The link is to the Brit Blog the Daily Ablution, wherein Scott Burgess wrying deconstructs enviro-silliness by Hollyweird.
A taste:
...if the general public paid attention to the more stridently self-righteous of the green voices, we'd be "living on kale for months" and pissing into straw bales in our backyards. Which is precisely why the rational among us do not.
#1
how many private jets ferried the elite to the awards? Green restrictions on lifestyle is for the "little people"
Posted by: Frank G ||
01/14/2007 11:07 Comments ||
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#2
You've got to admire the way the EMA covers all the bases - An Inconvenient Truth as video wallpaper acts as a kind of "moral cleanser", completely negating any potential qualms about flying water in from Fiji.
Whatever reputation Jimmy Carter once enjoyed as a former President, Nobel laureate and peace broker has spiraled down the toilet since publication of his book "Palestine: Peace not Apartheid." The book's slanderous title, factual inaccuracies, biased analysis and willingness to excuse terrorism have alienated even Carter's friends, 14 of whom expressed their disgust by quitting the advisory board of the Carter Center in Atlanta.
Among those distancing themselves from the cardigan-wearing peanut farmer were his one-time White House aide Stephen Selig and his ambassador to the Bahamas, William Schwartz. What moved these upstanding Atlantans to treat their pal as a pariah? Carter's vile and inflammatory comparison of Israel to the brutal racism of South Africa. His distortions of historical events. His biased determination that Israel is to blame for the murderous hostility of its neighbors. His loose talk about a "Jewish lobby" that supposedly squelches debate in America. And - worst - his readiness to condone the murder of innocents through suicide bombings and random missile attacks.
Don't believe it? Check page 213, where Saint Jimmy writes that Arabs and Palestinians should "make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace are accepted by Israel." In other words, bombings are okay until Israel meets his standards for the Palestinians. And this drivel sits near the top of the best-seller lists. Carter isn't just annoying anymore. He's dangerous.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/14/2007 00:00 ||
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#1
"You were right! That fool Carter fell for it AGAIN!"
#2
With as fast as Jimmuh is falling off the deep end, I would expect to hear him use the word kike any day now. Probably at the same time he blames the Joos for all the bad press he is getting.
I am now going to call him Jimmuh Goebels.(sp?)
Posted by: Mike N. ||
01/14/2007 0:54 Comments ||
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#4
Here is a blurb from the last paragraph from VDH's most recent: In short, his post-presidency will now be considered as failed as his notorious administration. Note the role of the Greek god Nemesis. As the retired Gerald Ford, who liberals once snickered at as a Golf Course apolitical functionary, went off into the night with grace, his own dignified emeritus career only highlighted Carters foolery.
#5
I've been reading that Ford was really hurt by his constant portrayal by the MSM as a clumsy oaf when in fact he knew he was the best athlete ever to be President. I'd kill to shoot 15 from my age and Ford did it several times, and golf was his 4th or 5th sport.
#6
Shipman: The "clumsiness" was Ford's own fault--he had terrible vision but refused to wear glasses when he should have.
On a lighter note, I think Carter has suddenly realized that he is close to the finish line, too; and he had a "legacy panic", seeing that his legacy was for crap and failure. Unfortunately for him, his book just makes a bad situation worse. Where before many historians would have given him far too much benefit of the doubt, now they will be reminded that he was little more than a mean, cowardly, ineffectual turd, who betrayed millions of people to dictatorial tyrants in five countries.
#9
Geez, don't you remember the pictures of Ford wearing reading glasses? He had some degree of hyperopia, farsightedness, while not a great amount, made it somewhat tricky for him to see the ground at his feet without glasses. Usually people with bifocals have a similar problem. I believe I saw a picture of him wearing reading glasses once, but that would be unrelated.
Ronald Reagan had a stronger case of myopia, which was sneered at by the left, of course.
Fineman gets out his kneepads for Teddy
Ted Kennedy speaks with the voice of bourbon history. White-maned and nearing 75, the brother of two assassinated heroes and a veteran of 44 Senate years, he isin defiance of the oddsagain in his prime: a chairman in good health with a doting wife and a packed legislative agenda. Mmmmmm. Healthy bourbon.
