"I Have Not Yet Made A Decision"

... but Obama made enough of a decision to throw British Prime Minister Cameron out into the line of fire. The very lowest bar of all in American foreign policy is to get the British to go along with something. President Obama had made a decision to launch strikes because you know the British PM didn't get humiliated in front of Parliament on his own. He had to have had a phone call with the American Commander-in-Chief before taking one for the team.

Way to go, genius. I'll bet Cameron will be happy to do that again.

Meanwhile, there's this. Is it satire or real news? Hard to tell.

The Catican Guards Taken With A Nikon Coolpix

I love the photos this thing takes. It's a little too big to fit in your pocket comfortably, but that's because it's got a lens that goes to 22x optical zoom. Beautiful shots. The two below are cropped and then reduced more than 1/4 in size (surface area). If you click on them, you'll get a really good view of the Guards.

Now That The Brits Have Backed Out Of The Syria Thing

... Obama should rethink this whole bomb-them-gently idea. Instead, I recommend he show how he's working for peaceful change in the region and have his Silicon Valley cronies fund the opening of a satellite campus of UC Berkeley in Lebanon where Syrian refugees are given free tuition to take gay, lesbian and transgender studies classes while receiving abortions and birth control at taxpayer expense.

Hey, at least it would be consistent with what he's been saying all his life.

Unstable

Clicking around the Interweb Tubes this morning, I found an article on Japan's Nikkei Index. I hadn't been watching it and discovered I've missed out on some wild drama. Dig this 1-year chart.

In 5 1/2 months, it almost doubled.

That's not the Costa Rica index or the Moldovan 20 industrials, that's Japan.

That's totally unstable.

Link Of The Day

... comes from Fr. Dwight Longenecker who shreds atheists as boring. Here's a tidbit.

Atheism on the other hand is so mind numbingly dull, and the worst kind of atheism is the self righteous, “We’re good people too you know” kind of atheism. “Oh, look at me. I’m working at the soup kitchen! I campaigned to ban nuclear power! I have a ‘co-exist’ bumper sticker on my Prius.” They pretend to be revolutionaries, but to me they seem as dull as the McMansion next door and the usual suburban, fast food, shop at the mall American. At least the old fashioned atheists followed their logic and tried to wipe out everyone who didn't agree with them. Stalin, Lenin, Mao and Pol Pot had teeth. The present day respectable atheists are about as interesting as yesterday’s oatmeal.

Read the whole thing. It puts my feeble efforts to shame.

Yes, It Is Indeed 2013

Dig this.

Earlier Wednesday, the U.K. introduced a draft proposal to the core nations of the United Nations Security Council seeking authorization for military action against Syria to protect civilians. But Russia and China blocked the action, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Samantha Power, said in a Twitter message that was verified by her spokesman. Russia, one of the council's five permanent members, is an ally of President Assad.

The US ambassador to the UN released an official statement on Twitter about a possible move towards a war in the Middle East.

What, did she forget the password to her Tumblr account?

:-)

Assad Will Claim Victory

As I understand it, we're going to bomb Syria to punish them for using chemical weapons against the rebels, but not to destabilize or topple the regime. In effect, we're acting as NFL referees here. Assad's team Illegally Used Chemical Weapons resulting in a 23 Cruise Missile penalty and Loss of Airplanes.

Or something like that.

Meanwhile Assad will broadcast to his loyalists and allies that he withstood the might of the Crusaders and still stands, defiant and faithful to Islam and the Arabs. Of course, as B-Daddy argues, toppling the regime would be even worse than not toppling it, so there's that to consider. I'm still trying to figure out what we get out of the whole deal other than smug, self-satisfaction.

I swear, this administration never left the faculty lounge.

Professor Pepper Schwartz Needs To Watch Some East Cleveland Street Fights

... and maybe take some math and finance classes, too.

So Miley Cyrus went full porno on MTV. You can find her performance on YouTube. I watched about 3 minutes of it. The word appalling doesn't do it justice. By the end, I was thinking that anyone involved in any way with that Caligulan piece of trash should have all government benefits taken away, permanently, including social security. Everyone watching it for real at home should have their benefits taken away, too. If you want to live like that, fine, but expecting the rest of us to take care of you is not OK.

My fiscal dream will come true long before Miley's teddy bear orgy one.

Professor Schwartz, a highly decorated veteran of academian bubblery, penned a piece of fantasy wherein she recommends that we all just get over Miley Cyrus' antics and use the event as a way to counsel our kids. Great idea, Pepper. I'm sure the single moms out there will get right on it.

