interesting, very interesting

atheist supports missionaries
Republicans blinded by love?
USMC 12 Days of Christmas
Jeff Foxworthy 12 Days of Christmas
How to survive a bear attack
Jeff Foxworthy on medicine side effects

Update 12/28/08: Who gives the most? Americans. But why?

’50 ways to get bin laden’

In searching for Adam Sandler’s Hanukkah song, I came across a parody he did called 50 Ways to Get Bin Laden:

post-Advent playlist

Right, Christmas is over, so you blokes pack up your sappy attitudes and get back in line.

For all my Jewish readers (anyone? anyone?), putting Adam Sandler’s Hanukkah Song up should make you groan:

And for those who just hate Christmas, and New York City, here are the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl:

I blame it all on Mad Minerva.

dear misanthrope

I forgot to mention, in this blog’s heyday, that if everyone who thinks the earth is overpopulated would off themselves, it would help.

Thanks.

(w/ thanks to Dan Collins over at Protein Wisdom for reminding me to say this)

Kathleen Parker, Martyr?

I like Ms. Parker and have enjoyed many of her columns. However, lately she’s turned her guns on her fellow conservatives, and has taken some heat for it. Apparently she considers herself a martyr, but who fired the first round? Let’s think about this: You shoot at a BIG group of people with your one gun, and they fire back in a hail of bullets. Too bad for you, but what did you expect?

Oh, reasonable conversation? Please don’t offend everyone’s intelligence that way. Offer me more than ‘Palin was picked by McCain’s sex drive’ and we’ll have something to talk about.

Now Ms. Parker whips out her holier-than-thou-ness and blames those idiot evangelicals for McCain’s defeat, and Jonah Goldberg nails her on the arrogance and faux-martyrdom. I swear the woman expects a hagiography.

Update: Jeff Goldstein over at Protein Wisdom also takes Ms. Parker to task, though with a different angle and some constructive ideas:

…what Parker seems to miss is that Palin is “part of the problem” largely because Parker gives cover to the Democrats and the liberal media to paint her — and those like her — as crazed religious fanatics, rather than as ordinary people of faith who happen to believe in the tenets of their religion.

…

So rather than highlighting those instances where Sarah Palin’s belief in God — and her own personal sense of morality — was overridden, in terms of public policy, by fidelity to the law, and a truly conservative style of governing, Parker went instead for the easy target, scoring points with the “right” kinds of people by attacking something that proves increasingly easy to attack: faith.

The Denver Post’s libertarian columnist David Harsanyi and others outlined Gov Palin’s governing philosophy and found it far more palatable than, say, the governing policy of the “Maverick” John McCain. (Recall, Palin vetoed a Republican effort to deny same sex couples certain privileges on the grounds that she thought the measure likely unconstitutional.)

Yet, were you to ask the average voter about Palin, those not diehard conservatives or political junkies would know virtually nothing of her governing philosophy — but plenty about her speaking in tongues, or her burning books, or her stance on abortion, or her slaughtering of helpless wolves, or her pregnant daughter, or her career as a beauty pageant contestant.

And people like Parker, putative conservatives, are largely to blame for allowing that caricature to take shape and breathe.

Preach it, brother.

no, not THAT Glenn gives me an idea

In a comment to my emotionally overwrought post on the eminent demise of my universe, er, on Obama’s election, no, not THAT Glenn gives me a great idea:

I saw your admission about rewriting comments and leaving the names unchanged and giggled. I wonder if some smart coder could come up with an AI-type way to automate that in midst of the act of posting.

It would make moderation obsolete! Not to mention the other virtue of maybe making the heads of oxygen-wasters explode. (That’s not what I wrote!)

To which I replied:

I love the idea of automating comment editing! You’d have to have some way of detecting moonbattery, however. Maybe write a little script to measure the moonbat content of a comment, and then:

if moonbattery >= .3 {
screwWithCommenter();
}
else {
postComment();
}

Also, it’s not an ‘admission,’ per se. I proudly advertise the fact when I do it. Example.

It might be similar to the evilly brilliant Sean Gleeson’s Autorantic Virtual Moonbat, which is WELL worth your time (especially if you have been engaged in mortal combat with moonbats lo these last eight years).

Update: This all started here at Rachel’s, so I blame her.

A Cure for HIV?

Looks like it. Via Slashdot comes this article from the WSJ:

The startling case of an AIDS patient who underwent a bone marrow transplant to treat leukemia is stirring new hope that gene-therapy strategies on the far edges of AIDS research might someday cure the disease.

The patient, a 42-year-old American living in Berlin, is still recovering from his leukemia therapy, but he appears to have won his battle with AIDS. Doctors have not been able to detect the virus in his blood for more than 600 days, despite his having ceased all conventional AIDS medication. Normally when a patient stops taking AIDS drugs, the virus stampedes through the body within weeks, or days.

