| Photostory 6 |
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December 14th,
2009 3:36 pm
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Oh my, this is so embarassing to post. But my mistress worked hard on this, so... here it is.
( Read more... )
Have to warn the sensitive people, that this is probably not recommended for you. If you are easily offended and hate immoral traumatic happenings, then do not read this or skip to the end.
( Read more... ) ( Read more... )
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| Horoscope - Day 2 |
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December 14th,
2009 7:32 am
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mood |
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"How will you ever write your novel if you don't get rid of a few distractions?"
Well that part of my daily horoscope today just cracked me up. How true! I'm in a novel lull at the moment. Rather than continuing to write on the one I've been working on I've been rereading one of the others in the hopes of picking that up again.
Let's see about the rest of the horoscope....
"Between your job, your home life and your social life, everything seems to be draining your energy resources. But what about you? You may have set aside precious little time in the past days to nurture yourself. Now's a good time to remedy that. As soon as you can, head off to your favorite spa or cafe and kick back. Buy yourself a cup of cappuccino and drink it sloooowly. If you have caller ID on your phone, use it for all it's worth.
The interpersonal energy's a bit off at the moment, so don't be surprised if interactions take strange turns. Meanwhile, taking extra-good care of yourself is favored. Get yourself a treat, and relax and enjoy it."
Hmm. I just took all of yesterday to do nothing. Maybe it's off by a day. But I will, however, bring the cappuccino mix I got at the family party on Saturday night to work and enjoy that slooooowly in the afternoon! =D And if I have strange interactions with people today I'll know why. *nods*
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| The War of Words — Why We’re Losing |
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December 14th,
2009 12:14 am
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This happens throughout the media, education, everywhere. Liberals set the rules of the discussion by choosing deceitful framing. That and other antics happen in this community constantly, too. While some of us know to look for it, the uninitiated won't unless we consistently point it out. I thought this article damn well put, at least as a starting point for awareness. It's something I think non-Liberals need to keep in mind at all times.
Emphasis is mine, partially for the patience impaired who want to skip to the meat. Too many obviously don't bother to read even the OP let alone the links before sounding off.
The War of Words — Why We’re Losing
"He who defines the rules controls the game. And we’re letting them define the rules.
Jobs. Health care. Economic justice. Working families. Income redistribution. Fairness.
Words mean things. Very specific things. We on the Right tend to forget that. By following the lead from the Left, we abdicate our arguments without even knowing it. By using their terms, and in so doing, tacitly allowing their outrageous assertions to stand unchallenged, we surrender ground – one step, one phrase, one election at a time."
"We are told the main issue on Americans’ minds in these perilous economic times, is ‘Jobs’. The main problem is putting people back to work, dontcha know. ‘Creating more jobs’. And of course, this is a classic example of the cart before the horse. It’s a tried-and-true ploy of the Collectivist to frame the problem as that which affects ‘the masses’ alongside the solution, which involves the central government. (The people need jobs! We’ve got to create more jobs!) As if…in a free republic the purpose of government is to provide each citizen with a job. As if…a job is merely this mystical anomaly that suddenly appears by fiat of a benevolent and elegant president. As if…the very economic policies of the new administration aren’t doing everything they can to retard the growth of the economy and hence hamper and defeat the expansion of the work force. As if…it’s not the stifling regulation, punitive taxation, and restriction of movement on business that prevents business from hiring new employees."
"But we on the Right surrender the argument every time we lead our point with, 'Jobs'. A job is a result of a need of a business to run effectively. A business needs people to carry out various functions. And…contrary to popular Leftist thinking…the purpose of a business is NOT providing people with jobs. The purpose of a business is to create profit for its owners and shareholders by providing goods and/or services. Job creation is a happy ancillary effect of a business as it grows."
"Too often, Leftist redistribution thieves, Race Merchant poverty pimps, Envoys-of-Envy class warriors, and their toadies — the mainstream media — paint Business as the bad guy. Sometimes their paint strokes are subtle…sometimes not. Corporations, big and small, and those who head them are depicted as nothing more than greedy, selfish, bastards out to ‘screw the little guy’. And we let them get away with this. We allow these ‘shades of lie’ to live in our national lexicon. And we do so by passively accepting…adopting…and eventually embracing their twisted phraseology. They distort our beloved English language…and we wave the white flag, content that anyone even talks to us, happy to be invited to the table."