This, of course, is another piece of fantasy. The Pepster isn't writing for the single moms nor anyone else below the poverty line. She's writing for her peers in the Academy where the walls are high and the security guards numerous. Out in the, err, less savory parts of town, there are fewer people interested in what she has to say, but plenty whose daily intellectual intake includes Miley Cyrus and far, far worse. With predictable results.

The ultimate fantasy from Pepperoni is that she thinks she can sip her lattes, discuss Miley's marketing strategy with other charming, erudite elites (who all hold the Proper Opinions) and then find her car where she parked it because the impoverished Miley-watchers are staying where they belong and not victimizing her or her other betweeded comrades from the University.

Good luck with that.

Pepper ought to take a little time to read some history. Maybe some financial history. I don't know, like maybe any financial history where a country pays its bills with printed money while engaging in large-scale moral debauchery. When the bills finally have to be paid, the Mileyites in the hood won't be helping Pepper with the tab, they'll be helping themselves to Pepper's goodies. After all, that's what people like Pepper, who sneer at traditional morality ("I don't think we are ever going to get our teenagers and young adults back in saddle shoes"), have taught them to do.

You've got your concealed carry permit already, don't you Pepps?

Reality Is Optional

Dig this bit from an insane article in Der Spiegel.

Intersex people, that is, those who are born neither exclusively male nor exclusively female, form one of the most invisible groups in our society. Contrary to popular belief, this has little to do with their supposed rarity and more to do with the violence our society inflicts upon those who don't conform to binary and mutually exclusive "male" and "female" categories.

The rest is equally crazy.

Umm, guys? You might want to look at this.

My favorite part is not the chart above that shows how Germans have completely detached themselves from the reality of reproduction, but how a bunch of "science-based" secularists have gone off the deep end when it comes to an essential aspect of biology.

If they were talking about some animal they were studying, say, Ernst the Polar Bear (who was at this moment drowning because of Global Warming Climate Change), they would tell you Ernst was a male. They wouldn't tell you that Ernst was of indeterminate gender and still searching for his sexual identity.

So while the rest of the world goes on with life, making babies, caring for their young, raising the next generation of polar bears, spiders, Mexican feather grass or what have you, German intellectuals are objecting to the whole notion of sexual identification to ever smaller classrooms of Kinder.

Good luck with that.

I Am Thy Lord The State And Thou Shalt Have No Things Before Me

(T)he New Mexico Supreme Court ruled that Christian photographers cannot decline to participate in gay-marriage commitment ceremonies, even though that state does not have gay marriage and the court acknowledged that providing services for the ceremony violated the Christian’s sincerely-held, traditional religious beliefs.

Fascism, anyone?

Rest Until You Feel Better

It's been a crazy month and a half or so here in the Catican Compound. Kids going back to college, others finishing summer school, plenty of turmoil at work, volunteering at Catholic Charities, home projects getting done, dinner parties and on and on. I don't know about you, but if I don't get some alone down-time to recharge, I gradually lose steam. Right about now, I'm at this energy level:

I think one of the reasons I've been so agitated about the way NBC has botched the English Premier League coverage is I had discovered last year that laying around watching EPL games on demand on foxsoccer was a great way to recharge. It was depressing to think I no longer had that sanctuary available to me.

Today we're going to experiment with Jedi Master Ivyan's idea for getting at it another way. In any case, the kids are all off working or at college now (save for our daughter), so a little R&R can now be had. In the past, I'd take it easy until I was barely able to get up and rush to the next task, but this time I think I'm going to lounge a bit longer. Like running around too soon after recovering from a cold or flu, that kind of thing can just wear you out even more.

Sound Advice

If your sandwich smells bad, don't eat it.

You're welcome.

The Proper Context For Counter-Zimmermans

As I've blogged before, the whole Zimmerman racialism thing was like leaning into a left hook. With so many counterexamples out there to be thrown in their faces, it was just ratcheting up the "No, you suck!" contest. Personally, I've got no problem with a bit of that mud slinging, but I think it ought to be in this context:

Is this what you wanted - everyone reaching for examples of people of their race being attacked by another? How much more of this would you like to see?

Until race-mongers like Sharpton, Jackson, Obama and Holder get 10,000W yellow traffic light bulbs shining right in their eyes every time they start down this road, we're all going to be drowning in this garbage.

Before dragging race into any issue, proceed with caution. Lots of caution.

A Trayvontastic Pandora's Box

... or maybe a Zimmerman Boomerang, given the most recent interracial crime to get the headlines.

