Sadly, No!

Josh is right. I’m really going to miss this guy:

Above: The Dead Kennedys in the studio, recording a song from the ‘In God We Trust’ EP

Jeesh. Who would’ve imagined that there was a professional-quality video of the entire session?

I’m going to rise above a certain resistance and say something.

Apropos Megan McArdle (and including Matt Yglesias and Andy Sullivan, et al., in this thoughtstream):

We’re a gang of idiots, no doubt. We’re roisterers on the Internet who make fun of people.

But we’re idiots who hunted, and bought, and treasure copies of the Atlantic Monthly from the 1860s (and copies, from the 1920s, of the Mencken-edited American Mercury, and the Nathan-edited Smart Set). Our enthusiasms are different: Retardo is more into the ’60s Partisan Review thing, while I’m more into finding fragments of James Branch Cabell, for instance, in tiny lit-mags before and after the war. But none of us has any money, and this is part of what we do simply because we care.

Addressing the people above: What you’re doing matters to us, and it ought to matter to you as well. If it doesn’t, someone is going to say something.

It’s a tragedy if it has to be an Internet comedy blog.

That’s all I want to say right now.

[Gav out]

If you haven’t seen the video of Miss Teen USA South Carolina Lauren Caitlin Upton trying to answer why most Americans can’t read maps yet, you really should. It’s quite possibly the most shockingly idiotic thing I’ve watched since the last time I saw Bush on TV:

Now, there’s a very simple explanation for why most Americans can’t read maps: because we’re a stupid nation full of stupid people with a stupid popular culture.*

How can we test this thesis? Well, we can watch poor Ms. Upton’s video over and over again. Or we can read Paul from Wizbang Blog, who blames Ms. Upton’s stupidity on… (wait for it!)… LIBBRULS!!!

At the risk of taking something utterly mindless and irrelevant way too seriously, I felt the need to revisit the case of Miss Teen USA South Carolina Lauren Caitlin Upton who had what will probably go down in history as the most extreme blonde moment in history.

In a way, she’s a victim. Any fair look at her answer shows she got mired in liberal taking points.

Pageant questions for the last 30 years are just fluff designed to extract from the young girl her liberal qualifications. So young girls practice spouting liberal buzz phrases, no matter the question.– Because looking good isn’t enough to win a beauty parent, you must have the proper liberal credentials, or there’s no sparkly tiara for you!

First we came for the public schools… then we got hold of the entire media… then we took over the CIA, the State Department, the Justice Department and every piece of the federal government that hasn’t been overrun by Bush cronies for the past seven years… and now, in our most dastardly plot yet, LIE-berals have conspired to subvert America’s teen beauty parents pageants. Yes, once we get a bunch of beautiful-but-not-so-bright young women to spout our talking points, we will have all the pieces in place to legalize gay marriage and impose Sharia law!

Read the rest of this entry »

McArdle again. Good cripes, there used to be beauty and laughter in our lives:

Sick of being sick

A commenter responds to my last post thus:

People don’t have a right to money from society simply because they have gotten sick.

I disagree. Now what?

Well, obviously, at some level we’re just going to have to agree to disagree.

But it raises some interesting questions. Why do you disagree? If we should give money to sick people regardless of need, is it because being sick sucks and we’re giving people bonus payments for having sucky things happen to them? If that’s the case, why don’t we give people bonus payments for, say, being really ugly, or being severely socially awkward, both of which seem at least arguably worse than, say, having chronic asthma.

Also, bonus payments to elite Upper West Side, Ivy League people who are really stupid.

I’m just thinking out loud here.

(Payday at the Atlantic is Thursday, IIRC.)

*Diodes song title // Damned song title.

See, the problem with reading all of this right-wing honk and blat every day is that, for instance, I came across this item a little while ago, and realized that I’m no longer intelligent enough to make fun of it:

Call Darwinists ‘Slime-Snake-Monkey-People’ Author Urges Christians
Merited Ridicule May Shame Them into Accepting Evidence in Greek Art for Genesis Events

ANNAPOLIS, Maryland, August 21 /Christian Newswire/ — Solving Light Books announced today the release of Robert Bowie Johnson Jr.’s new book, “Noah in Ancient Greek Art,” featuring 27 ancient images of the Greek version of Noah. The book details Noah’s role in Greek art as a known historical figure in relation to whom the artists were able to depict, and boast of, the rapid growth of their contrary spiritual outlook, exalting man, instead of God, as the measure of all things.

In his previous book, “The Parthenon Code: Mankind’s History in Marble” (a 288-page hardback now translated into Greek and French), Mr. Johnson presents abundant evidence that ancient Greek art preserves a record of humanity’s origins matching the Genesis account, but from an opposite viewpoint- that the serpent enlightened, rather than deluded, the first couple in paradise.

