It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish…
Archives for 2009
Blackwater on water
It’s hard to imagine anything going wrong with this plan:
Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and a growing number of national security experts are calling on Congress to consider using letters of marque and reprisal, a power written into the Constitution that allows the United States to hire private citizens to keep international waters safe.
Used heavily during the Revolution and the War of 1812, letters of marque serve as official warrants from the government, allowing privateers to seize or destroy enemies, their loot and their vessels in exchange for bounty money.
Here’s one of those national security experts:
“If we have 100 American wanna-be Rambos patrolling the seas, it’s probably a good way of getting the job done,” said Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow and security expert Eli Lehrer.
Open Thread
Not to turn this blog over completely to my dyspeptic rantings about coffee, although at this point, that may be a noticeable improvement over the rest of my posts, but on the suggestion of many, I was set to have a cup of Dunkin Donuts medium roast while waiting for the Community Coffee I’m ordering to show up. Sadly, I fat-fingered the mug and dropped it, smashing my new favorite mug into a thousand pieces on the kitchen tile and shooting hot coffee everywhere. It smelled great.
I’m back to drinking coffee out of a measuring cup again, it seems. I really need to find a coffee mug I like and order 100 of them. Or install rubber floors.
Here is a picture of Abby, who belonged to commenter Polish the Guillotines, and had to be put down yesterday after 18 years:
Not that it makes it any easier, but eighteen years is a pretty solid run. The most awesome cat ever, the cat we had as a kid, Mr. Purr Puff (my sister named him), lived for close to twenty years, and at one point my father’s only goal in life was to “outlive that God damned cat.”
Colbert Got Robbed
NASA comes up with a consolation prize:
Colbert received more than 230,000 votes out of 1 million, but NASA reserved the right to be the final arbiter.
While it wasn’t the leading vote-getter, Tranquility was one of the top 10 suggestions submitted by respondents to the online poll, which ended March 20, NASA said in a statement. It was selected in part because of a connection to the 1969 first manned lunar landing.
“Apollo 11 landed on the moon at the Sea of Tranquility 40 years ago this July,” said William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations. “We selected Tranquility because it ties it to the exploration and the moon, and symbolizes the spirit of international cooperation embodied by the space station.”
As a consolation prize to the comedian, Gerstenmaier said NASA is naming “its new space station treadmill the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill, or COLBERT.”
I’m sure this has been great publicity for NASA and they love it.
How To Understand The “Tea Party” Phenomenon
Simply mentally replace the phrase “tea party” with “hissy fit” and it really clears things up. For example, the Instapundit’s editorial in the WSJ (further proof, no doubt, of the grass roots nature of this event!):
Today American taxpayers in more than 300 locations in all 50 states will hold rallies — dubbed
“tea parties”“Hissy fits” — to protest higher taxes and out-of-control government spending. There is no political party behind these rallies, no grand right-wing conspiracy, not even a 501(c) group like MoveOn.org.So who’s behind the Tax Day
tea partieshissy fits? Ordinary folks who are using the power of the Internet to organize…The protests began with bloggers in Seattle, Wash., who organized a demonstration on Feb. 16. As word of this spread, rallies in Denver and Mesa, Ariz., were quickly organized for the next day. Then came CNBC talker Rick Santelli’s Feb. 19 “rant heard round the world” in which he called for a
“Chicago tea party”“Chicago hissy fit” on July Fourth. Thetea-partyhissy fit moniker stuck, but angry taxpayers weren’t willing to wait until July. Soon,tea-party protestshissy fits were appearing in one city after another, drawing at first hundreds, and then thousands, to marches in cities from Orlando to Kansas City to Cincinnati.
I hope that helps you.
How To Understand The “Tea Party” PhenomenonPost + Comments (48)
Potemkin protests
Think Progress notes that “Americans For Prosperity” is now paying people to publicize all tomorrow’s tea parties. Which makes me wonder: do you think some of the people who show up tomorrow will be getting paid to be there?
The purpose of all the tea-bagging is, of course, to make it look there is some groundswell of antipathy towards Obama’s policies coming from real Americans. And “Americans For Prosperity” and the like don’t care how they get the real Americans to show up. That stands in contrast to left-wing protesters, who are often unabashedly hippie and want everyone who protests with them to be there for the “right reasons” (based on my experience with protester friends).
One thing we know for sure: there will be lots of fighting over the number of people who show up at the tea parties. Some reporter in Pittsburgh or Cincinnati will estimate there were 30 tea-baggers downtown and Michelle Malkin will find a witness who says there were really 150. Grainy cell phone video will be examined and confused calculations will be made, possibly with the help of Google earth. If the city is within driving distance, we may even find out what kind of countertops the reporter has.
Update. My local tea-bagging site actually has that asinine “American Tea Party Anthem” video.
You People Sure Like Your Coffee
In the seven plus years I have been running this website, I have never received as many emails about a specific post as I have in the past 24 hours regarding last night’s rambling coffee post. I have received at least 50 emails, varying in length from a link to a coffee store to 2-3 page long pieces from NASA engineers (not a joke) with detailed bean descriptions and brewing instructions.
At any rate, I just wanted a decent coffee I could use as an every day drink, so I think I am just going to go with Community Coffee, although I am going to try some of the other ones for special occasions. My local grocery has Peet’s, but it is already ground.
**** INCOMING BSG SPOILER STOP READING ***
In other news, I am finally working my way through season 2.5 of BSG, and I cheered loudly when Admiral Cain was shot. I don’t think there has been a character I viscerally disliked as much as her in a long, long time.
*** Update ***
Mary in the comments says I’m not being very gracious, and now that I re-read this post, it does seem kind of snide. I didn’t mean it that way. I just thought it was funny that coffee, of all the thousands of things we have talked about, provoked such a response. I am grateful for every email and read every one, and had no idea there were good coffee houses in Fiji and Oklahoma and all the other places. In fact, one of the emails mentioned an aeropress, which I am definitely going to get. I didn’t mean to sound like a jackass. It is just natural, I guess.