March 19, 2010
Men are quite simple to understand, actually
Sandra Bullock's husband cheated on her with the heavily tattooed Michelle “Bombshell’ McGee, leaving David Forsmark confused (hat tip to Kathy).
Leave aside the tattoos* and we are left with the question of why a man would pass over a great beauty for the charms of a seemingly lesser beauty. If he could have Sandra Bullock why would he choose to turn elsewhere?
There are two answers to this question.
The first concerns a distinction between a woman who is "beautiful" and a woman who is "hot". While the expression of this distinction is idiosyncratic to some degree, I believe the distinction itself will be immediately recognizable to most men. When it comes to sex, "hot" trumps "beautiful" every time.** Sandra Bullock is beautiful, quite lovely actually, but Bombshell McGee is hot, much more so in person, I suspect, than in her photographs.
The second answer is a bit more straightforward: Sex addiction.***
Related: Michelle McAgee teaches men how to pick up women. They like the unattainable, apparently.
* Theodore Dalrymple will never see eye to eye on the issue.
** Some lucky men are blessed to find both qualities in the same woman. But then I am in favour of tattoos.
*** In which Matt Stone mocks The Huffington Post to their face.
Omega Males
Jessica Grose offers a limited typology of the Omega-male, a non-Alpha, non-Beta male who is middle-aged, unemployed and beneath the notice of quality women like Jessica Grose.
I cannot help but notice the one thing Liberal Arts Layabouts, Mimbos, Beer Guys and Game Boys have in common is their varied life strategies all mean they do not have to deal with grasping and, I strongly suspect, single post-feminist entertainment journalists whose liberal ideology conflicts with their conservative biology. Call them Omega Females, confused and paralyzed by their forbidden longing for Don Draper and apoplectic with rage that real Don Drapers all yearn for Sarah Palin.
Not to worry, Jessica. I imagine you will find someone willing to settle for your bullshit.
The sleeper awakes
Gary Hubbell says Barack Obama is a good thing for America.
Read the whole thing.
Preaching to the reverted
Mezhgan Hussainy's family wants music mogul Simon Cowell to convert to Islam before he marries her.
'Simon might be a big deal in the UK, but there are other people in the Afghan community in Los Angeles who her parents will be more afraid of offending. It would bring shame on their family and community if Simon did not respect their beliefs,' the friend added.
Simon Cowell might want to increase his security detail.
Related: Notable people who converted to Islam.
March 18, 2010
The problem, in a nutshell
This is what the IDF thinks will win hearts and minds in the West.
It won't.
A self-declared “green” army, the IDF recognizes projects that connect its soldiers with the environment.
Look, barn owls are awesome (at the link) but they are also entirely beside the point.
Almost nobody in the United States who supports Israel is much fussed about an impact on the environment if it means defending an embattled democracy, still less by yesterday's carbon emmissions hoax. And anybody in the United States yearning for a "green army" (most Leftists would describe this as a contradiction in terms) would already be convinced of Israel's virtue by now were they open to reason, justice, even naked self-interest, in the first place.
The Left is right about one thing: They do not despise Israel out of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is an excuse - for the paleocons, a reflex - but I expect the Left would hate Israel all the same if its first language were, say, Swedish. The key is to find a people other than the Jews who would have dared a democratic and socialist experiment in the desert, who would have attempted to found a polity grounded in equality in the midst of medievalism, barbarism and spiritual darkness.
The Left despises Israel not for its crimes (imagined, for the most part) but precisely for its virtues. The Left hates Israel because Israel is a democracy, because Israel supports the rights of minorities, because Israel defends the rights of women. Advertising the green credentials of the only country in the Middle East that isn't an environmental (economic, social, political and moral) disaster is a lost cause. If anything, it is more fuel for the fire.
The Left hates Israel because the Left hates itself. The Left is a suicide cult but - as with their shaheed brothers - they do not have the decency to top themselves quietly in a corner. Their plan is to take as many of us with them in as gruesome and pointless a manner possible.
Worse yet, Israel is itself largely a product of the Left. How else to explain Gaza, armed and aggrieved with a stated aim of genocide. In most normal history, Gaza would be green, prosperous and empty of evil squatters. The war would have been over fifty years ago and the Arabs, having lost, might have learned to live with their neighbours in peace.
Note to future civilizations: Think carefully before extending the franchise to the mob. It is not as if you haven't been warned. We were.
To the US postal worker who opened my letter from Washington DC
There was no money in it, you union scum.
Fuck you and fuck Barack Obama, your hero.
(There was no customs sticker or the like. Don't make excuses. This was attempted thievery. Such is the state of the Republic in its twilight.)
