Fun With Headlines (Warning: Intense Glibness Ahead)

Jihad Watch:  Yemeni president open to “dialogue” with al-Qaeda members who “renounce violence”

Better have some government agents seated behind the AQers, to watch for crossed fingers.

Fox News:  High Robbery Rate Gives NBA Players Reason to Carry Arms

I agree.  But it doesn’t give them the right to point them each other in the locker room over a gambling debt dispute.

UK Daily Mail:  We’re in this together: Gordon Brown tries to rally jittery MPs as Miliband is branded ‘immature’ in radio ambush

Obama, Biden and the Democrats used “we’re all in this together” a lot during the 2008 campaign.  So, the Republican Party had the Southern Strategy, now every center-left party in the developed world has the High School Musical Strategy.

UK Daily Mail:  Parents’ fury as photo of teacher posing with AK-47 on [high school] trip is posted on school’s website

Don’t give her any flack.  She just might teach AK-47ology elective classes at night.

UK Telegraph:  Foreign footballers must carry ID cards – Foreign footballers are among an extra 40,000 skilled migrants who now have to carry identity cards to prove who they are.

Is kicking a ball now a “skill?”  I’d hate to find out what an “unskilled” migrant is like.

UK Telegraph:  Injured troops to get priority NHS care for life

Same crappy care, but they’ll get it first.

UK Telegraph:  Bleach attack teenager locked up for a year

But will have to spend the proceeding five years after getting out wearing dingy whites, as a condition of his probation.

UK Daily Mail:  The teens who can barely talk – they only have an 800 word vocabulary

America can beat that — Teens with five-word vocabularies:  Sheeyt, mother, fucker, damn and poleeeceseses.

UK Telegraph:  Lewis Hamilton and Nicole Scherzinger split up

That was fast.

Examiner.com:  Feds seeking indictment of Sheriff Joe Arpaio

What would you expect when you ignore all those illegal Swedes running around Phoenix and only focus on the Hispanics, Joe?

Kansas City Star:  Census participation is called critical for minority community

But whites don’t count.

Chicago Sun-Times:  Daley: We should be more like China

Masses of lemmings and drones all voting for the same political party, and no private ownership of handguns.  Yep, Chicago should be just like China.

I’m a Man, Not a Slave. So to Speak.

Reuters:

Egypt tombs suggest pyramids not built by slaves

CAIRO (Reuters) – New tombs found in Giza support the view that the Great Pyramids were built by free workers and not slaves, as widely believed, Egypt’s chief archaeologist said on Sunday.

Films and media have long depicted slaves toiling away in the desert to build the mammoth pyramids only to meet a miserable death at the end of their efforts.

“These tombs were built beside the king’s pyramid, which indicates that these people were not by any means slaves,” Zahi Hawass, the chief archaeologist heading the Egyptian excavation team, said in a statement.

“If they were slaves, they would not have been able to build their tombs beside their king’s.”

Even without archaeological evidence, this wasn’t a hard deduction to make.  In the ancient world, the only way you could have masses of slaves in your land is if your “country,” so to speak, was an empire.  For it took successful military conquests to garner slaves, who were mainly members of the loser military, or desirable natives of the land that was being garrisoned.  Ancient Egypt of the Old Kingdom’s 4th Dynasty, when the biggest of the Pyramids were built, only had several million people, and not enough resources nor manpower to have an empire.  Therefore, the Pyramids had to have been built with the toil of the “citizenry,” so to speak again.

Save the Pyramids, all the imagery that people have about Ancient Egypt comes from the New Kingdom.  Then, Egypt did have the manpower and resources (i.e. gold from Nubian and Kushite mines) to build an empire, and bring back slaves, or, in the case of a certain ethnicity, invite them there then enslave/brutalize them after the Pharaoh became jealous.  (Who says Hitler was the first Hitler?)

Avatar: A Triumph of CGI

Because the plot is a retread.

Mark McGwire’s Controlled Burn

Fesses up to ‘roids in order to grease the skids for a good reception as Cards hitting coach this coming season, and for Cooperstown in the long term.  And I thought we weren’t here to talk about the past.

Any moron could have figured out that he let the juice loose, and by that, I don’t mean swinging OJ’s jail cell door open.  What else is anyone with an IQ over 70 to conclude when he:  (1) Took the 5th in the Congressional testimony in March 2003, and (2)  Tried unsuccessfully to swing an immunity deal with the House Judiciary Committee in the weeks before his testimony?

Among his excuses, McGwire said that even though he did do steroids and HGH, including the 1998 season, that he had good years while on the stuff, bad years while on the stuff, good years while not on the stuff, and bad years while not of the stuff.  In other words, he nailed down all the possibilites in the matrix.  However, that dog doesn’t hunt for me, because (WARNING:  Intense Common Sense Ahead) if he had good years while not on the stuff, then why did he even need/want to take the stuff at all?  His excuse here is weasely, b/c most of his good years were done while on the stuff, and most of his bad years, he wasn’t on the snuff.

