A hockey fan met a fairy who granted him one wish. "I want to live forever,"
he said.
"Sorry," said the fairy, "but I am not allowed to grant that type of wish."
"Fine,” said the man, "Then I want to die when Toronto wins the Stanley Cup."
*.*
A motorcycle patrolman was rushed to the hospital with an inflamed appendix.
The doctors operated and advised him that all was well. However, the patrolman kept feeling something pulling at the hairs in his crotch.
Worried that it might be a second surgery the doctors hadn't told him about, he finally got enough energy to pull his hospital gown up enough so he could look at what was making him so uncomfortable.
Taped firmly across his pubic hair were three wide strips of adhesive tape, the kind that doesn't come off easily.
Written in large black letters was the sentence.....
"Get well soon.....
From the nurse in the jeep you pulled over last week…..
Take care and all the best….."
*.*
I checked into a hotel on a business trip and was a bit
lonely so I thought I'd get me one of those girls you see
advertised in phone booths when your calling for a cab.
I grabbed a card on my way in. It was an ad for a girl
calling herself Erogonique, a lovely girl, bending over in the
photo. She had all the right curves in all the right places,
beautiful long wavy hair, long graceful legs all the way up. You
know the kind. So I'm in my room and figure, what the heck, I'll
give her a call.
"Hello?" the woman says. Wow! she sounded sexy.
"Hi, I hear you give a great massage and I'd like you to
come to my room and give me one. No, wait, I should be straight
with you. I'm in town all alone and what I really want is sex. I
want it hard, I want it hot, and I want it now. I'm talking kinky
the whole night long. You name it, we'll do it. Bring implements,
toys, everything you've got in your bag of tricks. We'll go hot and
heavy all night; Tie me up, wear a strap on, cover me in chocolate
syrup and whip cream, anything you want baby. Now, how does that
sound?"
She says,
"That sounds fantastic, but for an outside line you need to press 9."
*.*
On stormy days, I like to snuggle with my girlfriend on the bearskin rug by the fireplace with a bottle of really expensive sherry.
But only if my neighbor's out of town for the weekend, 'cause he's kind of touchy about his stuff.
*.*
Eighty percent of married men cheat in America.
The rest cheat in Europe.
Quote of the Times;
How can one enter into a strong man's house, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong man? and then he will spoil his house. He that is not with me is against me. - Matthew 19:30
Link of the Times;
http://directorblue.blogspot.com/p/best-of.html
Issue of the Times;
Why My Wife And I Decided To Abort Our Unborn Gay Son by Stephen Lavedas
Even Richard Dawkins tweeted it would be immoral to have a child who would suffer because of his genetics. I’m sure we’re on solid ground here. My girlfriend and I recently found out she is pregnant. I told her I’d support her and the baby, and secretly started saving for an engagement ring. She said she thought I would have wanted her to get an abortion. I didn’t—at least at first.
She was excited and started planning the nursery. It took me two months to save up, but I finally got on one knee and popped the question. She cried and said yes. I’m still scared about being a dad, but I’ve got a good job and so does she. We’ll make a great family, just the three of us.
Last week, though, she went in for a checkup. We decided to get full fetal blood work done. Everyone’s doing it; the doctor said there is little risk to the fetus, and better safe than sorry, right? I’m sure everything will be fine, and we’ll learn the sex. I really hope it’s a boy.
Oh, and we decided to make everything official with a trip to the courthouse. We are married now! Well, got the blood work results, and there’s good news and bad news. Good news: It’s a boy and he’s healthy. Bad news: He’s gay. I didn’t even know there was a blood test for that now, but I guess it’s new? They found the genes that cause homosexuality and they test for them now.
I’m a really tolerant person, but this has made me think hard. I don’t know how I feel about trying to raise a gay son. Will I be able to relate to him? Won’t his life be super hard? I know things are getting better for gay people, but it seems to me that being gay is really hard in the South, where we live. Gay people aren’t really accepted here like in other parts of the country yet.
This really started to weigh on my mind, so I did some research. Suicide attempts are significantly higher among gay teens—five times more likely. Gay kids are five times more likely than a heterosexual youth to end up hospitalized as a result. More than 70 percent of calls to Trevor Lifeline, a targeted suicide prevention hotline, come from the South and central regions of the country, right where I live. Another study found that any kind of victimization at school leads to much higher risks of substance abuse. Studies in progressive states like Vermont and Massachusetts found that for gay and bisexual boys, rates of victimization were nearly five times that of straight kids. More disturbingly, that victimization coincides with a host of risky behaviors, from cigarette and alcohol abuse all the way up to hard drugs like cocaine and heroin. Gay kids are way more likely to do all of these things than similarly persecuted straight kids.
On top of that, in every studied risk factor but cigarette use, gay and bisexual boys are at a much greater risk than girls. What kind of life will my gay son have? How could I justify subjecting him to such horrible experiences for his entire life?
I can’t imagine what things here in the South must be like. I remember being accused of being gay in school. It was awful. I don’t know if we could send our child to public schools. We would need to find and pay for a progressive private school. If we couldn’t afford it, I guess we could homeschool.
But this is not at all how we wanted our future to be. We both have good jobs we love, but I don’t see how we can afford private schools—and which one of us would give up our job to homeschool our son?
So my wife and I talked, and we’ve decided we aren’t ready to raise a gay child. It isn’t fair to raise a gay child in our area. It would be so hard for our son to live here. And I don’t think either of us could handle it if he killed himself.
Moving elsewhere just to have this baby would be totally unfair to us. We are going to get an abortion, both for the child’s sake and for ours. It’s the best thing for all of us. I’m really glad we found out before it’s too late. I’ve never been more thankful for a woman’s right to choose what to do with her body.
My wife told one of her friends that we are going to have an abortion because we don’t feel equipped to deal with raising a gay child. Apparently it got around to some of our gay friends from college. I’ve been getting emails, texts, and IMs all day from them asking me why I’m a homophobe, and why I hate gay people.
I don’t hate gay people! I just can’t bring a child into the world who would have such a hard time. I mean, we’d do the same thing if the fetus had Down syndrome, and so would about 67 percent of others if they found themselves in that situation. Even Richard Dawkins tweeted that it would be immoral to have a child who would suffer because of his genetics. Many people believe it’s immoral to bring a child into the world who is just going to suffer. Ending the pregnancy is just better for everyone. It seems so obvious.
I don’t understand. It’s my wife’s body. It’s her choice, and I agree with it. It’s our choice of what to do with our pregnancy. How can anyone else tell my wife what to do with her body?
Tomorrow is the day we are supposed to go in for the abortion, but we’ve had to switch clinics twice due to the threats. We actually ended up crossing state lines to go to a clinic, four hours from home. Thankfully the federal law allowing abortion makes that possible. I was exhausted, but it’s our choice. No one else can tell us what my wife is allowed to do with her body.
We got to the clinic almost an hour early. They made us sit in the waiting room for a while and finally called us back, but instead of walking us into a table with stirrups like we expected, they escorted us into an office. A man in a lab coat was waiting at a desk.
“I recognize you,” he said, after looking at us sternly for what seemed like an eternity. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. My wife didn’t speak either. “What you are doing should be a hate crime, and I won’t have any part in it,” the man said, looking angry.
“But it’s my body,” my wife said, sounding defiant, but like a little girl too. “It’s my right.”
“It’s hateful,” the doctor responds. “You are terminating this pregnancy because you don’t want a gay child. Are gay children less valuable than straight children?” He sounded like a teacher trying to impart a lesson to a very slow student.
“No, but—” my wife started to say.
“A gay child has just as much value as a straight child. In fact, you are lucky! Gay children are very rare. Census numbers put the number of homosexuals in America at around 3 percent. It wouldn’t take many more people like you,” he nearly spits the words, “to eliminate homosexuality in America. That’s genocide, and I won’t have that on my conscience!”
With that, we were ushered out. My wife cried all the way home. When we got there, we found that someone had firebombed our rented townhouse and wrote “Bigotry Doesn’t Belong Here!” and “Love Wins!” in spray paint on the sidewalk. I guess some fetuses are more equal than others, but I can’t understand it. I just followed all the arguments I’ve heard from our society to their logical conclusions.
Decided?
Founded?
A nursery school teacher was delivering a station wagon full of kids home one day when a fire truck zoomed past.
Sitting in the front seat of the fire truck was a Dalmatian dog.
The children started to discuss the dog's duties.
"They use him to keep crowds back," said one youngster.
"No," said another, "he's just for good luck."
Then a third child brought the argument to a close...
"They use the dog," she said firmly, "to find the fire hydrant."
*.*
While on maternity leave, a woman from our office brought in her new bundle of joy. She also had her seven-year- old son with her. Everyone gathered around the baby, and the little boy asked, "Mommy, can I have some money to buy a soda?"
"What do you say?" she asked.
Respectfully, the boy replied, "You're thin and beautiful."
The woman reached in her purse and gave her son the money.
*.*
KABUL — Young Afghan hipster Hesh Gul is making a name for himself in Kabul with his locally-sourced artisan bombs.
“Those big Pakistani bomb factories use their mass-produced fireworks to try to put the little guys like me out of business,” Gul commented as he rolled out a fresh batch of homemade explosives. “They may have started small like we did here at Improvised Explosive Delights, but they’ve really sold out. Their bombs have no heart.”
The IED facilities are located in a newly-gentrified section of Hesh’s village next to a Hole Foods outside of Kabul.
“I don’t deliver by goat because it’s faster,” Gul said, adjusting his horn-rimmed glasses.“I do it because it’s better.”
Mo Jahani, Gul’s assistant, says what they do is really about social justice. “Did you know that ninety-nine percent of Afghanistan’s bombs are owned by one percent of the population?” Jahani sneered, sipping a glass of fair-trade chai. “Sounds like a system rigged to blow at any time if you ask me.”
Gul, an unassuming figure in his skinny jeans and ironic Osama bin Laden t-shirt from Turban Outfitters, casts a big shadow in his community. When he’s not running operations at his shop, his sister says he lives green and is an outspoken feminist.
“Hesh was zero-emission before those Taliban posers destroyed all the roads and infrastructure,” his sister claims. “Hesh also supports equal employment for women in jobs like law enforcement. When I am killed for speaking with you because you are not my husband, Hesh will insist that more women and less men do the stoning.”
Hesh shook his head. “Fewer men,” he corrected as he put on a vinyl record of Arcade Fire.
“And ignore that bag of industrial-grade fertilizer,” Gul remarked. “It’s strictly for making bombs. I wouldn’t be caught dead eating anything grown with that poison.”
USAID administrator Gayle Smith predicts that boutique, socially-conscious businesses like Gul’s will lead to a more prosperous Afghanistan. “Hesh’s business uses over fifty percent reclaimed materials, such as landmines and mortar shells left behind by the Soviets,” says Smith. “And the shop’s bombs are so ineffective, they leave hardly any carbon footprint.”
In addition, Smith noted, using cruelty-free ingredients ensures that no animals are harmed in the production of the bombs.
*.*
A study says people suffering from acne may live longer. If you were looking for the key to longevity, that's zit.
Always follow your dreams. The odds are likely that they'll lead you to the restroom.
I saw this on a readerboard the other day - "I'm not superstitious. Just a little stitious."
A poll says 29% of Americans trust the media's fact checking of candidates. But only .3% actually believe that poll.
Ferrari has already sold out all 200 of their new $2.2-million supercars. They come complete with a turbo engine, leather interior and sixteen speeding tickets.
A study by the University of Nebraska says that telemarketers are more likely to permanently lose their voices. Of course, the big question: when?
Ford has announced they're bringing back the Bronco. They didn't need to announce that a former football player will not be the spokesperson.
Is denial on the rise in the United States?
Former USC and Raiders quarterback Todd Marinovich is being charged in connection with a nude break-in attempt of a home in Irvine, California. I’m just afraid to ask where he was carrying his I.D.
Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered a pair of socks meant to be worn with sandals from 2,000 years ago. They figured the guy was married because they were found on the floor.
*.*
A guy applies to the welfare office. They ask why he needs financial assistance.
"I'm having trouble with my eyes," the man says.
"I can't see myself going to work."
Quote of the Times;
A vast cloud of billowing smoke is certainly no proof of any fire, but only a fool would completely ignore it without attempting further investigation. – Unz
Link of the Times;
http://ace.mu.nu/
Issue of the Times;
What’s Exceptional About American Exceptionalism? By Allen C. Guelzo
The nation was founded on natural law and natural right, not myth or tribal legend.
