“Clarence Thomas Has a Right to Be Angry”

Many Americans have a blind spot when it comes to black conservatives. They don’t have the foggiest idea what makes these people tick.
And they blew their chance to learn more during the October 1991 confirmation hearing for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Instead, there were those who tried to destroy someone who dared to think for himself.
… As Thomas recalls in his book, he felt compelled in 1986 to take issue with an article by the journalist Hodding Carter that accused President Reagan of reviving racism in America. Carter responded by comparing Thomas, a Southerner, to “those chicken-eating preachers who gladly parroted the segregationists line in exchange for a few crumbs from the white man’s table” and said Thomas was “one of the few left in captivity.”
Thomas correctly described that language as “nakedly racist.” It was also awfully presumptuous for a white man to lecture a black man about racism, just because one is a liberal and the other a conservative. And yet, Thomas laments, not a single civil rights leader rose to say anything about it.

Whew. I’ll bet he’s getting some letters.

The Peril Of The Cascade Consensus

A very surprising article in today’s Pravda on the way herd mentality and public fear of rebuke, and frankly very sloppy and lazy ‘research’, led to widely praised “consensus” that was, well, wrong

In 1988, the surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, proclaimed ice cream to a be public-health menace right up there with cigarettes. Alluding to his office’s famous 1964 report on the perils of smoking, Dr. Koop announced that the American diet was a problem of “comparable” magnitude, chiefly because of the high-fat foods that were causing coronary heart disease and other deadly ailments.
He introduced his report with these words: “The depth of the science base underlying its findings is even more impressive than that for tobacco and health in 1964.”
That was a ludicrous statement, as Gary Taubes demonstrates in his new book meticulously debunking diet myths, “Good Calories, Bad Calories” (Knopf, 2007). The notion that fatty foods shorten your life began as a hypothesis based on dubious assumptions and data; when scientists tried to confirm it they failed repeatedly. The evidence against Häagen-Dazs was nothing like the evidence against Marlboros.

The article describes quite clearly how this came to be, and how the ‘researchers’ all either relied on one flawed report or simply caved in to peer/media pressure.
I found it exceedingly interesting that the author never even hints at the 800 pound Gorezilla in the room, as instructive as this story is relative to the current Global Warming climate.
(h/t Insta)

Today Is…

Be Nice To Bolivians Day.
If you know any Bolivians buy them lunch today, and thank them.
(thanks to Val, FFOT God)

Dear Vicente

I’ve got one question for you: is it racist to lock your house?

NEW YORK – Former Mexican President Vicente Fox said Monday that the United States is letting racism dictate its policies, especially when it comes to immigration.
“The xenophobics, the racists, those who feel they are a superior race … they are deciding the future of this nation,” he said, without naming names, in an interview with The Associated Press.
…”To be so repressive isn’t democractic or free … to be putting up fences, chasing Mexicans, that isn’t right,” Fox said. “The U.S. needs better answers than repression, weapons and violence.”

I’m assuming that Vincente, as well as all the other Open Borderistas don’t lock their houses, right? I mean, how could they be so oppressive and discriminatory as to exclude anyone from their living room who wants to walk in, right?

After All These Years, When I See Him Kick That Leg Behind His Head…

…in those tights…I still just melt. GAH-RROOWWLLLLLL.

That is all.

Chill Out

I love a logical, calm discussion.

All eyes are on Greenland’s melting glaciers as alarm about global warming spreads. This year, delegations of U.S. and European politicians have made pilgrimages to the fastest-moving glacier at Ilulissat, where they declare that they see climate change unfolding before their eyes.
Curiously, something that’s rarely mentioned is that temperatures in Greenland were higher in 1941 than they are today. Or that melt rates around Ilulissat were faster in the early part of the past century, according to a new study. And while the delegations first fly into Kangerlussuaq, about 100 miles to the south, they all change planes to go straight to Ilulissat — perhaps because the Kangerlussuaq glacier is inconveniently growing.

A Swill salute to Powerline.

They Said We’d Become A Theocracy If Bush Were Re-Elected

And by god they were right!

During the nearly two hour service that featured a rock band and hip-hop dancers, Obama shared the floor with the church’s pastor, Ron Carpenter. The senator from Illinois asked the multiracial crowd of nearly 4,000 people to keep him and his family in their prayers, and said he hoped to be “an instrument of God.”
“Sometimes this is a difficult road being in politics,” Obama said. “Sometimes you can become fearful, sometimes you can become vain, sometimes you can seek power just for power’s sake instead of because you want to do service to God. I just want all of you to pray that I can be an instrument of God in the same way that Pastor Ron and all of you are instruments of God.”
He finished his brief remarks by saying, “We’re going to keep on praising together. I am confident that we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth.”

