The philosopher’s call of nature

Like most people who bother thinking you’ve probably been wondering when it is appropriate for a famous philosopher to urinate on a dinner guest. The answer is, of course, it depends, at least as demonstrated by the Athenian philosopher Diogenes (c. 412-c. 323 BC)

Diogenes was once invited to dinner by a wealthy man. During the evening, one of the guests became so outraged by Diogenes’ general behaviour that he began to throw bones at him, calling him a “dog.” Whereupon Diogenes got up, went to the guest, cocked up his leg and urinated on him.

But what we still long to know is, when is this an appropriate response to a politician at the dinner table?

Finally, someone intelligently explains the theory of wife beating

Remember, wives, “if pus or blood comes out of your husband’s nose you must lick it up.” It is your duty and it is the Will of you know Who.

I wonder if our American universities are going to start teaching this as part of their multicultural program?

Airlines–just like the bus (…er, only slower)

It used to be that flying was a couple of levels above taking the bus. I mean bus terminal people were always scary, not only at the Port Authority building in NY but, well, anywhere. The drivers were surly, drove like moonbats in heat and couldn’t care less if the couple in the back were naked or clothed. Yeah, but now I’ve noticed for myself over the past few years just how bad the airline is. It’s become a bus with wings. Not only do you have to worry about chanting imams making those annoying clicking sounds as they strap on suicide belts but the other passengers as well. They’re slimy. They talk loud. They snore. They argue loudly. The stewardess yells for someone’s baby to shut up (no wonder the pilots keep their door shut and locked). They look like lowlifes, and why do so many of them stay in the bathroom so long?

Here’s a supporting view from Serguei Netessine, a professor of operations and information management…I think he’s trying to tell us a bus is faster.

Wharton professor Serguei Netessine’s trip from Philadelphia to Dallas in May was an all-too-typical day in the sky. After circling Dallas for an hour because of stormy weather, his flight was diverted to San Antonio where he spent several hours on the runway waiting for the storms in Dallas to clear and eating a bag of peanuts for lunch. He arrived in Dallas five hours late and missed most of his scheduled meetings, rescheduled his appointments for later in the day and succeeded in booking — actually overbooking, as it turned out — what he thought would be an evening flight back to Philadelphia. He had no choice but to fly home the next day after paying $400 for the only room available at the airport Park Hyatt. While airline service is no longer the white-glove experience it once was, it has now gone beyond bad food and snappish flight attendants. Today, when passengers board an airplane, they might well question whether there is a reasonable chance they will make it to their destination in the next few days. “Previously, airlines worried about dissatisfied customers. Now I don’t think they worry about it because the customer service at all airlines is so horrible.”

Scary quotes from the past

The scary part is that they’re coming to fruition:

“Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.” President Woodrow Wilson.

“The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise their power from behind the scenes.” — Justice Felix Frankfurter, U.S. Supreme Court.

“The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is the American Branch of a society which originated in England … (and) … believes national boundaries should be obliterated and one-world rule established.” — Professor of History Carroll Quigley, Georgetown University, in his book “Tragedy and Hope”.

“I am concerned for the security of our great nation; not so much because of any threat from without, but because of the insideous forces working from within.” — General Douglas MacArthur

Chemical leaking cheap Chinese-made Wal-Mart sandals wreck woman’s feet

With poisonous pet food, tooth paste, mouthwash and a host of their other products Chinese Commies are out to get us–now they want to ruin our feet. See dozens more grotesque foot pics here (hopefully her husband doesn’t have a foot fetish). I can just imagine what Chinese-made underwear can do (yeah, that would not be a pretty picture).

Here’s some examples from the above link:

Today’s bumper sticker: Ban Wal-Mart Chinese Commie Products Before We All Die!

UPDATE: Here’s some other info on flipflops.

“I could hear them. I actually thought I was going crazy.”