Americans like to believe that they are an exceptional people. We speak of ourselves as a nation lifting our light beside the golden door, a people who “more than self their country loved and mercy more than life,” in the words of “America the Beautiful.” The first person to apply the term “exceptional” to Americans was a Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, in his prophetic survey of American life in the 1830s, Democracy in America. But the germ of the idea had been around even longer, and it has never lost its grip on our imagination. Rallying Americans to his program for a new “Morning in America,” Ronald Reagan described America in almost mystical terms as a “shining city on a hill.” The light it shone with was like none that lighted any other nation. “I’ve always believed that this blessed land was set apart in a special way,” Reagan said in 1983, “that there was some divine plan that placed the two great continents here between the oceans to be found by people from every corner of the Earth who had a deep love for freedom.” In his 2012 presidential bid, Mitt Romney hailed America as “an exceptional country with a unique destiny and role in the world.” By contrast, the man who defeated Romney pointedly spoke of America in unexceptional terms, explaining to the Financial Times that if America was exceptional, it was only in the same sense that “the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” American exceptionalism has almost become a modern political litmus test.
But what is “American exceptionalism”—and what is exceptional about it? Reagan’s invocation of the “shining city on a hill” echoed what many commentators have assumed is the basic statement of American exceptionalism: John Winthrop’s layman’s sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” which he delivered to the colonists he was leading to find refuge for English Puritans in Massachusetts in 1629. But none of the British North American colonies—not even Winthrop’s Massachusetts—saw itself as an exception to the basic European assumptions about how a society should be organized. All the colonies, in varying measures, believed that societies were organized as hierarchies—pyramids, if you will—with the king at the top, the lords and nobility beneath, and the common folk on the bottom. Like all good pyramids, the colonial one was supposed to be static; each layer was to work reciprocally with the others, not in competition. The idea that people could start small and poor and work their way up to the top was considered dangerous. Those who did make it to the top did so, not through work but through the patronage of those already there. There would remain differences between England and its colonies—as native-born Englishmen would remind their colonial brethren—but those distinctions existed within the same recognizable European hierarchy of kings, lords, and commons.
That might have been the way America developed, too, if not for two events. The first was the Enlightenment, which proposed a radically exceptional way of reconceiving human societies. The Enlightenment began as a scientific movement, and especially as a rebellion by scientists like Galileo and Isaac Newton, against the medieval interpretation of the physical world. Medieval thinkers viewed the physical universe as no less a hierarchy than the political world, with Earth at the bottom, and ascending in levels of perfection through the moon, the planets, the stars, and finally, the heavens. This structure had already begun to come apart in the 1500s, when Niklaus Copernicus insisted that viewing the solar system in this way was contradicted by observing the motion of the planets themselves. But it took its greatest blow from Galileo, who trained the newfangled telescope on the moon and observed that nothing about it looked like the next step up in a hierarchy from Earth. It remained for Isaac Newton to show us that the various parts of the physical world were not related by order or rank but by natural laws and forces, like gravity, which were uniform and equal in the operation.
Eventually, people wondered whether the new rules that described the operations of the physical world might have some application to the political world, too. Taking their cue from the revolution in the physical sciences, philosophers sought to describe a natural political order, free of artificial hierarchies such as kings, lords, and commons. They dared to talk about equality rather than pyramids, about universal natural rights rather than inherited status, about commerce rather than patronage, and to question why some half-wit should get to wear a crown, just because his father had done so. But all the Enlightenment’s political philosophers could offer as alternatives were thought experiments about desert islands or ideal commonwealths, and the kings continued to sit undisturbed on their thrones.
The second event was the one that really gave birth to American exceptionalism: the American Revolution. For in one stupendous burst of energy, Americans overturned the entire structure—political, constitutional, legal, and social—of hierarchy and applied the Enlightenment’s thought experiments about equality and natural rights to practical politics.
The confidence that Americans displayed in the existence of a natural political order based on natural rights and natural law was so profound that Thomas Jefferson could describe the most basic of these rights—to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—as “self-evident.” The Virginia Declaration of Rights—another product of the year 1776—explained that “all men . . . have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” Americans did not merely demand a corrected version of British common law or Britain’s hierarchical society; they proclaimed that they were creating a novus ordo seclorum. Their voice, said Frederick Douglass, “was as the trump of an archangel, summoning hoary forms of oppression and time-honored tyranny, to judgment. . . . It announced the advent of a nation, based upon human brotherhood and the self-evident truths of liberty and equality. Its mission was the redemption of the world from the bondage of ages.”
Creating a new politics in America that broke decisively with the past proved surprisingly easier than we might have expected. Whatever lip service they had paid to the old theories of hierarchy during the century and a half before 1776, the colonists, in everyday practice, had developed their own consent-based civil society, created ad hoc legislatures, written their own laws, and spread landownership so broadly across the North Atlantic seaboard that, by the time of the Revolution, 90 percent of the colonists were landowners. Benjamin Franklin remembered that his father, a tallow chandler in Boston, had no particular education, “but his great Excellence lay in a sound understanding and solid judgment in prudential matters, both in private and publick affairs. . . . I remember well his being frequently visited by leading people, who consulted him for his opinion in affairs of the town or of the church he belonged to, and showed a good deal of respect for his judgment and advice: he was also . . . frequently chosen an arbitrator between contending parties.” Americans like Franklin’s father were, in effect, already desert islands and ideal commonwealths; the political philosophy of the Enlightenment gave them a theory that matched the realities they had been living.
The American mix of Enlightenment theory and practical experience in government produced a result that was seen from the first as—there is no other word for it—exceptional. In revolutionary America, reveled Tom Paine, Americans are about “to begin the world over again. . . . The birthday of a new world is at hand, and a race of men, perhaps as numerous as all Europe contains, are to receive their portion of freedom from the events of a few months.” That “portion of freedom” would be a political order with no ranks, no prelates, no hierarchy; a government that limited itself, and confined itself by a written Constitution; and an identity based not on race or blood or soil or ancestry or even language but on a single proposition as relentlessly logical as it was frighteningly brief, that “all men are created equal.”
In European eyes, this was folly. The American decision to license equal citizens to govern themselves invited anarchy. Too many areas of public life, argued Otto von Bismarck in 1870, required an authoritative government to intervene and direct, and the more that authority was based on hierarchy and monarchy, the better. “Believe me,” prophesied Bismarck, “one cannot lead or bring to prosperity a great nation without the principle of authority—that is, the Monarchy.”
Americans compensated for whatever vacuum was made by limiting government through the invention of private, voluntary associations, “little communities by themselves,” as Pennsylvania leader George Bryan called them, to manage their affairs, without the need for a swollen imperial bureaucracy 3,000 miles away. And so they did: in Philadelphia alone, newly independent Americans created the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and for the Relief of Free Negroes, the Guardians of the Poor of the City of Philadelphia, the Female Society of Philadelphia for the Relief and Employment of the Poor, the Hibernian Society, the Magdalen Society for the Shelter and Reformation of Fallen Women, the Society of the Free Instruction of Female Children, the Philadelphia Society for the Free Instruction of Indigent Boys, the Indigent Widows and Single Women’s Society—all without government sanction. Americans took association to the level of an art. Tocqueville surveyed the proliferation of American self-help groups and concluded that “the extraordinary fragmentation of administrative power” in America was offset by the multiplicity of “religious, moral . . . commercial and industrial associations” that substituted themselves for European lords and chancellors.
Thus, American exceptionalism began as a new kind of politics. Americans had not merely done something different; they had captured in living form a natural order that made the old political systems of Europe look as artificial and irrational as fully as Newton’s laws had made medieval physics irrelevant. “We Americans are the peculiar chosen people,” wrote Herman Melville, “the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.”
But establishing a novel political framework was to create only the first leg of what became a three-legged stool of American exceptionalism. If it was not inherited rank and titles that gave authority in society, then it was up to the free initiative of citizens to make of themselves what they wanted, and with government itself so deliberately self-limited, their energies would run instead in the direction of commerce. They would create not only a new politics but also a new economy—the second leg.
“What, then, is the American, this new man?” asked transplanted Frenchman Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in 1782. “He is an American,” Crèvecoeur replied, who has stopped doing what others tell him he must do. He has escaped “from involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour” and has “passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence.” Inside the stiff boundaries of hierarchy, Europeans looked down upon labor as slavery and trade as the unsavory pursuit of the small-minded bourgeoisie—in America, there was almost nothing except a bourgeoisie, and it gloried in labor and commerce. British novelist Frances Trollope was appalled to listen to Americans “in the street, on the road, or in the field, at the theatre, the coffee-house, or at home,” who never seemed to talk “without the word DOLLAR being pronounced between them.” But other Europeans were enchanted by the liberty of American commerce. J. C. Loudoun’s Encyclopaedia of Agriculture recommended that its British readers emigrate to America, since the American “form of government” guaranteed that “property is secure, and personal liberty greater there than anywhere else . . . and both maintained at less expense than under any government in the world.” In America, wrote the French evangelical pastor Georges Fisch, in 1863, “There is no restraint whatever on the liberty of business transactions.” Nor did it matter much who succeeded on a given day and who didn’t, because the next day those who were down were likely to be up.
Abraham Lincoln captured this dynamic when he said that in America, “every man can make himself.” There would always be extremes of wealth and inequalities of enterprise. What mitigated those inequalities was an incessant tumbling-up and tumbling-down, so that one man’s wealth achieved at one moment could pass into the hands of others at another. “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world,” Lincoln said in 1859 (with his own history in mind), “labors for wages a while, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.” This, Lincoln believed, represented a “just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all.” Not all would prosper, but that was no argument against the “system” as a whole.
Significantly, the energy with which Americans threw themselves into unfettered commercial exchange was soon seen as a primary obstacle in the path of a newer enemy of hierarchy—socialism—which emerged out of the self-inflicted wreckage of nineteenth-century aristocracies. Socialism’s great architect, Karl Marx, believed that every society would move out of the old world of hierarchy into capitalism; inevitably, capitalism would yield to socialism; hence, the more advanced a nation becomes in capitalism, the closer it must be to embracing socialism—and eventually Communism.
But Marx was baffled by how the United States defied this rule. No nation seemed more fully imbued with capitalism, yet no nation showed less interest in becoming socialist. This became one of the unresolved puzzles of socialist theory, and it gave rise to frustrated socialists (like Werner Sombart) who struggled with the question: Why is there no socialism in America? Sombart blamed it on the drug of material abundance: socialism, he complained, had foundered in America “on the shoals of roast beef and apple pie.” But another socialist, Leon Samson, had seen better than Sombart that the real enemy of socialism was exceptionalism itself, because Americans give “a solemn assent to a handful of final notions—democracy, liberty, opportunity, to all of which the American adheres rationalistically much as a socialist adheres to his socialism.”
Actually, Marx and Sombart were wrong. There had been an American socialism; they were reluctant to recognize it as such because it came not in the form of a workers’ rebellion against capital but in the emergence of a plantation oligarchy in the slaveholding South. This “feudal socialism,” based on race, called into question all the premises of American exceptionalism, starting with the Declaration of Independence. Nor were slavery’s apologists shy about linking this oligarchy to European socialism, since, as George Fitzhugh asserted in 1854, “Slavery produces association of labor, and is one of the ends all Communists and Socialists desire.” What was extraordinary about this vast step away from American exceptionalism was the titanic effort that Americans made, in the Civil War, to correct it. That struggle—a civil war that (as Lincoln said) understood the American republic to be “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” and aimed at the completion of the project of political equality for all its people—may be the most exceptional moment in all of American history, for there is no record of any other conflict quite like the war that Americans waged among themselves, to “die to make men free.” And everyone, down to the slaves themselves, knew that freedom and equality were means toward social mobility and economic self-transformation, not a frozen egalitarianism. “We have as a people no past and very little present, but a boundless and glorious future,” said Frederick Douglass, himself once a slave—one who nevertheless believed that American opportunity was without a copy anywhere else. “America is not only the exception to the general rule, but the social wonder of the world.”
The third leg of the exceptionalist stool was the attitude and relationship that the United States was to adopt toward the rest of the world, where hierarchy still ruled. This has proved a wobbly leg—it divides even exceptionalists—if only because Americans’ notions of what exceptionalism dictates in terms of policy toward other nations have changed since the Founding.
The novelty of exceptionalism’s first two legs—politics and economics—was so great that it was hard for Americans not to see them as part of a deliberate plan. Even before the Revolution, Jonathan Edwards, the architect of American religious revivals, had viewed America as the linchpin of a scheme of divine redemption for the world. “We may well look upon the discovery of so great a part of the world as America, and bringing the gospel into it,” he wrote, “as one thing by which divine Providence is preparing the way for the future glorious times of the church.” Timothy Dwight, Edwards’s grandson, took to poetry to translate these expectations about America’s role in redeeming Earth from Satan into a sacred mission to proclaim an American political gospel:
As the day-spring unbounded, thy splendor shall flow,
And earth’s little kingdoms before thee shall bow;
While the ensigns of union, in triumph unfurl’d,
Hush the tumult of war, and give peace to the world.
But if God did have a special role for America, it was one that America was strictly charged to keep safe on its own shores; its role would be passive and self-protective. Far from any desire to share their nation’s redemptive culture, Americans tended to regard the rest of the world as a potential threat, eager to strangle the American experiment by the reimposition of empire or by association with more unstable attempts at revolution—as in France. “Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will [America’s] heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be,” promised John Quincy Adams in 1821. “But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” So when the Hungarian revolutionary Louis Kossuth came to America in 1852 to drum up support for his rebellion against the Austrian Empire, Lincoln spoke of him cordially, based on “our continued devotion to the principles of our free institutions.” But Lincoln made it plain that “it is the duty of our government to neither foment, nor assist, such revolutions in other governments.”