It will be brutal
The British enjoy a budget deficit worse than Greece.
Jedi believer wins apology after being kicked out of Jobcentre for wearing a hood
When benefits claimant Chris Jarvis was asked to put down his hood in a Jobcentre, he said he was entitled to wear it because of his Jedi faith.
'Someone with their own religious views is allowed to wear what their religion says - the Sikhs are able to carry a great big dagger. My religion allows me to wear my hood.'
I am foursquare in favour of the Jedi religion (Episides IV, V, VI, obviously; followers of "I", "II", "III" must be killed) but surely this sets a bad precedent. Imagine the next time some child rapist is caught and he claims to follow a religion where God tells you to rape children. It would be compensation next. "No such religion exists", of course, but give it time and something like that might turn up in the UK.
/angry sarcasm
Then the angels will hit you with a hammer
Some might consider this insensitive, even offensive. Some would be wrong. It is a righteous duty to ridicule these morons. And by "we" I mean our elected representatives. We (really, you and me, the electorate) have instead spent the last ten years making disingenuous apologies and trying to figure out how big a bribe it is going to take. Meanwhile, the Left has made it illegal to laugh at stupid ideas (for obvious reasons).
Not to worry, it's a process. It took us several hundred years the first time before we got round to inventing the Crusades.
Related: Lawfare taken to the next level as "descendents of Mohammed" take in Britain's adventageous cuisine, climate and libel laws.
March 17, 2010
Temper tantrum
Yet another Day of Rage in the disputed territories and we are meant to believe this is connected to a new Jewish suburb of Jerusalem. If they need an excuse, this latest rage has much more to do with the rebuilt Hurva synagogue.
And, I suspect, with the explicit encouragement of the Obama administration.
In related news: The Central Bank of Iran plans to issue 100 thousand Rial notes in the next Iranian year (whatever an Iranian year might be when it is at home). At some point, the "Palestians" are going to run out of backers for their United Nations reality show.
Back off, get your own sandwich
Rumours British firm Desire Petroleum may have struck oil near the Falklands arise as the Royal Navy announces the arrival of nuclear attack submarine HMS Sceptre to patrol the islands.
There are already two Navy vessels in the area. HMS York, a Type 42 destroyer, is partolling off the island's capital of Port Stanley. HMS Scott, a survey vessel, is also nearby and the fleet has air support from a squadron of RAF Typhoon fighter jets based on the islands.
The United States of Deferred Maintenance
A Declinist moment at Newsweek.
Fatuous
Funny how none of the four Entertainment Tonight and Entertainment Tonight Canada puff pieces on Kirstie Alley's fatuous new weight loss show mention her Organic Liason diet food line is yet another Scientology front company.
WWTDD? comments on the scandal.
March 16, 2010
Corpus Coranicum
Jeff Black says German researchers are preparing “Qur’an: The Critical Edition”.
What this means is that the research team is in the process of analysing and transcribing some 12,000 slides of Qur’an mansucripts from the first six centuries of the text’s existence. Once that is complete, the way is open to producing a text that annotates and, presumably, provides some sort of exegesis on the differences found in the early manuscripts.
RTWT (via Quotulatiousness).
Now about the “terrible and forbidden books” — I am forced to say that most of them are purely imaginary. There never was any Abdul Alhazred or Necronomicon, for I invented these names myself. Robert Bloch devised the idea of Ludvig Prinn and his De Vermis Mysteriis, while the Book of Eibon is an invention of Clark Ashton Smith's. Robert E. Howard is responsible for Friedrich von Junzt and his Unaussprechlichen Kulten.... As for seriously-written books on dark, occult, and supernatural themes — in all truth they don’t amount to much. That is why it’s more fun to invent mythical works like the Necronomicon and Book of Eibon.
- H.P. Lovecraft, In a letter to Willis Conover
Gearing up totally for the destruction of Iran
Ten containers carrying bunker-buster bombs including 195 smart, guided, Blu-110 bombs and 192 2000lb Blu-117 bombs.are supposedly on their way to Diego Garcia.
Promises, promises.
The preparations were being made by the US military, but it would be up to President Obama to make the final decision.
I may have identified a weakness in American strategery.
Related: Iranian leader shuns ancient fire festival.
Hopefully, this makes Persia's ancient fire gods cranky.
Insulting
Israeli's Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren makes an observation. Then I make an observation.
Ambassador Michael Oren's remarks clashed with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's assurances that the political turmoil resulting from the settlement announcement, which the Obama administration slammed as "an insult," was under control.
Barack Obama: America's first President to have been born and raised in a shame-culture.
