writing shit that's so ducking fumb that people like me have to link it. I've floated that theory before myself, about Slate's egregious article claiming that an AP story about a woman who fell from a building was Slut-Shaming You Guys.

This is actually a real technique: The Daily Mail, I think, put that non-beautiful woman up to writing about how beautiful she was. They knew that would get a reaction.

So here were are again, and Slate is embarrassing itself yet again, in the hopes of collecting some links.

Well there you go. Are you happy?

What is the article about? Well, it's a response to an article (of course it's a response to an article; God forbid one of these ninnies write something on their own initiative, instead of being forever reactionaries) that was published in the New York Times celebrating the uses of quiet in life, how quiet aids one in thinking, how it helps one maintain a balance and calm, and so on.

I have not read it and don't plan to because no one has to sell me on the benefits of a round of cold crisp Shut Up Juice for the house.

Her response? What a horrible attack on women. #WarOnWomen.

Yes that's right, she's sort of right there saying "Women are Super Loud and Noisy and Never Shut Up and Can Never Get to the Point of a Story!"

But it's okay for her to say that, because she's An Feminist, and she's claiming being a loud, caterwauling whiner is some sort of positive contribution to society.

And yet. Something off-putting lurks behind Prochnik’s whole Mr. Darling “a little less noise there” routine. Maybe it’s just that the expectation that one can work in pin-drop quiet feels very … male, or at least alien to a lot of women’s experience.

She then talks about how women are expected to do their jobs at their jobs n stuff.

I detect a strong whiff of resentment about that, but whatever, read it for yourself.

Prochnik opens his piece by quoting the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who believed “a great mind can have great thoughts only if all its powers of concentration are brought to bear on one subject, in the same way that a concave mirror focuses light on one point.” Noise disperses focus, disrupting the formation of ideas. Fine. Yet any “great mind” in Schopenhauer’s philosophizing by necessity belongs to a man. In his 1851 polemic On Women, the thinker isolates rationality as the quality peculiar to men; women “are childish, silly and short-sighted, in a word big children.” (Sidebar: “Big children” is two words.)

Sidebar: this tangent is irrelevant.

Did you catch that? The author quoted Schopenhauer for the proposition that silence is a pleasure and then she linked a different Schopenhauer piece saying Mean Things About Girls!!! (footystomp) and then declared Quietude = #WarOnWomen.

I thought I would explain that to you because it is so strained and twisted some of you probably couldn't follow that without hurting your brains with illogic.

Prochnik’s second historical example, after Schopenhauer, involves Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter narrating how “the men whose labors brought forth the Constitution of the United States had the street outside Independence Hall covered with earth so that their deliberations might not be disturbed by passing traffic.” A true and resonant detail! But it’s also one dude quoting another dude describing a bunch of dudes seeking to carve out a tranquil dude-space in which dudes’ rights could be secured across the country. Sausagefest aside, you get the sense a group of founding mothers would maybe just shut the windows.

Yup. Close the windows firmly shut against the noise. Seal it up tight. Jam wadding in the sills.

In the summer. In Philadelphia. Capital idea, Genius.

Whoshe a shmart girl? Youshe a shmart girl! Yesh you are! Yesh you are!

See the "How Terribly Embarrassing" Update at Post's End.

“The quiet in Independence Hall was not the silence of a monastic retreat,” Prochnik writes. “It was a silence that made them [the “men whose labors … ” etc] more receptive to the sound of the world around them.” Not quite. The world around them was muffled by all that dirt. Playing out the metaphor, while the constitutional convention accomplished wonderful things, must we pretend it did a great job amplifying all marginalized voices? Some serious silencing was still going on.

Let me point out once again that Sex & the City had done terrible things to women, from promoting "Have Sex Like a Man!" promiscuity in very young girls, to telling women that the pinnacle of discourse is Carrie Bradshaw's twee chicklit burblings.

I guess thatÂ’s my problem with ProchnikÂ’s otherwise excellent article. History is littered with instances of white men thoughtlessly asking (or forcing) people who are not white men to shut up.

You know, I don't want to be the guy who says "Hitler did it," but Hitler was known to be quite the shushyface in his day.

It just feels jarring to read a male author use the words of other male authors to extol the virtues of silence. Either Prochnik shouldnÂ’t place such a high premium on quiet, or, if he must have a hushed, pristine bubble in which to think great thoughts, he should retreat to a highbrow man cave and let the rest of us live in and contribute to the sound of the world around us.

As I said before: Connoisseurship. If what she were saying were true, it would probably be obvious, and a connoisseur does not get compliments for recognizing things which are obvious. Yes, the wine is dry, but anyone could have said that; the connoisseur, if he seeks to impress, will have say something unexpected and preferably nonsensical, like "The wine is dry, and yet, at the same time, rather wet in its dryness; a rather moist sort of dry."

So there you go. According to Slate, Serious You Guys anyone speaking of the benefits of quiet Hates Women, #WarOnWomen You Guys, and furthermore, Serious You Guys, women need to put a sock in it or something.

Embarrassing.

I can't say this is a new low because, frankly, the other one was really far stupider. At least this silly blogpost referenced an article that may be interesting to some, brought up an interesting anecdote about the drafting of the Constitution (here's another interesting fact: It's hot in the summer), and mentioned Schopenhauer.

And yet, still very, very embarrassing.

I never doubt the equality of the sexes until I read Feminists.

How Terribly Embarrassing: The windows in fact were closed -- nailed shut, in fact -- as a privacy issue.