"Before we can restore our nation to its original intent, we need to take back the argument. And that will take backbone – from all of us. Don’t let them frame the argument. Stand up for what you know is right!"
"They use innuendo and generalization as their major tools. I say kick them square in their syntax! Make them define their terms. (They are loath to do it.) Make them get specific; and if they won’t, dig your heels in and refuse to let the argument proceed until they do so."
"You on the Left are like the misguided farmer on the road with a broken-down horse. You’re kicking him to get up…while you bash him in the head with a hammer."
"And by the way, fellow Righties — to frame the argument over free-market vs. government controlled health care by calling it simply ‘Health Care’ is a losing gambit. [...] But…I hear it repeatedly from the Right…. 'We stand in opposition to Health Care. We oppose Health Care. We’ve got to stop Health Care from moving forward.' Yes, most of us on the Right know what you mean…but stop and think a minute how that sounds to the uninitiated. 'You oppose health care? You heartless morons!'
"It seems like a tedious, never-ending task…but make the Lefties do it; make them define and refine their terms. It’s obnoxious, but play dumb, as if you truly don’t know what they’re talking about. It’ll drive them nuts…but it will force them out of the clouds"
"It is my firm belief that if we bring the Left out of the generalized fog of euphemism, innuendo and non-specificity, and force them to clearly illuminate their positions…the voters will reject them."
Lying to themselves and others is a necessity for the Modern Liberal. Another common tactic I especially see here is for the Liberal to ask questions but provide no answers, thereby steering the conversation and putting others on the defensive. That even saves them the trouble of deceit. Why on earth this would be acceptable is beyond me. They chose to come here to conservatism. It was to change minds or possibly learn, or to harass. If it's the former they should provide their argument and be open to answering questions as necessary. When we tolerate any of this behavior, big or small, in and out of the community they gain the upper hand. Please pass this article around so more non-Liberals can start looking for and calling them on it.
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| What's your Rashee? |
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December 13th,
2009 10:48 am
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Yesterday I just happened to check my horoscope on Yahoo, and strangely enough, it fit exactly with what I was thinking about. It advised me that in the process of making a major decision I shouldn't take any action until I was absolutely sure. I laughed. And then I thought, OK, I'll follow what it says. Not only that, I am going to try an experiment. I'm going to read my horoscope every morning for, oh, let's say a week to start, and try to live my life exactly as it says. Just out of curiosity. I wonder what the results will be.
So the rules: I'm going by the horoscope posted on the Yahoo home page. Apparently it's delivered by astrology.com. Today's horoscope for Cancer:
"You may have a hard time making up your mind today about simple things, like which socks to wear. It's not as hard as it seems, but you just can't filter out the extraneous information from your thinking."
Hmm. It took me about two seconds to pick out my socks. Extraneous information? I always have a hard time filtering that out of my thinking. I do not usually have a hard time making decisions. And I don't really have anything going on today. My plans for today were postponed until next week. So not much to go by there.
However, the site has other various pieces of advice in other areas, like love and relationships, etc, so I checked those too. And the following really struck me:
"Not taking things personally is one of the secrets to a happy life, so don't stress out on someone else's high expectations. It's really not about you at all -- people who aren't satisfied with their own lives try to rule everyone else's."
Damn! Someone was a total jerk to me on Facebook this morning and I did take it very, very personally. I was stressing out about it! But I also absolutely believe that the only reason this person would lash out like that is because they aren't satisfied with their own life, etc. etc. Hmm! Go astrology!
More to come in the days ahead....
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| Argh, why am I not more computer savvy? |
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December 12th,
2009 10:10 pm
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Man, sometimes I feel so dumb. NONE of my IM programs are working properly and haven't been for sometime. I keep trying to message people but all that happens is it gets bounced back to me with a 'message could not be delivered' popup. The weird thing is I can receive messages so I can see people trying to talk to me. I simply have no idea what is going on (and this isn't the first time this has happened either).