Bobby Knight, who I used to have a lot of respect for until today, makes an even bigger ass out of himself:

Knight said, “I have a different approach to performance-enhancing drugs than a lot of people do.  My question is, Who decides what can be used and what can’t be used, and on what basis is that decision made? You know, Gatorade is a performance-enhancing substance. It replaces electrolytes in the human body that are used up through extreme exercise. So I’ve always had a really skeptical approach to all this performance-enhancing stuff.”  Bob Knight ladies and gentleman.

Knight goes on to say that Mac should have been “a first ballot hall of famer,” that he’s one of the great people” in sports, and that Knight’s son Tim, as a Stanford student, saw Stanford-USC baseball games (Mac went to USC) where he hit HRs so long that nobody could find the ball.  Knight also said that Mac “was badly advised” by his attorneys before the Congressional testimony.

Where do I start?  Bobby Knight is a basketball coach, and not a baseball writer, so who gets in the HOF and when is not his purview.  Of course, a great college hitter can hit very long home runs off college pitching.  Nothing against Stanford pitching, but the odds are that if you’re that great, then you’re drafted into the majors right out of high school, and if you’re good but not good enough to go into the minors out of HS, then there are many better college baseball programs than Stanford.  And even Perry Mason couldn’t have given Mac any better advice than what he got, because he was boxed into a corner.  The only option other than taking the 5th and “not talking about the past” would have been to fess up in front of Congress, which was undesirable in his eyes at the time.  In retrospect, that probably would have been better.

“Who decides what can and can’t be used, and on what basis?”  The MLB has a rules and competition committee.  And Gatorade is a soft drink with vitamins and minerals.  It is not a drug, and not a performance-enhancing drug that has drastic side-effects (shrinks your balls, rots your hair, you go on vicious rampages, etc.).  I would presume that the MLB rules and competition committee knows what it’s doing.  I’m also sure that they have the phone numbers of some well-respected doctors in their rolodex.

A Lott of Memories

I was listening to Rush today, and he played a clip of some Democrat strategist yacking on MSNBC (how can you tell the difference between a Democrat strategist and MSNBC?) about the comparisons between the Lott-Thurmond and Reid-Obama rows.  She said that no Republicans called for Lott’s head in the late 2002-early 2003 controversy.

One of the good things about having a long memory is that you have a long memory.  I covered the Lott-Thurmond row pretty comprehensively in another medium, and during my interest, I coined the phrase “Paranoia-Industrial Complex” to describe organizations like Morris Dees’s Personal Cash Cow (SPLC) and the Pro-Defamation League (ADL), as both of them and many smaller analogues were tangentially involved in the row.  But I digress.

I specifically remember noticing and writing at the time that the loudest mouths for Trent Lott’s head were other Republicans — Some Senate Republicans, Neo-Con columnists and talking heads, Colin Powell, Peggy Noonan and eventually President Bush.  I also remember some noted liberal (don’t quote me on it, I think it was Tom Edsall in the WaPo) noticing this, and writing that (and complimenting) the Republicans “for taking the lead” in “standing up to implicit racism” (or something like that).  Other than Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, most Democrats were silent.  I think the timing was the issue — Trent Lott’s comment at Strom Thurmond’s 100th B-Day Party was in early December 2002, well after the mid-term elections.  I guess the Dems didn’t think they could get any mileage over it, for the election was over.  Therefore, they had no desire to crow.

Like I said a few days ago, I think the reason why the authors of Game Change, and the MSM, are peddling this Harry Reid “scandal” is because he’s probably DOA in November, and this is all an effort to create an excuse to explain his defeat.  They want to create a diversion, to peddle the notion to the political class that being un-PC and racist is why Reid lost, in an effort to scare other politicians away from white nationalism and race realism.  (Similar to “Macaca” of George Allen fame, though I have already explained why that conventional wisdom is bullshit).  On top of that, if Reid does lose, it will be b/c of the Obama agenda, and the media and the White House can’t afford for the notion of Obama being an albatross to be accepted as CW.

What worries me, though, is that the Stupid Party is already towing the PC line in calling for Reid’s head.  And they’re being hypocritical –  I hear a lot of them on the talking head shows saying that they’re just getting payback’s a bitch for what the Democrats did to Lott in 2002.  But, as you now know, thanks to my elephant-like noggin, the Democrats didn’t do anything to Lott in 2002, it was almost entirely Republicans taking him down.  In fact, a few of the very same people who whined about Lott in 2002 are now saying that their whining about Reid in 2010 is revenge for what the Democrats “did” to Lott in 2002.  I don’t blame someone for having a short memory, but I do blame them if they can’t remember their own words and actions.

Aye aye aye aye aye.