So she was wrong to suggest that as something they could have done (they did it), and I was wrong to say that the couldn't have done it, for the heat.

At least this seems to be the lore. I sort of doubt all the windows were shut. Maybe the first-level windows were nailed shut.

I'm having a hard time believing that you seal all the windows in the summer in Philadelphia.

You just can't have a hundred guys in the room, in the summer, working by candlelight (and candles do pump out heat), with no ventilation.

Nevermind the wigs and the ten layers of jackets and frilly shirts.

Unless they were porting in ice or something. Which isn't inconceivable, I guess.

Thanks to MSYB.

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Posted by: Ace at 02:09 PM | Comments (391)
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Now this a premise I'm willing to entertain a bit.

WASHINGTON—Carefully jotting down notes as the two sat in his small second-floor office on K Street, psychiatrist Dr. Thomas Eccleson patiently let President Barack Obama angrily voice his complaints and grievances about every single American in the nation, sources confirmed Tuesday.

While conceding that the president has “made some decent progress” over the course of several months of therapy, Eccleson told reporters that Obama still has many deep-seated issues with each of the 313 million members of the U.S. populace.

“This week we continued exploring Barack’s resentment about being constantly judged by others,” said Eccleson, noting the president’s reliance on unhealthy defense mechanisms to distance himself emotionally from the American public. “Again and again I hear things like, ‘No matter how hard I try, nothing is ever good enough for Seattle resident Bryan Harrison.’ But I keep stressing that, at the end of the day, Barack is a human being and can’t expect himself to be perfect.”

“A lot of his feelings of inadequacy—thinking that no matter how successful he is, he can’t live up to people’s expectations—stem from his relationship with his father,” Eccleson continued. “That’s also at the core of his trust issues with not only Bryan, but also Gail Shaughnessy, Eric Corker, Amy Bergin, and more or less the entire population of Worcester, MA.”

Give it a click, that's just the beginning.

And if you think that's funny, wait 'til you hear the one about the three thugs who were playing a game consisting of hitting a random citizen with a high-powered stun gun but it turned out the random citizen they chose brought a gun to a Taser fight.

Posted by: Ace at 01:21 PM | Comments (127)
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Oh, no kidding.

Presidential hopeful Delaware Sen. Joe Biden stated unequivocally that he will move to impeach President Bush if he bombs Iran without first gaining congressional approval.

Biden spoke in front of a crowd of approximately 100 at a candidate forum held Thursday at Seacoast Media Group. The forum focused on the Iraq war and foreign policy. When an audience member expressed fear of a war with Iran, Biden said he does not typically engage in threats, but had no qualms about issuing a direct warning to the Oval Office.

"The president has no authority to unilaterally attack Iran, and if he does, as Foreign Relations Committee chairman, I will move to impeach," said Biden, whose words were followed by a raucous applause from the local audience.

Posted by: JohnE. at 11:25 AM | Comments (310)
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Hugh Hewitt, who is racist and Hates Women, forced this poor boob to hang up.

He used a cruel and racist trick to do so: he just kept asking her a question. It is racist to ask if Alger Hiss, a communist spy in the State Department (high ranking, too), was a communist spy in the State Department, because Alger Hiss was himself a lesbian Latina, or at least he was in aura.

Stupid people often do not know they're stupid. And when you pull on that particular thread, you agitate them greatly, and then they hang up on you.

More from Ed Morrissey.

Like most people in the media or the New Class, Karen Finney is overpromoted and undereducated. She has been promoted not because of what she knows, which could fit in a thimble, but because of her unflagging enthusiasm in applauding the Dear Leader as he stands at the podium and talks about his New Five Year Plan.

And when she's outside an environment in which only Loyalty to the Tribe/Class/Party matters, she's exposed for what she is, which is to say, an imbecile.

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Posted by: Ace at 12:25 PM | Comments (295)
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Oh wait I thought that people who Refused to Negotiate and Compromise were bad and people who Sought to Negotiate and Compromise were good...?

Here's an alternate explanation: The media are Suckers of C**k who have a formal (and yet fake) rule against taking a position on the substantive merits of a political debate. So they observe this... by instead attacking Republicans for holding a substantive position, but claiming their objection is made upon procedural grounds.

That is, they're not saying that Republicans should allow Obama to spend every trillion he feels like spending.

They're only saying that Republicans' "intransigence" and "refusal to allow government to work, through compromise" is bad.

It just so happens that attacking the Republicans on this process issue also, coincidentally enough, advances Obama's substantive position.

So, having taken this position on the Incredibly Important Value of Compromise earlier, surely the media is duty-bound to savage Obama and Jack Lew for spurning that value now?

No, of course not, because their procedural objection was never honest. They agreed with Obama on the substance before (or, at least, they simply wanted Obama to win, even though they had no real opinion on the substance, because Obama is a Conquering Hero and Conquering Heroes Always Conquer). They agree with Obama (or just want him to win) now.

So it doesn't matter that the media will wind up supporting Compromise earlier and Obama's Bold, Presidential Gravitas Decision now to Not Compromise. The "Compromise" narrative was a con for suckers. The real argument -- dishonestly fought for by a corrupt and dishonest media -- is that Obama Should Win Because Unprecedented.

And that's the same argument they're making now. They're just making it dishonestly, because that's what an industry supposedly dedicated to truth should do, argue in bad faith, argue dishonestly, and lie about their actual core mission.

Posted by: Ace at 10:25 AM | Comments (274)
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