No one tells Ted Kennedy what to do; in any case, the Senate's Democratic leaders were fine with his plan to give a big speech two days before President George W. Bush announced a troop "surge" in Iraq. They are generally glad to let Kennedy play the role he relishes: Irish-American Isaiah, calling his party to account even as legislative insiders keep their distance. Meaning: the other dhimms are scared, but Teddy knows the Peoples Republic of MA will keep on sending him back, no matter what.
This time party brass got more than they bargained for. Summoning the authority of his years as an drunken cretin intimate witness to Chappaquidick history, Kennedy made an slurring, incoherant eloquent case for a Senate vote on the surge and for a court test of its legitimacy under the War Powers Resolution. "Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam!" he thundered. "Echoes of that disaster are all around us today!" And I know! My brother instigated our Vietnam adventure! Hiccup.
It was, in its own way, a defining moment. He got a standing ovation and, the next day, congratulations all around on the Hill. By the end of the weekin the aftermath of Bush's tepid speech and Condi Rice's evasive testimonyKennedy looked prescient. Prescient? Oh, my hero, always in the lead!
A generation ago, a war started and expanded by dhimmi Presidents Vietnamlaunched a realignment of American politics. Now, it seems increasingly clear, Iraq is doing the same. In 1968 college students flocked to the New Hampshire primary to protest Lyndon Johnson's policies, sparking a civil war in the Democratic Party on foreign policy that lasted for a generation. By contrast, Vietnam united the GOP around an anti-communist crusade that endured for decades. "Ronald Reagan was gung-ho about Vietnam," says Craig Shirley, a GOP operative and Reagan biographer. "It solidified his world view, and the party's." So.......Reagan was right, correct?
Now a mirror image is developing. Democrats seem to be uniting around a themethe primacy of global diplomacy and congressional review. Republicans, by contrast, have lost the unity that they had during the cold war and the early years of the war on terror. Ya, diplomacy and congressional oversight. That will fix it.
As Republican divisions grow, Democrats, pressed by their antiwar grass roots, are drawing together. Except for "Independent Democrat" Sen. Joe Lieberman, Dems are increasingly of one mind about Iraq in particular and antiterrorism strategy in general. A vote on surge spendingwhich Democratic Senate leaders had hoped to avoid and which is technically difficult to devisenow is likely at some point. In general, the party seems less fearful of the old "soft on defense" shibboleth, and ever more tolerant of groups such as Win Without War and Move On. One of the Senate's few other hawkish Democrats, Sen. Evan Bayh, told me that he opposes the surge, and agreed that Congress might have to face the question of funding at some point. The Senate's growing ranks of Democratic presidential contendersChris Dodd jumped in last week, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are expected to do so soonare gravitating toward a bring-them-home-quickly stance. "We don't want to come off looking like wimps," said Terry McAuliffe, a Clinton supporter and former party chairman. But he added: "We're jumping all over ourselves now to see who can be the toughest on Bush and the war." It's a fateful competitionwhich Ted Kennedy already won. Teddy, the lead lemming. Good luck with that.
#1
I am tending more and more to agree with the following opinion from a poster on The Belmont Club:
I think the Iranians have tested the political resolve of the American people and have found out what they knew to be the case all along: we are not united as a people and are not willing to fight this to a successful conclusion. The problem has not been political leadership, vascilating as it has been at times. The American people have put 9/11 behind them, and all the other manifestations of Islamic jihad against us since 1979 behind them. They want to return to the world as it was the way they perceived it before 9/11. They don't want to face this and will only face it at such time as the enemy exacts a terrible toll against us. There is no way to make the nation move energetically if it is enervated. As far as most Americans are concerned, Islamic terror is a criminal matter, not a manifestation of war.
#3
At of yestiddy, the RINO CINO Left were still putting out GOP-Conservative looking,toned-down, professional andor well-dressed, cosmetics-heavy, ex-CheerLeader/Model, Motherly Caring Educated demure "Your Mom wants Her for Daughter-in-Law + Bear Her Grandchildren" attractive Babeperts to offset the opposing GOP-Right Babeperts across the TV screens. JEANNE GARAFOLOS AND ASSORTED BRA-BURNING DEDICATED HIPPIE CHICKS, ...........etc. NEED NOT APPLY. * NEWSMAX > MORRIS & MCGANN > Inter-Lefty, Inter-Democrat CIVIL WAR looming between Clinton-style PC "Centrists" + "Moderates" vs. ANTI-CLINTON/CENTRIST "NEW LEFT" Democrats, i.e. those Dems = DemoLefties to the [Far/Radical???] LEFT OF AL GORE + JOHN KERRY???