We were not, however, always consistent in this. The outsize influence of Southern slaveholding interests in American politics in the 1840s helped drag us into a war with Mexico, for no better reason than to acquire large stretches of territory that Southerners hoped to convert into slave states. We half-blundered into the Spanish-American War in 1898 and found ourselves with a colonial empire on our hands, in the form of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and, for all practical purposes, Cuba. And in 1917, we thrust ourselves into World War I behind President Woodrow Wilson’s notion that American democracy ought to be exported to Europe. These attempts to convert American exceptionalism into a missionary endeavor nearly always met with sabotage by other nations, which resented our claims to some unique political virtue; and they met with serious criticism by other Americans—even outright rejection, as when America declined to join the League of Nations.
But even those criticisms disappeared after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which not only thrust us again into a worldwide conflict but also presented the question of how we could prevent such world crises from erupting. It had been demonstrated one too many times to American policymakers that the European states, left to themselves, were incapable of establishing a peaceful continental order; so we have found ourselves, ever since, forced into the role of savior of civilization, whether through the Marshall Plan, NATO, NAFTA, the Security Council, or sometimes through simple unilateralism.
We have accepted this role since World War II, often because we believed we had little choice. But this role has had an adverse effect on American exceptionalism by repeatedly involving the United States in foreign-policy projects that do not yield easily to American solutions—and that then raise doubts about the exceptionalist assumptions behind those solutions. When we have turned to multilateral or multinational solutions, we find ourselves yoked to European and other allies, which, even if they have long since shucked the mantle of aristocracy and inherited hierarchy, have often replaced it with vast social bureaucracies that serve much the same purpose. If we act unilaterally, we find ourselves hounded by international condemnations of American claims of arrogance based on exceptionalism. If we fail to act, we are accused of isolationism.
The third leg is not the only one to suffer the wobbles. We are, for one thing, becoming less reliant on voluntary associations to accomplish the tasks of American society. We often see this illustrated in statistics showing how millennials have staged an unprecedented withdrawal from American churches, so that the share of Americans who refuse any religious affiliation has risen from one in 20 in 1972 to one in five today. But this is only part of a larger American withdrawal from a broad range of voluntary associations, from the PTA to bowling leagues. Between 1973 and 1995, the number of Americans who reported attending “a public meeting on town or school affairs” fell by more than a third; PTA membership fell from more than 12 million in 1964 to barely 5 million in 1982. Even mainline civic organizations, such as the Boy Scouts and the Red Cross, have suffered declines since the 1970s. In the most general sense, Americans’ trust in one another has declined from a peak in the mid-1960s (when 56 percent of survey respondents affirmed that “most people can be trusted”) to a low today, in which only one in three Americans believes that “most people can be trusted.” Among millennials, it’s as low as one in five.
In the place of voluntary association, we have come to rely on state agencies and administrative law. This development has roots leading back to the Progressivism of the past century, which believed that American society had become too complex to be left to ordinary citizens, who lack the expertise to make government work efficiently. The same conviction animates modern progressives, as illustrated by the notorious 2012 campaign video The Life of Julia, which casts the life of one American as an utterly unexceptional progress through one European-style bureaucracy after another.
We have also seen the rise of identity politics, which has made us shy of asserting the old exceptionalism because every identity is now considered exceptional in itself. One’s identity as an American fades—even becomes optional—beside one’s identity as part of an ethnic, racial, religious, or cultural minority. This moves us a world away from Lincoln’s belief that the proposition set out in the Declaration trumped all other identities. We’re no longer even sure that the Declaration has persuasive power. We are, writes Peter Beinart, “products of an educational system that, more than in the past, emphasizes inclusion and diversity, which may breed a discontent with claims that America is better than other nations.” Even conservative jurists like the late William Rehnquist allowed that U.S. courts should “begin looking to the decisions of other [nations’] constitutional courts to aid in their deliberative process.”
But nothing in our national life has so undermined confidence in American exceptionalism as the erosion of economic mobility. From the time we began measuring gross domestic product in the 1940s until 1970, American GDP grew at an average annual rate of 2.7 percent; from 1970 to 1994, it slid to a growth rate of only 1.54 percent, recovered briefly to 2.26 percent, and then began sliding to its pre-Trump level of 1.21 percent. From 1948 until 1972, Americans in the lower 90 percent of income-earners saw their incomes rise by 2.65 percent annually—almost twice the income growth experienced by the same group between 1917 and 1948. Since 1972, though, the growth rate for the 90 percent has collapsed—in fact, turned negative—and middle-class workers who began their careers in the center of the earnings curve have seen their fortunes decline by 20 percent since 1980. The United States has become as economically immobile as the United Kingdom, where the top 10 percent calcify into a self-perpetuating aristocracy that sees itself as part of global networks of communications and exchange and feels little sympathy for those left behind.
Is American exceptionalism merely an artifact of an earlier, more confident time in our history, which should now yield to the blandishments of globalization and conformity to multinational expectations? Only, I think, if we regard the ideas of the American Founders as being mere historical artifacts, too. What made the American experiment exceptional was precisely that it was not founded (like other national identities) on some myth or tribal legend but on the discovery of natural laws and natural rights as unarguable as gravity and born from the same intellectual source. Unhappily, natural law philosophy has been bumped from its place as the American philosophy by the pragmatism of William James and his heirs, and even more by the values pluralism of John Rawls and literary postmodernism. These approaches were supposed to liberate the mind from the restraint of fictitious narratives of honor, truth, and law—but overthrowing these principles merely became a platform for egotism and unfettered lust for power.
To discount American exceptionalism is to suggest that the American political order itself was only a figment of one nation’s imagination, at one time. If there is no such natural law, then, yes, let us discard exceptionalism; but let us then say that neither the old hierarchy nor the new bureaucracy is wrong, either, and accept that all politics is merely an arena in which power, rather than law or right, determines our future. I believe that the American experiment, based on the Declaration and embodied in the Constitution, belongs to an exceptional moment in human history, and remains exceptional. I believe that the U.S. economy is flexible enough to recover its mobility and astonish the world with its capacity to disrupt artificial barriers. And I believe that we can repair the deviations we have sustained from an overconfident mission-mentality without needing to accommodate ourselves to the mores of globalization. Globalization, after all, has been no great success; its main accomplishment, as Christopher Lasch reminded us in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites, has not been international peace or prosperity but “the cosmopolitanism of the favored few . . . uninformed by the practice of citizenship.”
The task of restoring confidence in our exceptionalism will nevertheless be a daunting one. Exceptionalism will have to become what Lincoln called a “civil religion,” to be “breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap . . . taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges . . . written in Primmers, spelling books, and in Almanacs . . . preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice.” The task will require a determined pushback against progressive unexceptionalism and the idea that only government can ensure efficiency and happiness. It will involve the revival of the rule of law (rather than agencies), the rejuvenation of our voluntary associations, and the celebration of their role in our public life. And it will force us to lift the burden of economic sclerosis, not merely with the aim of producing simple material abundance but also with the goal of promoting a national empathy, in which, as Georges Fisch saw in 1863, Americans rise and fall, and rise and fall again, without the stigma that consigns half the nation to a basket of deplorables.
Can this, realistically, be done? Can we disentangle our public life from the grasp of the new hierarchy of bureaucrats and, overseas, pull back from foreign-policy crusades? Can we, in short, recur successfully to our first principles?
Well, we did it once before.
Sitting in the front seat of the fire truck was a Dalmatian dog.
The children started to discuss the dog's duties.
"They use him to keep crowds back," said one youngster.
"No," said another, "he's just for good luck."
Then a third child brought the argument to a close...
"They use the dog," she said firmly, "to find the fire hydrant."
*.*
While on maternity leave, a woman from our office brought in her new bundle of joy. She also had her seven-year- old son with her. Everyone gathered around the baby, and the little boy asked, "Mommy, can I have some money to buy a soda?"
"What do you say?" she asked.
Respectfully, the boy replied, "You're thin and beautiful."
The woman reached in her purse and gave her son the money.
*.*
KABUL — Young Afghan hipster Hesh Gul is making a name for himself in Kabul with his locally-sourced artisan bombs.
“Those big Pakistani bomb factories use their mass-produced fireworks to try to put the little guys like me out of business,” Gul commented as he rolled out a fresh batch of homemade explosives. “They may have started small like we did here at Improvised Explosive Delights, but they’ve really sold out. Their bombs have no heart.”
The IED facilities are located in a newly-gentrified section of Hesh’s village next to a Hole Foods outside of Kabul.
“I don’t deliver by goat because it’s faster,” Gul said, adjusting his horn-rimmed glasses.“I do it because it’s better.”
Mo Jahani, Gul’s assistant, says what they do is really about social justice. “Did you know that ninety-nine percent of Afghanistan’s bombs are owned by one percent of the population?” Jahani sneered, sipping a glass of fair-trade chai. “Sounds like a system rigged to blow at any time if you ask me.”
Gul, an unassuming figure in his skinny jeans and ironic Osama bin Laden t-shirt from Turban Outfitters, casts a big shadow in his community. When he’s not running operations at his shop, his sister says he lives green and is an outspoken feminist.
“Hesh was zero-emission before those Taliban posers destroyed all the roads and infrastructure,” his sister claims. “Hesh also supports equal employment for women in jobs like law enforcement. When I am killed for speaking with you because you are not my husband, Hesh will insist that more women and less men do the stoning.”
Hesh shook his head. “Fewer men,” he corrected as he put on a vinyl record of Arcade Fire.
“And ignore that bag of industrial-grade fertilizer,” Gul remarked. “It’s strictly for making bombs. I wouldn’t be caught dead eating anything grown with that poison.”
USAID administrator Gayle Smith predicts that boutique, socially-conscious businesses like Gul’s will lead to a more prosperous Afghanistan. “Hesh’s business uses over fifty percent reclaimed materials, such as landmines and mortar shells left behind by the Soviets,” says Smith. “And the shop’s bombs are so ineffective, they leave hardly any carbon footprint.”
In addition, Smith noted, using cruelty-free ingredients ensures that no animals are harmed in the production of the bombs.
*.*
A study says people suffering from acne may live longer. If you were looking for the key to longevity, that's zit.
Always follow your dreams. The odds are likely that they'll lead you to the restroom.
I saw this on a readerboard the other day - "I'm not superstitious. Just a little stitious."
A poll says 29% of Americans trust the media's fact checking of candidates. But only .3% actually believe that poll.
Ferrari has already sold out all 200 of their new $2.2-million supercars. They come complete with a turbo engine, leather interior and sixteen speeding tickets.
A study by the University of Nebraska says that telemarketers are more likely to permanently lose their voices. Of course, the big question: when?
Ford has announced they're bringing back the Bronco. They didn't need to announce that a former football player will not be the spokesperson.
Is denial on the rise in the United States?
Former USC and Raiders quarterback Todd Marinovich is being charged in connection with a nude break-in attempt of a home in Irvine, California. I’m just afraid to ask where he was carrying his I.D.
Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered a pair of socks meant to be worn with sandals from 2,000 years ago. They figured the guy was married because they were found on the floor.
*.*
A guy applies to the welfare office. They ask why he needs financial assistance.
"I'm having trouble with my eyes," the man says.
"I can't see myself going to work."
Quote of the Times;
A vast cloud of billowing smoke is certainly no proof of any fire, but only a fool would completely ignore it without attempting further investigation. – Unz
Link of the Times;
http://ace.mu.nu/
Issue of the Times;
What’s Exceptional About American Exceptionalism? By Allen C. Guelzo
The nation was founded on natural law and natural right, not myth or tribal legend.
Americans like to believe that they are an exceptional people. We speak of ourselves as a nation lifting our light beside the golden door, a people who “more than self their country loved and mercy more than life,” in the words of “America the Beautiful.” The first person to apply the term “exceptional” to Americans was a Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, in his prophetic survey of American life in the 1830s, Democracy in America. But the germ of the idea had been around even longer, and it has never lost its grip on our imagination. Rallying Americans to his program for a new “Morning in America,” Ronald Reagan described America in almost mystical terms as a “shining city on a hill.” The light it shone with was like none that lighted any other nation. “I’ve always believed that this blessed land was set apart in a special way,” Reagan said in 1983, “that there was some divine plan that placed the two great continents here between the oceans to be found by people from every corner of the Earth who had a deep love for freedom.” In his 2012 presidential bid, Mitt Romney hailed America as “an exceptional country with a unique destiny and role in the world.” By contrast, the man who defeated Romney pointedly spoke of America in unexceptional terms, explaining to the Financial Times that if America was exceptional, it was only in the same sense that “the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” American exceptionalism has almost become a modern political litmus test.
