Via Tim Blair.

Susan Sarandon on 9/11:

The actress said one of the positive results of the September 11 attacks was that it gave America something in common with other countries who have fallen prey to terrorism.

"Afterwards, I said to my kids: 'We've joined the rest of the world now'," she said.

"You're so lucky in Ireland, England and Spain. Everyone there already knows what it's like to have inexplicable terrorist violence."

God damn, what a stupid thing to say. This came out of the mouth of an actress who is supposedly trained to discern and empathize with the emotions of others?

I live within sight of the WTC. One of the reasons we bought this house was the view of the NYC skyline. The view from my window gave me a great deal of pleasure.

On 9/11 I was alerted to the attack by a friend and colleague to whom I was talking on the phone. I went to the window and watched. From the safety of my living room far removed from the scene, I saw the antenna atop One WTC disappear as the building collapsed. As a result, I will never take the same pleasure in the view from my window again. Amazingly, that was the only personal loss I suffered on 9/11, and for that I consider myself fortunate. But the "loss" I feel every time I look at the altered NYC skyline is completely and utterly insignificant in comparson to the losses borne by dead and their familes. I think they would disagree that everyone now knows "what it's like to have inexplicable terrorist violence."

And not just the dead at the Pentagon and the WTC and their families. The causalties of any terror attack anywhere (and those closest to them) bear the same unique burden. The dead know nothing. But their families know what its like. I don't, and neither do you, Ms. Sarandon.

And I don't think they consider themselves lucky.

I sure as hell hope I never get that lucky.

 
Aha! Through the magic of actually reading the code in the polygeek test I took and posted earlier, I have learned how to post an image here. And therefore I can show you Susanna Cornett's photo.



Note: Photograph used by permission; you may link but not duplicate or use on another site without permission.

Except that when I posted the photo, the geek test results, along with my deathless prose from all of my other posts, was moved so far to the right as to be off the page. In fixing that problem, it was easier just to delete the geek test results. If anyone missed it and cares, I am 46% geek.

But the recessive geek in me can now post photos!

 
The high point to date of my brief blogging career came when Glenn Reynolds linked to this post on Brad de Long's vision of the steps on the road from liberal to neoconservative. Now I come to find out that Mr. de Long himself has taken notice of the Power of Cognition. He agrees with my comments concerning the recitation of the Gettysburg Address on the observation of the first anniversary of 9/11.

All right, all right, I hear you (yes, both of you). The man's politics are not to my liking, but no one's perfect. Can't fault his taste in classic speeches. His site is pretty good, too, since he is not afraid to poke a little fun at himself.

 
I am cheap. Pennies quail when I enter a room, such is my reputation for pinching. I am certainly cheap enough to not want to pay for a server and all the other stuff it would take to maintain this site myself. For my purposes, Blogger is perfect.

Except I can't post graphics. Normally, I just write. No pictures, no graphs, just thoughts, occasionally expressed in whole sentences.

There are times, however, when I long to post a picture. This is one of them. Susanna Cornett, over at Cut on the Bias, has a picture that the world should see, and I can't post it here.

The price one pays for being cheap.

 
One of my earliest posts was a disagreement with Steven denBeste concerning the effects of a treaty the terms of which violate the constitution. My only excuse is that I was young and stupid.

OK, my only excuse was that I was stupid.

Today, I again fearlessly venture into the wild to test my wits against that same Titan of the Web. But this time, I'm going to be really smart about it. I'm not going to use my name. Remember, you didn't hear it here first. OK, here we go:

In discussing the deferral of the disagreement in the UN between the EU and the US about immunity from prosecution (in the International Criminal Court) for US peacekeepers, den Beste notes:

[T]he EU has asked that any nation requesting membership in the EU not make ... an agreement with the US [to grant immunity from such prosecution to US peacekeepers] until after the EU comes up with an overall policy on the issue.

He later concludes that [i]f one of these nations [we ask to enter into such an agreement] comes to need our help, ultimately they will have to agree to this no matter what the EU says. Of course, they could always ask the EU to help defend them against armed invasion instead of us, and the EU could deploy its army of bureaucrats from Brussels, using their much-feared ferocious glowering at the invaders.

It is that last phrase that draws my ire. It has been well established that the Krupp FGG-19 is the finest ferocious glower generator made in the world today. These aircraft mounted generators can ferociously glower at high power in a "footprint" seventy meters wide from an altitude above ground of one hundred meters. Once in flight, this remarkable weapon is capable of making the difference not only in any single engagement, but an entire campaign. Test flights over Paris have conclusively demonstrated that the once the glowerers have ferociously glowered at the glowerees for a total of 1.75 ferocious glowers, the will to oppose any threat of violence is reduced by 82.74%, regardless of the nature or source of the threat.