Now, imagine the hue and cry if Chimpy McVangelist had said these things.

This Is Your Monet

This is your Monet on drunks…

Museum intruders damage Monet painting
Drunken vandals punch hole in ‘Le Pont d’Argenteuil’
Intruders, apparently drunk, broke into the Orsay Museum, getting in by a back door, and punched a hole in a renowned work by Impressionist painter Claude Monet, “Le Pont d’Argenteuil.”

If I’m underwriting the insurance policies for the Orsay’s priceless masterpieces, I think I’m now kinda curious exactly what their ‘security’ safeguards are. Especially as it seems any drunk staggering along from a street fair can wander in if they luck into the right door.

…The intruders tried to force open other doors before succeeding at a back door, “even though it had big bolts,” she said. The painting hung on the ground floor with other Impressionist masterpieces.

Ooooo! BIG bolts.

If It Pains You to Remember…

…the way we were…

Tryphorgetin

This Is Your Head

This is your head on potatoes

SYDNEY, Australia (AP) — Customs officers discovered nearly 10.5 ounces of ecstasy tablets hidden inside a Mr. Potato Head toy sent to Australia from Ireland, the agency said Thursday.
Upon opening the parcel, the officers were greeted with the smiling face of the popular children’s toy, which features a potato-like head and removable facial features. But when they removed a panel from the back of the toy, the officers found 10.34 ounces of ecstasy in a plastic bag.

Oh Goody

The bird flu is mutating

NEW YORK – The H5N1 bird flu virus has mutated to infect people more easily, although it still has not transformed into a pandemic strain, researchers said on Thursday.
The changes are worrying, said Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“We have identified a specific change that could make bird flu grow in the upper respiratory tract of humans,” said Kawaoka, who led the study.

Wow.

I mean, who knew?

A daring ambush of bombs and gunfire left Poland’s ambassador pinned down in a burning vehicle today before being pulled to safety and airlifted in a rescue mission by the embattled security firm Blackwater USA. At least three people were killed, including a Polish bodyguard.
The attack — apparently well planned in one of Baghdad’s most secure neighborhoods — raised questions about whether it sought to punish Poland for its contributions to the U.S.-led military force in Iraq. But Poland’s prime minister, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, said his nation would not retreat “in the face of terrorists.”
…Poland, a staunch U.S. ally, contributed combat troops to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and has since led a multinational division south of Baghdad. About 900 Polish troops remain in the country training Iraqi personnel; 21 Poles have died during the conflict.

Bravo, Poland. And we thank you.

This Is Where It Gets Ridiculous

Halloween ISN’T religious, unless you’re…well…into Samhain rituals. That would be about.0000002 percent of the population.

Parents in Oak Lawn sounded off Tuesday night about what they see as an assault on traditional American celebrations. At issue is whether Halloween and Christmas celebrations are insensitive to school children who are Muslim.

Ask any fundamentalist Christian in our redneck o’ the woods~ they lose their minds over it EVERY frickin’ year, trying to equate it to devil worship, with which it has JACK (o-lantern) to do. And why they write pitiful, bombastic bullsh*t letters to our local rag. Screeching screeds about having to explain these horrible, terrifying decorations that heathen merchants put out earlier every year to their frightened/confused/under assault from demon forces young-uns. (“Mommy!!! It’s a pumpkin?!? What would Jesus DO…?!?!?!?” See how stupid it sounds?) I guess maybe it’s too cold to stand outside McGuire’s waving bibles and shrieking threats about hell, so they turn to tamer assaults. Which is ALSO why they get shot down time after time. Halloween’s secular, it’s FUN, it’s boatloads of scary make believe. It’s…

The MOST WONDERFUL Time of the Year!!

Fight about Christmas if you have to have a religious throwdown ~ it, at least, has those connotations. But be forewarned. Much to the dismay of traditionalists everywhere, Christmas has also become a day, a SEASON, for the masses, however many fights rage over keeping the ‘reason for the season’. In my humble, tree worshipping view, if ever Christ’s vision was fully realized, it’s by the arbitrarily selected December 25th. How we spend the weeks surrounding it, how we treat our fellow man during it, how we feel during the close of autumn and in the sparkling birth of winter. We feel good. We feel disposed to kindness and bon homie, be we black, orange, green, white, purple, Jew, Baptist, Catholic, agnostic, Druid or whatever, and wherever our origins If we’re here, we feel good. ‘Can’t help yourself’ feel good. I don’t see that same sense of inclusion permeate the very air at any other time of year, in any other religion or any other celebration.
We feel good. When Ramadan, Eid or insert-Islamic-ritual-of-your-choice has that same effect on EVERYone, we’ll discuss it. So far I haven’t seen any evidence they want to share the love.