But what is “American exceptionalism”—and what is exceptional about it? Reagan’s invocation of the “shining city on a hill” echoed what many commentators have assumed is the basic statement of American exceptionalism: John Winthrop’s layman’s sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” which he delivered to the colonists he was leading to find refuge for English Puritans in Massachusetts in 1629. But none of the British North American colonies—not even Winthrop’s Massachusetts—saw itself as an exception to the basic European assumptions about how a society should be organized. All the colonies, in varying measures, believed that societies were organized as hierarchies—pyramids, if you will—with the king at the top, the lords and nobility beneath, and the common folk on the bottom. Like all good pyramids, the colonial one was supposed to be static; each layer was to work reciprocally with the others, not in competition. The idea that people could start small and poor and work their way up to the top was considered dangerous. Those who did make it to the top did so, not through work but through the patronage of those already there. There would remain differences between England and its colonies—as native-born Englishmen would remind their colonial brethren—but those distinctions existed within the same recognizable European hierarchy of kings, lords, and commons.
That might have been the way America developed, too, if not for two events. The first was the Enlightenment, which proposed a radically exceptional way of reconceiving human societies. The Enlightenment began as a scientific movement, and especially as a rebellion by scientists like Galileo and Isaac Newton, against the medieval interpretation of the physical world. Medieval thinkers viewed the physical universe as no less a hierarchy than the political world, with Earth at the bottom, and ascending in levels of perfection through the moon, the planets, the stars, and finally, the heavens. This structure had already begun to come apart in the 1500s, when Niklaus Copernicus insisted that viewing the solar system in this way was contradicted by observing the motion of the planets themselves. But it took its greatest blow from Galileo, who trained the newfangled telescope on the moon and observed that nothing about it looked like the next step up in a hierarchy from Earth. It remained for Isaac Newton to show us that the various parts of the physical world were not related by order or rank but by natural laws and forces, like gravity, which were uniform and equal in the operation.
Eventually, people wondered whether the new rules that described the operations of the physical world might have some application to the political world, too. Taking their cue from the revolution in the physical sciences, philosophers sought to describe a natural political order, free of artificial hierarchies such as kings, lords, and commons. They dared to talk about equality rather than pyramids, about universal natural rights rather than inherited status, about commerce rather than patronage, and to question why some half-wit should get to wear a crown, just because his father had done so. But all the Enlightenment’s political philosophers could offer as alternatives were thought experiments about desert islands or ideal commonwealths, and the kings continued to sit undisturbed on their thrones.
The second event was the one that really gave birth to American exceptionalism: the American Revolution. For in one stupendous burst of energy, Americans overturned the entire structure—political, constitutional, legal, and social—of hierarchy and applied the Enlightenment’s thought experiments about equality and natural rights to practical politics.
The confidence that Americans displayed in the existence of a natural political order based on natural rights and natural law was so profound that Thomas Jefferson could describe the most basic of these rights—to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—as “self-evident.” The Virginia Declaration of Rights—another product of the year 1776—explained that “all men . . . have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” Americans did not merely demand a corrected version of British common law or Britain’s hierarchical society; they proclaimed that they were creating a novus ordo seclorum. Their voice, said Frederick Douglass, “was as the trump of an archangel, summoning hoary forms of oppression and time-honored tyranny, to judgment. . . . It announced the advent of a nation, based upon human brotherhood and the self-evident truths of liberty and equality. Its mission was the redemption of the world from the bondage of ages.”
Creating a new politics in America that broke decisively with the past proved surprisingly easier than we might have expected. Whatever lip service they had paid to the old theories of hierarchy during the century and a half before 1776, the colonists, in everyday practice, had developed their own consent-based civil society, created ad hoc legislatures, written their own laws, and spread landownership so broadly across the North Atlantic seaboard that, by the time of the Revolution, 90 percent of the colonists were landowners. Benjamin Franklin remembered that his father, a tallow chandler in Boston, had no particular education, “but his great Excellence lay in a sound understanding and solid judgment in prudential matters, both in private and publick affairs. . . . I remember well his being frequently visited by leading people, who consulted him for his opinion in affairs of the town or of the church he belonged to, and showed a good deal of respect for his judgment and advice: he was also . . . frequently chosen an arbitrator between contending parties.” Americans like Franklin’s father were, in effect, already desert islands and ideal commonwealths; the political philosophy of the Enlightenment gave them a theory that matched the realities they had been living.
The American mix of Enlightenment theory and practical experience in government produced a result that was seen from the first as—there is no other word for it—exceptional. In revolutionary America, reveled Tom Paine, Americans are about “to begin the world over again. . . . The birthday of a new world is at hand, and a race of men, perhaps as numerous as all Europe contains, are to receive their portion of freedom from the events of a few months.” That “portion of freedom” would be a political order with no ranks, no prelates, no hierarchy; a government that limited itself, and confined itself by a written Constitution; and an identity based not on race or blood or soil or ancestry or even language but on a single proposition as relentlessly logical as it was frighteningly brief, that “all men are created equal.”
In European eyes, this was folly. The American decision to license equal citizens to govern themselves invited anarchy. Too many areas of public life, argued Otto von Bismarck in 1870, required an authoritative government to intervene and direct, and the more that authority was based on hierarchy and monarchy, the better. “Believe me,” prophesied Bismarck, “one cannot lead or bring to prosperity a great nation without the principle of authority—that is, the Monarchy.”
Americans compensated for whatever vacuum was made by limiting government through the invention of private, voluntary associations, “little communities by themselves,” as Pennsylvania leader George Bryan called them, to manage their affairs, without the need for a swollen imperial bureaucracy 3,000 miles away. And so they did: in Philadelphia alone, newly independent Americans created the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and for the Relief of Free Negroes, the Guardians of the Poor of the City of Philadelphia, the Female Society of Philadelphia for the Relief and Employment of the Poor, the Hibernian Society, the Magdalen Society for the Shelter and Reformation of Fallen Women, the Society of the Free Instruction of Female Children, the Philadelphia Society for the Free Instruction of Indigent Boys, the Indigent Widows and Single Women’s Society—all without government sanction. Americans took association to the level of an art. Tocqueville surveyed the proliferation of American self-help groups and concluded that “the extraordinary fragmentation of administrative power” in America was offset by the multiplicity of “religious, moral . . . commercial and industrial associations” that substituted themselves for European lords and chancellors.
Thus, American exceptionalism began as a new kind of politics. Americans had not merely done something different; they had captured in living form a natural order that made the old political systems of Europe look as artificial and irrational as fully as Newton’s laws had made medieval physics irrelevant. “We Americans are the peculiar chosen people,” wrote Herman Melville, “the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.”
But establishing a novel political framework was to create only the first leg of what became a three-legged stool of American exceptionalism. If it was not inherited rank and titles that gave authority in society, then it was up to the free initiative of citizens to make of themselves what they wanted, and with government itself so deliberately self-limited, their energies would run instead in the direction of commerce. They would create not only a new politics but also a new economy—the second leg.
“What, then, is the American, this new man?” asked transplanted Frenchman Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in 1782. “He is an American,” Crèvecoeur replied, who has stopped doing what others tell him he must do. He has escaped “from involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour” and has “passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence.” Inside the stiff boundaries of hierarchy, Europeans looked down upon labor as slavery and trade as the unsavory pursuit of the small-minded bourgeoisie—in America, there was almost nothing except a bourgeoisie, and it gloried in labor and commerce. British novelist Frances Trollope was appalled to listen to Americans “in the street, on the road, or in the field, at the theatre, the coffee-house, or at home,” who never seemed to talk “without the word DOLLAR being pronounced between them.” But other Europeans were enchanted by the liberty of American commerce. J. C. Loudoun’s Encyclopaedia of Agriculture recommended that its British readers emigrate to America, since the American “form of government” guaranteed that “property is secure, and personal liberty greater there than anywhere else . . . and both maintained at less expense than under any government in the world.” In America, wrote the French evangelical pastor Georges Fisch, in 1863, “There is no restraint whatever on the liberty of business transactions.” Nor did it matter much who succeeded on a given day and who didn’t, because the next day those who were down were likely to be up.
Abraham Lincoln captured this dynamic when he said that in America, “every man can make himself.” There would always be extremes of wealth and inequalities of enterprise. What mitigated those inequalities was an incessant tumbling-up and tumbling-down, so that one man’s wealth achieved at one moment could pass into the hands of others at another. “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world,” Lincoln said in 1859 (with his own history in mind), “labors for wages a while, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.” This, Lincoln believed, represented a “just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all.” Not all would prosper, but that was no argument against the “system” as a whole.
Significantly, the energy with which Americans threw themselves into unfettered commercial exchange was soon seen as a primary obstacle in the path of a newer enemy of hierarchy—socialism—which emerged out of the self-inflicted wreckage of nineteenth-century aristocracies. Socialism’s great architect, Karl Marx, believed that every society would move out of the old world of hierarchy into capitalism; inevitably, capitalism would yield to socialism; hence, the more advanced a nation becomes in capitalism, the closer it must be to embracing socialism—and eventually Communism.
But Marx was baffled by how the United States defied this rule. No nation seemed more fully imbued with capitalism, yet no nation showed less interest in becoming socialist. This became one of the unresolved puzzles of socialist theory, and it gave rise to frustrated socialists (like Werner Sombart) who struggled with the question: Why is there no socialism in America? Sombart blamed it on the drug of material abundance: socialism, he complained, had foundered in America “on the shoals of roast beef and apple pie.” But another socialist, Leon Samson, had seen better than Sombart that the real enemy of socialism was exceptionalism itself, because Americans give “a solemn assent to a handful of final notions—democracy, liberty, opportunity, to all of which the American adheres rationalistically much as a socialist adheres to his socialism.”
Actually, Marx and Sombart were wrong. There had been an American socialism; they were reluctant to recognize it as such because it came not in the form of a workers’ rebellion against capital but in the emergence of a plantation oligarchy in the slaveholding South. This “feudal socialism,” based on race, called into question all the premises of American exceptionalism, starting with the Declaration of Independence. Nor were slavery’s apologists shy about linking this oligarchy to European socialism, since, as George Fitzhugh asserted in 1854, “Slavery produces association of labor, and is one of the ends all Communists and Socialists desire.” What was extraordinary about this vast step away from American exceptionalism was the titanic effort that Americans made, in the Civil War, to correct it. That struggle—a civil war that (as Lincoln said) understood the American republic to be “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” and aimed at the completion of the project of political equality for all its people—may be the most exceptional moment in all of American history, for there is no record of any other conflict quite like the war that Americans waged among themselves, to “die to make men free.” And everyone, down to the slaves themselves, knew that freedom and equality were means toward social mobility and economic self-transformation, not a frozen egalitarianism. “We have as a people no past and very little present, but a boundless and glorious future,” said Frederick Douglass, himself once a slave—one who nevertheless believed that American opportunity was without a copy anywhere else. “America is not only the exception to the general rule, but the social wonder of the world.”
The third leg of the exceptionalist stool was the attitude and relationship that the United States was to adopt toward the rest of the world, where hierarchy still ruled. This has proved a wobbly leg—it divides even exceptionalists—if only because Americans’ notions of what exceptionalism dictates in terms of policy toward other nations have changed since the Founding.
The novelty of exceptionalism’s first two legs—politics and economics—was so great that it was hard for Americans not to see them as part of a deliberate plan. Even before the Revolution, Jonathan Edwards, the architect of American religious revivals, had viewed America as the linchpin of a scheme of divine redemption for the world. “We may well look upon the discovery of so great a part of the world as America, and bringing the gospel into it,” he wrote, “as one thing by which divine Providence is preparing the way for the future glorious times of the church.” Timothy Dwight, Edwards’s grandson, took to poetry to translate these expectations about America’s role in redeeming Earth from Satan into a sacred mission to proclaim an American political gospel:
As the day-spring unbounded, thy splendor shall flow,
And earth’s little kingdoms before thee shall bow;
While the ensigns of union, in triumph unfurl’d,
Hush the tumult of war, and give peace to the world.
But if God did have a special role for America, it was one that America was strictly charged to keep safe on its own shores; its role would be passive and self-protective. Far from any desire to share their nation’s redemptive culture, Americans tended to regard the rest of the world as a potential threat, eager to strangle the American experiment by the reimposition of empire or by association with more unstable attempts at revolution—as in France. “Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will [America’s] heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be,” promised John Quincy Adams in 1821. “But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” So when the Hungarian revolutionary Louis Kossuth came to America in 1852 to drum up support for his rebellion against the Austrian Empire, Lincoln spoke of him cordially, based on “our continued devotion to the principles of our free institutions.” But Lincoln made it plain that “it is the duty of our government to neither foment, nor assist, such revolutions in other governments.”
We were not, however, always consistent in this. The outsize influence of Southern slaveholding interests in American politics in the 1840s helped drag us into a war with Mexico, for no better reason than to acquire large stretches of territory that Southerners hoped to convert into slave states. We half-blundered into the Spanish-American War in 1898 and found ourselves with a colonial empire on our hands, in the form of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and, for all practical purposes, Cuba. And in 1917, we thrust ourselves into World War I behind President Woodrow Wilson’s notion that American democracy ought to be exported to Europe. These attempts to convert American exceptionalism into a missionary endeavor nearly always met with sabotage by other nations, which resented our claims to some unique political virtue; and they met with serious criticism by other Americans—even outright rejection, as when America declined to join the League of Nations.