“Squirming fly larvae pulled from traveler’s head. Doctors thought the strange, bleeding bumps on Aaron Dallas’ head might be from gnat bites or shingles. Then the bumps started moving.”

You know what this incident reminds me of? Something I read a few years ago in Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery by Richard Selzer. The chapter was The exact location of the soul.

“The patient is a young man recently returned from Guatemala…His left arm wears a gauze dressing which, when removed, reveals… a …hole. The tissues about the opening are swollen and tense. A thin browning fluid lips the edge, and now and then a lazy drop of the overflow spills down the arm…I will enlarge the opening to allow better egress of the pus…[what then emerges from the hole is] “a narrow gray head…with a pair of black pincers. The head sits atop a longish flexible neck arching now this way, now that, testing the air.Alternately it folds back upon itself, then advances in new boldness. And all the while…the unspeakable pincers open and close…I advance a surgical clamp towards the hole…Minutes pass, perhaps an hour…and once again the thing upraises…and clamp–and yes. Got him! Transmitted to the fingers comes the wild thrashing of the creature..Tight grip now…steady, relentless pull. How it scrabbles to keep its tentacle-hold…There, writhing in the teeth of the clamp, is a dirty gray body…hung everywhere with tiny black hooklets…”

psssst, this is RAHODEB

The clandestine CEO:

CEOs make gobs and gobs of money for the fabulous jobs they do. We know they’re important. We know others think they’re important. We’re just not sure what they really do. Well now the picture is getting more transparent for the rest of us. In addition to snooping on individual board of director members and influential members of the media, CEOs also find time to snark online at their competition using pseudonyms in online forums.
Whole Foods Market CEO John Mackey used the pseudonym “rahodeb,” to jab and make disparaging comments about his rival competitor Wild Oats and others. Earlier this year, Whole Foods agreed to buy Wild Oats for $565 million, or $18.50 a share.

Survival tale of the crusin’ lib…

An article entitled, Neocons on a cruise: What conservatives say when they think we aren’t listening, by Ms. Johann Hari in the The Independent UK is an outstanding example of, well, liberalism on a roll of feel-goodism. Considering that logical, reasoned arguments and conclusions can follow a false premise the writer starts off with a a good handful of cliche-riddled assumptions–her talking point premises– she attributes to the “neo-cons” in her midst:

The Iraq war has been an amazing success, global warming is just a myth and Guantanamo Bay is practically a holiday camp. The annual cruise organized by the ‘National Review,’ mouthpiece of right-wing America, is a parallel universe populated by straight-talking, gun-toting, God-fearing Republicans.

Now of course you’d have to look long and hard to find a conservative, and especially the kind of conservative who reads the National Review, who has ever held those particular opinions, at least in that simplistic form. (I think she’s thinking of rightwingers who who sleep with a gun in the crotch of their underwear –by the way, that “mouthpiece of right wing America” is of course another zinger she artfully slipped in there). With loose premise material like that who even has to bother with lines of reasoned arguments. This girl can fritter around like a bee, stinging as she goes. Which is exactly what she does.

I lie on the beach with Hillary-Ann, a chatty, scatty 35-year-old Californian designer. As she explains the perils of Republican dating, my mind drifts, watching the gentle tide. When I hear her say, ” Of course, we need to execute some of these people,” I wake up. Who do we need to execute? She runs her fingers through the sand lazily. “A few of these prominent liberals who are trying to demoralise the country,” she says. “Just take a couple of these anti-war people off to the gas chamber for treason to show, if you try to bring down America at a time of war, that’s what you’ll get.” She squints at the sun and smiles. ” Then things’ll change.”

Yeah, right, the woman actually said that–stuffing liberals in the gas chamber… Who was this woman? Mrs. Dr Evil? She goes on like this, finding other Dr Evils. Read the article (it’s a long one) and read all the sinister quotes attributed to the Right Wing Killer Squad from National Review. You start getting the suspicion that instead of having infiltrated a National Review reader group she’s stumbled instead upon some Mafiosi hitmen vacation cruisers in Bermuda shorts.