White Aussie Chris Lane was gunned down by a group of black thugs, apparently just for fun. This provided the perfect weapon for people sick of the Zimmerman race baiting to counter attack as detailed by Ann Althouse. Specifically, there was this Drudge headline.

The MSM Zimmerman hysteria, which led the president and his fellow racialists to demand a National Conversation on Race, was probably the largest miscalculation of the year. The bubble these people live in must have walls 4' thick. After all, they never considered the ease with which one can find counterexamples of interracial crime, blacks being 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against whites than vice versa.

So now, instead of having a discussion about, say, the breakdown of the traditional family, we're going to spend lots and lots of time shoving interracial crimes in each others' faces.

Yay.

A Cat Pianist

This is absolutely brilliant.

Smart Diplomacy

Nothing to see here. Move along.

CAIRO (AP) — After torching a Franciscan school, Islamists paraded three nuns on the streets like "prisoners of war" before a Muslim woman offered them refuge. Two other women working at the school were sexually harassed and abused as they fought their way through a mob.

In the four days since security forces cleared two sit-in camps by supporters of Egypt's ousted president, Islamists have attacked dozens of Coptic churches along with homes and businesses owned by the Christian minority...

Nearly 40 churches have been looted and torched, while 23 others have been attacked and heavily damaged since Wednesday, when chaos erupted after Egypt's military-backed interim administration moved in to clear two camps packed with protesters calling for Morsi's reinstatement...

Review: English Premier League Soccer on NBC Sports

... it's about as bad as I'd anticipated. It's a huge step down from Foxsoccer.tv.

NBC has paid $250M for the rights to the English Premier League. They carry all of the games on NBC sports and NBC Sports Live Extra on line. That means that if you have the right cable or satellite package, you can watch any game you want on TV if it's the premium match of the week or online if it's a second-tier game.

Note how I did not say you can watch every game you want. There is no on-demand feature like there was with foxsoccer. Since most of the games go on at the same time, you have to choose which one you're going to watch. Yesterday, I watched the Fulham - Sunderland game, hoping to see the Mackems (Sunderland) lose. They obliged, falling 1-0 to Fulham, but I missed the best game of the day, Arsenal vs. Aston Villa. The Arsenal game was total chaos in the second half with red cards, penalty kicks, a big upset and booing, unhappy Arsenal fans stalking out of the stadium before the game was over. It would have been awesome to see. Here's a sample.

αρσεναλαστον ourmatch.net by ourmatch

Last year, I would have clicked over to foxsoccer and watched the second half of the Arsenal game at my leisure. This year, thanks to the troglodytes at NBC, I have to track down Russian video servers to watch the highlights. It's like the people at NBC never watched foxsoccer and are only vaguely familiar with the concept of digital media servers. Pathetic.

There are some solutions. The companies that own the EPL rights in both New Zealand and Australia offer all of the games on demand for up to a week after they've been played. unfortunately, you have to come at them from an Australian IP address which means finding a proxy server with reliable throughput.

Sigh. Why can't NBC just do it the right way?

Taking A Break

It's been a rough couple of weeks here in the Catican. No trauma or crises, just way more work than normal and no time to recharge. That ended last night when I delivered a talk I'd been preparing. It went well and got a partial standing ovation, but it also went over time and apparently missed a couple key points. Oh well. I had a good time giving it. Maybe more on that later. For now, it's time to rest.

I Would Watch The Republican Primary Debates If

... they were moderated by someone who, you know, had actually talked to real conservatives at some point in their lives.

There's a debate going on within the Republican party about how the debates should work in the next election cycle.

A few RNC members are even talking about ditching conventional journalists as moderators and bringing in Sean Hannity or Mark Levin

I'm completely in favor of this. I watched almost none of last year's debates, knowing they were going to get questions like George Stephanopoulos', "Should contraception be outlawed?" The candidates should have walked off the stage at that point, after flipping Georgy the bird. As long as MSM "journalists" are allowed to run these things, this is what we're going to get. Questions about sodomy laws, one percenters and why are Republicans always such racists.

At least Hannity and Levin would ask questions I'd like to see answered.

"Congressman Ryan, would you rather see gays gassed or shot?"

We Need A Dictatorship

... to implement Obamacare.

In essence, that's what the president is saying. When asked why the administration is having to backtrack on this or that element of the law, he blames his political opposition. As the bill was rammed down our throats, passed without any support at all from his opposition, this can hardly come as a surprise to him.

So he needed total control to pass it and now he needs total control to implement it.

Sounds good to me.