But even those criticisms disappeared after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which not only thrust us again into a worldwide conflict but also presented the question of how we could prevent such world crises from erupting. It had been demonstrated one too many times to American policymakers that the European states, left to themselves, were incapable of establishing a peaceful continental order; so we have found ourselves, ever since, forced into the role of savior of civilization, whether through the Marshall Plan, NATO, NAFTA, the Security Council, or sometimes through simple unilateralism.
We have accepted this role since World War II, often because we believed we had little choice. But this role has had an adverse effect on American exceptionalism by repeatedly involving the United States in foreign-policy projects that do not yield easily to American solutions—and that then raise doubts about the exceptionalist assumptions behind those solutions. When we have turned to multilateral or multinational solutions, we find ourselves yoked to European and other allies, which, even if they have long since shucked the mantle of aristocracy and inherited hierarchy, have often replaced it with vast social bureaucracies that serve much the same purpose. If we act unilaterally, we find ourselves hounded by international condemnations of American claims of arrogance based on exceptionalism. If we fail to act, we are accused of isolationism.
The third leg is not the only one to suffer the wobbles. We are, for one thing, becoming less reliant on voluntary associations to accomplish the tasks of American society. We often see this illustrated in statistics showing how millennials have staged an unprecedented withdrawal from American churches, so that the share of Americans who refuse any religious affiliation has risen from one in 20 in 1972 to one in five today. But this is only part of a larger American withdrawal from a broad range of voluntary associations, from the PTA to bowling leagues. Between 1973 and 1995, the number of Americans who reported attending “a public meeting on town or school affairs” fell by more than a third; PTA membership fell from more than 12 million in 1964 to barely 5 million in 1982. Even mainline civic organizations, such as the Boy Scouts and the Red Cross, have suffered declines since the 1970s. In the most general sense, Americans’ trust in one another has declined from a peak in the mid-1960s (when 56 percent of survey respondents affirmed that “most people can be trusted”) to a low today, in which only one in three Americans believes that “most people can be trusted.” Among millennials, it’s as low as one in five.
In the place of voluntary association, we have come to rely on state agencies and administrative law. This development has roots leading back to the Progressivism of the past century, which believed that American society had become too complex to be left to ordinary citizens, who lack the expertise to make government work efficiently. The same conviction animates modern progressives, as illustrated by the notorious 2012 campaign video The Life of Julia, which casts the life of one American as an utterly unexceptional progress through one European-style bureaucracy after another.
We have also seen the rise of identity politics, which has made us shy of asserting the old exceptionalism because every identity is now considered exceptional in itself. One’s identity as an American fades—even becomes optional—beside one’s identity as part of an ethnic, racial, religious, or cultural minority. This moves us a world away from Lincoln’s belief that the proposition set out in the Declaration trumped all other identities. We’re no longer even sure that the Declaration has persuasive power. We are, writes Peter Beinart, “products of an educational system that, more than in the past, emphasizes inclusion and diversity, which may breed a discontent with claims that America is better than other nations.” Even conservative jurists like the late William Rehnquist allowed that U.S. courts should “begin looking to the decisions of other [nations’] constitutional courts to aid in their deliberative process.”
But nothing in our national life has so undermined confidence in American exceptionalism as the erosion of economic mobility. From the time we began measuring gross domestic product in the 1940s until 1970, American GDP grew at an average annual rate of 2.7 percent; from 1970 to 1994, it slid to a growth rate of only 1.54 percent, recovered briefly to 2.26 percent, and then began sliding to its pre-Trump level of 1.21 percent. From 1948 until 1972, Americans in the lower 90 percent of income-earners saw their incomes rise by 2.65 percent annually—almost twice the income growth experienced by the same group between 1917 and 1948. Since 1972, though, the growth rate for the 90 percent has collapsed—in fact, turned negative—and middle-class workers who began their careers in the center of the earnings curve have seen their fortunes decline by 20 percent since 1980. The United States has become as economically immobile as the United Kingdom, where the top 10 percent calcify into a self-perpetuating aristocracy that sees itself as part of global networks of communications and exchange and feels little sympathy for those left behind.
Is American exceptionalism merely an artifact of an earlier, more confident time in our history, which should now yield to the blandishments of globalization and conformity to multinational expectations? Only, I think, if we regard the ideas of the American Founders as being mere historical artifacts, too. What made the American experiment exceptional was precisely that it was not founded (like other national identities) on some myth or tribal legend but on the discovery of natural laws and natural rights as unarguable as gravity and born from the same intellectual source. Unhappily, natural law philosophy has been bumped from its place as the American philosophy by the pragmatism of William James and his heirs, and even more by the values pluralism of John Rawls and literary postmodernism. These approaches were supposed to liberate the mind from the restraint of fictitious narratives of honor, truth, and law—but overthrowing these principles merely became a platform for egotism and unfettered lust for power.
To discount American exceptionalism is to suggest that the American political order itself was only a figment of one nation’s imagination, at one time. If there is no such natural law, then, yes, let us discard exceptionalism; but let us then say that neither the old hierarchy nor the new bureaucracy is wrong, either, and accept that all politics is merely an arena in which power, rather than law or right, determines our future. I believe that the American experiment, based on the Declaration and embodied in the Constitution, belongs to an exceptional moment in human history, and remains exceptional. I believe that the U.S. economy is flexible enough to recover its mobility and astonish the world with its capacity to disrupt artificial barriers. And I believe that we can repair the deviations we have sustained from an overconfident mission-mentality without needing to accommodate ourselves to the mores of globalization. Globalization, after all, has been no great success; its main accomplishment, as Christopher Lasch reminded us in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites, has not been international peace or prosperity but “the cosmopolitanism of the favored few . . . uninformed by the practice of citizenship.”
The task of restoring confidence in our exceptionalism will nevertheless be a daunting one. Exceptionalism will have to become what Lincoln called a “civil religion,” to be “breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap . . . taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges . . . written in Primmers, spelling books, and in Almanacs . . . preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice.” The task will require a determined pushback against progressive unexceptionalism and the idea that only government can ensure efficiency and happiness. It will involve the revival of the rule of law (rather than agencies), the rejuvenation of our voluntary associations, and the celebration of their role in our public life. And it will force us to lift the burden of economic sclerosis, not merely with the aim of producing simple material abundance but also with the goal of promoting a national empathy, in which, as Georges Fisch saw in 1863, Americans rise and fall, and rise and fall again, without the stigma that consigns half the nation to a basket of deplorables.
Can this, realistically, be done? Can we disentangle our public life from the grasp of the new hierarchy of bureaucrats and, overseas, pull back from foreign-policy crusades? Can we, in short, recur successfully to our first principles?
Well, we did it once before.
Catering?
While I was driving through a seedy area of San Francisco, I noticed that, sandwiched between a strip bar and a liquor store sat a storefront with all of its windows suspiciously blacked out.
Over the door was a sign that proudly declared; "Welcome to Kinko's.”
“We have nothing to do with office supplies."
*.*
The minister drove into a sand trap. He picked up his golf club, broke it but didn't say a word.
Then he picked up the golf bag and tore it to shreds but didn't say a word.
He then took out all the golf balls and flung them into the woods but did not say one word.
Finally he muttered, "I'm gonna have to give it up."
"Golf" asked the caddie.
"No" he replied. "The ministry."
*.*
Musician Jokes
A young child says to his mother, "Mom, when I grow up I'd like to be a
musician."
She replies, "Well honey, you know you can't do both."
Q: What do you call a beautiful woman on a trombonist's arm?
A: A tattoo.
Q: What's the difference between a banjo and an onion?
A: Nobody cries when you chop up a banjo.
Q: What did the drummer get on his I.Q. Test?
A: Saliva.
Q: What do call a guitar player without a girlfriend?
A: Homeless.
Q: What's the similarity between a drummer and a philosopher?
A: They both perceive time as an abstract concept.
Q: What's the difference between a jet airplane and a trumpet?
A: About three decibels.
Q: How do you get an oboist to play A flat?
A: Take the batteries out of his electronic tuner.
Q: What's the difference between a SCUD missile and a bad oboist?
A: A bad oboist can kill you.
Q: Why do clarinetists leave their cases on the dashboard?
A: So they can park in the handicapped zones.
Q: What's the difference between a saxophone and a chainsaw?
A: You can tune a chainsaw.
Q: What do a viola and a lawsuit have in common?
A: Everyone is relieved when the case is closed.
Q: Why are harps like elderly parents?
A: Both are unforgiving and hard to get into and out of cars.
Q: What's the difference between a Wagnerian soprano and a baby elephant?
A: Eleven pounds.
Q: Why are violist's fingers like lightning?
A: They rarely strike the same spot twice.
Q: What's the difference between alto clef and Greek?
A: Some conductors actually read Greek.
Vibrato.
Used by singers to hide the fact that they are on the wrong pitch.
Q: What's the difference between a Lawnmower and a Viola?
A: Vibrato
Q: How can you tell when a singer is at your door?
A: The can't find the key, and they never know when to come in.
Q: What's the difference between a dead chicken in the road, and a dead trombonist in the road?
A: There's a remote chance the chicken was on its way to a gig.
Q: How do you get a guitarist to play softer?
A: Place a sheet of music in front of him.
Q: How do you get a three piece horn section to play in tune?
A: Shoot two of therm.
Q: What's the difference between a bull and a band?
A: The bull has the horns in the front and the asshole in the back.
Q: Why are violas larger than violins?
A: They aren't. Violists heads are smaller.
Q: How are trumpet players like pirates?
A: They're both murder on the high Cs.
*.*
"Do not meddle in the affairs of cats, for they are subtle and will piss on your computer." -Bruce Graham
"There is no snooze button on a cat who wants breakfast."-Unknown
"Cats are smarter than dogs. You can't get eight cats to pull a sled through snow." --Jeff Valdez
"Cats are rather delicate creatures and they are subject to a good many ailments, but I never heard of one who suffered from insomnia."
-Joseph Wood Krutch
"Some people say that cats are sneaky, evil, and cruel. True, and they have many other fine qualities as well." --Missy Dizick
"You will always be lucky if you know how to make friends with strange cats."-Colonial American proverb
"Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want."-Joseph Wood Krutch
I had been told that the training procedure with cats was difficult. It's not. Mine had me trained in two days.
*.*
The day I started my construction job,
I was in the office filling out an employee form,
when I came to the section that asked:
Single____, Married____, Divorced____.
I marked single. Glancing at the man next to me,
who was also filling out his form,
I noticed he hadn't marked any of the blanks.
Instead he had written, 'Yes, in that order.'
Quote of the Times;
The fact that the postmodernists dare to be Marxists is also something that I find I would say not so much intellectually reprehensible as morally repugnant and one of the things that – one of the things that the post modernists – postmodern Neo Marxists continually claim is that they have nothing but compassion for the downtrodden. And I would say that anybody with more than a cursory knowledge of twentieth century history who dares to claim simultaneously that they have compassion for the downtrodden and that their Marxists are revealing either their ignorance of history. That’s so astounding that it’s actually a form of miracle or a kind of malevolence that’s so reprehensible that it’s almost unspeakable. Because we already ran the equity experiment over the course of the century and we already know what the Marxist doctrines have done for oppressed people all around the world and the answer to that mostly was imprisoned, enslave, work them to death or execute them. – Petterson
Link of the Times;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB6p5QPVhPI&t=19s
Issue of the Times;
How Catering To Mentally Ill Transsexuals Is Making Our Whole Society Crazy by John Hawkins
When someone is clinically depressed, we’re not encouraged to say, “You should be depressed! No one will ever love you because you’re a bad person!” If we run across someone with Narcissistic personality disorder, we’re not supposed to go, “We are all inferior to you great and mighty one!” If we talk to someone who believes the CIA is reading their thoughts through their teeth, no one suggests feeding their delusion by going, “Yes they do. In fact I know they do because I’ve been listening to your thoughts and knew you were going to come ask me about it.” As a matter of fact, not only do we not do these things, if we are compassionate people, we can recognize that it would be CRUEL to encourage someone’s mental illness instead of helping them back in the right direction.
Believing you should be the other gender is a mental illness. We seem to have no problem recognizing this even in very similar cases. For example, people with Body integrity identity disorder believe they should be missing limbs or paralyzed. They often ask doctors to mutilate them in this way and they are TURNED DOWN because it’s considering unethical for a doctor to destroy a healthy body part. Furthermore, there are people who believe they are Jesus Christ, a Raccoon, and alien or a planet (Yes, really). We don’t just roll with that and say, “Oh you’re a planet! Well, we need to get you into space where you belong” or “You’re a Raccoon, huh? Well, I’ve got a tasty garbage can you can get into in my back yard.”
