H/T to KA-CHING! for the image.
June 11, 2013
Remember the Canadian political scandals?
Andrew Coyne got the secret decoder ring from one of his readers:
A reader writes: “Is it not possible McGuinty went to Ford & asked him to pose for that videoto divert attention from the gas-plants?…1/3
— Andrew Coyne (@acoyne) June 11, 2013
… Then Ford realised the heat was on him so he gave Nigel $90,000 with which to repay Duffy…. 2/3
— Andrew Coyne (@acoyne) June 11, 2013
… Don’t try to tell me that having three inane scandals like this, all at the same time, is a coincidence.” I, uh, THINK he was kidding. 3/3
— Andrew Coyne (@acoyne) June 11, 2013
June 8, 2013
The Moral High Ground has finally been mapped
NewsBiscuit provides the details on the latest Ordnance Survey discovery:
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June 3, 2013
“Checking your privilege”
Sean Thomas outlines the notion of “checking your privilege” before discovering that he is the most underprivileged person in Britain:
The idea of Checking Your Privilege is that the opinions of “underprivileged” people, in any political debate, are deemed to be intrinsically more important and valuable than the beliefs of those who are luckier in life.
This is especially true if the debate relates to an area in which The Underprivileged Person is adjudged to be deprived. Extreme versions of Privilege Theory assert that, in especially sensitive arguments, the more privileged person should say nothing at all. e.g. white people are not allowed to express an opinion on racism.
[. . .]
It’s an impressive list of deprivations. Sometimes, when I look at my life, I wonder if I am [a] talented black saxophone player in the 1950s, or at least a meth dealer in central Baltimore – rather than a writer in north London. Certainly, I am THE most underprivileged person in the UK. And this means that my opinion is the most worthy and important of all, and everyone else must shut up, while I opine.
And my opinion is this: Privilege Checking is stupid. It is vacuous and diseased. It is a duet of moral vanity and bourgeois guilt which symptomizes the decadence and redundancy of what passes, today, for lefty “thinking”. Karl Marx (middle-class, well-travelled, disapproved of Engels’s plebby girlfriend) must be spinning on his Highgate pedestal when he sees what his great discourse has turned into.
I hope that clears things up. Now we can move on; IMHO, of course.
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June 1, 2013
QotD: Internet espionage
A new report says that the Chinese are hacking American computer networks at an alarming rate. This is hardly news. I’ve been including the phrase “早安，我抱歉有沒有在這封電子郵件中的商業秘密或加拿大色情。請停止殺害酷動物啄木鳥醫學。剛剛買了一些偉哥了” at the bottom of every e-mail for months (I put it just above where it says “Hello Mr. Holder!”). It means, according to Google translate: “Good Morning, I’m sorry there’s no trade secrets or Canadian porn in this e-mail. Please stop killing cool animals for pecker medicine. Just buy some Viagra already.”
What is new is the scope of the problem the report lays out. This is a thorny issue and I think the U.S. needs to be much, much more aggressive in combating it. Why it’s not a bigger issue for the WTO, for instance, is baffling to me. They are stealing our stuff, which strikes me as a bigger deal than taxing it at the border.
Explaining to the Chinese leadership that they shouldn’t be doing this because it’s wrong is like explaining to a dog licking its nethers that what he’s doing is bad manners: To the extent they understand at all, they couldn’t care less. They respect power. They understand when you put a price on bad behavior. So we need to put a price on Chinese hacking. It’s really that simple. The hard thing to figure out is how.
Jonah Goldberg, “Chiiiiiicoms in (Cyber) Spaaaaaaaaaaaace!”, The Goldberg File, 2013-05-31
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May 27, 2013
Kim Il Sung’s 1974 higher education management text is “a perfect book for our times”
Alex Usher can’t stop recommending On Improving Higher Education, by Kim Il Sung, going so far as to call it “a perfect book for our times”:
Pay raises, for instance are Right Out. “As long as you make an issue out of remuneration, you cannot be a revolutionary,” says Kim, righteously noting that nobody paid Marx to write Das Kapital (the fact that Marx died before completing it might have had something to do with that, but no matter). North Korean intellectuals had the privilege of giving lectures and writing books, “and yet they insist on receiving money for this wonderful task,” Kim splutters.
Work rules, too, come under serious scrutiny. Responding to complaints that “university and college professors lecture a thousand hours a year”, which some consider to be too much, Kim is clear: “You are wrong! Fundamentally speaking, calculating lecture hours is not the attitude of a revolutionary. If you are true revolutionaries who serve the people, you would never calculate the hours; you try hard by all means to work as much as you can”.
(I make the following offer to university administrations across Canada: if any of you decide to try to outflank your faculty union to the left by telling them their views are evidence of captiveness to bourgeois ideology, I’m buying the first round.)
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May 19, 2013
Modern terminology update from Chris Kluwe
Even though he’s moved on from the Vikings, I still follow Chris Kluwe’s twitter feed. Here’s today’s terminology lesson from @ChrisWarcraft:
If a bunch of guys together is a sausage fest, does that make a bunch of girls a clam bake?