Experiments with the less expensive technology of painting a frowny face on the lower surfaces of an aircraft have also been planned. Those experiments include varying the size and placement of the frowny face and changing the color of the aircraft from grey to both camouflage green and solid pink. Additionally, despite fierce political opposition, enhancements to the existing technology are in the works, including the thermobaric ferocious glowerer, which, experts predict, will be able to ferociously glower around corners and into underground bunkers covered by as much as three inches of course gravel. However, both the planned enhancements and the new trials had to be delayed until a new test range is located. Paris was deemed to no longer be a suitable test range when it was discovered that Jacques Chirac had ceded the Louvre and Versailles to the first pre-teen he saw with a soccer ball after receiving a complaint from an eight year old boy that the neighborhood bully had stolen his ball.

Incredibly, den Beste simply ignores the well known capabilities of this proven and devastating technology. The argumentum no-see-um is no more than a well known debating tactic, the use of which does not measure up to den Beste's usual impeccable standards.

Posted by Anonymous

 
Tim Blair, ozblogger extraordinaire, has learned that there are abnormal women in the world who actually like sex. He claims to have read it in a science journal. He's lying. You know he read about such women in every prepubescent males first "men's" magazine: National Geographic.

 
Where in the world has Osama bin Hidin?

The Osama is dead crowd is apparently gaining converts. On the other hand, someone recently pointed out that radical islamic organizations love to publicize and worship their dead "martyrs" and that a dead Osama would be too good a PR bonanza (for consumption outside the US, of course) for al Qaeda to pass up. And, of course, no body has been found.

My none too certain conclusion (guess, really) is that Osama has been forcibly converted to yak food in or near some cave in Afghanistan. The longer we don't hear from him the more certain I am of that conclusion.

That leaves the question of why we have not been treated to a rendition of "Osama and his Virgins" from the al Qaeda PR machine. Perhaps they aren't sure either, and fear that Osama, if alive, will not have the same reaction as Mark Twain to the greatly exaggerated claims of his death.

 
An interesting question has been posted by Jane Galt:

Is Europe's peace and unification a result of a philosophical evolution, or the fact that we have essentially made Europe an occupied protectorate of the United States for the last 50 years?

I think American military presence in Europe affected European philosophical evolution.

With the exception of the western portion of Germany under the control of the western Allies (US, UK, France) American occupation of Europe was not designed to, nor did it, militarily threaten any western European nation. After the formation of NATO in the face of the threat of Soviet expansionism, even West Germany was no longer threatened by the occupation. To me, that means that, even though the US troops stayed put, the "occupation" ended, at the latest, with the formation of NATO. It simply wasn't an occupation any more. West Germany was our ally in both name and deed. The presence of the US Army in West Germany was no more an occupation of West Germany than the presence of the US Army at Fort Leavenworth was an occupation of Kansas. The presence of US military forces in Europe was no longer aimed at keeping a resurgent Germany from rearming and threatening its neighbors, or keeping the peace among western European nations. The purpose was to deter (and, failing that, to oppose) a Soviet invasion.

Our post war presence on German soil, both initially as occupying conquerors and later as invited allies had the effect of allowing a economically and militarily exhausted western Europe to forego the cost of preparing to fight a third European war, and, to a large degree, similarly avoid the cost of defending Europe against the Soviets. The inevitable result was that West Germany was seen to have been neutralized as a military threat to Britain and France, and all of western Europe therefore ramped up spending on a socialist or quasi socialist political and economic agenda and allowed their respective militaries to deteriorate.

My father once observed that when a practical man fails at something, he tries a different solution to the problem, but that when a idealist fails, he often attempts to impose the same failed solution on more people. The problem with gun control, for example, was not that controlling guns in, say, New York was impossible or impractical, it failed only because other states refused to go along and prohibit the sale of guns to New Yorkers. The idealist's solution is not to try something else in New York, it is to impose the policy which had failed in New York on a larger group of people. The same mindset gives rise, in part, to the present war on drugs. Because the government has utterly failed to control domestic consumption of illegal drugs, it is attempting to impose its anti-drug policy on those foreign nations which are home to the producers of drugs illegal in the US.

