Moe Lane

Because, really, just because I didn’t update my blog, didn’t keep up with the news, and limited my email to once a day meant that I stopped being a political blowhard/pedantic pain in the butt (otherwise known as a ‘blogger’):

CW Walk Back In Time Sidewalk Plaque: 1920: From This Date You Accept That Women Cannot Vote.

Me: Bullsh*t.  By 1920 over twenty-nine states had suffrage on at least the Presidential level; Wyoming had given full suffrage for over fifty years at that point. Which may have been why the 19th Amendment passed, don’t you think? – And, not to be a d*ck about this or anything, but I can’t help but notice that the states that weren’t offering women the vote were mostly notorious Democratic party strongholds.  There was a reason why Susan B. Anthony was a Republican, you know.

Yes, I am an absolute joy to go to museums/historical monuments with.

Moe Lane

Hot Air and Ace of Spades HQ are both contemplating the issue of Herman Cain, whether he can win, and whether he is truly likely to win.  Fortunately or unfortunately – depending on your point of view – I take a utilitarian point of view on the matter: what does the Herman Cain Iowa plan look like? Does it look like this?

Campaign organizer: We’re going to harness the power of the grassroots and take this country back by getting together and coming together with one voice in caucuses all across Iowa to win and we’ve got people calling and the enthusiasm out there that I’m seeing every day is infectious!

…or does it look like this? (more…)

Catching up on my webcomics, I came across this one.  It’s an example of one of the reasons why I regularly peruse Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal; the cartoonist often draws stuff that says one thing on the first reading, and then the opposite on a deeper one.

In this case: the old guy gives a conceptual framework to the kid, who then uses to communicate with the other kids (who have been given similar frameworks, or at least recognizable ones).  This communication allows all the kids to grow up with a unique perspective and framework for life, which he then uses to achieve his childhood dreams and succeed in the larger society.  And then, at the end of his life, he makes sure that the next generation can do the same thing.

Isn’t that the goal?

Silent All These Years, Tori Amos

I’d say that it was that kind of evening, except that I’m damned if I know what a Tori Amos evening is actually like.

So my current iPod pretty much lost its battery capacity a while back; it whimpers and dies when I take it from the car to the house.  Thus, I’m looking for a replacement: specifically, I’m looking at this sucker – Apple iPod touch 8GB (4th Generation) – Black – Current Version. It turns out that, thanks to people hitting the Amazon.com link a goodly bit (thanks, by the way) and a low incidence of hitting the bank account recently, I can pretty much cover a used version of this.  The big question is the difference in capacity between the 8GB and the 32GB version; does this iCloud thing make that effectively moot?

Moe Lane

(more…)

Isn’t it cute how quickly they learn how to fib to reporters?

Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren said Thursday that the Wall Street protests were “independent” and “organic,” conceding that she misspoke during an earlier interview in which she seemed to be taking credit for the movement.

By ‘misspoke’ Warren meant that this:

“I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do,” she says.

…is not actually true, and that Elizabeth Warren should not be associated with the group in the sense of being an inspirational figure for them.  Can’t imagine why she’d want to do that.  Besides the sexual assaults and public indecencies and freeloading behavior and blatant Marxism and rampant anti-Semitism and attacks on the troops and, oh my goodness, the list keeps growing and growing and growing.

Very ‘organically,’ in fact.

Moe Lane

With a dull knife.

The Republican presidential dynamic — various candidates rise and recede; Mitt Romney remains at about 25 percent support — is peculiar because conservatives correctly believe that it is important to defeat Barack Obama but unimportant that Romney be president. This is not cognitive dissonance.

Much as Mitt Romney would like you to believe otherwise.  And note that this is not the nastiest thing that George Will* wrote about Romney; it is, in fact, probably the nicest.  Give you an idea: Will’s piece ends by bringing up Michael Dukakis – and this sentence: “Has conservatism come so far, surmounting so many obstacles, to settle, at a moment of economic crisis, for this?”

You know it’s bad when George Will feels the need to italicize.

(more…)

To quote somebody or other, IT MUST BE MINE.

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar (7958)

And probably yours, too.

It’s the funniest thing.  You know Western civilization?  That patriarchal, logocentric, heteronormative collection of imperial hubris, Gaeacidal ideology, facist-capitalist-authoritarian economics, and war-worshipping mindset that continually oppresses the organizationally challenged and seeks to dismiss the concerns of the differently-paradigmed?  Yeah, those folks.  You know what their phallocentric engineer-destroyers have been doing while more enlightened people have been conducting on-street seminars on the inherent privilege found in semiotic analysis of protest communication – at least, said analysis that is insufficiently diverse so as to accept the profound meaning implied by unconstrained grammar and nonrestricted spelling*?   Can you guess?

Well, I’ll tell you: they went out and invented thermal imaging. Which is, of course, something that lets you look at a bunch of tents and determine whether they’ve got people in them or not. In fact, London’s Daily Mail sent out a person with a thermal imaging camera to Occupy London Stock Exchange late one night and discovered that the answer was mostly not: (more…)

Colonial Williamsburg.  There was rum.  There were ribs.  There was my wife getting some valuable spa time.  There were my kids learning to play mini-golf.  And there was rum.

Well, I’m back.

Moe Lane

PS: Nasty weather this weekend, huh?  Indeed, my wife reports sleet.  Sounds like a perfect opportunity for dry socks – oh, so dry – and hot chicken noodle soup.

See you on the flip side.

That’s arguably an improvement.

Via @seanarther.