Blair’s Law In Action Yet Again

Yes, I’m talking about Tim’s brilliant universal rule: “the ongoing process by which the world’s multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force.”
Here’s the latest proof of it

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. – In an unlikely marriage of desire to secede from the United States, two advocacy groups from opposite political traditions — New England and the South — are sitting down to talk.
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Tired of foreign wars and what they consider right-wing courts, the Middlebury Institute wants liberal states like Vermont to be able to secede peacefully.
That sounds just fine to the League of the South, a conservative group that refuses to give up on Southern independence.
…Harry Watson, director of the Center For the Study of the American South and a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said it was a surprise to see The Middlebury Institute conferring with the League of the South, “an organization that’s associated with a cause that many of us associate with the preservation of slavery.”
He said the unlikely partnering “represents the far left and far right of American politics coming together.”

If this doesn’t get Tim a Nobel nomination…

More on everyday life in Zimbabwe…….

From Cathy Buckle’s blog, how would you like this plumbing bill?

A geyser in my roof burst this week and when the plumbers got it out the original price was hand written in marker pen on the side of the tank alongside a dated sticker from the shop where it had been purchased. The date stamp was from a local hardware store and was machine printed: “02. 2000” was still legible. The price, written in clear red letters was one thousand, nine hundred and eighty five dollars. The plumbers gave me a quote to repair the geyser by welding the numerous leaking joints, flushing the sludge which had gathered (thanks to our filthy and very intermittent local water supply) and reinstalling the tank. The quote was for twenty six million dollars. To replace the geyser with a new one, the plumbers quote, before labour, was for one hundred and twenty million dollars. In just seven years the price had gone from under two thousand dollars to 120 million dollars – which, in reality is actually 120 billion dollars because 3 zeroes were slashed from our currency a year ago.

At least you can get a plumber, unlike trying to get anything to eat, I suppose.

Hurrah!

They’ll be back!

Wallace and Gromit are to return in a half-hour television adventure – the first since 1995’s A Close Shave.
Aardman Animations has announced that the cheese-loving inventor and his loyal dog will star in Trouble at’ Mill – to screen on BBC One in late 2008.

Overheard On ‘Millionaire’

…just this second (as I was drying my hands to change the channel):

Meredith: How many planets in our solar system have one syllable names?
[Pregnant pause as male contestant ponders]
[ponders ponders ponders] Contestant: I can only think of two right now. Mars and Venus.

Lucky thing for him the audience was on top of that one.

A Dust Bowl Hell Hole

…of his own making.

Ringed by a clutch of Zimbabwean soldiers clicking automatic weapons, Charles Lock handed over the keys to his farm and drove off his land for the last time.
Scores of white farmers, the last survivors of President Robert Mugabe’s land grab, and thousands of their black workers are going through similar agonies.
They now face the final deadline. As from today, any white farmer still on his land will be deemed to be trespassing on state property.

Once the Garden of Africa, all their natural resources are staggering against the ropes now.
.

..The GOZ is attempting to offset this by encouraging investment from China and other Asian nations.

…who aren’t as offended by tyrants and dictators, not to mention only being in it for what they can pull OUT of the country, vice build IN it.

…The economic decline has resulted in renewed shortages of food, fuel, electricity, and other critical imports. A once-thriving industrial sector is suffering. Forty-eight formal businesses closed in 2004, bringing the number of closures to 350 since 2002. The official unemployment rate of over 70% excludes hundreds of thousands of former farm workers who were internally displaced by the GOZ’s fast-track land reform program.
Zimbabwe’s once robust social services continue to collapse due to the economic crisis, the AIDS epidemic and the extraordinary brain drain. Over the past five years an estimated 25% of the population has left Zimbabwe in search of economic opportunities and political protection. Zimbabwe has one of the highest HIV/AIDS prevalence rates in the world, with a prevalence rate of 24.6% among the adult population. Life expectancy dropped from 61 years in 1990 to 34 years in 2003; infant mortality is 76 per 1,000 live births; and under-five child mortality is 123 per 1,000 live births.

I’ll revisit one of my favorite quotes from “Dark Star Safari“:

Even the kindly winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Reverend Desmond Tutu, had said,

“The man is bonkers.”

Junkmen for Jesus, Cooks for the Koran, Tellers for the Torah?

