Category Archives: Obsessions

Detente with the Castros

Posted on December 22, 2014 | 2 comments

Frankly, I couldn’t care less about Obumbles’ latest bad negotiation with a dictator. He’s a lying sap. We know that. Fidel and Raul are thugs. No surprise.

As for Lurch, hey, the man never met a dictator he didn’t love. Otherwise, as PJMedia’s Roger L. Simon puts it: “In the end, that will pretty much be about beach resorts, maybe a Havana gambling casino or two for Jay-Z.  Standard crony capitalism stuff.”

The Cubans won’t be getting any more political freedom any time soon. They’ll get the cleaning jobs, and wait tables, join the half-naked chorus line and maybe even aspire to croupier. A swarm of gringo tourists to fleece. Better than the communist nothing they have now.

Much more worrisome is Obongo’s and Lurch’s love-affair with Iran. The mullahs will have nukes, and probably a lot sooner than we think.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Obamalot, Obsessions, South of the Border, The Culture, War Without End

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The PC Cult

Posted on December 20, 2014 | 2 comments

As seen through the sharp lenses of celebrated Russian writer Victor Pelevin:

“I think political correctness is justified when it allows you to preserve human dignity. When it becomes a fetish and a national cult, it is a bit ridiculous. Nobody wants linguistic He-or-shema, as in America, but in any society where different ethnicities live one next to the other, a certain minimum of politically correct clichés will not hurt. Americans are very pragmatic people. They introduced political correctness because it instantly creates a formal bridge across the emotionally charged quagmire. Call a black person a Negro and you immediately acquire a share of responsibility for the slave trade. Call him/her an African-American, and it will be easy to fire him/her. Political correctness creates clear rules, relying on which you can avoid ambiguity, although by itself political correctness is a very ambiguous thing.”

An ambiguity that facilitates news media witch hunts (and racist-manufacturing machines like Al Sharpton) against anyone the cult disagrees with for whatever reason, narrowing the range of thought and steering it hard Left.

Via Simply Jews.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Obamalot, Obsessions, The Culture

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No due process at SMU

Posted on December 16, 2014 | 1 comment

The Ponies don’t just have a lousy football team, they’ve also rigged the system against students accused of rape. Men, in other words. Despite all the recanted rape charges of recent years, the feds still encourage (shoot, they require) schools to favor the rape accuser over the accused.

“To reiterate: this new procedure, which OCR [federal Office of Civil Rights] requires SMU to continue in the future: (1) denies the accused student the right to an attorney; (2) denies the accused student the right to cross-examine his accuser; (3) allows the accused student no meaningful discovery; (4) can brand the accused student a rapist even if SMU’s own investigator and, later, own conduct review officer concludes he did nothing wrong; and (5) can reach that determination on a 3-2 vote.”

Innocent until proven guilty? Not on this subject and not at SMU. Keep your nose clean out there. The Supreme Soviet (i.e. OCR) is back in business, in Dallas.

Via Instapundit.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Obamalot, Obsessions, Texana, The Culture

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The badge gang’s crimes

Posted on December 14, 2014 | 8 comments

Good examples of why the Badge Gang needs reform:

“They can shoot unarmed men and lie about it. They can roll up and execute a child with a toy as casually as one might in Grand Theft Auto. They can bumble around opening doors with their gun hand and kill bystanders, like a character in a dark farce, with little fear of serious consequences. They can choke you to death for getting a little mouthy about selling loose cigarettes. They can shoot you because they aren’t clear on who the bad guy is, and they can shoot you because they’re terrible shots, and they can shoot you because they saw something that might be a weapon in your hand—something that can be … any fucking thing at all, including nothing.”

Fortunately, people are finally catching on to the fact that Officer Friendly ain’t.

Via The Atlantic & Fox News.

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Posted in Obituaries, Obsessions, The Culture, The Drug War

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The Martian

Posted on December 11, 2014 | 2 comments

Far and away the best self-published book I’ve read. The Martian by Andy Weir started out as a 99 cent indy ebook and didn’t get its current name brand publisher and hard- and softback editions until after it became an Amazon hit.

The story of an astronaut mistakenly left for dead on Mars and how he deals with it does a great job of puffing NASA, Weir obviously being a NASA fanboy. A private space consortium behind the protagonist would have been more logical than a bloated government bureaucracy. SpaceX or one of its progeny. But never mind.

I got a little tired of the technical stuff at several points but it seemed that whenever I did, the author took the narrative in a more interesting direction. Mercifully the story has almost no politics in it nor any of contemporary science fiction’s usual dystopian babble. It was also a pleasure to meet some unadulterated heroes in science fiction again. Hopefully that will become a trend.

It was amusing to see Weir pick CNN and NBC as NASA’s chief media conduits to the public. Perhaps he doesn’t know those two have been dead last in the audience ratings for more than a decade. No mention at all is made of Fox, which is number one, and whose audience is vastly larger than CNN’s or NBC’s combined.

Nevertheless, Weir’s story is an immensely enjoyable testament to the value of the individual. It’s optimistic about humanity in general and human space exploration in particular. Can we get back to it now, all these years after Apollo and the space shuttles endlessly going nowhere?

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Posted in Obsessions, Science/Engineering, Space, The Culture

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Great dreams

Posted on December 9, 2014 | 2 comments

I met Duke Ellington in a dream the other night in a remarkably small theater after his ensemble had concluded their 1927 composition Black & Tan Fantasy.

I tried to bum a cigarette from the great jazzman, but he refused. I thanked him for doing that. “It will make a better story,” I said. Then I woke up with a smile.

When I told my fiddle teacher about it, he wasn’t surprised. “You’ve been playing his music,” he said. Spooky instrument, the fiddle.

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Posted in Fiddle Stuff, Music, Obsessions, The Culture

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Rule 5: Wanderers

Posted on December 6, 2014 | Comments Off on Rule 5: Wanderers

WANDERERS_cape_verde_01 (1)

Once more with… This is a recreation of a Martian landscape snapped by one of our robot explorers, turned to an imagined dirigible landing pad where human explorers await.

From the short film Wanderers that’s worth several viewings and reading the words from the forward of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of The Human Future in Space. Click the pix to biggerize for more detail.

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Posted in Obsessions, Science/Engineering, Space

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