Six unconventional uses for it. What’s particularly amusing is that, because it’s the Internet, the comments section almost immediately degenerates into a political flame war.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
When My Dog Lucky Disappeared
…so did I.
I haven’t mentioned it, but last Saturday we put Jessica down. She was eighteen, and still loving, but she had become incontinent (not in the sense that she had lost control, but in that she didn’t care where she went, and the litter box was generally last on the list). She was down to half her peak body weight from an original nine pounds, just skin and bones, and very finicky about food, demanding not food per se, but to be fed.
She was always a very social cat (even when we rescued her at the age of one and a half, she seemed more dog than cat in her need for attention), and remained so, but she was tired, and didn’t seem to enjoy anything in life other than eating, and lying on us. At the end, she had to stay outside lest she destroy the house, and when I took her to the vet to diagnose a diarrhea problem, we both concluded that despite her continued affection, she was suffering from dementia. Patricia and I made an appointment for Saturday, and saw her through to the end, which came very quickly and painlessly, at least for her. There was very little fight left in her. We brought her home and buried her in the yard where she used to play when she was young.
While we’re relieved that we can finally clean floors (and perhaps replace some of the wood flooring where she’d made permanent urine stains through a rug that we hadn’t seen), there’s a hole in our lives as well, after over sixteen years. Rerun (the young cat we adopted three years ago) doesn’t know what happened to the older cat she used to try to play with, but she’s been more subdued than usual. At some point, I hope we’ll get her companionship her own age.
[Update a while later]
Thanks for the condolences in comments. It’s interesting to note that what we did was very common when we were growing up (and not unusual at all to our great grandparents), but a lot of people think it’s weird today, I think. Some friends of mine live in a farmhouse west of Ann Arbor across the road from a church in which some of their relatives are buried in the yard.
When we first got a quote for the procedure from the vet, it included cremation, with an option to keep the ashes. That’s in fact what I did when Stella died, but I didn’t really have a choice, because I was half a continent away when it happened. Apparently keeping the body of the animal is an unusual request. When we asked, the vet said that we weren’t supposed to bury it ourselves, but she would give it to us as long as we didn’t tell her what we were going to do — for all she knew we were taking it to a pet cemetery for interment. It actually saved us a little money, and made us feel like we were taking care of her ourselves.
And apparently dealing with pet remains is a pretty good business. We just used a cardboard box. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t care. The vet did make a little clay cast of her paw print, that the young women in the office paint (one of them was a little apologetic about it — “It’s nothing fancy, sort of like a kid’s art project”). I’ll pick it up tomorrow. Maybe I’ll embed it in a cement slab.
[Update late afternoon]
One more point, per comments. I am never offended by someone offering their prayers for me, though I’ve been god blind all my life (and expect to go to my grave that way, which is one, but not the only reason that I’m into life extension).
I can’t imagine how they would hurt me (well, OK, I can, but only in a ludicrous, Pascal’s-Wager-denying thought experiment), and I assume that they at a minimum benefit the person praying. I always appreciate everyone’s good will, and good thoughts, in whatever form.
Lileks Weighs In
She doesn’t hate Jews. How could she? Nobody hates Jews. She just wants their homeland dismantled and its residents scattered to – well, somewhere. Take it up with Germany, she notes. Fiddle-de-dee.
Read the comments, as the right-thinking folk of the West line up to applaud her. No doubt some of these people posted it as a Facebook update, leaned back from the keyboard, and felt that rush you get when you know you’ve finally shed some archaic inhibition that kept you from doing what you wanted to do.
It’s okay. You were fooled. You were misled. No one hates the Jews. As for the Yids, the Queers, the lower forms of life known as women – it’ll all sort itself out once the millstone of Oppression is lifted from the breast of the Oppressed.
So that’s what we’re supposed to believe: good will abounds in the world. It flows from the human heart in unstanchable quantities, but now and then things happen. Bad things. Someone makes a movie. Someone dances in public. Someone sits with his wife in a Pakistan McDonald’s. The adults have to step in and make things clear. Calls have to be made. Speech has to be ceased; videos have to be blocked. If you don’t jazz the rabble they’ll come around. Any day now.
Any day.
But yesterday was not that day, and when the mob came to the embassy, it seems there were no Marines to defend the place. Perhaps that’s for the best. In the blinkered, jingo-sodden mindset of Red America, the Marines might have thought weapons free, and mowed the lot of them down. Among the dead would have been a young man – not particularly political, really, caught up in the excitement, really, righteously offended by the existence of a contrapositive argument existing in ones and zeroes on a server in America. His grieving parents would tell the world he had no weapon, he was not a terrorist. Yet they shot him down. Within hours the story would have the Marines outside the gates firing on people who had assembled to list a legitimate grievance – nevermind the security camera footage; the Jews are devilishly good at faking that – and the story would morph in a trice from an act of dogma-sodden barbarism to a tale of conflicting stories that underlines the difficulties of reconciling two sides.