“In Greek art, we find detailed, consistent portrayals of the early Genesis themes including: the ancient garden, the serpent-entwined apple tree, the first family, Cain killing Abel, the Flood, and the successful rebellion against Noah after the Flood. Greek artists made the gods look just like people because that’s who they were-our ancestors. Socrates himself referred to the gods as such,” Mr. Johnson said.

The author devotes the final section of his new book to explaining why mainstream scientists, academics, and journalists remain oblivious to the true significance of Greek art. “Their ruling paradigm is Darwinism, a closed-minded, anti-Creator mindset which compels them to ignore or deny any evidence which tends to validate the Book of Genesis. Viewing Greek art as what it truly represents — human history — painfully contradicts their pompous evolutionist speculation. That’s why they must blindly insist that ancient Greek vase-painters and sculptors spent their entire lives portraying nothing more than myths,” Mr. Johnson stated.

To shock the Darwinists out of their denial of the overwhelming evidence in Greek art for the reality of Genesis events, the author urges Creationists to refer to evolutionists as what they imagine they are-“Slime-Snake-Monkey-People.” Mr. Johnson, who holds a general science degree from West Point, also suggests that since Slime-Snake-Monkey-People insist they evolved over millions of years through a countless series of random mutations, Christians should also refer to them as “mutants.”

My brain is standing by the bus stop wearing a little hat and carrying a little suitcase with a shirttail hanging out of it.

Cruisin’ for jihadists

• The Muslims have overtaken the homos as the most powerful and well-protected minority in the United States.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

Sometimes I hate my job. Not the balloon-animals thing, but the main daily job of writing for a prestigious Internet blog publication.

Above: Smiling, even-featured females are
widely presumed to be ‘good on the inside’

Because okay, here’s what certain parties are trying to pass off on people these days:

Class act
27 Aug 2007 04:48 pm

There’s something sort of touching about this:

A top police sniffer dog working for an elite Mexican drug squad was stolen during an airport transfer by thieves who left a mixed-breed puppy in its place, the attorney general’s office said.

Rex IV, a highly trained Belgian Malinois sheepdog with a string of drug hauls behind him, was checked on to a flight from Mexico City this week with seven other police dogs bound for an operation in the northern state of Sinaloa.

But when the dogs arrived at Mazatlan airport, Sinaloa, their police handlers discovered a small black mongrel puppy inside Rex IV’s cage, with the sniffer dog nowhere to be seen.

“In 17 years I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s rather delicate,” a Public Security Ministry spokesman told Reuters on Sunday, adding that the worry was the dog could help smugglers find new ways to conceal drugs.

“It’s like kidnapping an intelligence agent,” he said.

You know, it’s the little touches that count. Many thieves would just have stolen the dog. Or left a Belgian Malinois in its place in order to forestall detection as long as possible. But this bunch left a mutt puppy in order to stave off the discovery just long enough to make their getaway. I feel like I’ve just witnessed a virtuoso piano performance, or a perfect game.

You know, it’s the little touches that count. Many thieves would have just stolen the thing dog. Or left a [checking spelling] Belgian Malamois Malinois in its place before the police busted in and exposed the theft racket on the airplane which. . .um, except it must at some point have landed, with the owners not around, which whee, I have attractive feet I forgot what I was saying.

But oh wait! Okay, this bunch left a mutt puppy on the plane in order to stave off the discovery just long enough to make their getaway! When the airplane landed with a different dog on it, they were right there and scampered away through the terminal like clever sly-bootses, having paused just long enough to. . .okay, never mind, they were actually hundreds of miles away and therefore long-gone. Um.

So yes, it’s like I was saying all along: I feel like I’ve just witnessed a virtuoso piano performance, or a perfect game.

Whatever, they switched the dog instead of trying to, you know, empty cage, okay?

Frankly, I find that this concentration on my rational arguments suggests a teenage crush of which my critics are the initiators.

[/mcardle]

Dai-yee.

Scott Horton, We’d Like to Hear a “Who”

Above: “Boil that dust speck!”

• A liberal journalist in Iraq has now accused a neoconservative journalist in Iraq of making things up, so I should like to be consistent in my investigations by also debunking every element of his story — ‘his’ naturally meaning that of the liberal traitor and false-accuser.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

…It must be time for another Republican closeted-gay scandal.

This time the breaking news is about Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho), who was apparently arrested in June in an airport restroom.

Above: Craig

There has yet been no word as to whether The Singing Senators will be looking for a new lead vocalist.

Update: According to the Roll Call article, Craig explains that he has ‘a wide stance’ on the toilet and his foot might therefore have touched the officer’s by mistake. Grade-school reasoning suggests that this detail, like walking bowlegged or farting noiselessly, is not necessarily exculpatory.