— Chris Kluwe (@ChrisWarcraft) May 18, 2013
I only ask because my wife is hosting a bridal party and I’m unsure of the appropriate etiquette. I’d hate to be uncouth.
— Chris Kluwe (@ChrisWarcraft) May 18, 2013
It appears “taco fest” or “taco fiesta” is the widely accepted nomenclature. Duly noted. #themoreyouknow
— Chris Kluwe (@ChrisWarcraft) May 18, 2013
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May 17, 2013
Rob Ford already immortalized in Taiwanese news animation
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May 16, 2013
May 8, 2013
Repost: Wine without whining
Originally posted 27 September, 2007:
Scraped off the bottom of rec.humor.funny, from August, 1996, and attributed to “PiALaModem@aol.com”:
The Down And Dirty on The Fruit of the Vine
I’m going to do you a big favor. I’m going to free you from feelings of inadequacy that have been haunting you since sometime in your teens. I’m going to fill you in on the greatest scam ever perpetrated upon the consuming public. I’m going to tell you what I know about wine.
The bottom line is that wine tastes awful. It’s just grape juice gone south (forgive me, dixiewhistlers). All the millions of poor slobs dutifully disguising the revolted pucker behind looks of thoughtful analysis, parroting gibberish of which they’ve no idea of the meaning, studying for hours so as not to be humiliated by menial restaurant employees once again, have fallen for a complex and insidious canard (see COLD DUCK). An “acquired taste” they call it. Well, you could acquire a taste for Ivory soap.
Herewith is a glossary of selected wine terms and what they really mean:
APPELLATION CONTROLEE: French for “Trust me”
AROMA: A bad smell that comes from the grapes; See BOUQUET
BEAUJOLAIS NOUVEAU: Wine so awful that it isn’t worth aging.
BOUQUET: A bad smell that’s added during processing; See NOSE
BRUT: Describes a wine that sneaks up on you and stabs you in the back. Or a wine dealer. From the Latin, “Et tu, Brute”
CHATEAUNEUF DU PAPE: The pope’s new house was paid for by swindling buyers into paying the price for this wine.
DRY: Hurts your throat while swallowing.
FRUITY: Tastes like children’s cough medicine. See ROBUST
NOBLE ROT: What well-born wine snobs talk.
NOSE: The total effect of AROMA and BOUQUET; something you wish you could hold while drinking.
ROBUST: Tastes like cough medicine. See FRUITY
ROSE: Many people mistakenly pronounce this to rhyme with Jose. A term for a pinkish wine, named for what an early commentator said his gorge did when he tasted it.
VARIETAL: Having the worst qualities of a single type of grape, rather than a mixture of sins.
VINTAGE: How many years we’ve been trying to get rid of this rotgut.
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May 7, 2013
Chris Kluwe sees @OnionSports satire, responds appropriately
The Onion posted a short “editorial” “by” “Chris Kluwe”. The former Vikings punter responded that he’s quite capable of writing his own biting satire with extremely generous sprinklings of naughty words:
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April 28, 2013
The “first sin of conservatism”
In yesterday’s Goldberg File email, Jonah Goldberg talked about making a speech at Washington College the night before:
During the Q&A a very attractive girl who’d spent much of my talk rolling her eyes and chatting with her friend, asked me a pretty typical question. She asked, more or less: How can you expect the Republicans to have a future if you go around antagonizing liberals, who are half the country, the way you did tonight?
I responded with a few points. First, I did my “Babe Ruth pointing to the outfield.” Then I did “dog pointing at water fowl.” I followed up with “Billy Hayes furiously pointing at Rifki in Midnight Express.” And I closed with the crowd pleaser “Bill Clinton pointing out his nightly selections from the intern pens.”
Once I was done with my interpretive dance “points,” I adjusted my form fitting unitard and made some verbal ones.
I explained that I was not there as a Republican and that I don’t speak for the Republican party. The GOP is simply the more conservative of the two political parties and as such it gets my vote. I speak for myself, for conservatism as I understand it, and — it should go without saying — the riders of Rohan.
Second, liberals — as in people who actually call themselves liberals — make up only about 20 percent of the electorate, while people who self-identify as conservatives make up 40 percent of the country. So even if I was speaking for Republicans, the idea that the key to Republican success lies in avoiding antagonizing liberals is just plain weird. Besides, liberals have had a great run of late antagonizing conservatives. Shouldn’t that mean liberals are doomed?
I made a few other (verbal) points. Deep Space Nine, much like Brussels sprouts and Swiss armed neutrality, is underrated, etc. But here’s the interesting part (“We’ll be the judge of that,” — The Couch). A central theme of my speech was that conservatives should spend less time demonizing liberals and more time trying to understand why so many people find the liberal message of “community” appealing.
I suggested that maybe what she took for my “antagonizing” could more plausibly be described as me offering “hard truths” she didn’t like hearing. This made her quite angry. One might even say it antagonized her. And that’s fair enough. No one likes being told that their anger stems not from being wrongly insulted but from being rightly told that they’re wrong (“Gimme a second; I’m still trying to follow that” — The Couch).