Enough, already.

…Making some provisions for worship, like providing an empty room for Bible study at work, for example, isn’t entirely new, Saunders explains. What’s new, he adds, is the magnitude of worker requests:

“Now people are saying I don’t want to do my job because it doesn’t fit in with my faith practice.”

So find a job that suits you to begin with. Now there’s a concept.
I wonder if an application had boxes that asked, “Do your peculiar religious practices preclude you from performing ANY function within the confines of this company? If you check ‘yes’, EXPLAIN/CLARIFY. Does it require you have extraordinary access/accomodation to a separate area/unscheduled breaks for purposes of worship during your shift? If you check ‘yes’, EXPLAIN/CLARIFY”, would be legal. I know you can’t discriminate on the BASIS of religion, but you sure should be able to call the shots if said religion sweeps its way onto your showroom/retail/production floor and disrupts the whole enterprise. And I believe an employer is entitled to know that there is something said prospective employee believes which will shortly have said employer dealing with chaos, mad customers and talking to the EEOC, while his formerly hardworking regular employees are now pissed off and looking for something for them. (Like belonging to the Church of Nicotiana Virginianus, for instance. That was always the Marine Corps scam for undeserved breaks.)

…”Religions have become more prominent in how they want freedom to be expressed in the workplace, and we have a ‘what’s in it for me’ kind of thing.”

If you want to run your little Christian bookstore and play that God AWFUL music, so be it. It’s clearly identified as such, any prospective employee has an idea what’s required/tolerated and it’s also clearly my right not to enter. But if I hire you to work the line at What-a-Burger and it’s time for the bacon chicken sandwich promotion, which you then tell me is unclean and you’re not touching it or any surface that might have interacted with the pork fat…well.
I think the employee should have the problem.

Dhimma Bells, Dhimma Bells

It’s Dhimmitude time in the city

Oak Lawn Schools May Cancel Holiday Traditions
School District To Discuss Possible Cancellation Or Renaming Of Holiday Celebrations
(CBS) OAK LAWN, Ill. A southwest suburban school district has taken action, responding to the concerns of a parent who is Arabic.
But now, as CBS 2’s Suzanne Le Mignot reports, other parents are angry that traditional school holidays will be renamed or even eliminated.
“That does not represent all the Muslims, all of the Arabs at that school,” said Qais Nofel, the father of a student in Ridgeland School District 122.
There was some heated discussion between parents outside Columbus Manor Elementary School in Oak Lawn on Friday. The thought of no more traditional holiday celebrations has many parents really upset.
For now, children in Ridgeland School District 122 will celebrate fall festival instead of Halloween and winter festival instead of Christmas.

It’s not our country any more.

The Perfect Costume to Express Your Non-Dhimmi-ness

Cover all your offensive bases and kill two birds with ONE unclean stone.

Geesh, Rudy, It’s About Time

Look who’s going to Philly for some Whiz

WASHINGTON (CNN) – It’s almost a necessity for any presidential candidate who swings through Philadelphia — making a stop at one of the city’s famous cheesesteak shops.
But the landmark Philly restaurant former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani plans to stop at later Monday is also famous for another reason: its controversial ‘Please speak English’ sign.
Joe Vento, the owner of Geno’s Steaks, sparked controversy last year when he put up a sign at his store proclaiming, “This is America. When Ordering Please Speak English.”

As always, your Swilling hosts are cutting edge trend mongers.

Ummmmmm, tasty.

Normally I Equate Jim Cramer With O’Reilly

You know ~ the loud, blowhard, run-everybody-over-with-your-mouth type. (“Okay. So the shark bit off your leg and you swam to shore. Then what?”)
This time Cramer brought some heat on himself that’s completely undeserved, but I sure understand why they’re pissed. The truth usually sucks at any given point, but when it’s spoken with no apology on national TV? By God, that’s more than…the National Association of Realtors should have to take.

Cramer on Homes

“Pellicula in Interrete Vulgate de Coitu Paridis”

…is probably one entry they could have left out and no one would judge them harshly.

…For those who think Latin means Cicero’s orations, caveat emptor. “We’re using an ancient language, but we’re writing on a computer, not papyrus,” says Josh Rocchio, a graduate student and one of the most active editors. “There isn’t anything that doesn’t belong in Vicipaedia. You can write about Julius Caesar, or you can write about blue cheese.”

ALWAYS one of my favorite subjects. The concept is a complete hoot.

I Just Happened To Catch

…the Clarence Thomas on 60 Minutes last night. I thought it was excellent and he came across quite well. The best thing on him I’ve ever seen.