Because the existence of two sides proves the equivalence of two sides. In the larger meta-sense of it all.
As always, read all.
A New Kind Of Leftist
So what are we dealing with here? A radical leftist movement pretending to be liberal, growing out of the New Left of the 1960s, painfully aware of how the far left miserably failed in American history, and trying to create a twenty-first century stealth leftism. The first step was to gain hegemony in the key institutions that created ideas, rather than the factories that created material goods. They succeeded brilliantly.
The next step was to shape millions of Americans, especially young Americans, to accept their ideas that the United States was a force for evil in the world, a failed society, a place of terrible racism and hatred for women, and a country where the vast majority didn’t have a fair chance because the system was unfair. In fact, if you take away the varnish rhetoric, they argue that America is a virtual dictatorship of a small minority of wealthy people who just set everything up for their own convenience. Obviously this parallels both Marxist and non-Marxist historical leftism.
The fact that their description of America has so little to do with the actual country makes it all the more impressive that they’ve been able to sell this set of ideas. Having one of their indoctrinated products become president was a special bonus. That doesn’t mean Obama was backed by some conspiracy or singled out for highest office. There are thousands of such people who are in positions of power, including one-third of the Democrats in the House of Representatives. Obama just perfectly fit the needs of the moment.
Let’s hope the moment has changed.
Romney Is No Savior
…and that’s the point:
Do you hear yourselves? You’re Americans, not Europeans. You are the fruit of a nation constituted in liberty and based on the idea that the people can govern themselves. You should not wait for the king who sleeps beneath the hill.
Oh, I realize — I see — you look at 1980 and now, and you see the similarities and then you cry out “Romney is no Reagan.”
This is good, because Obama is no Carter. And our situation is in many ways far worse than it was.
But it is good, most of all, because Obama was bad enough that he woke the force that protects this country. It had been asleep for seventy years, sleeping beneath the dark hill of statism. It is now up, and roused and active. It is moving. The tea parties are proof of that, as is the massive swatting the Lords of Political Correctness got over the Chick-fil-A business.
Romney is a decent business manager. He’s a decent man. He likes America. He wants America to like him. He’s not going to actively dismantle our way of life, as will the one now in power. There will be no attacks on freedom of religion, no wild power grabs for the Internet, no executive orders that violate the laws of the land. He will not hanker for more “flexibility” so he can give more to Putin. And — this is petty but important for how the world sees us — he will neither apologize nor bow to foreign leaders.
Is he perfect? Oh, goodness, no. Is he exactly what we need? Probably not. Who is? Do you know the trouble we’ve got ourselves into by trusting presidents for this long? It’s a big hole. No one man can get us out of it. Only we can. And it will take time.
But that’s fine. He won’t be anointed by any gods. There will be no halos and no Greek columns. Instead, he’ll be the elected by the people and the people — the sovereign people of this free land — who are now awake will stand ready to make sure he knows it.
The Founders didn’t envision the president as a messiah, and neither should we. That kind of thinking was one of the reasons that our ancestors left Europe.
[Update]
Link is fixed, sorry!
First Chick-Fil-A
…and now Clint Eastwood.
Go see the movie for him. Make if one of his biggest hits ever.
A Fake Romney Quote
…and the Left falls for it. Of course they do.
America’s Wealth
Five ways it saps our character.
Fortunately, it’s a problem that the Democrats seem determined to solve, albeit unwittingly.
Unsure Robots
…make better teachers than know-alls.
This doesn’t surprise me at all. I’ve always found that the best way to learn a subject is to teach it to someone else.
That “You Belong To The Government” Video
…was no gaffe:
Later this summer, Obama notoriously argued that government created the environment for success through infrastructure spending. “If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that,” Obama told a crowd in Oakland. Obama later claimed he meant that businesses didn’t build the infrastructure that allowed them to be successful, and that government deserves the credit. But where did government get the capital to build the infrastructure in the first place? From the successful businesses that produced that capital, not from the Progressive Sunshine Forest.
The reference to churches in the video is another interesting point, although not one that Democrats want voters to notice. This administration imposed a mandate on employers to provide free birth control and sterilization to employees, even those employers whose religious values prohibit them from facilitating such access. Explicitly religious organizations such as schools, health care providers, and charities did not get an exemption, either. The message was very similar to what the video argued: you can join a church, but you belong to the government.
Yup.