I think the same dynamic is at work in Europe, today. The individual members of the EEC could not successfully apply many of their overly idealistic policies within their own borders. Each national economy subject to those policies became less and less efficient and experienced higher and higher unemployment, and each sovereign nation had a strong incentive to make its policies just a little less restrictive than its neighbors. The result in the US would normally be the widespread adoption of minimalist restrictions. Not so in Europe. Unification is an attempt to apply those same failed policies on a continent-wide basis. I think that most of the policies failed not because the policies of a neighboring nation were slightly different, but because the policies themselves are economically unworkable. Changing the number of people or nations to which those policies appy will not change the economic viability of the policies. It will only change the number of the people burdened by them. For example, the drive for equalization of the tax structures of the member nations has become, in fact, a drive to tax all people at the highest rate of any individual member nation, otherwise the citizens of low tax members like Ireland have an "unfair advantage." The low tax regime in Ireland does in fact give it and its citizens an economic advantage over much of the rest of Europe, and it did so before unification. Unification allows those with the self imposed disadvantage to level the playing field by imposing a similar disadvantage on the others.

On an oversimplified basis, the urge to control "just a little bit more" to achieve the desired result is in large part what drives European unification. That desire for control arises from the socialist mindset now widespread in Europe. The socialist mindset is, ironically, enabled by the post war American military presence in Europe.

 
I stumbled across Jerry Pournelle's website some time ago. On Chaos Manor, I found the flame to end all flames. It is vitriolic, hilarious, and, most strikingly, entirely free of vulgarity. It immediately came to mind when I read Adrian Hamilton's proposal for a regime change in the US (via a resurrected Sgt. Stryker's Daily Briefing).

Now, both of you who read my long winded rants regularly know that I fairly frequently complain about the tenor of political discourse. So I am not free to use the flame on anyone while still retaining the single shred of self respect remaining to me. That does not mean that The Flame is altogether useless. I use it as a measuring device to test Tim Blair's theory that the idiocies of the world are converging. I will know that we have reached the Chomsky Event Horizon when everything in The Flame applies to a single act or post. Fortunately, that has not yet happened.

I could never use any part of The Flame on someone with whom I was attempting to conduct a political dialogue. But that will not be true of everyone, so I have decided that this is too good an opportunity to waste.

And therefore ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, I give you the flame of flames:

You swine. You vulgar little maggot. You worthless bag of filth. I'll bet you couldn't pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel. You are a canker. A sore that won't go away. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you. You're a putrescent mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, and a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, and a big suck on a sour lemon. You are a bleating foal, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. Insensate, blinking calves, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts that sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done.

I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, and a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell? Try to edit your responses of unnecessary material before attempting to impress us with your insight. The evidence that you are a nincompoop will still be available to readers, but they will be able to access it more rapidly.

You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood. May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs. You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane.

You are foul and disgusting. You're a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won't have sex with you. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot.

And what meaning do you expect your delusional self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake?

You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile one-handed slack-jawed drooling meatslapper. On a good day you're a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go.

You smarmy lagerlout git. You bloody woofter sod. Bugger off, pillock. You grotty wanking oik artless base-court apple-john. You clouted boggish foot-licking twit. You dankish clack-dish plonker. You gormless crook-pated tosser. You churlish boil-brained clotpole ponce. You cockered bum-bailey poofter. You craven dewberry pisshead cockup pratting naff. You gob-kissing gleeking flap-mouthed coxcomb. You dread-bolted fobbing beef-witted clapper-clawed flirt-gill. You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you, and I wish you would go away.

I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid, so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are Trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Your writing has to be a troll. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I'm sorry. I can't go on.

This is an epiphany of stupid for me. After this, you may not hear from me again for a while. I don't have enough strength left to deride your ignorant questions and half-baked comments about unimportant trivia, or any of the rest of this drivel.

The only thing worse than your logic is your manners. I have snipped away all of what you wrote, because, well... it didn't really say anything. Your attempt at constructing a coherent statement was pitiful. I mean, really, stringing together a patch of paranoia among a load of babbling was hardly effective...

Maybe later in life, after you have learned to read, write, spell, and count, you will have more success. True, these are rudimentary skills that many of us "normal" people take for granted that everyone has an easy time of mastering. But we sometime forget that there are "challenged" persons in this world who find these things more difficult. If I had known that this was your case then I would have never read your post. It just wouldn't have been "right". Sort of like parking in a handicap space. I wish you the best of luck in the emotional and social struggles that seem to be placing such a demand on you.

Hope this finds you in good health

UPDATE: I forgot to credit Paul Wright at TANSTAAFL for coining the term "Chomsky Event Horizon". That omission (along with my failure to mention that TANSTAAFL is one of the best blog names I've come across) has now been corrected.