So to the five people who are waiting for responses from me (although only two are on my f!list) I'm really, truly dreadfully sorry. I'm not ignoring you I just have no clue why this is happening. A restart didn't help and I've fiddled with all of the settings. I have no clue.
*sulks*
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| Because I don't say it enough! |
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December 12th,
2009 8:43 pm
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I have some truly awesome friends and I don't say how much I appreciate them so here's a short but sweet post on how I feel:
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| In Need Of Some Ballot Initiative Help |
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December 10th,
2009 11:02 pm
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Nessun Dorma, Katherine Jenkins |
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This community has never really coordinated any political activism, which isn't really a bug, but it might be an interesting change of pace to request some help here.
My problem is drafting precise language. Sometimes, no matter how many valid signatures you can collect, an initiative can be thrown out if any ambiguity in meaning provides an excuse. A good example might be Ward Connerly's ballot initiatives calling for the end of affirmative action. (Here's an example of the language he uses)
( Read more... )
So here's the draft I have on my own:
The Preferential Voting Initiative
This initiative proposes the use of “ranked” balloting as a contingency when no candidate wins a majority (over 50% of the vote). When a voter's top-ranked choice fails to be in the top two, your highest-ranked selection who finished among the top two receives your vote in an instant run-off election.
( Read more... )
What say you?
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| BCS |
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December 10th,
2009 11:02 am
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What business does congress have telling the NCAA how they can go about determining their national champion?
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20091209/D9CFVTR01.html
"WASHINGTON (AP) - A House subcommittee approved legislation Wednesday aimed at forcing college football to switch to a playoff system to determine its national champion, over the objections of some lawmakers who said Congress has meatier targets to tackle.
The bill, which faces steep odds, would ban the promotion of a postseason NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision game as a national championship unless it results from a playoff."
Say what you will about the BCS, but this is just wrong. Could there be any greater example of "shiny object" legislation to distract from the real issues? I'm glad congress has taken it upon themselves to stop partisan bickering and come together to find a solution for this non-problem.
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| left-wing u.k. paper reports on norway's anger at obama diplomatic snub |
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December 10th,
2009 11:21 pm
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considerable anger over the White House's decision to cancel a series of events normally attended by the prizewinner - According to a poll published by the daily tabloid VG, 44% of Norwegians believe it was rude of Obama to cancel his scheduled lunch with King Harald, with only 34% saying they believe it was acceptable. - "Of all the things he is cancelling, I think the worst is cancelling the lunch with the king," said Siv Jensen, the leader of the largest party in opposition, the populist Progress party. "This is a central part of our government system. He should respect the monarchy," she told VG. - Peace activists opposed to the Afghanistan war are planning a 5,000-strong protest in Oslo.
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/10/obama-norwegians-nobel-snub-harald
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| Stop the Mandate! |
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December 9th,
2009 8:57 pm
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A nifty link on how Obama and the Demons, er, democratic congresscritters are aiming to make everyone's life that much more shoddy, via a personal mandate for health insurance. That's right, you can go to jail for tax evasion for refusing to purchase health insurance.
Land of the free, right?
http://volokh.com/2009/12/09/conspirators-at-heritage-today/
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| "Intellectual" vs "Educated" |
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December 9th,
2009 3:09 pm
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I want to post an excerpt from the TimesOnline review of the book Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? by Frank Furedi dated back to the 2004. Past the thoughts on the book the reviewer discusses "intellectual" vs "educated" man. I think it's a very interesting reading.
The review itself is here
As an Englishman, I am bothered by the term “intellectual”, which came late to our language. Humane education was shaped in our country by Coleridge, Ruskin, Arnold and — in the political sphere — Macaulay, Gladstone and Disraeli, people who would have described themselves as educated men, but not as intellectuals. The intellectual is a synthesis of French bohemianism and Russian nihilism. Intellectuals have an inveterate tendency to be on the Left and to turn on dissenters with a venom that no educated person could comfortably endorse. Much of the decline that Furedi is describing in this book could be described in another way, as the gradual vanishing of the educated person as the goal of education, and its replacement by the intellectual instead. Intellectuals are critics of the established order; they are on the side of the victim, and against the bourgeois normality; they repudiate discipline, authority, family, tradition, and nothing gets up their nose so much as the calm forgiving acceptance of human imperfection. And, as we know from the cases of Marx, Lenin, Mao, Sartre, Pol Pot and a thousand more, they are dangerous.