From the Jerusalem Post, so you'll have to register, but it is free, and well worth it for my preferred source of news from Israel. Looong article - 5 pages - but worth your time to wander over and read the whole thing. Betcha didn't know we were contributing to the next wave of intellectual enterprise! ;-)
For Adam Bellow (see his PajamasMedia page for his bona fides), who began his career as an editor in one of the first American publishing houses established by Jews in the post-war era, the world of ideas is inherently Jewish. This may explain why he considers even his latest project, publishing thought-provoking pamphlets, a "Jewish" activity. The subject of the first series - the recent war in Lebanon - also speaks to Bellow's long-standing interest in Israel and the fate of the Jews.
Bellow believes the ferment in the Middle East is now, and will be, the "engine" of America's intellectual life. "The disarray in our politics is directly related to the disarray in the Middle East and that won't change any time soon," he says. "Israel and the Jews are at the center of this conflict, like it or not."
The project, spearheaded by Bellow and his partner David S. Bernstein, is new on two fronts: It marks the return of the pamphleteer, and it draws on the Internet as a source of intellectual fervor.
As the title suggests "Blog Digest #1: The Hezbollah War," one of the pamphlets in the first series is a compilation of blog posts. Bellow plans to rely on the blogosphere for many of his future pamphlets. "I've decided to do it in a way that marries an 18th-century literary form to a 21st-century digital technology," he says. "Seems to me we have not only an opportunity but an obligation to go back to the origins of our own ideas and to democratize the debate and public conversation."
The $4 pamphlets - small, staple-bound books - are Bellow's latest attempt to drive intellectual debate in the US and are being paid for with money he inherited from his father, Saul Bellow, the 1976 Nobel literature laureate. Bellow modeled his project on the Little Blue Books of the 1920s, a series of small staple-bound books published by the Halderman-Julius Publishing Company in Kansas. Halderman and his wife set out to publish low-priced pocketbooks that were intended to lure the ranks of the working and educated classes.
Like its predecessor, Bellow's pamphlet series can easily fit into a back pocket and can be read in one sitting, on a break from work, or sipping a cappuccino. "In these matters less is more," says Steve Wasserman, former editor of The Los Angeles Times Book Review. "In a world in which people think they are too busy to read a book, to read smaller books seems entirely seductive, and if it leads people to further exploration of ideas, it's for the good."
Bellow has been involved in the world of ideas for a long time. Having studied with Alan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, which became a kind of bible for the conservative intellectual revolt, he went on to publish the vanguard of younger generation conservative intellectuals, such as Richard J. Hernstein and Charles Murray, authors of the widely debated book The Bell Curve. He was also the editor of Deborah E. Lipstadt's Denying the Holocaust, one of the first books about Holocaust denial, that led to a much publicized lawsuit by David Irving, whom she referred to in the book as a Holocaust denier.
As an editor Bellow has sparked controversy, in part for rejecting the dominant "liberal" or left-leaning New York Jewish intellectual tradition he grew up with on the Upper West Side of New York, for a still Jewish, but more conservative line of thought. But, politics aside, Bellow is a self-designated heir to a European approach to publishing that looks to publishers to drive intellectual debate, against the more passive and safe American model, which he calls "publishing in the rearview mirror.
"I had been groomed as the heir to this tradition, very much a Jewish immigrant enterprise," says Bellow, who began his career at the Free Press under the wing of Erwin Glikes, known for having published some of the most prestigious intellectual figures. "From the start I wanted to be driving debate in this country, and books always seemed to be the main engine of debate."
In the 1990s, however, the book industry came under attack. The rise of a mass market for books over the last 20 years pushed the publishing industry in unparalleled ways. The pressure for higher profit margins and the rise of chain bookstores that have the potential to sell large quantities of books have made it increasingly difficult to publish books that aren't best-sellers. "Many books that come to me as an editor, I recognize as not viable because who really wants to spend $27 on a book arguing that [Herbert] Hoover was a great president after all," Bellow says.
For the last decade, Bellow has been looking for a way to make ideas viable again. Some years ago he decided that the solution to the problem was to bring back the pamphlet. "I knew many writers who would be delighted to express their views in 10,000 words - less than a book, but longer than a magazine article," he says. "There are many people bursting with provocative ideas that they are passionate about, but which they have no outlet for because no magazine will give them the scope, and no publisher will take a gamble."
