The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
Quote of the Day.
Much as it boosts the resonance of the bathroom baritone, a shower and tiled room will elevate a pedestrian girlie-scream into an operatic shriek. I’d like to say it was a bellow of surprise and outrage, but bellows do not hit the kind of high notes required to make all the metal in the room ring in sympathy.
LabRat, from this hilarious post.
I feel for you, sister. I fucking hate spiders.
Kill ’em with fire!!!
Quote of the Day.
An email link from Robb of Sharp as a Marble brought me to this Protein Wisdom post on Britons seeking foreign alternatives for their National Health Service when major surgery is needed. Read the whole post, but here’s the QotD:
Of course, none of this will stop the push for socialized medicine in the US, because if there’s one thing progressives excel at it is convincing themselves that any failure of ideology is attributable to the failure of the person or persons leading it — and that all that is required for Utopian policy to prove truly viable is the right kind of leaders: confident and brilliant (by their own lights) elitist bureaucrats who will resist the corrupting influences that “free market types” are always arguing are inherent to such systems.
Gee. Remind you of anyone?
Quote of the Day.
As for the United States being Imperialist, to quote the immortal, you keep using that word but I don’t think it means what you think it means. I don’t think the Roman, Chinese, British, etc. Empires would have ever reached the size they did if they poured money INTO the conquered provinces.
If we’re Imperialist, well, rejoice, we suck at it on a scale never seen before in history.
From a comment by “Treefrog” to a truly excellent post by Mark Danziger, “Armed Liberal,” at WindsofChange.net: Patriotism Rears its Head Again. Highly recommended; both it and the comment thread.
Quote of the Day.
It’s a twofer! From American Thinker, an essay entitled President Thompson by J. Peter Mulhern:
We have gotten so used to speaking of the President of the United States “running the country” that most of us no longer notice how unrealistic and unAmerican that expression is. The whole point of the American Revolution was to establish a country without anyone to run it.
Actually, there’s a whole bunch of quotable quotes in this piece, and while I do not agree with every point Mr. Mulhern makes in it, I am in overall agreement with his analysis of Fred Dalton Thompson’s chances.
His piece is quite long (Yeah, I know: “Pot? Meet Kettle!”), but I think Tam’s take on Fred’s run is just as accurate, and far more brief:
Personally, I think in a one on one national race, Hillary might edge Giuliani or Romney, but Fred Thompson would beat her like a drum. She would look like a shrieking harpy on stage next to Mr. Folksy, and your average American just isn’t ready to vote for the Shrew over the baritone Paterfamilias. They’d better run somebody with more charisma than Rudy or Mitt, though, because to your average Survivor-watching ‘Murrican who reads no news other than the sports page, those are just another couple of white guys in suits, but they know and trust D.A. Arthur Branch and Admiral Painter because the TeeVee and Tom Clancy told them to.
Quote of the Day. (Warning: graphic!)
If sticking a plasma grenade to an alien’s ass and watching as he runs around in panic before blowing up his buddies in a ball of blue flame doesn’t sound like fun to you, then maybe you need to hang out with this guy and discuss your lack of balls. – Papa Delta Bravo, It’s Okay To Be Popular: pdb Preemptively Defends Halo 3
There’s a man who understands first-person shooters!
Question of the Day.
Via Instapundit I came across a quote I’d heard about when it happened, but didn’t have a cite for. Now I do:
In December 2004, the executive director of MoveOn.org’s PAC said of the Democratic Party: “Now it’s our party. We bought it, we own it, and we’re going to take it back.”
My question: Do you have the receipt, and what do you want to exchange it for? (No cash refunds, in-store credit only!!)
Quote of the Day.
If you think of the “ideal” system- the one that produced life on earth, in all its diversity and richness- as guided by a top-down process that has a goal set for everything (or maybe just humans), then that sounds a lot more like a version of socialism that somehow produced wild success than anything.
ACTUAL evolution is a lot more like the world’s most cutthroat capitalist proposition. No rules except “succeed or go extinct”. – LabRat from this comment thread.
From an excellent post by Joe Huffman. Joe’s formerly hoplophobic friend explains why he felt it necessary to demonize gun owners in his own mind:
Back in the days when I was very anti-gun, I tended to think of “gun nuts” as drooling, knuckle-dragging morons. Cavemen. Uneducated. Beer-drinking slobs who could barely read and who probably beat up their wives a lot. Maybe they were even all closet Nazis, eh? Etc., etc., etc. It was an image that came instantly to mind. I would talk about “gun nuts” that same way with friends of like mind. It all made such perfect sense to us.
But if ever I came across a “gun nut” in person I would be silent — especially if it was someone dressed in, say, hunting cammos. Or I might see “gun nuts” on TV and make a snide comment about them, but seeing them made me feel a bit afraid (something I didn’t reveal to other people). It wasn’t rational, but it wasn’t surprising considering how I’d been raised. It wasn’t until a long time later that I realized what I’d been doing: trying to make the “gun nuts” almost into sub-humans in my mind, and paint them as ridiculous and stupid so that they shrank in stature and were less scary to me. (But as I said, this doesn’t work. No amount of sneering made me feel less afraid.)
Read Joe’s whole post. There’s a good comment by Clayton Cramer at the bottom, too.
Quote of the Day.
Bill Ardolino is an independent journalist in Iraq. He normally posts his stories at his blog, INDCJournal, but Long War Journal sometimes carries his pieces. They posted one yesterday, an interview a local translator, a Fallujan, on several topics, but especially the invasion and occupation, with special emphasis on Fallujah. I recommend you read the whole thing. There’s a lot of good information there. (You’ll like it, Markadelphia, I promise! Much grist for both sides.) But this passage I found particularly quotable:
INDC: But what motivated al Qaeda to do that though? Why would they start killing those innocent people?
Leo: I think the major goal was chaos … to make big chaos. And everyone knows [that the radical mujahadeen] were pushed [into Iraq] from beyond the borders: Iran particularly, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait. Nobody wants Iraq to stabilize, to be a good country and a democratic country, because democracy will affect them, and they are dictatorships. There is a prince in Kuwait, there is a King in Arabia, there is what everyone calls a republic, but it’s not a republic, it’s a kingdom in Jordan. And Iran, Iran wants to take over the whole area, if possible. So they see an opportunity to take over Iraq, and they take it. That’s what everyone thinks, just like what I’ve said.
Gee, it sound’s like he’s reading from Karl Rove’s Bush Doctrine Manual.
This second quote is a close runner-up:
INDC: One thing I’m curious about is, what do the Fallujans think of the Marines as fighters? Do they respect them, hate them, fear them? I know that your culture is very proud and tough. You fight. What do they think of the Marines?
Leo: You know, al Qaeda and other mujahadeen say that the Americans are not tough, they are just cartoon soldiers, just like characters in cartoon films, but most of the people see the fact that they are tough people. And they are so patient. And they can fight outside of their country overseas, and I don’t think al Qaeda or someone else can fight like Marines, overseas and so distant from home.
But if we pull out because of the defeatist Democrats, then al Qaeda and the other mujahadeen will know that they can defeat us politically – and our defeat is all that matters. They learned that lesson from Vietnam.
The Wal*Mart of Malfeasance: Quote of the Day.
In relation to the post below:
What is it about the DNC that attracts such sleazy flakes? Maybe they figure the price of a GOP candidate is too steep so they shop for political patronage in the Walmart of malfeasance; the DNC
Left as a comment at Small Dead Animals by “W L Mackenzie Redux”