Quiz Question

Whenver our Maximum Leader goes through her cat door, she reminds me of one of these.


Quiz question: What are they and where are they referenced?

Cheezburger of the Day

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If Tim McIlrath Wins, He Still Loses

So some dude named Tim McIlrath performed at one of the Wisconsin Union rallies recently. He played that ghastly CSNY song, Ohio, and urged the ralliers to "rise against" ... compound interest tables.

Fight the power! Or maybe the exponent!
Poor Timmy, you see, can't seem to fathom the whole pensions-are-underfunded thing nor does he get the idea that the Unions are the power. They negotiate with the politicians who agree to have Union dues taken directly out of employee paychecks so part can be handed over to the politicians to re-elect them so they can go back and negotiate with the Unions again. In any case, here's the Timster crooning that lovely ballad written to commemorate a few students who got shot after they spent a cheery afternoon throwing rocks and bottles at people with guns.

The song is a fitting choice for too many reasons to list here. It's a famous ballad from a group that personified the empty-headed selfishness of the time that led us to so much that is wrong with America today. The kids in the audience will spend their lives paying, paying, paying for the idiocies of the CSNY crowd. Perhaps his next selection might be that wonderful paean to sexual gratification for males and economic slavery for single moms, Love the One You're With.

Or maybe just a reenactment of the Greek riots of last year.

These Unions won their fight with The Man, Timmy, but lost to the compound interest tables. That's your stage down there in the bottom center at about 0:35, getting peppered with rubber bullets and engulfed in tear gas. Go on up there and play, man, go on! You're next!

How To Change A Tire

Spicy Mushroom Gravy

Playing around with my new Blogger app on my Droid.

Glee, House And Charlie Sheen

The last episode of House that we watched featured an annoyed Dr. House speaking at a grade school for career day. Trying to get out of the assignment, he decided to be his usual, shocking self. He described a vaginal exam for a woman who had overused her vibrator. The teacher was scandalized, but the real joke was on the one fat kid in the back of the room who didn't know what a vibrator was.

As I understand it, the last episode of Glee involved the kids all getting drunk and then performing.

Once we have properly "educated" our children and none of them are shocked any more by what they here or see - straight up pornography, drug abuse and drinking, then what?

In other news, Charlie Sheen, living the life endorsed and recommended by House, Glee, and his own show, Two and a Half Men, has completely self-destructed. No hint of irony was detected on anyone reporting the event.

Update: And, of course, a couple hundred young, fatherless men were arrested last night and sent to jail. But then again, that happens every night. What's the big deal?

Rich Boy Syndrome

Our Holy Ambassador to the Mainstream Media, Peggy Noonan, penned a great column today. Here's a tidbit.

Another reason for budget denialism is that everyone now in Congress lived through the greatest expansion of wealth in the history of man on earth. It happened here, in America, in the past 30 years. And we were rich even before that. But when you grow up in a time of constant expansion, when you grow up immersed in the assumption that we are rich and will always be rich, that we're powerful and will always be powerful, you start to think that America can take any amount of damage and still continue. This is called optimism, but it is not optimism, it is Rich Boy Syndrome. A boy is lucky enough to be born to rich parents who are themselves the product of generations of wealth going back as far as the eye can see. But he never got into the habit of making money, never learned to respect it, and never felt protective of the system that allowed it to exist. So the money went away. Rich Boy Syndrome is thinking wealth will just continue no matter what you do. A lot of members of Congress have Rich Boy Syndrome. They think they can do anything and America will always be rich.

It's worth reading the whole thing as this was not her main point, just one of many things in the column that struck me as particularly good.

Multiculturalism Explained

... as only Andrew Klavan can explain it.

Things I Recommend

I just started playing with the pages feature in Blogger and decided to put together a page of things I use all the time and would recommend to others. You can see it in the sidebar to the left. I'm not terribly happy with the content or formatting, but I figured I'd get started and modify it as I go along.

Something I Did Not Know

A friend invited me into a closed Facebook discussion on abortion and Libertarian morality. Thanks to my own warped view, it has devolved into a conversation about the first principles from which one might derive secular morality. In the process of the discussion, the topic of faith vs. science came up. I did some digging and here is the Catholic position on the two:

When a religious view is contradicted by a well-established scientific fact, then the sources of revelation have to be re-examined, and they will be found to leave the question open. When a clearly-defined dogma contradicts a scientific assertion, the latter has to be revised, and it will be found premature. When both contradicting assertions, the religious and the scientific, are nothing more than prevailing theories, research will be stimulated in both directions, until one of the theories appears unfounded.

If established science and accepted matters of faith collide, science wins and the matters of faith are re-examined. Way cool!

