…from cowardly anonymous morons.
A comment that my moderation software caught, in response to my Michael Mann lawsuit post: “Rot in fu**ing he**ll you piece of s**t. Enjoy poverty.”
Aren’t these idiotic creatures sweet? Their tears will be delicious when the frivolous suit is dismissed, or we win.
OK, I’m sure I’m not the first to point this out, but who’s number 3?
A few weeks ago, I was invited to a gathering to hear the latest from Howard Bloom in downtown LA, but I had a conflict. But David Swindle attended, and has a report. (I did talk to Howard briefly a few days later, in San Diego.)
This –>
It became apparent again that I was the odd man out in the room. Most of the questions were phrased in explicitly secular terms.
Afterwards as Howard and a group of us sat around discussing, I raised my objection to the soulless, materialist focus. I drew a parallel between the groups who had sought to explore and settle the North American continent in the 1600s and those who should now seek to place their mark on the Moon, Mars, and the earth’s orbit.
I reminded Howard and the others that people came to the New World for varying reasons — capitalists eager to make money, the Crown eager to maintain power (primordial corporatists), science-minded explorers eager to discover what was out there, and one group unrepresented at the talk tonight, save for yours truly: the fanatical religious radicals wanting to live free of persecution as they built a godly, happy, counterculture community. It was this mix together that enabled the American experiment to begin and succeed.
People of faith — whether they interpret the Bible through Jewish, Christian, or mystic lenses — are called by God to transcend nature and rise upwards. The earth is not holy; it’s not our mother. As I’ve blogged about before, inspired by Glenn Reynolds’s An Army of Davids, the earth is just a rocky death trap. We can grow a better one ourselves.
To the degree that I have a religion, that’s pretty much it.
Professor Althouse has a suggestion.
While I don’t have a strong position personally on whether or not abortion should be legal (other than it’s none of the federal government’s business, either way, and that Roe was a constitutional atrocity), I’m always struck by the callousness of the “pro-choice” movement, which seems to be more of a pro-abortion movement. For instance, they don’t even want to get “bogged down” with the apparently inconsequential issue of whether or not a developing child can feel pain in the womb. And as Yuval Levin notes, as with other issues on the Left, they won’t even grant sincere good will to their political opponents:
The headline in the print edition [of the NYT] is “Unfazed by 2012, G.O.P. Is Seeking Abortion Limits.” As if the people struggling to save the lives of innocent children whose only crime is that they are unwanted by their mothers or would disrupt somebody’s plans should be “fazed” into inaction by the 2012 election.
The article itself offers no sense at all that the pro-life cause has any moral component, no notion that perhaps this isn’t just about this or that election. Just a perfect confusion about why anyone would want to spend time worrying about this issue.
“The re-emergence of abortion as a driving issue among the conservative base has left some moderate Republicans baffled,” the article notes. Has it really? Baffled?
The Times sometimes changes the headlines of its stories when they go online, and I wondered if maybe the online editors saw that this particular headline was ridiculous. So does the story have a different one online? Yup: The online headline is “G.O.P. Pushes New Abortion Limits to Appease Vocal Base.”
Even better.
In a similar vein, KLo writes about the pain of Penelope Trunk:
…it’s almost as if we prefer abortion. It’s an expectation. We’ve adapted our lives to it. And so a whole ideology needs to exist to insist it’s okay, that women and men aren’t feeling what they’re feeling. That this is good, when not very long ago we absolutely knew better. And it was not just priests or self-identified pro-lifers who knew better.
It’s all of a piece with the death merchants of the Left who think that humanity is the world’s biggest problem.
There are no simple answers.
I am completely unshocked to hear that schools of education do a terrible job of teaching teachers:
“We don’t know how to prepare teachers,” said Arthur Levine, former president of Teachers College at Columbia University and author of a scathing critique of teacher preparation. “We can’t decide whether it’s a craft or a profession. Do you need a lot of education as you would in a profession, or do you need a little bit and then learn on the job, like a craft? I don’t know of any other profession that’s so uncertain about how to educate their professionals.”
You don’t say.
Democrats shopping badly.
The country’s in the very best of hands.
One of the most amusingly stupid categories of spam I get is emails about how “Congress passed a bill” or “The president signed a law” resulting in lower auto insurance or (as they often idiotically say) “driving” rates. They sometimes try to tie it into current events. Here are two nutty subject lines today:
“President’s G8 Summit Meeting Yields Lower Auto Ins. For All,”
and
“Following meet with Putin, President announces lower auto ins. for all.”
Sadly, there are enough idiots out there that this probably does work. Until we come up with some cost for emailing, spam will persist.
Is it going out of business?
As late as 1981, Hollywood could still muster up enough energy to care what the audience thinks and want to please it. Today, the American moviegoer is anathema, particularly now that he’s no longer buying sufficient quantities of DVDs to support the lavish lifestyle of Hollywood elites, despite following the advice of Hollywood elites who told him to stop buying DVDs.
It certainly deserves to.
Regardless of what one thinks about the legality of the NSA surveillance, it has gotten peoples’ attention in a way that none of the other abuses of power have.