People who are transsexual deserve our compassion and sympathy because they are living with a mental illness that has a high suicide rate and often leads to a lot of unhappiness. However instead of acknowledging that transsexualism like the mental illness it is and considering it to be a problem for poor individuals inflicted with it and their psychologists, we are treating them like the sane ones and acting like the rest of our society is crazy for not accepting their delusional beliefs as fact. Worse yet, because we’ve wrapped this mental illness in the cloak of Civil Rights, we’ve warped our behavior in bizarre ways.
We’re allowing men, with testicles, that are often sexually interested in women, into bathrooms and changing rooms where women and little girls are in various states of undress. This has already led to numerous incidents (Here’s a far from complete list). Then, if women quite naturally complain about this, they’re treated like they have the problem for not wanting to share that private space with the opposite gender. Yet, the whole purpose of having men’s and women’s bathrooms instead of just bathrooms is so that women don’t have share bathrooms with men.
We are now starting to see men posing as women dominating in certain women’s sports. For example, transgender weightlifter Laurel Hubbard who transitioned a few years ago has now qualified for the women’s Olympics. This is not a big surprise because men are bigger, stronger, faster than women and everything from men’s hearts, to the length of our legs to our bone structure tends to give us a competitive advantage in sporting events. Yes, you can chemically force down the level of testosterone in a body, but that only takes away a small percentage of man’s advantage. Again, this is why we have “men’s sports” and “women’s sports,” but not just “sports.” It’s because we all know it’s not fair to women to make them compete with men. Yet the women who lose out on chances at scholarships or are defeated in athletic contests they’ve spent years training for because they’re beaten by men are treated as the ones with problems when they’re simply asking for a level playing field.
We’re now regularly seeing small children being allowed to “choose” their gender. Just as one example out of many, Charlize Theron claimed her son came out as transgender at 3. Since when do we allow small children to make massive, life altering decisions like this? We even have some people claiming TODDLERS can change their gender. Despite the fact that “80 to 95 percent of children with gender dysphoria will come to identify with and embrace their bodily sex,” 15 states have already made it illegal to have therapy that tries to reconcile them with their gender. In other words, we simultaneously note than transsexuals struggle with their mental health and have a 41% suicide rate, yet we are working overtime to steer young children towards life altering surgeries, hormones & identity changes despite the fact that many of them would just grow out of it if left alone. This the moral equivalent of child molestation, but we simply shrug our shoulders and ignore it.
Just as we don’t consider it ethical for doctors to chop off the healthy arms and legs of people with Body integrity identity disorder, it should not be considered ethical for a doctor to mutilate a person to look like the opposite gender. Yet not only are we allowing that, increasingly we as a society are paying for it. There are multiple states that pay for the enormous cost (150k is a very rough estimate) of these surgeries and some others even pay for prisoners to get sex changes. Right now there’s a trans employee suing his employer for refusing to pay $40,000 for a surgery to fix his mannish face. But of course, his face looks mannish because he’s a man. So now the big ask is for taxpayers to pay for mentally ill people to mutilate themselves and there are supposedly sane people going along with it.
We can go on and on with this. Have you heard of “deadnaming?” That’s another name for calling transsexuals by the names they were born with. There is a lawsuit over that in Britain. Similarly in Canada, there is – and no, this is not a joke – a guy suing to force women to wax his scrotum. He claims he’s a “she” and apparently has right to have women touch his junk. We now have states changing the name and gender on the birth certificate for a child decades later, as if lying on the birth certificate will make it reality. There is also now a regular argument being made that men who won’t date transgender women are “transphobic.” So the argument is now that straight men who don’t want to date other men pretending to be women are the ones with the problem, not the mentally ill men that have surgically mutilated themselves to appear to be the other sex.
By taking a mental health issue and pretending that it’s a civil rights issue, we’ve turned the mental issues of a tiny slice of the population into mental health issues for everyone else. Suddenly, if Tom decides at 30 years of age that he’s really a woman, it’s your responsibility to pay for it, call him by his new name and send him into the locker room with your daughter to watch her change. All in the name of what, exactly? Having the rest of us act like head cases doesn’t have an upside and there’s really not much evidence that these “sex changes” are helping transsexuals as a group either either.
…”There is huge uncertainty over whether changing someone’s sex is a good or a bad thing,” said Chris Hyde, the director of the facility. Even if doctors are careful to perform these procedures only on “appropriate patients,” Hyde continued, “there’s still a large number of people who have the surgery but remain traumatized-often to the point of committing suicide.”
…The most thorough follow-up of sex-reassigned people—extending over 30 years and conducted in Sweden, where the culture is strongly supportive of the transgendered—documents their lifelong mental unrest. Ten to 15 years after surgical reassignment, the suicide rate of those who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery rose to 20 times that of comparable peers.
It’s almost like asking mentally ill people what they want to do and then just rolling with it even though you know it’s an extremely bad idea doesn’t work out very well for anyone.
Over the door was a sign that proudly declared; "Welcome to Kinko's.”
“We have nothing to do with office supplies."
*.*
The minister drove into a sand trap. He picked up his golf club, broke it but didn't say a word.
Then he picked up the golf bag and tore it to shreds but didn't say a word.
He then took out all the golf balls and flung them into the woods but did not say one word.
Finally he muttered, "I'm gonna have to give it up."
"Golf" asked the caddie.
"No" he replied. "The ministry."
*.*
Musician Jokes
A young child says to his mother, "Mom, when I grow up I'd like to be a
musician."
She replies, "Well honey, you know you can't do both."
Q: What do you call a beautiful woman on a trombonist's arm?
A: A tattoo.
Q: What's the difference between a banjo and an onion?
A: Nobody cries when you chop up a banjo.
Q: What did the drummer get on his I.Q. Test?
A: Saliva.
Q: What do call a guitar player without a girlfriend?
A: Homeless.
Q: What's the similarity between a drummer and a philosopher?
A: They both perceive time as an abstract concept.
Q: What's the difference between a jet airplane and a trumpet?
A: About three decibels.
Q: How do you get an oboist to play A flat?
A: Take the batteries out of his electronic tuner.
Q: What's the difference between a SCUD missile and a bad oboist?
A: A bad oboist can kill you.
Q: Why do clarinetists leave their cases on the dashboard?
A: So they can park in the handicapped zones.
Q: What's the difference between a saxophone and a chainsaw?
A: You can tune a chainsaw.
Q: What do a viola and a lawsuit have in common?
A: Everyone is relieved when the case is closed.
Q: Why are harps like elderly parents?
A: Both are unforgiving and hard to get into and out of cars.
Q: What's the difference between a Wagnerian soprano and a baby elephant?
A: Eleven pounds.
Q: Why are violist's fingers like lightning?
A: They rarely strike the same spot twice.
Q: What's the difference between alto clef and Greek?
A: Some conductors actually read Greek.
Vibrato.
Used by singers to hide the fact that they are on the wrong pitch.
Q: What's the difference between a Lawnmower and a Viola?
A: Vibrato
Q: How can you tell when a singer is at your door?
A: The can't find the key, and they never know when to come in.
Q: What's the difference between a dead chicken in the road, and a dead trombonist in the road?
A: There's a remote chance the chicken was on its way to a gig.
Q: How do you get a guitarist to play softer?
A: Place a sheet of music in front of him.
Q: How do you get a three piece horn section to play in tune?
A: Shoot two of therm.
Q: What's the difference between a bull and a band?
A: The bull has the horns in the front and the asshole in the back.
Q: Why are violas larger than violins?
A: They aren't. Violists heads are smaller.
Q: How are trumpet players like pirates?
A: They're both murder on the high Cs.
*.*
"Do not meddle in the affairs of cats, for they are subtle and will piss on your computer." -Bruce Graham
"There is no snooze button on a cat who wants breakfast."-Unknown
"Cats are smarter than dogs. You can't get eight cats to pull a sled through snow." --Jeff Valdez
"Cats are rather delicate creatures and they are subject to a good many ailments, but I never heard of one who suffered from insomnia."
-Joseph Wood Krutch
"Some people say that cats are sneaky, evil, and cruel. True, and they have many other fine qualities as well." --Missy Dizick
"You will always be lucky if you know how to make friends with strange cats."-Colonial American proverb
"Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want."-Joseph Wood Krutch
I had been told that the training procedure with cats was difficult. It's not. Mine had me trained in two days.
*.*
The day I started my construction job,
I was in the office filling out an employee form,
when I came to the section that asked:
Single____, Married____, Divorced____.
I marked single. Glancing at the man next to me,
who was also filling out his form,
I noticed he hadn't marked any of the blanks.
Instead he had written, 'Yes, in that order.'
Quote of the Times;
The fact that the postmodernists dare to be Marxists is also something that I find I would say not so much intellectually reprehensible as morally repugnant and one of the things that – one of the things that the post modernists – postmodern Neo Marxists continually claim is that they have nothing but compassion for the downtrodden. And I would say that anybody with more than a cursory knowledge of twentieth century history who dares to claim simultaneously that they have compassion for the downtrodden and that their Marxists are revealing either their ignorance of history. That’s so astounding that it’s actually a form of miracle or a kind of malevolence that’s so reprehensible that it’s almost unspeakable. Because we already ran the equity experiment over the course of the century and we already know what the Marxist doctrines have done for oppressed people all around the world and the answer to that mostly was imprisoned, enslave, work them to death or execute them. – Petterson
Link of the Times;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB6p5QPVhPI&t=19s
Issue of the Times;
How Catering To Mentally Ill Transsexuals Is Making Our Whole Society Crazy by John Hawkins
When someone is clinically depressed, we’re not encouraged to say, “You should be depressed! No one will ever love you because you’re a bad person!” If we run across someone with Narcissistic personality disorder, we’re not supposed to go, “We are all inferior to you great and mighty one!” If we talk to someone who believes the CIA is reading their thoughts through their teeth, no one suggests feeding their delusion by going, “Yes they do. In fact I know they do because I’ve been listening to your thoughts and knew you were going to come ask me about it.” As a matter of fact, not only do we not do these things, if we are compassionate people, we can recognize that it would be CRUEL to encourage someone’s mental illness instead of helping them back in the right direction.
Believing you should be the other gender is a mental illness. We seem to have no problem recognizing this even in very similar cases. For example, people with Body integrity identity disorder believe they should be missing limbs or paralyzed. They often ask doctors to mutilate them in this way and they are TURNED DOWN because it’s considering unethical for a doctor to destroy a healthy body part. Furthermore, there are people who believe they are Jesus Christ, a Raccoon, and alien or a planet (Yes, really). We don’t just roll with that and say, “Oh you’re a planet! Well, we need to get you into space where you belong” or “You’re a Raccoon, huh? Well, I’ve got a tasty garbage can you can get into in my back yard.”
People who are transsexual deserve our compassion and sympathy because they are living with a mental illness that has a high suicide rate and often leads to a lot of unhappiness. However instead of acknowledging that transsexualism like the mental illness it is and considering it to be a problem for poor individuals inflicted with it and their psychologists, we are treating them like the sane ones and acting like the rest of our society is crazy for not accepting their delusional beliefs as fact. Worse yet, because we’ve wrapped this mental illness in the cloak of Civil Rights, we’ve warped our behavior in bizarre ways.
We’re allowing men, with testicles, that are often sexually interested in women, into bathrooms and changing rooms where women and little girls are in various states of undress. This has already led to numerous incidents (Here’s a far from complete list). Then, if women quite naturally complain about this, they’re treated like they have the problem for not wanting to share that private space with the opposite gender. Yet, the whole purpose of having men’s and women’s bathrooms instead of just bathrooms is so that women don’t have share bathrooms with men.
We are now starting to see men posing as women dominating in certain women’s sports. For example, transgender weightlifter Laurel Hubbard who transitioned a few years ago has now qualified for the women’s Olympics. This is not a big surprise because men are bigger, stronger, faster than women and everything from men’s hearts, to the length of our legs to our bone structure tends to give us a competitive advantage in sporting events. Yes, you can chemically force down the level of testosterone in a body, but that only takes away a small percentage of man’s advantage. Again, this is why we have “men’s sports” and “women’s sports,” but not just “sports.” It’s because we all know it’s not fair to women to make them compete with men. Yet the women who lose out on chances at scholarships or are defeated in athletic contests they’ve spent years training for because they’re beaten by men are treated as the ones with problems when they’re simply asking for a level playing field.
We’re now regularly seeing small children being allowed to “choose” their gender. Just as one example out of many, Charlize Theron claimed her son came out as transgender at 3. Since when do we allow small children to make massive, life altering decisions like this? We even have some people claiming TODDLERS can change their gender. Despite the fact that “80 to 95 percent of children with gender dysphoria will come to identify with and embrace their bodily sex,” 15 states have already made it illegal to have therapy that tries to reconcile them with their gender. In other words, we simultaneously note than transsexuals struggle with their mental health and have a 41% suicide rate, yet we are working overtime to steer young children towards life altering surgeries, hormones & identity changes despite the fact that many of them would just grow out of it if left alone. This the moral equivalent of child molestation, but we simply shrug our shoulders and ignore it.