…

The breakthrough appears to be that Dr. Hütter, a soft-spoken hematologist who isn’t an AIDS specialist, deliberately replaced the patient’s bone marrow cells with those from a donor who has a naturally occurring genetic mutation that renders his cells immune to almost all strains of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

It’s been known for some time that approximately 1% of Europeans are immune to HIV, and it looks like bone marrow transplants from immune donors may render AIDS patients immune as well.

Let’s hope!

Update – More Science News: Miracles never cease!  Scientists claim tequila can be used to make diamonds!  (The jokes write themselves on that one …)

my goodness

Did I really use the phrase “battlecry of freedom” in a blog post? If anyone actually read this blog, I’d be the laughingstock of the dextrosphere!

Here’s a couple doses of antidote:

Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters to Realize How Empty Their Lives Are

Obama Undertakes Presidential Internship

Shattering and Binding

Two days. Forty-eight hours it’s taken me to articulate my reaction to Obama’s election. So many calls for conservatives to be adults, to put country first, to look at the bright side.

Wordless rage. Obama won through deception, dishonesty, and with the full-knowing falseness of the media and academy. Much of the journalistic and intellectual realms have betrayed America. They know what they have done; they know they hid inconvenient truths and propagated harmful lies.

Why should I stand up and be a good citizen? I will only be destroyed, my voice ripped out, my character fed into the industrial shredder should I dare speak out for my beliefs. Why should I continue to guard and feed those who have slammed the picks and axes of irrational hatreds between my shoulder blades? Please explain how Obama was duly elected in the midst of possibly hundreds of millions in illegal campaign cash, voter fraud, the dumping of military ballots, and so many other attacks on election integrity? Please explain how an America who was intentionally blinded to the truth about her candidates made a legitimate choice of leader?

Again I had to ask: Why should I stand up and be a good citizen when America has so grandly rewarded being a bad one?

I was trying to study, deciding my own victory lay in what I could achieve, what I could do. I am becoming part of the academy, and just like the Left took it, I will be part of the next revolution. I had to stop to sift through events and bodies of sense. I wandered into the next room where CNN was showing reactions to the election.

There was singing and dancing in Harlem, a sea of black faces in bright garb, drums, and joyous voices. A black man was front and center saying he could now tell his children they really could be anything. A black woman said “Obama isn’t just a black president, he’s the president of whites and everyone.” The scene shifted to champaign corks popping in France, to the people of the city of Obama, Japan, singing their silly “Obama” song.

Confucians believe that ceremony is an inherent part of being human. Rituals mean something, symbols carry power, and acting in accordance with those ceremonies brings us into harmony with those meanings, that power. Ritual allows that power to use us for righteousness and us to use it for strength and direction.

The elation on the faces of my fellow Americans, my brothers and sisters who have for so long been estranged in spirit from this country I love, brought salt water to my face. I think Michelle Obama was wrong for never being proud of her country before her husband was raised up before it, but I understand, and I can’t hold that against her. I hope all these people, from Harlem to Paris to Obama City, have felt the power and meaning of the rituals we are enacting. I hope their joy brings their spirits into harmony with ours, because we need that. It is most difficult to fight a brutal enemy while divided from those who are your family.

In Classical meanings, the meanings of function and reason, America lost this election. In Romantic meanings, the meanings of symbol and ritual, America won.

As my heart has wandered these brick canyons and alternate realities of the academy, it had no choice but to align with the force field of Love. Not some dewy-eyed emotionalism that weakens knees and spine, no, not that hippy toke trip. Rather, Love as the righteous and terrible twin of Hate: unifying love for the One who Drew us all in breath and dirt, compassionate love for the good-hearted soil of humanity, proud love for my nation — the tribe of the free, sensuous love for this glorious Created world in which we are all given merely a few brief moments to shudder in Awe at the Divine incarnate, and violent love for all-consuming combat against Evil and its demon horde of injustices. This is why I must be a good citizen, not only now, but until my last breath, until I can no longer wear the armor and swing the sword and shout the battle cry of freedom.

*

Post-election Analysis

This is a collection of links to interesting and worthwhile analysis of “what next.”  Again, I will post my own views in a later post.

Randy Barnett over at the Volokh Conspiracy, an Obama foe, notes three good things about Obama winning.  I agree.

Joel Kotkin over at Forbes discusses the triumph of the creative class.  This is an interesting demographic shift.

Cassandra at Villainous Company talks about how to handle the situation and offers post-election predictions.

Via Rachel Lucas come Bill Whittle (always a worthwhile read) and predictions from Steven Den Beste, a legend in the dextrosphere.