Month: February 2010

Quote of the Day – Vicious Circle Edition

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I made my first appearance on Vicious Circle Thursday night. The other guests were JayG, Aepilotjim, LabRat, Stingray, Breda (for about half the show), and our host Alan. The topics of discussion were Hollyweird and movies (our favorites, least favorites, Avatar etc.), and my most recent überpost, What We Got Here Is . . . Failure to Communicate. Aepilotjim zinged me with this one:

The money-quote for me in your post, and I’ve got it up here and I’m going to quote it, I mean, this sums up the entire thing for me in one nice little line. You said, “I know this post is already excruciatingly long.”

I actually liked this one better, though, by Jay :

This is a good parallel for 2001, because reading Kevin’s überpost, I felt like the monkey staring at the monolith.

Vicious Circle #38 is now available for your listening . . . pleasure?

Quote of the Day – Shameless Edition

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Quote of the Day – Shameless Edition

Whether or not you believe the authenticity of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau’s quote of 1939 – “We are spending more money than we have ever spent before, and it does not work. After eight years we have just as much unemployment as when we started, and an enormous debt to boot” – the substance is true. The New Deal made the Depression worse – and we are doing it again, only with bigger numbers and more zeros. Furthermore, now the Chinese own us. We enact this nonsensical budget and we might as well give them the whole thing – the Statue of Liberty, McDonald’s and Apple Computer. No backsies. They can have Steve Jobs’ next iPad extravaganza in Shanghai. They build everything over there already anyway.

But unfortunately this is no joke. The passing of this budget is a straight out act of economic insanity. Everyone knows it. The 217 Democrats who passed it surely know it too. Only they are too corrupt to face it honestly. Shame on them. Shame on them. Shame on them. – Roger L. Simon, 217 Democrats take suicide pact

They have no shame, Roger. They haven’t for decades. They’re politicians elected to national office who have made, as Mencken described, so many compromises and submitted to so many humiliations that they have become indistinguishable from streetwalkers. The shame has been campaigned out of them.

And this isn’t limited to Democrats.

But What Happens When One Becomes the Other

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But What Happens When One Becomes the Other?

I found a very interesting quotation from Henry Louis Mencken tonight that raises that very question:

THE VALUE the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigator. What actually urges him on is not some brummagem idea of Service, but a boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find out what has not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes.

H.L. Mencken, The Scientist, first printed in the New York Evening Mail, March 25, 1918

What happens when someone who should have a “boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown” instead becomes enraptured with the idea of doing good?

We get Anthropogenic Global Warming Climate Change.

And when these people are exposed for what they are, they pull themselves down those rat-holes and try to disappear.

Quote of the Day – Previous Election Edition

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Quote of the Day – Previous Election Edition

From this comment thread:

My favorite comment from last election (I think it was here, actually) was “I like Cthulhu’s foreign policy of destroying everthing and devouring everyone, but not so much his domestic policy of destroying everything and devouring everyone. Still better than Hillary, though.” – Ken

I don’t care who you are, that’s funny right there.

Misbehavin’

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Misbehavin’

More vehicular free speech seen on the streets of Tucson today:


If you can’t read the bumper sticker, try this:


It says “B.O. Stinks.” And painted on the window, obviously, “Marx Sux.” I couldn’t read the fine print on the way by.

Obviously a racist.