Once in a while I skim Dailykos, but can't find stimulation there. Markos Moulitsas has a certain realism and transparency, but the rest are dross. Just dross. Kos today:
Republicans are playing hardball and winning.
Just more evidence that their side plays the game far better than ours. Politics is a contact sport, which puts us at a huge disadvantage when only one side seems to grasp the rules.
Very funny. I won't dwell on the whine, but the realism about the state of play is worthwhile while the rest of his gang mouths propaganda. It's reminiscent of Lenin. The realism is dangerous, but fortunately there's no sense of history, no exiled sister, no hanged brother.
She - Please don't tell me you actually like the gun-toting 'beauty' queen Sarah Palin whose belief in the sanctity of life apparently doesn't stretch to the animals she kills for fun, where your own once did (but perhaps no longer...? are you even vegetarian these days?)
Me - I do like and admire Sarah Palin, so far. As for hunting, that's bad, but buying a hamburger is worse. You will probably be surprised to find out that her acclaimed speech was written by Matthew Scully who wrote "Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy". Yes, I'm an imperfect vegetarian, who occasionally eats fish in social settings.
She - The idea of teaching creationism alongside evolution in schools is bizarre - should we teach every theory for which there is zero evidence? There are not enough hours in the school day.
Me - Intelligent Design isn't applied science it's philosophy and as arguable as the opposite. Evolution, which is certainly correct, doesn't say anything about Intelligent Design. It would bother me more if secularist commissars succeed in banishing ID or its opposite from schools. Creationism is simply a special case of ID. In it's biblical form it's a myth. So what? It would be wrong to teach it as science and if Governor Palin proposed that (she hasn't), she'd be wrong. But the issue doesn't have the intrinsic importance you give it. Its importance derives from its status as a badge for bien pensants who want to shut down non-conformist speech. Voltaire would recognize the syndrome.
She - 'Intelligent design' *has* of course been comprehensively debunked, first by Hume and most recently and eloquently by Dawkins. Anyone with a grasp of probability and natural selection applies Ockham's Razor and says, there is a far simpler and more plausible explanation for this phenomenon than to postulate the existence of a god. Natural selection explains the phenomenon that you perceive as design without postulating the existence of imagined beings to explain it - that is its beauty. You might as well postulate the existence of a Flying Spaghetti Monster if you refuse to accept that the simplest explanation is the one most likely to be true.
Me - No. ID and Natural Selection don't conflict at all as ideas. Natural Selection explains a tiny subset of the organized universe. Occam's Razor cuts both ways. If I find an apparent artefact, the simplest explanation is that somebody made it.
She - G. K. Chesterton puts it best: "One elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot." Complexity does not imply design. Even if it did (which it doesn't), it would not imply the existence of a Christian god, any god, or any being whose existence is continuing. I can feel you itching to come out of the Christian closet...
Me - I'm not in any closet, WYSIWYG. What I do see is that free thought and free expression is far more threatened by the modern secularists than by Christians. Dawkins by the way is ultimately agnostic about ID, like me.
Mick Stockinger of Uncorrelated posts on Microsoft's $300m ad campaign with Jerry Seinfeld:
It's probably hilarious to a 'Seinfeld' afficionado, and I can tell there's something there, but it's over my head. You have to feel sorry for Bill Gates. It shows a disfunctional business bringing out an ad about, well, nothing, to go with an operating system about, well, nothing.
One day later, after McCain's fatherly speech, Sarah Palin seems even more significant. She is the future. I suppose that's what others see in Obama. Thatcherites like me are projecting their hopes onto her as liberals project onto Obama. Suddenly, if McCain loses, Palin is front-runner for 2012 nominee. In a way we want to hurry up and get there, skipping over the honourable old man, but the chemistry between McCain and Palin may be special enough that this VP has real power. She'd be an operator with a mandate and a hinterland. This piece by the admirable Barbara Amiel, who is going through her own Purgatory as is Thatcher, makes interesting play with the Thatcher/Palin idea. It reminds me of François Mitterand's aperçu about Thatcher: she has the eyes of Caligula and the lips of Marilyn Monroe.