And then of course there is the sinister, eerie, preternatural otherworldly cocktail hour on the Lido deck (the one in the parallel universe), to wit:

The Reviewers have been told to gather for a cocktail reception on the Lido, near the very top of the ship. I arrive to find a tableau from Gone With the Wind, washed in a thousand shades of grey. Southern belles – aged and pinched – are flirting with old conservative warriors. The etiquette here is different from anything I have ever seen. It takes me 15 minutes to realize what is wrong with this scene. There are no big hugs, no warm kisses. This is a place of starchy handshakes. Men approach each other with stiffened spines, puffed-out chests and crunching handshakes. Women are greeted with a single kiss on the cheek. Anything more would be French.

That’s scary– stiffened spines and crunching handshakes …I just hope to hell I can sleep tonight with the lights off after that weird alien conservative stuff she describes.

At one point, when the boat docks in Mexico she decides to shock those damn “racist” Reviewers (after all, they do oppose mass illegal immigration) by announcing “Over breakfast, I forgot myself and said I was considering setting out to find a local street kid who would show me round the barrios – the real Mexico. They gaped. “Do you want to die?” one asked…” She leaves it there, probably very flush with feel goodism after pumping out her love-for-the -masses barrio speech. Evidently though she never went. Of course she must’ve had a private flash after that, a momentary but sufficient dose of real world clarity (I mean this is crime-gang Mexico), a horrifying vision of seeing her barrio-stabbed corpse washing through a sewer drain (with a bunch of other bodies).

Oh yeah, this woman, Ms Hari, hates Mark Steyn (author of America Alone, about the dangers of radical Islam), who was on the cruise.

“The idea that Europe is being ‘taken over’ by Muslims is the unifying theme of this cruise. Some people go on singles cruises. Some go on ballroom dancing cruises. This is the “The Muslims Are Coming” cruise – drinks included. Because everyone thinks it. Everyone knows it. Everyone dreams it. And the man responsible is sitting only a few tables down: Mark Steyn.”

Run, Mark, run (one can imagine Ms Hari’s face beginning to resemble the tooth loaded mouth of a pitbull. God she hates this man. If she had to make a choice between kissing Mark Steyn on the mouth (French style of course) and a suicide jihadist who just blew himself up (and is now a steaming pile of innards) she’d choose the latter.
“He [Steyn] is wearing sunglasses on top of his head,” she says, ” and a bright, bright shirt that fits the image of the disk jockey he once was. Sitting in this sea of grey, it has an odd effect – he looks like a pimp inexplicably hanging out with the apostles of colostomy conservatism.”

Sunglasses on top of his head? A bright bright shirt? Jesus, these wacko right wingers. Imagine dressing like that on a cruise ship. And by the way, what exactly is an apostle of colostomy conservatism? As I said this is a good size article so there’s lot more of this fun stuff.

And then she comes into contact with–a Republican black man, Ward Connerly, “the only black person in the National Review posse. Does she fear for his safety? I mean what if the Reviewers suddenly start goose-stepping acroos the deck brandishing flaming crosses?

…When I ask him to empathise with the black victims of Hurricane Katrina, he offers [nothing sympathetic]. No, all Katrina showed was “the dysfunctionality that is evident in many black neighbourhoods,” he says flatly, and that has to be “tackled by black people, not the government. ” Sure makes sense to me (but then again I’m sort of a conservative and a big fan of Mark Steyn).

We can imagine the scene next: She takes Mr Connerly protectively aside (even if he is a Republican and not a real black man) and in hushed whisper to make sure there’s no evil Reviewer lurkng about –”Ward, do you ever worry you are siding with people who …would hang you by a rope from a tree?