This sort of thing has consequences.
Related: Na-na na-na na-na Leader!
Sticks and stones: Sultan Knish considers what the Left is calling Israel's insult to the United States (via JihadWatch).
No, none of those incidents were described as insults. Nothing that Muslim countries did to mock, humiliate and murder Americans were even noticed at all. None of them produced furious condemnations from the White House or two hours of Hillary Clinton screeching on the phone at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. So what did Israel do that was so awful, so horrible and terrible? It built houses. Yes, civilian houses. Not army bases or nuclear missiles or walls. Houses.
November 1, 4006
Sabrina Sforza Galitzia has worked out the real Da Vinci code, a clue to the end of the world as we know it.
“There is a da Vinci code — it is just not the one made popular by Dan Brown,” she said.
Not so fast, say the comments.
If Leonardo really referred, in 1498, to the date "November 1, 4006", he would have been using the Julian calendar, as that was the calendar then in use. On our current Gregorian calendar, the date in question would be November 29, 4006. Not that the four-week difference means that much when you are talking about the "end of the world". But Ms. Galitzia also says that the date will mark "a new start for humanity", so I guess it isn't the literal end of the world after all, is it? Any more than December 21, 2012 will be.
March 15, 2010
Community cohesion
Two weeks after Dispatches, a Channel 4 current affairs program, revealed entryism by the Islamic Forum of Europe as it attempts to take over, amongst other things, the Labour party in Tower Hamlets, the IFE rebuttals to the piece include one directed at Channel 4's undercover reporter, "Atif."
“We’ve tracked you down,” said the IFE’s community affairs co-ordinator, Azad Ali, in a webcast targeting the Channel 4 reporter “Atif”, who went undercover at the IFE’s headquarters, the East London Mosque, filming the group’s true views – and its boasts that it controlled the local Tower Hamlets council. “Yes, Atif, we’ve got a picture of you and a lot more than you thought we had. We’ve tracked you down to different places. And if people are gonna turn what I’ve just said into a threat, that’s their fault, innit?”
Mr Ali’s words sit strangely with his role as an official advisor to the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, and to the police, but perhaps his annoyance is understandable. The undercover reporters filmed him saying: “Democracy, if it means not implementing the sharia, no one’s going to agree with that.”
Attacks on churches, gay people, Jewish history tours and a Hindu association - not to mention race attacks on white people; this "community cohesion," I do not think it means what you think it means.
Against the Dry Bones paradigm
Belmont Club claims, entirely correctly, the Middle East "peace process" is really a process: a mime show of appearing to do something.
It’s not the settlements that are the problem, it’s the region.
Andrea: Nai-velik
Also: Bulgarian dancehall comin' at ya'.
March 14, 2010
Lady Gaga feat. Beyoncé: Telephone
Ladies and germs, the greatest pop music video not featuring Gwen Stefani since 1982 (hat tip to Agent Bedhead).
Illuminating Hadrians Wall
Illuminating Hadrians Wall, from Wallsend to Bowness-on-Solway.
The Guardian calls it a recreation. I call it foreshadowing.
Vroom
Luxist rounds up the 2010 Geneva Motor Show featuring the Italians (ace), the Germans (boring Porsches)*, the French (French) and the rest including the extraordinarily tasteless Bufori Geneva (Australian).
I particularly enjoy the Stile Bertone Alfa Romeo Pandion Concept (above).
* But I repeat myself.
More: 2010 Alfa Romeo Pandion. Images.
The most unique trait of the Pandion is its side windows which extend down to the front wheel arch. Like the Pandion bird, the doors open up in a gull-wing fashion.
Memories of Potemkin
Blazing Cat Fur reports from above a Hezbollah Potemkin Village on the border between Israel and Lebanon.
Notice the time
The BBC cites a former inmate on a Muslim takeover of British prisons and a former prison officer claiming the underworld gangsters who used to keep discipline and order were no longer in charge.
...
"Islam is a very sensitive matter. And the screws don't understand that. I respect what the screws do but they've got to understand our ways, where we're coming from," he added.
By a happy coincidence
We are tired of him too.
...
And according to London’s Sunday Telegraph, the president’s decision to not welcome British Prime Minister Gordon Brown last March with the customary press conference and State Dinner was not a result of a deliberate slight, rather POTUS was pooped. "People say he looks tired more often than they're used to," said an anonymous strategist.
Feeble. This is the man in whom the American public decided to entrust the defense of the Republic and, no small thing, the former Dominion to its north.
Paris Hilton meets Lady Gaga at the Nokia 5800 Launch
Lady Gaga is right: Stars Are Blind