Moreover, intellectuals value their oppositional and transgressive stance far more than they value truth, and have a vested interested in undermining the practices — such as rational argument, genuine scholarship and open-minded discussion — which have truth as their goal. They will seize on the relativist arguments — even if they are as shoddy as Foucault’s or as empty as Rorty’s — as they will seize on any kind of mumbo-jumbo that silences the critic and furthers their subversive aims. And when they take hold of institutions they form a “confederacy of dunces” whose first aim is to exclude anyone who thinks out of line.
That is why university departments in the humanities and social sciences are now such grim, bigoted places, and why Furedi, who must have one hell of a time in the University of Kent, still tries to claim the status of a left-wing intellectual, and to conceal as best he can the truth, that he is a genuinely educated (and transparently conservative) man.
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| A Response I made to a Liberal. |
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December 7th,
2009 7:25 pm
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Being from the right, and observing Mr. Obama, there are things that he's done that nobody can be for, and there are things that he's done that are for the right, things he said he wouldn't do. From the last election, I've observed that he is still restrained by forces that he accepted when he became president, and his rhetoric was in a manner naiive, promising things that were highly unlikely, and it would be inevitable that he would alienate his base in not just one issue, but many.
Also, being from the right, some of the things he's been pushing are astonishing from a conservative perspective; so when there are admitted leftists that astonishingly support these actions, it seems like a zombie-like following. But, then, this goes both ways, and right-minded people are as susceptible to the same accusations.
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| Rebuilding our manufacturing base |
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December 7th,
2009 4:20 pm
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My Republican father wrote this and sent it to me this morning -- he's one of the few conservatives I respect, so I thought I'd pass it on to some people who might think along the same lines as him.
In 2005 every realtor believed that home prices would continue to go up. In 2000 then President Clinton predicted a 10 trillion budget surplus over the next ten years. In 1974 everyone believed that the world was just about of oil. In 2008 most Americans believed a young Chicago politicians campaign slogan of ‘Change’ would solve all of our problems.
In fact, Realtors helped create the housing meltdown by assuring potential buyers that real estate was the best investment for the future and when they decided to sell they would make a handsome profit. Most realtors actually believed this because, in the end, all that mattered was the commission check.
The budget surplus prediction was accepted because “expect the unexpected” just doesn’t work in Washington.
The oil shortage was partly OPEC testing it’s ability to influence world oil prices and partly the American policy of buying foreign oil and saving ours.
Today President Obama’s ‘Change’ looks like this:
Healthcare for everyone using money that does not exist
It would be cheaper just to expand Medicaid and build more public health clinics staffed with physician assistants and nurse practioners .
Create thousands of green jobs
Build massive wind and solar farms that produce electricity when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining at a cost of about 35 cents a KWH as apposed to 6 cents for existing power sources.
In fact, the only change we need is to rebuild our manufacturing base. Small businesses are not the backbone of our nation. They just employ the most people. Close down a large factory that does business nationwide and worldwide and watch how many small businesses disappear along with it.
Remember when we were a manufacturing based economy? Then we were a serviced based economy. And now we are a consumer based economy. The time will come when the ‘worldwide search for cheap labor’ will not be able to produce a product so inexpensively that the American consumer will be able to afford it.
We cannot compete with the world in labor costs but we can compete in transportation cost (it’s cheaper to ship a car to Chicago from Kansas City then from Seoul, South Korea, and in energy costs. If we can provide cheap, plentiful, and reliable electricity, and cheap transportation the factories will return.This nation needs to be not only energy independent but energy rich. Building a power production and distribution system that includes clean coal, gas, geothermal, hydroelectric, nuclear, wind, and solar will bring the factories back. This will not cost the government a dime. All they have to do is streamline the permit procedures and assure builders that once a project is approved the government will prevent any group from stopping the project. The added future benefit is more tax revenue which will then provide financing for a decent healthcare program.
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pissed off
grateful
Whatever