Of course there’s a limit to what a Lib can take while in such close proximity to the Reviewers, so of course in departing, Ms Hari can no longer hold in that disdain. She’s going to burst… Yes, the pitbull is really growling now–a bite’s comng, and it’s a sarcastic one. “Couldn’t they just do experiments on Muslim stem-cells?” I ask [you know, to "cure" 'em].

Hey – that’s a great idea!” [a Reviewer] laughs, and vanishes. Hillary-Ann [you know, Mrs Dr Evil who wants to gas the libs] stops to say she is definitely going on the next National Review cruise, to Alaska. “Perfect!” I yell, finally losing my mind.”

That’s a shame because a mind is a terrible thing to lose. How nice to be a Lib of such pure idealism and one with such squeaky clean tolerance–except for those who hold a different political view, or choose not to French kiss strangers on the Lido deck. Hopefully Ms Hari will find solace back in Britain (she probably doesn’t live near the Tiger Tiger Club in Piccadilly which the terrorists recently tried to incinerate) and keep her tolerance level on such a high plane with the growing Death to Infidels crowd. When the telly reports car bombs and beheading chants one can imagine Ms Hari clicking quickly up the channels to escapethe harsh reality, jogging her remote like it’s a little pin ball machine. Probably reminds her of Mark Steyn.

3.5 VS 4.0 (and some notes on the Founding Fathers, like Georgie Washington and Tommy Jeff)

Hit those you despise–with Shakespearean insults

You “gotta be tuff” in this world so don’t be afraid to use these Shakespearean insults:

Against individuals (e.g., say you’ve been kidnapped in Iran and you want to insult President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad): “A fool, a coward…, an ass, a madman” (Measure for Measure)

Against mankind : “A foul and pestilent congregation of vapours…” (Hamlet)

Against the IRS: “A knot you are of damned blood suckers.” (Richard III)

Against Democrats and Republicans: “A plague on both your houses.” (Romeo and Juliet)

Against people shorter than you: “Away, you three-inch fool.” (Taming of the Shrew)

Against Bush: “And in his brain … is as dry as the remainder of a biscuit after a voyage…” (Antony and Cleopatra)

Against Michael Chertoff: “As loathesome as a toad.” (Titus Andronicus)

Against Ted Kennedy: “A villain with a smiling cheek, a goodly apple rotten at the heart (Merchant of Venice)

Against Nancy Pelosi: “A stony adversary, an inhuman wretch, uncapable of pity, void and empty from any dram of mercy.” Merchant of Venice

Against Paris Hilton: “her beauty and brain go not toegther.” (Cymbeline)

The collected Shakesperean quotes themselves come from this great site.

H. L. Mencken’s Creed (and of course, the official Creed of the Cynic)

I read Mencken like some people read the Bible. And here on Mencken they present Mencken’s Creed. Read and apply…
I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind – that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty…
I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect.
I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech…
I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run.
I believe in the reality of progress.
I – But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is be tter to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant

A well-meaning white liberal takes on her id

Feeling way too white

…as I stepped over the curb, I became excruciatingly aware of my skin color, and my heart pounded with social anxiety. In going around a single block, I got stares. Mine was the only white face around, and for five minutes, five blocks from my home, I was a stranger in a strange land.

The sin of mixed vegetables

American commanders cite…that in Baqouba (a city in Iraq), al-Qaida has warned street vendors not to place tomatoes beside cucumbers because the vegetables are different genders.

No, evidently it is not even acceptable to these radicals if the female vegetables are wearing burkas. Of course these vegetables here do look…er, well, kind of indecent.

Note: I don’t know know which vegetable is considered female but it’s probably the tomato. I mean, we’ve all heard the expression, She sure is a hot tomato or Wow, what a hot tomato… And the cucumber, well that really does look phallic…

Will these gay carrots be stoned to death?

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Are you too poor, man, to own a weapon to defend yourself while scavenging for food in this cruel world?

Then read this: How to make a weapon out of a newspaper.