Just as we don’t consider it ethical for doctors to chop off the healthy arms and legs of people with Body integrity identity disorder, it should not be considered ethical for a doctor to mutilate a person to look like the opposite gender. Yet not only are we allowing that, increasingly we as a society are paying for it. There are multiple states that pay for the enormous cost (150k is a very rough estimate) of these surgeries and some others even pay for prisoners to get sex changes. Right now there’s a trans employee suing his employer for refusing to pay $40,000 for a surgery to fix his mannish face. But of course, his face looks mannish because he’s a man. So now the big ask is for taxpayers to pay for mentally ill people to mutilate themselves and there are supposedly sane people going along with it.
We can go on and on with this. Have you heard of “deadnaming?” That’s another name for calling transsexuals by the names they were born with. There is a lawsuit over that in Britain. Similarly in Canada, there is – and no, this is not a joke – a guy suing to force women to wax his scrotum. He claims he’s a “she” and apparently has right to have women touch his junk. We now have states changing the name and gender on the birth certificate for a child decades later, as if lying on the birth certificate will make it reality. There is also now a regular argument being made that men who won’t date transgender women are “transphobic.” So the argument is now that straight men who don’t want to date other men pretending to be women are the ones with the problem, not the mentally ill men that have surgically mutilated themselves to appear to be the other sex.
By taking a mental health issue and pretending that it’s a civil rights issue, we’ve turned the mental issues of a tiny slice of the population into mental health issues for everyone else. Suddenly, if Tom decides at 30 years of age that he’s really a woman, it’s your responsibility to pay for it, call him by his new name and send him into the locker room with your daughter to watch her change. All in the name of what, exactly? Having the rest of us act like head cases doesn’t have an upside and there’s really not much evidence that these “sex changes” are helping transsexuals as a group either either.
…”There is huge uncertainty over whether changing someone’s sex is a good or a bad thing,” said Chris Hyde, the director of the facility. Even if doctors are careful to perform these procedures only on “appropriate patients,” Hyde continued, “there’s still a large number of people who have the surgery but remain traumatized-often to the point of committing suicide.”
…The most thorough follow-up of sex-reassigned people—extending over 30 years and conducted in Sweden, where the culture is strongly supportive of the transgendered—documents their lifelong mental unrest. Ten to 15 years after surgical reassignment, the suicide rate of those who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery rose to 20 times that of comparable peers.
It’s almost like asking mentally ill people what they want to do and then just rolling with it even though you know it’s an extremely bad idea doesn’t work out very well for anyone.
Mock?
There were two old men sitting on a park bench. A blonde woman walks by.
One old man says to the other one, "Ever sleep with a blonde?"
The other old man says, "Many a time. Many a time."
A brunette then walks by. The old man says to the other, "Ever sleep with a brunette?"
The other old man says, "Many a time. Many a time."
A redhead walks by, and the old man says to the other, "Ever sleep with a redhead?"
The other old man says, "Not a wink."
*.*
Two highway workers were busy working at a construction site when a big car with diplomatic license plates pulled up.
"Parlez-vous fran?ais?" the driver asks them. The two workers just stared.
"Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" The two continued to stare at him.
"Fala portugu?s?" Neither worker said anything.
"Parlate Italiano?" Still no response.
Finally, the man drives off in disgust.
One worker turned to the other and said, "Gee, maybe we should learn a foreign language..."
"What for? That guy knew four of them and what good did it do him?"
*.*
Capitol One announced Monday that some 100 million accounts have been compromised. Apparently, the crooks no longer need to wonder, "What's in your wallet?"
They're experimenting with "tickling" therapy, saying that it can actually slow down the aging process. This, according to Dr. Goochie Goochie-Goo.
To be fair, President Trump may have dissed Baltimore, but you should hear what the rats and rodents there are saying about him.
There have been two shark attacks in the past few days in Florida. How do they know it's Shark Week?
A study says too much time on the smartphone could make people fat. I read that on my phone the other day at the all-you-can-eat ice cream buffet.
A Singapore engineering company has built a robot that makes noodle dishes in seconds. I suppose now that we've knocked that out, we can get back to working on that cancer thing.
A report says 43 Million Americans struggle with reading and writing. We should probably throw in "tweeting" in there, too.
Scientists at the University of California at Berkeley have created a robot cockroach, that can apparently stand the weight of a human. OK, NOW can we get back to cancer research? I had no idea there were concerns of a cockroach shortage.
*.*
Later, Grandma says, "Boy, I'm really worn out.
I remember being exhausted when our kids were babies, Ben.
Now, with grandkids, I'm exhausted all over again!"
Grandpa replies, "It's to be expected, Bea.
Why do you think they call folks our age re-tired?"
*.*
Those guys at Disneyland who have to wear character costumes ought to form a union.
I'm not really all that concerned about their working conditions.
I just think the picket lines would be a hoot.
Quote of the Times;
If you are capable of understanding that the survival of the British red squirrel is threatened by the mass immigration of the North American grey squirrel, how can you consider it it even remotely objectionable to observe that the survival of the European nations are threatened by the mass immigration of foreign populations considerably larger and more fecund than they are?
Link of the Times;
https://www.neonrevolt.com/2019/07/26/the-biggest-heist-in-american-history-exposing-the-kingston-groups-nefarious-activities-with-usattyhuber-and-genflynn-qanon-greatawakening-neonrevolt/
Issue of the Times;
The Morning Rant: Minimalist Edition
Ace made a really good point yesterday in the comments, that "weaklings turn into vicious monsters when they have a little power over someone else granted by the state. Weakness is an important part of cruelty"
It's why they mock masculinity, because they cannot fathom what it means, and they conflate the real strength of masculinity with what they see themselves doing if they had personal power, and that is where they get the idea of 'toxic masculinity."
But real masculinity is the antithesis of what is exhibited by most of those in power. Helping a woman with her heavy suitcase or opening a door for others or stopping to help change a tire or carrying a few grocery bags to the car is not sexual dominance or the dominant patriarchy or any such ridiculous post-modern idiocy. It is the quiet recognition of reality, and the decision to do one's part in making that reality as pleasant and good as possible. But so many of them are helpless in the face of that reality, and resent and hate those who can help.
And that is why the Left sees an armed America as some sort of dystopian playground combat, in which those toxically masculine men run around flaunting their sidearms and shooting anyone who looks at them funny. The truth of course is that most armed Americans are very careful to avoid situations that require their weapons, and see them as a last resort, when all other options have been exhausted.
But that's how the soi-boys of the Left would behave, and they cannot imagine anyone who wouldn't take advantage of the power and control that they imagine a gun grants to its user. Because deep down inside (and recently not so deep!) they are not confident of themselves and desperately need the validation that they get when they dominate others. It's their most basic and base instinct, and the mark of a less highly evolved being.
That's why they are dangerous, and that's why we must confront them at every turn.
One old man says to the other one, "Ever sleep with a blonde?"
The other old man says, "Many a time. Many a time."
A brunette then walks by. The old man says to the other, "Ever sleep with a brunette?"
The other old man says, "Many a time. Many a time."
A redhead walks by, and the old man says to the other, "Ever sleep with a redhead?"
The other old man says, "Not a wink."
*.*
Two highway workers were busy working at a construction site when a big car with diplomatic license plates pulled up.
"Parlez-vous fran?ais?" the driver asks them. The two workers just stared.
"Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" The two continued to stare at him.
"Fala portugu?s?" Neither worker said anything.
"Parlate Italiano?" Still no response.
Finally, the man drives off in disgust.
One worker turned to the other and said, "Gee, maybe we should learn a foreign language..."
"What for? That guy knew four of them and what good did it do him?"
*.*
Capitol One announced Monday that some 100 million accounts have been compromised. Apparently, the crooks no longer need to wonder, "What's in your wallet?"
They're experimenting with "tickling" therapy, saying that it can actually slow down the aging process. This, according to Dr. Goochie Goochie-Goo.
To be fair, President Trump may have dissed Baltimore, but you should hear what the rats and rodents there are saying about him.
There have been two shark attacks in the past few days in Florida. How do they know it's Shark Week?
A study says too much time on the smartphone could make people fat. I read that on my phone the other day at the all-you-can-eat ice cream buffet.
A Singapore engineering company has built a robot that makes noodle dishes in seconds. I suppose now that we've knocked that out, we can get back to working on that cancer thing.
A report says 43 Million Americans struggle with reading and writing. We should probably throw in "tweeting" in there, too.
Scientists at the University of California at Berkeley have created a robot cockroach, that can apparently stand the weight of a human. OK, NOW can we get back to cancer research? I had no idea there were concerns of a cockroach shortage.
*.*
Later, Grandma says, "Boy, I'm really worn out.
I remember being exhausted when our kids were babies, Ben.
Now, with grandkids, I'm exhausted all over again!"
Grandpa replies, "It's to be expected, Bea.
Why do you think they call folks our age re-tired?"
*.*
Those guys at Disneyland who have to wear character costumes ought to form a union.
I'm not really all that concerned about their working conditions.
I just think the picket lines would be a hoot.
Quote of the Times;
If you are capable of understanding that the survival of the British red squirrel is threatened by the mass immigration of the North American grey squirrel, how can you consider it it even remotely objectionable to observe that the survival of the European nations are threatened by the mass immigration of foreign populations considerably larger and more fecund than they are?
Link of the Times;
https://www.neonrevolt.com/2019/07/26/the-biggest-heist-in-american-history-exposing-the-kingston-groups-nefarious-activities-with-usattyhuber-and-genflynn-qanon-greatawakening-neonrevolt/
Issue of the Times;
The Morning Rant: Minimalist Edition
Ace made a really good point yesterday in the comments, that "weaklings turn into vicious monsters when they have a little power over someone else granted by the state. Weakness is an important part of cruelty"
It's why they mock masculinity, because they cannot fathom what it means, and they conflate the real strength of masculinity with what they see themselves doing if they had personal power, and that is where they get the idea of 'toxic masculinity."
But real masculinity is the antithesis of what is exhibited by most of those in power. Helping a woman with her heavy suitcase or opening a door for others or stopping to help change a tire or carrying a few grocery bags to the car is not sexual dominance or the dominant patriarchy or any such ridiculous post-modern idiocy. It is the quiet recognition of reality, and the decision to do one's part in making that reality as pleasant and good as possible. But so many of them are helpless in the face of that reality, and resent and hate those who can help.
And that is why the Left sees an armed America as some sort of dystopian playground combat, in which those toxically masculine men run around flaunting their sidearms and shooting anyone who looks at them funny. The truth of course is that most armed Americans are very careful to avoid situations that require their weapons, and see them as a last resort, when all other options have been exhausted.
But that's how the soi-boys of the Left would behave, and they cannot imagine anyone who wouldn't take advantage of the power and control that they imagine a gun grants to its user. Because deep down inside (and recently not so deep!) they are not confident of themselves and desperately need the validation that they get when they dominate others. It's their most basic and base instinct, and the mark of a less highly evolved being.
That's why they are dangerous, and that's why we must confront them at every turn.
Baltimore?
Mr. Parker saw his son's shiner and demanded, "Jimmy, who gave you that black eye?"
"No one," replied the spunky child. "I had to fight for it."
*.*
SAN DIEGO, CA - A polar bear at the San Diego Zoo has apologized to black bears, brown bears, and all other mammals of color for his "problematic whiteness."
The bear "got woke" after a leftist protesting the zoo for keeping animals in captivity bravely leaped into the bear's exhibit. After eating the protester, the polar bear picked up the book on critical race theory the woman had in her pocket and devoured it, first figuratively, then literally.
"Wow," he said. "I never realized how problematic my existence was before. I really need to think about this."
Shortly after reading the book, the polar bear, whose name is Chad, held a press conference in which he apologized for his many years of not being "woke" to the struggle of non-white animals.
"I am so sorry for everyone I've hurt," he said. "I am hereby canceling myself. Please listen to black and brown bear voices." He also announced that he was donating his remaining walruses to minority bears in need. "The overwhelming whiteness of the polar bear community should give us all paws."
The bear escaped the zoo, devoured several people, and cast himself into exile on an ice floe for his crimes.
*.*
I went out for a run this morning, but I came back after a couple of minutes because I forgot something.
I forgot that I can't run for more than a couple of minutes.
*.*
As told to me by my music teacher....
This guy goes on vacation to a tropical island. As soon as he gets
off the plane, he hears drums. He thinks "Wow, this is cool." He goes to
the beach, he hears the drums, he eats lunch, he hears drums, he goes to
a luau, he hears drums. He TRIES to go to sleep, he hears drums.
This goes on for several nights, and gets to the point where the
guy can't sleep at night because of the drums. Finally, he goes down to
the front desk.
When he gets there, he asks the manager "Hey! What's with these
drums. Don't they ever stop? I can't get any sleep."
The manager says, "No! Drums must NEVER stop. Very bad if drums
stop."
"Why?"
"When drums stop... bass solo begins."