Hall-of-Famer science dude Louis Pasteur was a Catholic. Go team!
Update: Don't take this as a slap at anyone else. It's just something that made me smile.

Because Friday Is The Traditional Day For Catblogging

The air was cold and the hood was warm.

The Price Of Gold

A random observation: Every time we find out that the world isn't really going to end after all, the price of gold goes down.

Concentric Flowers

Cheezburger of the Day

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It's Like Watching NASCAR

... just to see the wrecks. With 42 minutes to go to finish the thing, I came across this.

O you who believe! do not take My enemy and your enemy for friends: would you offer them love while they deny what has come to you of the truth, driving out the Apostle and yourselves because you believe in Allah, your Lord? If you go forth struggling hard in My path and seeking My pleasure, would you manifest love to them? And I know what you conceal and what you manifest; and whoever of you does this, he indeed has gone astray from the straight path. If they find you, they will be your enemies, and will stretch forth towards you their hands and their tongues with evil, and they ardently desire that you may disbelieve. Your relationship would not profit you, nor your children on the day of resurrection; He will decide between you; and Allah sees what you do. Indeed, there is for you a good example in Ibrahim and those with him when they said to their people: Surely we are clear of you and of what you serve besides Allah; we declare ourselves to be clear of you, and enmity and hatred have appeared between us and you forever until you believe in Allah alone...

WHAMMO! Glass and metal and tires are flying in all directions!

When I listen to the thing, I can't help but do so trying to figure out just how it's been bent to encourage war and destruction. And then I hear verses like that and think it was never bent at all. Just like the video Secular Apostate posted said, the thing is picking up speed as it gets near the end.

Dangerous, frightening and yet utterly engrossing.

Fra Chris, Zig Ziglar and the Pro-Life Movement

Over at Portiuncula*, Fra Chris is re-thinking the pro-life movement. Less screaming (well, no screaming) and more praying and kindness. It's a very Zig Ziglar approach.

In his excellent Secrets of Closing the Sale, Zig teaches us that selling is the transferrance of emotion. When the prospect feels about your product the way you do, she buys. Kindness and empathy transfers feeling much better than screaming. Further, prospects never admit they were wrong. You can't get them to change their minds, only to make a new decision. Rather than arguing with them when they turn down your product, you need to present new information that allows them to make a new decision. I love the free ultrasounds outside of abortion clinics for this.

In any case, check out the video over at Portiuncula. It's a very nice example of Christian teaching informing a practical decision.

* - Have you tried Mystic Monk Coffee yet? You should. It's quite good.

We've Got Some Serious Mental Disconnect Going On Here

There's an MSN article about Greeks starting an I Won't Pay movement.

At dawn last Friday, about 100 bleary-eyed activists from a Communist Party-backed labor union covered ticket machines with plastic bags at Athens metro stations, preventing passengers from paying their fares, to protest public transport ticket price hikes.

Other activists have taped up ticket machines on buses and trams. And thousands of people simply don't bother validating their public transport tickets when they take the subway or the bus.

"The people have paid already through their taxes, so they should be able to travel for free," said Konstantinos Thimianos, 36, an activist standing at the metro picket line in central Syntagma Square.

This being MSNBC, you don't get any sense of scale. It could be a dozen protestors doing it or it could be a nationwide movement. Whatever the size of the thing, here's the mind-bending part.

(M)any see the "I Won't Pay" movement as something much simpler: the people's refusal to pay for the mistakes of a series of governments accused of squandering the nation's future through corruption and cronyism.

Umm, dude, Greece is a democracy. If the government has wrecked the place, the person to blame is always nearby.

You did this to us on purpose, didn't you?

Some Pointless Macro Photography

I was playing around with my Nikon D60 artillery piece this weekend and shot this photo. I liked it a lot, so I thought I'd share. I uploaded a nice version of it, so I think the photo is worth a click.

A Little on Wisconsin

Here are just a few tidbits of idle thought on the showdown in Wisconsin.

• I saw this in a comment thread elsewhere and found it an excellent summary of the Unions' position: They're fighting over money that isn't there.


• If you run away, as the Democrats have done, you leave the press to interview your opponents.


• Unions exist to prevent oppression of the workers by their management. In this case, the management is the voters as represented by their elected officials. Calling us all oppressors probably isn't a good idea.


• Seriously, they're doomed. Even if the governor caves, which seems unlikely, they're doomed. Where is the $3B going to come from? Even if they split it evenly between taxes and cuts, the Unions are going to get whacked. The game is over and they've lost, the only thing left to determine is the score.

It Made My Day

It's an awesome new site from the Cheezburger gang.