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Local Bike Nut Meets the Real World

An Open Question

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Who Hates the Lebanese?

Something else you’re not being reminded in arguments about the Hamasque (and in the broader non-dialog concerning the people of Antijudea):

According to the Arab American Institute, the breakdown of religious affiliation among Arab Americans is as follows:

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It’s Frightfully Realistic

Thanks to the latest technological advance, you can enjoy the interactive satisfaction found at community meetings and legislative sessions right from your keyboard.

Try it!

Another 600 Feet

I’ve seen several posts about all the other things within 600 feet of the WTC site. Strip bars, fast food joints, and pretty much eveything a big city offers. The point of the posts, I think, is to counter the notion that the proposed Hamasque site is sacred ground. If there are so many vices so close, how sacred can that spot be?

The counter-counter fielded by the Hamasque opponents is that the building in question was struck by a piece of one the planes. That damage somehow anointed the structure with socio-cultural holiness.

I see merit in both points. But I am not persuaded. On one hand, we’ve got the beginnings of a “George Washington slept here” farce. And we open ourselves to phony relics from “the one True jetliner”. Yet, the surrounding vices only increase the importance of holding some places sacred. If we promised to Never Forget, we do have to be on guard against the encroachment of the mundane.

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Fujichrome? F*ck that sh!t. Tri-X 400!

Dennis Hopper was a photographer:

James Dean first introduced Hopper to the Los Angeles art world after the two met on the set of Rebel Without a Cause. He went on to produce a wide body of visual art while working as an actor and director on classic movies like Easy Rider. As an artist, Hopper’s talent was most obvious in his photography, which documented his creatively charged milieu and reflected his uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time.

He was good:

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Mussulmen Against the Mosque

There are some Islamic clerics speaking against the construction of a mosque near the WTC site. Out of respect and a spirit of cooperation, healing and peace?

Nope.

Because it is part of a Jewish conspiracy:

Dr. Abd Al-Mu'ti Bayumi, a member of Al-Azhar's Islamic Research Academy, said that the mosque's construction could link Islam to 9/11, even though Islam is innocent of the deed. He also called the plan a "Zionist plot”.

Dialing back the crazy just a bit (maybe?), here’s another pronouncement from the same interview on the futility of interfaith dialog:

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Patton’s America

TJIC links to a retelling of General Patton’s famous speech:

Men, this stuff that some sources sling around about America wanting out of this war, not wanting to fight, is a crock of bullshit. Americans love to fight, traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. You are here today for three reasons. First, because you are here to defend your homes and your loved ones. Second, you are here for your own self respect, because you would not want to be anywhere else. Third, you are here because you are real men and all real men like to fight. When you, here, everyone of you, were kids, you all admired the champion marble player, the fastest runner, the toughest boxer, the big league ball players, and the All-American football players. Americans love a winner. Americans will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise cowards. Americans play to win all of the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost nor will ever lose a war; for the very idea of losing is hateful to an American.

This is the culture I was born into.

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Coexisting Near Ground Zero

The proposed mosque community center at near ground zero the World Trade Center site has many people agitated. To me, they all seem dirty.

The site is two blocks from the WTC. How much of Manhattan must we declare to be sacred ground? Sure, it is “in the shadow”, but the buildings were a thousand feet tall. They cast long shadows. Get over it.

But why does the mosque have to be exactly there, anyway? Wouldn’t the alleged “religion of peace” guide the faithful to find a less-confrontational site?

The non-Muslim pro-mosquers seem to be the dirtiest of all. What exactly is their goal? To make the bible-thumping flag-wavers mad? To get more revenge on George W. Bush? They can’t seem to make a distinction between arguing against this particular tasteless proposal and wanting to outlaw Islam entirely.

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Same Picture, Different Frame

Perhaps the notable feature of the [1980s] decade was not that some people made money but that so many others were so bent out of shape by that. If some yuppie got a bonus, what was that to us? Rather than the Decade of Greed, wasn’t it really the Decade of Envy? Or the Decade of Envy, Jealousy, and other resentments there was no reason for those afflicted to sound so proud about?

Subjectively, far from being a Decade of Greed, the early 1980s were years of hard work and maximum productivity, better in my opinion than any period that has come since. For me and a lot of other people, the eighties were the young-adult Wonder Years, when autonomy came to the fore and we could finally do the things we were in uncomfortable preparation for all the years before that.

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There is a ladder, but you must choose to climb it

An observation by Steve Sailer, interesting even without its context:

Ironically, when I left the "Collapse" exhibit, with its warnings about overpopulation, at Los Angeles's Natural History museum, I turned out of the parking lot onto Martin Luther King Boulevard, where the billboards were in Spanish. In LA, the African Americans have been pushed off even MLK Blvd. by Latin American immigrants.

I read years back that South Central, the notorious crack-and-gang neighborhood in L.A., was rebranded as South Los Angeles. Not necessarily by some wishful-thinking community organizers, but as recognition that Latinos had moved in and improved the character of the place.

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Fury on the Horizon

Vox Day writes:

A private sector job which exists solely to comply with government-dictated paperwork is every bit as government-manufactured and unproductive as a public sector job. And that is precisely the type of job which is going to disappear entirely once the debt edifice collapses and the extent of the dollar-denominated imaginary economy is revealed. Just as stripping out the debt-funded component of GDP reveals that there has been no actual economic growth for decades, stripping out the paperwork jobs will demonstrate that the real labor force is still roughly 2/3rd male, just as it was in 1950.

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College Marxists Are Just Adorable

At a campus coffee shop, sitting near a PoliSci major and a Planning major. There is so much nonsense, I wish I could just record the whole dialog. It has been a perfect stereotype of what Big Ed does to mushy young minds.

Individualism creates an environment where, if everyone can succeed and you don't, it is your fault. People need to recognize the system is at fault.

Yup, Jenny, in a Utopia without personal responsbility, nothing bad would ever happen.

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Unemployment is Welfare

I may need to work up a better-documented rant about this. But I have had enough of people proudly proclaiming their extended unemployment benefits. Getting laid off is not an invitation to twiddle around working on your novel. YOU NEED A JOB!

Twiddling on a novel is not a job. It will not lead to a job. You need to develop a new skill that someone will actually pay you to practice.

If people are afraid to take a job because it pays less than the job they lost and choose to spend another six months on the dole, they are parasites. GET OFF THE PUBLIC TEAT!

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Censorship in the Name of Tolerance

A U.S. Judge has upheld an anti-gay activist’s right to participate in this weekend’s Gay Pride celebration in Minneapolis. Pride leases a downtown park as the center of their festival. They thought they should have exclusive control over who can be there. The Minneapolis Park Board, surprisingly, sided with the activist.

The Park Board figured that it is still a public park, and anyone who wants to be there should be allowed to show up. The activist, a Christian evangelist, had been a regular at Pride for a decade without causing a ruckus. Maybe his message wasn’t well received, but the gays did at least tolerate him. Now the gay community is getting more exclusive. According to their lawyer:

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Make ya lonesome, now

The Blues is a product of a distinctly American culture. Its peak and decline parallels American passenger railroading. The peaks left us with a wealth of blues songs about the rails. Since riding the railroad is something that our parents and grandparents did, the blues tunes are charged with a personal melancholy that puts the past right into your heart.

Here’s maybe my favorite of all:

Falling Out of Fashion

Back in the day, I lived many of the episodes of Sex and the City. I had friends that paralleled each of the main characters, and I was some shadow version of the various love interests. But not to my friends, so I got to be part of the dishing about their own Aidans and Mr. Bigs.

At the time, it was a blast. I was in step with popular culture. Or at least some pretty and insecure segment of it.

Those days are passed. I think the most awesome description of the series was from a cartoon show (Family Guy?); it’s about three hookers and their mom. So I haven’t been interested in the movie sequels.

Girl Friday has a review of the latest one:

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Ummah All the Way

Today’s Rant of the Day makes the plainest case I’ve seen that Islam is a threat to everyone else:

Islam is not a religion, nor is it a cult. In its fullest form, it is a complete, total, 100% system of life.

Islam has religious, legal, political, economic, social, and military components. The religious component is a beard for all of the other components.

Islamization begins when there are sufficient Muslims in a country to agitate for their religious privileges.

When politically correct, tolerant, and culturally diverse societies agree to Muslim demands for their religious privileges, some of the other components tend to creep in as well.

In Memory of Commisar Yezhov

From Chicago Boyz:

A new museum of World War II is opening in London. Some anonymous nanny stater has taken the liberty of airbrushing the cigar from Winston Churchill’s mouth.

nonsmoke

It isn’t even a very good job as the whole lower left side of his face is distorted. The museum directors say they don’t know who did it. It is a mystery but not surprising.

I Wanted to Like It, Too

Facebook posting with 666 likes

Also, respect to the men of Operation Overlord; and to the men at the Battle of Midway, who turned the tide against Imperial Japan a mere six months after Pearl Harbor. And don’t forget the last major battle of the Pacific in WWII, Okinawa.

Thanks to them, I am free to rock on 6/6 six decades later.

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