*.*
Game of Thrones received 32 Emmy nominations yesterday.
Hopefully, fans will like how this ends.
Quote of the Times;
In Movie One, President Trump is absolutely, definitely a racist, and any honest person can see it in the way he talks, the people who support him, and his policy proposals. For the viewers of this movie, Trump’s alleged racism is a fact, not an opinion. Therefore, logically, all Trump supporters must be racists because they support a racist president. This view of reality is promoted by CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC, NBC, NPR, and essentially all of the left-leaning press. In Movie Two, President Trump promised the country he would not be politically correct if elected, and sure enough, he is not. He goes hard at all critics, with uncautious language, and that makes it easy for his political foes to cherry pick the times he criticizes women and people of color, framing those instances as some sort of pattern. Viewers of Movie Two are confused about whether the viewers of Movie One are lying, stupid, brainwashed, or mentally ill. – Adams
Link of the Times;
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/08/a_health_care_system_thats_the_envy_of_the_world.html
Issue of the Times;
The real reason Democrats defend Baltimore by Liz Peek
Democrats and the liberal media are incensed that President Trump has criticized the mostly-black city of Baltimore, but not for the reasons you might think.
When Trump calls “Charm City,” as it was described by advertisers trying to boost its reputation in the 1970s, “FAR WORSE and more dangerous” than the situation at the Southern border, he highlights Democrats’ Achilles Heel - the wreckage left behind by their liberal policies, and most especially the damage done to minority communities.
They are terrified that black voters will tune in.
When Trump asked black voters in the 2016 election, “What have you got to lose?” he struck a nerve. One of the most startling elements in his unexpected victory over Hillary Clinton was that he won a higher percentage of the black and Hispanic vote than Mitt Romney in 2012, despite incessant media accusations that Trump was a racist.
It used to be that calling someone a racist was a serious and important charge. No longer. Today some Democrats have determined that not only is the president a racist, but so are all of his supporters. Joe Lockhart, CNN contributor and former press secretary for Bill Clinton, tweeted recently, “Vote for @realDonaldTrump and you are a racist.” That kind of over-the-top insult could get Donald Trump reelected.
People who support the president do so for a wide variety of reasons, but Trump voters whom I know mostly support his economic agenda, convinced that growth in jobs and incomes is essential to delivering opportunity for all Americans. Many believe in the power of free enterprise to deliver the American dream, affording those willing to work hard the chance to improve the lives of themselves and their children.
Trump supporters think that Democrats’ push to increase the role of government through higher taxes and more regulation takes away from America’s vibrant entrepreneurship, which attracts ambitious people the world over.
Trump supporters are also fed up with the kind of mindless political correctness that leads to truly idiotic policy-making. Allowing men to compete in women’s sports in the name of gender neutrality is just plain stupid. You don’t need a blue-ribbon committee of medical experts to know that men are stronger and faster than women; they simply are.
Standing by while thugs throw water on our cops, as has recently taken place in New York City, undermines respect for law enforcement and the safety of our citizens. Does that make sense? Berkeley, California, banning gender-sensitive names is also ridiculous. Changing “manhole” to “maintenance hole” does not move mankind forward.
Every day a story comes along that makes millions of Americans roll their eyes, and renew their commitment to voting for President Trump.
Meanwhile, the left accuses the president of racism for inartfully pointing out that the city of Baltimore is a mess. They are incensed - not at the numerous ways in which that city fails its citizens, but rather because President Trump has suggested rather crudely that the legislators in charge of the city and the district are not getting the job done.
He is right, of course. And, he is not the only politician who has pointed out Baltimore’s failings. Bernie Sanders in 2015 described the city as looking like a “Third World country.”
But because the city is largely black, Trump’s criticisms have been cast as racist. In a recent column, New York Times columnist Charles Blow asserted (again) that Trump is a racist. His proof is the frequency with which the president uses the word “infest.” He claims that Trump’s use of the word, as when he tweeted that Baltimore is “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” or, earlier, when he described the presence of MS-13 “in certain parts of our country” as an “infestation,” is evidence of racism.
The Merriam-Webster definition of “infest” is to “spread or swarm in or over in a troublesome manner,” or, in other words, nothing to do with race. But that is irrelevant.
What is relevant is that Trump’s critiques of Baltimore are on the mark. The past three mayors, all Democrats, have left office in disgrace.
As Seth Barron pointed out in a recent piece, the New York Times Magazine last May ran a cover article entitled “The Tragedy of Baltimore.” The piece cited the breakdown of law and order in the wake of the 2015 riots, which the author describes as “nothing less than a failure of order and governance the likes of which few American cities have seen in years.” As Barron notes, Baltimore has the highest murder rate in the nation.
It also has one of the worst school districts, in which, a couple of years ago, one survey showed that in 13 mostly black high schools, not one kid was proficient in math. In 2018, Prosperity Now research revealed that Baltimore’s black unemployment rate was triple that of whites, while a third of blacks in the city had zero net worth and a median income slightly more than half of that claimed by white citizens.
This is the city the left is defending.
Democrats are opposed to charter schools, which families know offer a rare beacon of hope to inner-city kids, and they want to raise the minimum wage, which will eliminate jobs. Moreover, they raise money through soft drink taxes and lotteries that mainly fall on the shoulders of low-income and minority families. These are among the many reasons black voters, who traditionally vote Democratic, could turn to Trump.
That scares the heck out of Democrats, and that’s why they are so angry that President Trump has dared to pull back the curtain on Baltimore. Racism isn’t calling out the failures of Baltimore; racism is not caring enough to do anything about it.
"No one," replied the spunky child. "I had to fight for it."
*.*
SAN DIEGO, CA - A polar bear at the San Diego Zoo has apologized to black bears, brown bears, and all other mammals of color for his "problematic whiteness."
The bear "got woke" after a leftist protesting the zoo for keeping animals in captivity bravely leaped into the bear's exhibit. After eating the protester, the polar bear picked up the book on critical race theory the woman had in her pocket and devoured it, first figuratively, then literally.
"Wow," he said. "I never realized how problematic my existence was before. I really need to think about this."
Shortly after reading the book, the polar bear, whose name is Chad, held a press conference in which he apologized for his many years of not being "woke" to the struggle of non-white animals.
"I am so sorry for everyone I've hurt," he said. "I am hereby canceling myself. Please listen to black and brown bear voices." He also announced that he was donating his remaining walruses to minority bears in need. "The overwhelming whiteness of the polar bear community should give us all paws."
The bear escaped the zoo, devoured several people, and cast himself into exile on an ice floe for his crimes.
*.*
I went out for a run this morning, but I came back after a couple of minutes because I forgot something.
I forgot that I can't run for more than a couple of minutes.
*.*
As told to me by my music teacher....
This guy goes on vacation to a tropical island. As soon as he gets
off the plane, he hears drums. He thinks "Wow, this is cool." He goes to
the beach, he hears the drums, he eats lunch, he hears drums, he goes to
a luau, he hears drums. He TRIES to go to sleep, he hears drums.
This goes on for several nights, and gets to the point where the
guy can't sleep at night because of the drums. Finally, he goes down to
the front desk.
When he gets there, he asks the manager "Hey! What's with these
drums. Don't they ever stop? I can't get any sleep."
The manager says, "No! Drums must NEVER stop. Very bad if drums
stop."
"Why?"
"When drums stop... bass solo begins."
*.*
Game of Thrones received 32 Emmy nominations yesterday.
Hopefully, fans will like how this ends.
Quote of the Times;
In Movie One, President Trump is absolutely, definitely a racist, and any honest person can see it in the way he talks, the people who support him, and his policy proposals. For the viewers of this movie, Trump’s alleged racism is a fact, not an opinion. Therefore, logically, all Trump supporters must be racists because they support a racist president. This view of reality is promoted by CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC, NBC, NPR, and essentially all of the left-leaning press. In Movie Two, President Trump promised the country he would not be politically correct if elected, and sure enough, he is not. He goes hard at all critics, with uncautious language, and that makes it easy for his political foes to cherry pick the times he criticizes women and people of color, framing those instances as some sort of pattern. Viewers of Movie Two are confused about whether the viewers of Movie One are lying, stupid, brainwashed, or mentally ill. – Adams
Link of the Times;
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/08/a_health_care_system_thats_the_envy_of_the_world.html
Issue of the Times;
The real reason Democrats defend Baltimore by Liz Peek
Democrats and the liberal media are incensed that President Trump has criticized the mostly-black city of Baltimore, but not for the reasons you might think.
When Trump calls “Charm City,” as it was described by advertisers trying to boost its reputation in the 1970s, “FAR WORSE and more dangerous” than the situation at the Southern border, he highlights Democrats’ Achilles Heel - the wreckage left behind by their liberal policies, and most especially the damage done to minority communities.
They are terrified that black voters will tune in.
When Trump asked black voters in the 2016 election, “What have you got to lose?” he struck a nerve. One of the most startling elements in his unexpected victory over Hillary Clinton was that he won a higher percentage of the black and Hispanic vote than Mitt Romney in 2012, despite incessant media accusations that Trump was a racist.
It used to be that calling someone a racist was a serious and important charge. No longer. Today some Democrats have determined that not only is the president a racist, but so are all of his supporters. Joe Lockhart, CNN contributor and former press secretary for Bill Clinton, tweeted recently, “Vote for @realDonaldTrump and you are a racist.” That kind of over-the-top insult could get Donald Trump reelected.
People who support the president do so for a wide variety of reasons, but Trump voters whom I know mostly support his economic agenda, convinced that growth in jobs and incomes is essential to delivering opportunity for all Americans. Many believe in the power of free enterprise to deliver the American dream, affording those willing to work hard the chance to improve the lives of themselves and their children.
Trump supporters think that Democrats’ push to increase the role of government through higher taxes and more regulation takes away from America’s vibrant entrepreneurship, which attracts ambitious people the world over.
Trump supporters are also fed up with the kind of mindless political correctness that leads to truly idiotic policy-making. Allowing men to compete in women’s sports in the name of gender neutrality is just plain stupid. You don’t need a blue-ribbon committee of medical experts to know that men are stronger and faster than women; they simply are.
Standing by while thugs throw water on our cops, as has recently taken place in New York City, undermines respect for law enforcement and the safety of our citizens. Does that make sense? Berkeley, California, banning gender-sensitive names is also ridiculous. Changing “manhole” to “maintenance hole” does not move mankind forward.
Every day a story comes along that makes millions of Americans roll their eyes, and renew their commitment to voting for President Trump.
Meanwhile, the left accuses the president of racism for inartfully pointing out that the city of Baltimore is a mess. They are incensed - not at the numerous ways in which that city fails its citizens, but rather because President Trump has suggested rather crudely that the legislators in charge of the city and the district are not getting the job done.
He is right, of course. And, he is not the only politician who has pointed out Baltimore’s failings. Bernie Sanders in 2015 described the city as looking like a “Third World country.”
But because the city is largely black, Trump’s criticisms have been cast as racist. In a recent column, New York Times columnist Charles Blow asserted (again) that Trump is a racist. His proof is the frequency with which the president uses the word “infest.” He claims that Trump’s use of the word, as when he tweeted that Baltimore is “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” or, earlier, when he described the presence of MS-13 “in certain parts of our country” as an “infestation,” is evidence of racism.
The Merriam-Webster definition of “infest” is to “spread or swarm in or over in a troublesome manner,” or, in other words, nothing to do with race. But that is irrelevant.
What is relevant is that Trump’s critiques of Baltimore are on the mark. The past three mayors, all Democrats, have left office in disgrace.
As Seth Barron pointed out in a recent piece, the New York Times Magazine last May ran a cover article entitled “The Tragedy of Baltimore.” The piece cited the breakdown of law and order in the wake of the 2015 riots, which the author describes as “nothing less than a failure of order and governance the likes of which few American cities have seen in years.” As Barron notes, Baltimore has the highest murder rate in the nation.
It also has one of the worst school districts, in which, a couple of years ago, one survey showed that in 13 mostly black high schools, not one kid was proficient in math. In 2018, Prosperity Now research revealed that Baltimore’s black unemployment rate was triple that of whites, while a third of blacks in the city had zero net worth and a median income slightly more than half of that claimed by white citizens.
This is the city the left is defending.
Democrats are opposed to charter schools, which families know offer a rare beacon of hope to inner-city kids, and they want to raise the minimum wage, which will eliminate jobs. Moreover, they raise money through soft drink taxes and lotteries that mainly fall on the shoulders of low-income and minority families. These are among the many reasons black voters, who traditionally vote Democratic, could turn to Trump.
That scares the heck out of Democrats, and that’s why they are so angry that President Trump has dared to pull back the curtain on Baltimore. Racism isn’t calling out the failures of Baltimore; racism is not caring enough to do anything about it.
Several animals were savagely beaten in the making of this page, including but not limited to; kittens, rabbits, zebu, skunks, puppies, and platypus. Also several monkeys where force fed crack to improve their typing skills.
And someone shot a duck.
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.
And someone shot a duck.
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.