Still, I find this representative of a lot of campus liberals. They seem to think that the first sin of conservatism is disagreeing with liberals, as if it is simply mean-spirited to think liberals are wrong.
Facts, Horrible Facts
Second perhaps only to the glories of women’s prison movies, this was one of the earliest themes of the G-File, going back to the ancient origins of National Review Online, when I would personally tattoo this “news”letter on the back of a dwarf and have him run to each reader and take his shirt off. It was really inefficient.
What was I talking about? Oh right, the “meanness” of disagreement. Without getting into the weeds of the immigration or gun-control debates, there’s a certain liberal attitude that disagreement is just nasty. If you point out that background checks or “assault weapon” bans won’t work, the response is anger and frustration that you just don’t get it.
That’s because, as Emerson once said, “There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.” Whenever I talk to liberal college kids, I think of this line, because when I disagree with them it hurts their feelings (I would say their tears are delicious, but even I recoil at the image of me running out into the audience and licking the cheeks of weepy college kids).
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April 26, 2013
Minnesota introduces new policy for dealing with veterans
You may not hear about this in the mainstream press, but The Duffel Blog digs for the real story:
Officials from the Minnesota Department of Motor Vehicles have confirmed approval of a new policy making it mandatory for all active-duty and military veterans to register their status with the agency. The move will require all veterans to have a special “Vet” designation on their drivers’ licenses and state identification cards.
The Minn. DMV, which hopes to have the policy implemented by 2015, cites an inherent mental health threat by veterans as their main reason for devising the plan.
“We’ve seen what these savages are capable of all over CNN and MSNBC,” says DMV director, Greg Olson. “Out of all the millions of men and women who have deployed to combat zones this past decade, there are literally a dozen, perhaps even two, who have come home and committed atrocious acts. That’s way too big a chance. We can’t risk having these people hidden in our community and will be making sure they’re easily identifiable to law enforcement personnel and citizens in general.”
The new strategy will most likely result in changed police escalation-of-force procedure when dealing with veterans during routine traffic stops.
According to Olson, law enforcement officers will be given more opportunity to defend themselves against a perceived threat.
“Phase One will consist of the officer identifying an individual’s vet status on his or her driver’s license,” he says. “Once the officer realizes what he or she is dealing with, Phase Two will kick in and they will immediately unsheathe their pistol and drawdown on the potential psychopath. Then, at Phase Three, the officer will be given free reign to search the individual’s vehicle for weapons and dead bodies. If, and only if, the officer doesn’t find anything, then he will subsequently release the veteran and thank them for their service.”
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April 25, 2013
Interpreting what NFL coaches and general managers say leading up to the draft
It’s a time of the year when pretty much nothing coming out of the mouths of team officials can be taken at face value … GMs and coaches don’t want to tip their hands in advance of making their selections on draft day, so lots of misinformation is spread. For example, the Daily Norseman‘s Ted Glover goes through yesterday’s press conference by Vikings general manager Rick Spielman and tries to give us an interpretation of what was said (and not said):
Vikings GM Rick Spielman has become known for his amazing ability to fill up a notebook saying anything…unless one is willing to read between the lines.
Here at DN,
I got drunk one night and started posting,I was tasked with deciphering what we’ve come to know as Rick Speak, and take his paragraphs of nothing, non- denials, and unequivocal statements that really are equivocal, and turn them into some useful information.[. . .]
Rick Says: I think this is going to be one of most intriguing drafts I’ve been associated with because of the depth of the draft.
What that means: There’s not a lot of top shelf talent, and GM’s across the league would cut their grandma’s achilles tendons if they could get a good deal. We’re moving up to get an impact player, because he’s got two draft picks and and they’re BURNIN’ A HOLE IN MAH POCKET WOOOOOOOOOO!
Rick Says: And to be honest with you (Ed note: LOLWUT), where we’re picking at 23 and 25, we’re looking at all our needs, from the whole defensive side of the ball to needs on the offensive side of the ball, trying to distinguish what makes this potential receiver better than this corner, better than this linebacker, better than this defensive end, better than this defensive tackle.
What that means: None of our scouts agree on anyone, and that means no matter who we draft, a sizeable portion of our fanbase is going to be disappointed and call for my head on a platter. If we stay where we are many of you will IMMEDIATELY draw comparisons to 2005. But hey…new uniforms WOOO!
[. . .]
Rick also talked about a couple positions and position players, and how that might relate to the upcoming draft.
Tom P says Rick says: Asked if Erin Henderson was strictly considered a weak-side linebacker at this point, Spielman said, “No, that’s flexible. That depends on what happens in the draft. If we go outside, Erin can slide inside or if we go inside Erin can play outside. That’s what is great about this linebacker thing. We have the flexibility to go either way.”
What that means: We’re so gooned at linebacker right now. There’s nothing great about not having a starting MLB on the roster, and we have to be so flexible because we’re currently gooned. Did I mention we’re gooned at the linebacker position right now?
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