After September 11 the Internet exploded with talk about ideas. Unlike any other event in recent history, Americans and others were looking for a way to explain the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. And in the two years following, blogs emerged as a powerful forum for discourse. Bloggers across the world opened up the opportunity for large-scale, democratic debate. [And] Bellow saw the blogosphere as an opportunity.
[He decided to] bring his skills as an editor to the blog world. Bellow's idea is to provide an editorial filter to the blogosphere and give the ideas discussed there a "semi-permanent" form - more permanent than the Internet but less than a traditional book - in a series of small, paperback pamphlets. "I consider myself to be doing something analogous to what bloggers have done in relation to the news media - a popular revolt against the monopoly power of big journalism," he says. "No one has really done that in publishing."
Bellow had been reading popular American blogger Michael Totten's blog Middle East Journal since shortly before the "Beirut Spring," when protests in Lebanon led to the end of Syria's military's occupation. In one of their many conversations, Totten told Bellow: "If you want to know what is going on in the Middle East, you won't get it from the media."
Bellow took Totten's advice to heart and hired him to edit two of the first three pamphlets. The series includes "Blog Digest #1: The Hezbollah War," a compilation of some of the many blog posts by Lebanese and Israeli bloggers written during the war; "Hassan Nasrallah: In His Own Words," speeches and writings translated into English; and "Everything Could Explode at Any Moment," dispatches from the Lebanese-Israeli front by Totten.
"What I really like about the Internet is that it liberates the individual's voice," Bellow says. "It doesn't matter who you are, or what your education is - if you have a voice, it will come through." The trouble is that individual voices often get lost in the sea of voices that is the Internet. But that's precisely where Bellow finds his niche. The problem is not quality, but rather how to weed through the sheer quantity of words to reach the pot of gold. His job, as he sees it, is to compile the best of what exists on the Internet. "There is a lot of material that deserves to be published that would be interesting to read in print," he says.
To do that he hires experts in a particular field to edit the pamphlets. The business model is an editorial democracy: bloggers are being given their own imprints for a limited time. Philip Roth did this successfully in the 1980s by introducing Americans to Eastern European writers. Readers trusted Roth to guide them through a new literature they otherwise would not have been exposed to.
The current release is "Best Recipes from the Jewish Blogosphere," edited by Judith Weiss, who blogs at keshertalk.com. Later this month Bellow and his partner plan to release "Embrace the Suck: A Pocket Guide to Milspeak," a dictionary of military slang and jargon coming out of Iraq edited by Austin Bay, a blogger and retired colonel. Further projects include a possible collection of writings by female Arab bloggers and testimony from people who have escaped from the North Korean gulag.
"There is no limit to the amount of material we can publish," Bellow says. And here's his website. I've some shopping to do! ;-)
#1
Whilst I am not convinced for the need for dead tree versions, he is quite right about blogs being very much like the 18th century pamphleteers who, for the most part, were polemicists openly promoting a particular position. Their works circulated by hand/referral and were crucial to the explosion of ideas in the (English) Enlightenment, where almost anyone (well at least the middle classes) could promote their views and the consumers decided who to read and believe.
#2
It remains to be seen, phil_b. He's putting his own money into the venture, and is selling only via his website and Amazon.com thus far, to keep the overhead low.
Mr. Bellow's tale of how he became a conservative. I wonder if I should start thinking of myself as a New York conservative?
#3
Better do it while he/they still can. WORLDNEWS/FREEREPUBLIC > TERRORISTS USING GOOGLE EARTH [Net] MAPS TO PLAN ATTACKS. LUCIANNE/OTHER > Continuing calls from US Pols to regulate-monitor Internet + Gooogle. LUCIANNE/FREEREPUBLIC > USDOD CAN SEARCH BANK RECORDS OF KNOWN [SUSPECTED?] TERRORISTS. ACLU p.o'd at alleged Gubmint violations of rights of privacy.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Whatever reputation Jimmy Carter once enjoyed as a former President, Nobel laureate and peace broker has spiraled down the toilet since publication of his book "Palestine: Peace not Apartheid." The book's slanderous title, factual inaccuracies, biased analysis and willingness to excuse terrorism have alienated even Carter's friends, 14 of whom expressed their disgust by quitting the advisory board of the Carter Center in Atlanta. 