I gave up after 24 minutes. He's not wrong, just boring, which may be effective in the context. My mind kept drifting to McCain's betrayals of conservatism like the Gang of 14 and shamnesty and Global Warming and offshore drilling (against, now for) and ANWR (still against) and populist slurs on speculation and Big Oil. I trust his sincerity, but not his understanding of the abstractions which underpin good, stickable, co-ordinated policy. That appreciation took Thatcher through fire. Let's face it, President McCain will need perpetually to be corraled by conservatives, but I don't know what leverage they'll have. Maybe McCain's finally internalised that the msm is a pit of snakes rather than a political base, so that he'll get his kicks from sticking it up them instead of sticking it up conservatives.
Piper Palin has my heart. She's almost as scrumptious as my youngest. Seeing her lick her hand to wet down Trig's hair made me want to lean into the screen and kiss her.
This whole process is like watching a body that seemed beaten start to fight off a wasting disease. A lot more is being played out here than a Presidential election in America.
every Democratic presidential nominee for president and vice president in the last seven elections — except Gore, who dropped out of law school to run for Congress — has been a lawyer.
Can't resist it: You have a rifle, 2 bullets and face a lawyer and a charging tiger. What do you do? You shoot the lawyer twice to make sure he's dead.
Most of the show around the London Olympics makes me cringe, especially the pc propaganda for 'diversity', cripples as athletes, ant-like communitarianism, wrinkly heavy metal, effeminate male performers, visual cliche's of London buses and bobbies and so on. So the Mayor of London to the rescue in Beijing last night, effortlessly upstaging the PM, David Beckham and Seb Coe:
So where did Obama do his on-the-job training? Berlin? Maui?
I've been wrong in all my 2008 election predictions so far (Romney, Bayh, Kaine, Hillaryputsch), tho I may yet be right that McCain will sweep all 57 states. So here's my instant assessment of Biden as Obama's running mate, based as usual on 5 minutes research:
Now I understand what 'vetting' means. It means picking an admitted plagiarist (both at law school and running for the Presidency), an admitted multi-point liar (running for the Presidency), a man who has no resume' other than in the US Senate where he's been pontificating since 1973...that's his adult life, a US Senator for 35 years...a man with no charisma, no executive experience, no cross-party appeal, no appeal to Clintonistas, he's not a woman, he's a faux-Catholic with a 100% NARAL rating, a noted gasbag and gaffebag who says Obama isn't ready to be commander-in-chief. 'Vetting', eh?
Obviously picking Biden says that Obama feels his own main deficit is zip credibility in foreign relations, but no-one in his party has any whiff of credibility in foreign relations except Hillary, so he should have gone for someone who could charm the Hillary wolves ladies a little...any of Sebelius, Bayh or Kaine...because the pack's going to howl for McCain now.
Update: I just replaced a different video clip with the one above from Team McCain. There's blood in the water now. How do you feel if you're a Democrat waking up to this news and that video? You see Obama's eyes slowly close like a man hearing a death sentence, you realize that Obama has thought long and hard and yet chose Biden, knowing this clip is there so he must be desperate, you realize that Team McCain are pretty competent at sliding the blade between Obama's ribs, the blade he's just given them, and you're waiting for the Obama comeback, but it isn't there, nothing's there, only "a speech that he gave in 2002", and the Convention's convening and the Clintons hate Obama and it shows. A politician doesn't die from knife wounds, but from the gangrene of ridicule. Obama's hair will be white come November. Maybe there will be a Hillaryputsch after all.
Update 2: It's funny how Obama made the VP announcement in European time, giving me the drop on my merely American colleagues. This is fun. Every conservative comment is happy, every liberal comment is wary or rebellious. I didn't realize Biden has hairplugs. It's over, folks. All McCain has to do is not pick Lieberman, Ridge or Michael Moore or Hillary Clinton for veep...even then.
Been chatting with a RINO friend (just teasing, Chris) who's been chatting with a liberal friend. The image of Obama opposite Putin disqualifies Obama plain and simple in their eyes, so I confidently forecast that McCain will sweep all 57 states.
Once in a while I skim Dailykos, but can't find stimulation there. Markos Moulitsas has a certain realism and transparency, but the rest are dross. Just dross. Kos today:
