HMMMM: The Philosopher’s Stone Bacteria kind of has a ring to it, no? Apparently these superman-strength bacteria can produce gold.
Archive for 2012
October 2, 2012
MOVIEGOERS HAVE A STARK CHOICE TO MAKE THURSDAY NIGHT, Breitbart News notes:
They can watch a whimsical tale of Dracula and his teen daughter (“Hotel Transylvania”), see a pair of cops working the beat (“End of Watch”) or witness one of Hollywood’s greatest epics back on the big screen where it belongs.
The 1962 classic “Lawrence of Arabia” returns to theaters for one day this week, part of a promotional effort to mark the film’s Nov. 13 Blu-ray release.
“Lawrence of Arabia 50th Anniversary Event: Digitally Restored” will play at 7 p.m. Thursday along with special matinees in select theaters.
You younger readers might not realize this, but prior to the collapse of midcentury liberalism in the late 1960s, there were opportunities to see epic films such as Lawrence that didn’t insult their viewers intelligence, and delivered blockbuster action, without men in spaceships or superhero costumes.
This 2003 Terry Teachout article from the Wall Street Journal is an excellent introduction to the joys of midcentury Middlebrow Culture.
I REMEMBER WHEN STAYING HOME AND BAKING COOKIES WAS A BAD THING: now, of course it’s another sign of the Obamas’ superiority. Or something. Hey, Michelle, you didn’t bake that.
THE 10 SLOWEST SPORTS CARS OF ALL TIME: Don’t admit it if you owned one. LOL.
INSUFFICIENT DETERRENT: Cardboard Cop Stolen From Supermarket.
EVER SEEN A LILIGER?: It’s a hybrid between a liger (lion-tiger hybrid) mother and a lion father. The first liliger was born in a Russian zoo recently. It’s very cute, to be sure, but kind of weird in a chimerical way.
THE WHITEST MAN TO RUN FOR PRESIDENT (BUT THAT’S NOT RACIST BECAUSE THE PERSON WHO SAID IT IS A PROGRESSIVE): And being a progressive makes it okay, of course, to say all kinds of outrageously offensive, racist things. You can’t make this stuff up, people: Stephanie Li, an English professor blogging over at the Huffington Post, says Mitt Romney “truly is the whitest man to run for president because he doesn’t realize how his whiteness has influenced his life and how his class standing provided him with remarkable educational and financial opportunities.” Further (as though she really needed to go further!):
This theme and the Romney’s repeated vow that they are the creators of their own success taps into long standing myths of the self-made American man, a man who is always implicitly white. But Romney’s narrative of rugged individualism is as false as the image of self-reliant colonists and frontiersman who made their fortunes in large part by relying on the slave trade and the exploitation of Native Americans. Romney’s blindness to his own racial privilege is a further function of his whiteness and its invisible entitlements.
So let me get this straight: The “myth” of being “self-made” can only be attained by white males– and specifically a subset of white males who “rely[] on the slave trade and the exploitation of Native Americans”?
This race-obsessed view of things is of course common in progressive circles, including the critical race theory circles in which former adjunct law professor Barack Obama ran. Consider also this incendiary op-ed by Lee Siegel that ran in the New York Times, in which Siegel said,
The simple, impolitely stated fact is that Mitt Romney is the whitest white man to run for president in recent memory.
Of course, I’m not talking about a strict count of melanin density. I’m referring to the countless subtle and not-so-subtle ways he telegraphs to a certain type of voter that he is the cultural alternative to America’s first black president. It is a whiteness grounded in a retro vision of the country, one of white picket fences and stay-at-home moms and fathers unashamed of working hard for corporate America.
Yes, you heard that right: Not only is Romney the “whitest white man” but this label means that such super-white folks have a “retro vision of the country” involving white picket fences, stay-at-home moms (watch those lady parts, y’all!), and fathers “unashamed” of working hard for “corporate America” (and what a shameful thing that really is).
Wow. Really– just wow. Can you feel the hatred?
THWARTING FREE SPEECH: Europe’s medieval libel laws.
LIFE AFTER ASSAD: Syria’s Kurds are already building their own institutions.
ROMNEY’S NEW AD — JOE BIDEN APPROVED?
Who will raise taxes on the middle class? Barack Obama and the liberals already have. To pay for government-run healthcare, you’ll pay higher taxes and more for your medicine.
And their plan includes $1 trillion in higher taxes, even on the middle class. Mitt Romney and common-sense conservatives will cut taxes on the middle class, and they’ll close loopholes for millionaires.
Obama and his liberal allies? We can’t afford four more years.
— Script from “Romney Ad [which] Hits Obama for Raising Middle Class Taxes,” transcribed by John McCormack, the Weekly Standard.
The middle class has been “buried the last four years” with taxes, says, um… JOE BIDEN
— Jim Treacher, the Daily Caller. Here’s the video of Biden, sure to be in a Romney campaign ad very soon:
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PURPOSE OF CAIRO ATTACK? FREE THE BLIND SHEIK!: Kerry Picket at the Washington Times blogs today about the probable reason the Obama Administration refused to call the Egyptian embassy attack “terrorism” for so long–preferring instead to blame the incident (and others around the globe like it) as a “spontaneous” outburst of anger directed at a lame You Tube video about Mohammed.
The reason? Because it knew that the attacks were an effort to bully the Administration into freeing 74 year-old Omar Abdul Rahman, aka the Blind Sheik, who is currently serving a life sentence at a federal pen in North Carolina after his conviction for seditious conspiracy after issuing a fatwa to set off bombs in the NYC subways.
Because as PJ Media reporter Raymond Ibrahim posted on September 10– one day before the attacks— an Egyptian paper called el Fagr reported that various jihadi groups had issued a statement “threatening to burn the U.S. Embassy in Cairo to the ground.” According to Ibrahim’s post:
According to El Fagr, they are calling for the immediate release of the Islamic jihadis who are imprisonment and in detention centers in the U.S. including Guantanamo Bay: “The group, which consists of many members from al-Qaeda, called [especially] for the quick release of the jihadi [mujahid] sheikh, Omar Abdul Rahman [the “Blind Sheikh”], whom they described as a scholar and jihadi who sacrificed his life for the Egyptian Umma, who was ignored by the Mubarak regime, and [President] Morsi is refusing to intervene on his behalf and release him, despite promising that he would. The Islamic Group has threatened to burn the U.S. Embassy in Cairo with those in it, and taking hostage those who remain [alive], unless the Blind Sheikh is immediately released.”
The new Egyptian President, Mohamed Morsi, has publicly called for the release of the Blind Sheik for “humanitarian” reasons. The White House denies any plans to release the Blind Sheik.
Whether the White House does/does not consider the freeing of the Blind Sheik, the more salient question for reporters to ask is this? Why did radical Islamists believe that such a terrorist ploy would possibly get traction with the Obama Administration? Does the “Obama Doctrine” of appeasement to radical Islamists (and other avowed enemies of the U.S.) encourage this sort of terrorist behavior?
One can see that, if properly understood as an act of terrorism, these acts of violence should trigger much greater– and long overdue– scrutiny of the Obama Administration’s foreign policy.
WEAK HORSE: Hunt for Obama’s Middle East Policy Comes Up Empty, Jeffrey Goldberg writes at Bloomberg News:
Yet all we have from Obama is passivity, which is a recurring theme in the administration’s approach to the Middle East. So is “aggressive hedging,” a term used by the Brookings Institution’s Shadi Hamid to describe Obama’s strange reluctance to clearly choose sides in the uprisings of the Arab Spring.
“There’s a widespread perception in the region that Obama is a weak, somewhat feckless president,” Hamid, who runs the Brookings Doha Center, told me. “Bush may have been hated, but he was also feared, and what we’ve learned in the Middle East is that fear, sometimes at least, can be a good thing. Obama’s aggressive hedging has alienated both sides of the Arab divide. Autocrats, particularly in the Gulf, think Obama naively supports Arab revolutionaries, while Arab protesters and revolutionaries seem to think the opposite.”
Leaders across the Middle East don’t take Obama’s threats seriously. Neither Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor the Arab leaders of the Gulf countries believe he’ll act militarily against Iran’s nuclear program in his second term.
RELATED: Obama waives sanctions on countries that use child soldiers:
“When a little boy is kidnapped, turned into a child soldier, forced to kill or be killed — that’s slavery,” Obama said in a speech at the Clinton Global Initiative. “It is barbaric, and it is evil, and it has no place in a civilized world. Now, as a nation, we’ve long rejected such cruelty.”
But for the third year in a row, Obama has waived almost all U.S. sanctions that would punish certain countries that use child soldiers, upsetting many in the human rights community.
And finally, Obama: ‘protecting’ American lady-parts. Egyptian ones? …Well, not so much.
None of which should seem very “unexpectedly” at this point — even to Bloomberg.
I, FOR ONE, WELCOME OUR NEW ROBOT SHRINKS: Smartphone Apps Become Surrogate Therapists.
WHY WOULDN’T EPA TALK ABOUT OFFICIALS USING SECRET EMAILS TO DO PUBLIC BUSINESS? A Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) lawsuit in federal court demands documents on what appears to be a long-standing practice at the highest levels of the agency. An agency spokesman declines to comment. This could be the most important FOIA litigation in decades.
AT AMAZON, warehouse deals in Electronics.
Also, today only: Save up to 40% on Kitchens of India products.
POLITICIZING THE SUPREME COURT, PROGRESSIVE STYLE: In the debate between Massachusetts U.S. Senator Scott Brown and his Democrat challenger, progressive poster girl Elizabeth Warren, Scott was asked to name his “model” U.S. Supreme Court Justice. Brown responded that Justice Antonin Scalia was “very good,” a choice that immediately drew respectful boos from the oh-so-tolerant progressives/liberals in the audience.
Elizabeth Warren wasted no time capitalizing on Scott’s selection, tweeting that Scalia is “adamantly opposed to Roe v. Wade” (the abortion decision). Ah, there those progressives go again: Not-so-subtly warning us females that we’d better watch our lady parts!
Oh, and why is it okay for progressive leaders like Warren to politicize the Supreme Court while others of the same ilk– e.g., her Harvard Law colleague Laurence Tribe–go around condemning (loudly) anything they perceive as politicization of the Supreme Court? Can you say, “hypocrisy”?
HAVE YOU NO DECENCY? U.S. News: Obama Supporters’ Dirty Tricks to Win the Catholic Vote. “Hudson also revealed that a group calling itself Catholics for Obama had been making push poll phone calls in support of the president’s re-election bid. Among the questions being asked, he said, was ‘How can you support a “Mormon” who does not believe in Jesus Christ?'”
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD ON AFGHANISTAN: “Because these failures happened on President Obama’s watch, the mainstream press isn’t particularly interested in relentless, non-stop scrutiny of the unpleasant news. If George W. Bush were president now, and had ordered the surge and was responsible for the strategic decisions taken and not taken in Afghanistan over the last four years, the mainstream press would be rubbing our noses in his miserable failures and inexcusable blunders 24/7. The New York Times and the Washington Post would be treating us to pictures of every fallen soldier. The PBS Newshour would feature nightly post-mortems on ‘America’s failed strategies in the Afghan War’ and every arm-chair strategist in America would be filling the op-ed pages with the brilliant 20/20 hindsight ideas that our pathetic, clueless, failed president was too dumb and too cocky to have had.”
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IT WAS FIVE IN THE AFTERNOON WHEN MR. OBAMA TOOK HIS 3 A.M. CALL. HE STILL FLUBBED IT, Bret Stephens writes in the Wall Street Journal today:
Let’s review:
The U.S. ignores warnings of a parlous security situation in Benghazi. Nothing happens because nobody is really paying attention, especially in an election year, and because Libya is supposed to be a foreign-policy success. When something does happen, the administration’s concerns for the safety of Americans are subordinated to considerations of Libyan “sovereignty” and the need for “permission.” After the attack the administration blames a video, perhaps because it would be politically inconvenient to note that al Qaeda is far from defeated, and that we are no more popular under Mr. Obama than we were under George W. Bush. Denouncing the video also appeals to the administration’s reflexive habits of blaming America first. Once that story falls apart, it’s time to blame the intel munchkins and move on.
It was five in the afternoon when Mr. Obama took his 3 a.m. call. He still flubbed it.
Read the whole thing.
(Video found via Steve Green.)
THE FANNIE AND FREDDIE FEE MACHINE: “The Treasury announced in August that it would take all profits from the two housing giants in ‘a quarterly sweep of every dollar of profit that each firm earns.'”
VIDEO: “Why Marxism?” An Evening at FEE (the free market-oriented Foundation for Economic Education) with C. Bradley Thompson.
A little too late to help Eric Hobsbawm, though.
MORE HOPE & CHANGE (BUT WAY LESS PRIVACY): An ACLU report reveals that warrantless, electronic monitoring of Americans’ communications (email; phone calls, etc.) have increased a whopping 60% since 2009, all on the Obama Administration’s watch.
Good for the ACLU for issuing the report. Now: Where is the all the liberal/progressive outrage? Will Keith Olbermann call President Obama a “fascist,” as he did when President Bush engaged in similar warrantless eavesdropping? I don’t know about you, but I hear only crickets from the mainstream media.
THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN HAS MEMORY-HOLED ITS “LADYPARTS” ITEM. But I saved a screenshot for posterity, because I figured they’d try to cover their tracks once the mockery started. That’s their M.O.
